by Zenith Brown
Facing him, on a high stool behind the rows of open ledgers on a high sloping desk, was a startled ashen face. It ducked almost instantly, its green visor bent over the ledger concealing all the upper half of it. Mr. Pinkerton’s hand holding his cheque shook violently. He stood gaping, entirely unaware of the smiling clerk waiting to serve him. He stood so long, in fact, that the smile on the clerk’s face froze on the inside and rather defeated its external purpose. Then he glanced round to see what the odd little man could be gaping at. There was nothing of importance in sight but a large crayon reproduction of a drawing by Lazio. Then his eye fell on another work of art, and he understood instantly. He turned back to Mr. Pinkerton and leaned forward.
“That’s the murdered man, all right, sir,” he whispered.
Mr. Pinkerton stared at him, and swallowed. Then, as the clerk looked back again, his eyes travelled up to the portrait drawing of the old Sir Lionel hanging between the windows above the great closed safe.
“He was chairman of our Board of Directors, sir,” the clerk said, again in a whisper. “—You’re stopping at the Old Angel too, aren’t you, sir? I remember waiting on you the other day.”
Mr. Pinkerton, utterly speechless, hastily pushed his cheque across the counter. It was, not, however, the portrait of Sir Lionel Atwater that had shocked him into absolute inarticulateness, for he certainly should never have recognized it if it had not been for the large brass plaque under it, now that was brought to his attention. He would not, in fact, have recognized the young man behind the ledger, in spite of his startled face, if he had not lowered it so quickly, so that his sudden pallor, combined with the mal-de-merish light of his green visor had not produced so precisely the same effect as the ghostly light through the casement windows in Mr. Pinkerton’s dark room at the Old Angel the night before.
He stood steadying his meagre body against the mahogany counter. The pen in the young man’s hand bobbed about like a stylo in the entranced hand of an automatic writer whose spirit control had died of St. Vitus’ Dance. He kept his head resolutely down, absorbed, apparently, in totting up his accounts.
The clerk handed Mr. Pinkerton two crisp new pound notes, smiling professionally. Mr. Pinkerton put them in his note case and scurried out the door. Mrs. Pinkerton and all her family for generations, wraith or human, might have been out there and he would have gone through them like the bullocking rush of an entire scrum. He scuttled down the narrow winding street to the strand and up the steep cobbles of Mermaid Street to Trader’s Passage, and stopped abruptly.
He was clearly in no state to carry out his pledges to Kathleen. It wouldn’t take Bull a second to see that something had shattered him even more effectively than usual. The sign in the window of the Oak House—“Morning Coffee”—filtered through his asthmatic gaze like manna from heaven. He scurried up the steps and opened the door. A merry fire burned in the broad oak-beamed fireplace across the whole end of the beamed and plastered room. He made for the oak settle beside it and sat down, took a deep breath, took off his hat and laid it down beside him, straightened his tie and his spectacles, and took another deep breath.
“I’d like some coffee, please,” he said to the maid who came up out of the narrow stairs at the left of the room.
Then he just sat there, and allowed the normal functions of his respiratory and cardiac organs to resume their equilibrium. The coffee, the best, it seemed to him, that he had ever drunk in England, warmed his grateful insides. The fire, the pleasantest he had ever sat beside in all his life, warmed the rest of him. He tried for a moment to think; then he gave it up. The less he thought, the kinder he would be to the dark curly-haired girl . . . no doubt trembling still so fitfully in her bed that it was no wonder Mrs. Humpage thought she’d got a chill. It was her heart that was chilled, really, Mr. Pinkerton thought. Then he realized, instantly, that that was merely the effect of his cinema going, and that actually people’s hearts remained through life the warmest spot in their bodies.
On the other hand, it occurred to him, he might warn her, of course. But it was too late to do that, really—even if it happened to be any of his business, which it clearly was not. He finished his coffee and went out into Traders Passage again. He did not, however, go on up to Watchbell Street. He turned back, climbed the steep cobbled road that in the great days—when the sea flowed in, and ships came to the Strand Gate, and Rye was, like Winchelsea, one of the most powerful towns in all England—had been the main street up from the strand, and straight through to the market place.
