Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  Where indeed? Mr. Pinkerton wondered. But not for long. Miss Myrtle Grimstead was smiling happily at him through the narrow office window that guarded the approach to the carpeted stairway like a sentry box in an armed camp. Her bright blonde curls under the overhead light were as brassy but not as toothy as her smile.

  “Oh, Mr. Pinkerton! A perfectly charming young American, a Mr. Daniel McGrath, has just arrived—he’s gone out for a few hours but he’ll be back tonight. He simply wouldn’t take No for an answer.”

  Her smile fixed itself intently on the little man.

  “You aren’t taking holiday beginning Monday morning, are you, Mr. Pinkerton? You have looked so seedy lately, the sea air would do wonders for you. I was telling Mrs. Winship just yesterday you look far sicker than she does. I’ve got a sister in Bournemouth that I could arrange to make you very comfy indeed. I can just transfer your account and you’ll be fit again in no time.”

  Miss Grimstead waggled her curls at him, and became at once brisk and efficient. “Monday’ll do very nicely. I wouldn’t want to hurry you at all. Mr. McGrath can manage very comfortably in the box room till Monday, I’m sure.”

  “—I’m not going on holiday.”

  Miss Grimstead turned back with a startled jerk of her blonde curls. She was no more startled than Mr. Pinkerton. He stood gaping at her just as she stood gaping at him, at the idea of hearing himself come out and say what was in his mind.

  “I mean—I mean Mr. McGrath’s a very good friend of mine, and I’m sure—I’m sure he wouldn’t like . . .”

  “Oh,” Miss Grimstead said. “Oh,” she repeated. Her pale managerial eyes bored skeptically into his. “He said he had a friend here he wanted to be near. I must say it never occurred to me it was you.”

  Mr. Pinkerton swallowed. He could see her opinion of Dan McGrath take an abysmal dive. He backed toward the door and hurried up.

  “Oh, dear,” he thought. “When she stops to think she’ll know I’m not telling the truth.”

  In the middle of the second flight, well out of Miss Grimstead’s visual range, he stopped to catch his breath, and caught it in fact quite literally. The door of Eric Dalrymple-Hughes’s small rear flat on the first floor had opened, and a girl’s voice came up the stairs.

  “. . . be ready, Eric, won’t you?” she was saying. “And stop grousing, darling. I promise you I had nothing at all to do with it. I’m just lucky for once, that’s all. And please don’t try to spoil it.”

  It was Mary Winship. At the sound of her voice the basilisk-eyed Miss Grimstead vanished from Mr. Pinkerton’s mind as promptly as if she had never existed, and his face brightened. Mary Winship was the one person at Number 4 Godolphin Street, except of course Betty the little Welsh maid, who ever gave him a friendly smile, or spoke to him as though it was a pleasure and not a duty. He listened to her speaking back through the door to her insufferable cousin. She sounded so gay and excited that Mr. Pinkerton did not for an instant doubt the reason.

  “She knows he’s here,” he thought, himself almost as excited because she did sound so happy about it. He could not have been happier himself, even when he heard her cousin’s petulant affected voice answer her.

  “I’m not grousing. And don’t misunderstand me, Mary. It’s not Aunt Caroline personally that I’m objecting to. It’s the tyranny of the very old.”

  “I doubt if she’d like that very much, dear. She’s not that old, and if it’s tyranny at least you don’t have to put up with it. There are jobs, you know. You don’t have to stick here.”

  Mr. Pinkerton had started down the stairs again. If he pretended he was going out instead of coming in, he could meet her quite casually. Even if all she said was “Good evening,” he would still have the satisfaction of seeing her violet-blue eyes light up—even if Dan McGrath’s name was not spoken. But he hesitated now. His device, transparent at best, had become slightly awkward in view of the turn the situation had taken.

  “I know you’d like to have me out of the field, even if I am only a soi-disant nephew that’s got to sing nicely for his supper if he’s to get any. It’s not my fault my mother was a cousin instead of a step-daughter like yours. And maybe I shall get out. I’m fed up with fiddling for every kipper I get. I’m on to something that would surprise you, Mary Winship. All I want is a bit of ready cash.”

