by Zenith Brown
“Sorry, sir—you’re Mr. McGrath? Sergeant Dick. Stay where you are, sir.” The man released Dan’s arm and sprang across the fence. Dan swallowed, staring across the darkness.
“Got him, sir!” He heard a voice, solid but triumphant. “Easy. Take it easy there. Get him to the car.”
He could hear sounds of a struggle.
“Wasn’t there another one, sir?”
It seemed to Dan there had been half a dozen, the garden suddenly alive with moving figures converging on the wall in front of Number 22. And as suddenly and silently melting away, or into the solid group around the man they’d taken, who was now quietly being led to the car parked toward the top of the Square. Dan watched in silence from his side of the wattle fence. He felt much like a small boy being rebuked for playing cops and robbers. He stood there with his arms hanging down at his sides, looking at the quiet street and at the car, backing to turn in the narrow strip of road.
It was a hollow sort of anti-climax, all so neatly and efficiently and quietly managed that he felt rather like a fool. “I guess Scotland Yard can manage without you, McGrath,” he thought with a wry grin. He stood there. In a moment a man came along the road from where the car had been. Another car was coming into the Square. The two stopped as they passed, and the second one came on.
The man in the road called out. “Mr. McGrath? Sergeant Dick again, sir. I’m sorry I had to startle you. We’ve been waiting all evening—we didn’t want things to go wrong.”
“My fault,” said McGrath the magnanimous.
“We’re taking him to Divisional Headquarters, sir. Inspector Bull expected you might be about. He’s meeting us there; he wants you to come along, if you don’t mind, and see if you can identify him. He’s bringing Constable Weedham from the Yard, too, sir.”
Dan McGrath thought quickly. Weedham was the man Bull had told him Mr. Pinkerton had given the slip when Bull appointed him, McGrath, to take over unofficially. If he was bringing him along, and bringing McGrath in, it must mean he thought his catch was one of two people—either the man he had himself seen coming out of Pegott’s room, or at his door, who’d said he was Elliot Winship, or the man who’d stopped Mr. Pinkerton outside the Corner House and said, “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good.”
The officer in charge at the Divisional Headquarters in Solomon Street looked at the clock on the wall. “Inspector Bull will be here in a very few minutes, sir.” He went back to his writing. It was twenty-five minutes to one o’clock. Dan read for the fourth or fifth time the notices of men and women wanted by the police and the list of personal and private property that had been stolen or otherwise illegally removed from the premises of their legitimate owners. He was thinking anxiously of Mary Winship, and how simply a quiet knock on her door would make her forget and open it . . .
“Here he is now, sir.”
Bull nodded to him. He looked like what he was, a man who’d been routed out of his bed and a sound slumber to dress hastily and take up the chase again.
“He’s along here, Inspector.” A constable on duty opened the door and led the way through an antiseptic-smelling corridor to the block of cells on the floor below. “Given us a good deal of trouble, he has too, sir. Quite mad, in a quiet way, sir.”
“I think I might recognize him, sir,” Detective-Constable Weedham said. He and Dan followed the large figure of the Inspector.
“Here he is, sir.”
Dan looked in through the barred door. Sitting on the edge of the narrow iron bed was the man the officers from Divisional Headquarters in Solomon Street had booked for trespassing on bombed-out property at Number 22 Godolphin Square. He did not look mad, nor did he look like a vicious type. In fact, Dan thought, he looked very near to tears.
He did not quite know what to do when Inspector Bull looked round at him.
“I asked you to take care of him for me, sir—”
Bull spoke with pained deliberateness. He turned to the constable. “Open up,” he said. “Come out here,” he said to Mr. Pinkerton.
Mr. Pinkerton came, slowly, trying hard to look as if he’d not really much rather be dead.
“I—I didn’t mean any harm,” he said wretchedly. “And he was there, Chief Inspector. I thought somebody ought to go, and Mr. McGrath wouldn’t go with me. And he was there. I kept telling them there was another man, but they’d not listen to me. But there was another. He got off down the back stairs. Truly, Chief Inspector. He tripped me and threw me over.”
