Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  He eased himself back into his chair. “He’s quite harmless, they say, except out on the street when he sees a—a brand to pluck from the burning.”

  His sober face lighted again, slightly, for an instant. “I expect your sins have found you out, Pinkerton. Anything else?”

  Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. He was nevertheless a little relieved that the chef had been talking about his own stone walls and iron bars, not about Mr. Pinkerton’s. He hesitated for an instant. “You told me to tell you everything I could think of, Chief Inspector. I’ve not been able to think of anything else except one thing that is very trivial. Miss Winship called me ‘Mr. Pilkington’ once. I expect she was put out, at the moment, because she thought Dan was an American antique dealer trying to buy her mantelpiece.”

  Mr. Pinkerton was really only trying to gain time, hoping that perhaps Bull would break down and tell him something. But the Inspector gave no sign of breaking down anything except possibly the chair that he was leaning his enormous bulk backward in.

  “Well, good-bye, Chief Inspector. I expect you’ll be out later?”

  “I expect so,” Bull said. “Cheerioh.”

  He watched Mr. Pinkerton close the door and listened to his scurrying footsteps along the narrow corridor. He pushed up his horn-rimmed glasses then and started going through Inspector Pulham’s notes one by one, reading them soberly and carefully while another part of his mind wandered up and down, in and out, round the intricate maze of fact and surmise, impression and doubt, that he was immediately concerned with, picking a path here and abandoning it at a dead end there, assorting and reassorting, trying to reach out and grasp the frail thread that would lead through the dark labyrinth.

  Suddenly he took off his glasses and put them sharply down on the desk, in effect discarding them—saying, in effect, “How blind I have been.” If he had not been blind, he would have seen it all clearly without the aid of written words. He sat there for a moment, reached down and pulled open the drawer that had the neatly labelled exhibits the Prosecutor would take to Court. A small sledge hammer, not the one that Eric Dalrymple-Hughes had been killed with but another, taken from the room Sophie Barnes had led them to the night before, where she had met Pegott in his pied-à-terre in Bayswater. He looked at it a moment, and the cold chisel that had been with it, wrapped in a towel marked “4 Godolphin Square” in Pegott’s bureau drawer. He put them back, took up the book that had been in Pegott’s despatch case, taken out by Dan McGrath and finally given to Bull when McGrath had decided to tell everything he knew. He turned to the page he had marked with a slip of paper.

  “Of special interest to me,” wrote the Boston McGrath, “has been a small picture reputedly a Dutch Master, sold by an Englishman, reputedly a gentleman, for what in these days of less enthusiastic purchases of old canvas seems a fairly large sum. The opinion of the dealer who bought the picture but never received it—and which he freely admits was second-sight in view of the circumstances surrounding the transaction—was that the owner was aware it would not stand up to present-day microscopic and X-ray tests, which were agreed upon at the time of sale. Dealers are human, and loathe to admit their errors. In this particular instance, however, error was the easier to admit as the dealer suffered no loss, either in his pocket or his prestige, as his mistake has never come to light for his fellows to see and point their fingers at.

  “The picture quietly disappeared, the family quietly made restitution. It would not be the first time that a reputed old master has vanished, or been taken off the market, before its authenticity could be determined. Nor the first time that an heir has found his heirloom Chippendale to have been made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If the family has money enough, they are frequently glad to draw in their horns and continue to point out Great-great-grandfather’s Chippendale to undiscerning friends, not to dealers. Caveat Emptor!”

  Bull closed the book and let his eyes rest for a moment on Inspector Pulham’s dog-eared notes.

  “Caveat Emptor,” he thought. Let the buyer beware. He shook his head silently. He had come very close to being a buyer himself; he had just next to bought Inspector Pulham’s idée fixe.

  He pushed the notes back and got to his feet. Pegott’s luggage was stacked neatly in one corner of the small room. He went over to it, opened the despatch case that had been lying on the murdered man’s bed, and stood looking down at it. He went back to his desk and picked up the telephone.

