by Zenith Brown
“A day or so,” Mr. Pinkerton said nervously.
“Me too.”
Mr. Pinkerton edged closer to his stairs and scurried up them. At the top he glanced back. Mr. McPherson had moved quickly across to Mrs. Humpage’s office and was looking through the register—acting, Mr. Pinkerton thought, considerably more like a Pinkerton’s man than a traveller in sweepers.
Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. It really was most odd. In fact, the more he saw of the Old Angel and its guests, the odder the whole place appeared.
He gained his door and went in. The maid Kathleen was there, turning down his bed. She still looked pale and shaken, or so Mr. Pinkerton thought at first. Then, in a brief instant, he realized that she had not been turning down his bed for more than half a moment. She had been listening at the panel wall. Through it he could hear the sound of voices, not loud or violent—not, at any rate, except when Sir Lionel Atwater had the floor.
The girl folded the yellow rayon bedspread.
“I put your sheets on wrong side out, sir,” she said. “But I didn’t change them. It’s bad luck, and we don’t want any—not any more than we’ve got.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked at her. The dead sound in her cheery little voice—“Kathleen’s a ray of sunlight in this old-world place, sir,” Mrs. Humpage had said—made him fairly shudder.
“Has . . . the other gentleman come, sir?” she asked suddenly.
“Mr. McPherson?” Mr. Pinkerton asked.
“Not him.” She said it almost contemptuously. “The Mr. Fleetwood that Mr. Atwater was telephoning to when they first came, sir. Oh, dear—that’s him now, I expect.”
Mr. Pinkerton could hear the bell in the lounge jangling violently.
“Oh, dear!” the girl said again. “Poor young lady—poor Mr. Jeffrey! Oh sir, I do feel so badly!”
She buried her face for a moment in the damp pillow she’d lifted to fluff and made odd little sounds as if she’d got a very bad cold. Mr. Pinkerton straightened his tie nervously. What if Inspector Bull should pop in, or Mrs. Humpage, and find the child crying in his room? He felt himself, as Chrissie the Bulls’ cook-general used to say, going fair queer all over.
She put the pillow down and turned indignantly to him.
“Oh, sir, what right have people got going about making other people miserable?” she demanded hotly.
“I . . . I’m sure I don’t know, miss,” Mr. Pinkerton said hurriedly.
Downstairs the bell rang again, more imperatively still. Kathleen looked from one side to the other as if trying to find some way to escape.
“I expect I’ve got to answer it, sir,” she said. She picked up the hot copper water can and went out.
Mr. Pinkerton heard a crisp arrogant voice come up the crooked old stairs.
“Has everybody gone to sleep in this damned place? Here, girl—fetch my luggage in out of the rain.”
“Yes, sir,” Kathleen said. “Are you Mr. Fleetwood, sir?”
“I’m glad I’m at least expected,” the arrogant voice said.
“Is Sir Lionel Atwater in?”
“Just a moment, sir.” Mr. Pinkerton heard the bell ring again. “Jo, show this gentleman upstairs. In Number Four, sir.”
Mr. Pinkerton looked out shamelessly through the crack in the door. A tall pompous man, a tweed greatcoat over his dinner jacket, his black hair receded so that he had a broad, very ample forehead, was standing at the bottom of the steps.
“Here, boy—just ask for Mr. Darcy Atwater. Tell him privately to come down a moment. Hurry along.”
He tossed the boy a coin. Mr. Pinkerton could see him looking at it, and noted that he actually did hurry. Then he closed his door quickly as he saw, coming down the opposite steps, the unmistakable cinnamon-brown trouser legs of Inspector Bull, alias Mr. Briscoe.
CHAPTER 4
Mr. Pinkerton sat down on the edge of his oak settle and bit the nail of his left forefinger. If only he knew what was up, he thought dejectedly. Whatever could the man from Scotland Yard be doing here, under a name not his own, when he was supposed to be in Brighton? Whatever could be the matter with the girl Kathleen? It occurred to him suddenly together with the thought that it should have occurred to him before—that she spoke of Jeffrey Atwater as “Poor Mr. Jeffrey,” as if she knew him quite well—even better, Mr. Pinkerton thought, than he would do, no matter how many weeks he’d spent at the Old Angel.
Then through the old walls behind the oak panelling he heard Sir Lionel’s voice.
“He hasn’t got a bent farthing, madam. Have you thought of that, madam?”
