Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

Bull put down the last pair of shoes. He looked at the bolt on the bedroom door, and round the room.

  “She’s left all the lights on,” he said soberly. “There’s no sign of anything wrong. She must have gone out purposely. I’d not worry, sir. It looks as if she’s safer outside this house than in it.”

  He went back into the sitting room. “If you knew where she’d be likely to go . . .”

  “I don’t.” Then Dan remembered that he did know. There were two places: her uncle’s in St. Giles’s Terrace, and the place in the Adelphi she’d gone to from the train in Watterloo the first night he was in London—the night he’d found her again after six years of waiting. And Bull could stand there, stolid and imperturbable. McGrath was made of hastier metal. He took one look at the Inspector, said “I’m going after her,” and went out. Bull got to the door in time to see him going down the stairs three at a time. He stopped, halfway to the stairs himself, shook his head, went back into the murdered man’s bedroom and opened the wardrobe again, thinking about the bad moment he had himself had until McGrath had jerked the door out. He had felt the cold sweat on his own brow, and he had seen Eric Dalrymple-Hughes, as McGrath had not done.

  He started methodically to work on the pockets of the suits hanging on the brass rod at the top of the cupboard. In less than a half hour he closed the door of the flat and went on up to Mr. Pinkerton’s third floor bed-sitting room. Somewhere in that half hour a faint ray of light had begun to glimmer, though he had found only two things of interest in the small flat. Like Pegott, Dalrymple-Hughes had planned a voyage. Unlike Pegott, he had apparently been content to travel in a sterling area, where he could spend pounds and not be restricted by travel and currency regulations. It was interesting to Bull because the cheque book locked in his desk drawer showed a balance of three pounds, eight shillings and sevenpence—adequately explained, he thought, by the second item of interest, which was the counterfoil of the last cheque drawn. It was in the amount of one hundred pounds, and the entry on the counterfoil was “Self for A. Peg.”

  Bull opened the door of Mr. Pinkerton’s room.

  “Well, Pinkerton,” he said.

  “Well, Inspector.” Mr. Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles and glanced apprehensively past Bull’s great cinnamon-brown bulk. “Where—what have you done with my friend Mr. McGrath?”

  “Your friend Mr. McGrath has gone out to find his friend Miss Winship,” Bull said placidly.

  “Oh, dear,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He shook his head dismally. “I—I’m afraid this is all a very dangerous business,” he said timidly. He glanced hesitantly up at the Inspector, and took courage. “Dan McGrath can say it’s because I’m so—so repressed that I have to escape into what he calls bizarre whimsy all he likes—but I still think, Chief Inspector, that . . . Well, if you’d sit down a moment, I could tell you what I think.”

  He went on, even though it really was fantastic, the Inspector listening silently and gravely, and to Mr. Pinkerton’s surprise even nodding his head, almost, from time to time.

  19

  THE impelling need, as national and characteristic in Dan McGrath as Bull’s stolid patience was in him, to translate his anxiety into some form of action however irrational, succumbed abruptly to an equally native common sense and pragmatic realism as he pounded along toward the bottom of the Square. This was London. The chances of his finding a taxi in these parts at three o’clock in the morning were nil. If Mary was at her Uncle Elliot’s, charmingly vague though Uncle Elliot was he could easily be expected to be pretty sore also, routed out of bed a second time, first by his niece and second by McGrath. The occupants of Adam Street, Adelphi, would no doubt be the same, especially as he did not know the particular flat or the particular house even that Mary had planned to go to the night he’d stopped her there, under the street light, in front of a whole block of houses and flats.

  Stopping to figure it out, he could see no reason to think she would go to either place anyway. She would have had to stop in her own room and get her bag and coat, at the risk of waking her aunt. He stood at the end of the Square, frowning, his anxiety, that had been so acute when he saw her empty bed and had relaxed somehow at the idea she was at her uncle’s or Adam Street—away from Godolphin Square, actually—seeping back into his mind, sharpening again. He looked at the dark rectangle of the garden down the center of the Square, at the clumps of black rhododendron, remembering Caroline Winship out there in the night. He also remembered the invisible hand of Detective-Sergeant Dick that had reached out and held him in his tracks. He looked over at the gaunt remains of Number 22, silent and deserted now after the abortive flurry of the attempt to catch the phantom of the dark.

