Therefore, said David to himself, still gazing with unseeing eyes at the roofs of London, he must have pushed the barrow to the vicinity of Waterloo Station in the morning and collected it from there in the evening. But where could he leave it?
This, as David knew well, was no easy problem, for the officials of the Southern Region were jealous of their property, and not willing to allow parking by any vehicle not connected with the railway or the taxi-cab profession. He decided to go down at once and investigate.
Conditions were just as he expected. The long ramp from the Westminster Bridge end was too exposed, the dark turn-round off the Waterloo Road much too congested. Besides, it was unlikely that Rust would leave his barrow unattended where it might be stolen or, worse still, searched by the policeman on the beat. Where then could he put it?
He began to ask for the nearest car-park, and after visiting one or two where he found no answer to his question, came at last to one that commonly served the Old Vic Theatre.
And there was the answer. The car-park attendant on duty remembered quite clearly a man who asked to leave his barrow in a corner of the park while he was away on a daily job. They didn’t open the park very early, the man explained, so he wasn’t sure of the time the bloke left his cart, but it must have been early.
“What time of day was it when he first saw you?”
“Oh, that was one evening. To ask if ’e could leave it the next day. Two bob a week we charged ’im. Very reasonable.”
And the item would not appear on the accounts of this licensed park, David felt certain. But it did not appear in the tariff, so why shouldn’t the men get the benefit?
“He just left an empty handcart?” David went on. “Did you know what he used it for?”
“No. ’E never said. It ’ad a few sacks on it most days, and a little weighing machine and weights, and ’e always ’ad a bunch of fresh papers under ’is arm when ’e come for it, evenings.”
“What sort of papers?”
“Newspapers.”
David remembered seeing the notes of Mrs. Hunt’s early statement to Inspector Cole. When he brought the handcart to Waterbury Street it had sacks on it and a supply of clean newspaper and a weighing machine. It had not occurred to Cole to wonder where the clean newsprint had come from. Nor to Johnson, apparently. Nor to himself until now, when it only confirmed what he already guessed.
“You must have wondered what his trade was?”
“Not particular. They sells most things on barrers, don’t they?”
“How long did this go on for?”
“Month or six weeks. Round about.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“Not a sign.” The man leered at him. “What’s ’e done? Shall I ’ave my name in the papers?”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said David, and strode away, leaving the astonished car-park attendant staring after him.
David was not very sure of the whereabouts of Waterbury Street, but he knew in which part of Lambeth it lay, so he set off in the right direction, walking at about the pace he thought he would employ if he were pushing a handcart. He took thirty minutes to find the street, making several mistakes on the way there. And then, after inquiring the shortest route to Waterloo, he walked back again, still at the same restricted pace. He took only twenty minutes this time. His theory was feasible, and backed by the evidence of the man at the car-park.
Having reached Waterloo for the second time that morning David decided to have a quick lunch there before going down to Boxwood. But first he rang up St. Edmund’s to know if he was wanted there, and afterwards he rang up Jill to tell her he did not know what time he would be home that day.
“But what about this woman?” asked Jill.
“What woman?”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“What message?”
“Oh, darling, do stop being a parrot. The message I told them at St. Edmund’s to give you immediately.”
“I haven’t been there the last hour and a half. I’m speaking from Waterloo.”
“Oh!” There was a pause while Jill considered. “She’s in answer to your advertisement,” she said, at last.
“Oh, hell! I’ve got to go to Boxwood as soon as possible. If I come out home I may lose an hour or more.” He thought rapidly. “Never mind, I must come. Is she any good, do you think?”
“She has two suitcases, she says. Not with her, of course.”
“Hold her! I’ll be with you in twelve minutes. And Jill, listen carefully, darling. Try to get Terry Byrnes on the phone and tell him if he can possibly make it, to get leave at four this afternoon. In connection with the case. His boss knows he started the whole thing, and that we might want him at any time. Tell Terry I’ll pick him up at the front doors of his insurance prison.”
“That palatial building!” laughed Jill. “Anything less like—”
But David had rung off. So she went back to her visitor to explain that the Free Advice was even now on its way.
David drove into the city at the appointed time. In the back seat of the car were Jill and an elaborately dressed woman whose name was Mrs. Bracegirdle and whose address was in Prince of Wales Road, Battersea.
Terry was standing on the steps of his great office building when David drove up. He got in beside him and was introduced to Mrs. Bracegirdle.
“She knows all about it,” David explained to him. “She is coming with us to see if she can recognize the man we suspect.”
“Do you really suspect anyone, sir?” said Terry.
“I do. But Inspector Johnson may by now have found someone quite different.”
“I back you, sir,” said Terry. “Every time.”
“That’s very flattering,” said David, with a laugh. “But it may be rash. The reason I asked you to come, Terry, is in case you might possibly recognize the man yourself.”
“I didn’t see his face.”
“I know. You only saw a hand and arm. But you saw the gesture, and you might feel it was familiar if you saw a similar movement.”
“I hope not,” muttered Terry.
“Oh, nobody is going to be laid out. I just wanted to try everything I could think of.”
