Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  The taxi drew up in front of a small tea room with a large green parrot sitting in the window. Mary opened her bag. “I’ll pay him,” she said, and had done so before Mr. Pinkerton could get his worn brown leather purse out of his trousers pocket. It had been one of the late Mrs. Pinkerton’s methods of discouraging impulsive expenditure that he had never quite dared to abandon.

  “It won’t be so crowded upstairs this early.” She led him up to a small table in a corner. “Now tell me.”

  But as Mr. Pinkerton looked at her she seemed so very young, and so unhappy, that his throat closed up. All he could do was blink at her like a bewildered owl. She put her hand out impulsively across the table and on his sleeve.

  “I know it sounds dreadful, but it’s not really. It can’t be. There must have been some terrible misunderstanding. Because, don’t you see, Mother’s always told me wonderful things about him. She’d never have done if he’d been so awful—or if he’d even been capable of doing anything awful. There’s something wrong, somewhere.”

  Her small pointed chin was high and her eyes bright and clear.

  “Do you know what he’s supposed to have done?”

  In the face of her passionate conviction, Mr. Pinkerton was a little ashamed that his answer had to be on the basis of information that he had not come by in a really honest and legitimate fashion.

  “Was it—something about a picture?”

  “Yes. You do know.”

  Her attitude was so matter-of-fact that he found himself ashamed again, of thinking that a few tears, or a trace of them anyway, would have been rather more becoming in one so young. He saw too that she knew what he was thinking.

  “You can’t go on forever not facing up to things, can you?” she asked calmly. “That’s always been the trouble. I think that’s why Mother’s always ill, and why Aunt Caroline gives the impression of being so—so hard and so bitter. She’s not really. She’s terribly sensitive, and terribly kind. If it hadn’t always been such a mystery—I don’t believe in having skeletons in the closet.”

  Mr. Pinkerton mentally shook his head. She had always been so sweet, whenever he’d seen her, and she was actually one of these modern young women.

  “Well, perhaps,” he said tentatively.

  “You can’t hide things,” she said warmly. “They go on thinking I know nothing about it, but ever since I was a child . . . They should have told me. Then I’d have got used to the idea. You see, I knew Mother always had one of her attacks— she nearly dies with asthma when certain things happen. Like— when the flowers come. When they came yesterday, and she tried to hide them. And the time I found the copy of my grandfather’s will on the desk, and read it—I didn’t see why I shouldn’t—and asked her where the picture he left her had got to. She wasn’t really his child, her mother was his second wife, so he hadn’t got to leave her anything, except that he adored her mother, and her too.”

  Mr. Pinkerton put down his fork and blinked at her, bewildered at the sudden flow of information all quite new to him.

  “I mean, why should anyone be ill sometimes and not others? You see, for years now, she’s always got three red roses, on October sixteenth, and in April on her birthday a little bunch of yellow primroses. I—I found out my father sent them. And she’s always desperately ill. Last night, just before I left . . . I’d been so excited I hadn’t noticed that either of them was upset. I went to her room and I saw she’d got her fur jacket out. I saw the flowers, and a note she’d got. I asked her what it was, and she wouldn’t tell me and burned it up the minute I turned my back. The ashes were in a tray on her dressing table. She was already getting an attack.”

  Mr. Pinkerton ate his tinned fruit and watery custard without really noticing it very much. He remembered he had seen the flowers himself, last night, in the lift. What was it Mason had said about them? Bring on another one of her attacks, poor lady. Hay fever, he had said. So even the servants in the flats knew about them. But still . . . What Mary Winship said next startled him so much that he almost dropped his spoon.

  “You won’t believe this—but I—I got it into my head something must be happening to her. I decided she was being poisoned—deliberately, I mean.”

  Mr. Pinkerton swallowed hastily, adjusted his lozengeshaped spectacles and looked at her in dismay. In his role of gadfly and leech on the stolid flank of Chief Inspector Bull of New Scotland Yard, he had had several rather unpleasant experiences with poisoners.

  “Poisoning her?” he managed to stammer.

