Bones in the Barrow Read online

  “No. I’ll have to go down to Duckington, though. Colonel Wetherall had better warn them. At any rate Hilton doesn’t know what the vicar found.”

  But Hilton did. Because the Duckington Archaeological Society sent its fragments of the jug, as a present, to the British Museum, just about the time that Hilton, receiving his fragments back from Scotland Yard, offered them to the British Museum as a donation. In the ensuing archaeological excitement letters were exchanged between the vicar and Mr. Hilton. The latter quoted the report on his bones, and asked for Mr. Symonds’s views on the Society’s finds. Mr. Symonds, foolishly reassured, and repenting his former misgivings, explained the shock he had had.

  “You may consider yourself fortunate,” he wrote, “that you did not come across these mysterious recent remains. Perhaps I ought not to let this cat out of the bag, but as we have shared the honours in putting together an ancient jug of great historical and artistic value, I feel I can safely share this other knowledge which has nothing to do with you. Especially as Scotland Yard has the matter in hand.”

  “Just so,” said Mr. Hilton, aloud, putting down the letter.

  And then he got up from the breakfast table and walked across the room to where a large photograph of Felicity Hilton stared at him from big mournful eyes above an artificial smile.

  “Safely,” he whispered, and suddenly his mouth crumpled, and he clasped the photograph to him, tears bursting from his closed eyes.

  5 Terry Byrnes Consults a Specialist

  I

  Though Terry Byrnes made up his mind to talk things over with his scientific friend Cyril Collings, he did not manage to do so at once. For one thing, Christmas was drawing near, and Terry had other things to think of. There were parties and dances to arrange; a gala night at the Square Dance Club he belonged to; also presents to buy for his family and the girl friend. None of this was, or could be, on a large scale, but it occupied his thoughts quite enough to stop him worrying about a mystery that grew more dim and less important with every day that passed. And when, Christmas over, the New Year took the stage in a cloak of thick snow, his physical discomfort from chilblains and chapped ears forced his attention upon his own grim path in life: the early rising, the daily journey, the monotonous grind at the office. He did not criticize its value, or question its inevitability; he merely grumbled. To himself, when surrounded by his elders; to his friends when they complained of their own misery.

  But he had not altogether forgotten his dreadful experience. Again and again, as he travelled to Waterloo, he gazed out the window at the houses beside the line, trying to recognize the one that held the undisclosed secret of that foggy morning in November. He was never able to do so. He had seen so little of the building; his attention had been fixed from the start upon the brief, terrible scene at the window. And there were too many small houses overlooking the line. He knew only that he had been standing at a window of the train on the left-hand side facing the way they were going. So it must have been one of the houses on the north side of the railway.

  It was not until April, when, the winter past, and some hours of daylight still left at the end of his working day, he began to meet his friends again, particularly those who lived further off than the cluster of small houses and gardens up the hill from Toxley Green station. Among these was Cyril Collings. Going for a bicycle ride with Cyril one evening, and the talk turning to a series of violent crimes committed that week, Terry at last described his long-preserved secret.

  “Do you mean to say they never found the body?” said Cyril, in so much astonishment that he almost rode down his friend.

  “Look out! You darned nearly had me off. No, they didn’t, nor the house either. I’m not sure they didn’t think I was trying to pull a hoax of some sort.”

  “You can’t blame them.”

  “One chap was all right. Chief-Inspector Johnson.”

  He brought out the name with an effortless ease he had practised while brushing his hair before the mirror. No expression on his face, his lips hardly moving. It had the desired result; Cyril was deeply impressed.

  “A chief-inspector. That shows they took you seriously.”

  “He did. The others didn’t. It stuck out a mile. They said they’d let me know the result. There never was a result. I sometimes wonder if I did really see anything.”

  “Have you ever thought you saw anything else that turned out not to be there?”

  “No. Do you think it was that? Hallucinations or something?”

  He looked so disturbed, so wild and lost, that Cyril first gave a loud and vulgar laugh, and then, putting a large hand on his friend’s shoulder, rode on close beside him, to their mutual danger from passing cars.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “If Scotland Yard has given it up, what about trying to get my old man interested?”

  “Do you mean your father?”

  Cyril laughed so heartily this time that he nearly fell off himself.

  “Of course not. I mean the head of our department. And that’s not McAndrew, the senior lab assistant, though he does try to push us all around when the boss isn’t there. No. I mean Dr. Wintringham. Dr. David Wintringham, director of clinical research at St. Edmund’s Hospital. There are four assistants in his team, three of them doctors. But he doesn’t only work at these special lines of research; cases, and what’s behind them. At the hospital, I mean. He’s a private detective as well. You must have heard me mention him before. He’s a brain. Genuine article.”

  Considering that Cyril Collings hardly ever spent an hour in his friend’s company without describing Dr. Wintringham’s exploits in one or other of his pursuits, Terry now smiled bitterly.

  “I suppose you think I was building up to that?” he said.

  “Weren’t you?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  It must have been a sneaking thought of the great Wintringham at the back of his mind, Terry honestly admitted, that had led him at last to unburden himself to Cyril.

