by Zenith Brown
What, he thought, and it was so simple he was amazed it had not occurred already to him who knew as well as anyone in all Rye that a watertight alibi is virtually tantamount to open guilt, what if the deaf and dumb gentleman had not been climbing down the drain . . . but up it?
If the cheese in front of him had not been stewed cheese, he would have left it untouched and bolted up to tell Bull. As it was he ate it quickly, pushed back his chair and scurried out into the lounge. Inspector Bull was in the middle of the room. Inspector Kirtin was with him, and the two of them looked so sober and so grim-faced that Mr. Pinkerton stopped abruptly, his roseate bubble dropping to his feet with a soundless plop and breaking to nothing.
“I must still be a little . . . intoxicated,” he thought remorsefully.
“He can’t have got far,” Kirtin was saying doggedly.
The two Atwaters and Eric Fleetwood came out of the dining room and started upstairs. Darcy stopped. “I think I’ll get some cigarettes. I’ll join you,” he said. He came back, crossed the lounge and went along to the bar. Pamela looked at Fleetwood, shrugged her shoulders lightly, and they went on upstairs.
“He’s not in Kathleen Rawls’s room,” Bull said. “I’ve just been up there.”
Atwater came back through the lounge, opening a packet of cigarettes.
“Something up?” he enquired.
“Young Ogle has given us the slip,” Bull said shortly. “Have you seen him?”
“He was in the bar about an hour ago,” Darcy said.
Bull glanced at Mr. Pinkerton, standing nervously there.
“He thinks it’s all my fault,” Mr. Pinkerton thought dismally . . . quite unaware that the Inspector was merely wondering what else the small man knew that he had not told.
Darcy Atwater disappeared up the stairs. In a few moments the potboy came out of the dining room with a coffee tray and went up, and in a few moments he returned. Inspector Bull looked at his watch. Then, very deliberately, as if time were something he had at the moment nothing to do with, he went into the dining room.
Mr. Pinkerton watched him. He felt like a house dog that had been shut outside in the rain. He crossed the lounge, after some fruitless thought, and sat down by the fire. After a few moments the deaf and dumb gentleman came out, hesitated a moment, glancing about the lounge, his face puckered with distress and apprehension. He looked at the clock on the mantel and at the door, and went across the lounge and up the narrow stairs between Mrs. Humpage’s office and the parlour lounge. Mr. Pinkerton heard his steps along the old corridor above, and a door close.
He sat there, very much puzzled indeed. He’d met a good many Englishmen in inns who never opened their mouths, without the excuse of being deaf and dumb, but they had not, most of them, hid themselves away in their room all day. They had, in fact, usually stood squarely in front of the fire, when they were not out taking walks, absorbing all the available heat with total disregard of the comfort of the other guests. But this man did not take walks, and he did not monopolize the fire. The only time Mr. Pinkerton had seen him in the lounge at all, he had sat as discreetly in a corner, reading a paper-backed book, as Mr. Pinkerton had sat under the rubber tree. In fact, if it had not been for his well-worn but obviously Bond Street tweeds and stout English shoes, Mr. Pinkerton would not have thought he was English at all. He was too polite and not in the least lord of the world, the way Englishmen in inns usually were, in Mr. Pinkerton’s experience. That he was distressed and worried about something was also obvious to Mr. Pinkerton; and, since he knew of only one thing that was worrying anybody at the Old Angel, now that Kathleen’s status was explained, it seemed to him that Inspector Bull really ought to do something about it.
He got up and moved about the lounge. After a few moments he went over and peered cautiously into the dining room. He stood there, blinking in great perplexity. Inspector Bull was not in the room. His serviette was still beside his plate, there was still a half of a boiled potato on it, and a little mound of delicately yellow boiled cabbage; but there was no Inspector Bull.
Mr. Pinkerton shook his head and crossed the room to the window by the goldfish bowl. The fog lay low over the marshes, obscuring the lights of Rye Harbour. Somewhere out there were the ruins of Camber Castle, and the spot where the lost city of old Winchelsea had lain mightily, long before Armada. Now it was sand and fog and a few shepherds’ huts, and fat sloe-eyed sheep, and beyond, the Channel and France.
