Bones in the Barrow Read online

  “How do we know he wasn’t hiring it to himself? That he wasn’t really the hiring firm? We haven’t the foggiest idea who he was, or what his real trade was.”

  “No. And from Mrs. Hunt’s description he sounds very superior for a cat’s-meat man.”

  “That’s what I mean. On the face of it, he might simply be a genuine trader, who left his lodgings for no apparent reason. I’d suspect an accident, if he hadn’t paid off his hiring bill and taken his possessions away in secret. Even so, a suicide is not out of the question. Only, we have no evidence of one.”

  “Funny Mrs. Hunt didn’t suspect him, from his superior manners.”

  “He obviously had some kind of personal attraction for her. Flattered her, probably; made much of her. The whole set-up would have seemed fishy to any woman of Mrs. Hunt’s usual shrewdness. She must have fallen for him at the start.”

  Mr. Rust’s identity proved elusive in other respects. No amount of inquiry was able to connect him with the cat’s-meat trade on the one hand, or on the other with the general body of street traders. His name occurred in no list of licensed hawkers, nor was he a customer of any of the known reputable sources of meat for animal consumption. While further samples of material from the window ledges and adjacent roofs on Waterbury Street were being examined scientifically, Inspector Cole continued to make his inquiries. Finally he was called to a conference where he found Detective-Superintendent Mitchell, and also a senior colleague, whom he knew as Bob, but whose other name was Johnson.

  Mitchell greeted him with a look of approval.

  “It was blood on that window ledge,” he said. “And human at that. So the bones were probably not a medical student’s study set, unless we have a very queer coincidence at work.”

  “Coupled with the fact that there hasn’t been a medical student in any of the houses in the street, nor anyone remotely connected with a hospital.”

  “Medical school, you mean. Not quite the same thing. Your chemistry boy might have medical student friends. No. The whole thing involves coincidence. This man Rust might have cut himself and bled on the window ledge. There’s precious little to go on, yet. Just two main facts, that we could link together. Some human bones on the roof, and some human blood on the windowsill of a room occupied by a man purporting to sell cat’s meat. Fantastic, unlikely, impossible almost, except for one more thing. Tell him, Bob.”

  “It’s the dates,” said Chief-Inspector Johnson. He told Cole the story Terry Byrnes had brought to him, and went on, “I’ve always believed that boy actually saw what he described to me. Now you come in with this tale of a highly sinister character taking a room near the Southern Region’s main railroad on November 26th, and hiring a refrig a couple of days later. The lad came here with his tale on November 25th. The victim in his account was a woman. And nothing has ever been reported about her.”

  “Provisionally I’m adding Johnson’s short file to yours,” said Mitchell. “You can pool your ideas. In the meantime, you can get on with finding the firm where Rust hired his refrig. We must examine the machine itself. It’ll have been out to someone else, I don’t doubt; probably still is, but we might, with luck, get something from it. If a large quantity of—er—meat, was stuffed into it, there might be a trace or two the ordinary householder won’t have cleaned off.”

  His hearers’ faces discouraged him from enlarging his theme. Cole pulled a list from his pocket and laid it before Mitchell.

  “It occurred to me Rust might have used an alias for the purpose of hiring. Mrs. Hunt is certain the refrig was delivered to Mr. Rust by name, but she was out, and her cleaner simply says the men asked for Rust. They might have been told that was the landlady’s name. Mrs. Hunt was too angry to look at anything when they called to remove the thing. I’m working on the address now rather than the name. If I get the firm that supplied the refrig I might get the source of the supplies of cat’s meat, supposing the man used the same name for that.”

  “It is just possible this man Rust did not know what he was doing. He may have been employed to sell the meat. Always supposing he had some genuine cat’s meat to sell. Again, there are plenty of illicit wholesalers and we shan’t draw them, whatever we do.”

  “Wholesalers of what?” protested Chief-Inspector Johnson. “What are we getting at? Organized murder?”