  He went round the end of the wattle fence, toward the bombed house, staying on the soft ground so as not to attract the attention of Bull’s driver, dozing behind the wheel of the car in front of Number 4. Across the road from Number 22 he stopped, hidden in the shadow of the fence and the overgrown shrubs, his eyes intent on the open staircase and the pale expanse of plastered wall rising up to the dense black shadow cast by the broken projecting roof. There was no sound except the shivering claque in the plane trees overhead. It was like some child’s game that had taken on a real and frightening significance, as if he had asked “Am I warm?” with none to answer but the dry dead lips of the ghosts whispering in the sear and yellow leaves.

  Then he knew suddenly he was not alone. There was someone in the garden across the fence.

  He took two steps in that direction. “Who’s there?” He meant to keep his voice down, but it was sharpened as he thought he heard behind him something that sounded like a low moan. It could have been only the breeze in the plane trees, or a swinging damper somewhere among the chimneypots.

  A quiet voice answered him. “It’s me, sir—Dick again.”

  The detective from Divisional Headquarters eased himself over the wattle fence. “I came back after our little fiasco, sir. Did you hear something over there ? I’ve been here half an hour. It’s seemed all quiet, but I thought I heard something just now. There it is again.”

  He went across the narrow strip of road to the barrier in front of the ruined house, Dan beside him. They stopped there, listening. A soft moan that was not the breeze in the treetops or a whirling damper in a chimneypot came again from somewhere on the other side of the barrier. It was followed by a slow scraping sound, as if a foot moved painfully, grating over the rubble and fallen plaster. Sergeant Dick jerked his electric torch forward. A sharp beam of yellow light pierced the black emptiness of the cellars, its bright arc describing the broken masonry before it leapt up to the balcony and reached the graceful hanging stairs, flying down it then until it reached the bottom, and stopped with an abrupt jerk on the dark slight figure huddled in an unconscious heap on the stone floor at the foot of the stairs.

  Dan was across the barrier, clearing the open space that dropped down into the area with a leap that had only fool’s luck to commend it. “Mary!” He knelt down, gripping her cold hands, and bent to listen to her heart. “She’s alive.” His voice sounded not like his. “Let’s get her out of here.”

  Sergeant Dick threw the torch beam on the solid strip of masonry that had been the wall between this and the house next door and that went to the street. “Steady, sir. I’ll give you a hand.” He stopped for an instant, listening intently, and swept the torch around, up the stairs, into the black hollows on either side of them, before he helped Dan pick the girl up. “Careful, sir. Watch your footing here.”

  Dan carried her across the Square, running, the Sergeant ahead of him opening the wattle gates. When they came to Number 4 the porter on the ground floor turned, staring.

  “Call Mr. Sidney Copeland,” Dan said. “Get hold of him right away.”

  The lift was too narrow and too slow. He carried her up the stairs, Mason with him fumbling for his key.

  “Here’s ’er flat, sir.”

  “I’m taking her upstairs where we can bolt her in,�
� Dan said curtly. “Where’s Inspector Bull?”

  He was coming down from the third floor, took the last three steps in one and was at Eric’s door before Mason.

  “Get a doctor,” Dan said urgently. “Call Sidney Copeland, won’t you?”

  “We’ll get a doctor.” Bull looked at the girl, put his hand on her pulse, lifted her eyelid with his thumb and forefinger. “She’s coming round, sir. I’ll not get Copeland, I think. One of our own men. Mason, you get Miss Grimstead.”

  He went across the room and picked up the telephone. “Put me on to Scotland Yard.” He turned back. “Dick, you go over to that house—go through it from cellar to garret. Get two men on it with you. Keep a watch there till I tell you to take it off.”

  Dan put the girl gently down on the bed. “You’re taking Mr. Scott Winship seriously at last?”

  It was an offensive thing to say and he knew it, but he was in an offensive mood.

  “I’ve taken him seriously from the beginning, sir,” Bull said.

