Mystery Villa Read Free Page B

himself again, and so get that opportunity for which his soul yearned of a quiet little heart-to-heart chat with him about brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrellas.
    He found Windsor Crescent easily enough, and strolled down it, and then by Osborne Terrace into Balmoral Grove. The houses all seemed much the same; large, roomy, comfortable but neglected-looking dwellings, generally detached or semi-detached, with good gardens, and nearly all with those basements that prove so conclusively by their very existence the truth of the theological doctrine of original sin and the natural perversity of man. The whole district appeared to have everywhere much the same shabby, neglected air, the same appearance of a prosperity that had passed and a poverty that had replaced it. A small proportion of the houses were vacant, many of the others showed those contrasting curtains at the different windows of the different floors that suggest occupation by different families of different tastes, and, indeed, there were a good many bills displayed proclaiming that there were to let flats described according to the fancy of agent or landlord as ‘self-contained’, ‘convenient’, ‘eligible’, ‘desirable’, ‘mansion’, or ‘family’. Gardens and fences, too, had all the same neglected air, for this was, in fact, a neighbourhood that, fifty or sixty years ago, had been a favourite with well-to-do City men, but that since then the flow of the high tide towards the flat in Town, and the ebb of the low tide towards the villa on the Surrey Downs, had left desolate. For the tubes had passed it by, the trams knew it not, the motor-buses ignored it, and this lack of convenience of access to the City and the West-end had resulted generally in tenants to whom the consequently lower rent was of importance. Agents and landlords had found themselves finally driven to recommend it as ‘quiet’ – desperate device indeed to suggest ‘quiet’, as an inducement, to a generation that adores in equal measure jazz, the motor-cycle, and the loud-speaker, and that has invented the pneumatic drill.
    It was with a distinctly puzzled air that Bobby perambulated this little decaying backwater of London life.
    â€˜Now what on earth can Con Conway have been after round here?’ he asked himself, as he hesitated whether to turn down Teck Gardens into Battenberg Prospect or to retrace his steps up Windsor Crescent, which, by the way, was no more a Crescent than Battenberg Prospect was a prospect or Balmoral Grove a grove – though probably their builder was a loyalist. ‘But I’ll bet,’ Bobby added to himself, ‘there must be something that brought Conway here – something he was after, just as something certainly happened that scared him like the devil.’
    For Con Conway – no one knew for certain whether the ‘Con’ represented his first name or was merely a pleasant allusion to the numerous occasions on which he had been a convict in one or other of His Majesty’s gaols – was a man of some standing in his profession, and, as a self-respecting practitioner, was not likely to have been attracted save by the prospect of a job really worthy of his attention, such a job, and such loot, as in fact none of these ‘converted’ residences seemed very likely to offer. Several of the empty houses would no doubt yield a visitor a certain amount of plunder in the shape of brass taps and lead piping and so on, but such vulgarities were not likely to tempt a man like Conway, who dealt only in jewels or cash. Indeed, so highly specialised a business is that of crime, so water-tight are its different compartments, that Conway would most likely have had no more idea than the average honest citizen how best to dispose of such stuff as brass taps and their like, though for a diamond ring or a gold brooch he would have known at once the best available