The Paddington Mystery. John Rhode

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       CHAPTER I

      ‘STEADY, sir!’ exclaimed the taxi-driver sharply.

      Harold Merefield made a wild clutch at the open door of the vehicle and managed to save himself from falling into the roadway.

      ‘It—it’s all right,’ he stammered. ‘Beastly shlippery tonight, must be a frost. Wosher fare?’

      The taxi-driver lit a match and gazed speculatively at his clock. The young toff was too far gone to have any inkling of time or distance.

      ‘Eight and ninepence,’ he declared, with the air of a man who states an ascertained and incontrovertible fact.

      Harold Merefield fumbled in his pocket and produced a ten-shilling note. ‘Here you are,’ he said magnificently. ‘I don’t want any change.’

      He suddenly let go of the door handle, as though it had become too hot for him to hold, and started off rapidly down the Harrow Road. The taxi-driver watched his course with an appraising eye.

      ‘That’s a rum set-out,’ he muttered. ‘Bloke picks me up in Piccadilly at ’alf past two in the morning, and tells me to drive ’im to Paddington Register Office. Drunk as a lord, too. An’ when I takes ’im there, blowed if ’e don’t make tracks straight for the perlice station, like as though he wants to give ’imself up for drunk and disorderly. No, he don’t, though, he’s got ’is wits about ’im more than I gave ’im credit for. Well, it’s no concern o’ mine. Time I ’opped it.’

      He put his lever into gear, swung his wheel round, and disappeared in the direction of the Edgware Road.

      The object of his solicitude, although he had certainly set out towards the police station, had turned off to the left past the gate of the casual ward of the workhouse, planting his feet with the severe determination of one who dares his conscience to declare that he is drunk. It was obvious that he had often trodden this way before; an onlooker, had there been such, might have gained the impression that his legs, accustomed to this route, needed no guidance from a bemused brain. They steered an uncertain course down the middle of the road taking corners warily, like a ship swinging round a buoy, and turned at last into a narrow cul-de-sac adorned with a battered sign upon which, by daylight, might have been deciphered ‘Riverside Gardens.’

      But, as it happened, there were no onlookers, as was perhaps natural at three a.m. of a winter’s night. The evening had been foggy; one of those late November evenings when a general gloom settles down upon London, producing not the merry blind-man’s-buff of a true pea-souper, but an irritating, choking opacity through which the gas-lamps show as vague blurs of light, beneath which the shadowy traffic roars and jolts. A thoroughly unpleasant evening, making the luxury of warmly-carpeted rooms, illuminated discreetly by shaded electric lamps, seem all the more desirable by contrast with the chill discomfort of the cheerless streets.

      So Harold Merefield had felt as he had entered the portals of the Naxos Club, that retiring establishment which veiled its seductions behind the dingy brick front of an upper part in a modest Soho street. Upon leaving it his reflections were no longer meteorological, but it was somehow borne in upon him that the fog had lifted, to be replaced by a fine and exceedingly chilly drizzle. Having found a taxi, and persuaded the fellow that he really did want to be driven to the Paddington Register Office—a matter of some difficulty, since the man had expressed disgusted scorn at such a destination—‘’Ere, come off it. ’Tain’t open at this time o’ night, and besides, you ain’t got no girl with you’—he had flung himself down into the corner, the easier to meditate upon his grievance. Oh, yes, it had been a jolly night enough, he was ready to admit that, jolly enough for the other fellows, that is. His own evening had been spoilt, for what was the fun of drinking by oneself, or with such of the girls who chose to offer themselves as temporary solaces to his loneliness? Vere, who had never before failed him, had unaccountably absented herself, without a word of warning, without even ringing him up to make her excuses. Of course, he might have gone to her rooms and fetched her, but why the devil should he, on a night like that? He wasn’t going to run after any girl, she could come or not as she chose. Next time he wouldn’t turn up himself, and we’d see how she liked that.

      The stopping of the taxi had interrupted the train of his thought. His stumbling exit provided him with a new sense of grievance, as he became conscious that he had barked his shins. He felt himself a deeply ill-used man as he turned into Riverside Gardens and splashed unsteadily through the puddles which had collected on its disreputable paving. On either side of the short road, a backwater, hidden away in this remoter part of Paddington, the unkempt front gardens of a row of tumble-down two-storied houses stood, dark and smelling of the rubbish they harboured. He passed them all, and turned in through the gateway in the low wall of the last garden on the right-hand side. He had reached home safely.

      Number 16, Riverside Gardens was, perhaps, the least decayed of the row that bore this surprising name. From the narrow pavement of the cul-de-sac an asphalt path some ten yards long led through what had once been a garden, but was now merely a plot of waste land covered with rubbish, to a doorway screened by a ramshackle porch. You mounted a couple of steps, and from the top of these the mystery of the name was revealed. A low wall bounded the end of the cul-de-sac and the side of the garden; on the other side of this, dank, ill-odorous and forbidding, lay the stagnant waters of the Grand Junction Canal, an inky liquid besprinkled with nameless flotsam. It only needed sufficient imagination to see in this melancholy ditch a river, and in the desolate patches of earth before the houses a wealth of vegetation and the unexpected nomenclature became obvious.

      Your enquiring mind thus set at rest, you explored the doorway in front of you. You had a choice of two panels on which to rap—there was no sign of a bell, merely the narrow orifice of a Yale lock on either door. One of these doors led into what was known by courtesy as ‘The Shop’; so much you could guess by peering through the filthy panes of the window on your left. Above this door you might have deciphered the name ‘G. Boost.’ From your necessarily limited survey through the window you would probably gather that Mr Boost’s shop was devoted to the accumulation of all the rubbish that the march of progress has banished from the Victorian middle-class home.

      It was into the lock of the other door that Harold Merefield, not without some difficulty, occasioned by the reluctance of his hand to find the more distinct of the images conveyed to his brain by his eyes, inserted his key. The door swung open, revealing a narrow flight of stairs, rather surprisingly covered with a worn but excellent carpet. These heavily surmounted, the tenant of this curious dwelling reached a small landing, off which two doors led. He opened that towards the front of the house, stumbled in, knocked clumsily against various pieces of furniture, and at length, after much vain groping, accompanied by muttered curses, found a box of matches and struck a light. This done, he flung his coat in a heap upon the floor, and sank into a remarkably comfortable and well-cushioned chair.

      The spectacle of a young man in impeccable evening dress sitting in a luxuriously-furnished room in the heart of a particularly ill-favoured slum might reasonably have been considered a remarkable portent. But then, Harold Merefield—his name, by the way, was pronounced Merryfield, a circumstance which had led to his being known as ‘Merry Devil’ to certain of his boon companions at the Naxos Club—was, in every respect, a remarkable young man. It had always been understood that he was to succeed his father, an elderly widower and a respected family solicitor, in his provincial practice. СКАЧАТЬ