  Mr. Pinkerton crept quietly back into his room and closed the door. From his crow’s nest at the top of the stairs, peering over the bannister rail, he had seen Miss Grimstead come running up to the flat that had been Dalrymple-Hughes’s. He had seen the doctor come, and a young woman in the uniform of a nursing sister but who looked very much like a young woman he had once seen at New Scotland Yard in a uniform of a different sort. Bull had not left, nor had Dan McGrath, but Miss Grimstead had gone, stopping outside the door and leaning against the wall a moment in such patent relief that he had not needed Mason to tell him Miss Mary had come round, with no bones broken, and was now asleep under a sedative.

  “And you’d best go to bed, sir,” Mason had said very sensibly, as Mr. Pinkerton’s teeth were chattering as effectively as if they had all been his own. “I’ve got to get on with my work.”

  So Mr. Pinkerton was back in his own room. He felt worn out and exhausted, like an orange that Inspector Bull’s patient interrogation had squeezed the last drop of juice, even pulp, out of and thrown into the gutter for the dustmen to pick up and carry away in their burgundy-colored sacks and bags. Except that he did not smell quite like an orange. He still smelled unpleasantly of antiseptic from his brief stay in the Solomon Street gaol. In stir, like an old lag, he thought wretchedly. He glanced at himself in the mildewed mirror, not able to tell, quite, whether it was mildew or prison pallor, or whether his face merely wanted washing. He took off his clothes and put on his patched nightshirt, too tired, really, to make the trip to the washroom until he decided the washing might remove the antiseptic memory as well as dirt.

  He put on his slippers and got his soap and towel from the rack inside the wardrobe. He did not put on his dressing gown. The stripes were a little too gay, as tired as he was, and McGrath was belowstairs and Pegott was dead, so no one would see him. Nevertheless, he peered cautiously out into the hall before he slipped out of his room and scurried along the darkened corridor to the bathroom door. He opened it, and stopped petrified in his tracks, sure finally and with no possible room for let or doubt that he had completely and irretrievably lost the last vestiges of his mind and the last tattered remnant of any sanity he had ever possessed. He was staring directly at himself. He was there in the doorway, but he was also there inside the bathroom, himself in his long white nightshirt, wanting only his slippers and his steel-rimmed lozenge-shaped spectacles.

  He had left his spectacles on the bureau under the mildewed mirror, so that the image of himself staring back at him had blurred and confused lines. He could still see, however, what he was doing. He was brushing his hair with the chef’s silver-backed hairbrush.

  “Oh, dear, dear, I am balmy,” he muttered to himself, and tried to edge back out of the doorway. Then he blinked violently, moistened his particularly dry lips and tried to swallow when suddenly the other figure of himself put down the hairbrush and padded with horny toes and calloused feet scraping on the waxed floor covering directly toward him, one finger raised, pointing at his palpitating chest.

  “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good!”

  Mr. Pinkerton, gulping, edged back into the hall. The other man, barefooted in the long nightshirt, padded along with him. Mr. Pinkerton’s heart felt as if it was in his mouth choking him. He edged round surreptitiously so he could back down the hall to his own door. But the man stopped. He raised his bony finger and spoke again.

  “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage!” With that he turned and strode like a prophet, barefooted, his nightshirt flapping about his bony ankles, along the hall to the door of the room next to Pegott’s. He opened it and looked back at Mr. Pinkerton. Then he bowed.

  “A very good night to you, sir. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  Mr. Pinkerton was alone in the hall. “Oh, mercy me!” he said, and ran the rest of the way to his room. He would have pushed the bureau across to block his door, but it was heavy and he did not want to make any noise. As Miss Grimstead had said, however, you had to make do with what you could get, these days. That could apply to a chair as well as a chef. He could get the chair in front of the door, and did, quietly but with considerable relief before he sank down on the side of his bed and wiped the cold sweat off his brow with the sleeves of his patched and worn nightshirt.

  “Peculiar” seemed to him a very mild word for Miss Grimstead to have used. He thought for a moment of going downstairs and telling the Inspector, but he gravely doubted if he had strength enough to go out of his door again in the close future. “And I must get myself some pyjamas,” he thought as he laid his head on the pillow and closed his weary eyes.

