CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XX III
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER I
LONELY HOUSE
EVEN now, it didn’t occur to Roger West that there had been anything faked about the message. He was just afraid in case Janet had run into trouble.
You could spend your life walking into trouble with your eyes wide open and feel hardly a tremor. When you began to wonder whether your wife was in danger, you had a sick feeling of dread; assuming that you were in love with your wife, of course.
Roger stood outside the back door.
It was locked, like the front door and like all the windows. It was a small, lonely house, and he hadn’t heard of the place until two hours ago. There was a rotting hurdle fence round the large garden, and the light was just good enough to show the distorted shapes of trees. Grass grew knee high on what had once been lawns. The gravel drive was covered with weeds.
There wasn’t a light anywhere.
A chilly wind blew on to his back, coming across the open moorland and hilly country of Surrey. Low clouds threatened rain.
Except for the wind, there was no sound.
The message had been clear enough, but he hadn’t taken it himself. Janet had telephoned Scotland Yard. Roger hadn’t been in his office, so Eddie Day had spoken to her. Eddie wasn’t a shining light, but a man who had been thirty years in the force and become a Chief Inspector; he didn’t get messages wrong.
“Bit of trouble for you, Handsome—Janet ‘phoned. All right, all right, you needn’t get worried, there’s nothing the matter with the kids! Janet’s gone to see a cousin of hers, Phyllis—the one that lives in Surrey. She says can you go straight there to-night? Copse Cottage, Helsham— not far from Guildford. Difficult place to find, she says. I’ve written the directions down.”
The note was in Roger’s pocket.
He’d followed the directions with ease; this was Copse Cottage. The big white stone at the corner, near the signpost, had been unmistakable. There’d been one odd thing about the old, rotting signpost; the pointing finger and the words Copse Cottage had been freshly painted, but the name-board, on the narrow wooden gate, hadn’t been painted for .years.