  She nodded. “Deliberately poisoning her. It just shows you the state I’d got into. People quit acting like normal human beings when this sort of thing goes on. Last spring, when the primroses came, I took the rest of her food—she’s always so ill she can hardly eat anything—I took the rest of her food to a chemist I know at the hospital. Of course all of us were eating the same food, but I didn’t know. So that’s what I did. He analyzed everything she ate for a whole week before I broke down and told Aunt Caroline what I was doing.”

  Mr. Pinkerton shuddered inwardly. “What—what did your aunt do?”

  He was almost afraid for her to tell him.

  “She was terrified, of course. First she thought I was out of my mind. Then she thought we ought to keep on with it another week. We did, but there was nothing at all. Just the primroses. And she was over it then, by that time.”

  “Is she—could she be allergic to—”

  “But the roses too? And to three red roses. Not to a dozen red roses. And not primroses in the garden or anyone else’s house? But I know what you mean. I thought of that. I’ve thought of everything. And then I—I asked a psychiatrist I know. He said it was all quite simple. She really doesn’t want to see him. Not really, you see. So she gets sick so she can’t. Instead of going out to see him she has to go to bed. He said there are millions of cases like it. And Mother is high strung and nervous, of course.”

  Mr. Pinkerton wondered. He knew nothing about psychiatry himself, but it did sometimes seem to him people were rather too confident about making judgments about other people’s motives.

  “And I’m afraid he’s right,” Mary Winship said. “You take the war, for instance. The blitz and all the rest of it. She was perfectly all right all during that. She took all that better actually than Aunt Caroline did. Of course the flowers stopped coming during the worst of it, but you didn’t have time to think about escape mechanisms. That’s part of the pattern, the psychiatrist said.”

  Of course that was true. Mr. Pinkerton knew it from his own experience. A neighbor of his in Golders Green who’d been a semi-invalid for years became an unmitigated nuisance as a fire watcher by night and a Nosey Parker into other people’s dustbins by day, as indefatigable as a ferret. And his own rheumatism had entirely disappeared. Still—he rather liked what he’d seen of Mrs. Winship. It was better, of course, to be a psychiatric case than be poisoned, from her point of view anyway. On the other hand . . . He looked hesitantly at Mary.

  “But I don’t quite understand,” he said timidly. “You say you know about—about your father and the picture, and you know there’s some—some misunderstanding. And yet you seem to think your mother has some . . .”

  Fortunately she seemed to understand what he meant, which at that point he himself actually did not. All he knew was that he was very much bewildered, and that there was obviously some really basic confusion in matters as they now stood. But as he bogged down Mary nodded her head.

  “I know what you mean. And you’re quite right, of course. Maybe Mother’s just made him sound wonderful, and never told me so I’d never know he was—something else. Of course, she should want to see him. But I do know I’ve always thought I knew she expected him to come back to us some day. I’m sure of it. That’s why I can’t understand her always getting sick. And— you see, Mr. Pinkerton, I want to do something to stop all this, before it kills her. I don’t believe she believes my father stole the picture. How could he? How could he take it and
sell it and run away and leave the two of us before I was born even ? And why should he go on tormenting us? I don’t believe he’d do that. I don’t believe my father could do it.”

  Her long black eyelashes were moist. Mr. Pinkerton was silent. It was a sturdy faith that he admired greatly—but she did not seem to realize that her father had not only taken the picture, and the money for the picture, but he had not turned the picture over to the man he had got the money from. If Pegott was right.

  “And now that policeman’s here, or whatever he is,” she said. Two hot bright spots burned in her cheeks and her eyes were like molten sapphires. “He must have been following him, or he wouldn’t come here just when my father comes here again, and turn up at Godolphin Square. And he’s got my book—it’s Aunt Caroline’s really—about missing pictures. If he finds my father, they’ll put him in prison. I’m not supposed to know that either, but I do. So I’ve got to find him first. I’ve got to find him and warn him that Mr. McGrath—”

  Mr. Pinkerton’s jaw dropped. He had entirely forgotten that he had himself had the same suspicion of Dan McGrath not three hours before, and that that was in fact his sole reason for being here now.

