by Zenith Brown
MR. PINKERTON AT THE OLD ANGEL
DAVID FROME
Table of Contents
MR. PINKERTON AT THE OLD ANGEL
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1939, 1967 by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com
CHAPTER 1
“Lord love you, sir,” said Mrs. Humpage. “Blood has run like water in these sunny streets.”
The little grey man standing by the south window of his room in the Old Angel dropped the casement curtains from his agitated fingers without turning round, and blinked his watery grey eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. It was not the idea of blood, so much, for he had got definitely used to that, during his long association with his late wife’s number one lodger, Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of New Scotland Yard. It was rather more the idea of the steep, dismal and rainy streets of the little town of Rye being called sunny. Above all it was the sudden appearance of Mrs. Humpage herself, for Mr. Evan Pinkerton had somehow thought he had locked his door. He swallowed, moistened his dry lips, and turned round.
The proprietress of the Old Angel, buxom and apple-cheeked—so Mr. Pinkerton thought; anyone else would have known it was gin—stood beaming at him from the low, studded oak door. Mr. Pinkerton’s knees shook a little. There was something too masterful about Mrs. Humpage. Something of the iron hand in the velvet glove sort of thing. More literally, something of a very determined woman under a soft and apparently yielding bosom . . . and Mr. Evan Pinkerton had once been married himself, for long painful years, to a determined woman without any disguise whatever.
“Love you, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said, with brisk cheeriness. “You must be stark frozen. How about a nice bit of fire?”
And before the little man could stammer that he didn’t want a fire—knowing as well as Mrs. Humpage that it would relentlessly appear in his bill at two shillings—she had bustled in and set a match to the paper in the high grate of the Caen stone fireplace with “1537” carved under the Tudor rose in the centre.
“We must make you comfortable, sir, mustn’t we?” Mrs. Humpage said, very comfortably herself.
Her enthusiasm was far warmer than the feeble flame creeping up about the damp edges of the Morning Chronicle and sizzling against the reluctant coals piled sparsely on top.
“We shall have a time tonight, I’m afraid, sir,” she said. “What with all them people dropping in out of the blue, as they say.”
Mr. Pinkerton noted the unprofessional concession to the leaden streaming skies and the wind howling the smoke back down the chimney-pots.
“—Sir Lionel Atwater indeed, sir. Turning the place inside out. I said, ‘If the Old Angel don’t suit you, sir, perhaps the ’all porter can move your traps to the Mermaid,’ I said.”
Mrs. Humpage, her two feet firmly planted on the hearth, placed her plump arms on her much plumper hips, her whole plump person absorbing at least tuppenny’orth of Mr. Pinkerton’s fire.
“And he starts banging on the table, and all them poor dears starts running. Now, what I’m askin’ you, sir, being a man, and a gentleman, is why don’t they settle their family differences in their own house, without coming ’ere to upset mine?”
Mr. Pinkerton moistened his dry grey lips, not moving from his position by the casement.
“Oh, dear!” he thought. He said, “I’m sure I . . . I don’t ever know, ma’am.”
“Nor I, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said flatly. Mr. Pinkerton could tell, however, by the relish with which she poked up his fire, knocking the coals to the bottom where the maid could salvage them in the morning, that she had a jolly good idea.
“Well,” Mrs. Humpage said, “I just wanted to say you’re not to mind them, sir. If they come annoying you, I’ll send them packing to the Mermaid, bag and baggage.”
She laughed suddenly, a rich and hearty laugh that made Mr. Pinkerton’s small spine chill a little.
“I said baggage, sir, and which one is a baggage and which one is not, I’ll leave to you, sir!”
Mr. Pinkerton stood staring helplessly at the stout oak door through which Mrs. Humpage had disappeared with a swish of petticoats. The perspiration stood too, in cold beads on Mr. Pinkerton’s small greyish forehead. He was above all a very modest man, and the mere idea of anybody sending anybody else packing just for him was unnerving; but to send an actual knight of the realm packing for him was utterly shattering.