  “Put me on to Inspector Carson. I’m not going to the in quest on Arthur Pegott,” he said when the inspector was on. “Adjourn it as soon as possible, for further information.” He made two other calls, thought a moment, and took up the phone a fourth time. “Put me on to Mr. Sidney Copeland in Wimpole Street.”

  “Inspector Bull here,” he said when he heard the surgeon’s dry precise voice. “I have to ask you to go to 4 Godolphin Square, Mr. Copeland. I’ve put a nurse with Mrs. Winship. I’ll be there to talk with her in a few minutes. I think it would be wise for you to be present. I know you’ve a full day ahead, sir. I think it would be better if you come of your own accord.”

  He put the phone down and got up. Big Ben was striking ten slow sonorous notes from the tower above the Houses of Parliament on the river embankment. He listened until the last note died above the hoot and clamor of motor traffic across Westminster Bridge and the scurry of the taxis and trams in the street below. He looked at his watch, got his hat and put it on, ignoring the telephone ringing on his desk. It rang again as he opened the door, a short and somehow urgent demand that made him stop, close the door and go back.

  “Bull here.” He listened, intently after the first few words. “Repeat that.”

  The voice in his ear came from the sergeant on duty downstairs.

  “A man here says his name is Winship, sir, and you’re looking for him. He’s come to give himself up. He says to tell you his coat is torn—the pocket has been pulled off, sir.”

  Inspector Bull took his hat off mechanically, and dropped it on his desk. He stared blankly out of the window, for an instant, at nothing.

  “Send him up,” he said.

  He put the phone down. His mild blue eyes, sober and not a little perplexed, moved from Inspector Pulham’s notes to the book written by the Boston McGrath, and from there to the drawer of exhibits, and across the room to Pegott’s despatch case on top of the pile his luggage made in the corner. He stood there for several moments, moved around then to his chair and sat down, leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the door.

  21

  DAN MCGRATH tapped lightly on the door of Dalrymple-Hughes’s second-floor flat and waited. He was back from the inquest on Arthur Pegott, an hour and a half lost getting there and back, with the coroner’s proceedings taking seven and one-quarter minutes before they were adjourned until another day. Mr. Pinkerton had not showed, nor the man he was supposed to look for, nor anyone he could conceivably imagine to be the little Welshman’s friend calling down anathemas on unrepentant sinners. There was no one he had ever seen before, and not even Inspector Bull. He rapped impatiently on the door again. It was eleven o’clock and he still had not seen Mary.

  “Oh sir, she’s gone downstairs.” Sarah, the maid who had taken Betty’s place, put her head out of the door of the flat across the hall. “The nurse helped her down. She is a sight, sir. It’s a blessing she wasn’t killed too, I expect, if you want to look at it that way. A detective was here talking to her too, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Dan started down the stairs. He had a certain not unnatural reluctance about barging in on the Winships again; but it was no place for Mary, and he was going to get her out. Scotland Yard might well be tops, taken over a hundred years, but they were too blasted casual to suit McGrath—too casual and too damned deliberate. It was good the British were law-abiding people, or the whole population could get its throat cut while Inspector Bull sat on his derriere. He knocked at Miss Winship’s door.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re here.”


  Mr. Sidney Copeland equally repressed any enthusiasm he may have felt at seeing Dan McGrath on the other side of the door.

  “Is there something you wish, sir?” His hand stayed on the door.

  “Yes. I wish to see Mary. If it’s all the same to you.”

  Come on, McGrath. Stop being a bloody fool. Be nice to the gentleman.

  “I’d like very much to see her, sir. Sorry to have to bother you.”

  “Come in.”

  He went in as Copeland stood aside.

  “Hi, there.” It was all he could say, seeing her, and she was all he did see, for a blurred profoundly grateful moment, sitting up in a big chair, in her dressing gown, one taped ankle resting on an ottoman, one wrist taped and a square patch of white bandage where her dark curly hair had been shaved away from the cut on her head.

