by Zenith Brown
“It just happens, ma’am,” Inspector Kirtin said stiffly, “that the gentleman in Number Five is connected with Scotland Yard.”
“You mean . . . he’s a policeman?” the girl cried, before Mrs. Humpage could speak. Mr. Pinkerton’s heart sank. It was not the words. It was the frightened despair in her voice that was so dreadful. It wasn’t cricket, he thought wretchedly, frightening the child . . . especially since his connection with the Great Umbilicus of the Yard was about as real as a year-old litter of kittens to a forgotten alley cat. And Inspector Bull, he knew, would never have missed the implication of that cry. “Oh, dear,” Mr. Pinkerton thought, “if only I’d stopped on in Golders Green where I belong, this never would have happened!”
The door opened below; a man came in whom he recognized as a detective-sergeant of the C. I. D. who had worked with Bull before. He drew Bull aside. Mr. Pinkerton saw the Inspector’s face go a little heavier, as it did when he was annoyed. He nodded to Inspector Kirtin, and, for a moment, the three of them went into what Mr. Pinkerton believed the Americans called a huddle. When they came up from it—he was not quite sure if that was what the Americans would call disengaging themselves—the sergeant went out into the night again. Mr. Pinkerton heard a motor-car start.
Inspector Bull moved over to the fireplace with his usual deliberateness. Whether he had known all the time that Mr. Pinkerton was standing up there in the makeshift balcony, the little man could not tell, but Bull nodded to him as if he were not surprised at all at seeing him.
“Come along with me,” he said briefly.
Mr. Pinkerton scurried down his stairs, and up the others, avoiding Mrs. Humpage’s incredulous and somewhat hostile gaze and Kathleen’s disillusioned one, and crept along in the solid wake of his protector.
“Is . . . is something amiss?” he enquired anxiously, as he rounded the old corridor and passed the W. C., where the light still burned feebly, illuminating the dark panelled walls and an old print of Europa fording a stream on the broad back of a decorated and benign bull.
Inspector Bull, undecorated, his broad back looking definitely not benign, grunted.
“Plenty,” he said. He opened the door of the sitting room.
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Pinkerton, as close to him as he could get without actually treading very often on his heels, slipped in too, and peered out, a little below the level of Inspector Bull’s great brown shoulder, at the group still hugging the fireplace in their night-clothes and dressing gowns. Jeffrey Atwater was holding his mother’s frail transparent hands. Pamela Atwater was sitting as close to her as possible. It seemed to Mr. Pinkerton, from the space between her and the arm of the short leather sofa, that Lady Atwater had kept sliding closer to her son and that her daughter-in-law was not, as the Americans said, having any. Darcy Atwater was shrivelled down in a chair poking at the fire. It looked to Mr. Pinkerton as if he, like his mother, was trying to create as much space as possible between himself and not his wife but his friend Mr. Fleetwood. Mr. McPherson had abandoned the group altogether . . . which was odd, Mr. Pinkerton thought, because he had not been down in the lounge.
Lady Atwater raised her pale red-lidded eyes and pressed more closely to her son. His face was drawn, his eyes and jaw, what they had been earlier in the evening, resentful and stubborn. Though anyone could see, Mr. Pinkerton thought, that he was horribly distressed; or could be, Mr. Pinkerton thought again, as he saw the savage glance he gave his sister-in-law as she promptly took matters into her own hands.
“I think it shows very poor taste, bringing that dreadful little creature here at this time. Inspector,” she said briskly.
Mr. Pinkerton edged a little closer to the Inspector. Pamela Atwater had a quality that a number of Welsh women he’d known had got. Chiefly the two maiden aunts who had raised him, and his late wife who had done the opposite.
“Lady Atwater isn’t—”
The tiny old lady interrupted her daughter-in-law with an asperity that Mr. Pinkerton would never have expected—so meekly had she followed her husband, and so quietly fed the mouse under the sofa.
“I wish you’d be quiet, Pamela,” she said sharply. “And try to remember we’re in England. It’s still an Englishman’s privilege to be heard before he’s condemned.”
Pamela Atwater flushed.
