Buch lesen: «Murder Gone Mad»

CHAPTER I
I

THERE had been a fall of snow in the afternoon. A light, white mantle still covered the fields upon either side of the line. The gaunt hedges which crowned the walls of the cutting before Holmdale station were traceries of white and black.

The station-master came out on to the platform from his little overheated room. He shivered and blew upon his hands. The ringing click-clock of the ‘down’ signal arm dropping came hard to his ears on the cold air.

‘Harris!’ called the station-master. ‘Six-thirty’s coming!’

A porter came out from behind the bookstall. He was thrusting behind a large and crimson ear a recently pinched-out end of a cigarette.

The six-thirty came in with much hissing of steam and a whistling grind of brakes. The six-thirty reached the whole length of Holmdale’s long platform. The six-thirty looked like a row of gaily-lighted, densely-populated little houses. The six-thirty’s engine, for some reason known only to itself and its attendants, let off steam in a continuous and teeth-grating shriek. The doors of the six-thirty all along the six-thirty’s flank began to swing open. Holmdale was the six-thirty’s first stop since leaving St Pancras, now forty miles and forty-five minutes behind it.

The station-master stood by the foot of the steps leading up to the bridge. He opened a square and bearded mouth and chanted his nightly chant, quite unintelligibly, of what was going to happen to the train. He should properly have walked up and down the train with his chant, but he knew only too well that to walk at all against this tide which now covered the platform like a moving carpet of black, huge locusts, was impossible.

The six-thirty’s engine ceased its hissing. There was a great slamming of doors which sounded under the station’s iron roof like big guns heard in the distance. There were indistinguishable cries from one end of the train to the other. The guard held up his lantern, green-shaded. The six-thirty settled down to her work. The little lighted houses, most of them now untenanted, began once more their rolling march … The six-thirty was gone.

But, as yet, only the very first trickles of the black flood were over the bridge and outside Holmdale station. They were so tight packed, the units which went to the making of this flood, that speed, however passionately each unit undoubtedly desired it, was impossible. They surged up the stairs. At the head of the stairs they split into two streams, one flowing right and east and the other left and west. Two streams flowed across the bridge and down other stairs. At the foot of each staircase stood a harassed porter snatching such tickets as offered themselves and glancing, like a distracted nursemaid, at hundreds of green, square pieces of pasteboard marked ‘Season’.

The left-hand staircase leads into the main booking hall of Holmdale station and this hall is lighted. As the flood, after the first trickling, really surges into the hall, it is possible for the first time fully to realise that not only are the component parts of the flood human, but that these humans are not uniform. Look, and you will see that there are women where at first you would have been prepared to take oath that there had been nothing save men. Look again, and you will see that all the hats are not, as you first supposed, bowler hats and from the same mould, but that every here and there a rebellious head flaunts cap or soft hat. Look again, and you will see that the men and the women are of different height, different feature and perhaps, even, different habit. But you will look in vain for man or woman who does not carry a small, square, flat case.

The flood pours through the booking hall and out through the double doors into the clear, cold night. In the gravelled, white-fenced, semi-circular forecourt to the station, wait, softly chugging, two bright-lighted omnibuses looking like distorted caravans. Each of these omnibuses is meant to hold—as he who peers may read—twenty-seven passengers. Each, not less than two minutes after the flood has begun to break about their wheels, grinds off through the night with fifty at least. The rest of the flood, thinning gradually into trickles and then, at last, into units, goes off walking and talking. Their voices carry a little shrill on the cold, dark air and the sound of their boot-soles rings on the smooth iron road. Between the forecourt and the station is a dark expanse edged at its far sides by little squares of yellow light where the houses begin.

II

‘Coo!’ said Mr Colby. ‘Sorry we couldn’t get the bus, ol’ man!’

‘Not a bit. Not a bit,’ mumbled Mr Colby’s friend, turning up the rather worn velvet collar of his black coat.

‘Not,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that I mind myself. Personally, Harvey, I rather look forward to a nice, crisp trudge. Seems somehow to blow away the cobwebs.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Quite.’

Mr Colby, having shifted his umbrella and attaché-case to his right hand, took Mr Harvey’s arm with his left.

‘It’s only a matter,’ said Mr Colby, ‘of a mile and a bit. Give us all the more appetite for our supper, eh?’

‘Quite,’ said Mr Harvey.

‘I wish,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that it wasn’t so dark. I’d have liked you to have seen the place a bit. However, you will tomorrow morning.’

Mr Harvey grunted.