  “Mr. McGrath?”

  Mary Winship nodded. “He’s—he’s a beast.” Her cheeks flushed hotly.

  Mr. Pinkerton hesitated only an instant. “He’s going to see your father. Pegott knows where he is. He’s going to take Mr. McGrath to see him tonight. At eleven o’clock.”

  He blurted it out breathlessly. It was what he had intended to tell her until he had forgot all about it—an escape mechanism in itself, no doubt, as he’d been so tongue-tied in the taxi with her.

  “Pegott?”

  She was looking at him incredulously.

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded. “That’s what I went to see Mr. Copeland about. But he wouldn’t see me.”

  “Oh, not Copey!” The flush died in her cheeks. “He’d— he’d do something awful. He hates my father.”

  “I—I thought of your aunt,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “She’d be worse.” Mary gathered up her bag and gloves. “If you think Mother’s allergic to primroses, you ought to see Aunt Caroline if anyone happens to speak of my father. You’d best keep out of it, Mr. Pinkerton. It’s a family row. A really serious one.”

  “I—I expect you’re right,” Mr. Pinkerton said apologetically. He put down sixpence for the waitress and took up the bill. “I—I wasn’t meaning to interfere.”

  He followed her across the room to the stairway, feeling very old and seedy in the spring-like wake of her erect young figure and quick elastic step. She clearly had no need of him. He thought ruefully of his rather absurd efforts of the day before to bring her and Dan McGrath together.

  “I think I’ll go and see my Uncle Elliot again.” She turned back to him at the top of the stairs. “He’s vague but he can make sense when he wants to.”

  She started down, with Mr. Pinkerton at her heels, and on them, in fact, as she came to an abrupt halt where the stairs angled and she had a view of the dining room on the ground floor. She stepped backwards so quickly that he had to scramble aside to get out of her way.

  “Quickly,” she whispered. “Come back.”

  He scurried up the stairs after her, more than puzzled.

  “Do you think we might have a pot of tea over by the window?”

  The waitress gave her an unfriendly stare, about to say something about closing up, Mr. Pinkerton suspected, until she glanced at him. He was aware she was relenting in spite of the sixpenny tip. He must look as seedy as he felt. The scramble on the stairs had been acutely jarring to his head.

  “My cousin’s down there,” Mary said coolly. “Eric. Who do you think he’s with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pegott.”

  She brushed a crumb off the tablecloth.

  “Eric’s up to something. He’s a snob. He wouldn’t lunch with Pegott unless . . .”

  She was silent until the waitress put down their tea and left them. Then she smiled faintly. “I told Eric this was a quiet place where he wouldn’t see any of his friends. You said Pegott was going to take Mr. McGrath to see my father tonight?”

  “At eleven o’clock.”

  “But—how does Pegott know where he is? He never knew him.”

  She looked silently at Mr. Pinkerton for a moment.

  “You know, I’d bet anything it’s Eric that knows where he is. And he’s using Pegott. Is Mr. McGrath ready to pay for information?”

  The scorn in her voice was clear, though she spoke without any emphasis.

  Mr. Pinkerton hesitated. “There’s the picture, of course. And the ten thousand pounds—”

  “The ten thousand pounds?” She looked at him blankly.

  She didn’t know about that, then, he thought miserably.

  “Do you mean he—he’s still got the picture and what it was sold— Just what are you saying, Mr. Pinkerton? You’ve started. Go on.”

  Mr. Pinkerton managed to tell her what he had heard outside Dan McGrath’s door. “Of course, that’s just what Pegott said to Mr. McGrath—”

  Her lips were parted, the blood quite gone from her face.

  “I—I’m so sorry,” he said wretchedly. “I didn’t—”

  “It’s all right. I’m glad you told me. I really see now why Aunt Caroline had that book. I thought she was trying to trace the picture to—to get it back for Mother and me.”

  She sat quietly looking down into the tea cup for a moment, or seeming to do. He saw her eyes were really focussed sideways under the long curling lashes on the street below. She was waiting for her cousin and the valet to appear.

