sir!’ exclaimed Harold. ‘When would you like to go?’
Professor Priestley considered for a moment. ‘I shall be disengaged at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon,’ he replied. ‘Now, my boy, I do not wish to raise your hopes unduly, but this case does not appear to me to be so hopeless as it seems. Good-bye until tomorrow.’
HAROLD returned to Riverside Gardens rather despondently. What he had expected as a result of his visit to Professor Priestley he hardly knew. It had been a sub-conscious impulse that had driven him to seek his father’s old friend, an instinct to seek protection under the mantle of unquestioned respectability. His reception, contrary to what he had expected, had been warm, had somehow led him to expect an immediate dissipation of the clouds that had surrounded him. Whereas the result of their prolonged interview seemed to leave the matter exactly where it had stood before.
Remember, Harold’s desire to solve the mystery was very keen. He had been through a remarkably unpleasant ordeal, had been an object of strong suspicion, and had been put through a very fine mill of inquisition. He had come out of it with hardly a shred of decency left to him; the papers had published full reports of the inquest, at which he had figured in none too favourable a light. And, worst of all, although the verdict had exonerated him from the accusation of having caused the man’s death, he was conscious that there was a pretty strong notion abroad that he knew more about the business than he had divulged.
He felt like an outlaw, shunned by the whole world. Return to his former life was impossible; the Naxos Club had been raided and dispersed, notoriously as the result of his enforced account of his doings on that fatal evening, and he could scarcely expect his old friends to welcome him with open arms. A return to the world of respectability was impossible while the stigma of intangible wrong-doing still attached to him. The only way out that he could see was to discover the truth of the mysterious circumstances that had involved him in their toils. Professor Priestley had led him to believe that this was possible, and had left him with nothing more cheering than that the business was not so hopeless as it looked!
The first thing Harold noticed as he opened the gate of Number 16, Riverside Gardens, was that the door of Mr Boost’s shop was open. As he came up the path the proprietor himself came out and barred his further passage, silent, accusing.
‘Good evening, Mr Boost,’ said Harold politely. ‘So you’re back again?’
The man made no reply, but stood looking at him malevolently. He was tall and thin, with a pronounced stoop, sharply-cut features and a curiously intense look in his eyes. He wore an untidy-looking tweed suit but the most striking thing about him was an enormous red scarf, which did duty both as a collar and tie, and an equally pretentious red handkerchief, a good half of which protruded from the side pocket of his coat. He was obviously not the sort of person to disguise his political convictions.
This individual regarded Harold for some moments in silence. Then he suddenly turned and led the way into the shop, beckoning to Harold to follow him. He closed the door behind them, then, for the first time, spoke.
‘What did you do it for, comrade?’ he asked, in a surprisingly deep voice, that seemed to come from some strange vocal organs concealed within his narrow chest.
Harold turned upon him indignantly. ‘What the devil do you mean?’ he replied angrily. ‘You seem to know all about it. Haven’t you heard that the police found that I had nothing to do with it? I shouldn’t wonder if you knew more about it than I do.’
‘Damn the police!’ exclaimed Mr Boost. ‘They’re only the servants of a tyrannical capitalism. The first thing we shall do will be to discard them and set up Red Guards who’ll know their business instead. Police, indeed! Why, they had the sauce to come to me in Leicester where I was doing a lot of business and badger the life out of me. Where was I that night? Did I know the man who had been found dead in my house? Showed me his photograph and description and cross-questioned me till I told them what I thought of them. I wouldn’t give a curse for anything the police might think.’
Harold smiled. He recalled a remark of Inspector Hanslet. ‘Boost? Oh, yes, we know all about him. He’s harmless enough, but we’ll have him looked up, though, for all that.’ But he refrained from repeating it to his landlord.
‘What your idea was I don’t know and I don’t want to know,’ continued Mr Boost. ‘You seem to have scrambled out of it, and I suppose that’s all you care about. But you can’t expect me to thank you for bringing every silly fool in London to gape round this place. I thought you wanted to lie low when you came here.’
He went into the back room, still grumbling, and Harold, seeing the futility of trying to persuade him of his innocence, took the opportunity of going up to his own rooms. He spent the evening trying to write, and then at last, giving up the task in despair, went to bed and slept fitfully, dreaming impossible dreams in which the dead man, Boost, Professor Priestley and a host of minor characters came and went, mocking him, scorning him for the outcast he was.
At nine o’clock Mrs Clapton, from Number 15 over the way, thundered at his door, as was her custom. When he had first come to Riverside Gardens he had engaged her to come in for an hour every morning to tidy the place up. The Paddington Mystery, as the headlines had called it, had raised her to the seventh heaven of delight. In an incautious moment Inspector Hanslet had called upon her to ask a few questions, and had only succeeded in escaping after an hour of breathless volubility which had left his head in an aching whirl. Since that moment she had regaled her neighbours and all whom she could prevail upon to listen to her with a torrent of eloquence. As the only person besides the central figure who had access to the scene of the discovery, she poured forth in an unceasing stream the little she knew and the enormous volume of what she conjectured.
But this morning Harold was in no mood to listen to her theories or her remarkably frank comments. He put on a dressing-gown and let her in, then returned again to bed, leaving her the run of the sitting-room. For her regulation hour she busied herself in moving the furniture about, then, after making several unsuccessful attempts to engage Harold in conversation through the closed door, she departed, firmly convinced that her employer had something discreditable to conceal. ‘It’s hawful the life that young man leads,’ she was wont to whisper. ‘I’ve seen him go in with girls after dark—you mark my words, there’s somethink be’ind it all!’
Harold waited for the door to bang behind her, then wearily made up his mind to get up. He was half dressed, when once more a loud and insistent knocking on the door disturbed his train of thought.
With a muttered imprecation he went down stairs, to find Boost standing on his doorstep.
Harold frowned. He and his landlord had always got on pretty well hitherto. Boost had never abandoned the hope of converting his tenant to the doctrines of Communism, and had called upon him at all sorts of hours for that purpose. The man’s energy and ferocity had amused him; he had regarded him as a harmless crank whose proper field of action was surely Soviet Russia. But now he had other things to think of, and was in no mood for a lecture upon the iniquities of the bourgeois and the advantages of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
‘Good morning, Mr Boost,’ he said coldly. ‘What can I do for you? I’m going out as soon as I’ve finished dressing.’
‘You and I’ve got to have a word first,’ replied Mr Boost truculently. ‘There’s a question or two to which I want an answer.’
Harold