‘There are two ways to get to my little place,’ said Mr Colby. ‘One’s across the fields and the other’s up here through Collingwood Road. Personally, I always go over the fields but I think we’ll go by Collingwood Road tonight. The field’s a bit rough for a stranger if he doesn’t know the ground.’ Mr Colby broke off to sniff the cold air with much and rather noisy appreciation. ‘Marvellously bracing air here,’ said he. ‘Didn’t you feel it as you got out of the train? You know we’re nearly five hundred feet up and really right in the middle of the country. Yes, Harvey, five hundred feet!’

‘Is that,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘so?’

‘Yes, five hundred feet. Why, since we’ve been here, my boy’s a different lad. When we came, a year ago, his mother—and his old dad too, I can tell you—were very worried about Lionel. You know what I mean, Harvey, he was sort of sickly and a bit undersized and now he’s a great big lad. Well, you’ll see him yourself … Here we are at Collingwood Road.’

‘Collingwood Road, eh?’ said Mr Harvey.

Mr Colby nodded emphatically. In the darkness, his round, bowler-hatted head looked like a goblin’s.

‘We don’t live in Collingwood Road, of course. We’re right at the other side of the place. More on the edge of the country. Our bedroom and the room you’re sleeping in tonight, ol’ man, look out right across the fields and woods. In the spring, as Mrs Colby was saying to me only the other day, it’s as pretty as a picture.’

Mr Harvey unburdened himself of a remark. ‘A good idea,’ said Mr Harvey approvingly, ‘these Garden Cities.’

‘Holmdale,’ said Mr Colby with some sternness, ‘is not a Garden City. You don’t find any long-haired artists and such in Holmdale. Not, of course, that we don’t have a lot of journalists and authors live here, but if you see what I mean, they’re not the cranky sort. People don’t walk about in bath-gowns and slippers the way I’ve seen them at Letchworth. No, sir, Holmdale is Holmdale.’

Perhaps the unwonted exercise—they were walking at nearly four miles an hour—coupled with the cold and bracing air of Holmdale—had induced an unusual belligerence in Mr Harvey. ‘I always understood,’ said Mr Harvey argumentatively, ‘that the place’s name was Holmdale Garden City.’

‘When you said was,’ said Mr Colby, ‘you are right. The place’s name is Holmdale, Harvey. Holmdale pure and Holmdale simple. At the semi-annual general meeting of the shareholders—Mrs Colby and I have got a bit tucked away in this and go to all the meetings—the one held last July, it was decided that the words Garden City should be done away with. I supported the motion strongly; very, very strongly! And fortunately it was carried.’ Mr Colby laughed a reassuring, friendly laugh and once more put his left hand upon Mr Harvey’s right arm. ‘So you see, Harvey,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that if you want to get on in Holmdale you mustn’t call it Holmdale Garden City.’

‘I see,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Quite.’

They were now at the end of Collingwood Road—a long sweep, flanked by small, neat, undivided gardens and small, neat-seeming, shadowy houses. Beneath a street lamp—a curious and most ingeniously un-street-lamplike lamp—which was only the third that they had passed in the whole of their three-quarter mile walk, Mr Colby stopped to look at his watch.

‘Very good time,’ said Mr Colby. ‘Harvey, you’re a bit of a walker! I always take my time here and I find I’ve beaten last night’s walk by fully half a minute. Now we haven’t far to go. We shall soon be toasting our toes and perhaps having a drop of something.’

‘That,’ said Mr Harvey warmly, ‘will be very nice.’

They crossed the narrow, suddenly rural width of Marrowbone Lane and so came to the beginning of Heathcote Rise.

‘At the top here,’ said Mr Colby, ‘we turn off to the right and then we’re home.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr Harvey.

‘The only thing about this walk,’ said Mr Colby glancing about him in the darkness with the air of one who knows the place so well that clear vision is not required, ‘the only thing about this walk that I don’t like, is this bit. Of course you can’t see it, Harvey, but I assure you Heathcote Rise isn’t—well—isn’t, as you might say, worthy of the rest of Holmdale. I don’t think anyone could call me snobbish, but I must say that I think it rather extraordinary of the authorities to let this row of labourers’ cottages go up here. They ought to have kept that sort of thing for The Other Side.’

‘The other side,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘of what?’

‘The railway, of course,’ said Mr Colby. ‘You see, the idea is to have what you might call an industrial quarter one side of the railway and a—well—a superior residential quarter on this side of the railway. Very good notion, don’t you think, ol’ man?’

‘Splendid!’ said Mr Harvey.

‘Round here. Round here,’ Mr Colby, with increasing jocularity, swung Mr Harvey to his left. They entered the dark and box-hedged mouth of what seemed to be a narrow passage. They came out after ten yards of this into a small rectangle. So far as Mr Harvey was able to see, this rectangle was composed of small and uniform houses all ‘attached’ and all looking out upon a lawn dotted with raised flower beds. Round the lawn were small white posts having a small white chain swung between them. All the square ground-floor windows showed pinkly glowing lights. Mr Harvey wondered for a moment whether all the housewives of The Keep—he knew his friend’s address to be No. 4, The Keep—had chosen their curtains together.