  “You’re a cute looking mess,” he said. The side of her face was scraped and there was a patch over one eye. But she was smiling at him, and words didn’t matter a great deal. He took her good hand and squeezed it, bent down and kissed her softly on her good cheek, and on her lips. “Gosh,” he whispered, aware then that his semantic approach must sound exceedingly vulgar to Sidney Copeland.

  It was then that he saw the rest of them—Mrs. Winship, frail but apparently surprisingly fit after her attack of the day before, the white-clad nursing sister on the sofa beside her, and Caroline Winship.

  He saw her with a shock that jolted him to the soles of his shoes. She was still in the yellow chair, but it had been moved. It was no longer backed up against the fireplace like a beleaguered throne. It was beside the desk, turned so that her back was toward the door. Miss Winship faced the window looking out onto the Square. She had her stick gripped in her hand, her head bent forward like some great, silently brooding figure from Michelangelo, passionately alive in spite of the heavy-lidded eyes, still glazed, that were fixed out of the window, not seeing him, or if she saw him ignoring him as if he were not there. Mary put her hand up, touched his lightly and shook her head. Until she did, he had not realized how he was staring at her aunt, and he turned away quickly.

  Sidney Copeland was winding up a roll of bandage. “I think you’ll be fairly comfortable, now.” He managed to ignore Dan too. Only Mrs. Winship seemed interested in his being there. She smiled at him from her pillows on the sofa. He went over to her.

  “I hope you’re better,” he said, and stepped back as the nurse executed an unobtrusive but neat movement that seemed somehow to prevent him from coming close to her patient.

  Mary held her hand out to him with a quick smile. “Why don’t you bring a chair over here by me, Dan,” she said. “Or sit down here on the ottoman.” She moved her sprained foot over to make room for him. It was reassurance McGrath badly needed. He felt awkward and ill at ease. Mary and her mother were the only ones who seemed to want him there, but Mary’s wanting him was enough. He sat down by her feet and touched the taped ankle gently.

  “Hurt?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s all right now.”

  “What happened? Can you tell me?”

  He glanced at her aunt in the yellow chair.

  “It’s quite all right, they all know,” Mary said quickly. “It was stupid, that’s all. I thought you were going over there to find him. I thought you knew. So I followed you out. I saw you speak to Copey, from Mason’s window downstairs, and then I saw you at the top of the Square, and going through the garden. I was this side when everything happened. Only I didn’t come in. I—I waited, and then I went over, by myself. For a long time I’ve—well, I’ve wanted to go back and go up those stairs. So I— I climbed over the barrier and went up. I was at the top before I realized that—that anybody was still there. He came up out of the back stairs. He ran when he saw me. He ran down and got in the street, and I started after him. I tripped on something and fell. I must have hit my head on the iron rail, because that’s all I remember. I don’t remember falling all the way down. That’s where you found me, wasn’t it?”

  Dan nodded. “He . . .” He hesitated. It was a hard question to ask. “He didn’t strike you, then? Honest?”

  She shook her head. “Really. He seemed as startled as I was. I don’t think he saw me at all—not to see who I was, I mean. Of course he wouldn’t recognize me. But he just sort of gasped and cut and ran for it.”

  “You were a fool to go.” Caroline Winship’s voice was grating. “I told you to keep away from there. You might have been killed too.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Be still!”

  Caroline Winship raised her hand peremptorily. She pulled herself forward in the chair.

  “What is that? Who are those men?”

  She struck the floor with her stick. Her voice rose. “Who are those men!” she exclaimed again. Her free hand shot out, pointing in an imperative gesture through the window across the Square.

  “What are they doing there? What are they doing in my house? What right have they—”

  As she struggled to raise her heavy body upright, Dan moved across the room, and standing behind the yellow chair followed the intense staring gaze of the brilliant heavy-lidded eyes.