  “And all I hope is it’s nothing that’ll get you in trouble again,” Mary Winship retorted cheerfully. “But let’s not quarrel. I’m much too excited to quarrel with you now. And do be ready. I don’t want this spoiled.”

  As she closed the door, Mr. Pinkerton in his nervous anxiety to get back up the stairs without being heard did precisely what Pegott had done. The toe of his boot hit the brass rod at the foot of the riser. The sharp metallic clink made Mary Winship turn quickly from the door and glance up.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Pinkerton.” Her face broke into a sunny smile. She took a quick light step over to the middle of the hall and looked up at him. “Oh, Mr. Pinkerton, the most wonderful thing’s happened! You can’t ever guess!” Her eyes were dancing, her whole face lighted up. “I can hardly believe it!”

  “I—I think it’s very nice,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  He felt a glow of modest pride because he didn’t have to guess. He knew. He thought Mary Winship-was a pretty girl, one of the prettiest he’d ever known—in real life, that is, not of course in the films. He also thought she was sweet, an old-fashioned virtue he did not look for in the cinema. At the moment she seemed to be both in an extraordinary degree. Slender and graceful as an osier wand, she had wide-set violet-blue eyes fringed with curling dark lashes so long they would have looked unreal except that her brows were thick and shining and her hair almost blue-black and curly too. She did not always look so radiantly happy as she did just then. Once Mr. Pinkerton had seen her in a tea shop, looking tired and so hopeless, all by herself, that he hadn’t spoken to her, thinking perhaps she had just come there to be alone and get a little peace away from her dominant aunt, her invalid mother and her poisonous cousin Eric. But now she was radiant and lovely.

  “I’m very pleased about it too,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He wished Dan McGrath could see her then.

  “Oh, Aunt Caroline told you? I thought she’d just decided. You know, she’s really an angel! Just think of it—a whole month in Paris! I knew I was to have a week’s holiday, but not now, and here at the flat, not a whole month in Paris. But I’ve got to rush—I’m going on the night boat. Good-bye, Mr. Pinkerton—take care of yourself. I’ll bring you a present!”

  She was off, her feet fairly dancing as she waved her hand and ran along the hall to her aunt’s apartment, leaving Mr. Pinkerton mute and stricken halfway up the dimly lighted stairs.

  “—Paris. She’s going to Paris.” Some cracked disembodied voice was whispering it in his incredulous ear. “She’s not happy about Dan McGrath. She’s happy because she’s going to Paris. She’s happy because she’s getting away from here.”

  Suddenly Mr. Pinkerton caught his breath, standing perfectly still. The truth was brilliantly clear all about him.

  “She’s not going to Paris. They’re sending her to Paris. To get her away from here. Her aunt’s sending her away so she won’t see Dan McGrath.”

  Mr. Pinkerton’s own voice was telling him that, but he knew it was not the truth. They were sending her away, but it was not on account of Dan McGrath but on account of her father. They were sending her so she would not see Scott Winship. But it was all the same. A month in Paris . . . Miss Grimstead had said a month of sea air in Bournemouth. It was the same month—except that his was to begin on Monday, Dan McGrath’s in the box room and Mary’s in Paris both began that very night. Mr. Pinkerton’s pallid viscera turned over in agonizing protest. It couldn’t be, not after Dan McGrath had come all the way from America. Somebody had got to stop it.

  He looked around frantically, as if he hoped by some miraculous dispensation Dan McGrath would appear out of the murky depths of the
cabbage-scented hallway and put a stop to it then and there. And it was all his fault. If he had never mentioned Scott Winship it would never have happened. And it couldn’t happen. It mustn’t be allowed to happen. He blinked his watery grey eyes and swallowed. Then he moistened his lips. It had got to be stopped, and he was the one who’d got to stop it.

  “Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton said. It was all very easy to say he had got to stop it. The question was how to do it. If only Dan McGrath was there . . . He glanced down into the hall. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes was coming out of his flat. He was whistling under his breath, a jaunty self-satisfied young man, well built and handsome, too handsome for his own good, in Mr. Pinkerton’s opinion, and with a weak mouth and petulant voice. He was a feeble reed to lean on, but at the moment he was the only reed there was, and Mr. Pinkerton himself was hardly a sturdy oak.

