Bones in the Barrow Read online

  “I didn’t try,” Terry answered.

  It had simply not occurred to him to look. His Sensation was a real one; it had nothing to do with the gossip drama he was accustomed to reading with such pleasure on his way home from work.

  Again the inspector was surprised, impressed, and in a curious way, touched, by Terry’s answer. The boy must have something, he decided. He hoped it was not a mental disease.

  “Well, now,” he said, “it ought to be fairly simple to fix the position of the place and check it afterwards with the railway people. What train did you get from Toxley Green?”

  “Eight-thirty. The trains were all late, so I don’t know—”

  “Eight-thirty, Toxley Green,” said Johnson, making a note of it. “Do you mean the time was eight-thirty, or is that the normal time of the train you go by?”

  “The normal time of the train. But you see, on account of the fog it was after nine that—”

  “What time did you make Waterloo?”

  “Ten,” said Terry, and immediately saw himself plunged into a pit of complicated lies. Ten was the time he had noted when he finally went down into the Underground, but it was not the time he had arrived at the station. There had been his frantic meditation on Waterloo Bridge in between. He simply did not know the correct time of his train’s arrival. And he could not take back what he had said. For this copper would want to check it and would do so with the boss, and he had told the boss ten at Waterloo, which fitted in with his undoubted arrival at the office at ten-twenty. So the lie must rest. Anyway, he didn’t know which train it had been. He had got into the first one that came, sometime between nine and half-past. No one was bothering with the exact time; there was no point. They were late, and they couldn’t do a darned thing about it.

  “Did you pass Vauxhall Junction before or after this incident?” the inspector was asking; he seemed to be repeating the question.

  “After. No. I don’t know,” Terry answered hurriedly. He remembered thinking that the houses were the ones before Vauxhall, but he could not recollect passing the station.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I thought they were those near the line, after Nine Elms, but I couldn’t really see. I only saw two or three of them, and not clearly then. After I saw what I’ve told you, I didn’t look at anything else.”

  “And after you moved on?”

  “I don’t know.” Terry turned his eyes from the inspector.

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I wasn’t looking out the window. Not afterwards.”

  Johnson rested his chin on his hand. The lad had been upset, properly upset, and did not want to acknowledge it.

  “I suppose you said nothing at the time to the other people you were with?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’d have thought I was scatty.”

  There was a silence. Then the inspector said briskly, “Well,” and rose to his feet, which made Terry get up too. “If we make anything out of this we’ll get in touch with you. Just as well not to spread it about, you know. Rumours have to start somewhere, and the press is always hungry, and expects us to feed it. Besides, people are apt to jump to funny conclusions. So be careful.”

  “You don’t think I’m making it up, do you?” Terry asked. “Or seeing things?”

  “I don’t,” said the inspector. “But other people might. Don’t worry, son. You saw something real, all right. But you may be exaggerating the meaning of what you saw.”

  “It was murder,” said Terry.

  “O.K. We’ll contact you in due course.”

  Terry was shown out of the Yard. At Westminster Station he bought three evening papers. A girl had been found strangled on a heath, four people had been killed on the roads, two in plane crashes. One child, unattended, had fallen into an ornamental lake and been drowned, and another, similarly neglected, off the parapet of a third-floor balcony, and been crushed. But no one had found, or reported finding, the body of a woman with her head sunk on a grimy windowsill, in a room near Vauxhall Junction, overlooking the suburban line from Toxley Green to Waterloo.

  Nor did the police find any trace of a crime committed on that foggy day in November.

  The Insurance Company agreed with the stated time of Terry Byrnes’s arrival at the office. The Railway Authority identified the train he must have caught and corroborated the fact of its stopping on the Wimbledon side of Vauxhall. The upper windows of the houses Terry had described were clearly visible two sets of rails away. Of the occupied houses in the row, three were accustomed to letting the top room on the railway side. But in two the lodgers had clearly no connection with Terry’s victim, and in any case had been there for a considerable time, and the third was occupied by two brothers. No one in the row had ever seen a woman with curly dark hair framing her face, and large dark eyes and a wide mouth and a pale skin and long bony hands, as Terry had described her. No one had heard any sort of disturbance or quarrel. They all remembered the morning of the fog quite clearly. The railway was noisy enough, what with the fog signals and that. As for a scream, women were always yelling out, weren’t they?

  The inquiry, meeting this sort of half derisory, half indignant response, was not pursued with enthusiasm. Only Chief-Inspector Johnson, who had been so strangely impressed by Terry’s manner, took it at all seriously. He was not allowed to give it much time, however.

  “It’s rather more important to find murderers who have left us the body to work on,” Detective-Superintendent Mitchell told him.

  “I’m certain the boy knew what he was talking about.”

  “If he did we shall hear more of it. The woman must have had friends or relations of some kind. Sooner or later she’ll be posted as missing.”

  “They aren’t always. We find plenty that are never claimed.”

  “You can’t have it both ways,” said Mitchell, obscurely. “File it for reference. You never know your luck.”