He glanced uneasily at the fire sullenly eating up his coal. Mrs. Humpage, of course, had no way of knowing that the solitary reason he’d fled the comfortable fire in the inn parlour was not to be underfoot when the large, pompous, irate man whose name was Sir Lionel Atwater, with the violent beet-red face and snow-white walrus mustaches, suddenly ran entirely amuck, as he seemed on the verge of doing at any moment. Still less could she have known that Mr. Pinkerton was not nearly so terrified of the beet-faced person as at the dreadful idea that the late Mrs. Pinkerton would certainly turn over in her grave at the wanton waste of two shillings. And still more terrifying, even, was the idea that she might get up altogether, absolutely reincarnated through the sheer force of parsimony.
Though Mrs. Pinkerton on her late unlamented decease had left him the very considerable sum of £ 75,000, by the happy chance of its never occurring to her that the little grey man she had turned from an underpaid, underfed, undermaster in a Welsh school into a potboy and scullery maid at no pay at all in her lodging house in Golders Green could have greater survival value than she, Mr. Pinkerton had never in all his life spent as much as a farthing on a fire just because he was cold. In fact, he had hardly spent anything at all, on anything, without the queasy fear plucking at his viscera that he might look up and see her standing there, handing him sixpence to go fetch a kipper for a lodger’s breakfast . . . and then everything else would turn out to be a dream, including all his glorious associations in the detection of crime with Inspector Bull, and even the large stone memorial he’d bought with Mrs. Pinkerton’s money, on the assumption that it at least would keep her down.
So Mr. Pinkerton, once accustomed, during Mrs. Pinkerton’s life, to warm his toes and his soul, when he could escape, at the gas fire of her lodger, Inspector Bull of the C. I. D., had ever since warmed his toes at public fires, in inns, and even his meagre posterior, when no one was looking. His soul was still, however, in Inspector Bull’s hands. In fact the only reason he was now at Rye was that Bull was at Brighton, and he had so nearly told Mr. Pinkerton he was a bloody nuisance that Rye was as close to Brighton as he had dared go.
Standing miserably in front of his two-shilling fire, Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. It had not, so far, been as good an idea as he had thought. Though in some respects the Old Angel was very nice, it had turned out to have one substantial drawback: namely, the middle-aged angel who managed
it, and the way she kept popping up when she was least expected. How, for instance, she had ever discovered he was a widower, Mr. Pinkerton did not know. It could not be his weeds, for he had never worn any, except to put a black band about his hat reserved for Sundays, a day on which he never went out. And yet, Mrs. Humpage had told him she was a widow practically the moment he came in the Old Angel’s door.
Mr. Pinkerton ran his fingers around inside his narrow celluloid collar, and straightened his purple string tie. If she were to send a knight packing for him, it could be compromising in the extreme. Even he could see that. He glanced surreptitiously at his bright new suitcase that the man had said could expand enormously to hold his immediate effects, and that he knew could contract enormously and still hold his entire wardrobe, and went across the room to the old oak cupboard.
As he swung the door back, a solid panel in the wall by the chimney piece flew open, and a white-faced girl practically fell into the room. Her startled eyes met the startled little Welshman’s; she put one hand up to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, and with the other reached behind her mechanically and pushed the panel shut. She then stood there as if paralyzed, her eyes as wide open as her mouth, her breath coming in sharp frightened spasms.
“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry!” she gasped. “I must have got the wrong stairs—don’t tell Madam, please, sir!”
Mr. Pinkerton stared, virtually as paralyzed as the girl. Just then—it sounded almost as if from the next room—he heard the loud bellow that he had already learned to recognize as the customary manner of speaking of Sir Lionel Atwater.
“I won’t tolerate that young scoundrel! . . .”
The girl’s eyes widened still farther in dread.
“. . . I’ll smoke him out of his stinking hole!”
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought.
“Oh, please, sir, don’t tell them, will you, sir?” the girl demanded again, in a frightened whisper.
