by Zenith Brown
“I understand that, Inspector,” Jeffrey Atwater said quietly.
Mr. Pinkerton, seeing him away from the irritating presence of his sister-in-law that affected him like a mustard poultice on a sunburned back, decided that he was not as difficult and belligerent as he had appeared. His jaw was not set as tightly, his eyes were not so burning with conflicting resentments. He was deeply disturbed, Mr. Pinkerton could see . . . more than any of the others, even his mother. That was probably because he was a person of more depth than they were. The struggle he’d had with his father, his father’s death, had affected him more deeply than it had them.
Mr. Pinkerton watched him. His blue eyes under his thick brows and his crisp light hair were deadly earnest. An idea occurred confidently to Mr. Pinkerton. Those firm lips, and the lean jaw, were not marks of a man who could thrust a dagger into another man’s heart. A bayonet, perhaps, a gun; but not a silver meat skewer from a dresser in an inn dining room. Mr. Pinkerton was as sure of that as he was of anything in the world.
“When did you last see him?” Bull asked.
“After he’d talked to Mrs. Bruce. He called me in and told me to take her home. She went out, I stayed a few minutes.”
“If you’ll tell us what he said to you, sir.”
Jeffrey Atwater’s eyes lighted in a frosty smile.
“He said if I wanted to marry a vixen, it was no affair of his. He said he thought I ought to think of Pamela—my sister-in-law—as Mrs. Bruce would have her on the ropes and out cold before the seconds could get the towel in. He said he’d done everything he could to keep me from ruining my life, but if I was hell-bent on it, he’d not stand in my way. Let’s see. He said my mother was a vixen when he married her, but he’d been man enough to tame her, which he doubted I was, and I needn’t come crawling to him to plaster my wounds.”
“Nothing more, sir?”
Jeffrey Atwater shook his head. “That’s the lot. Except to shout at me to get out of his sight.”
“You weren’t surprised, then, at his instructions to Mr. Fleetwood?”
Atwater hesitated.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was,” he said. “He asked me, not long ago, if I wished to take a settlement, leave the country, and give up the collection to my brother Darcy, or rather, as he put it, to my brother Darcy’s wife, and how much would I take. I said I’d stay in the country and not give up the collection. I must say I thought he’d been as pleased as he could ever be with anything I said or did. We never got along.”
He stopped again for an instant.
“I was very fond of him, nevertheless, Inspector. I always thought I understood him better than anybody, except my mother. I didn’t agree with him often, but I could always see why he thought the way he did.”
Bull nodded. “And he said nothing to you, last night, about not getting the jewels, or leaving?”
Inspector Bull waited enquiringly.
“He did say something else. I remember it now. He said that if I married Mrs. Bruce, I’d have my hands too full to help destroy the British Empire. He thought, of course, that anybody who was opposed to any part of our present policy was trying to smash everything. I didn’t think anything of it. We’ve had the empire with our South African wine and Australian apples and Canadian bacon as long as I can remember.”
“You had no reason, then, sir, to believe he didn’t want you for his heir?”
Lord Atwater nodded. “On the contrary—I know he didn’t. He wouldn’t have cut me out of most of the estate if he had. My mother thinks he intended to give back part of it but she doesn’t know how bitter most of the rows we’ve had have been. He’s said a hundred times he regretted he hadn’t cut me off entirely.”
“And if he had, Lord Atwater?”
His face hardened. “That is my private and personal affair, Inspector.” he said evenly. “He didn’t—before—so the question has no bearing.”
“He was planning to, sir—and he was murdered a very short time afterwards,” Bull said imperturbably. “May I ask when you first knew of the conversation he’d had with Mr. Fleetwood?”
“When I got home from seeing Mrs. Bruce home,” Lord Atwater said calmly.
Mr. Pinkerton stared at him.
“You saw Mr. Fleetwood?”
“No, he’d gone to bed. I saw my mother. Fleetwood had gone in and told her. He wanted her to try to argue with him.”
“And she?”
“She said there was no use talking to him until he’d slept on it. She always managed him that way, without his ever catching on.”
“She wanted you to retain the jewels, I take it for granted?” Bull said.
