by Zenith Brown
He made a note on the pink paper pad on his desk. He had little use for notes. There was no danger of his forgetting even the minor details he was supposed to remember, but if you had a desk you should have pads on it, and if you had pads you should use them if you happened to remember it.
“But if there was a man, you’ve got several possibilities,” said Mr. Pinkerton, carefully fitting a cigarette into a long white bone holder and lighting it. “In fact, you’ve got four distinct possibilities.”
“Four?”
“Four.”
Inspector Bull’s mind was the type that could cope successfully with one possibility at a time. Four were a little overpowering. Not to Mr. Pinkerton, whose agile mind could build edifices that made New York a city of Lilliput. Especially if he had an audience, and Inspector Bull was listening to him with mild wonder in his eyes.
“If there was a man,” continued the little Welshman with a certain complacent eagerness, “if there was a man, four things are true about him.
“First, he knew about the diamonds.
“Second, he knew the car was going by way of Colnbrook—that it was not taking the by-pass.
“Third, he knew the chauffeur didn’t carry a gun. “Fourth, he knew—at least according to Peskett—that if he didn’t disguise his voice he’d be recognised.
“Now what does that give us?”
Inspector Bull was making diamonds, squares and circles on his pink pad.
“It gives us,” said Mr. Pinkerton, “the four possibilities.”
“Four?”
“Four.”
“How so?”
“The man and the driver working together,” said Mr. Pinkerton; “the man and Mrs. Colton; the man and Mr. Colton; the man and someone not the driver or Mrs. Colton who knew all about it.”
Bull gazed at his grey little friend with admiration. Mr. Pinkerton, having built his edifice, wanted no one to tamper with it. He hurried on.
“The man and the driver could have been in it together. From what you said the driver had plenty of time to telephone a confederate—if he wasn’t already in the Royce house. He knew Mr. Colton was never armed, and that the driver was not armed. He must have been surprised when Mrs. Colton fired—he lost his head, and fired too. The driver lied about not knowing about the diamonds until he saw the satchel in Mr. Colton’s hand, and about not knowing they were going to Colnbrook.”
“That’s right,” Bull agreed cautiously. “In that case the shooting was accidental. If it was Mrs. Colton and the driver it was premediated. But if it was Mrs. Colton and the murderer, then she wouldn’t have fired, would she?”
Pinkerton frowned. He didn’t like to appear too positive, however; so he let it go.
“If it were the bandit and Mr. Colton,” he began tentatively.
Bull shook his tawny head.
“That means that Colton was trying to steal Mrs. Royce’s jewels, and there’s no evidence for that.”
“There’s no evidence against it, on the other hand,” Mr. Pinkerton observed judicially. “You don’t yet know the real reason for his getting the diamonds.”
Bull scowled.
“You don’t know but what he may have been in bad shape. Say he got this man Gates to help him put on a robbery. He’d have the diamonds, Mrs. Royce would have £ 35,000.”
They looked at each other.
“Suppose it wasn’t Gates at all but Michael Royce,” said Bull. “Suppose Colton and he arranged it between them. If Royce got £ 35,000 out of it, and Colton sold the stones re-cut for £ 10,000, there’d be over £ 20,000 for each of them”
“At any rate,” said Mr. Pinkerton, “it’s clear that whoever the man was, if there was one, when Mrs. Colton shot, he thought Colton was double-crossing him. That was the end of Mr. Colton.”
They smoked in silence for several minutes.
“That’s three,” said Bull at last.
“The fourth,” Pinkerton said, “is more complicated.”
He prodded an infinitesimal stub of Woodbine from the holder, looked at it for some time and eventually decided that it could be thrown away. He remembered that once in Paris, in front of the Deux Magots, an old man picking up one of his stubs from the sidewalk had shaken his fist at him.
He put the long bone holder on the desk and leaned back in his chair.
“The man in league with somebody, not the driver or Mrs. Colton or Mr. Colton, is the fourth.”
“It could be Mrs. Royce, who stands to gain £ 20,000. Michael Royce’s interests are presumably the same. It could be Miss Agatha Colton, who apparently doesn’t like her father or stepmother.”