Mr. Pinkerton pressed the end of his nose against the diamond-leaded panes of the old window. The inn had once had a garden back there, but the sea had lashed against it for centuries before it suddenly turned and gave back the marshes, and left the town of Rye perched on its hilltop, a mile and a half from the ebbing flowing tide. Not, however, before it had taken the houses built on its rim; and with them the stable yard of the Old Angel, where pack ponies, bringing smugglers’ spirits and lace and carrying back wool to ships under the red noses of the King’s Men, had rested. Now the Old Angel stood on the very edge of the rock cliff. Mr. Pinkerton looked down a sheer drop of two hundred feet of flinty stone to the paved undercliff motor road below, with a few houses and tiny shops nestled under its rocky side.
He craned his neck. Above him was a narrow oak balcony extending along the first floor rooms overlooking the sands. In the summer artists sat out there and painted the salts and Camber Castle, and the ships floating a mile away in Rye Harbour. Mr. Pinkerton shivered a little, looking down again, and rubbed his cold dry hands together. For one of the few times in his life he thought of the bleak barren house in Golders Green with something like nostalgic affection.
He glanced around, as if he had had some kind of friendly psychic warning; and as he did, certainly without any other kind of warning, the apparently quite solid oak panel in the chimney corner opened, and Inspector Bull’s great figure, doubled up grotesquely like a jackknife, came out of it, puffing a little. He did not so much as glance at the little man as he went back to his table and settled down to his pudding, the expression on his face one of childlike calm.
Mr. Pinkerton shivered again, in spite of himself, and edged forward timidly from behind the goldfish tank. He sat on the edge of the chair opposite Bull, and cleared his throat. Bull looked up and nodded soberly.
“I’ve . . . just been thinking, Inspector,” Mr. Pinkerton said, “about the deaf and dumb gentleman.”
Bull nodded again, so patently without interest that Mr. Pinkerton hadn’t the heart to go on.
“I shouldn’t worry about him, if I were you,” Bull said comfortably. He folded his serviette and pushed back his chair. He looked down at the little grey man sitting on the highback chair.
“And mind, Mr. Pinkerton—you’re not to meddle with him, do you understand me? I don’t want him alarmed, or disturbed in any way.”
Mr. Pinkerton gaped, unable to believe his ears. Who . . . could the deaf and dumb gentleman be? He couldn’t, just off-hand, think of anyone too important for Scotland Yard to disturb, not anyone who was deaf and dumb at any rate. For a moment he had the bizarre idea that perhaps he was a member of the Royal Family, incognito naturally. But he dismissed that. He certainly was not the Home Secretary, for Mr. Pinkerton had met him face to face.
He looked up eagerly at Bull. “For . . . for reasons of public policy?” he asked, breathlessly.
A curious light warmed Bull’s blue eyes.
“Yes,” he said placidly. “I think we might say that. For reasons of public policy.”
At that moment, while Mr. Pinkerton still stared at him with a kind of uncomprehending excitement, he heard the inn door open, and the sound of unfamiliar voices that were oddly subdued, and then Detective-Sergeant York: “Where’s Inspector Bull?”
Bull took two great strides to the lounge door, and Mr. Pinkerton, after standing for an instant where he was, a nameless apprehension catching at his heart, the cold perspiration standing suddenly on his forehead, scurried after him as fast as he could go.
At the door he stopped short, and stood there, his hands shaking violently, his heart pounding like mad.
Three men in fishermen’s oilskin coats, their heads bare, moved heavily into the lounge. The burden they were carrying weighed in their weather-beaten faces as well. They laid it down gently on the floor.
Then Mr. Pinkerton, staring wildly beyond Bull’s great form, heard a low terrible cry:
“Oh, Harry, Harry!”
He saw the white-faced girl. His eyes fell for an instant on the fishermen’s burden on the floor, and he turned away, sick to the very bottom of his soul. In life Harry Ogle had not been especially attractive. In death, his battered frame, the clothes ripped and foul with mud, the flesh bruised and torn, was horrible.
CHAPTER 17
“At the foot of the cliff, sir,” Sergeant York said.