He passed the Mermaid Tavern, turned up West Street past the steps where Rye’s other famous murder had taken place, where the American novelist Henry James had, as the guide-book said, compiled his works, and where another great man now lives, and turned past the crooked chimneys of the corner house into the Church Square. There he stopped. The large cinnamon-brown figure of Inspector Bull was plodding heavily through the windy street. Mr. Pinkerton quickened his pace to a smart dogtrot, and came up with him just as he paused for a moment in front of the tiny cottage of the American lady, Mrs. Sally Bruce. Mr. Pinkerton thought he scowled a little. He certainly grunted as he said, “Oh, it’s you.”
Mr. Pinkerton was well used to having the Inspector mildly disgusted, and so, since he was not, as the Americans would say, told to scram, he stuck figuratively to his guns, and, literally, to Inspector Bull.
The maid opened the door.
“Madam says you may come in,” she said.
Mr. Pinkerton, a little surprised that Bull should have asked in advance for an interview, followed into a cheery white-panelled chintz-furnished little room that looked at least two hundred years younger than the outside of the house would have led him to expect. A coal fire burned under a Georgian mantelpiece. There wasn’t a warming pan or a pewter tankard or a strip of orange casement cloth in the place—just deep easy chairs and red roses in silver bowls and white delicately bellied pots. The soft rug on the old floor was white too, so that Mr. Pinkerton trod as gently as he could to keep from soiling it with his clumsy boots—as near the regulation for the Metropolitan Police as he could get for feet the meagre size of his.
CHAPTER 9
He looked up awkwardly as the girl with the ash-blond hair and grey eyes appeared. Her eyes were very tranquil, and under eyebrows that were rather too thick, according to cinema standards, and quite dark, so that they accented her suntanned face and made her cool eyes and long dark lashes the most important thing in her face.
She glanced at the small man.
“This is Mr. Pinkerton,” Bull said. “He . . . discovered Sir Lionel, last night, and tried to save him.”
“Of course,” Sally Bruce said. “I saw you last night. You looked so absurd under that enormous rubber plant.”
She laughed suddenly, and Mr. Pinkerton, who normally would have been as livid as it was possible for him to get, and very greatly annoyed, laughed himself, quite happily. Not that there had been much ice at any moment, but what there had been had certainly been most effectively broken. Even Bull seemed to feel it, because he settled himself in a chair by the fire instead of standing as he normally did, a wool-integumented Colossus of Rhodes, in the middle of the floor. Mr. Pinkerton would never have thought, of course, of criticizing him, but he had frequently thought that an easier, somewhat suaver drawing-room manner could have been a big help, from time to time, in their business.
Mrs. Bruce sat down too, her face serious again. “Is it really true?” she asked abruptly. “It doesn’t seem possible. Not really.”
“It’s quite true, miss,” Bull said soberly. “I wish it wasn’t, for more reasons than one.”
“I’d like to see him,” she said.
Mr. Pinkerton blinked. He was appalled. He knew of course that she was an American, and that American women were on the ghoulish side. Look at the way they’d stampeded the funeral of Rudolph Valentino. But he had not expected a nice-looking girl like Sally Bruce, who’d lived in England, to come righ
t out with it brazenly.
“He’d like to see you too, miss,” Bull said placidly. “But Lady Atwater thinks there’d be less talk if you both waited a bit. I just routed a pair of press photographers out from behind a tombstone in the churchyard.”
Mr. Pinkerton took his purple silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and patted his forehead. Of course it was Jeffrey Atwater she’d be thinking about.
“You may have to come to the inquest. Perhaps we can avoid it. The family’s anxious to escape—”
Sally Bruce laughed shortly. “They’re not as anxious to escape publicity by half as I am, Inspector, and you might tell them so.”
Mr. Pinkerton could tell by the way her eyes darkened that she was annoyed, and quite reasonably, he thought.
“In fact” Mrs. Bruce said, “I’ve had about as much of that family as I can swallow.”
Bull looked at her mildly. The colour deepened in her delicately molded matt-smooth cheeks.