Bull shook his head.
“She wasn’t there. She didn’t know they were going through Colnbrook.”
Mr. Pinkerton examined his friend’s stolid visage critically.
“No?” he said. “You saw her with Michael Royce this afternoon? Couldn’t they have done it together?”
“That makes Royce shooting her father!”
Mr. Pinkerton shrugged his shoulders. “It’s been done before,” he said callously and rather pleased with himself for it
Bull chewed his moustache, unconvinced.
“It could be Michael and Mrs. Royce, or Michael and Miss Agatha, or Michael and Mrs. Colton.”
“Or it could be one of Mrs. Royce’s servants without anybody’s help.”
Bull brightened considerably.
“I thought of that,” he said. “That would explain why Peskett would think his voice was disguised but Mrs. Colton wouldn’t think of it. He knew him, she didn’t.”
Mr. Pinkerton smiled with pleasure. His pupil was improving in mental agility.
“Precisely,” he said eagerly. “And you can see that that holds for Gates too. Peskett probably knows him and Mrs. Colton probably has never heard him speak, or barely.”
“However,” Bull continued, “there’s another explanation of that disguised voice.”
Mr. Pinkerton decided to allow himself the extravagance of another cigarette.
“There,” he said complacently, “are your four possibilities.”
“Not four,” replied Inspector Bull, switching off the green shaded desk lamp. “Five.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
By Tuesday Inspector Bull was no farther along towards a solution of the Colnbrook Outrage than he had been when he and Mr. Pinkerton discussed the matter Saturday evening.
“If there was a motorcycle,” Bull explained to Commissioner Debenham, “it managed to disappear without a sign.”
“How about the old lady in Cranford, Bull?”
Bull grimaced.
“She saw a man with a leather helmet go by about twenty minutes to ten. But the sergeant there says she’s a noted liar, sir. He says she’s been eyewitness to every misdemeanour within three miles for the last twenty years; when they run her down she was at church or drinking tea in her kitchen. He says she goes to bed at seven-thirty anyway. That’s no good, sir. Then the garage man at the London end of the bypass couldn’t remember anybody then.”
“What about your other idea? That he turned back towards Windsor at the by-pass.”
“He could have done that,” Bull said thoughtfully. “He had a furlong or so between the turn and the garage. But even then the garage man ought to have heard him. There’s a tobacconist at Slough says he saw three men on motorcycles a little before ten that night when he was going home from his shop. Two of them went through on the Windsor road and the other turned down towards the station. He didn’t notice the licence plates of course. But even if we assume that the man came to Slough and boarded the London train—for instance—it doesn’t help much. We might still pick that motorcycle up, sir, if he did that.”
“What about young Royce? You say the butler saw him come in about eleven?”
Bull nodded.
“He says he went out after cigarettes when the Coltons left Then he dropped in on some friends in Staines about ten, and stayed there half an hour o
r so. Had a drink and that sort of thing. I called on them—it’s a young Oxford gentleman who has a private printing press and his wife. They say Royce did come, in his car—a racing Hispano—; he comes in often when he’s in Windsor. Well, nobody knows about that hour from nine to ten. I didn’t want to make a point of it—not yet.”
Debenham lighted one of the mild cigars he smoked incessantly, in self-defence, he said, because they were the only form of tobacco his wife and daughter didn’t borrow from him.
“Well, Bull,” he said patiently, examining the tip of it critically, “you’ve got to do two things, at least Find out if there was a motorcycle. Find out who drove it”
Bull allowed himself a grin.
“Sounds simple, sir.”
“I know it isn’t simple. All we can do is cover the ground. He’s getting rope enough now, these few days. He’ll do something more. Let him make a mistake and we’ll have him.”
“I don’t want to let him do any more of the same, sir,” Bull replied. “And I don’t seem to be getting on with it. I was wondering if you didn’t want to put Dryden on it . . . He’s got a theory. I haven’t.”
“Bother Dryden’s theory. You go find who killed George Colton, Bull, and I’ll let you have a week in France.”
