Bones in the Barrow

by Josephine Bell

  “Mrs. Hilton’s feather boa?”

  “I’m serious,” said Johnson severely. “I found Hilton’s old mac that was supposed to have been burgled. Under a lot of ashes and that. I’m having it examined for stains. I’m not at all sure he didn’t stage the burglary himself.”

  “Why should he?”

  “To cover up disposing of Mrs. Hilton’s clothes. And to get rid of that mac, perhaps.”

  “But why put it in the dustbin? Knowing how long they take to come and empty things. Much more likely someone else planted it for you to find. Part of this attempt to place suspicion on Hilton. Anyway, why should he bother to dispose of his wife’s clothes? At this particular moment, too?”

  “If he didn’t, where are they?”

  “There now,” said David. “Now you have given me an idea.”

  “What are you doing?” Jill asked.

  “Writing out an advertisement in block capitals.”

  He showed her a piece of paper. On it she read: “UNPAID HOTEL BILLS. WHY SUFFER THE ABSCONDING GUEST? DISCRETION AND TACT A SPECIALTY. ADVICE FREE.”

  “For the local trade journals,” said David. “Particularly in the Battersea area.”

  “I don’t understand,”

  “Unless Harding took over more than he confesses to, and Johnson thinks not, somewhere,” he told her, “according to my theory, there is an irate landlady, or perhaps more than one, still hanging on to a suitcase or two containing clothes belonging to Felicity Hilton.”

  “Oh! Oh, I see,” said Jill. “You mean because Rust had so little personal luggage with him? Won’t Inspector Johnson have thought of that one?”

  “Perhaps. But not of my method.”

  “Advice,” said Jill. “Free. But David, you can’t! They’ll come here! What about Mrs. Matthews? She’ll leave in a week. What about Nanny? I can’t risk upsetting her now. She’s our last stand-by.”

  “I don’t really believe that. And now the children are all off her hands I think she leads a thoroughly pampered existence. But she won’t be upset. You’ll see. She’ll rise to the occasion like a—like a—Well, never mind like what.”

  “A heroine,” said Jill fondly. “But perhaps no one will come for advice, after all.”

  “Perhaps,” said David, folding up his advertisement. “It’s worth trying, though.”

  II

  Mrs. Norbury was worried, and, for the second time that year, Mr. Hilton was the cause of it. He seemed to her to be going downhill at an alarming pace.

  “That man’s ill,” she said to Norah. “Properly ill. He ought to see a doctor.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “It’s not for want of a hint,” went on Mrs. Norbury. “The minute I set eyes on him, I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Hilton, you do look done up! You oughtn’t to drive all this way at the end of a day’s work.’ ‘Hardly a full day,’ he said, with that funny little smile of his. ‘I left town at three. I’ve been taking my time over it.’ And so he must have done, not getting here till seven.”

  “He stopped for his tea, I expect,” said Norah.

  “He may have. He’s not much hand at tea, as a rule. So then I told him straight he ought to see a doctor. And what d’you think he said?”

  Norah could not think. Mrs. Norbury lowered her voice.

  “He said, ‘Doctors can’t cure damaged hearts.’ Then he went off to his room. What bothers me is, which way did he mean it? Broken heart, meaning he’s unhappy, or something wrong with his heart. His tone was bitter, if you know what I mean, and sort of hopeless. I don’t like it at all.”

  “It wouldn’t do to have anything happen here—in the season, too,” said Norah, with practised calm.

  “You mustn’t say such things!” responded Mrs. Norbury at once. “We ought to think of Mr. Hilton for his own sake.”

  And though, as a business woman, she could not help agreeing with Norah that all steps must be taken to prevent a public disaster at the hotel; as a kindhearted, sentimentally inclined person her greater concern was for the man himself. It was Thursday, and he was staying until Sunday evening. No doubt he intended to do some more of his digging, since he had brought the haversack, with his tools in it; the trowels and little pick, and the long thin crowbars that had given Daisy’s imagination such a jolt. But if she could persuade him, he’d leave the digging till Saturday, when he’d had a chance to rest. She took matters into her own hands and, without consulting Hilton, rang up Mr. Symonds, the vicar.