“I’m sorry if I shock you.” She smiled faintly. “But I mean it. They’ve had detectives following me in London, and in Paris, and my mother writes me that somebody’s been snooping about, talking to the lawyer who got me my divorce, and digging up the fact that my mother’s family ran a boarding house . . . as if everybody in the South didn’t do anything they could after the Civil War to keep body and soul together. I’m getting pretty fed up.”
Inspector Bull said nothing. He fished about in his pocket and brought out his pipe and oilsilk pouch.
“I didn’t mind going to see Sir Lionel last night and explaining I’d got a divorce because I got sick of putting up with a man who came home—when he did come home—so drunk he couldn’t stand up except to kick my dog and couldn’t speak except to curse the servants. I was ready to admit he had a right, if he wished to use it, to ask how much alimony and how big a settlement I’d got from my husband. I didn’t even mind his calling me a fool and a nitwit when I admitted I hadn’t got any, of either. But I didn’t think he ought to have denied having me hounded by detectives, when it’s been going on since the first letter I got from him, telling me to let his son alone, that he was virtually a pauper and by God would become one if he married me.”
Mr. Pinkerton watched eagerly, his eyes fairly popping out of his grey skull. She was quite beautiful, her eyes dark and alive, her face flushed, her slightly husky voice quite soft but full of fire. It was better than the pictures, and very like them, really.
Then, quite unlike the pictures, she laughed infectiously.
“I didn’t even mind the letter. It was so exactly the way my father acted when I decided at eighteen I’d marry what he called a nincompoop playboy.”
Her face sobered quickly.
“He was right, of course, but I was too young to know it. I only knew I’d fallen in what I thought was love. I guess maybe it was. I don’t know.”
“He asked you those questions?” Bull asked.
“And a thousand others. Including why I wanted to marry his son.”
She looked down into the fire. “I’m afraid I was rude, but I got rather sore at being catechized like a—a schoolgirl. I told him I didn’t. That sent him into a frightful choler. I thought he was going to have a stroke. He demanded what was wrong with his son, and I said his family, and I meant it.”
Mr. Pinkerton sat forward on the edge of his chair. He had heard that much, just before whatever it was happened that deadened the acoustics from the adjoining room.
“What did he say to that?” he heard himself saying eagerly, to his intense astonishment. There was even a look of mild surprise on Inspector Bull’s stolid face.
“He said, ‘Well, by Gad!’ ” she replied, quite as if it had never occurred to her he’d got no right to question her. “In fact he said it several times. Then, all of a sudden, he started to bellow. I was scared stiff until I realized, somehow, that he was laughing. He rolled around in his chair, wiping the tears out of his eyes, wheezing. ‘I like that, by Gad—his family!’ Then he banged on the table shouting for Jeffrey, and when the poor dear came he pointed at me and said, ‘Take this vixen home. Get her out of my sight!’
“He was puffing and blowing, and Jeffrey was terribly alarmed. He pushed me out into the hall and went back, and a few minutes later, when he came back out, I heard his father shouting, ‘Get out, you young puppy. By Gad, his family!’ ”
She looked from one to the other of them.
“I suppose I made a first class fool of myself,” she said unhappily. “He’s so proud of his family. But I’m pretty proud of my family too. It’s just as good as his. It’s better in Virginia.”
“Atta girl!” Mr. Pinkerton thought involuntarily, and hastily straightened his spectacles and his tie, and settled back primly in his chair, blinking.
Inspector Bull chewed the end of his tawny mustache meditatively, Mr. Pinkerton looking nervously at him.
“Otherwise he seemed all right?” he asked, looking at the smart slim figure of the girl in the chair across the hearth.
“Yes. Except that if he’d had a stroke I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nor would Jeffrey, I imagine.”
“Was Mr. Jeffrey Atwater very much disturbed?” Bull asked placidly.
Mr. Pinkerton looked at the girl with some anxiety. There was no conceivable way for her to tell, of course, not from the Inspector’s childlike blue eyes and mild deliberate speech, that he was leading her into a wicked trap. She couldn’t know, either, that the dying man had gasped, “My son . . . my heir.” She was being so perfectly frank and straightforward that it never would occur to her, apparently, that the big guile-less-looking man opposite her was being anything but. Mr. Pinkerton even had, for a fleeting instant, the incredible desire to blurt out a warning of some sort. But that would never do, of course. He sat back in his chair and moistened his lips.
