by Zenith Brown
Bull nodded. “Watch yourself,” he said shortly. “I don’t expect anything else will happen. She’s got herself barricaded in.”
He stood for a moment looking from one of the closed silent doors to another. Then he went back toward the front stairway, Mr. Pinkerton, quite frozen, padding along behind him. At the foot of the stairs Bull nodded.
“Good night,” he said.
“She’s . . . she’s got the wind up, hasn’t she?” Mr. Pinkerton said, excitedly.
Bull grunted mirthlessly.
“She has,” he said. “But why?”
CHAPTER 25
The quarterboys struck once, twice, three times, before Mr. Pinkerton finally closed his eyes. The meagre facts at his disposal went round and round in his little grey skull like a ghastly carrousel in a dingy side street in Clapham. Mrs. Darcy Atwater was frightened, desperately frightened. That was self-evident. But, as Bull had said, why? And of whom? Of the person who had murdered twice, and consequently might murder again—that was the likeliest answer to the second question. But . . . Mr. Pinkerton shook his head in tired perplexity. He tried wearily to recall if she had ever appeared nervy before. She certainly had not been about going through the dark narrow streets of Rye, past the churchyard, with its slanting tombstones and dark ancient trees.
The carrousel of his mind slowed down gradually, and at last subsided altogether. Mr. Pinkerton slept. The last conscious thought he had was that if she was so horrified of danger to her own life, then she couldn’t have been the person who took Sir Lionel’s, or Harry Ogle’s. It didn’t stand to reason.
It was half-past seven when he heard the clanking hot-water cans outside his door, and Jo thrust his head inside.
“Something’s screwy, if you arsk me,” he said. He put the steaming polished copper can beside the wash stand, closed the casement window and poked at the live coals in the bottom of the grate.
“I shan’t want a fire,” Mr. Pinkerton said firmly.
The boy shovelled the ashes into the empty coal-box.
“I ’ope all this ain’t goin’ to make trouble for Mrs. ’Umpage,” he said over his shoulder. “She’s been better’n a mother to me, she has, sir.”
“How is Kathleen?” Mr. Pinkerton enquired. He was a little wary of treading on the ground of Mrs. Humpage’s virtues.
“Seedy,” Jo said. After a moment he added philosophically, “Some people don’t know when they’re well off, if you arsk me. Lydy Atwater, she told ’er the syme thing, wordin’ it different. Blime, sir, ’e didn’t do nothink but myke ’er cry, every time ’e come.”
Mr. Pinkerton dressed and went downstairs to the dining room. Jo was clearing a table of the remnants of a breakfast that could have been devoured by no one but the man from Scotland Yard. Bull, however, was nowhere in sight. Mr. Pinkerton ate his porridge, and eventually got through his fish, sausage, eggs, kidneys, toast, marmalade, and tea, the solitary occupant of the low panelled room. He went out into the equally empty lounge, and glanced into the tiny office. Kathleen was at Mrs. Humpage’s desk, staring blindly in front of her. She looked up as he came to the door.
“I’m very sorry, Kathleen,” he said awkwardly.
She gave him a pale smile and turned her head away. She had not been crying, and she sat there now with a kind of tragic youthful dignity that was very moving to Mr. Pinkerton.
“If you’ve a moment, sir,” she said after a little, “could I talk with you?”
He came into the office, blinking a little.
“Would you close the door, please?”
Mr. Pinkerton closed it, first taking a cautious look about the lounge, and sat down beside her.
“It’s . . . about Harry, and the other night,” she said slowly. “You know you can hear what’s going on in the sitting room from the cupboard by the chimney, if you listen, sir.”
He nodded. It seemed natural and easy for him to talk to her; he didn’t feel small and insignificant, as he did when with most people.
“You see. Harry was afraid Sir Lionel would see me,” she went on. “He knew about the chimney cupboard. I showed him when we first came, because I thought it was just like the pictures—so spooky it gave me the horrors thinking about all the things that used to go on when the smugglers were here in the old days.”
Mr. Pinkerton nodded, understanding perfectly what she meant.
“But Harry used to listen to what people said. I told him he shouldn’t, but he just laughed at me. And that’s what he was doing to the Atwaters, listening. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t get him to stop. He said he had to know whether they knew about him and me, as if Sir Lionel would have bothered his head about us.”
She pressed her red little hands together, looking at them.
“He wouldn’t come back up, and he wouldn’t go home, sir. I kept begging him too. Finally he did . . . and it wasn’t very long, sir, before Sir Lionel began to groan.”
Mr. Pinkerton watched her face intently.
“Did Harry say anything . . . about what he heard?”
The girl’s eyes moved desperately round in front of her, in a fear and doubt that Mr. Pinkerton could understand perfectly.
“Oh, that’s what makes it so hard, sir,” she said brokenly. “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her . . . she’s been so kind to me. I don’t know what to think, indeed I don’t, sir. And there’s nobody to tell me but you.”