In his tiny office Bull read two trivial reports from the men who were watching Michael Royce and Mrs. George Colton, put on his hat and coat and went out to Cadogan-square. He reflected as he rang the bell that what he had ahead of him was what he detested most of all parts of his job.
A new maid conducted him into the back parts of the Colton house to the cook, who, he soon found, was in charge of the household management.
“Coggins is my name, or was my husband’s name, but it’s all I ever got from him but trouble so I call it mine nevertheless. I tell all these girls that comes here no good comes of a girl marrying when she’s got a post no matter how bad it is.”
Bull sat down and took a cup of tea.
“Do you call this a bad post, Mrs. Coggins?”
(“There’s what I calls a gentleman. No hoity-toity about him. Drank his tea like my own son, if I’d had one, but Coggins wasn’t much good,” Mrs. Coggins reported for many a day after the settlement of the Colnbrook Outrage to her cronies gathered at the post office for the payment of weekly insurance.)
“Bad, indeed, sir! The finest post these girls’ll ever have. Why the madam is as sweet a lamb as ever drew her breath. And that’s saying something.”
Inspector Bull agreed. He was fond of old women of whatever social level, unless they reeked of gin too much.
“Now mind you, I don’t hold with marrying more than once. I always says that it’s tempting Providence. So after I’d slaved, girl and woman, for the Mrs. Colton before her for twenty years and more, it seems a bit hard to have the master up and marry the first pretty face that’ll have him. I packs my box ready to leave when she puts her foot in the door. I says to the house-maid as was then, ‘No hoity-toity young miss, barely a madam, is telling me her new-fangled thoughts about cooking.’ “
In complete agreement, Bull joined Mrs. Coggins in a further cup of tea, strong as witches’ brew.
“Tea is tea,” said Mrs. Coggins, “and dishwater is dishwater. There’s no use using them for purposes God didn’t make them for. What was I talking about?”
“Mrs. Colton,” said Bull.
“So I was. But no, she no more than gets in this house than she comes straight down here and says, ‘Mrs. Coggins, you’re a wonderful cook and I’m going to pay you ten pounds a year more, and I wants you to continue just like you’ve been and wouldn’t you like some new curtains for the windows?’ As I says to the house-maid, Wot could you do?’
“I says, ‘Yes, madam,’ and unpacks my box and a sweeter body mortal’s never had to do for. That was two years Whitsunday and never a cross word.”
Mrs. Coggins pursed her lips in admiration and wagged her grey head.
“And if you should ask me, I don’t think it’s all been roses.”
“Ah?” said Inspector Bull between sips.
“Ah. It’s not for me to say, but the master, rest his soul, wasn’t so jolly as he looked, all pink and shiny and pleasant. Look at the way he’s treated that poor lamb his own daughter!”
Bull realised perfectly that no comment was needed.
“Wouldn’t let her so much as have young Mr. Royce in the house. Many’s the time them two have met here in my kitchen and me standing like the Horse Guards in the pantry till I was ready to drop and the mistress seeing him coming rings the bell so Mr. Royce can get out—and him up at the University too.”
“I thought it was Mr. Field who was fond of Miss Colton?” Bull asked with innocence.
“That’s according to the master. He was bound and determined that that lamb should marry Mr. Field, but Mr. Field, there’s no doubt of it, he gave his blessing to Mr. Royce. Those two precious birds have been set on each other since they were in pinafores and longer, and the master was just plain going against Nature. And as I says to the housemaid I’d sooner go against the master than against Nature because you can always get another master and Nature can strike you dead in your tracks. So I helps them all I can.”
It took Inspector Bull forty-five minutes and seven cups of tea to lead the conversation gently around to the subject of the maid whom he had seen before.
“I gave the worthless baggage the sack,” said Mrs. Coggins promptly. “She going around saying—openly, mind you—that the mistress had killed him! The lying little scamp! I always said that girl was no earthly good from the day I hired her. Accusing the mistress of talking to Peskett and Miss Agatha too. I told her Friday night to pack her box and get! And she did.”
“Where did she live?” Bull ventured.
