Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel

by Zenith Brown

  “I’ll be busy for a bit, now, Mr. Pinkerton,” Bull said, almost cheerfully. “It’s not for me to tell you what to do, but I think I’d keep out of the bar, if I were you.”

  He crossed the hall, opened the door of Jeffrey Atwater’s room and closed it behind him.

  Mr. Pinkerton stood flushing painfully for a moment, and then turned and went slowly down the passage. At the end, just past the lavatory, he stopped. He didn’t actually mind, he thought—though he knew he did very much, really—being made a laughing stock of, if only Bull would find out who killed Sir Lionel Atwater. He stood for a moment looking up and down the dim hall. He glanced to his left. The narrow corridor there ran a few steps to a window. As Mr. Pinkerton’s gaze fell on it, a sudden idea struck him. He glanced cautiously back at the door of Jeffrey Atwater’s room, and cautiously down the passage to his right, leading to the stairs and the lounge. There was no one in sight, no sound of anyone. He crept silently down the small passage to the window, hesitated for a bare instant, startled at his own audacity: and then, with considerably less qualm than he did ordinary things like venturing alone into a tea shop in Piccadilly, he reached out and turned the iron handle of the casement window, caught his breath as the cold night air got him full in the face, and crawled through it out onto the dark rickety balcony.

  He stood shivering a moment in the piercing murky miasma rising from the salts below. The sound of a hooter came up; the lights of a car speeding along the undercliff were visible, faintly, through the wispy fog coming in from the marsh. The windows along the balcony were pale oblongs of light. He closed the window behind him, crept silently toward the right, and peered into Lady Atwater’s bedroom. Her window was a long one too, cut down from the old narrow casement through the wattle-and-daub wall to the uneven floor. Her bed was turned down, her dressing gown was on a chair by the fire, her slippers beside it. Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. There was such a thing, of course, in considering suspected persons, as their sheer physical capacity. Lady Atwater could never have pitched Harry Ogle headlong over the balcony even if she had wished to. She simply was not strong enough.

  And apart from that, even, it was inconceivable, of course, that she had driven a silver skewer through her own husband’s heart. There were depths of wickedness that even Mr. Pinkerton, looking dizzily down the sheer flinty drop to the road below, could not bring himself to consider.

  Mr. Pinkerton turned noiselessly and crept back, past the hall window, to Mr. Eric Fleetwood’s room. There he stopped breathlessly. His friend Darcy Atwater was in there. So was the elder Fleetwood, as well as the legitimate occupant of the room. It was not, however, the fact that they were in there, though it did seem odd to him that they’d not heard a sound from any of them all the time they were in Mrs. Atwater’s room. The odd thing about this was the extraordinary difference in Mr. Darcy Atwater himself. He was no longer hunched over the fire, or in the least under the influence of liquor. He had none of the pained air of patient suffering that he had when his wife was about. There was nothing in the least incompetent about the way he was pocketing what appeared to be a cheque from the hands of his father’s solicitor.

  Mr. Pinkerton could not hear what he was saying, but he saw Eric Fleetwood nod significantly at his father and shake his head, as if he were saying something too indiscreet for the old gentleman to hear. Darcy Atwater nodded back cheerfully. He seemed on the whole completely satisfied with life in all its aspects. And no wonder, Mr. Pinkerton thought. He had no idea of the extent of the late Sir Lionel Atwater’s private fortune, except that it was very great indeed; and of course, the jewels the young man had not inherited, whatever they meant to his wife, meant nothing to him. He had grown up knowing they were not to be his, and the fact of actually inheriting a fortune, instead of what would no doubt have been a very small part of one, must of course have been sufficiently gratifying with no Atwater Collection. Especially as, from what Mr. Pinkerton had made out, knowing the two brothers as slightly as he did, it was much more likely to be Darcy who borrowed money against the old lord’s death than his brother the present lord.

  Darcy Atwater settled back in his chair, turning a quizzical face to the solicitor, who, as Mr. Pinkerton could recognize quite easily, was giving him a friendly lecture on thrift. Then he yawned prodigiously and got to his feet. For a moment his eyes seemed to rest on the window. Mr. Pinkerton shrank back apprehensively against the damp red-tiled wall. When he gathered courage to peer in again, the room was empty.