The slightly husky voice of the girl Sally Bruce answered.
“I had one very rich husband. Sir Lionel. That was the trouble with him. But don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to marry your son. It was his idea from the first, not mine.”
“And what’s wrong with my son, madam!”
“Nothing but his family,” said the cool husky voice.
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton, utterly aghast, thought the noises he then heard were the old gentleman’s death rattle . . . except that he knew only very wicked people swore while they were dying. Then, the atmosphere apparently clearing, he heard, “By Gad, madam! I like that!”
Then all sound was closed off again, and Mr. Pinkerton sat, bewildered and blinking. The wind howled down the chimney and buffeted at the casement windows. Mr. Pinkerton glanced at his fire. It was dying in the grate. He shivered. He didn’t dare go downstairs. He looked dismally at his bed. Then, after a long time, he undressed his meagre frame, put on a pair of pyjamas that had a red band with a yellow bird looking like the Prussian eagle embroidered on it, turned off the light and got into bed, leaving the door unlatched on the off chance that Inspector Bull might come.
He lay there a long time, waiting, his heart shrinking smaller and colder in his chest. Then at last he went to sleep, and suddenly, in the middle of a series of astonishing events that he knew were certainly the stuff of dreams, since he walked through them the hero of each, he woke up, the gooseflesh standing on every half-frozen inch of his epidermis.
The thin sound of the gilded quarterboys on the church clock striking three came through the silent night. In the pale light that came from the casement window—light only in relation to the Stygian blackness of the panelled room—Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes, barely protruding above the musty eiderdown, were turned toward the Tudor chimney-piece. The only sound was a rat, gnawing again, as if it had been alarmed and stopped for a moment in the old walls. Then, even before Mr. Pinkerton heard anything, the rat stopped again. He could hear its lumbering tread in the wattles. Then Mr. Pinkerton saw a thin sliver of light in the solid wall, and the panel through which Kathleen had come so abruptly opened, so silently that the little man thought he must be dreaming again. Then he saw the round yellow ball of light from an electric torch bounce on the floor into nothingness. The light tread of stockinged feet touched his ears. In the glimmer of light from the casement, he saw a dark figure creeping toward the door, and, for a bare instant, it illuminated the thin pale face of a young man he had never seen before.
It was not even in that brief light a particularly attractive face. Its pallor, the tense drawn expression, even in the dim shadows, was apparent to Mr. Pinkerton. He could not hear the man’s feet on the rug, but he could hear his taut breath as he caught it sharply, his hand on the latch. Mr. Pinkerton lay still as an old mouse himself, not daring to breathe. As the latch clicked, and the door opened and closed, he looked back at the dark open panel. He heard a quick breath there, saw a white figure high in the dark strip behind it, heard bare feet, and saw the panel close.
Mr. Pinkerton had a sudden sick feeling in his stomach. The maid Kathleen was letting the young man out of the garret where her room was. But she couldn’t, he thought desperately, have mistaken the stairs a second time . . .
Just then, as Mr. Pinkerton was staring through the dark at the closed panel, before he could think what to think, he heard a long labo
ured and choking groan, shaking through the old hostel like the anguished cry of a ghost long dead . . . except that it was not a ghost. He sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the eiderdown up against his scrawny chest with freezing hands. The wind moaned outside, rattling at the casements, hitting with hard gloved hands at the seaward side of the house overlooking the salts. The groan sounded again.
Mr. Pinkerton, his heart too cold to feel how cold his feet were, slipped out of bed and turned on his light. He then put on his plaid carpet slippers, got his overcoat out of the wardrobe, put it on and stood, trembling. Through the panels came that terrifying sound again—and palpably weaker. In a flash of something, perhaps intuition, or even recognition, perhaps only the doubts and alarms precipitated suddenly by the fish with the pink sauce in his upper colon, the little Welshman knew it was Sir Lionel Atwater he had heard. The thought flashed into his mind that he had had a stroke, then, just as his younger son had said he would do. Mr. Pinkerton opened his door and stood a confused instant at the top of the staircase.
The old inn was like a rabbit warren, he knew. There must be some way to get to the room beyond without going downstairs, but he did not know it. He listened an instant, but there was no sound. Trembling, Mr. Pinkerton hurried down the stairs into the dark lounge. A single faint bulb in an old ship’s lantern burned in the entry, behind the single bottle-glass pane in the door. Mr. Pinkerton looked about. No one was there. There was no trace of the young man who had slipped down there not three minutes before.