“You’re not going to listen to any of her talk?”
“Certainly not, Mrs. Coggins. She’s been writing letters to the papers. I’m going to tell her to quit it.”
Bull saw no reason for avoiding the truth in this instance.
“I just want to stop her before she gets anybody—or herself—into trouble.”
Mrs. Coggins got an insurance booklet from her cupboard.
“Well, here it is. 246 Ifield-road. S.W.—I can’t make it out. It’s out Earl’s-court way.”
Bull wrote the address in his black note book, for the sake of courtesy; he remembered such things perfectly. It was also a part of his qualifications to need no direction to such roads as Ifield-road.
“Now you’re a pretty good judge of people, Mrs. Coggins,” he said next. “What about Mr. Peskett?”
“Mr. Peskett’s a nice, well-spoken young man,” said Mrs. Coggins promptly. “Not that he isn’t a bit above himself, be-because he is. But never a word that’s unpleasant from him, and once when the master was away and the mistress said he could he drove me to Haslemere to see my sister and was as nice as you please even to buying me sweet chocolate to eat on the way back. There’s not many young men driving people’s motor cars that’d do as much. He says, ‘Glad to, Mrs. Coggins, you remind me of my aunt that raised me,’ ”
Scoring one for Mr. Peskett, and marking down another interrogation point for him at the same time, Bull took his way when it was decently possible to Ifield-road. Miss Mabel Gaskin would not have a tongue dipped in motherly kindness as Mrs. Coggins had, but he had some hopes.that his interview would not, on the other hand, take so long.
Miss Gaskin gave the impression that she had been waiting some time for a call from the Press but had not expected Detective-Inspector Bull. Bull glanced around the cheap back bedroom with gas ring, shilling metre, chipped basin and pitcher and distorted mirror from Woolworth’s over a deal bureau, and modified the severity of his more professional tone.
“I have the letter you wrote to the Telescope, Miss Gaskin,” he said.
She sat down weakly on the side of her wretched bed. Brazen it out, her voice said; but her eyes were frightened. Bull hated above all to badge
r servant girls. They had so little but fear to fall back on.
“I guess I’ve a right to write to papers if I choose.”
“You have to be careful about it, though,” said Bull, “or you might be guilty of malicious slander.”
His voice was gentle, but the words were not pleasant. He hurried on.
“But what I want to find out is this. What did you have in mind when you wrote that? Don’t you like Mrs. Colton?” “I hate the lot of them.”
Miss Gaskin might be frightened, but she was not frightened out of her firm beliefs.
“And Mrs. Coggins always being so pleased because the new mistress depended on her—all because the new mistress was too lazy to run her own house. She didn’t bother about nothing in the kitchen. Paid Mrs. Coggins ten bob a week more instead of hiring a housekeeper. But I wasn’t taking any of her fancy talk.”
“That’s no sign she killed her husband,” said Bull sensibly. “A lady can like not to do housework without being a murderess.”
That was a little hypocritical of Inspector Bull; of two women, one housewifely and the other not, he would have put money on the second as a possible murderess without a second’s thought.
“No, but they fought all the time. Whenever he was home there’d be trouble about something. He didn’t like the way she left Mrs. Coggins to run the house. He used to say she spent too much money on clothes and things, he wasn’t a millionaire and she’d bankrupt him. And she used to let Mr. Royce come there to see Miss Colton when the master had said she wasn’t to. He locked them both in their rooms once. I took their dinner up on a tray. Bread and tea was all he let them have.”
Bull listened with inward surprise to this straight-forward tale. It had all the marks of truth as far as it went. If it was true, Bull hadn’t a doubt Mrs. Colton had killed her husband. Bull didn’t blame her.
The girl was quick enough to see what he was thinking.
“And why shouldn’t he, sir?” she demanded, to his further surprise. “It was his money, when they had any.”
Again she caught his thoughts.
“We had to wait for our wages, once. It was her fault—the fighting, I mean. She knew he’d be set in his ways when she married him. It wasn’t her place to set herself up against him—no matter what he did. He gave her a home.”