  Mr. Pinkerton hesitated a moment, and glanced along the balcony. Mrs. Atwater’s room was next, Darcy Atwater’s after that. There seemed no point in either of them. He hesitated again, and decided that it would not be bothering the deaf and dumb gentleman who was not to be disturbed, for reasons of public policy, just to look unobserved into his room. He crept along. In passing he raised his head and peered into Mrs. Atwater’s room. She was still sitting in front of the fire where he and Bull had left her. From the side view that he had, Mr. Pinkerton could see that she was smiling to herself, the cigarette still between her fingers, unlighted.

  He stole quietly along the balcony, not wanting her to hear him and looked out. The bottom of the cliff was far below, and he had not had much experience in climbing over rails and hanging by his fingertips until danger had passed, as people did in the pictures while huge trains rumbled over their heads. He straightened up as he came to his friend Darcy Atwater’s high leaded windows. They were not cut down to the floor, as the others were, and it occurred to Mr. Pinkerton with some relief that young Atwater was the only person along the row who hadn’t the facilities for pitching Harry Ogle over and down the cliff, for he couldn’t possibly have got out those high-set windows even if he had wanted to.

  The long window of the deaf and dumb gentleman was next. Mr. Pinkerton, colder than he had ever been, shivering uncontrollably, crept forward cautiously, peered through the small leaded panes, and blinked violently.

  The deaf and dumb gentleman was pacing up and down the floor, a small paper-backed book clasped behind his back. From time to time he stopped his pacing, brought the book round in front of him, looked at it, frowned, put it behind him again, and continued his pacing . . . and as he paced, to Mr. Pinkerton’s fascinated astonishment, his lips moved constantly, very much indeed as if he were talking to himself.

  Then Mr. Pinkerton, watching him, his heart beating more rapidly and his breath coming faster, felt a dreadful prickling sensation in his nose, and simultaneously the dreadful realization that he was going to sneeze. He then thought, almost simultaneously, that of course he could sneeze his head off without the gentleman being any the wiser. He said “Ker-choo!”

  The deaf and dumb gentleman swung violently round, staring directly at the window, his face a panorama of shock and dread. Mr. Pinkerton, his eyes nearly popping out of his head, steadied himself for a fraction of an instant against the balcony rail, and then turned and scurried like a frightened rabbit back along the wet narrow path. Behind him he heard the window opening. He stopped short and pressed his shivering body against the tiled wall, peering furtively back. The head and angular tweed shoulders of the gentleman who probably was not dumb and certainly was anything but deaf were thrust out into the pale light. Mr. Pinkerton, shrouded in the merciful darkness and gathering fog, was as still as a mouse. The gentleman stood there, leaning out, for a moment, and disappeared, and Mr. Pinkerton heard the window close.

  He took out his purple handkerchief and mopped his brow, which was quite unaccountably warm all of a sudden. In fact, he was so hot everywhere, particularly under his celluloid collar, that he was definitely uncomfortable. Moreover, his head was going round in dizzy circles. What could be the meaning of it? Why should anyone pretend to be deaf and dumb when he was not?

  Mrs. Humpage’s flimsy story of the poor fellow’s terror at smelling smoke the night Sir Lionel Atwater was murdered in the inn, not fifty feet from him, collapsed of its own weighty untruth. But why had the
man fled down a drainpipe, of all places? Mr. Pinkerton, standing out there in the wet fog, thought back again to the proprietress of the Old Angel. Why had she gone to such laborious length to concoct such an outlandish fabrication? Why had Bull himself acted in such an extraordinary way? Public policy indeed, Mr. Pinkerton thought, indignantly. He recalled the startled expression in the man’s face as he had swung round and stared at the window. It was more than startled; there was alarm and fear in it too.

  Then Mr. Pinkerton thought again. There was more than that, or more than that had come into it after the alarm and fear, now that he really was collected enough to remember and realize it. They had given away to something remarkably like relief.

  Mr. Pinkerton shook his head in great perplexity, until an idea leaped sharply into his head. The man had thought it was Mr. McPherson.

  Mr. Pinkerton thought about that for some time, getting nowhere, except to another question that he now realized had been in the back of his mind for some time in connection with Mr. McPherson: Why was Inspector Bull here, in the Old Angel, at all? Why was he not in Brighton where he was supposed to be? And, above all, now that he was here, what had Scotland Yard to do with a traveller in vacuum cleaners?

