Chief-Inspector Johnson leaned forward.
“I think Hilton knows him. I think Peter is just a fancy name she invented for her lover, to hide his real name. I think Hilton saw through that. He knows him, and he is building up a case against him. Either that, or he is Peter himself and the murderer.”
“No. We decided that was impossible. But are you perfectly sure you shouldn’t have your other theory the other way round? Peter building up a case against Hilton?”
“Yes. The man I mark as Peter suspects nothing, but he is worried about Felicity Hilton.”
“Who is that?”
“Have you ever heard of a business friend of Hilton’s called Basil Sims?”
A couple of days after this, David was considering making another visit to Boxwood, this time without warning Alastair Hilton of his intention. But he was forestalled by the man himself, who rang him up to ask him to go down at once.
“I can’t explain on the phone,” he said, “but it really is important, or I would not be bothering you like this.”
David had left his car at home that day. He went down to Boxwood by train. When he got out of the carriage the station seemed to be deserted. He crossed to the up platform where the main entrance was. A porter was moving wooden crates at the far end near the signal box, but in the small booking office, which was also the way out, he found no one. As he hesitated, wondering whether to keep his ticket, drop it on the platform, or knock at the closed window of the ticket office, he caught the eye of a youth in the station bookstall. The youth grinned.
“Is there anyone to take this?” asked David, holding out his ticket.
The boy shook his head. David went up to the bookstall.
“I wanted to ask about a return train, too.”
“About what time, sir?”
David looked at his watch; it was now a little after half-past five.
“Half-past six or so,” he answered.
The boy named several trains. There seemed to be at least three in the hour, so it would not matter very much what time he got back to the station after seeing Mr. Hilton. As the boy was friendly and helpful, David asked him the quickest way to Grange Road. He knew how to reach it from the London Road, by car, he explained, but not from the station.
Again the bookstall youth came to his help with a few clear directions. As he was turning away the friendly voice said: “Grange Road, is it, sir? You wouldn’t be passing the Willows by any chance?”
“I am going to the Willows,” said David.
“What I mean to say, Mr. Hilton didn’t have his magazine this morning. We’re short-handed through illness. I was going to take it up myself later. But perhaps as you’re going—”
“Of course,” said David, taking the copy of The Archaeologist the boy handed to him across the shining ranks of women’s papers.
“We send it up as often as not,” went on the boy. “Because he don’t always go to business. He isn’t strong, is he? Or so they say. If he isn’t on the train in the morning, we send it up later, if we aren’t short-handed. Or sometimes Mr. Sims takes it.”
“Sims!” said David, then recollecting himself, added, as he thought, fatuously, “Good old Sims!”
“Do you know Mr. Sims too, sir? He doesn’t mind taking Mr. Hilton’s copy because he takes the same book himself now.”
“Does he indeed?” said David. “When did he start that?”
“February or March. I disremember. Somewhere about then.”
Before David had decided what to ask next the boy said confidentially, “Mrs. Sims is a smasher, isn’t she, sir? But not such a smasher as Mrs. Hilton.”
Seeing David’s stare of complete astonishment the boy reddened and mumbled, “At least, that’s what the boss says,” immediately afterwards disappearing into the little box at the side of the stall where office work was conducted.
David leaned across the papers.
“Hi!” he said. “Come out!”
The boy put his face round the corner of the box. It was expressionless and cold, very much on guard.
“I thought you were the boss,” David said.
There was no answer.
“How many of you work here?” said David. “Or do you only stand in when there is illness?”
“I always work here, but I only run the place when the boss is away.”
“So you have a free hand with the papers and the magazines when the boss is taking time off.”
“On holiday,” said the boy, defiant but sulky. “Or away ill.”
“When was the last time you were in charge, for any length of time?”
“End of last year, if you want to know. And not Christmas, neither. November. What is all this? What’s it got to do with you whether I’m in charge here or not? If you hadn’t said you were a friend of Mr. Hilton’s—”
“You like Mr. Hilton, don’t you?” said David, gently.
“I’m not speaking to you any more.”
“What about Mr. Sims? Do you like Mr. Sims?”
The boy gave him a look of hate and fury and disappeared once more into his box.
David walked through the deserted ticket office into the road beyond. A waitress and a newsagent’s boy. Both were so easily upset by questions about the Hiltons and their friends. There was too much emotion flying about in this case, he decided. Too much emotion, and far too few facts.
“Good of you to come down so promptly,” said Alastair Hilton opening the front door himself to his visitor. “Come in.”
As he followed Hilton into the sitting-room, David smiled over his shoulder at Mrs. Mason, who had appeared to answer the bell.
“Your housekeeper is doing overtime,” he said, accepting the chair Hilton offered.
“Not really. I think she’s waiting to have a word with you. She found me rather upset this morning.”
“Why?”
“I’ve had a burglary,” said Hilton. He sat down himself, facing David. His hands were shaking a little. “In the night,” he added.
“Didn’t you hear anything?” said David, slowly. He knew, for Hilton had told him, that the latter was sleeping badly. A man in that condition usually reacted to the slightest sound.