David drove first to the Willows and was thankful to find Chief-Inspector Johnson there, with Hilton, Mrs. Lapthorn, and a very nervous, pale-faced Miss Gardiner. All three were trying to read papers or periodicals in the pleasant sitting-room with the big windows; they were not having much success. Mrs. Mason, very much in her element, let the newcomers in, looking with approval at David’s additions to the growing list of witnesses.
Johnson took Mrs. Bracegirdle away with him into another room, and presently was in conversation with Scotland Yard. The photograph of Felicity Hilton was brought from the sitting-room and Mrs. Bracegirdle identified it. But the name the landlady had known was Norris. Felicity Norris and Peter Norris. Oh, yes, she had called her husband Peter.
“At last,” said David, when Mrs. Bracegirdle, in possession of the salient facts, had joined the waiting party, and he was alone with the chief-inspector.
“At last,” said Johnson. He had listened to David’s tale of his researches near Waterloo, and he felt quite pleased with the sum of the day’s activities.
“We go into action at five-thirty,” he said. “Mrs. Mason had better give us a cuppa in preparation.”
“What action?” asked David, as the inspector came back into the room, after issuing his order.
“The capture, we hope, and identification of Eric Ford, alias Philip Goode, alias Harold Rust, alias Peter Norris.”
“Which might, perhaps, be his real name?” suggested David.
“No. I told you we have not traced anyone answering to the description, working in Boxwood, called Peter, who also knows Shirley Gardiner.”
“You haven’t surely had time to cover the whole of Boxwood.”
“Perhaps not.”
“How will you work this showdown?”
&n
bsp; “Take Shirley to the main entrance at the station and let her go to the up-platform in the way she always does. She says Eric Ford crosses the bridge, to it. So would anyone coming into the station from the direction of the shopping centre. I shall have men posted at this entrance and also at the one to the up-platform. They will note anyone likely, and pass it on to men on the platform itself.”
“I think I will go on to the up-platform from the other side, a minute or two before the train is due,” said David. “Eric Ford should then have arrived, or be just arriving, to join Shirley. I shall have Terry with me.”
“Keep out of it,” said Johnson. “You can watch if you like; you deserve that, certainly. But don’t throw a spanner in the works.”
“I promise,” said David, and meant what he said.
At five forty-two Shirley Gardiner, waiting terrified on the up-platform at Boxwood Station, looked anxiously, but in vain, for her doubtful friend. On the other side, but standing back in the shadow of the station roof, were David and Terry. The former of these two was watching the opposite platform. He saw that the station bookstall was closed, with its shutter drawn. He had never looked at it from this position before, at a distance, across the line.
Shirley was looking at the bridge. A familiar figure had just climbed the stairs and was proceeding across the flat part over the line. Steeling her heart, she waved. This was Johnson’s agreed signal. He and two men with him moved out of the platform waiting room.
The signal bell for the train rang twice, and the signal fell with its usual deliberate clonk.
At this moment David sprang forward to the edge of the platform. Opposite him he was seeing the bookstall in a fresh light. The boards below the green shutter yelled at him; those advertised names, which no one ever bothered to look at. Picture Post. Evening Standard. Times. Economist. Reynolds’s News.
“Peter!” shouted David, and again, “Look at the bookstall! Peter!”
With Terry at his heels he ran rapidly across the bridge.
As they rushed past him, a hoarse cry came from the man moving down from the bridge. He jumped the last six stairs in one bound, nearly fell, recovered himself, and leaped at David. The train appeared on the bend, moving rapidly into the station.
Terry Byrnes wasted no time on warning cries. He had kept his eyes on Shirley, as much because hers was the only face worth looking at on the platform, as because she was the key to the solution of his drama. He had seen her signal, and had then stared hard at the man crossing the bridge, but had seen nothing he recognized. He knew David’s voice, however, and the man’s reaction to it was unmistakable. When he leaped at David, Terry launched himself at once across the murderer’s path.
They came down together, rolling nearly to the edge of the platform. David, who had sprung round at once when he heard the man call out, had time to fling himself against Terry as the train came in. The three of them were at the extreme edge of the platform as it passed them. But Johnson and his men were also on the spot, and the quarry was secured before he could recover his feet. David and Terry slowly extricated themselves from the melee.
“Thank you,” said David. “He would have put me under the train, if you had not jumped in as you did.”
“I’d have been under if you hadn’t stopped me,” said Terry breathlessly.
“Oh, David,” said Jill, running up, “are you all right?”
At the back of the platform, where Jill had left her, Mrs. Bracegirdle said, “There now! If it isn’t Mr. Norris himself!” But one of the policemen hurried her away, before she could speak to him.
“I thought I told you not to throw a spanner in the works,” Johnson said to David, as the latter turned, an arm round Jill.
“It’s been there for us to see all the time,” said David, hazily. “Peter. Just as Mrs. Hilton must have looked at it every time she went to London. She called him Peter because the advertisement boards on his bookstall had capital letters that made up ‘Peter.’ A silly whimsy, but she was like that, poor woman.”