  Terry waited in a fever of impatience for a week. Then he inquired at the Yard and was told to wait till he heard, and not to bother them. This was put in kindly and formal terms by Chief-Inspector Johnson. On his way out he saw the sad little row of notices about persons missing. He studied it carefully. Most of them had been found in the river: none resembled the image in his mind.

  After another fortnight had gone by, with no news, he found the burden of his secret becoming unbearably heavy. He wanted to fall in with Chief-Inspector Johnson’s wishes, because he was grateful to the Inspector for not making fun of his story. So he decided not to tell his girl friend. In any case women were too excitable for such news, and she would be angry with him for not telling it to her while it was hot. There was one friend, however, who would be safe with the secret. This was Cyril Collings, who had left the Grammar the same term as himself, and was set on making a career in science, though at present he was no more than a lab boy, washing test tubes, and setting up apparatus, and running messages, at St. Edmund’s Hospital. He decided to tell Cyril the whole story and to ask his advice.

  2 The Cat’s-Meat Man

  It was a hard winter. In November there were fogs, thicker, darker, and more persistent than for many years. In January, snow, lasting well into February, and bringing in its wake a harvest of jobs for the builders and plumbers, by way of cracked pipes, broken skylight windows, and blocked gutters.

  Among other sufferers were the tenants of certain properties not far from the Southern Region of British Railways, as the lines run out from Waterloo Station. When these people complained too loudly and urgently to be ignored, of dripping ceilings and fallen plaster, the landlord with great reluctance sent along a firm of builders to investigate the trouble. They sorted it out and made it good again. Whereupon other people, living opposite the scene of activity, and following their neighbours’ example, set a familiar repair work in train. The same firm undertook it. With the first job barely completed, they moved their ladders across the road, erected them
again, and started upon an exactly similar set of steep gulleys, sloping tiles, and narrow chimney pots.

  The snow had lain a good four inches thick on the roofs of all this part of London. But whereas the slopes the builders had first dealt with lay facing south, these faced north. In the first case the wintry sun, not altogether devoid of warmth, had hastened the thaw before its time. Consequently, after two whole days of clear sky and bright sun, the snow had melted fast, and being loosened all in a piece, had, on the next day, slid down from the chimneys and, gathering momentum, burst the narrow parapet, and fallen to the street below, carrying tiles and parapet with it. But on the opposite side of the street, the roof in shadow, facing north, had kept its snow a full week longer, melting quietly, sinking away into the gutters, washing the grimy tiles rather than destroying them.

  The builders found very much less to do, but they made the most of it by going carefully over the whole surface, and brushing out the crevices and gulleys, and the rickety gutters. On the second day, when the three men were sitting round their brazier, drinking tea at the lunch break, one of them fumbled in the pocket of his working coat.

  “Take a look at these,” he said. “I can’t make ’em out.”

  His companion peered into his large palm.

  “Bones,” said one of them.

  “That’s what I thought. But what of?”

  “Rabbit, from the size.”

  This suggestion was ridiculed.

  “Ever see a rabbit with legs that size? What’s the square ones, then?”

  “Backbone.”

  “Go on. Rabbit’s spine’s got spikes out of it. Don’t I know? Stopped one in a bad tooth, once. Crumbs! It didn’t ’alf give me gip.”

  “Could be mutton bones,” said the third man, holding out his hand for the relics. “Knuckle bones and that, I mean.”

  He considered them, with his head on one side, shaking it gently as he gave up this theory. “Not the long ones, I mean. More like chicken legs.”

  “Who’d ’ ave chicken bones to throw away in these parts?” said the first man. “That was why I said rabbit in the first place.”

  “Rabbit, my foot. Who’s ever seen rabbit bones the thickness of a finger?”

  He broke off short, looking down at the small straight bones, four of them, of unequal sizes, slim in the middle, and puffy at the ends.

  “Finger,” echoed his neighbour, who had not yet spoken. This was a building apprentice, supposed to be learning his trade; in actual fact, he spent most of his time looking after the brazier in the door of the working tent, and boiling kettles of water for tea.

  The man who held the bones poured them rather quickly into this boy’s hand. He slapped his palms together, as if he felt some contamination.

  “Anyone object if I keep these?” the youth went on. He was met by a few grunts and one derisory laugh.

  “Going in for natural history?” asked the man who had discovered them. “Making a collection?”

  “No. But a pal of mine does.”

  “O.K. son. They’re all yours. I’ll look out for more when I go up again.”

  He had spoken in jest, but at the end of the afternoon he called the apprentice over and gave him a further handful of relics.

  “Whoever lives in the attics up there has a mania for rabbit or chicken, or whatever it is,” he said. “I’ve a good mind to tell the owner. Chucking all that rubbish up on the roof. Might block the drains, after a storm.”

  “The snow left them there,” said the apprentice, and added, “I don’t think it’s rabbit or chicken, but Len will know.”

  “You ask him,” said the builder’s man. “I bet he’ll surprise you.”

  The boy said nothing. Len might surprise him, but he knew what he thought. It was not for nothing that he had helped Len with his anatomy. He took his handful of bones along to Len’s digs that night.