  This bold move succeeded beyond her expectation, for Mr. Symonds arrived at the White Hart that same evening, and spent over an hour with Mr. Hilton in the residents’ lounge. And the upshot of it all was that Hilton agreed to join an expedition to the Saxon farmhouse on the Saturday, an all day expedition. The vicar accepted his offer of transport for some of the members, including himself, who were making up the party. He was to bring his car to the vicarage at ten in the morning, Mr. Symonds said. They parted very cordially, and Hilton went up to his room immediately afterwards.

  That was on Wednesday evening. And on Thursday morning Mrs. Norbury saw with satisfaction that the downs were lost in grey cloud, while a steady drizzle fell on Duckington itself.

  “You’ll never think of going up there today, Mr. Hilton, will you?” she said, stopping him in the hall as he was leaving the dining-room after breakfast.

  “No,” he answered, smiling at her. “I’ve plenty of time before Sunday. All tomorrow, if this rain clears off. Saturday is booked with the local society: an invitation from Mr. Symonds. It was kind of him to call last night. I suppose you told him I was here?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Mrs. Norbury. “I hope you didn’t mind. I knew he’d want to show you that fresh place they’re working at.” She hesitated, then went on. “If you meant anything by what you said about your heart, I don’t think you ought to go in for this digging. I don’t really.”

  “So that was why he came.” Mr. Hilton did not seem to be annoyed, but he did not seem to be impressed, either. “I was joking, of course,” he added.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Mrs. Norbury, quite shocked by her own boldness, felt her cheeks go hot. But Hilton only laughed.

  “You spoil me,” he said. “But naturally, I enjoy it.”

  As he turned to the staircase he said: “I shall put on the fire in my room and have a thoroughly lazy day. Will that please you?”

  “It’ll do you a world of good,” she replied gaily, not answering his question. And then she went on to her kitchen, wondering why she felt so cheerful on such an altogether lousy morning.

  The rain continued. On Thursday night, instead of stopping when a wind came up to blow away the clouds, fresh clouds arrived, and the rain, no longer a summer drizzle, lashed the windows of the White Hart with a most unreasonable fury. Mr. Hilton spent a second day of total inaction, and seemed to enjoy it. Mrs. Norbury gave thanks to Providence for coming so signally to her aid.

  “He looks a different being,” she said to Norah, on Friday evening, when the girl passed her, taking coffee to the lounge.

  “He’ll be up to anything tomorrow if it clears,” said Norah.

  “The vicar won’t let him,” replied Mrs. Norbury. “They’re making a day of it out at Flitton. It’ll only be looking at what they’ve done, and going round that museum place they’ve set up in the remains of the barn.”

  “But some of them dig,” said Norah. “I know because of what Fred Stiles told me.”

  “I warned Mr. Symonds to stop him if he tried,” said Mrs. Norbury. “But don’t you let on to him, even if he asks you.”

  “He’s not likely to,” answered Norah. She thought her employer was making too much of the visitor; taking quite a personal interest. She looked at Mrs. Norbury with curious eyes, and the latter turned away, feeling more disturbed than she had at any time since Pat Norbury’s death.

  The Wintringhams drove down to Duckington on Saturday afternoon. They settled themselves in the room they had
booked at the Royal Arms, and then went down to the big lounge hall where they could sit and watch the traffic in and out of the hotel doors. Chief-Inspector Johnson had arranged to meet them there at six. He was exactly punctual.

  “Drinks, I think,” said David. “Before we get down to briefing.”

  “I’ve been in to see the parson,” began Johnson, when they were all served. “I rather wish I hadn’t.”

  “Why?” asked Jill. “Doesn’t he want to help?”

  “That’s the trouble,” replied Johnson. “He does. Much too eager, in fact. Of course, he has no idea Hilton is the man we’re after.”

  “I’m not after Hilton,” said David.

