Free Mystery Villa by E.R. Punshon Page A

had their effect on Wild, who began to look a little uneasy, and when they got to Windsor Crescent enquired, uncomfortably, how they were going to begin.
    â€˜We’ll knock first,’ Bobby said. ‘All things in order.’
    But to Bobby’s knocking no answer came, and Wild said: ‘You can knock for donkey’s years, but you’ll never get an answer – no one ever does.’
    â€˜No answer is a kind of answer just as not being is a kind of being, as someone once said, once upon a time,’ Bobby observed. ‘How about having a look at the side door?’
    â€˜May as well,’ agreed Wild, ‘but, if you ask me, there’s nothing in it, except the old party’s gone dotty living alone, and the young chap Mrs Rice saw was a doctor fetched in to have a look at her – very like by that smart little girl me and you saw, if you remember.’
    Bobby agreed carelessly that he remembered her more or less clearly, but couldn’t agree that the young man Mrs Rice talked about was likely to be a doctor.
    â€˜Why should a doctor be carrying a pistol?’ he asked.
    â€˜Well, I suppose,’ agreed Wild, ‘it’s more pills than pistols they use to finish you off with.’
    Pleased with the good old fruity flavour of this jest, he went, quite willingly, with Bobby round to the side of the house. There everything appeared as it had done before. Bobby looked inside the outbuilding near the back door, and peered into the basket hanging there, wherein Humphreys’ assistant had deposited the bread and tinned milk he had delivered. The basket was empty now, so presumably Miss Barton had come down later on to get her purchases. Bobby went back to the side door, and, while Wild looked on without much interest, he knocked. There was still no answer, so he tried the handle and found the door secure. Pie left it, and went to the still unmended window the football had broken. He said to Wild:
    â€˜How about getting in here?’
    Wild hesitated. In the portly maturity of his twenty-two years’ service he had no taste for scrambling through windows, even those on the ground floor. But Bobby was already on the sill.
    â€˜It can’t have been open for years,’ he said. ‘The catch has rusted into place.’
    But, if the rust of so many years had fixed the catch into place, it had also eaten its strength away, and as Bobby struggled with it, his hand through the gap the football had made, it gave way suddenly, breaking in half. With some difficulty still, Bobby forced up the reluctant sash and then stepped inside.
    Within, the walls were black with the dust of years, the floor was covered with a damp and rotting oilcloth, and on the accumulated dust that covered it could be seen distinctly a trail of small footsteps, where, presumably, the girl they had seen there had come to retrieve the football she had returned to them. Neither table nor chairs were to be seen, but an old-fashioned mangle stood near one wall, and a small bracket supported one of the circular knife-cleaning machines, once so necessary an adjunct to every house. Both articles were so wreathed in cobwebs as to be hardly recognisable. In a corner stood the sink wreathed in cobwebs too, and with taps black with age and neglect.
    â€˜No one’s been getting water here,’ Bobby reflected. ‘I wonder how they’ve managed? – bathroom, perhaps.’ The decrepit door, hanging insecurely on one hinge, the other having apparently crumbled away, stood half open. Bobby went through it and out into the passage, where, too, dust and grime lay everywhere, and cobwebs hung festooned on every side.
    For a moment he stood still, and then, with the full force of his lungs, he shouted:
    â€˜Is there anyone here? Police making enquiries. Anyone here?’
    His voice echoed strangely through the empty rooms and deserted passages, but no answer came. Only the spiders scuttled on the