  Shivering against the moist wall, Mr. Pinkerton decided it was all entirely too involved for him, and stole quietly on to the narrow window he had come out of. There he stopped and pressed back against the wall, peering round the window edge.

  Mrs. Darcy Atwater, her face concealed by the black veil she had worn at the inquest, was coming stealthily round from the hallway into the passage just in front of him. She gave one brief backward glance at Lady Atwater’s sitting room door, and slipped very quietly down the dark cramped little stairway just under the window.

  Mr. Pinkerton, blinking, colder than he could ever remember having been, wondered where she could be going, so covertly. He waited until she had been gone long enough so that she was hardly likely to be coming back immediately, and started to climb back through his window. And again he stopped and shrank back into the shadow. Lady Atwater’s sitting room door opened, and Lady Atwater herself stood in it.

  Her face, always when he had seen it so serene and untouched by pain, was drawn, the anguish behind its transparent surface so intense and so moving that Mr. Pinkerton forgot his extremely equivocal position and pressed his face against the leaded pane, staring at her. She stood looking down the hall toward her son’s room, pressing her hands desperately together. It was like the sleep-walking scene from Macbeth, almost, Mr. Pinkerton thought . . . and his position, seeing through a glass darkly, was very much better than the one he had had in the farthest and uppermost row in the Old Vic across the river the last time he had seen Macbeth.

  Quite abruptly Lady Atwater stiffened apprehensively, turned quickly back into her room and closed the door. Mr. Pinkerton could see Inspector Bull coming up the stairs then, young Jeffrey Atwater with him. As Atwater tapped on his mothers door and opened it, Mr. Pinkerton caught a glimpse of her face as she turned toward them. It was so calm that the little man thought he must have been dreaming.

  Atwater and Bull went in and closed the door. Mr. Pinkerton, cold to the pale grey marrow of his bones, pushed the window open quickly, and crept inside, and scurried as hastily as he could along the hall to the stairs.

  CHAPTER 20

  The inn lounge was full of people. The fishermen who had brought Ogle’s body, Inspector Kirtin, Sergeant York, the potboy. The place on the floor where the broken body had been was wet, but it was empty. Mrs. Humpage was not in sight, nor was Kathleen, but Darcy Atwater was there with Fleetwood, standing behind the other, against the window, looking on. A pale hysterical woman whom Mr. Pinkerton had not seen was talking to Kirtin.

  “I don’t know how long he’d been there. He wasn’t there at six, because I went out to fetch some coals to hotten the fire for supper. After supper I washed up and me and my husband were going round to have a little something at the pub. I went out to put the lock on the bin, and there he was, all crumpled up behind it, his arm sticking out over the top.”

  “You didn’t hear him fall?” Inspector Kirtin asked.

  “If I did I never noticed,” the woman said. “The lorries come round the corner making such a racket it fair deafens you. If he hit the ledge in the rock he could have slid the rest of the way and not made no noise that we’d have paid mind to. Sometimes bits of rock fall down, but we don’t pay attention to ’em if they don’t hit something, expecting as we do the whole cliff’s coming down on us some day.”

  Her husband standing beside her patted her quivering shoulder awkwardly.

  “Nobody’s to touch anything there till morning,” Inspector Kirtin said. “You can go along now, all of you.”

  They filed out in slow silence. The people of Rye had known death, but they knew it in late years in acts of bravery and sacrifice. Before that they had known it in fire and pillage from their enemies across the Channel, when the watchbell above the Gungarden by the stone tower had rung to call them to fight back the invaders. Blood had run like water in these sunny streets. Mrs. Humpage had said that almost proudly, Mr. Pinkerton, peering down the narrow staircase, remembered. But murder was something very different. Except for the sanguinary butcher whose skull still sat atop his iron cage like an ostrich egg, murderers—private murderers at any rate—had never infested the rosy-roofed little hilltop town. Wesley had almost abandoned them for their unrepentant sin of smuggling, but not for murder. They, with the rest of Sussex, had been converted to Christianity a whole century after the rest of England, Mr. Pinkerton remembered having heard somewhere, probably not from Mrs. Humpage. But that had been neither a cause nor a result of the heinous sin of taking human life, and here, within twenty-four hours, two men had met their death by stealthy violence. A peer, a bank clerk; and somewhere in the tiny town, somewhere, no doubt in the Old Angel itself, a cold heart went free, a bloody hand stretched out its horrible stain, invisible still except to God.