  “An Englishman’s house is his castle ... all the winds of heaven may whistle through it, but the King cannot . . .” The words remembered from his schoolday history flashed ludicrously into his mind. He was astonished, looking out through this window for the first time, to see how close the ruins of Miss Winship’s house were, and how clearly he could see the frail and delicate hanging staircase and the open balcony formed by the transverse hall, with no branches of yellowed leaves to obstruct the view. Something Mr. Pinkerton had said that first day flashed into his mind also: Miss Winship had bribed the gardener to prune away the branches that shut off her sight of the bombed house from the window where she always sat, eternally brooding.

  It was like being in the front row of the balcony in a theater, Dan thought suddenly, watching the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, with the pale sun spotlighting the stage, the dead leaves blown about on the ground by sharp gusts of wind, the disorderly impatient crowds in the pit, and the half-dozen men from the two cars pulled up in the road—the Capulets and Montagues in modern dress, armed, not with swords and pikes, but with pickaxes and crowbars.

  Miss Caroline Winship’s heavy voice beat angrily through the room. “Who are they? What are they doing? They’re trying to steal my staircase and my mantels! Copeland!”

  She turned toward the room, gesturing with her stick at the telephone. “Copeland—put me on to my solicitor!”

  Sidney Copeland, startled, came across the room toward her.

  “Don’t excite yourself, Caroline. You’ll—”

  The rap on the door cut him sharply off. There was a short silence in the room. Miss Winship gripped the wing of the yellow chair with one hand. Her voice was again the hoarse cry of the beleaguered despot as she faced the door. “Who’s there?” Copeland took a step toward it before it opened and Inspector Bull came in. Dan McGrath, watching silently, had the curious impression that something else had come in with his stolid and burly figure—the dignity and authority of the English law.

  Inspector Bull had a paper in his hand. “I have a warrant for the search of the premises at Number 22 Godolphin Square, Miss Winship,” he said. “It is your privilege to be present while we make the search, if you wish to do so.”

  “No,” Caroline Winship drew herself erect. “No.”

  Dan McGrath was hardly aware of the legal formalities, or even of little Mr. Pinkerton, like a small grey skiff trailing in the wash of the law’s majestic craft. He was staring past Bull and past Mr. Pinkerton at the third man easing himself uncomfortably into the room behind them. He had on a raincoat, but his trousers legs were of tweed that was more oatmeal than brown in color, and his sandy greying hair was rumpled. It was lighter in Miss Winship’s sitting room than it had been on the attic third floor, between the lift and Arthur Pegott’s roo
m; but even then Dan had the same instant impression of baggy tweeds, a slight build, an indefinable air of good breeding. The man was far from peering at him now with quietly amused interest, but he was the man Dan had seen up there with his hand on Pegott’s door.

  22

  THE man came on into the room, diffident and hesitant, and Dan McGrath, still staring at him, was suddenly aware that the man was looking at him. He had a slightly shamefaced look, then, and a deprecatory and apologetic smile.

  “I say, awfully sorry, my dear fellow,” he murmured. “Not sporting, you know. Not sporting at all.”

  Caroline Winship’s voice had sunk to a soft whisper, an iron threat in a velvet tongue.

  “Get out of my house, Elliot.”

  “I have asked Mr. Elliot Winship to come here, Miss Winship,” Bull said coolly.

  Sidney Copeland stepped forward from where he had halted on his way to the door. He had an abrupt authority of his own. “It’s my professional duty to warn you, Inspector, that Miss Winship is not a well woman. She has suffered a slight cerebral hemorrhage—a stroke—last night, as a result of finding her nephew killed in his bed. Any undue excitement and nervous strain at this time ... I shall hold you personally responsible.”

  Miss Winship was still gripping her stick in one hand, the wing of the chair in the other, her hooded eyes alive and brilliant with passion, fixed on the man who was Scott Winship’s brother. She moved them slowly to Copeland as he spoke. Her lips curled in a mirthless smile of contempt as she turned without a word, wrenching her chair forward. She sat there, her shoulders and head thrust forward, her vivid gaze making an almost tangible path through the window and across the garden to the house across the Square. Her face was suffused and dark with anger.