  “If you’re thinking of thugs,” said Mitchell, “it’s not here; it’s India. Or was.”

  “I wasn’t. I was thinking of Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Well, I’d rather you’d leave off the high-brow act and concentrate on Waterbury Street. And fast. We’re getting too well known there.”

  Inspector Cole nodded.

  “I noticed one or two Press boys around when I came out of Number Sixteen. If they get a start from the old woman in Ten, there won’t be much harm done, but the lad with the jitters in Twelve might put them wise to a thing or two.”

  A couple of days later, Mitchell’s fears were realized, but not at all as he had expected.

  The article was headed “Cats.” But it was no nature story. It had for its subject the cats of London, and the treatment was sociological. There were thousands of cats, it stated; wild cats, unowned or unacknowledged cats; roaming the rooftops, terrorizing their well-fed, well-behaved brothers and sisters who stayed at home, preying on any small animal or bird they could capture; savage, raucous, half starved, lustful, belligerent. Why did we tolerate these pests? the article inquired. They were dangerous to babies and animal pets; they destroyed town gardens and window boxes, they might spread disease, they had a high nuisance-value, especially at night. Here the article quoted a story from Waterbury Street, of bedlam on the rooftops, and another from the same source describing a tender-hearted cat’s-meat man at the end of his day’s work. “I asked him not to put any out for the strays,” said vivacious dark-haired Mrs. Hunt, “but he always said they were welcome to the surplus. And they certainly made the most of it. Swarmed round his window well before he came in from work, and scampered down to the barrow, when they heard him shut the yard door.” “We should like to know,” the article asked sternly, “where these street traders get their supplies of meat, and how they can afford to be so lavish with them, handing the surplus to strays and encouraging an undesirable parasite population that fouls our roofs and back yards and adds to the nerve-racking sum of unnecessary noise in the Metropolis.”

  Superintendent Mitchell gave a sigh of relief when he read this outburst. Not a word of human bones or police inquiries. The end of it, which he did not bother to read all through, was the old story of the worn-out horse, pitiful victim of man’s lowest form of brutality. It had cropped up every few years for as long as he could remember.

  Unfortunately, the matter did not rest there. Cole and Johnson, spurred now by the joint nature of their search, made further visits in Waterbury Street. They found that Mr. Rust used to go out at seven in the morning and come in at seven in the evening. He was always alone. No one in the street had ever seen him in company with man, woman, or child. He took his little handcart away in the morning, and brought it back at night. He had empty sacks on it and a weighing machine and a quantity of clean newspaper. When he came in he had no newspaper and one sack was filled with the meat for the following day.

  The Press noticed the two police officers. They had seen them before. They wanted to know if the cat’s meat was the object in view. Cole and Johnson put them off with vague answers. This only made them keener. They scented a mystery, and Mrs. Hunt’s bitter, but vague, accusations confirmed it. Though editors gave up the story as a dead one, one young and energetic journalist went down to Waterbury Street as often as he could find time. He leaned on the bar of the Fish and Hook, not far from the river, where he knew several Waterbury people were always to be found. He encouraged them to talk about Mrs. Hunt’s lodgers. He brought in the name of Harold Rust. And he discovered that the man had made almost no impression upon anyone but his landlady. It was not that he had never p
atronized the Fish and Hook. He had been seen there quite often, drinking a quiet pint, and was always willing to exchange a few words, but beyond that, no one had anything to say of him. No one had been surprised to hear he had gone. Mrs. Hunt’s short temper was well known; the journalist was told that none of her lodgers stayed with her very long. The man Rust had put up with her rather longer than most. But then he really only slept there; he was away the whole day. No one had got to know him, or wanted to do so. More important than all this, no one had ever bought his cat’s meat. No one, the journalist found, of all the people he managed to ask, who lived within a mile or so of Waterbury Street, except Mrs. Hunt herself, had ever bought a pennyworth of cat’s meat from Mr. Rust, or indeed had ever seen a man with a little cart, a weighing machine, and a thick pile of clean newspaper.

