Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel

by Zenith Brown

  “Eavesdropping, eh?” Mrs. Humpage said. “Why, sir! I am surprised!”

  Mr. Pinkerton scrambled hastily to his feet and pushed the panel to. Inspector Bull, he knew, could hear that voice with appalling clarity.

  “Well,” Mrs. Humpage said, a little grimly. “And me hearing you sneeze and come to offer you a nice hot glass of spirits.”

  Then she recovered her normal aplomb, bustled in and put another good shilling’s worth of coals on the fire, in spite of the fact, Mr. Pinkerton thought, with silent protest, that she could see he’d got his hat and coat on, ready to go out.

  “I must say,” she said briskly, “although I can’t feel it in my heart to be very sorry about poor Harry Ogle, I’m glad indeed to know it’s finished and done with and now we can have peace again.”

  At his very easiest and readiest, Mr. Pinkerton had never been what the simplest person would think of as a good dissimulator. Now he looked at her so like a startled rabbit that her eyes, fixed on his, changed abruptly.

  “It is finished, isn’t it, sir?” she demanded. “There’s no doubt Ogle did it, and killed himself when he heard he was to be arrested? That’s as plain as a pikestaff, isn’t it, sir?”

  Mr. Pinkerton straightened his tie and adjusted his spectacles. He was a little surprised, and he was a little worried. There was something about Mrs. Humpage’s more than anxiety that he should support her belief, that was vaguely frightening.

  She took a step toward him, her face quite pale, or the rosy spots in her cheeks quite red, he couldn’t determine which.

  “Tell me it’s true, sir,” she said urgently. “There’s no one else that would have done such a dreadful thing here.”

  Mr. Pinkerton hardly liked to look at her.

  “Why, it looks as if someone pitched him over to keep him from telling what he knew,” he said reluctantly. “At least, so far as I’ve been able to make out.”

  Mrs. Humpage sat down heavily. She was quite silent for a long moment. “It’ll ruin my house,” she said slowly. “If we aren’t all murdered in our beds first.”

  She tapped her foot on the hearth rug, her eyes fixed on the fire. What was going on behind her anxious face Mr. Pinkerton of course could not tell; but in some vague way he had the uneasy idea that there was more than was just, so to speak, on the face of it. It disturbed him.

  “It’ll . . . it’ll bring a great many people,” he said, trying desperately to find some faint ray of comfort for her in a situation that he could see was devoid of it.

  “The wrong kind,” she retorted. She spoke quite slowly, for her, and she stared down into his fire still. “Nice people don’t like to sleep in beds people have been murdered in. Unless it was done a hundred years ago. They like it then. They don’t want murder, not like this.”

  Mr. Pinkerton wiped the top of his brown bowler hat clean with his overcoat sleeve, and looked at her unhappily. After all, she had got her living to make. And she had been very kind to Kathleen. For that he could almost forgive the coals she had wasted at his expense.

  “He doesn’t think it’s anybody here in the house now, does he?” Mrs. Humpage said, looking up. She nodded her head toward the panel.

  Mr. Pinkerton started to nod his own head, just to signify that “he” did. Then he stopped, for two reasons. The first was, that he had no right to say “yes,” when he had not the faintest idea whether he was speaking the truth or not. The second was, if Mrs. Humpage meant Bull, which it seemed to him she must do, then how did she happen to know he was in the next room? She couldn’t have heard his voice, because he hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t have seen him go in, unless she had been spying on him, someway, upstairs in the corridor. In any case, it seemed very odd to Mr. Pinkerton, and again a little frightening in a vague way.

  “I don’t know, I’m sure,” he said, to be on the safe side. He edged a little way toward the door, for the same reason. The more he thought about Mrs. Humpage, the more uneasy he got, in a rather strange way for which he had no reason at all. She was not taking all this in the way he would have expected a woman of her sanguine temperament to take it. If she had stormed, or been hysterical, or even curious and interfering, he could have understood it perfectly. But, with the rarest exceptions, she hadn’t. She had kept singularly out of the way of the police at every turn. Whenever Bull had wanted her, somebody had to go and find her. The day before, she had been everywhere. Mr. Pinkerton had not been able to turn round without her smiling cheery red face and bustling figure popping up, being helpful or informative. He glanced furtively at her. She had changed enormously.

