by Zenith Brown
“If that’s Inspector Bull, and he finds me here, I’m for it,” he said nervously.
“Then go in there, quick,” Sally Bruce whispered. “And wait. I’ll write a note to Jeffrey—would you take it to him?”
He nodded. She gave him a little shove into the small dining room and drew the door to. He stood there in the dark, his heart precisely where his epiglottis normally was. He heard Mrs. Bruce cross the room and open the hall door, and heard her say, “Oh.” It couldn’t, then, be Bull, he thought, an extraordinary wave of relief coming over him.
“Will you come in?”
He heard the door close, and then a cool familiar voice.
“You mustn’t go away, Sally Bruce.”
It was Lady Atwater who spoke. The gentle appeal in her voice made the little man’s heart swell with joy. He peered about in the dark. If he could only get out, he thought. His presence there must naturally be most embarrassing to his hostess. He took a step, hit against a chair and drew his foot back. It would be still more embarrassing, of course, if Lady Atwater should find him concealed there, and difficult to explain, for both of them . . . especially for him, to Inspector Bull later on.
“Jeffrey is very unhappy, my dear. Don’t leave him,” Lady Atwater was saying. “He’s very deeply in love with you. You are with him too, aren’t you, Sally?”
Mr. Pinkerton could not hear her reply, but he imagined he could see her smile and nod her head.
“I’m an old woman, my child,” Lady Atwater said. Her voice was close to him now, so he knew she would have taken the chair Sally Bruce had been sitting in. “I’ve stood between Jeffrey and his father for thirty-two years. I want someone now, to help me stand between him and . . . whatever is to come.”
She stopped for an instant. “Has Pamela been to see you?”
“She left a few minutes ago, Lady Atwater.”
The room was silent for a long time. Then Mr. Pinkerton heard Lady Atwater’s serene unruffled voice again.
“My husband was a very difficult person, Sally,” she said. “You won’t find Jeffrey easy, but you’ll find him like his father loyal and completely devoted. My husband’s father didn’t want him to marry me, but he got over it. I think Jeffrey’s father would have done the same tiling. I think that wherever he is now, he knows he made a terrible mistake. I believe that very sincerely. So you must not let Pamela hurt you. You must—more important for a woman—not let her hurt my son. He told me what you said this afternoon. You’ll let me tell him, won’t you, that you didn’t mean it?”
“I was going to write and tell him,” the American girl said quietly. Then she added quickly, “You don’t think all the things—”
“My dear child,” Lady Atwater interrupted gently, “I’ve told you I’ve stood between Jeffrey and his father all his life.”
“But I mean, all the things the detectives—”
“What detectives?”
“The ones Sir Lionel had following me.”
“You’re mistaken about that, my dear. Sir Lionel would never have stooped to such a thing.”
“But it’s true,” Sally Bruce said quietly. “At my home, in Paris . . .”
“That may be, and undoubtedly is, true,” Lady Atwater said evenly. “But it was not my husband who inspired them. I can assure you of that.”
She paused an instant. “I’ve often wondered how Pamela—” She stopped again.
“Lady Atwater!” Sally Bruce’s voice broke with sudden passion into the dark room where Mr. Pinkerton stood against the door. “Jeffrey didn’t have anything to do with his father’s death, did he?”
“Of course not,” Lady Atwater said sharply. “How can you ask such a horrible question.”
There was another pause, and Mr. Pinkerton heard chair legs move on the old uneven floor, and knew she had got up.
“She told me about the note she found,” Sally Bruce said.
“Jeffrey found the note in a crumpled ball on the hall floor,” Lady Atwater said quietly. Mr. Pinkerton wondered if he could still hear an undertone of dismay in her voice.
“I shall go back now, my dear. No, don’t come with me. Just tell me you do love my son, as he does you, and that I may tell him that, and that you aren’t going home, because your home is here with us? . . . Good night, my dear.”
Mr. Pinkerton waited until the street door closed, and peered out into the little sitting room. Sally Bruce’s eyes were wet, but her face had a kind of radiance it had not had before. She smiled at the little man, who looked rather radiant himself, in a misty grey way.