Then, as he still stood looking at her, quite speechless, she darted across the room and out the door, just as Mrs. Humpage’s voice came from below. “Kathleen, Kathleen! Take the gentlemen some hot water! Hurry along, dear!”
From somewhere through the honeycombed walls of the old inn Mr. Pinkerton heard the thunderous blustering voice again: “Foreign scum! . . .”
Another voice spoke. It was smooth and even, and plainly intended to be pacifying.
“I’ll not be intimidated!” Sir Lionel Atwater roared. “I’ll take steps, sir! They’ll not tell me what I shall and shall not do, and I’ll be obliged if you’d mind your—”
Then quite suddenly, as if a heavy door had closed, Mr. Pinkerton could hear nothing more, except a faint low rumble indicating that Sir Lionel’s conversation was still going on.
He blinked and looked cautiously about, coughing at the sharp acrid puffs of smoke that caught themselves and hurried back into his big stone fireplace and up the chimney. Then he shook his head dismally. The Old Angel was, he knew, a very old inn, and strange things could easily happen in it. But surely, Mr. Pinkerton thought . . . He tiptoed over to the old oak panel by the chimney piece and touched it gingerly. It remained very firmly in place. He pushed it, then harder, and finally pulled at it as hard as he could. Outside of a broken fingernail, nothing happened at all. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton stood there. If he had not firmly refused the glass of stout Mrs. Humpage had pressed on him at lunch, he would have thought he had made up the whole business. But he had refused it. Furthermore, the door through which the white-faced maid had gone was still ajar. He could even hear Mrs. Humpage down below, saying sharply, “Hurry along now—don’t keep the gentlemen waiting.”
Mr. Pinkerton stepped quietly over to the door and peered out. On the narrow staircase at the opposite end of the crooked uneven hall he saw the tow-thatched potboy, Jo, not Kathleen at all, carrying up the polished copper hot-water cans. Beyond him, flattened against the wall so he could pass, was the deaf and dumb gentleman in the worn, baggy Bond Street plus-fours, who had arrived the night before, shortly after he himself had come.
Mr. Pinkerton shook his head again in great perplexity, closed his door, pushed the oak settle a little closer to the fire and sat down, staring at it. After all, he thought, not only were there his rights, as one of the King’s subjects, but he had also just taken out a two-shilling stake in the Old Angel. Furthermore, though he would not dare to admit it aloud, in a place where the walls suddenly turned out to be doors, Mr. Pinkerton was very curious indeed. Why, he wondered, had the maid Kathleen come from the garret in such mortal terror; why had she been so desperately anxious not to have Mrs. Humpage know she had come; why had the savage old voice through the suddenly opened walls added so astonishingly to her fear? Why had the walls, somewhere, closed so quickly again, shutting off even Sir Lionel Atwater’s voice? And what, Mr. Pinkerton wondered, was the old gentleman shouting about?
He blinked suddenly as the idea struck him that he had heard, somewhere, of Sir Lionel Atwater; he groped vaguely in his mind, gave it up and thought of Mrs. Humpage again. What differences were they supposed to be settling? From what he had heard in those few seconds, it did not appear likely to be an amicable settlement, what with the plethoric old chap smoking foreign scum out of their stinking holes.
Mr. Pinkerton swallowed as the idea occurred to him that he himself was Welsh, of course, not English at all. Still, it hardly seemed likely that he would be worth smoking out of any place. He looked about him at the old panelled walls, and the old oak four-poster sagging definitely in the middle, with the pair of carved cherubs with slightly lewd grins on their chubby faces in the headboard under the pink silk lampshade with no bulb in it. Whatever one might say about the room, furthermore, he reassured himself, it did not smell any worse than most damp old rooms in damp old hostels.
Then, just as the fire began to take itself seriously, Mr. Pinkerton heard the gong from below. It came instantly into his mind that if he went down quickly, perhaps he could eat his dinner and get back before the others came down.