Bull stood silently looking down. He said curtly, “Get the surgeon. Get Mrs. Humpage to look after the girl.” He strode across to the staircase to the left, opposite Mr. Pinkerton’s, followed by Inspector Kirtin. They both ignored Mrs. Humpage, who appeared from the kitchen and stood in the lounge door, rigid with horror.
Mr. Pinkerton heard her shocked cry as he hurried after Bull, up the stairs and along the narrow corridor to the end of the inn overhanging the cliff, the section of the house occupied—it occurred to him breathlessly—by the Atwaters.
At the end, Bull stopped. Mr. Pinkerton hastily recalled the list of occupants of this corridor and the diagram of their rooms that he had read round the Inspector’s elbow. As they stood there, he was looking straight down a narrower passage that ran between Lady Atwater’s bedroom, on the corner of the old house, and the W. C., to a window on the balcony. Opening on the balcony to his right was Lady Atwater’s room, to his left, past the narrow windowed passage and the W. C., the rooms successively of Eric Fleetwood, Darcy Atwater, his wife, and the deaf and dumb gentleman, on the corner opposite to Lady Atwater’s. Mr. Pinkerton noticed suddenly, standing there, that in the small passage leading to the balcony window in front of him, between Lady Atwater’s room and the lavatory, there was a small, very narrow staircase going down to somewhere.
Bull lifted the old latch of Fleetwood’s room and went inside, Mr. Pinkerton watching from the corridor. The bed was neatly turned down, pyjamas neatly across the foot. Bull went across to the long windows that had been cut down through the wattle and daub to the beam above the crooked floor. One upper half was open. Bull looked closely at the two bottom halves, kneeling down, and shook his head. He came out and tried the latch of the next room, Pamela Darcy’s. It was locked. Mr. Darcy Atwater’s room beyond it was open; his bed was also turned down. Bull looked again carefully at the high leaded casement, and again shook his head. He went out into the corridor, looked for an instant down toward the deaf and dumb gentleman’s room, hesitated and came back to the passage between the lavatory and Lady Atwater’s room. He turned down it to the left and opened the window leading to the balcony over the cliff.
“Be careful,” said Inspector Kirtin. “You’re on the heavy side. I doubt if that balcony . . .”
Bull clambered stolidly out. The cold damp air came through in shivering gusts. Inspector Kirtin leaned out, Mr. Pinkerton’s heart sinking. If both of them went out . . . But the Rye policeman had thought of that too; he merely leaned out, sending the beam of his electric torch along the oak timbers, keeping his feet on the sill.
Mr. Pinkerton waited, thinking dismally of Inspector Bull’s very solid eighteen stone, expecting every instant to hear the crash of splitting timbers. None came, but neither did Bull. At last he appeared and clambered back through the passage window, his face set and grim.
“Get Mrs. Humpage. I want Mrs. Atwater’s door opened,” he said.
Inspector Kirtin disappeared down the hall, and reappeared in a few minutes. Mrs. Humpage was with him. She was concealing very well, Mr. Pinkerton thought, her distress at Harry Ogle’s death, but not her concern with the fact that her house was again disturbed.
Bull cut short her voluble bustle. “Open this door, ma’am,” he said briefly. “Thank you—that’s all, ma’am.”
Mrs. Humpage disappeared reluctantly down the corridor. Mr. Pinkerton, not daring to go inside, peered through the door at Pamela Atwater’s room. Her bed was not turned down. Her things were neatly arranged on the oak chest of drawers in front of the window, the fire in her grate burned brightly. Bull looked about silently for an instant, then nodded to Inspector Kirtin and at the window. Mr. Pinkerton crept in and watched them lift away the heavy chest. One glance was enough to tell even him what had happened. The chest had been moved to its place under the window; the fine cinders from the chimney outside lay in a telltale black line beneath it.
Mr. Pinkerton heard an appalled and furious gasp from behind him, and looked apprehensively into the mirror stand. He swallowed abruptly. In its grey mildewed surface he saw the extremely angry face of no less a person than Mrs. Darcy Atwater herself. He stood there helplessly an instant, caught red-handed as it were, cleared his throat as a sort of warning to Inspector Bull, and turned about, just as it came. But it came so little the way he had supposed it would, from long experience of a Welsh wife and from the reflection of that flushed face with snapping black eyes in the mirror, that it rather unnerved him.