“You see!” he said triumphantly.
She stood by the fire again. After a bit she turned round to him. “But the police don’t know everything we know,” she said. “What if they believe Pamela instead of Jeffrey?”
Mr. Pinkerton fumbled at his purple string cravat.
“They won’t,” he said, but he did not, he was afraid, sound very convincing . . . largely because he was not very convinced himself. He moved over to the door and brushed the top of his brown bowler with his coat sleeve.
“I’ll go back, now,” he said. “If I find out anything, I’ll come and tell you. I don’t think I’d write anything to Mr. Atwater if I were you. It mightn’t sound the way you meant it, if the police got hold of it.”
She nodded and held out her hand. “Good night—and thanks,” she said. “I feel better than I did. You’ll help us if you can, won’t you?”
Mr. Pinkerton nodded. Her hand in his was soft as silk. He dropped it hastily and scurried out the door and over the cobbled square to Watchbell Street.
CHAPTER 22
At the end of the street he saw the sudden light from the door of the Old Angel as it opened and closed on Lady Atwater’s tiny figure. He felt a little twinge in the bottom of his heart for his determined countrywoman. Lady Atwater, he imagined, would not be the simplest foe a person could have, when once she’d made up her mind. And there was no doubt in Mr. Pinkerton’s mind that what she had stopped in the middle of saying, when Sally Bruce had spoken about the detectives, was that she’d wondered how Pamela Atwater came to know so much about her. There was no doubt also that she would put that on an even lower level than picking up the paper out of her son’s fireplace and reading it.
Mr. Pinkerton hurried along the wintry street. He didn’t envy Mrs. Darcy Atwater, he didn’t indeed. He slowed down to catch his breath as he passed the Hope and Anchor, and crossed Traders Passage to the Old Angel blocking the end of the street.
The big car was drawn up just beyond the door, in front of the narrow passage that led to the bar. Mr. Pinkerton opened the door and slipped inside. The inn was quiet as a tomb or as country inns are when the bar is empty. Most of the Old Angel’s transient guests had gone. He could hear Jo washing up, whistling happily. Then abruptly the door of the parlour lounge opened and Jeffrey Atwater came out, his face set, his blue eyes stormy. For a moment Mr. Pinkerton thought he had been having a brotherly talk with Mr. Darcy . . . and then he swallowed and moistened his dry lips, standing stock-still in his tracks.
The voice he heard was not the pleasantly alcoholic voice of Darcy Atwater at all. It was something quite different; and Mr. Pinkerton, taking an unobtrusive step forward, staring through the open door of the small panelled room, saw there the close-clipped military head and dark lean face and steely grey eyes of nobody less in all the world than Sir Charles Debenham, the Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard, himself. Beyond him was Inspector Bull, and another man whom Mr. Pinkerton had never seen before.
The door closed then, as abruptly as it had opened, and Mr. Pinkerton, after a moment, moved very cautiously across the lounge to his staircase. As he put his foot on the first tread, he stopped again. Someone was running along the other corridor across the lounge, opposite that from which the Atwater rooms opened on. Before he could do more than take a sharp breath of apprehension, Mr. Pinkerton saw the flying figure of Detective-Sergeant York come hurtling down the st
airs and burst into the parlour lounge door.
“He’s gone, Inspector!”
Inspector Bull appeared instantly in the doorway. “Where’s Kirtin?” he demanded curtly.
Sergeant York dashed to the inn door and out. Inspector Bull took about three strides to Mrs. Humpage’s office door and pulled the bell violently. Mr. Pinkerton pressed his insignificant form against the stair rail. His heart had shrunk to a tiny painful pellet that burned nauseatingly against his ribs. Something dreadful had happened, plainly. What it was he did not know, but he trusted painfully it was not due to any of his possibly misguided attempts.
Bull jerked the bell again. The potboy Jo, his whistling dead in his throat, was standing open-mouthed, his eyes like peeled grapes popping out of his head. Mrs. Humpage came through the door.
“What’s all the trouble, Inspector?” she demanded briskly.
“Where is Mr. Ross?” Bull said curtly. “I want him.”
“The poor gentleman is probably in his room,” Mrs. Humpage said practically. “Jo.”