“For God’s sake, shut up anyway,” Jeffrey Atwater said. His mother closed her hands on his.
“Please!” she whispered.
Inspector Bull said, “The local police have asked me to carry on. I don’t want to—”
“Then carry on,” Atwater said. “My mother will be happier if she knows something is being done.”
“Very well, sir,” Inspector Bull said. “Will you tell me, madam, why you didn’t go to your husband sooner? You must have heard him?”
“Well!” Pamela Atwater snapped. She looked angrily at her husband.
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake, shut up!” Darcy Atwater groaned.
“If you please, ma’am,” Inspector Bull said politely. “We’ll get along faster.”
Lady Atwater turned abruptly. “If you wish, Pamela, I shall ask you to go to your room and stay there. The Inspector is perfectly right. I should have gone sooner.”
She gripped her hands, fighting to control her suddenly quivering lips.
“I thought he was just . . . just putting on . . . the way he did if he had the slightest touch of indigestion, for instance. And he always did, after he’d overeaten and over-drunk and got overexcited. It usually meant I had to sit up in the cold while he went over the whole thing again, and tonight I simply refused, because I thought he’d been too unreasonable.”
Mr. Pinkerton caught Pamela Atwater’s sharp glance at Mr. Fleetwood.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little unwise, Lady Atwater?” Fleetwood said politely.
Lady Atwater’s small head—it took a real aristocrat, Mr. Pinkerton reflected, to look like one with curling kids clustered like escargots all over her head—shot up.
“If you’re suggesting, Eric, that my children had anything to do with this thing, or that I should try to hide what everyone in the inn knows quite well, I think it’s you that’s being most unwise.”
She turned to Bull.
“Mr. Fleetwood is the son of my husband’s solicitor, and a member of his firm, Inspector. Like all his fraternity, he has no respect for the power of simple truth simply stated.”
Mr. Eric Fleetwood flushed.
“And I shall ask you to be quiet too,” Lady Atwater went on. “Or you may leave with Pamela.”
She turned back to Bull. “You won’t have any difficulty in finding out, Inspector, that my husband and my son here have never got along. They were too much alike. My husband never got along with his father for the same reason. And several years ago Sir Lionel disinherited my son—that is to say from his fortune, which was not entailed. He did it to bring him round, and he might have known it was the worst possible way of doing it. He was on the point of admitting it, last year, when things seemed to be going badly with the empire.”
She spoke of the empire as all the upper classes speak of it, Mr. Pinkerton noticed; as if it were a piece of drawing room furniture that held pride of place in the home when visitors came.
“Unfortunately, my son chose that moment to decide to marry a young lady whom his father regarded as unsuitable. Which I’m afraid she is—in that she has no fortune, is an American, and has been married before.”
Mr. Pinkerton stole a glance at Jeffrey Atwater.
“Good Lord, mother, do we have to rattle the family skeleton?” Darcy Atwater exclaimed.
Lady Atwater ignored him.
“My husband brought us all here for a show down, as he termed it, with the young lady, who seems to prefer to live here for some quite inexplicable reason. She flatly refused to come to us, I think rightly.”
“You had seen her before, ma’am?” Bull asked.
“Never. Except my son Darcy.
I believe they’d met.”
Pamela Atwater cast one glance at her husband, her face darkening.
“Sir Lionel found the young lady as . . . objectionable as he’d supposed?” Inspector Bull suggested mildly.
The tiny old lady’s eyes filled with tears suddenly.
“Quite the contrary—Oh, that’s what I can’t understand! I was . . . sure he liked her. He didn’t say so—he couldn’t, not after all he’d said before. That’s one of the reasons I thought he was carrying on in there. I thought he could think of a volte-face better by himself. I was so sure it would be easy because Pamela has been so annoying lately.”
Her daughter-in-law’s jaw sagged. “Me, mother?” she gasped.
“Yes, dear,” Lady Atwater replied. “No man likes to be treated like a mental case in a Bath chair.”
Inspector Bull spoke a little hastily. “Do you know anyone who had any private grievance against Sir Lionel, madam?”
“No one—not really! He was difficult, and high-handed, there’s no doubt of that. But when he was convinced he was in error he could always be counted on. No, he always did the fair thing as he saw it. Though of course that doesn’t mean someone else mightn’t think he was grossly unfair.”
