And not only did he know the residents, he knew by name or by sight many of the visitors, many of the tradesmen who served them, and all their daily helps, if they had any. He was in fact a mine of information; he knew far more about everyone in the street than they knew about each other; and being an ex-policeman he had a keen eye for any stranger, especially any suspicious-looking stranger, who invaded its precincts. At the same time he was no night-watchman, and since many burglars, though by no means all, operate by night, he had not been able to detect who were the miscreants who had twice broken into Vivian’s house. He did, however, tell Vivian, with whom he was on friendly terms, that he had a clue and was following it up, ‘It could have been somebody who knew your house,’ he said rather darkly, ‘because after they had trussed you up they seemed to know where to look for everything, they got away that quick, or so you told me, Mr. Vosper.’
‘You are quite right,’ said Vivian, remembering with renewed bitterness the long silence that had followed while he was trying, sometimes hopefully, sometimes despairingly—to release himself from his bonds. ‘But I haven’t any friends who are burglars.’
‘You never know nowadays,’ said Mr. Stanforth, ‘you never know. Now what was it you wanted to see me about?’
Vivian had almost forgotten why he had telephoned to Mr. Stanforth, asking him to look in if he had a moment to spare.
He looked round his sitting-room, hoping to be reminded. ‘Oh, it was this,’ he said, taking the sherry-bottle, and holding it up for Mr. Stanforth’s inspection. ‘It contains some stuff l use to poison the rats.’
Mr. Stanforth’s eyes brightened as he took the bottle from Vivian’s outstretched hand.
‘Of course I’ve heard about it, sir,’ he said excitedly. ‘We’ve all heard about it, and how you’ve used it to get rid of a dozen rats.’
‘Well, not a dozen, but five or six.’
Mr. Stanforth looked disappointed at this reduced number of casualties. ‘They’re a perfect pest in these old-time dwellings. I suffer from them myself, so I know.’ With his hand on the cork he asked, ‘Can I take a sniff, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Vivian, ‘but careful, careful, it’s rather dangerous, so I put this on it’—and he pointed to the label, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,—‘in case someone should come in while I’m out, and be tempted to take a swig. You mustn’t put temptation into people’s way. You Mr. Stanforth know who can be trusted and who can’t, but present company excepted, we all fall into temptation sometimes, especially working-men who get thirsty delivering goods—’
‘Oh yes, Mr. Vosper, I know what you mean.’
‘You keep tabs on them, as far as you can, but you can’t be answerable for everyone, so I thought I’d just tell you.’
‘Quite right, sir, and I’ll drop a hint where I think it might be useful.’ He paused. ‘You haven’t got the recipe, sir? There are quite a lot of our neighbours, not to mention me, who are plagued with rats, and I’m sometimes asked, “How does Mr. Vosper get rid of his?”.’
Vivian hesitated before he explained. ‘But the cyanide is hard to get hold of in these days. It happened I had some by me from when I was a butterfly-collector. Chemists are pretty strict about it now. But there’s no harm in trying.’
‘I’ll remember that, sir. You don’t mind if I mention this to some of the others who are plagued by rats?’
‘Oh no, Mr. Stanforth, but just warn them that the stuff is dangerous.’
Days passed and nothing happened to disturb the harmony of Rateable House (as Vivian’s dwelling was bitterly called). No more rats; doubtless being the most intelligent of animals, with an instinct for survival which we have lost, they had informed their fellows that Rateable House was a place to be avoided. No more scratching and scurrying behind the wainscot; no more wondering if it was a rat or a mouse, or something less tangible but more horrid.
The disappearance of the rats had one effect which Vivian didn’t know whether to regret or not: it had taken away Ethel’s one subject of conversation. Sometimes she forgot and began, ‘If it wasn’t for those awful rats—and then, remembering they no longer existed, fell into an offended silence, as if their absence was an even greater grievance than their presence. ‘Those rats,’ she once said enigmatically, ‘did help to keep burglars away.’
‘How do you mean, Ethel?’
‘Well, most burglars are frightened of rats, just as you and I are.’
‘So they may be, but they can’t tell from outside if there are rats inside.’
‘They have their own ways of finding out. Rats and burglars are much the same, as you should know, sir. They’re both thieves, and they pass on information to each other, we don’t know how.’
Soon she discovered new causes of complaint, irregularities in what she felt should be Vivian’s fixed routine—clothes omitted from the laundry basket, objects mislaid which had cost her much time, and much waste of time, to track down. But these were only ruffles on the smooth surface of their relationship, protests, demonstrations against his taking her services too much for granted. And more than once she said, ‘I will say this, Mr. Vivian, you got rid of those rats, which is more than most of us can do.’
Vivian thought the matter over, and the further away the two burglaries were the less they seemed to matter, and the less likely to recur. A fire may happen twice in the same house, but it won’t happen a third time; the principles of probability, though so wayward in their action, for misfortunes seldom come singly, were against it. Vivian increased as far as he could, his antiburglar precautions; he lined his front-door and his two ground-floor windows with wreaths of protective and ornamental iron, as the Venetians, more practical in such measures than we, have always done, and he hoped for the best.
He realized, of course, that in a ‘permissive’ society, it was the victim, if so he could be called, who was in the wrong. He should have redoubled his efforts to safeguard his property against the very natural and, according to some psychiatrists, the almost laudable efforts of thieves to take it from him. When he came home, after dining with a friend, he surveyed with some satisfaction the intricate ironwork with which he had sought to thwart the thieves in their natural, praiseworthy impulse to get hold of him and his belongings. Permissiveness was the pass-word to today’s society; and little as he agreed with it he felt slightly guilty for trying to stand in its way.
On the sideboard in his sitting-room still stood, among the other aperitifs, the bottle labelled ‘Please do not touch’. No one had touched it except the rats and they were long ago extinct. When Vivian looked at it and saw the liquid was still half-way below the P of ‘Please’, he felt relieved and also (why?) a little disappointed.
Then came the night, for it was night about 3 a.m. by his watch, when, the unexpected happened.
From his bedroom which was directly above his sitting-room, he heard noises difficult to describe; stealthy shufflings, furniture creaking, and occasionally a whispered word. What to do now? He crept out of bed, locked his bedroom door, fastened the window as quietly as he could, and returned to bed though not, of course, to sleep. The telephone was by his hand; should he ring the police? No; the intruders would hear and either make off with the swag or break through his bedroom door, enter (breaking and entering!), cosh him and tie him up. The police themselves said that in cases such as these, where dangerous criminals were about, discretion was the better part of valour. Pulling the bedclothes over his head he feigned sleep and only hoped that the tell-tale ticking of his heart would not be heard by those below.
Thus camouflaged from sight and insulated from outside sounds he himself could not hear at all distinctly. But, cautiously shifting the bedclothes, it seemed to him that the sounds underneath had ceased. No doubt the burglars had made off, taking with them what their predecessors had left them to take. Yes, the silence was complete. No use shutting the stable-door after the horse has gone; but Vivian felt that without danger to life and limb he could now dial 999. He explained what had happened; and the police officer said they would be round in a quarter of an hour.