  Mr. Pinkerton crept down the stairs and up his own narrow flight. The Old Angel, he realized, was warmer than he had thought. A foggy miasma of sodden wool rose up from his undistinguished person as he moved. He kept from sneezing only by the stoutest effort of his will until he had closed his door and sat wretchedly down on the oak settle in front of his fire. It had undoubtedly got up to eight shillings, he thought ruefully, pressing his damp soles against the hot grate until they sizzled dangerously.

  Then he got up quite abruptly. The black-veiled figure of Mrs. Darcy Atwater creeping down the back stairway fairly haunted him. He blew his nose, put on his cheap overcoat, and picked up his shabby brown bowler. Of course, in a way it was not precisely his business to spy on Mrs. Atwater. But something in the cool crafty smile on her face as he’d seen it through the window, before the astounding affair of the gentleman who was not deaf and dumb, pinched at his little grey mind like a too tight new shoe. He opened his door, and peered down the stairs; then he came back, closing it, and stood by his fire, torn between what he knew was right and what was an overpowering temptation to do what he knew was definitely very wrong indeed.

  It was not, probably, the first time that unequal struggle had been waged in the old room. Possibly, however, it may have been the first time right had gone down without putting up even a half-hearted resistance. Mr. Pinkerton did feel very guilty. Nevertheless he crossed his hearth, bent down and pressed the spot in the oak panel that Kathleen had pressed, opening it for Inspector Bull. He heard the old catch spring, drew the panel open, and crept a little ways up the narrow steps. He swallowed to relieve his ears from the excited din of his own shamelessness, and leaned forward.

  He could hear Lady Atwater’s unruffled voice.

  “I have tried, very hard, Inspector,” she was saying. “I don’t hear as well as I once did. I was very much distressed by the whole evening. I thought my husband was unbearably rude to Mrs. Bruce. I thought she was charming. It was a surprise to me, I’ll adm
it—largely because I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how much I’d been influenced by my daughter-in-law’s reiteration of the fact that Mrs. Bruce was unfit for the position marriage to my son would give her. She knew so much about her. I always discounted what she said, but even then I wasn’t prepared for anyone so entirely lovely as she turned out to be. But I can’t—I really can’t—believe what you’re trying to tell me. I can’t think ambition would lead any human being to such extraordinary lengths. Have you told my son about the message from that unfortunate young man?”

  “He told me, Mother,” Jeffrey Atwater said. “I’ve told him I picked it up in the hall just outside my door. I did it quite unconsciously, without thinking of it as anything but a wad of paper the maid had dropped emptying the trash baskets. The idea of unwadding it to see what it was never occurred to me. I tossed it on the fire. Pamela’s right about that. I suppose she’s right about it’s dropping through. I didn’t notice. I shouldn’t have done anything about it if I had.”

  “She didn’t see you pick it up, I suppose?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her. I hadn’t got my door open before she was out of her’s and in my room after me.”

  “The same old business?” his mother asked.

  Mr. Pinkerton could easily imagine Jeffrey Atwater nodding curtly.

  “She’d arrange a suitable income for me to live abroad if I’d clear out and let Darcy have the Collection. It was a shame to have the house sold when she and Darcy could easily keep it open for you to live in.”

  “Thoughtful of her,” Lady Atwater said.

  Mr. Pinkerton tried to place Bull in his mind’s eye. He would probably be standing stupidly in the middle of the floor, chewing one end of his mustache. Precisely as he thought that, a very frightening thing happened, for down behind him he heard an unmistakable sound: the clicking of the old latch in his room. He thought wretchedly that if he had only the sense to close the panel behind him it wouldn’t have been necessary to bother, and scrambled down the steep steps. The sight through the panel of Mrs. Humpage’s stout form and shocked face in his room made him miss his footing on the last step, and he shot out into the room on the surprised seat of his trousers with something of a crash, and sat blinking up at her, the color of a grilled tomato.