  “Why did Inspector Bull call himself Mr. Briscoe when he came in last night, sir?” she asked, so suddenly that the little man jumped.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he stammered. “I haven’t the faintest idea. He was supposed to be in Brighton.”

  He could have bitten his tongue out the minute he said it.

  “Oh, dear!” he thought. “Now I have done it!”

  Mrs. Humpage’s foot stopped its nervous tapping abruptly. She was quite silent and motionless for an instant.

  “In Brighton, was he?” she asked.

  Concerned as he was with his own dreadful and utterly inexcusable breach of etiquette, confidence, morality and indeed nearly everything of the sort, Mr. Pinkerton was still aware enough of his environment to catch the sudden flattening of Mrs. Humpage’s brisk voice.

  “Well,” she said, “I see you want to go out. I won’t keep you, sir. I’ll just turn down your bed myself. Kathleen is back in bed. The doctor gave her something to make her sleep, poor sweet.”

  She drew off the bedspread with swift competent hands.

  “Don’t go taking more cold now, sir. Mind you wrap your throat up warm.”

  She folded the spread and laid it on the carved oak chest under the window. Mr. Pinkerton edged out the door, without another word, and let the latch fall behind him with a breath of relief. It was very odd. Everything Mrs. Humpage had said was precisely what she would have said the day he’d come, but the way she said it was so unlike, that he felt a prickling sense of dismay run along his narrow spine. It was like being in front of a fire burning brightly that no pleasant warmth was coming from. The loquacious bustle was there, but the heart had left it entirely.

  CHAPTER 21

  Mr. Pinkerton slipped down his staircase into the empty lounge. Voices were coming from the bar. It wouldn’t, he thought sententiously, and slightly mixed metaphorically even for him, be the first night men had washed the ghosts of wicked deeds out of their eyes with grog in this ancient hostelry. Then, peering round the corner of the rubber plant he saw he’d made a mistake—at least none of the occupants of the crowded bar that he could make out had any connection with the people at the inn. Except Jo, and Jo was not precisely at the bar. He was coming along balancing a small tray with the virtuosity of a comic acrobat in a music-hall turn. It had a glass with a double whisky in it, and a small green bottle of soda. He held it at arm’s length as he executed an elaborate right-angle turn into the door of the parlour lounge.

  “Don’t go broodin’ over ’Arry Ogle, sir,” Mr. Pinkerton heard him say cheerfully. “ ’E was a proper twerp, ’e was.”

  “It’s your Old Angel’s short measure I’m brooding over, my lad,” Darcy Atwater’s voice said as cheerfully. He started singing a song about “I married an old angel,” and broke off, laughing suddenly.

  Jo came out of the door, caught sight of the little Welshman sitting blinking under the polished green blades of the rubber tree, gave him a broad wink and touched his temple significantly. Mr. Pinkerton could see what he meant, though he thought it a little odd of a tow-thatched potboy to pass judgments on the Old Angel’s guests exactly as if he had been personally deputized by the Master in Lunacy himself. The boy went on, whistling. Mr. Pinkerton heard someone at the bar shush him reprovingly. His cheerfulness did seem, Mr. Pinkerton thought primly, to border dangerously on the macabre. After all, people as a r
ule did not go about calling corpses proper twerps. However.

  He looked about again, headed for the door and, in an instant, was out in the gusty cold of Watchbell Street, his black boots clattering along the smooth egg-shaped cobbles, his collar up about his ears, his brown bowler down over his eyes. He stopped suddenly, an awful idea popping into his mind just as a large car turned at the end of the road from Pump House Lane and headed toward him. He got out of the road onto the narrow footpath, and stood for a moment looking back at the snug lighted windows of the old inn. It should have occurred to him before, of course; why it had not done, he could not imagine. He could see it all as plainly as if he were back in his panelled first-floor room . . . namely, of course, the buxom apple-cheeked figure of his landlady in precisely the position she’d surprised him in with such annihilating unexpectedness. Listening, of course—just the way he’d done. And what if? . . .