‘Here we are! Here we are! Here we are!’ said Mr Colby in a sudden orgy of exuberance. He had stopped before a small and crimson door over which hung by a bracket a very shiny brass lantern. He released the arm of Mr Harvey and fumbled for his key chain, but before the keys were out the small red door opened.

‘Come in, do!’ said Mrs Colby. ‘You must both be starved!’

They came in. The small hall was suddenly packed with human bodies.

‘This,’ said Mr Colby looking at his wife and somehow edging clear, ‘is Mr Harvey. Harvey, this is Mrs Colby.’

‘Very pleased,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘to meet you.’

‘So am I, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Colby. She was a plump and pleasant and bustling little person who yet gave an impression of placidity. Her age might have been anywhere between twenty-eight and forty. She was pretty and had been prettier. She stood looking from her husband to her husband’s friend and back again.

Mr Colby, whose christian name was George, was forty-five years of age, five feet five and a half inches in height, forty-one and a half inches round the belly and weighed approximately ten stone and seven pounds. He had pleasing and kindly blue eyes, a good forehead and a moustache which seemed, although really it was not out of hand, too big for his face.

Mr Harvey was forty years old, six feet two inches in height, thirty inches round the chest and weighed, stripped, nine stone and eleven pounds. Mr Harvey was clean-shaven. He was also bald. His face, at first sight rather a stern, harsh, hatchet-like face, was furrowed with a myopic frown and two deep-graven lines running from the base of his nose to the corners of his mouth. When Mr Harvey smiled, however, which was quite frequently, one saw, as just now Mrs Colby had seen, that he was a man as pleasant and even milder natured than his host.

‘This,’ said Mr Colby throwing open the second door in the right-hand wall, ‘is the sitting-room. Come in, Harvey, ol’ man.’

Mr Harvey squeezed his narrowness first past his hostess and then his host.

‘You coming in, dear?’ said Mr Colby.

His wife shook her head. ‘Not just now, father. I must help Rose with the supper.’

‘Where’s the boy?’ said Mr Colby.

‘Upstairs,’ said the boy’s mother, ‘finishing his home lessons. It’s the Boys’ Club Meeting after supper and he wants to get the work done first.’

‘If we might,’ said Mr Colby with something of an air, ‘have a couple of glasses …’

Mrs Colby bustled away. Mr Colby went into the sitting-room with his friend. Mr Colby impressively opened a cupboard in the bottom of the writing desk and took from the cupboard a black bottle and a syphon of soda water. Mrs Colby entered with a tray upon which were two tumblers. She set the tray down upon the side table. She raised the forefinger of her right hand; shook it once in the direction of her husband and once, a little less roguishly, at Mr Harvey.

‘You men!’ said Mrs Colby.

Mr Colby and his guest lay back in their chairs, their feet stretched before the fire. In each man’s hand was a tumbler. They were very comfortable, a little pompous and entirely happy. To them, when the glasses were nearly empty, entered Master Lionel Colby; a boy of eleven years, well-built and holding himself well; a boy with an engaging round face and slightly mischievous, wondering blue eyes which looked straight into the eyes of anyone to whom he spoke. Lionel obviously combined in his person, and also probably in his mind, the best qualities of his parents. He shook hands politely with Mr Harvey. He reported, with some camaraderie but equal politeness, his day’s doings to his father.

‘Homework done?’ said Mr Colby.

Lionel shook his head. ‘Not quite all, daddy. I came down because mother told me to come and say how-do-you-do to Mr Harvey.’

Mr Colby surveyed his son with pride. ‘Better run up and finish it, son. Then come down again. What are you going to do at the Boys’ Club tonight?’

The round cheeks of Lionel flushed slightly. Lionel’s blue eyes glistened. ‘Boxing,’ said Lionel.

The door closed gently behind Lionel.

‘That,’ said Mr Harvey with genuine feeling, ‘is a fine boy, Colby!’

Mr Colby made those stammering, slightly throaty noises which are the middle-class Englishman’s way when praised for some quality or property of his own.

‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey again.

‘A good enough lad,’ said Mr Colby. His tone was almost offensively casual. ‘Did I happen to tell you, Harvey, that he was top of his class for the last three terms and that the headmaster, Dr Farrow, told me himself that Lionel is one of the best scholars he’d had in the last twenty years? Not, mind you, Harvey, that he isn’t good at games. He’s captain of the second eleven and they tell me he’s going to be a very good boxer. I must say—although it isn’t really for me to say it—that a better, quieter, more loving lad it’d be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Holmdale.’

‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey once more.