  “And not only the parson,” went on Johnson, ignoring this interruption, “but the chief constable in these parts, who turns out to be a buddy of Parson’s from World War I.”

  David nodded his head slowly.

  “So they want to come along with us, do they? Show us how to lie for an indefinite period in a muddy trench, I suppose?”

  “They’ll come along with us, I’m afraid,” said Johnson. “And probably give the whole show away.”

  Jill looked thoughtfully into the distance.

  “I don’t suppose there’ll be any show to give away,” she said. “After all, Mr. Hilton has been in Duckington since Wednesday evening, hasn’t he? He’s had plenty of time to do what he came to do. If it is Mr. Hilton.”

  “It isn’t,” said David. “If it’s the man I’m beginning to feel sure it is, he won’t come to Duckington until after dark, and he’ll be on his way directly he’s finished.”

  “You think it’ll be someone on a motor-bike, the chap who spoke to Joe in this hotel the time before?”

  “Yes.”

  “That could have been Hilton,” said the inspector.

  “Possibly it could, last time. Not this.”

  “That remains to be seen, and proved.”

  “Certainly it does.”

  They sipped their drinks in an amiable silence, each confident of the validity of his own reasoning. Presently Johnson said, “Though I think Hilton is my man I’m pretty sure he hasn’t acted yet. From what Mr. Symonds told me.”

  He described how bad the weather had been in Duckington on Thursday and Friday and how Hilton had spent the whole time indoors at the White Hart.

  “Mr. Symonds can’t know that,” said Jill.

  “On the contrary, the parson had it from the proprietress there when he was at the hotel waiting for Hilton this morning. I saw Mr. Symonds before I came on here, and he was only just back from a day at Flitton Marsh, where they’ve found some old building or other. Hilton drove him to this place, together with two more of the party that went over, and he brought the same men back. He’d been with them since ten this morning, and when they walked over to the White Hart to join him before starting he’d only just left the breakfast table. That was when Symonds spoke to Mrs. Norbury.”

  “Couldn’t he have gone out during the night?”

  “Very unlikely, unless he climbed out and back through his bedroom window. It’s only a small place, the White Hart. Mrs. Norbury locks up at eleven-thirty unless one of the guests wants to come in late. But that isn’t often. Her clientele is chiefly tired Londoners down for long nights, and days in the open.”

  “How delightful that sounds,” said Jill. “I think we ought to stay at the White Hart sometime, David.”

  But her husband was not listening to her.

  “All right,” he said to Johnson. “Then we’re all agreed that my theory will be tested tonight or not at all. How are we going to work it?”

  “I shall walk up,” said Johnson, “and I advise you to do the same. We don’t want any cars in the road near the track to the downs. I’m staying with a retired sergeant from the county police who lives about three miles from here. I don’t need to say anything to the local chaps at this stage. Mr. Symonds is going to meet me in the road where the track leaves it.”

  “We’ve got a map,” said David. “We thought of walking up, naturally. Did you get the detail of the barrows from Symonds?”

  “Yes. We can check it now, if you like.”

  The vicar’s large-scale chart of the barrows on the down was not very easy to correlate with an ordnance survey map, one inch to the mile, which was all the Wintringhams had been able to get hold of. But they copied the chart on a separate piece of paper, and as the important barrow lay at one end of the group they felt sure they would not miss it. The only cover thereabouts was provided by the other barrows. They would have to wait in their shadow, Johnson said, and trust to luck. The whole thing was a matter of luck. There might be nothing in it at all.

  “It is very unscientific to say so,” said Jill. “But I know there is something in it. The reasoning may be scatty, but we hope we are following a murderer’s mind, and that always is scatty.”

  “See you at the barrow, then,” said Johnson, as calmly as if the appointment were at Scotland Yard. “Wear something dark, Mrs. Wintringham, won’t you? And keep down when you’ve done your bit.”

  “Are you afraid he’ll be armed?” asked Jill solemnly.

  “They often are,” said Johnson, as he turned to walk away.