Mr. Pinkerton straightened up a little. “And I can prove it.” He put a shaking hand in his grey coat pocket and pulled it out again. In it was a square of light brownish Harris tweed, more oatmeal-color, actually, than brown.
“It’s—it’s his coat pocket,” Mr. Pinkerton said shakily. “I had got hold of him, and it tore loose when he jerked away and ran.”
Dan McGrath took the square of tweed out of Bull’s hand. He nodded slowly. “That’s right, Inspector,” he said. “That’s the stuff my man’s suit was made of—the man I saw at Pegott’s door. I could see it when he got in the lift.”
Inspector Bull took the small piece of cloth silently. His broad back was a solid wall of disapprobation as Dan, with Mr. Pinkerton scurrying miserably along beside him, followed the three police officers back along the antiseptic corridor. The officer at the desk was waiting, the telephone in his hand.
“It’s the C. O. for you, sir.”
“Bull here.”
Dan and Mr. Pinkerton stopped as the Inspector spoke into the phone. He sounded still not unlike his namesake, put out and annoyed at some small beast of the field hidden among the buttercups. Then his big face sobered abruptly.
“Right,” Bull said at last. “I’ll be out there in five minutes.”
He put down the phone and turned to Dan McGrath and the little man at his side. “There’s more trouble at Godolphin Square. Mr. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes has been found murdered in his bed. His skull smashed with a sledge hammer.”
18
MR. PINKERTON and Dan McGrath went back to Number 4 Godolphin Square from the Divisional Headquarters in Solomon Street, silent in the back seat of the police car, Inspector Bull silent in front with the driver, lost in a grim lethargy of thought that made his sudden physical and mental activity once they had got to Godolphin Square all the more surprising. They did not see Eric Dalrymple-Hughes, but following the Inspector, half automatically, into the Winship flat they saw Miss Caroline Winship. She was in the sitting room in the worn yellow satin chair, backed up against the fireplace, beleaguered and alone, her stick gripped in one hand, her heavy face working, livid and suffused, her brilliant eyes under their folded lids dull-glazed, with the paralyzed horror of one who had looked on Medusa’s head, unable to turn away.
She seemed as if she had had some profound physical shock, a cerebral hemorrhage even, Dan thought, except that her hands opened and closed in sharp spasms, working as her heavy face worked. If she recognized either of them they had no way of knowing it. Her eyes moved over them to the closed door of her sister’s room, and back, slowly and painfully, through them again to the other door, leading to her own room, where Bull and the police were, and all that remained of Darymple-Hughes lay in its final conflict with violence and death.
She shuddered horribly again, closed her eyes and bent her head down on her hand just as Bull opened the bedroom door and came out. The robust ruddiness of his own face had taken on the color of jaundiced putty.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Winship, but you must tell us what happened here. The night porter tells me you called to him?”
She nodded painfully. “I’d gone to sleep, in my niece’s room to be near my sister if she woke. Mason was cleaning the stair carpet. The vacuum woke me. I looked in on my sister. She was asleep, but I couldn’t get back to sleep myself. I went in my room to get my medicine I’d left in here. I didn’t turn on the light. I knew where it was on the table. I started back this way.”
She mo
tioned to the door he had come through.
“But he seemed so quiet. I stopped and listened. I thought he’d slipped out. I was annoyed, because I thought one night he could stay in if my sister and I wanted him. I switched on the light. I saw him.”
A shudder racked her heavy body. She shut her eyes again, her mouth working in spasms of remembered horror.
“I must have fainted. I was on the floor when I tried to shout. I could hear the vacuum going, but I couldn’t make him hear me. I crawled out and called to him. And he came. I should never have allowed him to sleep there. I never really believed—”
She broke off, strange dry sounds coming from her throat as she rocked her body back and forth. “He thought it was me,” she managed to say then. “The blow was meant for me.”
“What time did your nephew go to bed ?”
“Early. Before the rest of us. He was cross and impatient, about eleven o’clock. Mary stayed down, and Copeland stayed until Louise seemed quiet for the night. Copeland decided to go home. I’d gone to bed when Mary went upstairs. Copeland was in here. He left a note.”
