Intruder in the Dark (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

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  Intruder in the Dark

  by

  George Bellairs

  TO FRANCIS ILES

  WITH AFFECTION AND HIGH ESTEEM

  1

  The Disgruntled Legatee

  THE SMALL family car descended with brake-lights flashing on and off as Mr. Cyril Savage checked his downhill flight. A corner, a little planation of old birch trees and then the village of Plumpton Bois strewn along each side of the main road and creeping into the hillsides behind it.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said to his wife.

  The car stopped with a shudder and they both craned their necks to see what it was like.

  It was early afternoon and there didn’t seem anybody about. In front of the village pub, a large black dog was asleep with its muzzle between its outstretched forepaws. On a seat by the door, an old man was snoozing, his chin on his hands supported by the handle of a walking-stick wedged between his knees. Farther down the road, two parked old cars and an unattended lorry loaded with sacks of coal.

  The inn itself was a small primitive affair with a faded sign over the door. Miners Arms. A name quite out of place nowadays, though not so a century ago. Plumpton Bois had then been a busy community where fortunes were being made in mining a lot of lead and a little silver. Then the lodes had run out and so had the miners and the mining companies. Rows of empty cottages had stood derelict and the larger houses of the officials had been the same. The place became a deserted village occupied only by a sprinkling of those whose roots seemed to have sunk too deeply to be moved.

  Then, during the war, the great heaps of slag and rubbish and the stones and the rusty iron of the engine-houses, offices and weigh-houses of the deserted mines had been carted away for road-making and defence works, the wreckage had been covered by nature with a carpet of grass and wild flowers and somebody, finding beauty at last in the setting among the hills, had bought a decent house there for an old song and renovated it. In less than two years the village was almost fully occupied again, this time by week-end and summer retreats of the inhabitants of nearby towns. It even attracted some commuters.

  Nevertheless, it was a deserted place for much of its existence. The owners of the small houses once alive with the lusty families of the miners, now only visited them in their leisure. For the rest of the time, most of them were shut up and locked, their modern shutters closed and their gaily painted doors fastened and staring blindly on the village street.

  Mr. Savage entered the inn. It smelled of alcohol and garlic. The interior somewhat belied the drab outside. Mr. Crabb, the landlord, who met the intruder in his shirt sleeves, had been slowly adapting himself to the influx of new blood and ideas in the village. There was a project in embryo for tearing down the Miners Arms and rebuilding it, with a swimming pool behind and a new name to match. Plumpton Bois Auberge. People liked that kind of thing after holidays on the Continent. They also liked foreign cooking which accounted for the prevailing aroma of garlic. Mrs. Crabb had started making meals in the evenings; French cuisine gathered from recipes in ladies’ magazines.

  Mr. Crabb showed no enthusiasm when he saw his visitor at that time in the afternoon. Furthermore, Savage exhibited no signs of thirst or wishing to drink. In fact, he had the look of a teetotaller. He had on his face the enquiring expression of a lost traveller.

  ‘Could you tell me where I can find a house called Johnsons Place?’

  ‘I’ll show you …’

  Mr. Crabb sought a cap from under the bar. He had a bald head and quickly took cold, although he persisted in his shirt sleeves.

  He put on the cap and shuffled to the front door – for he was still wearing his carpet slippers – gently towing Mr. Savage along with him. They faced the view across the valley. Not a soul in sight; not a breath of wind. On that sunny day it was magnificent. A green hillside sparsely dotted with old trees and divided into small square fields with cattle feeding in them or else crops flourishing there. A stream ran in the valley between the inn and the hills.

  Mr. Crabb pointed downstream to where in a patch of greenery a stone bridge crossed the water.

  ‘See the bridge? Cross it. It’s the first house on the left. A biggish, stone place in a fair sized garden. Used to belong to a Miss Melody Johnson who died about a month ago. Very old lady. Past eighty.’

  ‘Yes I know. She was my great-aunt.’

  ‘Oh, was she? Fancy that. Didn’t know she had any relations. None came during her last illness.’

  ‘I didn’t even know she was ill. In fact, I only knew she was dead when the lawyer wrote.’

  Mr. Crabb gave him a reproachful look, as though, somehow, he thought Mr. Savage had been neglecting his duty.

  ‘I have inherited Johnsons Place under my great-aunt’s will. I’m on my way with my wife to see it now for the first time. This seems a nice locality.’

  ‘Not bad. Not bad. Live near here?’

  ‘No. Our home is in London. We started out early this morning and hope to be back again there late tonight. We’re just here to look over the place and then we’ll decide what to do about it.’

  ‘Thinking of selling? Because it should go for quite a nice figure. Since they did-up this village the value of property has gone up quite a lot. There’s been a lot of enquiries about Johnsons Place already. It’s commodious and in a lovely position.’

  Savage made no answer, but moved towards the car where his wife sat watching his every move and even seemed to be trying to read his lips and fathom what he and the landlord were talking about.

  ‘Well, thank you, landlord.’

  Mr. Crabb shuffled off and left the pair together again. They followed his instructions, downhill and across the bridge which carried a byway into the hills beyond. They quickly found the house.