Mr. Pinkerton paused an instant, and scuttled up the opposite steps and along a narrow crooked hall. Sir Lionel was in Number Four, and he knew vaguely where that was, because Mrs. Humpage had shown it to him the day before. It was the Old Angel’s most pretentious room, with a bed that Queen Elizabeth had slept in when she visited Rye in 1573; it adjoined a chintz-and-copper furnished sitting room looking down into the narrow inn court, where there was still the mouth of a subterranean chute that had once carried kegs up and down from the undercliff, in the golden smuggling days of Romney Marsh.
Mr. Pinkerton stopped again. He could make out the copper “4” on the door from the single light left burning in the W. C. He put his hand to the wooden latch, and hesitated. The etiquette of the situation suddenly smote him full in the face. Could a former schoolmaster and scullery maid enter the room of a knight of the realm, even if he was groaning in mortal pain? Mr. Pinkerton did not know; upon his soul he did not. Then, hearing that awful sound in his mind again, because he could not hear it in his ears at all now, he lifted the latch, and peered inside.
Through the door at the side of the room he heard the sound again, quite weak now, and weaker still as it came once more. Mr. Pinkerton bolted across the room like a rabbit across the moor, and pushed open the door. The light bulb in the old worn red velvet canopy was on. Under its stark pale filaments lay a terrible mass, heaving weakly. Mr. Pinkerton sprang across the drugget and up the little platform that held the old queen’s bed . . . and stopped there, his watery grey eyes almost popping out of his head.
It was Sir Lionel Atwater, and he had not had a stroke—except a very wicked one. Protruding from his breast, near the heart, was a long silver handle. Mr. Pinkerton recognized it instantly as a silver skewer . . . one that had once, no doubt, pinioned a boar’s head or a rump of stolen venison; and saw instantly that every feeble move the old man made, twisted over on one side, was driving it deeper into his body. He heard the breath rattling in Sir Lionel’s throat as he reached out, turned his head and closed his eyes, and plucked the skewer from the wound. There was a horrible surge of blood. Sir Lionel Atwater groaned once more. Mr. Pinkerton, shaking, bent over him.
“My son . . .”
The old man’s breath rattled the words.
“My heir . . .”
Then there was a last choking sound in Sir Lionel Atwater’s throat, and he lay quite still, the light in the ceiling of the bed going sharply out as his hand collapsed.
Mr. Pinkerton stood, the bloody skewer in his hand, frozen with horror. As suddenly as the light in the canopy had gone out, a light in the sitting room went on. Mr. Pinkerton saw standing in the door through which he had come, in long flannel nightdress and purple dressing gown and night-cap, a candle in her hand, the tiny figure of Lady Atwater. He stood utterly petrified, quite unable to move. Lady Atwater came across the room.
“Was it the fish, dear?” she asked.
Then the pale nimbus of her candle reached and included the little man in his overcoat, the meat skewer dripping blood in his hand. Lady Atwater stared for one instant and screamed, the candle dropping from her hand. She screamed again, and fell in a heap on the floor. In one instant—it seemed less than that to Mr. Pinkerton, in one way, and a million times longer in another—the room was full of people, all staring horror-stricken, from the little man still standing there paralyzed, to the murdered man in the bed. For a terrible moment they were all utterly speechless, though not as speechless as the little Welshman in the cheap grey overcoat by the bed, or the old knight in it. In the sudden appalling clarity that flashed into his mind Mr. Pinkerton could see each one of them: Jeffrey Atwater (“My son . . . my heir,” Mr. Pinkerton thought mechanically), Darcy Atwater, Pamela, the arrogant Mr. Fleetwood, Mrs. Humpage, Mr. McPherson. Not Kathleen, Mr. Pinkerton thought, still mechanically; not the pale young man, or the deaf and dumb gentleman, or—his heart curvetted and sank—not Inspector Bull.
Then Mr. Fleetwood took two strides up to him and caught his wrist so that the skewer dropped with a thin horrible clink to the floor. Jeffrey Atwater bent down, lifted his mother and carried her back into the sitting room. Mr. Fleetwood, still holding Mr. Pinkerton’s wrist in a grip of steel, seized him by the scruff of the neck, piloted him across the room, and thrust him down in a chair.
“Get a doctor, Darcy, you fool!” he shouted. “And fetch the police!”