She pressed her son’s hand with her old transparent fingers.
“He couldn’t be driven,” she added quietly. “He had to be led.”
The sudden weariness in her frail face testified to years of patient leading. Mr. Pinkerton thought of the boast of the men of Sussex. They too couldn’t be druv, they said. Perhaps, he thought, that was why Mrs. Humpage could so easily be all butter and soft compliance. The late Humpage had been a man of Sussex . . . though from all Mr. Pinkerton had made out he had been druv out of his own bar to meet his Waterloo at the foot of the Ypres Castle.
“Who was with your husband last night, as far as you know?”
Lady Atwater looked up at her son.
“I waited until he’d talked with Mrs. Bruce,” Jeffrey said quietly. “He called me in—said I was to take her home, to see she didn’t get drowned on the way. As we went out he was pounding on the table, raising hell because Mrs. Humpage came in with the hot water to turn down his bed. He was shouting for you, Fleetwood.”
The large man with the dark hair and high forehead nodded.
Inspector Bull looked at him. “What did he want, sir?”
Fleetwood looked more embarrassed, for an instant, Mr. Pinkerton thought, than his voice sounded when he spoke. “I’d rather not say, Inspector,” he answered coolly. “Not until I’ve consulted with Mr. Atwater.”
“Let’s have it,” Jeffrey Atwater said. “I’m like mother. Nothing I want hidden.”
“It’s a bit awkward, old chap, you know,” Fleetwood said. “I mean, it is, you know.”
“For whom?”
Atwater asked the question, a coldness in his voice sharpening the smoldering resentment in his eyes.
“For you, frankly, old fellow.”
“You can let me be the judge of that when I hear it.”
Eric Fleetwood hesitated. “Jeff—you don’t realize your position. I mean—”
Jeff Atwater interrupted curtly. “That’s what I want to know . . . what you think my position is.”
Fleetwood flushed. “Oh, very well, if that’s your tack. I’m merely trying to do my duty in protecting your interests.”
“The hell with them,” the large young man said. “What did my father want?”
“He asked me,” the solicitor said quietly, “to get in touch with my father, who was to get in touch with you, and find out how much you’d take to . . . to clear out of England, and stay out. And he was also to proceed to break the entail of the Atwater Collection . . . with the object, of course, of including it in the rest of the estate.”
Mr. Pinkerton caught his breath sharply, and then straightened his spectacles. That, no doubt, was what came of the young lady Sally Bruce saying to the old gentleman’s face that the only thing wrong with his son was his family.
“That’s interesting,” Jeff Atwater said evenly. He looked at his brother, still hunched in front of the fire. His eyes moved to the large dark competent figure of his sister-in-law.
“Before we go any further,” he said, “it might clear the air if I say the answer—to how much I’d take to do that—is exactly ten times more than the lot of you have got between you, plus the western half of Australia with a fence around it. Is that straight enough for you? And I’m not in a bargaining mood.”
He looked at Lady Atwater. “This wasn’t your idea?”
“Oh, dear, no,” she said quickly. “I’ve been opposed to it from the beginning.”
“Tonight was not the beginning, ma’am?” Inspector Bull said placidly.
She looked at him with startled surprise.
“It—my son’s leaving—has been suggested, several times,” she said reluctantly.
“By whom?”
“By my sister-in-law,” Jeffrey Atwater said calmly.
“Only because it seemed the best possible solution,” Pamela Atwater said. “After all, if you don’t like England, why should you stay here? You could settle down in Canada, or some place, and marry Mrs. Bruce. I understand it’s not the jewels she’s in love with.”
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton, quite breathless, was very much afraid that Mr. Jeffrey Atwater was on the point of strangling a close connection, and that Inspector Bull, being himself an eye-witness, would have to hang him. Then Jeffrey Atwater controlled himself with a sharp effort.
“When you say that, smile,” he said quietly.
“I’m only saying what the lady herself said, darling,” Pamela Atwater retorted curtly.
Mr. Pinkerton watched Inspector Bull’s eyes move curiously from one to another of them. They returned to Jeffrey Atwater.