  The garden stood neglected and overgrown and as Savage gazed at it, it seemed to grow more vast and forbidding. He felt a mood of melancholy and frustration seize him. He had played with the idea of taking over the place himself if it suited him and his wife. The thought of setting to rights this wilderness filled him with despair. He was a tall, spare, middle-aged man with a long, serious face, quite devoid of humour. His looks now grew harassed and petulant at his thoughts. He turned to his wife and shrugged. Her expression was almost exactly like his own, except that she was nearer to tears.

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  It was very hot and still and the surrounding trees and overgrown hedges oppressed the visitors almost to suffocation. The neighbourhood seemed deserted. A few birds twittered in the bushes and in the distance someone was rushing hither and thither on a tractor.

  All the blinds of the house were drawn. It stood back from the gate at the end of the worn-out path and its soiled white façade was sad-looking and desolate. An oblong structure, low lying and sprawling, with a door in the middle of the front with a window on each side of it. Three windows upstairs and a kind of glazed trap-door in the roof. A large stone doorstep, hollowed out in the middle by the feet of long-forgotten people. There was a neglected hen-run – a wire-netting enclosure with a tumbledown shed in one corner – at one end, apparently left just as it was after the poultry had been disposed of. As Savage approached, a rat ran from the shed and disappeared in the hedge.

  The two intruders made their way slowly along the path. Now and then they stumbled over protruding cobblestones which bristled underfoot.
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  Savage paused before they reached the door. He was obviously displeased. He was disappointed with everything: the village itself, the house, the damp abandon, the smell and decay, the solitude … the lot.

  He did not complain to his wife. There seemed too much to grumble about. He was hostile to the whole set-up and was now growing hostile to his wife, as well, for suggesting the visit there, although it was necessary and had to be made sometime or other. He trudged slowly to the door and took out the key which the lawyer had given him. Then, he paused and looked back as though someone other than his companion were following him.

  There was a view of the village between the trees. The scattered houses irregularly lining each side of the main road. The church tower with its rusty weathercock protruding through a thick mass of leaves. The abandoned Methodist chapel – ‘Erected to the Glory of God 1852’ – near the by-road to Johnsons Place. To Mr. Savage it was all depressing. He contemplated it with a strange dread, like a man condemned to exile from a beloved place inspecting his future prison.

  There was a bell-push on the door jamb and for something better to do as her husband hesitated, Mrs. Savage gently tugged it. There was a creak of old wire and somewhere, far away, a ghostly bell pealed in the darkness of the house.

  Mr. Savage jumped.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said hoarsely as though his wife were tinkering with something dangerous.

  He inserted the key in the lock and opened the door, which resisted him at first. Then a fetid draught of air surrounded the pair on the threshold. It reeked of damp stone floors, stored rotten apples and the greasy stench of neglected kitchens.

  They entered hesitantly, as though afraid to disturb some waiting occupant, and found themselves plunged in cold and darkness. Mr. Savage almost ran to the window at the end of the passage and with difficulty drew up the yellow blind. A thin trickle of light spread down the long, narrow corridor from the soiled window, half obscured by an overgrowth of dead old roses and leaves from the bushes outside.

  They could make out two doors to rooms on the left and right of the passage and another one to the kitchens to the right beyond. The passage was floored in old-fashioned red and cream tiles and furnished with a hatstand of bamboo, two chairs, pictures on the walls, a coconut mat on the floor. To the left at the far end, the stairs ascended.

  Mr. Savage’s aunt had left him the house as it stood, furniture and all, and he was anxious to inspect his windfall. He didn’t quite know what to expect among the goods and chattels of the dead woman. He had never been here before. Admitted, Miss Melody Johnson had been his great-aunt. But she might just as well have been a stranger. She had been his grandfather’s sister and both of them had been born at Johnsons Place along with two other sisters and another brother, all of whom had died before his grandfather. Grandfather Johnson had left home early in life. He had never taken to mining or the life in Plumpton Bois, had quarrelled with his father, and gone to become a clerk in a tea merchant’s office in London.

  Presumably his father had cut him off without a shilling and there was no account of any inheritance in Cyril Savage’s family archives. Grandfather Johnson had never got on with his sister Melody either.

  Cyril Savage had met his Aunt Melody once when he was a child. She had been in London on business and had called on his father and mother, her sole remaining relatives. She hadn’t taken on Cyril at all, nor he to her. And she had disapproved of the rest of the family, too; Cyril’s sister, since dead, and his brother, who had later gone down-hill to the dogs. Miss Johnson had been too starchy and exacting altogether the visit had been a failure and she had said farewell and departed for good. The family had broken up later and Aunt Melody had grown into a distant memory, a sort of ghost from the past.

  Cyril was a bank cashier in London and was keen on money. He had made several attempts to re-establish contact with his great-aunt, with an eye to ingratiating himself with her. After all, the Johnsons had been reputed to be very comfortably off. They had owned a very profitable mine in Plumpton Bois when the lodes were flourishing. His mother’s great-grandfather had, he knew, started a mine of his own, raised himself from a modest miner to a local bigwig, built Johnsons Place, and moved to it from a two-up and two-down cottage. But all Cyril’s approaches to his aunt had been repulsed. She had snubbed him, never answered his letters or his persistent Christmas cards.