  “Well, shall I?” the latter persisted.

  “What’ll he do?”

  “He might turn it down. But he wouldn’t mind my asking. Chaps can ask him anything—in reason. He’ll give you a straight answer. But it had better be something sensible. One of the other lads, when he was new in our place, thought he’d get a rise out of Dr. Wintringham and asked him how many white hairs there were in a piebald guinea-pig’s tail. Dr. Wintringham said he didn’t know, but would like this chap to find out for himself. He got a cageful of experimental guinea-pigs sent down to his bench with a note to say when he had completed his count, Dr. Wintringham would like to see the figures, and would he make them out as a graph of white hairs per gram body-weight to age of specimen. That had Dennis, all right. He’s a brain, the boss is.”

  “You’d better not tell him, then. He might say I’d got to make a graph of windows in the houses on the railway line, per broken panes to age of slum.”

  “That would be a good idea. Anyway, I’ll tell him. There’s no harm in it that I can see.”

  David Wintringham saw no harm in it, either, but he also saw very little good. His first reactions were similar to those of Chief-Inspector Johnson, and since the matter was put to him by a red-faced, rather incoherent lab boy from his own department, with none of Terry Byrnes’s absolute conviction, he was also a little suspicious. But, since he was David Wintringham, his unconquerable curiosity had not, even in middle age, begun to diminish, and he had, moreover, nothing in the detection line on hand at the moment.

  “It sounds extremely vague,” he said mildly, but without allowing any discouraging note in his voice. “Do you mean to say that Scotland Yard took it up, and then dropped it?”

  “Terry says so. He hasn’t liked to go since the last time they told him to wait. They were to notify him when they had anything. But they never did.”

  “Which does not necessarily mean they haven’t got anything, but only that they have no need of your friend’s assistance at t
his point.”

  “Yes, sir. I see, sir.”

  Cyril Collings began to edge towards the door. He had managed to catch the boss at the end of his day, and had missed his own train in consequence. It looked as if he might miss the next one. As his fingers reached for the handle of the door, David said casually, “Will you be seeing this friend of yours tonight?”

  Cyril straightened up smartly.

  “I could, sir. He lives about four miles from our place at Toxley Green. I could bike over.”

  “Then ask him to come along tomorrow evening about this time. He works at an insurance office, didn’t you say?”

  Cyril supposed he had said this, since the boss knew it, but he could not remember doing so. The familiar awe of Dr. Wintringham’s brain rendered him speechless, but he managed to nod his agreement.

  “Right. See you both tomorrow, then,” said David pleasantly, and the boy slipped out of the room almost before he had finished speaking.

  David’s secretary found him still smiling gently to himself, when she took some papers into his room a few minutes later. But she was used to it, and did not wonder why. In her opinion Dr. Wintringham took an unpardonably frivolous view of both his research and his detection. SCIENCE and REAL LIFE were both sacred in her eyes.

  “I have a new case,” said David to Jill that evening.

  “Interesting?”

  Jill’s thoughts were at St. Edmund’s, David decided. As well they might be, since she knew he had come straight home from there.

  “A mystery case. Or rather, the pale, faint ghost of one.”

  “What are you talking about, darling?”

  “Some new detection—perhaps.”

  “Oh, dear!”

  Jill, in the past, had been afraid of personal danger for her husband in these pursuits, sometimes with justification. But no real harm ever seemed to come to David, and now she only felt a mild annoyance at the thought of household upsets, late or missed meals, and comings and goings at all hours of the day and night.

  “Why ghost?” she asked in a resigned voice.

  David gave her a brief outline of Terry’s story as it had been relayed to him by Cyril Collings. She was frankly incredulous.

  “It must have been a rather sordid, violent sort of quarrel,” she insisted. “Perhaps someone did bonk a woman on the head. She can’t have been killed. There must have been other people in the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, even if there weren’t, the body would be found.”

  “Would it? Bodies have been hidden before now. In trunks, under floors, in hen-runs, in garages and sheds, in cellars, in cupboards. They have been put in acid, dropped in rivers, chopped up, boiled up—”

  “Stop!” said Jill. “You needn’t go through all the loathsome cases of the century.”

  “I’m only explaining why murder is not ruled out by the delay of—what is it—five months? in discovering a body.”

  “But by this time someone who knew her must be asking what’s happened to her.”

  “Exactly. I think I’ll ring up Steve and see if he knows anything about it.”

  Superintendent Mitchell was at his own home. He listened to David in an ominous silence. The latter repeated his final question.

  “Do you know anything about the case, Steve, or don’t you? And stop breathing like a grampus. I can hardly hear myself speak.”

  In the explosion that followed David plucked the receiver from his ear, holding it some six inches away. Jill moved quietly nearer. The infuriated voice at the other end boomed on.

  “Of all the infernal luck to have this wretched boy playing straight into your hands. Nosy young beggar. I’d like to—”

  “Tut,” said David, drawing the receiver nearer to exclude Jill. “My wife is listening to your bell-like tones, Steve, and probably the exchange as well. Can I come round and see you?”