“Come now, sir,” he said. “It’s who murdered your father we’re trying to get at.”
“Then you haven’t got very far to look,” Pamela Atwater said sharply; and Mr. Pinkerton, turning toward her with a violent start, realized that she was not looking at him either. Her dark eyes were fixed on her brother-in-law, her lips were a thin angry line.
“I’d just like to ask,” Bull said stolidly, “if anyone saw Sir Lionel Atwater after Mr. Fleetwood left him?”
“My husband and I,” Pamela said sharply, “went to our room when father said he wished to talk to Mrs. Bruce alone.”
Darcy Atwater said nothing.
“I retired after I said good night to Mrs. Bruce and my son,” Lady Atwater said.
Bull looked at Eric Fleetwood.
“He began to undress as I was leaving,” Fleetwood said. “There’s one thing, however. He asked me if I didn’t think the little chambermaid looked familiar.”
Lady Atwater flushed.
“My husband had a fine eye for a pretty face,” she said coolly. “I’m sure Mr. Fleetwood isn’t implying that the girl had any connection with Sir Lionel’s death. I think it’s very wrong, Eric, to try to involve a poor little chambermaid in a country inn. And besides, Mrs. Humpage turned down our beds.”
“That’s why it seemed to have some signficance, Lady Atwater,” Fleetwood said. It seemed to Mr. Pinkerton that he was a little annoyed, in spite of an attempt to conceal it. “Mrs. Humpage, or whatever her name is, looks to me like a woman not likely to be turning down beds or carrying her own hot-water cans, even for as distinguished guests as yourselves . . . unless there was no one else on hand to do it, or the maid was ill. Or pretending to be ill.”
Before Lady Atwater could reply Bull took a step toward the door, almost upsetting the little man behind him.
“I’ll bid you good night, ma’am,” he said heavily. “I shall have to see you all in the morning. I expect you understand none of you is to leave the inn at present.”
Outside in the hall Mr. Pinkerton looked up at the big man.
“She certainly wants to get him out of the way very badly, Inspector?” he ventured. �
��And . . . to have the jewels?”
Bull looked down at him in the pale light of the open door of the W. C. In a moment his face cleared. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. I see what you mean.”
It surprised Mr. Pinkerton no end. Could the Inspector, he wondered disloyally, be losing his grip? It wasn’t like him not to see what was as plain as a pikestaff.
At the foot of the stairs Bull said, “Good night, Mr. Pinkerton. I’m turning in now. I’ll be down for breakfast at seven.”
“Then you won’t get any,” Mr. Pinkerton thought to himself. The dining room of the Old Angel did not begin to function until half after eight. “Good night, Inspector,” he said.
Or good morning, rather, he thought as he climbed his own stairs and entered his room. The quarterboys, on the old steeple at the crown of the little hill that was Rye, struck half after the hour; the short hand of Mr. Pinkerton’s large silver watch stood at four. He got into a pair of less offensive pyjamas, and got into bed. Then he got out to open his casement window, and stopped, looking down into Watchbell Street, blinking his eyes. The duplicity of man bore in upon him sharply.
The large figure in the flinty street was none other than Inspector Bull. One of the men he was talking to was the detective-sergeant from Scotland Yard, the other, pointing down at the undercliff, was someone Mr. Pinkerton had never seen before. He crept back into bed, between the damp icy sheets, a prey to English discomfort and human harrowing doubts. He kept his eyes fixed on the silent closed panel beside the chimney-piece until they too closed and he fell asleep.
CHAPTER 7
He was still asleep when the potboy Jo banged on his door, clanking his hot-water can against it. It seemed to Mr. Pinkerton that there was a respectful light in the boy’s squinting eyes he had not noticed before. Whether it was due to him in his capacity of suspect for murder, or his even more dubious one of functionary to Scotland Yard, he could not tell. In any case, he was grateful for it, though it seemed to preclude their hitherto comfortable morning chat about the state of the weather. He noticed, as Jo put his water can down, that it was full instead of half full, and quite hot instead of possessing a degree of heat that to call tepid would be a definite exaggeration of known and experienced fact.