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for he remembered that he and Bobby were both sergeants; and, while it is one thing for a sergeant of many years’ experience to smile away the fancies of a sergeant of junior standing, mere constables should be more discreet – ‘that there’s been complaints from the residents in Windsor Crescent, and round that neighbourhood, of boys playing football in the streets. We’re badly off for open spaces in this part, and Windsor Crescent is a good, wide, open street without much traffic – only, the trouble is, soon as our backs are turned, there they are at it again. Richards – he was on the beat last week – says it’s nothing to make a song about, but he’s a football fan himself, and I wouldn’t put it past him to join in if he thought no one was looking. I shall have to go round myself, and see what it’s really like – don’t want to detail a plain-clothes man unless we have to.’
    â€˜Know anything of a deserted, neglected-looking house in Windsor Crescent – Tudor Lodge it’s called, I think?’ Bobby asked.
    Wild nodded, and his plumb good-humoured features took on a serious expression.
    â€˜We shall have to break in there one of these days, most likely,’ he said.

CHAPTER THREE
The Broken Window
    A little startled by this remark, Bobby looked up sharply.
    â€˜In what way? How do you mean?’ he asked.
    â€˜Old party lives there all alone,’ Wild explained. ‘Some of these days one of the neighbours will come along and say she hasn’t been seen for a week or two, and then we’ll break in, and we’ll find her dead in the kitchen or somewhere, and the verdict will be, “Natural death, accelerated by neglect and exposure.” I’ve known similar cases before, and that’s the way they always end.’
    â€˜There wouldn’t be any need to break in just now,’ Bobby observed. ‘I noticed one of the windows on the first floor was open, and there’s a gutter-pipe runs quite close. Anyone could get in with a ladder easy enough. Conway could swarm up the gutter-pipe and be inside in less than no time.’
    He spoke with a certain troubled uneasiness, for there was still a vivid picture in his mind of Conway fleeing through the streets as though driven on by some dreadful memory, and there still teased him, with the fascination an unsolved problem always possessed for him, the question of what it was had caused such extreme, strange terror. But Wild guessed what was in Bobby’s thoughts, and his grave expression gave way to a slightly superior smile.
    â€˜Nothing there worth picking up,’ he pronounced. ‘Rates haven’t been paid for donkey’s years. Gas cut off ever since I came to this division. Water turned off by the board, and turned on again by the sanitary people, quite as a regular thing. Besides, as it happens, Turner was on that beat last night, and he’s always taken a bit of interest in her, and been sorry for the old party, along of having a mother-in-law himself what’s half balmy, too. And, when he came off duty this morning, he told me he had seen the old lady of Windsor Crescent and said good night to her, and she said ‘Good night, officer,’ and scuttled off fast as she could. He didn’t say what time it was, but it must have been after he went on duty at 2 a.m., and that was later than you saw Conway, I take it?’
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ agreed Bobby. ‘It was before midnight when I saw him.’
    â€˜Well, then,’ Wild pointed out, ‘can’t have been anything to do with her that was upsetting him, or she would have said something about it to Turner – she’s not too balmy for that.’
    â€˜I was thinking, just for the moment,’ Bobby confessed, ‘that Con Conway might have been up to mischief there – but, then, anyhow he’s not the violent type; for one thing he wouldn’t