8 Landladies’ Chorus
I
As Chief-Inspector Johnson said afterwards, the end of it was really too easy. By attacking David on the platform at Boxwood the murderer laid himself open to a perfectly straightforward charge of assault. And he played still further into the hands of the police by saying he lost his head when David pushed past him and seemed to be making for his girl friend.
Johnson took him to the Boxwood Police Station, seeming to accept this explanation. The charge was made and the man, who now gave his name as Arthur Young, was taken into custody for the night.
“There seems to be a bit of a mix-up,” said Johnson. “Your young lady doesn’t know you by that name. She knows you as Eric Ford.”
The prisoner had no answer to this, but repeated that his name was Arthur Young, and that he was employed by the big firm of stationers that ran the bookstall on Boxwood Station. He did not seem to be unduly concerned at the way things had gone. Nor surprised to find himself arrested by three plain-clothes detectives.
But the next morning brought him a painful and secretly dreaded surprise. He found himself in the yard behind the Police Station being lined up with various other men of his height and general appearance; one of them was Alastair Hilton.
“What’s this in aid of?” he asked the constable who led him out. He had not slept very well, and his breakfast had not been what he considered adequate. He felt irritable. He wanted to appear before the magistrates, pay his fine, make his apology, and be dismissed.
“What’s the idea?” he said again, more angrily.
“You wait and see,” replied his escort. “Get over there in line and shut your trap.”
The row of waiting men opened their ranks unwillingly to admit Arthur Young, and two constables took up positions behind the row of backs.
The next move found Young steeled to show indifference, but as figure after figure emerged into the yard, led by Chief-Inspector Johnson, and as each in turn singled him out with no hesitation whatever, and as he heard the string of names which he had thought were buried with each incident in the concealment of his crime, he realized the extent of discovery, and knew that he was lost.
To the other men, standing there, the occasion became a little ludicrous. For the identifiers were nearly all women, and of a type made absurd by the music halls. One after another the landladies came out to recognize the man who had deceived them. Mrs. Bracegirdle came first. She recognized Peter Norris without any trouble at all. Had already recognized him at the railway station. She’d always had her doubts that the poor woman was not his wife. When he didn’t pay the rent Mrs. Norris sometimes gave her an article of clothing or a piece of jewellery to cover it. But in the end she had to get rid of the pair, keeping their suitcases, of course, as a deposit.
It was impossible to stop this flow of revelation, so Mrs. Bracegirdle was hurried away, still talking, to make her deposition elsewhere. Mrs. Hunt of Waterbury Street took her place, and after her Mrs. Field, for good measure, and so Harold Rust was secured. And then yet another landlady came, owner of lodgings where Arthur Young, under his real name, was now living. Her appearance seemed to give him a more substantial existence than the others.
After that, Joe, from the Royal Arms, pointed out Young as the man on the motor-bike, and old Harding recognized him as the man to whom he had lent his barrow. Two waitresses from Bloomsbury knew him as the husband of a Mrs. Hilton they used to serve. And a neat, polite person, representing a firm that dealt in refrigerators, picked out a former client, Philip Goode.
Finally Shirley Gardiner, protesting that she had already told them who he was, pointed to him as Eric Ford, and went away to sign her statement that he had made her a present of a brooch some eight weeks before.
For an identification parade, it was startlingly successful. The links had been widely separated, but this morning’s work brought them together at last, and welded them into a chain that was to bind Young’s guilt
upon him in a way that gave him no slightest hope of escape.
Towards the end of September of that year, David and Jill went down to Duckington to spend a quiet week end at the White Hart. The holidays were over, and their family back at their respective schools. After the sorting and packing, and sewing on the name tapes, Jill felt she deserved a rest.
In the residents’ lounge they were surprised to find Alastair Hilton, sitting near a cheerful wood fire. They had not seen him since Young’s trial: he looked remarkably improved in health.
“Down for the week end, too?” asked David.
“Down for good,” said Hilton. He told them he had felt he could not go on living at Boxwood with its bitter memories, and that he had realized he was hardly capable of continuing to work at his business.
“I’ve sold out,” he said. “And I wonder I didn’t think of it before. Mrs. Norbury has taken me on as a permanent guest. She has given me one of the best rooms in the house. It looks out on the downs—magnificent view. I feel I shall live to a hundred.”
They chatted for a time, and then Jill and David went to their room.
“The White Hart and Mrs. Norbury seem to have worked a miracle,” said Jill. “I didn’t think we were ever likely to see him again. The day Young was sentenced, I thought he would collapse any minute. He really does look as if he’d live to a hundred, as he said.”
“He won’t do that,” said David. “But he may be good for another ten years, with luck. Mrs. Norbury has it in hand, I think.”
“Good luck to them,” said Jill. “He deserves a break, if anyone does.”
“I think he’s getting over it,” said David. “He is not a vindictive man, but it’s a savage world, and it must have been heartening for him the day Young was hanged.”
Hilton had indeed recovered, as far as he was able to do so. Much as he had loved Felicity, he had always been made to feel, during their marriage, that its failure was his fault, and his alone. Relief from his derogation was sweet, and Mrs. Norbury’s gentle regard even sweeter. His self-respect had returned to him.
Bones in the Barrow Page 19