Pamela Atwater’s voice was as soft as silk, and, in the tiny interval between Mr. Pinkerton’s frightened glimpse of her in the old mirror and his sight of her actual fleshly embodiment, her face had changed incredibly, all the anger gone from it.
“This is my room, Inspector—Is there anything I can do for you?”
Inspector Bull turned to look at her, and scrambled up from the floor, deliberately if not gracefully, and, Mr. Pinkerton thought, not without some discomfiture. The discomfiture would not have been apparent to a casual person, probably. It didn’t, however, escape Mr. Pinkerton; it would not have escaped the late Mrs. Pinkerton. Nor did it, the little man thought, escape the large dark-haired, full-bosomed young woman in the door for an instant.
She came forward easily. Inspector Bull, if he had ever lost his centre of placidity, regained it before she had taken two steps into the room.
“Have you had your window open this evening, ma’am,” he asked calmly.
“Yes—just before dinner.”
She looked enquiringly round, from one to the other of them. “I thought I heard someone on the balcony. I thought, frankly, it was my husband. He does some extraordinary things from time to time. I’d seen yesterday what a dangerous spot it was, and I was alarmed. Is there any reason why one shouldn’t open the windows, except that they’re hard to get closed again?”
“Did you see anyone out there, ma’am?”
She shook her head. “It was too dark. However, it didn’t matter. I heard my husband in the next room and knew it wasn’t he. I wasn’t concerned with anyone else. What’s all the mystery about?”
“The young Ogle fellow just fell, or was thrown, off the balcony, Mrs. Atwater,” Bull said. His eyes rested soberly on her dark face. “And not many minutes ago. We’re trying to find out what happened.”
Mrs. Darcy Atwater looked at him silently for an instant, the flush deepening in her face.
“The young person in the bank—who was or was not married to the chambermaid?”
Mr. Pinkerton flushed with sudden annoyance.
“Who was,” Bull said.
“And are you implying that I had anything to do with it, Inspector?”
“I am just gathering information, Mrs. Atwater. Do you know anything that might bear on it? It can’t have happened more than half an hour or so ago.”
Pamela Atwater still stood looking at him.
“It seems to me, Inspector,” she said, “that it’s time you and I had a chat. It seems to me you’re making a sorry mess of a clear-cut proposition.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bull replied. “I’m busy here for a while. I’ll see you in half-an-hour in the parl
our lounge. Now if you would mind stepping along for a while.”
She started for the door, after an instant’s hesitation, came back, took a leather jewel case out of the top bureau drawer, and started out again.
“Do you think Ogle may have killed Sir Lionel,” she stopped to ask. “and killed himself then?”
Her black eyes searched Bull’s intently.
“That’s a possibility, Mrs. Atwater,” he said.
Something very odd seemed to Mr. Pinkerton to happen to Pamela Atwater’s face. Whether it was disappointment or relief he couldn’t decide. It certainly was something, and, furthermore, it was something that gave her to pause, as it were.
“In that case, Inspector, I suppose there’s no use of my taking up your time, when you’re as busy as you are,” she said coolly.
Bull spoke with equal coolness. “On the contrary, ma’am. I want to see you. In the bar parlour lounge. In half an hour.”
Mrs. Atwater hesitated again, nodded and went out.
Bull looked at Inspector Kirtin. “It’s odd she’d have left her jewel case in here, with someone on the balcony, as she thought. Unless she knew who it was.”
He chewed his mustache meditatively. “Or unless . . .”
He came to a full stop and stood there for a moment. Then he shook his head.
“Let’s get on with it.”
They moved the chest of drawers from its place. Bull opened the window. A wispy grey finger of mist came in, blown up from the marsh below. Bull looked out, shaking his head.
“Nothing to do here till it’s light,” he said. “No use risking our necks to no purpose.”
Still he stood there for some time. When he turned, his face was creased in heavy lines.
“It was my fault,” he said quietly. “I thought he’d got something up his sleeve. I wasn’t sure till Mr. Pinkerton told me about that second panel. A man standing on those steps can hear everything going on in the sitting room. There’s a bit of a cupboard opens behind the bookcase in there. The girl says it’s a priest hole—more likely a smugglers’ hide-out when the King’s Men were about.”