  “If they aren’t human, I’m as good as ploughed already,” said Len, laying the bones in a row on his tablecloth. “Four phalanges, all from different fingers, two of them not complete. One scaphoid, and the lower ends of an ulna and radius, still joined by ligament. Where did you say you’d found them?”

  “I didn’t. Gossage, one of the bricklayers, did. I guessed as soon as I saw them, from knowing your pictures and that.”

  “How’d they get there?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Bob, slowly. “And I wouldn’t care to ask.”

  The two youths stared at each other. Then Len drew the relics towards him.

  “Mind if I keep them?”

  “What for?”

  “I want to know if I’m right, I’ll ask the expert.”

  “Do you mean the professor?”

  Bob was impressed whenever he listened to his friend’s description of the University and its inmates.

  “No. He’d want to know too much. I’ll ask Ridgeway.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Junior demonstrator. Good bloke. Likes us to ask questions, but doesn’t drown you in the answers.”

  The next morning, however, Len found himself quite out of his depth in face of the combined questions of the junior demonstrator, the senior demonstrator, and finally the professor himself. They were all agreed that the bones had undoubtedly belonged to a human hand and arm, and that the strange circumstances of their discovery needed further explaining. Len was asked to produce the friend who had brought the odd collection to him. Bob was next persuaded to give his own account.

  “Then we must certainly inform the police,” the professor decided, in conference with his colleagues. “These boys are quite serious. I thought at first they were trying to put something over, but I am quite sure now they are speaking the plain truth. Human bones don’t find their way by themselves on to the roof of a small house in a poor area. Someone put them there.”

  “A someone who presumably had a good many more bones in his possession,” suggested the senior demonstrator.

  “Possibly.”

  “Couldn’t they belong to a medical student’s outfit, or to someone who makes up skeletons for medical schools and students?” asked the other demonstrator.

  “Possibly.” The professor repeated his usual qualified agreement. “Very possibly. Though they don’t look quite like prepared bones. That might, of course, be due to weathering from exposure.”

  “They turned up after the snow. They certainly underwent weathering.”

  “The police must find the answers to these questions,” said the professor. “It is their job, not ours.”

  Scotland Yard followed the same mental track as the professor and his colleagues. They too decided that the bones were human and needed explaining; that the boys were serious and spoke the truth; and that Gossage had really found the relics on the roof of Number Twelve, Waterbury Street, Lambeth.

  Under cover of an inspection of the roofs of the whole block, undertaken by the Borough engineer, with detectives in train, it was established that no other bones were hidden there. It remained to be discovered how the original ones got to the place where Gossage found them.

  Number Twelve, Waterbury Street, was occupied by a porter who worked at Waterloo Station, his wife, and three children. They had lived in the house for six years; they did not take lodgers. As far as they knew they were not aware of any medical students having lodgings in that street. The next-door neighbour but one, a Mrs. West, a widow, let rooms.

  Mrs. West lived at Number Eight, in the ground-floor front, which she used as a bed-sitting room in order to be able to take the maximum number of lodgers, one in each room. They were all businessmen and girls, she said. They were out at work, too. Yes, she had had one or two changes lately. Miss Niven had refused to get rid of her Sealyham, though it had the mange and might infect her, Mrs. West’s, cat Fluff. So Miss Niven and the Sealyham had to get out together. Then there was old Mrs. Parker, who had died, and Mr. Parker had gone away to live with a married son who could get on with his father but had always refused to t
ake in both his parents, because his mother was spiteful to her grandchildren.

  “Did this old woman die in the house?”

  “Good gracious, no! Up at Thomas’s. What is all this, anyway?”

  The question was asked again by the young detective sergeant who accompanied Inspector Cole. They had listened patiently to Mrs. West’s complaints, and to her surprise that a medical student from Thomas’s should be somehow mixed up with the law. Doctors, she always thought, were above that kind of thing.

  “What is all this, anyway?” asked the sergeant.

  “A very cold trail to begin with,” answered Inspector Cole. “A chap called Gossage, a builder’s man, found a few small human bones on the roof of Number Twelve.”

  “D’you mean a child’s bones?”

  “No. They say they’re some of the bones of the hand and arm, probably a woman’s. Possibly anatomical specimens of some sort. Hence the thin excuse, asking for a medical student. Just conceivably we are on to a crime. Since you can’t walk into a house and ask if anyone has been chopped up there, and scattered about the roof, I am still using the medical student as an opening gambit. If a real live one should turn up, I can ask him if he possesses a skeleton, anatomy-school type.”

  “Why should he put some of it on the roof?”

  “Can’t think. Students’ rag, perhaps.”

  “You don’t really think these bones are anatomy ones, do you, sir?”

  “Can you think of any other rational explanation? Do you suggest these few bones were carelessly thrown out of the upper storey, when the whole of the rest of a body had been mysteriously and secretly disposed of without anyone in the street coming to know of it?”

  “I don’t see how anyone could throw bones up on to the roof from the top storey of these houses. The gulleys run the wrong way.”

  “Quite right. They couldn’t. Would you suggest they were dropped from an aeroplane? Should we search for the other remains in Kent, or Timbuctoo?”