  “Where is Mr. McGrath now, Mr. Pinkerton?”

  “He was at the flat when I left.”

  She put her hand out quickly. “There goes Pegott.”

  The permanent valet had come out below. They watched him put his hat on and look along the road, a half-smile on his face as he swung onto a bus. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes came out then, his bored and unhurried air that of a man of the world who had got into bad company and was wondering how it had come about. He hailed a taxi and got in.

  Mary Winship gave Mr. Pinkerton a quick smile, and picked up her gloves again. “You and I are going out to see Mr. McGrath. You are on my side of this, aren’t you?”

  Even if she had not rested her cool fingers lightly on the back of his shaking hand for an instant before she pushed her chair back, Mr. Pinkerton would still have been on her side. He nodded his head without even noticing the pain.

  9

  AT TEN minutes past four, Dan McGrath came back to Number 4 Godolphin Square, so far as he could see not a great deal wiser than he had been when he left it at eleven o’clock in the morning. He had at least learned, for one thing, that there were no copies of that other McGrath’s book in any of the bookstores along Charing Cross Road, that the publisher had not regarded it as of particular importance and that in fact his was the only inquiry they had ever got about it. For another, he had learned, thanks to Betty the chambermaid, that Pegott was lunching with Mr. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes at a place in Regent Street called the Green Parrot.

  “Mr. Eric’s turned proper Socialist, sir. I expect he’ll be standing for Parliament one of these days. I’d not have believed it if I’d heard it in church, sir, but I heard it with my own ears.”

  The information while interesting had not turned out to be of very much use to him. He had seen the two go in separately and come out separately. For a brief instant he had wondered, hardly believing his own eyes, if he was on the track of a wider conspiracy. There might be a hundred little grey men with brown bowler hats in London, but there was only one Mr. Pinkerton, he was sure, and certainly only one girl who did to his pulse rate what the girl who got out of the taxi with Mr. Pinkerton did. Too conspicuous himself, he did not dare follow them all in, but he had a third pint of weak beer in the pub across the street and saw Mary and Mr. Pinkerton in the upstairs window,
watching the street themselves until Pegott and Eric Dalrymple-Hughes took their separate departures. He had tried to follow the other two when they left, but Mary had disappeared into the Underground and Mr. Pinkerton had been absorbed into the protective drabness of the crowds in Oxford Street, as invisible as a jackrabbit in a snow-covered birch woods.

  “Oh, Mr. McGrath!” He stopped at the door of the lift and looked down the hall. Miss Grimstead, smiling brightly, was leaning out of the office window. “Did you get your lunch properly, Mr. McGrath?” she inquired solicitously. “We’re so short-handed, and poor Pegott’s mother was taken to hospital just at lunch time.”

  “I was out, so it didn’t matter,” Dan said. “But thanks. I hope she’ll be all right.”

  He got into the lift and pressed the button for the third floor. Either Pegott and Dalrymple-Hughes were in the business together, he was thinking, or Pegott was taking his wares to the open market. Which it was he would find out at eleven o’clock that night. He could let it ride until then.

  The lift whirred to a stop. As he opened the door and got out he saw that Pegott was back. He was just coming out of his room, or going in—which, Dan could not have said. He then realized, as the man with his hand on the doorknob turned about, that it was not Pegott at all.

  Nothing but the economy of the lighting arrangements on the top floor would have allowed him to make the mistake in the first place—that and the fact that the man was about the same height and was there at the permanent valet’s door. Otherwise he was of quite a different cut. While Dan could not see him in any very illuminated detail, he got an impression of baggy tweeds, a slight build, an indefinable air of good breeding. The man was peering at him with quietly amused interest.

  “Oh, I say,” he said pleasantly. “I say, are you the American who writes books?”

  “No,” Dan said. “I can write my name, but that’s about all.”

  “Oh, I see, you’ve got what you call a ghost writer, is that it?”

  The man seemed more amused than before.

  “But you are the American that my niece is in such a blow about, are you not? The chap that’s hunting that wretched daub my sister-in-law thinks is Art?”