“No. I heard nothing. My doctor—” He hesitated, then continued. “My doctor is trying me on some new things for insomnia. They work—very well.”
“Especially if you take at least twice the dose he orders—yes?” said David, grimly. “You’ll have to be more careful, you know. Or more obedient, perhaps I should say.”
Hilton looked at him, smiling a little.
“You know too much. I’ve got to have sleep. I must have a few hours when I can forget—”
“That’s all right,” said David. “I’m not your doctor. Tell me about the burglary.”
“The house was broken into. My desk was turned upside down. Quite pointless, of course. I keep only household bills and receipts and letters from friends there. Nothing was taken as far as I know except some food out of the kitchen. And the burglar doesn’t seem to have gone into any of the upstairs rooms.”
“He must have expected more than he found. Or been disturbed at his work. Probably both. I still wonder you didn’t hear him. Or Mrs. Mason. Is she a heavy sleeper, too?”
“She doesn’t sleep here now. Said she preferred not.”
“Indeed.”
“What upset me,” said Hilton, growing a little pale as he went on, “was this. I had put out another copy of Felicity’s photograph in place of the one I gave you. I found the frame smashed and the photograph deliberately torn in pieces.”
“I see,” said David. He did not see at all, but he felt he had to say something to dispel the strange effect of this news.
“It was horrible,” said Hilton in a low voice. “Coming down this morning and pulling back the curtains and seeing the pile of glass and the broken frame on the floor. I thought the wind must have blown it down, until I saw the photograph. Torn across and across—deliberately. I’ll s
how you.”
He moved to a table where a silk scarf lay spread. Plucking this up by one corner he beckoned to David. Under the scarf, like a corpse under a sheet, lay the broken remains of Felicity’s picture. David repressed a shiver.
“Are you sure nothing was taken from the house,” he asked. “Except the food you mentioned?”
“I have not missed anything.”
“Can we ask Mrs. Mason?”
Hilton seemed surprised.
“Yes. If you want to.”
He went to the door and called to his housekeeper. She arrived very quickly.
“Dr. Wintringham wants to know if you have found traces of the burglar anywhere except here and the kitchen?”
“In the hall cupboard, sir.”
“Oh. You didn’t tell me.”
“I haven’t had the opportunity. I only looked there just now.”
When you were, perhaps, trying to listen from the hall to what was going on in here, thought David. But he only said, “What is kept in the hall cupboard?”
“Nothing of any importance,” said Hilton, irritably. “Old macs, hats, gum boots, croquet mallets, and balls. Things for the garden.”
“Can we look?”
“I’ve not touched a thing,” said Mrs. Mason. “I left it as I found it. I was waiting till the gentleman went.”
The cupboard was in great confusion. Two mackintoshes lay on the floor of it, mixed up with several pairs of old shoes, rubber boots, gardening gloves, with the fingers in holes, an old straw hat, an old felt one.
“Anything missing?” said David.
“I really don’t know.”
“Your old green hat, the tweed one, isn’t there,” said Mrs. Mason.
But David was not listening to her. He had found something interesting. A few crumpled pages of the April number of The Archaeologist.
“Yours, I suppose?” he said, holding them out to Hilton.
“They’d be what was in the hat,” said Mrs. Mason.
“What hat?” said David.
She repeated that the tweed hat was missing.
“My old deerstalker,” said Hilton. “I sometimes stuff a bit of paper in the crown if the wind is particularly cold. But not the April number. I know I didn’t use that. I haven’t worn the hat for ages.”
“You had it when you went to Duckington last,” said Mrs. Mason, stubbornly.
Alastair Hilton seemed to have some difficulty with his breathing.
“Come back and sit down,” said David kindly. “I’ve just remembered something. The new number of The Archaeologist. The bookstall at the station asked me to deliver it to you. I was asking the way here.”
He went back into the hall to get the journal, where it lay beside his hat.
“You seem to have enthused your friends,” he said, returning to Hilton. “They told me a Mr. Sims takes it regularly now.”
“Basil?” said Hilton, incredulously. “Basil always makes fun of—” He stopped, peering at David as if he didn’t see him quite clearly.
“You don’t think it was Basil who—”
“Who came here last night?” said David, softly. “Or were you going to ask another question?”
6 Terry Byrnes Speaks the Truth
For seven months Terry Byrnes had gone about with a load on his conscience. The cold, indigestible lump of his lie to Scotland Yard, and before that to his employer, had by this time so settled into his system that it did not impede its normal workings. Nevertheless it remained as an uneasiness, a perpetual vague discomfort. Especially was it a reproach in his relation to David Wintringham.