  Once only, when he had written to say that he would be in the vicinity on holidays and would call on her, had she sent him a formal note. ‘Miss Johnson is unwell and is unable to receive visitors.’ After that, he’d given up.

  And now, like a bolt from the blue, the legacy. A house and its contents. And what a house! Large, damp, rambling and shabby.

  When Mr. Jeremiah Cunliffe, his aunt’s lawyer in Povington, had written to him and explained that Miss Johnson wished the house and all its contents to pass to her sole surviving relative, Cyril Savage had pictured a fine patrician place. He was due to retire from the bank in four years and maybe he could then settle there, his mother’s family home. But now … Not on your life …

  ‘You’d better call and see the place and then come back to me and let me know what you decide to do about it,’ Mr. Cunliffe had told him when Savage had called on his way to inspect his windfall. ‘You may find it somewhat neglected. Of late years your aunt has not been at all well and unable to manage her affairs properly. Had I not done my modest share of keeping an eye on things, they might have been far worse …’

  Mr. Savage had grown bold.

  ‘Who inherits the money, if I’m only to get the property?’

  Mr. Cunliffe was a small, aged, wiry man with close-cut sandy hair, sandy eyebrows and a benevolent expression for the occasion. His benevolence turned to acid at the question.

  ‘There was very little left. A few hundred pounds in the bank. No investments and, as far as I can ascertain, no property elsewhere. You are the only one to receive any substantial benefit.’

  ‘Who gets the bank balance?’

  Mr. Savage was a persistent man. Mr. Cunliffe regarded him bellicosely over his spectacles.

  ‘I do. She and I had been friends for more than sixty years and during that time, I helped her with all her financial affairs. After her legacy to you, she left me the residue. It was in the nature of a mere honorarium, for I collected very little from her in the way of fees during her lifetime. Are you satisfied, or shall I read the will to you? It is quite short.’

  Mr. Savage decided that he’d been swindled by a sharp lawyer and that it was no use arguing about it.

  ‘You needn’t bother. I see your point.’

  ‘The house and grounds of Johnsons Place have been neglected of late. Miss Johnson’s maid, a woman of over seventy, who’d been with her since she was a girl taken from an orphanage, and nursed your aunt through her last illness, left about a week ago. I would have urged her to stay until you took over, but she had made other arrangements. So, as I couldn’t find a suitable caretaker in the vicinity, I had to leave things. A neighbour is keeping an eye on the place, however. I’m sorry, but I did my best. You see, Plumpton Bois was, until quite recently, an almost deserted village. There are very few domestic workers there, if any. The owners of the properties are either elderly retired people, or else residents from nearby towns who come and go over weekends …’

  Mr. Savage had left the lawyer feeling very unhappy and dissatisfied. He had a presentiment that somewhere, something was wrong …

  The whole interview came back to him as he stood before the door of the room on the left of the tiled passage. He turned the knob, but the door didn’t move. He put his knee to it and irritably banged it open. When he stepped inside, he recoiled.

  This was what must have been a ceremonial sitting-room. It smelled of damp horsehair and decayed curtains. There were stiff little chairs, a brass fender before the fireplace and a skin hearthrug which looked to be suffering from ringworm. A small Sheraton desk in one corner was the
only article of furniture worth looking at. The walls and mantelpiece were littered with framed and fading photographs of the Johnson family. Mr. Savage recoiled from none of these, but from the state of the room.

  A large mahogany chiffonier had all its drawers out and had been resolutely rummaged. The desk had suffered the same indignity and its locks had been forced. As though seeking a hiding place under the floor, the intruder had partly rolled back the carpet, a worn green affair, and apparently examined the boards under it. He had even been up the chimney, for there were marks of soot here and there in the room, as though he hadn’t minded his dirty hands or gloves.

  This was the last straw for Mr. Savage. He made whimpering noises as he paused to recover from the shock and then, ignoring his wife, rushed from room to room, upstairs and down. Without exception, they had suffered a similar going-over, but order had apparently been somewhat restored there. As though the searcher – whoever he was – had originally tried to make a neat job, but that his time had run out as he progressed.

  The mattresses and feather beds in the two furnished bedrooms had been opened and plumbed and there were feathers scattered all over the place like relics of a destructive fox in a poultry yard.

  Cyril Savage was almost hysterical with rage and confusion until intense hatered of the unknown intruder steadied him. Meanwhile, his wife, infected by the crazy atmosphere created by her husband, had collapsed in an armchair in the dining-room, Miss Johnson’s living place, with a round oak table, straw bottomed chairs and a large Welsh dresser with its drawers gaping wide.

  Savage didn’t even bother about his wife. He continued to rush here and there, like a caged rat seeking an outlet. Upstairs and down, to the attics and back. He was not a courageous man, but very impulsive. That was the reason he hadn’t got very far in the bank. He’d made a lot of stupid mistakes during his career, charging like a bull at a gate when faced by a problem. He would have killed the wrecker of his aunt’s house had he found him. That would have been another mistake.