She nodded toward the desk. “We were all exhausted. The vacuum outside the door was what woke me.”
“Who does this belong to, Miss Winship ?” Bull put his hand out to the officer behind him and took the thing he had been holding, the handle wrapped in a red-stained wash cloth. It was a small sledge hammer, the head smeared, dark and ghastly.
She looked away. “It was Eric’s. He brought it downstairs with him. He said it was for—protection. I thought it was a joke, in very bad taste. Until—until I saw it lying on the counterpane when I switched on—”
An abrupt thin ringing sound from the bedroom cut her off. She turned her head sharply. “That’s my alarm. Who set it for—”
She glanced quickly up at the Dresden clock on the mantel above her chair. It struck two soft lovely notes.
“Who set it for two o’clock? I keep it set at half-past seven. Why should anyone—why should Eric—?” She stared blankly at the bedroom door.
They went out into the hall. The police had persuaded the other tenants to go back to their rooms. Mason the night porter was there, and Miss Grimstead, clutching her old woolen bathrobe about her uncorseted hips, half managerial and half hysterical, at one moment ordering Mr. Pinkerton not to step on the cord of the vacuum cleaner, the next wringing her hands in the despair of the helpless.
“Mr. McGrath went out a few minutes before twelve,” Bull said curtly. “Mr. Copeland a bit later. Where were you, Mason?”
“I was below in the kitchen, sir. Everyone was in by ’arf past eleven and I’d made tea for them that takes tea. It was my understanding Mr. Copeland was spending the night ’ere. I was down putting out powder for the cockroaches, sir. The chef’s that touchy ’e don’t believe in killing God’s creatures.” He jerked his head toward Miss Grimstead. “But as I told ’er, the guests are touchy too. They don’t like God’s creatures crawlin’ all over the victuals they’ve got to eat.”
“We have very few roaches, Inspector,” Miss Grimstead came partially to herself. “And if the chef is a bit peculiar,” she added tartly, “so are all good male cooks—all of them I’ve ever had to do with. And these days you can’t pick and choose. You’ve got to make do with what you can get, and Mason knows it.”
Bull intervened between the glowering porter and the tight-lipped manageress. “What time did you come back upstairs?”
“It was ten minutes to one, sir. I was late getting on with the stairs and ’alls. I started at the top and came down. I was through ’ere and down at the bottom.” He motioned to the ground floor. “I’d never ’ave ’eard ’er, poor lady, but I kicked the cord, and when I tried to pull it down it got caught, and I ’ad to come up and unloose it. I’d never ’ave ’eard ’er in there groaning with the machine going. Pitiful it was, sir. ’Er in a ’eap on the floor by the door trying to make somebody ’ear. And ’im there on the bed—worse’n I ever see in the bombing, sir. That was at five-and-twenty to two o’clock, sir.”
Bull pieced it together. From twelve, when Sidney Copeland left the house, no member of the staff was in the halls until Mason came up fifty minutes later. From then until approximately one-twenty, he was upstairs with the vacuum cleaner going. It was an old model, and Mason, cleaning up there with it, could hardly have heard anyone slipping down the heavily carpeted stairway. No phantom tread was needed at Number 4 Godolphin Square, at least not on the lower floors where the carpets were new and the pads not worn as they were on the third floor where Mr. Pinkerton and Dan McGrath lived.
Dan McGrath was trying to piece things together too. It was half-past twelve when he got to the police station. It must have been at about quarter past when the melee broke out on the open staircase across the Square, leaving Mr. Pinkerton to hold the bag—and, Dan thought, the torn square of oatmeal-colored tweed. Why Eric Dalrymple-Hughes . . . Dan glanced along the hall to the door behind which Caroline Winship sat, alone with horror—and with terror, perhaps—in spite of the stolid figure in blue stationed there in the hall to protect her. She had refused to allow them to wake her sister or her niece or to call Sidney Copeland to come back.