But for seven months Terry could not bring himself to confess his fault. It was not that, at this stage, he feared any reprisals from the office, or, which had prevented an earlier admission, any loss of faith in his story among the police. From Dr. Wintringham he learned that the Mrs. Hilton, whose photograph he was prepared to swear to, had indeed disappeared, and that there was a good deal of evidence to support the theory that she had been murdered. It was simply a question, now, of personal pride. He had gone up to dizzy heights in Cyril’s estimation, and in that of his other friends who had been let into the secret. He could not bear to think of the loss of face he would suffer if he decided to put matters right at this late hour. He tried to banish the whole thing from his mind. But it would not be banished completely. And as the year advanced towards summer and the patient work at Scotland Yard continued, his guilt began to gnaw and nag at him like a relapsed gastric ulcer. He could hold out no longer. In the greatest secrecy he took his story to David Wintringham.
When he had finished telling it he wondered why he had held back for so long. Privately thinking the same, David allowed none of his annoyance with the young idiot to show on his face.
“What you are really telling me is that you must have been on a different train from the one Scotland Yard checked up with the Southern Region?”
“Yes, sir.”
“About twenty minutes earlier, should you say?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t notice the time till I was back in Waterloo, after walking up to the bridge. It felt like years.”
“We’ll call it twenty minutes at the outside, in the frame of mind you were obviously in at the time. We must find out where your train really did have its stops, if that is possible so long after the event.”
“There are only three places it could have been,” said Terry eagerly. He longed to make amends, and had, for the last week, watched carefully from his carriage window every morning. “It could be near Nine Elms, or near Vauxhall, or it could be before either of those, on the down side of Queen’s Road.”
“Queen’s Road, Battersea.”
“Of course.”
David stared at the boy. Lodgings in Golders Green. Lodgings near Battersea Park. A house on the railway near Queen’s Road.
“I shall have to tell Inspector Johnson,” he said. “I expect he’ll want to see you himself.”
“Must you tell him right away?” said Terry, desperately. “I thought if you found the house yourself you could explain afterwards—”
“And your lapse would drop quietly out of sight in the general excitement,” said David, smiling. “As a matter of fact, we have been interested in Battersea for some time now, for two reasons, which I can’t tell you about at present. I think perhaps I will just have a look round on my own. I’ll let you know if I get anywhere.”
It was the handcart, tipped up against the wall under the roofed passage, that caught David’s attention.
For two evenings he had driven his car in and around the borough of Battersea, following the main railway as far as possible. He had dived into side streets, and got himself involved with street markets and old bombed spaces and narrow cul-de-sacs. Gradually he had narrowed down the possible blocks of houses, supposing Terry’s new ideas were the right ones. On the third night he left the car at the side of the nearest main road, where such vehicles as his were not too conspicuous, and walked slowly past the dwellings he had selected.
It would have been better, he felt, as he left the first row of these, to tell Johnson and have the professional routine turned on to this job. The Southern Region highups might have been able to pin-point the position from their knowledge of where the right train must have stopped. But he doubted very much if records were kept of the details of fog dislocation. In the earlier inquiry the drivers and signalmen would still remember what had happened that morning. But now, seven months later, their word, even if they gave it, would be open to doubt, at any rate in a court of law. All the same, David felt, Scotland Yard would consult the railway people, and they might very well suggest the most probable place for the train to slow up if the signals went against it on the outward side of Queen’s Road, Battersea. And in any case the police would know straight off which houses answered Terry’s description. And the borough authorities could probably help with details of the type of property, whether privately owned or belonging to the Council; whet
her in good repair or condemned. The latter would seem the more likely, from Terry’s description.
But it was the handcart, together with his free imagination, that gave David the answer, by-passing the surer workings of the machine.
It held his attention precisely because it was a handcart. His mind was full of the known detail of Harold Rust’s brief appearance. Rust, rather than Hilton, because to David, they were still apart, irreconcilably different. Rust appeared to have traded human flesh to cat owners, though not in the neighbourhood of Waterbury Street. He had on the other hand been generous to the roof-walkers at his lodging. The thought of Rust was accompanied inevitably by the thought of Rust’s cart and its loathsome burden. And here was a handcart stowed under a covered passage between two houses.
David pushed open a rickety little gate in the railings that fenced the areas of the houses, and went up to the cart. It was old and dirty; it had the usual longish handles and a couple of short legs in front to support it when it was in a horizontal position. Its wheels had lost several spokes but their iron bands were sound. Having examined it, David stepped out into the road again.
It was apparent at once that neither of the two houses was occupied in the upper storeys. There were gaps in the windows, and cracks in the walls, and chimney pots were missing. It was equally obvious that the basement and lower floor of the right-hand one, being boarded up, were also empty, but that the left hand one had a tenant. A dirty red curtain hung before the basement window, and two milk bottles, one full, one empty, stood at the top of the area steps.
David stood against the area railings, elaborately lighting a cigarette. He did not know how many pairs of eyes were upon him from behind neighbouring curtains. Radios were playing an ill concerted chorus from most of the houses in the street, but though it was dusk very few lights were on. Deciding that an official bearing would become him best in that situation, he took out a notebook and began gravely jotting down in it, lifting his eyes to the roofs, touching the front doors, and making a complete pantomime of one interested in the architecture of these ruins. When he had thus examined the outside of the houses, he stepped into the passage, passed behind the handcart and, pushing open an unlocked wooden door, found himself in a small paved back yard.
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