Mystery Villa by E.R. Punshon Read Free Book Online Page B

fear that seemed to hang about the place.
    Nor, try as he might, could he imagine any reasonable cause for the extremity of terror that had seemed to be holding in its grip the girl whom he and Wild had seen there.
    â€˜If there was anything or anyone scaring her,’ he reflected, ‘she knew we were police, and she only had to say a word; and, if it was because we were police she was upset, she had only to keep the door shut. But it’s not even reasonable to suppose there can be anything criminal happening in a house where an old woman has been living alone for half a century or so, when all the neighbourhood knows about her, and would spot it at once if there was anything unusual going on.’
    Yet, in spite of himself, he could not help thinking that there must be some connection between the terror that had sent Con Conway flying in blind panic through the night and that other fear which so evidently the unknown girl was experiencing. Not that he could imagine how any such connection could exist, but it was in vain he tried to persuade himself that only coincidence linked together those two terrors. It was as though an intuition told him differently.
    In a quiet, unofficial way he tried, too, to get in touch again with Con Conway. Having no desire to experience the riot of leg-pulling that he knew very well would ensue, he had made no report of the umbrella incident, and so could not explain why he was so anxious to find Conway. But that enterprising gentleman was evidently taking very good care to keep out of his way, realising, no doubt, how ardently Bobby longed for a quiet little private talk with him on the subject of umbrellas, and, indeed, he seemed to have vanished altogether from all his accustomed haunts. Sometimes Bobby wondered if this disappearance could have any connection with whatever it was had caused his panic on the night of their meeting, but that did not seem to him very likely. Sometimes, also, he wondered if the unknown girl, too, had vanished in the same way from her usual circle.
    Then, opportunity serving, he found himself once again, very shortly afterwards, within a brief bus-ride of the Windsor Crescent district, and with an hour or two to spare before he was actually due back to report at the Yard before going off duty. For Bobby an unsolved problem had always an attraction – it would go on teasing his mind till he was able to satisfy it with an adequate explanation; it was for him much what some unusual play of light is to the artist, or some rush of image and emotion to the poet. A bus, going in the required direction, came up; he jumped on, and got down again at the Osborne Terrace end of Windsor Crescent.
    Walking along it, he came soon to Tudor Lodge. No change was apparent. Deserted-looking and lonely, blinds down and shutters closed, rotting wood and crumbling brick, there it stood with its padlocked gate and its front garden where all the rubbish of the world seemed gathered.
    With his own strong, vivid young life throbbing through his veins, Bobby tried to imagine what existence must be like, dragged out in that dreary place, solitary, unknown, forgotten. A hermit in a desert or a wilderness had some kind of natural background and tradition, and could, at least to some degree, be understood. But to live like this all alone, in the midst of the roar and bustle of a great town’s throbbing life, seemed to Bobby the most unnatural thing conceivable.
    He wondered again how it could have come about, how anyone at all could drift into such a condition, and he supposed that would never be known. But how had it happened there had been no friend or relation to rescue this lone, unhappy creature from her own perversity?
    For some time he stood there, looking and wondering, and finding no answer to his questions. It was growing late – Scotland Yard, of course, knows nothing of regular hours – and the falling shades of the evening added to the gloom and depression