“Of course, if he’d still got the key . . .” Mr. Pinkerton said in his small timid voice. He spoke in a hush that had fallen for a moment on the weary group in the hall as Inspector Bull chewed at the corner of his tawny mustache, his brow wrinkled and his mild blue eyes darkly troubled.
Bull turned slowly to him. “Key? What key?”
Mr. Pinkerton remembered, and caught his breath. “That Betty, the chambermaid, lost,” he said weakly. “Or—or had stolen.” He moistened his grey lips and tried to move a little closer to his friend McGrath.
Inspector Bull came as close to glaring as he had ever done —at Mr. Pinkerton, at Mason and at Miss Myrtle Grimstead.
“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Miss Grimstead said tartly. “Mr. Pinkerton must be mistaken.”
Bull looked at him, like a man counting not ten, or fifty, but a hundred, before he spoke.
“Where is the maid?” he asked patiently. “Does she live in?”
“She’s not with us any longer,” Miss Grimstead said. “She left without notice just before lunch. She’d got some wild tale that she’d rung up her young man and that he was afraid for her to stay on here and wanted to marry her at once. She certainly made no mention of a missing key to me, and Sarah said nothing about it this evening when it was time to turn down the beds.”
“They—they were not turned down,” said Mr. Pinkerton stoutly. “The girls were afraid to tell you the key was gone.”
Inspector Bull was still looking at his unfortunate friend. He turned to the manageress and the night porter. “Leave the vacuum cleaner here,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning, ma’am. Go on with your duties, Mason.” He turned to the two officers with him. “Carry on,” he said. “I’ll be back down in a few moments.”
Only Mr. Pinkerton and Dan McGrath were left there with him. He ignored McGrath.
“Pinkerton,” he said. “Come up to your room. I should have known . . .” Dan had the impression of a man never overly articulate now utterly bereft of words. “You’ll tell me all you know about this affair. If you don’t, I’ll—I’ll put you behind bars and keep you there.”
He did not add “till you rot,” but there was no doubt in Dan’s mind that it was what he meant. Or in Mr. Pinkerton’s. He edged along the bannister to the stairs, and if he had been as seedy as Miss Grimstead would have said he could never have made it up as fast without really having a heart attack. Bull and Dan followed with a heavier and slower tread.
Outside the door of Eric Dalrymple-Hughes’s flat Dan stopped. “I think it would be a good plan to look in on Miss Mary Winship, Inspector Bull,” he said gravely. “She’s got to know. She’d probably like to be with her aunt. And there’s something here I think you ought to see.”
Bull hesitated, and nod
ded. Dan rapped at the door, remembered there was a whole room for her to hear through, and knocked more loudly. He knocked again.
“Try the door, sir.”
“It’s bolted. That’s what I wanted you to see. He bought two bolts at the ironmongers’ this afternoon.”
He put his hand on the knob as he spoke, turned it and pushed. The door opened. The light was on at the desk in front of the window. Dan went across the room.
“Mary!” The cold sweat stood on his forehead, pricking it sharply, and his voice was hoarse as he called her again. “Mary!” He went quickly to the bedroom door and opened it. The light was on there too and the room empty.
“Easy, sir. Take it easy.”
Bull’s quiet voice and solid bulk behind him were like brakes applied to a car careening madly down a road. Dan drew up sharply, his heart an icy lump. The bed had not been slept in. He looked around, and froze for an instant into rigid intensity. There was a wardrobe—like Pegott’s wardrobe—against the wall between the fireplace and the window looking down into the air shaft to the kitchen area. He went across the room white-faced and put his hand out.
“Steady, sir. You’d best let me do that.”
Bull was at his side, but he had already jerked the wardrobe door open. There was nothing in there but Eric’s suits and overcoat and a neat row of shoes propped up by their heels on a rack at the bottom. Dan took out his handkerchief and wiped the icy sweat off his forehead. His hands were shaking.
“Where do you suppose she’s gone?”
The Inspector was looking at the shoes, calmly removing one pair after another, looking at them attentively and deliberately.
“She was going to bed when I left her. She promised to bolt both doors and not let anybody in.”