  He straightened his narrow shoulders and made a pathetic effort to clear his throat and attract Mr. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes’s attention as he paused to light a cigarette. He cleared his throat again. It was at least audible this time, but not so audible as to account for the startled jerk of the young man’s head as he looked up.

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  He snapped his lighter shut and blew a casual ribbon of smoke upward out of the side of his compressed lips. He started to move along.

  “Mr. Dalrymple-Hughes! Wait a moment, will you please?”

  Mr. Pinkerton found his voice. He scurried anxiously down the stairs. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes, his cigarette poised with an air of bored distinction, waited for him, his brows raised a little, looking so very down his handsome nose that Mr. Pinkerton would have gone no farther had there been any other way.

  “It’s—it’s about your cousin, Miss Winship—she mustn’t go to Paris tonight.” He blurted it out breathlessly. “You’ve got to stop her. She really mustn’t go.”

  That Eric Dalrymple-Hughes thought he had taken leave of his senses was perfectly apparent, even to Mr. Pinkerton. He did not stare at him precisely, but he looked at him a moment as if not quite sure he was actually there. Then he raised his brows.

  “And just what business of yours is it whether my cousin goes to Paris or does not go to Paris, Mr.—Mr. Pinkerton, I believe?”

  “Yes, I’m Mr. Pinkerton. I live on the third floor. And it’s not really any business of mine. But there’s an American coming here—to the flats, I mean—”

  “An American?” Mr. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes gave another slight start. “I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” he said briefly.

  “Oh, I know you don’t. But it’s quite true. I met him in front of your Aunt’s house this afternoon, and he was looking for your cousin. He didn’t know where she lived now, and I told him. He’s got a room here, the box room, and he wants to see her. So you see she—she mustn’t go to Paris just now. Your Aunt thinks he knows her father, Mr. Scott Winship, but I’m sure he doesn’t at all. He was just asking if he’d come back. And he never said Mr. Winship was here, or that he’d seen him. He just asked—”

  Mr. Dalrymple-Hughes was examining the tip of his cigarette with studied unconcern. “Why should he be interested in my deceased uncle?”

  “Oh, no, no!” cried Mr. Pinkerton. “He’s not interested in your uncle. It’s your cousin Mary. He came all the way from America to see her, so she mustn’t go off like this. She’s simply—”

  He stopped. The young man was regarding him with a skeptical, puzzled, half-amused and half-not-amused-at-all eye that was discouraging in the extreme. It was plain that the idea of anyone so much as crossing the road to see his cousin was too bizarre for him to consider seriously. Mr. Pinkerton almost gave up.

  “At least let me speak to Mary Winship before she goes? Do that, will you?”

  He was so in earnest that he knew he sounded absurd, pleading this way about such an incomprehensible matter, and knowing that pleading would not be enough he made a sudden desperate gamble. “You said—I heard you tell Mary you needed cash. I can let you have some. I could let you have a hundred pounds—or two hundred. If you’ll bring Mary up and let me talk to her, I’ll—I’ll give you the money.”

  It was not only a gamble. For Mr. Evan Pinkerton, who never spent a sixpence without misgivings or a pound without cold chills, it was more than that; it was fantastic. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes stood looking at him. What he was thinking Mr. Pinkerton had no way of telling. There was nothing on the handsome conceited young face that had any meaning for him, friendly or unfriendly.

  He stood simply staring for an instant, said then, quite coolly, “I’ll see what I can do,” turned on his heel and went back into his own apartment.

  Mr. Pinkerton started up stairs. He was not even thinking of the two hundred pounds. He was too numb with a horrible sense of guilt at having ruined Dan McGrath’s mission to Godolphin Square, and of defeat at having failed to make Mary Winship’s cousin see the truth. If only he had kept out of it, Mr. Pinkerton thought again wretchedly; if only he had let Miss Caroline Winship think it was the Town and Country planning people, and never mentioned the American. But it was too late now.

