Bones in the Barrow Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/josephinebell

  Contents

  Josephine Bell

  1 A Window in the Fog

  2 The Cat’s-Meat Man

  3 The Absent Friend

  4 The Archaeologist’s Week End

  5 Terry Byrnes Consults a Specialist

  6 Terry Byrnes Speaks the Truth

  7 David Takes Action

  8 Landladies’ Chorus

  Josephine Bell

  Bones in the Barrow

  Josephine Bell

  Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and 1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College, Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she was granted M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1922, and a M.B.B. S. in 1924.

  Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.

  Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in 1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped found the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and served as chair during 1959–60.

  1 A Window in the Fog

  The train ground to a stop for the tenth time since it had left Surbiton. Some of the passengers looked up from their newspapers to sigh, to exchange exasperated glances, or to turn up their wrist watches to confirm their fears; many of them continued to read, with the false patience of despair. In time, they supposed, their train would deliver them at Waterloo: they could do nothing to further that end, and they were so late already that it no longer mattered how much later they became.

  Outside the windows of the train the fog deepened and grew yellower with every hundred yards of the creeping, interrupted journey. In suburbia it had been no more than a white mist, making car drivers put on their lights and go slowly. Here, another train, clanking past on the next pair of rails, was only a dark wraith, with pinpoint lights showing as each carriage moved slowly on. Fog signals spluttered and cracked. London, beyond, wound and buried in the fog, was silent.

  Terry Byrnes stood with his nose to the window of his carriage, staring gloomily into the yellow blanket, and trying to believe that the shapes he saw moving in its depths were real, and not reflections from the carriage behind him. He cursed himself for not starting from home a full hour before the usual time, instead of only twenty minutes early. His mother had warned him the night before that it would be foggy. “He,” the wireless announcer in the Home Service News, had said so in the weather forecast. Terry’s mother relied on “him” implicitly, and was usually justified in doing so. But even his own independent judgment had reached the same conclusion. Nevertheless, he had arrived at the station only twenty minutes before his train was due, to find the usual timetable in chaos, with trains, unspecified, arriving at about half-hourly intervals. So he had eventually found himself in an old-fashioned carriage, narrow, confined, with five seats a side, each occupied by six persons, and a row of four standing. He squeezed in, and being ashamed of his insistence in doing so, and embarrassed by so many hostile eyes, had turned his back on his fellow sufferers, to stare at the impersonal, all-enveloping fog.

  Again the train moved forward a few yards; a fog signal, exploding near at hand, made everyone jump and stare about with anxious eyes; and the first coach, brutally halted as it was gathering speed, checked and bumped back into the next behind. The series of bumps passed away into the distance, while the usual throb and hum of an electric train at rest took the place of all other noise.

  It was at this point that Terry became aware of the gap in the fog. First he saw dim shapes, which he decided were pictures of the train that carried him; then he saw the parapet at the edge of the railway line, and beyond that the windows of houses, with roofs above.

  He thought with impatience, “Not even Vauxhall,” remembering the row of dingy dwellings alongside the railway that heralded the approach of that forbidding junction. While his disgust and impatience churned in his mind, the houses, or rather half-houses, came more clearly out of the mist. He was looking at upper floors and roofs, all dark, all dirty, some windows with lights behind, curtained in tattered lace or cotton, some bare; many dilapidated, unlighted, with broken panes, gaping or stuffed with cardboard.

  The train still waited: there was nothing else to look at. Staring sullenly, half dreaming, totally uninterested, Terry now saw move before his eyes, like a film trailer, the swift, inevitable progress of a crime of violence.

  At one moment, framed in his hole in the fog, all the dirty windows of the four or five houses were empty. At the next, he saw in one of them the distorted face and frantic figure of a woman. She was in a state of extreme terror; that was clear from her fixed staring eyes and desperate snatching fingers. She was trying to throw up the window. But the catch would not pull back, or the sashes were stuck, or both. She clawed and snatched, her mouth working convulsively. Once she glanced over her shoulder, then went to work again. This in absolute silence, as far as Terry was concerned, the window being shut, and the fog all round, still and deep. Moreover, the carriage window was also closed against its pungent waves, so Terry was doubly isolated. It was like a film with the sound track extinguished.

  For a few seconds the woman fought with the window. Then Terry saw a dark shape behind her in the unlighted room. She turned her head, her mouth opening in a scream as she did so. A hand struck, and she toppled forward, sinking slowly down the length of the pane, while Terry thought, dully: “She never broke it! What a bit of luck!”

  He could still see her dark hair spread along the window ledge at the foot of the glass. The hand had gone, and the weapon it must have carried, and the dark shape that controlled it. He waited for the woman to stand up again, but nothing happened. The dark hair along the window ledge did not move.