“He’s not in his room, ma’am,” Bull said, still more curtly, to Mr. Pinkerton’s surprise. The little man was already greatly surprised, for to the best of his knowledge he had never before heard the deaf and dumb gentleman spoken of by any name at all.
“Where is he, Mrs. Humpage?” Bull said.
The landlady of the Old Angel threw up her hands.
“Well, in heaven’s name, Inspector, how do I know where he is?” she cried. “Do I keep track of every move my guests make?”
Bull looked at her steadily.
“Will you go in the parlour lounge, Mrs. Humpage?” he said calmly. The red spots in her plump cheeks burned deeper red. She took a step across the lounge, her face, except for the two flushed spots, looking the colour of a bladder of lard.
“It might help if you found Mr. Ross before you go in, ma’am,” Bull added stolidly.
“I tell you I don’t know where he is, if he’s not in his room,” Mrs. Humpage said, almost sullenly.
“Very well, ma’am.”
She went across to the parlour. Bull closed the door after her and came back. Inspector Kirtin came through the outside door, with him a young man who was not Mr. Ross certainly, for he wore the tunic and helmet of a constable of the Rye police. His face was pale and he was obviously, Mr. Pinkerton thought excitedly, frightened.
“He’s given us the slip,” Kirtin said shortly.
“I didn’t see him, sir,” the young constable said. “He didn’t come out of the bar passage, I’d swear he didn’t. I recognized everybody that went in and came out. Two ladies and the little Welsh gentleman came out the front door. They’re all back here now. The new maid went out the kitchen door and down along Traders Passage, but nobody else has left the place I didn’t recognize by name, sir.”
Bull looked stolidly at him. “Did you recognize the maid?”
“No, sir, but I asked Mrs. Humpage who the woman was. She said she didn’t know unless it was the new maid so I thought that’s who it was.”
“Was she tall and thin?”
The constable nodded.
“She’d got a basket over her arm. I couldn’t see her face, it’s dark out there. I watched her go down the hill.”
He took out his notebook. “It was eleven minutes past ten, sir.”
Bull looked at his watch. Mr. Pinkerton took out his own large silver watch from his waistcoat pockets. It was twenty-five minutes past eleven now. That meant that Mr. Ross had been gone over an hour, He saw Bull draw a deep breath. He nodded to Inspector Kirtin. The two of them stepped into Mrs. Humpage’s office and came out almost at once. Kirtin hurried out the door, Inspector Bull returned to the parlour lounge and closed the door after him. In the instant it was open Mr. Pinkerton could hear Mrs. Humpage. She was crying.
He went slowly up the stairs and into his room, and sat down in front of his fire without turning on the light. He did not know exactly what he had done, but there was some connection, he was only too miserably sure, between what had happened to Mr. Ross and his activities of the earlier evening. Whether it was the scene on the balcony, after which of course Mr. Ross must have known that the business of his being deaf was no longer tenable, or whether it was his most indiscreet conversation with Mrs. Humpage when she’d caught him eavesdropping, that had precipitated it, he didn’t know. He only knew that undoubtedly he had once again, and after all Bull’s warnings, and Sir Charles’s warnings, and his own determinations, made a frightful mess of everything.
A small idea crept into his brain. Why had Mrs. Humpage come up to his room in the first place? How had she known he’d taken cold? He glanced over at the panel by the chimney-piece. What if she had come up to listen in, as it were, to what was going on in the next room, not knowing at all that he was there, and of course having no idea that he’d be listening in himself? It was much more probable than that she had come to offer him a nice hot glass of spirits.
Mr. Pinkerton glanced at his door. He got up, fastened the latch as best he could, and moved the heavy oak settle over in front of it. He sat down again, staring at the panel as a hungry spaniel stares at a tempting morsel with no one about to forbid him to touch it. Mr. Ross, after all, he reflected, was no affair of his. It was the people in the next room he was concerned with, and the girl in the Tudor house in Church Square.