“Did he speak of it on the way home?” Bull asked. The girl, her level brows contracted a little, had not answered.
She looked up.
“No. Not in words,” she said slowly. “It was just that he was—oh, more protecting, someway, as if I’d made a stinking mess of things and he didn’t want to let me down. He’s awfully reserved—the way Englishmen are supposed to be, though most of them I’ve met around aren’t at all. So I wouldn’t expect him to say anything. It was just the way he acted.”
She looked at Bull a little strangely.
“—Are you trying not to hurt my feelings, saying he wants to see me?”
Inspector Bull said nothing.
Her wide-set dark eyes rested on his for a moment, the colour deepening in her face. She looked away.
“I see,” she said. Then after a moment she said, “He was really devoted to his father. It was just that they didn’t see . . . the world out of the same eyes. If Jeffrey had sowed wild oats the way Darcy did, his father could have understood that . . . if he’d settled down and married a nice rich girl when his father thought he ought—even if he kept on with the oats.”
Bull watched her as impersonally as a St. Bernard would watch a mouse he’d not really intended to kill with his big paw.
“But Jeffrey wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. He went to South Wales one long vac and saw the people who lived as well on the dole as when they could get work in the collieries, and he got the odd idea that something ought to be done about it. His father called him all sorts of things he wasn’t, unless all the liberals in the House of Commons are that too. That’s what started the trouble. His father said he shouldn’t have his money to throw down the drain, as if the way Darcy sluices it down with champagne wasn’t infinitely worse.”
She looked up again.
“I don’t mean Darcy isn’t as sweet as he can be,” she said quickly. “It’s just that he’s . . . sort of post-war, and Jeffrey’s grown up, and thinks people with money have social responsibility. I don’t mean he’s a stick either, because he’s not. When he wasn’t at loggerheads with his father he was great fun.”
A
ghost of a groan echoed through the hollow ramifications of Mr. Pinkerton’s being. Sherlock Holmes had a dozen cataclysmic devices for bringing awkward situations to an awkward but devastating close. But Mr. Pinkerton hadn’t the courage to fall in a dead faint, suffer a frightful cardiac attack, or calmly get up and knock over a table with a bowl of oranges on it . . . not and still be able to say, “Clumsy, what?” as imperturbably as would be necessary not to land outside with the toe of Inspector Bull’s boot imprinted solidly on his meagre posterior. All he could do was sit there wretchedly, hearing this pent-up protest at the way his family had treated Jeffrey Atwater come out as innocently as the day, and much more clearly.
“Darcy Atwater gets his father’s money, I believe,” Bull said calmly.
“You mean half a dozen money-lenders and night-club proprietors get it,” Sally Bruce said, with a quick sardonic smile. “It hasn’t been as simple sailing for him, poor lamb, as all that. I mean, he’s got a rich wife, but she’s Welsh, and you know what that means.”
Mr. Pinkerton flushed painfully, and avoided what seemed to him an innocent glance from Inspector Bull’s blue eyes. Then he scrambled to his feet as Bull got up.
“I hope you’ll find out who did it,” Sally Bruce said. “It’s too terrible for Jeff.”
At the little drawing-room door she held out her hand. Bull shook it awkwardly. Mr. Pinkerton was glad to see he had some shame left.
“Do I have to stay in Rye?” she asked, raising her troubled eyes to his face. “I’d . . . I’d like to go back home, if I might.”
“To America?”
She nodded.
“I think you’d best stay on a bit, miss,” Bull said. “If you’d like to go to town in a few days, perhaps we could manage that.”
“I guess I’d better, then,” she said. “It’ll be rotten for them, having me around . . . after this.”
“I’ll get in touch with you when I see, miss,” Bull said.
Mr. Pinkerton, looking back from the street, saw her nod good-bye to them again, and saw her blink the sharp tears out of her eyes as she shut the door.