  In another second the train came to life. It jerked once and slid forward. The fog closed about it, thicker than ever.

  For some minutes Terry Byrnes continued to stare out the window. His mouth had gone dry, and he felt so dizzy that he put a hand on each side of the window to support himself. Then, turning abruptly, he leaned his back against the carriage door. What he had seen, or thought he had seen, could not be true. It belonged to a preposterous world of make-believe, to an unreality, exciting on paper, but unthinkable in cold bare fact. He felt he wanted to look at his fellow travellers: all these patient, peaceful citizens, quietly waiting to be conveyed through a difficult, perhaps dangerous, obstacle, to their quiet civilized jobs. It reassured him when an elderly businessman leaned forward to test the door against which he leaned, murmuring, “Can’t be too careful,” before he sat back and turned to the next page of his newspaper.

  Though it took another twenty minutes of stopping and starting, the train did at last reach Waterloo, and Terry got out with the rest. By now his first numb refusal to recognize the truth of what he had seen had been replace
d by a feverish excitement. It was a case of brutal assault: probably murder, he decided, thinking of the still dark mass of hair on the window ledge, behind the smeared glass pane. By pure chance he had seen it happen. No one else, except the woman and the man—it must surely have been a man—knew anything about it. He dismissed the possibility that other people were in the house, and must know something had happened. He carried a fearful secret.

  When he reached this conclusion, just after he had automatically returned his season ticket to his pocket, on passing the barrier, Terry stood still in the wide expanse of Waterloo Station. Irrelevant dance music blared against the blasts of the engines, and the noise of travellers; the crowds wove intricate patterns round the bookstalls and buffets and in front of the train indicators.

  To get away from the noise and organized confusion, he walked deliberately out of the station, and crossing the road, quite careless of vehicles crawling past him in the fog, found himself presently beside the parapet of Waterloo Bridge. Here he stopped, looking down at the mist swirling above the unseen river reach.

  He was dreadfully alone with his knowledge. In the train his natural reluctance to announce anything so fantastic had seemed to be justified by the futility of doing so. His own complete helplessness in the circumstances applied also to his companions. But now, remembering the terror in the woman’s staring eyes, her frantic struggle to throw up the closed window, presumably to call for help, and her mouth, distorted in that unheard final scream, as the blow fell, he felt his knowledge swell and grow within him, an unbearable distension.

  But it was not easy to find relief. Whom should he tell, and when, and how? He was due at the office. He ought to have walked straight down the Underground, to take the train to Bank. From the bridge where he stood he could walk to Aldwych and find a bus, if they were running. Or he could go back to Waterloo. In any case he was going to be very late, and though the fog was a good all-covering excuse, he would have to work hard and steadily to make up for lost time.

  Terry was a conscientious boy. He had won his place at the Grammar School and meant to make the most of his chances. He was not going to blot his copy-book with the boss for the sake of an unknown woman who was in no way his responsibility. If he did make up his mind to do anything, it must come at the end of his day’s work. Until then, he determined to put the whole thing out of his mind. Acting now with excess of caution, he turned abruptly and retraced his steps to Waterloo.

  Half an hour later he was sorely tempted to spill out the whole story. He found he was the last but one of the staff to arrive at the big insurance office where he was starting his career. The last was a girl clerk who was unlikely to appear at all. Fog usually brought a message from her the following day to say that she was confined to the house with asthma. It was recognized that she never suffered from this disease at any other time, but fog was a certain cause of an attack. Terry, discounting her, felt he had moved down to the bottom of the form.

  Later, he spent five uncomfortable minutes with the head clerk of his department.

  “The others managed to do better than you, Byrnes,” this individual stated coldly. “And many of them have further to come.”

  “The train kept stopping, sir,” Terry said truthfully.

  “Don’t be childish. Of course it did. And it was late starting, no doubt. But you knew there was fog. You could have left home earlier.”

  “I left half an hour early,” Terry said, this time improving a little on the truth.

  “What time did your train get to Waterloo? It was your usual train, getting in late, I suppose?”

  Terry had no idea which train it had been. Together with all the other businessmen waiting on the platform, he had got into the first one that came into Toxley Green. So he nodded to the second question, ignoring the first.

  “What time did it get to Waterloo?”

  Again Terry had not the faintest idea. He only knew what time it was when he finally reached Bank Station, and realized that he was over an hour and a half late at the office. He made a rapid calculation and said, “Ten o’ clock, sir.”

  The head clerk seemed to be satisfied, at last, or bored, or conscious of the pointlessness of his questions. The boy was only seventeen, after all, in his first year there; he was a good enough boy as a rule. He said: “Very well, Byrnes. Another time in case of fog, allow yourself an extra hour. Never take advantage of weather conditions to show slackness. You only let down the others.”

