The Hampstead Mystery | Page 8

to
the room in which the crime had been committed, for it was his system
to seek inspiration in the scene of a crime.
Tanton Gardens, a short private street terminating in a cul-de-sac, was
in a remote part of Hampstead. The daylight appearance of the street
betokened wealth and exclusiveness. The roadway which ran between
its broad white-gravelled footwalks was smoothly asphalted for motor
tyres; the avenues of great chestnut trees which flanked the footpaths
served the dual purpose of affording shade in summer and screening the
houses of Tanton Gardens from view. But after nightfall Tanton
Gardens was a lonely and gloomy place, lighted only by one lamp,
which stood in the high road more to mark the entrance to the street
than as a guide to traffic along it, for its rays barely penetrated beyond
the first pair of chestnut trees.

The houses in Tanton Gardens were in keeping with the street: they
indicated wealth and comfort. They were of solid exterior, of a size that
suggested a fine roominess, and each house stood in its own grounds.
Riversbrook was the last house at the blind end of the street, and its
east windows looked out on a wood which sloped down to a valley, the
street having originally been an incursion into a large private estate, of
which the wood alone remained. On the other side a tangled nutwood
coppice separated the judge's residence from its nearest neighbours, so
the house was completely isolated. It stood well back in about four
acres of ground, and only a glimpse of it could be seen from the street
front because of a small plantation of ornamental trees, which grew in
front of the house and hid it almost completely from view. When the
carriage drive which wound through the plantation had been passed the
house burst abruptly into view--a big, rambling building of
uncompromising ugliness. Its architecture was remarkable. The
impression which it conveyed was that the original builder had been
prevented by lack of money from carrying out his original intention of
erecting a fine symmetrical house. The first story was well enough--an
imposing, massive, colonnaded front in the Greek style, with marble
pillars supporting the entrance. But the two stories surmounting this
failed lamentably to carry on the pretentious design. Viewed from the
front, they looked as though the builder, after erecting the first story,
had found himself in pecuniary straits, but, determined to finish his
house somehow, had built two smaller stories on the solid edifice of the
first. For the two second stories were not flush with the front of the
house, but reared themselves from several feet behind, so that the
occupants of the bedrooms on the first story could have used the
intervening space as a balcony. Viewed from the rear, the architectural
imperfections of the upper part of the house were in even stronger
contrast with the ornamental first story. Apparently the impecunious
builder, by the time he had reached the rear, had completely run out of
funds, for on the third floor he had failed altogether to build in one
small room, and had left the unfinished brickwork unplastered.
The large open space between the house and the fir plantation had once
been laid out as an Italian garden at the cost of much time and money,
but Sir Horace Fewbanks had lacked the taste or money to keep it up,

and had allowed it to become a luxuriant wilderness, though the sloping
parterres and the centre flowerbeds still retained traces of their former
beauty. The small lake in the centre, spanned by a rustic hand-bridge,
was still inhabited by a few specimens of the carp family--sole
survivors of the numerous gold-fish with which the original designer of
the garden had stocked the lake.
Sir Horace Fewbanks had rented Riversbrook as a town house for some
years before his death, having acquired the lease cheaply from the
previous possessor, a retired Indian civil servant, who had taken a
dislike to the place because his wife had gone insane within its walls.
Sir Horace had lived much in the house alone, though each London
season his daughter spent a few weeks with him in order to preside over
the few Society functions that her father felt it due to his position to
give, and which generally took the form of solemn dinners to which he
invited some of his brother judges, a few eminent barristers, a few
political friends, and their wives. But rumour had whispered that the
judge and his daughter had not got on too well together--that Miss
Fewbanks was a strange girl who did not care for Society or the Society
functions which most girls of her age would have delighted in, but
preferred to spend her time on her