“Then you take more for granted than I do, Inspector,” Lord Atwater said dryly. “I have no idea what my mother thinks, and I fancy I’ve known her as intimately as anyone else. She’s the most detached and impersonal human being in the world. I’ve never seen her shed a tear or do an unkind or undignified act, but I’ve never had an idea of what she felt or thought.”
“You’ve seen her . . . influence your father’s thought and action,” Bull said.
“Only in the direction of rationality,” Lord Atwater replied. “My mother is completely sane, and as rational as Euclid.”
Mr. Pinkerton thought suddenly of her slipping bits of biscuit to the aged mouse under the sofa in the Old Angel’s lounge. He wondered if that was sane and rational. Then he thought suddenly that malice, however slight, is not rational; and there was certainly a touch of malice in her account of her daughter-in-law. He then decided hastily that that had not been malice, but detachment and clear vision. She had simply seen through another woman’s scheming, and was only amused at it, because it was too obvious and maladroit to a veteran like herself, unscarred after a thirty years’ war with a man who thought he had tamed her. Bull had said she was a smooth article. She was smoother, perhaps, than any of them, even Bull, suspected.
If the morning had come for her husband, Mr. Pinkerton wondered, would she have tried to dissuade him, or would she have let him go ahead? He thought he knew what she thought of certain aspects, at least, of her daughter-in-law’s character. What she thought of her son Darcy he had no idea. He was like her, in appearance, at any rate. Her elder son was totally unlike her in every way. By his own admission he knew what his father was all about; his mother was of another clay. Mr. Pinkerton wondered if Darcy Atwater, whose detachment he’d thought of as either alcoholic or protective colouration against his wife, was after all just like his mother that way. Yet nobody, so far, had called Darcy a smooth article; although, now that he thought of it, it was pretty smooth the way he had made Mr. Evan Pinkerton swallow enough rum to ration a man-of-war for a winter in the Baltic.
Inspector Bull got up. “Thank you, sir.”
Jeffrey Atwater rose. “Is there nothing you can tell me?” he asked quietly. “I don’t want to force your hand, but we’re damned anxious, you know. This bank clerk fellow?—”
“We’re looking into him, sir,” Bull said stolidly. “As soon as we’ve got anything to tell you, we’ll do it. You can depend on it. The Home Secretary phoned this morning, and the Assistant Commissioner will probably be down tonight.”
When Lord Atwater had closed the door, Inspector Bull looked at Mr. Pinkerton. He nodded toward a chair closer to him and not so close to the door.
“Now, if you’re sober enough, Pinkerton,” he said, “I’d like you to let us have the whole story about Harry Ogle.”
CHAPTER 16
Mr. Pinkerton flushed to the very roots of his sparse grey hair, and moistened his lips hurriedly.
“Why, it . . . it’s quite simple, Inspector,” he said. “I just heard a noise and woke up, and there he was, standing in the panel by the chimney-piece in my room.”
There was an odd and, to Mr. Pinkerton’s mind, rather alarming silence in Inspector Bull’s present room.
“What . . . panel?” Bull enquired, mildly.
Mr. Pinkerton flushed still more
deeply.
“Why, the secret panel,” he stammered. “The one that goes up the steps to the attic where Kathleen’s room is.”
He blinked nervously at the Inspector, and did not dare to look at Inspector Kirtin of the Rye Police.
“You mean,” Bull said slowly, “that there’s a secret panel in your own room, and you didn’t tell me about it?”
Mr. Pinkerton swallowed, and tried manfully to rally.
“I . . . I was going to tell you about it when I asked if Kathleen’s young man worked in a bank,” he said stoutly. “And you said I was to make an end of it.”
For the life of him, though no doubt it was interesting, he could not understand what there was in it to make his large friend seem to have got the wind up so greatly. Inspector Bull’s heavy face was definitely a shade heavier. Which meant he was quite cross, and he never had been before, not with him. He moistened his drier lips again.
“I’m . . . very sorry. Inspector,” he managed to get out. “I thought you knew from the way we heard Mrs. Humpage talking through the walls when we were in Lady Atwater’s sitting room.”