Then Mr. Pinkerton saw, bulking incredibly large in the sitting-room door, the cinnamon-brown figure of Inspector Bull, still in his great cinnamon tweed overcoat and his cinnamon-brown fedora.
“I am the police,” Inspector Bull said calmly. “Quietly, please.”
Mr. Pinkerton, sinking back in the chair, closing his eyes, could feel the tears running down his cheeks. Then he opened his eyes again, not being able to keep them closed any more than the pack can keep from yelping on the scent.
They were all looking at the big man in the door.
“I’m from Scotland Yard,” Inspector Bull said placidly. “I’ll take charge here until Inspector Kirtin comes.”
He turned to Mrs. Humpage. “Get a doctor, ma’am. And get Inspector Kirtin on the phone.”
Mr. Pinkerton saw Mrs. Humpage’s apple cheeks go a little pale.
“—Scotland Yard, sir?”
“Inspector Kirtin of the Rye police, ma’am,” Inspector Bull said, though Mr. Pinkerton knew very well that that was not what she had meant. “And the rest of you step in here and sit down quietly.”
He crossed the room to the huge bed and bent over what had been Sir Lionel Atwater.
Mr. Pinkerton saw Pamela Atwater look at Mr. Fleetwood, who stiffened aggressively.
“Come along, Mr. Fleetwood,” Inspector Bull said. “You know the law, sir. I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
Fleetwood hesitated. “You’re right, Sergeant,” he said. He glanced down at the shrinking little figure in the ridiculous orchid pyjamas. The beak of the embroidered eagle on the red ribbon across Mr. Pinkerton’s scrawny bosom protruded from between the lapels of his overcoat. Mr. Pinkerton tried to cover it up, but Mr. Fleetwood had seen it.
“He’s a dirty Russian rat,” he said hoarsely.
Mr. Pinkerton moistened his very dry lips and swallowed. He looked at Inspector Bull. The blue twinkle he thought he saw in those deceptively mild eyes he knew was a mirage caused by the salt tears in his own.
“I’ll attend to him, sir,” Inspector Bull said. “Step along now, please. Tell
Inspector Kirtin I’m in here.”
He closed the door behind them, and stood for a long time looking about the room; at the narrow leaded casement windows, at the débâcle on the bed, at the bloody skewer on the floor, and finally at the little rabbit of a man huddled miserable and speechless in the chair, his overcoat still clutched about his neck to cover up the pseudo decoration on his breast.
“Well, now,” Inspector Bull said, not unkindly. “Let’s have it, Mr. Pinkerton.”
CHAPTER 5
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton sat trying to extricate his tongue from the creeping paralysis that had it in a death grip. The times he’d got himself into similar predicaments, though never one as devastatingly incriminating as this, heaven knew, flashed through his mind the way a drowning man’s sins are said to flash through his. And not the actual times themselves, so much, as what Sir Charles Debenham, Assistant Commissioner of the C. I. D., had said about them. “Where there’s smoke, Mr. Pinkerton, you know,” he had said, at least a dozen times. Although he had laughed each time when he said it, nevertheless. . . . Once he had even said, “You’re a crime carrier, Mr. Pinkerton. We lock up typhoid carriers, you know.” Mr. Pinkerton had not been sure that the noise he made then was even meant to be taken as laughter. He had squirmed in his chair most uneasily. It was not, however, as uneasily as he squirmed now. Eventually something that was like his voice came.
“It wasn’t me, Inspector,” he heard himself saying. “—I heard him groaning through the wall.”
He moved his hand vaguely towards the great old chimney-piece and the solid oak linenfold panels flanking it across the room. Inspector Bull, looking at it, scowled faintly.
“There’s something very queer about this whole place,” Mr. Pinkerton said, hurriedly. “Sometimes you can hear, as if you were in the very same room, and sometimes you can’t hear at all. You see, he kept on groaning, and I’d heard the younger son say he’d probably have a stroke any time if he kept on getting angry, and the last time I heard him speak in there he was most frightfully angry, so I thought he’d got a stroke . . . and that, some way, nobody else had heard him. That’s why I came, really it was, Inspector. He was lying there with that thing”—he nodded to the long silver skewer—“in his heart. The light was on up there.” He nodded to the worn velvet canopy with “E R” embroidered in a scroll of tarnished gold threads. “Just as I pulled it out of his body, the light went out. And then Lady Atwater came.”