  He took his dejected way up the stairs to the second floor and on up the narrower flight to the third, let himself into the meagre bed-sitting room that was his own, and stood inside the door a moment. Besides being miserable, he was extremely confused. Again he thought, they couldn’t be sending Mary Winship away on account of the American they didn’t know, so they must be sending her away because they thought her father was coming back, or was back already. Was it only her Aunt Caroline, then, or was it her mother too? He tried to think back, recalling Mrs. Scott Winship standing stone-still by the door when he repeated the ill-starred question. All he could remember was the sudden clap of silence, and the intense motionlessness of the two sisters before Miss Caroline said, “Go to your room, Louise.” Then there was Miss Winship’s telephone call to Sidney Copeland. Between all that and now—it had been twenty-five minutes past seven when he left the tea shop after his compote of starling—they had decided, or Miss Caroline had decided, to send Mary away and had arranged to send her. And she was going on the night boat—unless he could stop her some way. And why? He kept asking it with no possible means of answering.

  He tried to think as he stood there in the pleasant darkness of the shabby room. The curtains had not been drawn, and the two French windows that opened out onto the narrow ledge forming a sort of balcony, behind the parapet made by the stone coping to hide the mansard windows of the attic storey and maintain the even classical lines of the Adam square, shone softly silver from the outside light. He went across the room and stepped out on the ledge.

  Through the ragged branches of the intervening plane trees he could see the gaunt ruins of Miss Winship’s house. The dim orange light from the street lamp threw it into a softly ghostly relief above the black empty spaces where the houses had gone from either side of it. Someone was moving along the street in front. Mr. Pinkerton could make out the dark figure of a man moving slowly along. He passed the house, and a moment later he came back. As he stopped again, Mr. Pinkerton had a fleeting impression that there was something familiar in the outline of his body or the movement of it, as if the man was someone he had seen, and now somehow recognized but could not identify. It was so puzzling that he watched him intently— so intently that he blinked with astonishment when the man was suddenly no longer there. He seemed to have disappeared, quite literally, as if he had dissolved not into the shadows but as a part of them. He had been there, darkly visible; then he was not there, and the space in front of the house, and the whole street, was empty. It was as eerie and uncanny as the shadowy ruin of the house itself.

  Mr. Pinkerton leaned forward, peering intently through the murky penumbra cast up through the settling haze by the orange overglow of the street lights. Suddenly he stiffened, every grey fibre of his nervous system quivering, as alert as if he heard again the shrill blast of the midnight siren warning of the approach of terror an
d death. Someone was in the room behind him. Was it the sound of a stealthy breath drawn or expelled? Or was it the slithering sound of a footstep in the dark room across the worn Brussels carpet? Or a garment brushing against the chair or the table? He could not tell, except that it was something, and something furtive and frightening, and it was there very close, inside the long open window behind him. He tried to swallow, to clear the sudden pounding in his ears, but his throat was dry. His hands were icy as he tried to grip the stone coping, drawing back not to see the street four floors below, paralyzed with a fear so horrible that it curdled everything inside him. When he tried to speak no sound came past his parched lips, and his cry for help was only a hoarse choked breath. As he tried to turn and look into the blackness of the room and cry out, he knew nothing more except a hideous woolly darkness as something thick and soft flashed over his head and a brutal stranglehold fastened about his throat, thrusting back his chin, as he slid down into a vast blinding nauseating abyss, down and down, with the high-pitched echo of something sounding crazily like the hoot of a taxi-horn bursting in his ears before the crash of a thousand lights and the blackness of oblivion. Mr. Pinkerton slumped down on the lead gutter pipe.

  Wait. The hooting taxi-horn thrusting in the knife blade of fear stayed the arms of the dark figure standing over him, murderous and intent. Wait. Wait till it passes and the street is empty again. But it was not passing. It was stopping at Number 4 Godolphin Square. The dark figure was motionless, arms reached down to lift the body and cast it over the raised coping.

  “He has seemed seedy lately. I advised him to go to the seashore,” Miss Myrtle Grimstead would say with easy tears when they picked him up from the street and brought him in. “I didn’t mean to upset him. I never thought he’d take it seriously and try to harm himself this way.”