Inspector Bull’s face slowly resumed its classic stolidity, with what appeared to Mr. Pinkerton to be a considerable effort. He started to speak, then turned away from the little Welshman perched on the edge of his chair, his brown bowler hat balanced on unsteady knees.
“You’d best get hold of Harry Ogle,” he said to Inspector Kirtin. “He was at the inn when I left. I told him he was free to go as he pleased, so long as he made no attempt to leave town. You’d best look to it, sharp.”
Inspector Kirtin nodded. “He won’t get far.” He slipped an electric torch from a drawer in the table into his pocket. “It’s dark as pitch already.”
Bull waited till he had gone. He turned to the little man.
“Now, look here, Mr. Pinkerton,” he said, and not so mildly. “If you’ve got anything else up your sleeve, out with it. We’re not playing a game down here. We’re up against a murderer that hasn’t left a single clue, that I can find so far. So far he’s been a lot cleverer than we are. He’s as cool as they come, and as cold-blooded. If it’s your young friend Kathleen you’re worrying about, just forget it. Unless you want to see her dead too, possibly. What else do you know?”
Mr. Pinkerton thought desperately. Should he tell him about the letter Harry Ogle had written? About his listening to the Atwaters? It wouldn’t do any good, he thought. He would only be repeating what he’d been told; they couldn’t make Kathleen testify against her husband.
“I don’t really know very much, Inspector,” he said apologetically. “The way I happened to know about the panel is that Kathleen came down it accidentally, or so she said, when I was in my room. Then last night he came down. He had a torch. I could just barely make out his face when the light from the window touched it. Then I saw him in the bank this morning, and recognized him. He looked very much upset and disturbed, but I thought that was because he was slipping out of Kathleen’s room, and was afraid Mrs. Humpage would catch him or that I’d wake up. I didn’t know he’d been listening and had heard what Sir Lionel . . .”
The words died in his throat.
Inspector Bull was looking at him with an expression that no words of Mr. Pinkerton’s could state.
“But I . . . I didn’t know that till just a few moments ago, when Kathleen told me,” he said as quickly as he could get it out. “He wrote to her this morning, that he’d been listening and he’d heard Sir Lionel say he’d seen Kathleen at the inn. And he told her to burn the letter, which she did. But, really, Inspector, I thought . . . I thought you’d know about the passage. Mrs. Humpage said you’d got a man going over the place this morning.”
Inspector Bull was silent for a moment. Then he drew a deep and patient breath.
“I had,” he said shortly. “He found the stairway up from the corner of the dining room to a cupboard between Sir Lionel’s bedroom, their sitting room, and your room. There’s an opening from both those rooms into your room. If there’s a stairway from yours to the attic, he didn’t find it. Which side of your fireplace is the panel on?”
“The left,” Mr. Pinkerton said meekly.
Bull drew another laboured breath. “The entrance he found is to the right. Now, this is the point, Mr. Pinkerton. No one went up those stairs from the dining room. The dust on the dining room end hasn’t been disturbed for days, not until Ogle went down it. I’d assumed Kathleen left Lady Atwater, went through your room and out up the stairs by that bathroom between your room and mine. If there’s a stairway up from the cupboard between the rooms, she may have gone up it, or into your room and up through the other panel on the left of the chimney-piece—”
“In which case, the murderer could have done the same thing, couldn’t he?” Mr. Pinkerton interrupted eagerly.
Bull looked at him with the greatest disapprobation.
He blinked contritely. “Still, Inspector,” he said, “you don’t think a . . . a person who would do a cowardly thing like denying he was married to a girl like Kathleen would have courage enough to kill anybody like Sir Lionel Atwater, do you? Just to keep from losing his post at a bank?”
Inspector Bull did not deign a reply. He took his cinnamon-brown overcoat off the rack, put it on and picked up his hat.
“We’d best get back to the inn,” he said patiently. “You can show me.”