  The big car passed him, crawling slowly along the flinty street. It was too late now, Mr. Pinkerton thought, without comfort. Anyway, she’d have to come down and welcome the new arrivals. There was no occasion for him to go back. He thrust his hands rather unhappily into his overcoat pockets, and bent his head again into the drizzling mist. He was probably too late at the other end too, he was thinking; but he kept along between the stuccoed Georgian-fronted houses into which later generations of Ryers had modernized their Tudor timber and plaster exteriors. He turned left at the house opposite the churchyard. Sally Bruce’s three-gabled little cottage of old oak and gleaming white was dark, but as he came close he saw a chink of light through the casement and the flicker of firelight behind it.

  He glanced nervously across at the blue light in front of the police station, and abandoned instantly any idea of trying to peep inside. And then, just before he reached the white painted step of the doorway, he saw it open, and heard Mrs. Darcy Atwater’s competent voice.

  “I’m merely trying to help you, my dear. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve not told the police all I know. I think Jeffrey has been under an intolerable strain. You’d better think it over, before they resume the inquest.”

  Mr. Pinkerton caught sight of the slim blond figure of the American girl holding the door open. Then it closed abruptly. Mrs. Darcy Atwater, her veil drawn down over her face, glanced neither to the right nor left as she hurried across the narrow cobbled lane and along the churchyard wall toward Watchbell Street. Mr. Pinkerton, edging up against the jutting corner of the Silver Swan, watched her until she disappeared in the dark. Then he crept out along toward Mrs. Bruce’s house, and stood nervously a moment.

  Almost at once the door opened and Sally Bruce, her hat on, buttoning up her camel’s-hair coat, slipped out. She looked quickly at the little man, blinking there not two feet from her, and said, “Oh,” even more surprised than Mr. Pinkerton was. She had said it again before he remembered, with a slight lurch in the pit of his stomach, that she thought he was a policeman. That was why she stood there, limp and frightened, the door still open, her hand on the knob.

  “Do you want to see me?” she asked at last, dully. “I was just going out to post a letter.”

  Mr. Pinkerton knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t mind that.

  “You were going to the inn, really, though, weren’t you?” he asked timidly.

  She hesitated. She must know, of course, he thought, that he’d seen Mrs. Atwater, and probably heard her parting remarks. She nodded.

  “May I . . . come in a moment?” he asked awkwardly.

  She pushed the door wide, stepped back in and dropped off her coat on the Queen Anne stool under the mirror in the small entrance hall.

  Mr. Pinkerton closed the door.

  “I’m . . . not really connected with the police, at all,” he said, in what he intended definitely to be a reassuring manner.

  She looked at him, her grey eyes widening, clearly incredulous.

  “Inspector Bull is a friend of mine, that’s all,” Mr. Pinkerton went on hastily. “Sometimes he lets me go along with him . . . so I won’t be . . . be going about my own, like this, I expect.”

  For an instant the colour deepened in her high pale cheeks, and her eyes darkened. “She’s going to put me out,” Mr. Pinkerton thought desperately. “You see, I heard what Mrs. Atwater said,” he hurried on. “I just wanted to tell you not to be alarmed . . . not to pay any attention to it. She’s already told Inspector Bull about the paper she found, and he’s talked to Mr. Jeffrey Atwater about it, and he’s explained it.”

  Sally Bruce sat down abruptly in the chair by the door. Mr. Pinkerton could see the pulse in her slender throat quiver, then give a throbbing beat as she raised her hand to it, as if she were choking really.

  “I mean, don’t let her get you so upset,” he said earnestly. “Because I’m sure Inspector Bull isn’t taken in by her, at all. I’m sure he thinks she’s a vindictive, scheming woman.”