  David and Jill went up to their room a few minutes later. So they missed a new visitor who passed through the lounge hall on his way to the men’s cloakroom. But a few minutes later Joe, in the public bar, did not miss him. The man was wearing crumpled jeans pushed into thick grey socks, and a dirty fawn-coloured windcheater. The thick oilskins were absent, and the leather balaclava. But Joe recognized him as soon as he caught sight of a pair of goggles set on a forehead above cold grey-blue eyes. He served the motor-cyclist with a pint of bitter, and watched him pour it down his throat with a steady hand. He said nothing, however. If he had not been tied to the bar he would have gone out to look at the stranger’s machine, and any luggage fastened to it, but as it was, he could not even get to the telephone until after nine. By which time the vicar had gone out. Mrs. Symonds knew he was with Colonel Wetherall, but she did not know where they had gone.

  It was dusk when David and Jill came out on flat ground at the top of the path leading up the down. Below them a light mist hung over Duckington; in front the hills rose and fell in smooth waves towards the coast, while far to the west, in the gap of a valley, a small straight line of indigo showed them where lay the sea.

  “I’d like to walk straight to it,” said Jill, “until we could stand on the cliffs and look down at it.”

  “It wouldn’t be straight,” said David. “Not walking.”

  “Then I’d like to fly.”

  “Yes. The hills make you feel like taking off, don’t they? We can walk towards it for a bit. According to my map the barrows are southwest of our present position.”

  They found them fairly easily, though in the fading light any large swelling in the turf looked as if it could have been made by man. They found the whole site corresponded exactly to their map, but it was not so easy to decide which of the two end barrows was the one they wanted. While they were discussing the problem they heard voices on the down behind them. David immediately pulled Jill down with him behind the nearest mound, where they waited in silence.

  The newcomers, Mr. Symonds, Colonel Wetherall, and Chief-Inspector Johnson, approached in a leisurely fashion, with no attempt at concealment. They stood for a few minutes, talking in low voices.

  “Mind you, it’s most likely a wild-goose chase,” Johnson was saying. “We know the chap I suspect has been staying here for three days, and if he wanted to get rid of anything as incriminating as a head he’d have done it by now.”

  “Incriminating and unspeakably gruesome,” said the vicar, with a shake in his voice. “Could anyone be so callous as to harbour such a thing in his room for three days before getting rid of it?”

  “Callous, my foot!” said the colonel. “Man in fear of his life doesn’t indulge in the finer feelings. Too bloody scared.”

/>   “We’d better get off the skyline,” said Johnson. “It would be a pity to put him off if he really is coming “

  “I doubt if anyone could see us now,” the vicar said nervously. “I’m afraid the Wintringhams will miss their way in the dark, if they have not already done so in the mist below the hill.”

  “That’s their pigeon,” said Colonel Wetherall, briskly stepping round the end of the barrow where David and Jill were crouching. “I’m going to take cover here, and there should be room for—death and damnation!”

  David had rolled out of the way before the colonel trod on him, but his heel had caught the latter’s ankle a smart blow, and now Colonel Wetherall was hopping to and fro, grating out curses in breathless jerks, while the vicar implored him to say what had happened, and Johnson stooped over the Wintringhams, who were trying to control their laughter.

  “At any rate,” David told him, “we can’t be seen from the path.” He struggled to his feet. “I’m terribly sorry, sir,” he said, peering through the dusk in the direction of Colonel Wetherall, who was now trying to recover his breath. “The barrows make very good cover, don’t they?”

  The colonel replied stiffly that they did, and after a more subdued conversation—the whole party seemed now to feel that whispers were preferable to full speech—they settled themselves behind two of the barrows and relapsed into silence.

  “How long are we going to keep it up?” David whispered to Johnson, forty minutes later.

  “Make a night of it, as we’re here,” replied the inspector.

  “It doesn’t seem such a good idea as it did,” David answered. “But I’m sure you’re right. Only, I never did get much kick out of negative experiments.”

  “Better not talk,” said Johnson. “Voices carry at night.”

  “So do other noises,” said Jill. “Can you hear that motor-bike? I think it’s coming up the path.”