It was pitch dark outside. The wind had gone down, however, and it was only raining a little. The fog was creeping up over the marshes. The lights from Rye Harbour would be invisible now. The slow monotonous fog warnings came hollowly through the night. Mr. Pinkerton turned his overcoat collar up about his ears and trotted along beside the big man. Across the churchyard he could see the lights behind the drawn curtains of Sally Bruce’s house. The clock on the church steeple struck seven. It occurred to Mr. Pinkerton that he was very hungry. He didn’t, however, quite like to say as much to Inspector Bull, who, as long as he had his breakfast, never seemed to regard other meals as important.
They went along Watchbell Street and into the Old Angel. The lounge was empty. From the dining room came the subdued clatter of dishes and the warm lovely smell of the boiled cabbage. The potboy, Jo, came whistling out of the bar with two foaming pewter mugs of bitter beer. He winked at Mr. Pinkerton, who hastily followed the Inspector up the stairs to his room. In the door he stopped short.
Kathleen was in there, turning down his bed. She looked up with a smile, which vanished suddenly as she saw the Inspector, as if a light had gone off leaving a blank dark room. Mr. Pinkerton’s heart sank to his stout black boots.
“I . . . had to tell Inspector Bull about the panel here, Kathleen,” he said hastily. “He’s . . . he’s got to know these things.”
She put the bedspread down and nodded silently.
“Open it, please, miss,” Bull said.
She went across the room, bent down to the bottom of the oak panel and pressed the molding. It swung open an inch or so. She drew it out and stepped aside. Her face was quite pale, her blue eyes round and serious.
Bull looked up the steep, extraordinarily narrow stairs set alongside the deep stone chimney. He turned back to Mr. Pinkerton.
“You go downstairs and have your dinner,” he said calmly. “I shan’t be wanting you any more this evening.”
Some minutes later a greatly chastened little man was unfolding his serviette with dismal thoughts. It was odd, Mr. Pinkerton thought, and more than odd, how he managed to make a lugubrious mess of everything he had ever tried to do. The bitter recognition of that fact was borne in on him doubly by the cold stony stare Mrs. Darcy Atwater bestowed upon him from over the blond head of her husband, whose back was toward him. Mr. Eric Fleetwood gave him another, not quite so stony hut certainly not warm. He was sitting at her left. Lady Atwater was not down, nor Jeffrey Atwater. Mr. Pinkerton, who could bear just so much and no more, got up and changed his seat to the other side of his table, so that he and Darcy
Atwater sat back to back and he didn’t have to look at Pamela or Eric Fleetwood every time he took his eyes off his plate.
He ate his gravy soup, looked at his fish and turned his head away. The potboy looked at him, solicitously.
“ ’Ow about—”
“No, thank you.” Mr. Pinkerton said firmly.
The boy came back with his plate of boiled mutton, boiled potatoes and the cabbage.
“They’re ’untin’ everw’ere for ’Arry Ogle,” he whispered, putting them down in front of Mr. Pinkerton. “Skipped, if you arsk me, the blighter.”
Mr. Pinkerton stared.
“I told Kathleen ’e weren’t no bloody good.”
He moved off hastily to pull out a chair for the deaf and dumb gentleman, who crept into the room, quietly bewildered as ever. Mr. Pinkerton stared at him too. He’d completely forgotten about him. He hadn’t seen him all day. He felt suddenly very remiss about the deaf and dumb gentleman, the way he’d felt the time Mrs. Pinkerton broke her leg and he went to the cinema forgetting to take her teacup up to her, only Mrs. Pinkerton had not been deaf and certainly anything but dumb.
He hoped Mrs. Humpage had not forgotten him, as he had and as Inspector Bull apparently had too. That, however, he decided on second thought, eyeing the deaf and dumb gentleman out of the corner of his eye, was hardly likely.
The deaf and dumb gentleman hardly touched his gravy soup, and barely nibbled at the pale white slab of fish on his plate. Mr. Pinkerton ate his boiled cabbage, then his boiled potato, saving the best for the last. He then ate his boiled mutton with considerable relish. When he had finished his boiled pudding, swimming in boiled custard, he felt almost himself again. He eyed the deaf and dumb gentleman, who had the only perfect alibi for the night before, a little more openly. And suddenly the most extraordinary idea popped into his mind. He sat there, staring at the small tin plate of stewed cheese that the potboy had exchanged for his empty pudding dish, blinking his eyes.