  He listened to himself in some astonishment. He had just been telling himself the very opposite all evening.

  Mrs. Bruce smoothed her honey-coloured hair back from her forehead with a trembling hand.

  “How did Jeff—Mr. Atwater—explain the paper?” she asked unsteadily.

  “He saw it lying on the floor in the hall and picked it up and threw it in the fire,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “He didn’t think anything of it.”

  “He wouldn’t, of course,” she said. “But she would, wouldn’t she?”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded.

  “But you see, she . . .”

  She got up and walked over to the fire. She stood there looking down, one hand grasping the mantel.

  “It’s such a dreadful thing to think, much less to say. But it’s true. She hates Jeffrey. She’d do anything she could to hurt him. It’s all this horrible business of the Atwater Collection. That’s what she really wants. She’s got everything but that. It’s the one thing she needs, and I don’t think she’d stop at anything to get it. That’s what’s so terrifying. Jeffrey can’t prove he was in bed and didn’t kill his father. He can’t prove he picked up a crumpled piece of paper in the hall. He’s in a horrible spot—don’t you see he is?”

  Mr. Pinkerton, sitting on the edge of the chair, blinking through his lozenge-shaped steel spectacles, saw it very clearly.

  “But all the business of killing his father because he was going to try to make him give up the jewels to Darcy doesn’t make sense!” Mrs. Bruce went on passionately. “He’d already done all he could by leaving Darcy all his money and Lady Atwater a trust to revert to Darcy when she dies, so she couldn’t leave it to Jeffrey if she wanted to.”

  She sat down in the chair she’d sat in that morning and looked anxiously at Mr. Pinkerton.

  “He adored his father,” she went on, desperately trying to convince the little grey man who had no need at all to be convinced, having already firmly convinced himself. “It would have been so easy, if he were the kind of person that would have stooped to murder, to have pretended to agree with him. He could have had his money as easily as not, but he’s not that sort. I always thought his father must know it, must know how much better a person he was than Darcy.”

  She stopped.

  “Don’t you see he just didn’t have any reason to kill him!” she added passionately.

  “And . . . the others?” Mr. Pinkerton ventured.

  “I don’t know. I keep trying not to think about it. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t believe anyone would do such a horrible thing for what seems to be involved. If it were money, or to save themselves, or if it had been that Ogle boy, trying to keep his job and keep his marriage from coming out, I could understand it. I thought that’s what Ogle’s death meant, when my maid came running to tell me about it. Mrs. Atwater says it isn’t that. Are they sure? Or is it . . . is it just the note that makes them think so?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Pinkerton said meekly.

  “Because, while I don’t think Mrs. Atwater would have murdered Sir Lionel just to make it look as if Jeffrey did
it, I don’t think she’d hesitate to do it . . .”

  She stopped abruptly. “I guess I’m as awful as she is,” she said, leaning her smooth lovely head back against the gold chair as if she were suddenly unbearably weary of all of it.

  “I expect Ogle wrote the note all right,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He thought Mrs. Darcy Atwater was genuinely a very dreadful woman, but not that dreadful. “Have . . . you seen Mr. Atwater?”

  She nodded.

  “He was here this morning. That’s why I wanted to go and see him now. It seemed to me I was the cause of all of it. Their being here, and everything. It would be better if I’d just clear out, and—”

  “You mean, not marry him?” Mr. Pinkerton said, swallowing.

  She nodded.

  “But . . . it’s rather late for that, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if he marries somebody else, Mrs. Atwater wouldn’t mind his having the title so much.”

  “Don’t . . . don’t you love him?” Mr. Pinkerton asked, boldly.

  The perspiration broke out all over him at his bald-faced incredible temerity.

  “I adore him,” she said simply.

  “Well, then,” Mr. Pinkerton began.

  She shook her head.

  “Too much to want to be such a . . . well, millstone around his neck.”

  She looked up quickly, and Mr. Pinkerton, who had settled back almost comfortably in his chair, jumped violently. Someone was at the door. “Oh, dear!” he thought.