  “What, now?”

  “Yes. It’s barely nine o’clock and I want to know a little more before I see this boy myself. Or would you like me to start an investigation from scratch on the information Terry will give me? Would you prefer that?”

  “Like hell I would.”

  “Be with you in twenty minutes.”

  “Thirty. I shall send out a general warning to pick you up for speeding. Fine, five pounds, or three months.”

  “I’ll take the three months. Might get my textbook revised on time. My publisher is always grumbling.”

  In exactly twenty minutes David arrived at the superintendent’s house in Edgware. Having taken an unusual route from his own house in Hampstead he had not been observed by any police officer on the way until he reached Edgware itself, when he was driving along the main road at less than thirty miles an hour.

  Mitchell brought out glasses and two bottles of beer. Mrs. Mitchell, after five minutes’ conversation with the distinguished visitor, removed herself and her mending to another room.

  “Now,” said the superintendent, sourly, “what do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “If we knew everything ourselves,” said Mitchell, “there wouldn’t be a case. There’d have been a conviction.”

  David sat up.

  “Then I take it there was a murder and this boy was the only witness.”

  Mitchell shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll put it briefly. This is what we’ve got. One. A witnessed scene of violence, possibly a killing. Two. Fragments of human bones, found on a roof a few miles away on the other side of the railway from the described scene. Also human blood on the upper back windowsill of a house in the row where the bones were found. Fingerprints of the landlady and her daily and several others, all over the room and window. The place has been cleaned out and relet several times since the blood must have got there. Nothing identified from our records, but may be useful later on. Bones identified as human, female. Three. A mysterious type, using two names, both probably false, who brings a hired refrigerator to this house where we found the blood, and to that very room. The refrig has been traced, but not the man. No prints or clues of any value on the refrig.”

  Mitchell explained Chief-Inspector Johnson’s theory of the part played by cats in the discovery of the bones. David listened with a closed face and eyes in which nothing showed except an alert interest.

  “Four,” continued Mitchell. “A woman reports a missing friend, which leads us to a man whose wife no longer lives at home.”

  “You’re very cautious.”

  “Bob Johnson is very cautious. For a long time this chap denied his wife had left him. Now he swears she is living with someone called Peter.”

  “Just that? No surname?”

  “No surname. He declares he does not know, and has never met, his wife’s lover.”

  “That’s quite possible.”

  “But fairly unlikely.”

  “It depends.”

  “He declares he has never wanted to know.”

  “That is also fairly unlikely.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Anyway, husband of missing lady no help. Does the lad, what’s his name, Terry Byrnes, identify her photograph?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Dead end,” said David.

  “Not quite. In fact,” said Mitchell, “we seem to have got quite a step further in the last few weeks. Fact number five is particularly interesting.”

  He went on to describe the Duckington discovery.

  “The man, Hilton, was working at the spot, and the vicar’s party subsequently dug up recent human bones there. An expert on this kind of relic, called Wilson, sent them on to us on the vicar’s advice, after he’d proved they were recent, not prehistoric. We’ve had them compared by a pathologist with the small bones from the roof in Waterbury Street. He says he can’t be absolutely positive, because all the bones are the worse for wear, but he thinks they may belong to the same individual.”

  “Blimey!” said David. “Now you have got s
omething.”

  “Johnson went down to Duckington, of course,” continued Mitchell. “He saw the vicar and the landlady of the pub where Hilton stayed, and the girl Daisy, and her boy friend, Joe, at the Royal Arms. And he got one more significant piece of news. There was a second bloke interested in ancient burials that week end. Asking the way to the barrows. Called at the Royal Arms for a drink and stayed chatting till Joe told him what he wanted to know.”

  “Did Joe tell him where to dig?”

  “More than that. He hold him to go to the vicar for permission. Explaining, as well, what Daisy had told him, that that was what this Mr. Hilton did.”

  “Do we know if this man was anything to do with Hilton?”

  “No.”

  “Did he go to the vicar?”

  “No.”

  “Then what did he do?”

  “He was seen riding a motor-bike up the footpath on to the downs. Duckington was rather scandalized. Two young people nearly had their feet run over. They said he had a haversack on his shoulder, and as the bike bounced, it rattled.”

  “Oh, come,” said David. “After the event!”

  “No one in Duckington knows about Wilson’s findings.”

  “But they have all heard Daisy’s theories, which are much more exciting.”

  “True.”

  “And from what you say she will be doubly convinced she was right when she does hear the truth about the bones. Have you traced this other man?”

  “No. He was wearing full motor-cycling kit when he called at the Royal Arms, including a leather balaclava, and goggles on his forehead. He was clean-shaved, and of average height. That’s all the barman, Joe, can say of him. No one else seems to have noticed him.”

  David thought for a few minutes.

  “Don’t you find it odd,” he said at last, “that the other man, as we must call him, never seems to materialize, whereas Mr. Alastair Hilton is always readily available?”