  “Yes, sir. Very sorry, sir.”

  Terry went back to his desk, much less contrite than before the interview, but feeling like a near-criminal. If he told his amazing story here, he felt, he would be in danger of being arrested on the spot. It was bad enough to let the others down, whatever that meant, and he suspected that it meant very little. It would let down the whole principle of Life Insurance, as conducted so discreetly and so expensively in that labyrinth of offices, to be mixed up, however distantly and impersonally, with a murder.

  But his conscience would not let him rest. He went out to lunch with his friends at the office, but could not share, as usual, in the general discussion of Football League prospects, players, and transfers. He could see only staring eyes and plucking fingers. His friends thought he had taken his lateness and its results to heart, and tried to make him laugh it off. But he stayed serious and preoccupied, only able to forget his problem by sinking himself in his afternoon’s work.

  The head clerk found him still at his desk when the others had gone.

  “I wanted to make up, sir,” Terry explained. It was only partly true. He wanted, above all, to delay what he knew he must do next.

  “Have you finished?”

  The head clerk, inwardly pleased with his junior, kept his stern looks unaltered.

  “Nearly, sir.”

  “You can stay another quarter of an hour. I don’t want you here after that. The place will be shut. I shall have left myself. Fifteen minutes only, remember.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He had to leave when the time was up. While he was fetching his raincoat from the cloakroom, he made a bargain with himself. If the fog was as bad as ever, he would grope his way to the Underground and go straight home. If it had cleared—

  He came out into the street. Above the houses a black pall hung thickly. Church spires disappeared into its depths, and the roofs of the taller houses. But below in the street there was only a light mist. The buses drove past at their usual pace. The shops and advertisements were bright on the other side of the road.

  Terry crossed to the stop and climbed on to a Whitehall bus.

  Waiting at Scotland Yard, his information, which had swelled to such enormous proportions, suddenly deflated. He felt the same sense of unreality that he had experienced directly after the incident, when he had turned to look round the carriageful of ordinary people amongst whom he stood. What did it really amount to, after all? Someone had socked a woman on the head. A quarrel, probably. Had she really been hurt? Had the blow really touched her, or had she ducked? Women were often hysterical—so he had read, and been told by his friends. It was none of his business, anyhow. He was a fool to be there. Telling on people. The crime of crimes, all his life. Telling a copper, too. The final betrayal. But deep in his right-feeling soul, Terry, the essential law-abider, knew that he had to go through with it. Murder was murder. Against all his specious arguments, he knew in his heart that he had seen a kill.

  By the time he was called into a quiet office room to tell his story to Chief-Inspector Johnson, his inner conviction had re-established itself completely. The inspector’s bland lack of excitement served to increase it.

  “You say you saw this attack take place in a house overlooking the railway line?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Through a gap in the fog?”

  Terry nodded.

  “Your train was near enough for you to see the expression on the woman’s face?”

  “Oh, yes.”

&nb
sp; “But surely the Toxley Green trains never run on the line next to the parapet. I travel that way myself. You must have been two or even three lines off. The fog was thick enough to hold up your train to the extent you describe, yet the temporary gap in the fog allowed you to see across a distance of not less than fifty yards, and to see clearly?”

  “I don’t know about all that. I’m telling you what I saw.”

  Chief-Inspector Johnson looked across the table at the thin-necked boy on the other side. The youngster believed in his story, hallucination or otherwise. It was not a hoax, unless the kid had unlimited powers of deception. He was not trying to argue: he was describing something he had seen and accepted at its face value, terrible as that might be. The inspector softened in his manner.

  “I’m not trying to catch you out,” he said, “but I’ll be frank with you. We have not been called in over anything remotely resembling this crime of yours. It’s approximately nine hours since it happened, according to you. The body should have been found by now. Or the injured person attended to. I think you said you heard the woman scream for help.”

  “Saw,” corrected Terry patiently. “I didn’t hear anything. The window was shut, and then the fog smothers noise, doesn’t it? I saw her mouth open, and her neck go stiff, like when anyone yells.”

  “I see. You can’t describe the assailant?”

  “No. I only saw a hand with something in it.”

  “Something?”

  “I was looking at her,” said Terry desperately. “I only saw him out of the corner of my eye, sort of. If you’d seen her expression you’d know what I mean. I couldn’t ’ve looked anywhere else.”

  He felt the sweat break out on his forehead as he remembered the horror of that moment. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. Johnson called for a subordinate and gave instructions. Then he turned back to Terry.

  “I am checking up with the hospitals,” he said, “and with our latest information. Something may have come in about it by now. Did you find it in the papers this afternoon?”