  So what? the young journalist’s sub-editor wanted to know. Well, so what was the set-up in aid of? Was Rust really a cat’s-meat trader at all? Or was it a cover for something else? Black market, suggested the editor, reminding his junior that the man had undoubtedly brought meat into Mrs. Hunt’s house and stored it in a refrigerator. Black-market meat? The young man reluctantly agreed this was possible.

  “Only, I was wondering if the whole thing wasn’t a blind. The police were after him for something.”

  “Have we asked them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But the police had no information for the Press. There was no “case” in Waterbury Street, only a routine set of inquiries from information received. No, the police had nothing to say about this information.

  The thing was dropped, until a further indignant letter on the subject of worn-out horses arrived at the newspaper office where the young journalist worked. The same sub-editor had it pointed out to him; he remembered the curious story; it had stayed in his mind, because of the young man’s keenness. So the letter was printed with a brief commentary, which set out some of the underground and unsavoury channels by which meat, both for animals and humans, was distributed throughout the country to those who were willing to pay for it and ask no questions. Among several thinly disguised examples of dishonest trading was mentioned the case of “H.R., the disappearing cat’s-meat man.” This fellow, it was suggested, moved his quarters at short intervals, to avoid attracting attention. Though he ostensibly sold cat’s meat, no one was known to have seen, much less bought, his wares. What, precisely, did he sell, and where did he get it? The short article ended with a half accusing, half pitying, comment on the shortage of police in the Metropolis, and their preoccupation with the minor offences of motorists.

  “We’ll never catch up on him now,” said Johnson to Cole, pointing out this paragraph. “We never had much of a trail, but he’ll go to ground now, good and proper.”

  In the sense in which Chief-Inspector Johnson spoke, the man who read the same article took action. Or rather decided upon the course he must take. He considered it, quite rightly, as a warning. He cursed the animal lovers and their interference, that had so unluckily started this partial exposure. It was something he had not imagined possible. He had thought himself utterly, fantastically, remote from every kind of inquiry.

  But what he did not understand was himself. He knew he was resourceful, but he did not know he was not thorough. He knew he was inventive, but not that he was careless about details. He knew he had imaginative grasp, but not that his imagination touched only himself. So he did not remember that he had failed to pay Mrs. Hunt for the extra current the refrigerator had used. He thought his plan, his admirable plan, for the disposal of a human body, had worked perfectly, because it was planned perfectly. Everything he had done was open, honest, and ordinary. So he thought, forgetting Mrs. Hunt’s way of managing her electricity bill.

  It was a shock to see his assumed initials in print, even though he could never be traced by them. He had invented the name of Harold Rust for the cat’s-meat man, and he would never be a cat’s-meat man again. But he resented the publicity given to even such a fictitious character as Harold Rust. It meant that Mrs. Hunt had taken more interest in him than was altogether healthy.

  As the police expected, the man made up his mind to cover his tracks afresh. But here he made his biggest mistake. He had already slipped up several times, not only over the business of the electricity. But the major mistake, the great error in basic strategy, took place as a direct result of reading the article in the newspaper.

  So the credit for his ultimate downfall should go, perhaps, to the young journalist, though he had no further connection whatever with the case.

  3 The Absent Friend

  I

  Janet Lapthorn was worried. That was bad enough, because she was the kind of woman who did not feel she was pulling her weight in the world unless the solving of her problems “took it out of her.” And so an outside anxiety, added to her usual personal strife, meant that her nerves were twitched and jangled more stridently with every day that passed.

  What made her new, absorbing worry insupportable, was her helplessness in face of it. Here was the genuine thing; an unease for which she had no remedy. It made her home-brewed, artificially forced, troubles look rather silly. And she resented this very bitterly.