For the second time that evening, what he ought to do waged an unequal battle with what he ought not to do, and lost heavily. He got up, pressed the bottom of the panel and swung it open. The cold dank air of the stone chimney and the passage between the panelled walls of his room and the panelled walls of Lady Atwater’s sitting room seeped into his lungs. He crept up the shallow staircase and strained his ears.
Lady Atwater was speaking, her voice crisp and icy.
“And one thing further, Pamela,” she was saying. “Inspector Bull is not as simple as he looks. I have talked to Sir Charles Debenham. He assures me it’s the worst mistake anyone can possibly make. I hope you haven’t made it. Good night. Please close the door quietly.”
Mr. Pinkerton listened a moment longer, and crept back down the stairs. He closed the panel softly, wishing very much he had heard what went before. It must have been crushing indeed to have rendered Mrs. Darcy Atwater so completely speechless as to go out without saying a single word. He lifted the oak settle away from his door, untied the leather thong on the latch, undressed slowly and went to bed. He lay there a long time, staring up at the shadows that the fire stencilled on the canopy. The inn was as silent as the grave. Jeffrey Atwater, he thought, must be the only person in it who had any cause for happiness that night. And perhaps Jo the potboy. All the rest of them—Lady Atwater, Pamela Atwater, Kathleen, Mrs. Humpage, certainly Inspector Bull, and most certainly himself—must be lying restlessly. Mr. Eric Fleetwood and Darcy Atwater of course did not count very much.
He closed his eyes at last, and opened them again. Below in front of the inn he heard a motor start and move away, and the door close sharply. The Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard was returning to town. That meant that he was satisfied with Inspector Bull, then, unless of course the other man whom Mr. Pinkerton did not know was staying on to take over. He had not, some way, looked like a policeman. Mr. Pinkerton turned over and nestled down in the cold pillow, and sat up again instantly. Heavy steps sounded on the stairs outside his room. His heart sank lower in his meagre frame. It was Bull, of course; he knew that before the door opened and the large cinnamon-brown figure blocked the light from the hall.
CHAPTER 23
Inspector Bull closed the door quietly and came on into the room.
“Asleep?” he asked.
“No.” Mr. Pinkerton said weakly.
Bull did not switch on the light. He moved over to the fire and sat down on the settle. As he took out his pipe, Mr. Pinkerton could see his heavy face in the flickering firelight. He looked tired and very low in his mind. A sharp blade of guilt pricked and sla
shed at Mr. Pinkerton’s uneasy conscience.
“Has . . . has Mr. Ross been found?” he asked.
Bull shook his head.
“Or Mr. McPherson?”
Bull shook his head again.
Mr. Pinkerton hesitated. “Did Harry Ogle kill Sir Lionel Atwater? He didn’t, did he?”
“No,” Inspector Bull said slowly. “He didn’t. He knew who did. That’s plain enough. It’s my fault, in a way, about him. I hadn’t thought he’d be as reckless.”
“Do . . . do you know who did?”
“I ought to,” Bull said deliberately. “But I don’t.”
He smoked silently for a moment.
“The only people that would have a motive for doing it don’t seem to have done it,” he said then. “You can’t convict on motive only. Especially when the evidence all points against their doing it.”
“You . . . mean Mr. Jeffrey Atwater?” Mr. Pinkerton enquired timidly.
“He’d got no more motive than a jack rabbit,” Bull said heavily. “His father couldn’t force him to give up the Collection, if he didn’t want to.”
“But—revenge,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “He’d got reason enough for wanting that.”
He realized that as Devil’s Advocate he cut a rather sorry figure, sitting up against the cold head of his bed, the covers drawn up to his chin.
Bull grunted.
“He’d got that for the last four years and it never worried him,” he said. “It works all the other way. As long as his father was alive, there was a possibility he might change his mind about the money. It was all to his interest to have him alive, not to have him dead. There was nothing more his father could do. He couldn’t cut him out of anything more—he’d cut him out of everything already. He couldn’t stop him marrying the young lady. No, it all works the other way.”
“But—that note of Harry Ogle’s that he found,” Mr. Pinkerton protested, unwillingly.
Bull scowled.
“In letting us find that note,” he said stolidly, “Mrs. Darcy Atwater did just about all she could to clear Jeffrey Atwater.”