CHAPTER 2
The dining room in the Old Angel in Watchbell Street in Rye was everything that Mr. Pinkerton, and a great many other people, including Mrs. Humpage, thought a Tudor inn’s dining room should be. Gleaming copper bedwarmers hung on the linenfold panelling of the walls, together with enough pewter tankards and enormous platters to stock the Caledonian Market for a whole season of American tourists. Oak dressers were full of fat-bellied liquor bottles, great silver-plated venison dishes and rows of old silver skewers. There was also a goldfish tank in front of the bottle-glass casement windows overlooking the sea. And the food was extremely good too. Jo the potboy in white apron put a plate of gravy soup in front of Mr. Pinkerton as the waiters, in black coats a bit spotty and trousers that sagged at the knees, bustled about a table set for six near the goldfish tank. The gravy soup was followed with a bit of pale fish, with a pale pink dab of sauce that tasted of fish also, and that was followed, even before the deaf and dumb gentleman crept in and had his gravy soup, with a nice bit of boiled mutton and boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage. Mr. Pinkerton polished that off, with enjoyment, and was well on into his boiled pudding when he noticed an unusual scurrying among the waiters and saw the large beet-faced, white-walrus-mustached figure of Sir Lionel Atwater in heavy Harris tweeds come thumping into the room.
He was followed by a little lady with white hair, also in tweeds, a large dark-haired windblown young woman, and a thin-faced nervous young man with blond hair and a tiny blond mustache. They were in tweeds too, and none of them spoke. Mr. Pinkerton knew very well, of course, that no one ever speaks in the dining room of a country pub in England. There is something about the very atmosphere that stills the human voice so that only the most brazen exhibitionist seems to have power against it. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton had the idea that it had stilled even Sir Lionel Atwater. But he was wrong. The beet face went even redder, in a moment, and Mr. Pinkerton heard a resounding thump on the table.
“Where is that young scoundrel?” Sir Lionel demanded angrily.
The others at the table looked at each other anxiously. Mr. Pinkerton saw the little lady with the white hair put her hand out and touch his arm, and whisper something.
“Dammit, madam, I told him to be here!” Atwater exclaimed.
He levelled a savage eye from under his thick tufted white brows at the thin-faced young man across the table. “Go fetch him, dammit all, Darcy!”
The young blond man pushed his chair back hurriedly. But not as quickly as the large dark young woman. “I’ll go, Darcy,” Mr. Pinkerton, listening avidly, heard her say. “Let me, Pater—really!”
“Sit down, Pamela,” Sir Lionel said gruffly. “Get on with it, Darcy, if you’ve got to haul him in by the scruff of the neck.”
The young man got up and hurried past Mr. Pinkerton toward the door. For one instant the eyes of Mr. Darcy Atwater and the little grey Welshman met; and then Mr. Pinkerton dropped his hastily, for, impossible as it seemed, the young man had winked at him. Mr. Pinkerton blinked, swallowed a hot bit of his golden roll, and blinked again. Then, outside in the lounge, he heard the young man say,
“Jeff—thank God you’ve got here! The old boy’s practically bust a gut. Pamela’s all for dragging you out of your love nest by the—”
“Shut up, will you?” Another voice, almost as savage as Sir Lionel Atwater’s, cut him off angrily.
“Oh, I’m sorry, old chap. But for God’s sake think of the rest of us in this beastly hole. And I say, if you’ve got to strike Pamela, do it when I’m not about, would you?—I’d have to take steps, as the old boy says, and I’m not up to it, not after last night.”
Mr. Darcy Atwater ended with a groan.
The other man gave a short laugh.
“If it weren’t for that damned woman I’d let you have the beastly Collection, but that . . .”
Mr. Pinkerton could not hear the rest of it, but it didn’t matter. He swallowed his last bit of boiled pudding hurriedly, shaking his head quite involuntarily. If, as he assumed, the other man outside in the lounge was Darcy Atwater’s elder brother, then that was no way for one brother to speak of another’s wife . . . for that the large dark woman called Pamela was Mrs. Darcy Atwater Mr. Pinkerton hardly needed to see the large gold wedding band on her finger to realize.