  “Felicity can’t be too busy,” she argued with her husband. “She can’t have nearly as much to do now she’s left Alastair as she did before, running the house for him.”

  Seeing her husband was obstinately reading his evening paper, she went on, “I know you don’t approve of what she’s done, but I can’t be disloyal myself, after all these years.”

  The silence continued, so she added loudly, “Can I?”

  This made Jack Lapthorn jump.

  “Can you what?” he asked mildly.

  “Let Felicity down.”

  “Oh, Felicity—”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t know I was talking about her.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s she who has let you down—and Alastair even more so. However, we’ve been over all that,” he added quickly, hoping to avoid a further fruitless argument. “So it just boils down to this, doesn’t it? Felicity has stopped answering your letters.”

  “Or been prevented.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jack Lapthorn put down his newspaper thoughtfully.

  “You never met her … this chap she’s bolted with?”

  “No.”

  Not for the first time Janet reflected that her husband had an uncomfortable talent for humiliating her.

  “No. She said she wanted me to meet him after they were married.”

  “That means she is expecting a divorce.”

  “I suppose so. Alastair wouldn’t be so mean as to refuse one.”

  “There is another point of view. He may consider the affair too flimsy to last, and not worth divorcing her for.”

  “Too flimsy! Considering it has gone on since this time last year, just about! And she left him in July.”

  “He may be going on what he knows of the other man. Trying to save her from future trouble. He’s absolutely nuts about her, and terribly possessive. Always was.”

  “I shall write to him. I wish we lived at Boxwood still. I’ve always regretted leaving there.”

  Jack did not answer this. The move to Romford had meant promotion, so naturally he did not regret it. Women were queer about these things. Janet had worried her head off when promotion didn’t seem to be on the way. Since the move she had been one long grumble over all she missed from their earlier days.

  “I shall write to him,” repeated Janet, and taking her husband’s continued silence as a form of disapproval, went to her desk, found notepaper and pen, and settled down to defy him, without delay.

  After two weeks of impatient waiting an answer came. A friendly letter, explaining that Felicity was in Scotland, looking after an old school friend, who was convalescent from an operation and had no regular help in the house.

  This letter annoyed Janet very
much. Alastair must know she was Felicity’s best friend. His bland assumption of her ignorance, and the implication that an earlier friend had prior claim on her affections, galled her not a little. She wrote again, more tartly, but still with caution, not mentioning her knowledge of the truth. She thanked him for his letter, pointing out that he had failed to give her Felicity’s address.

  Again Alastair Hilton wrote a friendly little note, but again it told Janet nothing. Nothing, that is to say, beyond the bare fact that Felicity was still away. There was no mention of Peter; she had not really expected it. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, about Felicity’s true whereabouts. No address, not even the name of the town or district in Scotland where she was supposed to be. And no surprise at Janet’s complaint. He did not seem to mind that Felicity had cut herself off, not only from her husband and her home, but also from her best friend. There was no news about Boxwood, or their mutual friends, there. No mention of his chief hobby, no reference even to the Archaeological Society’s branch to which he belonged, and whose meetings he was given to describing at quite boring length. He sent his regards to Jack and herself. He was hers ever—Alastair.

  “Too proud to complain,” said Jack. “Very like him, poor beggar.”

  “I can’t think what’s happened.”

  “I can. Felicity has put herself beyond the pale, and she prefers not to have contacts with the world she has left.”

  “That’s nonsense. It sounds just like an Edwardian play. Heavy moustaches and boaters. Oh, I don’t know how I can make jokes when I’m so dreadfully worried.”

  “Don’t make jokes, then. Go and make tea.”

  “It’s all very well for you to jeer. I’m fond of Felicity.”

  “Damn Felicity!”

  “All right. I’m sorry. You’ll have to make your own tea, I’m going out. I’ll put the kettle on for you.”

  “What the hell—Janet, come back. Janet!”