  20

  INSPECTOR BULL left the Bulls’ semi-detached villa in Hampstead at half-past seven o’clock that morning. He had got in three hours’ sleep, a bath, a shave and a clean shirt. He had also got a report of the young woman on duty with Mary Winship, who was still asleep. Mr. McGrath had been persuaded to go to his own room and go to bed shortly before five. The rest of Number 4 Godolphin Square was apparently quiet and apparently secure.

  Bull’s first call was in Wimpole Street. He found Sidney Copeland at breakfast.

  “I want to talk to you about Mrs. Winship’s illness, sir.”

  “I’m not the physician, you understand ? I’m a surgeon. But I did discuss it with him at length. It’s a psychotic disturbance, Inspector. In effect, an allergy upsetting her vasco-motor system. Apparently connected with the memory of her husband, and his reappearance in several forms.”

  “The flowers, for example, sir?”

  “Right,” Copeland said. He put down his coffee cup. “The flowers. You understand, Inspector, this is difficult for me. I’ve been very fond of Louise Winship for a great many years. I’ve waited to marry her for a long time. There have been times when she’s agreed to take legal action to free herself from this man, but each time she’s had a serious attack of her asthma.”

  “You really want to marry her, sir?” Inspector Bull asked deliberately.

  Sidney Copeland’s ascetic face reddened. “I’ve said so, Inspector.” He pushed his chair back. “If you will come with me, I’ll give you as much of the history of Mrs. Winship’s illness as I can, as briefly as I can. We’re both busy men. I’m sorry I was not called in when Mary was found last night.”

  “This morning, it was,” Bull said. “We preferred to have— another opinion.”

  “Unbiassed?” Copeland looked at him, raised his brows and opened the door into his surgery. “Sit down, Inspector.”

  Bull stopped forty-five minutes later at Guillaume’s, Florist, Tottenham Court Road.

  “My father and his assistants were killed when the shop was bombed out in Oxford Street,” the manageress said resentfully. “Most of our records were destroyed. These are what are left. I came down early to get them out for you. Sophie talks about things she doesn’t know about. I’d sack her if I could get anybody else. I can’t tell you much—this is all I know.”

/>   His third stop was in the Strand at the offices of the building concern where Nancy Pulham was secretary to the manager.

  “Here they are, Inspector Bull.” She handed him a bundle of papers tied with a brown shoe lace. “Father would love to know he’d helped you any way. He’d always been going to write a book, so give them all back to me—some day I’d like to write it for him or get somebody who can. I’ve taken out all the references to the Winship case for you. It was always his favorite case, you know. Mother called it ‘Pulham’s Folly.’ He called it ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma.’ He’d be surprised to know Mr. Copeland’s got ahead the way he has done.”

  His fourth stop was his own small office overlooking the Embankment. He hung up his hat and stood at the window a moment, looking through the plane trees, watching a coal barge move slowly up the Thames until it disappeared under the bridge. Big Ben’s solemn deep-tongued voice boomed out nine of the clock. He turned to his desk and picked up the telephone.

  “Send him along,” he said patiently. Then he took out his horn-rimmed spectacles and polished them thoughtfully for several minutes before he perched them on the end of his nose.

  “Well, Pinkerton,” he said. “What is it now?”

  Mr. Evan Pinkerton sidled into the office. He always sidled nervously in there, as if he were in some kind of invisible custody, yet with the concerted forces of Law and Order hot on his heels.

  “It—it was the chef, Chief Inspector,” he stammered. “He’s the one that thinks the wicked shall be repaid . . . He wasn’t away last night, he was there. I saw him. And—if he doesn’t believe in poisoning roaches, he’d be hardly likely to be poisoning Mrs. Winship. So my theory’s gone. Although I expect that doesn’t necessarily follow,” he added hopefully.

  Bull waived the point. “The chef was preaching in Hyde Park the afternoon Pegott was killed,” he said patiently. “A constable reported about him. He was standing by because a couple of young ruffians were heckling the man in a threatening manner. He was also quite safe last night.” Bull smiled faintly. “He was like you. In gaol. He was trying a competition with a Communist street meeting in Lambeth and was taken into protective custody. They sent him home shortly after one o’clock. There was a report here when I looked in on my way home this morning.”