Mr. Pinkerton didn’t even blink. He sat perfectly quietly, not thinking it at all odd that the girl should turn to him.
“What did he say, Kathleen?” he asked.
“He said, ‘Blimey, she’s sure giving him what for.’ Then he sat down on the side of my bed. ‘We’re not the only ones that has fights, I expect,’ he said. Then he said, ‘I’m going now, and you don’t need to expect to see me again, so you better go back home to your mother.’ He started down the cupboard stairs again, and just then we heard somebody moan, quick-like. Harry said, ‘I’ve got to get out quick.’ He grabbed my torch Mrs. Humpage gave me and went down. I expect he was afraid to go the proper way for fear he’d meet somebody. I followed him and closed the panel. I could hear Sir Lionel as plain, but I was afraid to rouse anybody, so I just stood there. Then I pulled the inside window, that’s just behind the cupboard, shut, so I couldn’t hear anything more.”
She stopped unhappily.
“You see, sir, it wasn’t Harry I was afraid for, it was her.”
Mr. Pinkerton’s heart was beating rapidly.
“When you came down the first time,” he asked, “you said you’d got the wrong door. Why did you do that?”
“Harry was there then, sir. He made me open the window behind the cupboard so he could hear what they were saying. I didn’t know you were in your room, and it was too narrow for me to go up with him there.”
She looked at him, her blue eyes wide with entreaty.
“But it couldn’t have been her, sir, could it?”
“I’m sure it couldn’t,” Mr. Pinkerton said. There was no conviction in his voice.
“You see, nobody knows how hard it was for her always having him and Mr. Jeffrey at each other’s throats, with Mr. Darcy so . . . so irresponsible and all.”
She hesitated.
“What shall I do, sir? Poor Harry’s gone, and it won’t bring him back. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I keep hearing that poor lady scream. And Mrs. Humpage was crying last night as if her heart would break, the way everything’s going.”
Mr. Pinkerton shook his head indecisively. He got up.
“I’ll . . . I’ll find out what you should do,” he said. “I’ll talk to Inspector Bull.”
“I expect you must do that, mustn’t you, sir?”
He nodded. Catching the image of himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, he felt sure for the first time of the precise appearance of a whited sepulchre. He closed the door of Mrs. Humpage’s office behind him, and looked about the lounge. It was still deserted except for the potboy, dusting
the mantel. Mr. Pinkerton opened the front door, slipped out, and took a deep breath of the salt fresh air. It had stopped raining, and, while the sun was only a feeble disc in the grey sky, nevertheless it was there.
He buttoned his overcoat up round his scrawny throat and set off along Watchbell Street. He hadn’t very clearly in his mind what he should do about what Kathleen had told him—or even what he was going to do. He ought, of course, to go at once to Bull, and, in fact, that was what he had got in mind when he came out of the office. If Bull had been present in the lounge, in the large and bulky flesh, he would undoubtedly have done it. However, he was not, which gave Mr. Pinkerton time to think about it a bit longer.
At the end of Watchbell Street he quickened his pace as he passed the police station, and turned left into Pump House Lane. For a moment he thought of calling on Mrs. Bruce, but abandoned that in deference to the time of day. He crossed Market Street and went down East Street to the High, and turned again along the East Cliff. Below him, down the sloping hill, stood the old Land Gate—the finest fourteenth century gate in the south of England, he had heard. From its twin towers, guards had watched the approach of the enemy across the Rother, east to the sea, and across the low forest lands to the north. They had watched for the French, watched too for people bringing the black death to their hilltop town.
Mr. Pinkerton heard the merry hammer of the smith at his forge under the gate. He looked out over the muddy river beyond the town salts at a group of dirty sheep grazing in the cricket field. A ship passed in the Channel. Beyond it lay sunny France, where he had never been.
A step by him caught his attention. He glanced up, to see, at the wall not far away, a guide-book in his hand, none other than Mr. Eric Fleetwood.
Mr. Pinkerton blinked; Mr. Fleetwood, turning and noticing him, nodded rather less unpleasantly and arrogantly than the little man had expected . . . if indeed he had expected the solicitor’s son to nod at all.
“Hello,” Fleetwood said, almost affably in fact. “I’ve been hunting for Turkey Cock Lane. They say a young priest who had a beautiful voice and forgot his vows for the neighbour’s daughter was buried alive there. Haunts it; gobbles like a turkey.”
He scrutinized the map in his book, and looked round again.
“I wish Mrs. Atwater would gobble like a turkey instead of shrieking like a banshee,” he remarked, Mr. Pinkerton thought pretty callously, if anyone was to ask him. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Did you?”
“I’m afraid I slept very soundly,” Mr. Pinkerton said, apologetically.
“Lucky,” Mr. Fleetwood said.
“Sergeant York said she must have heard someone go to the lavatory, and thought they were coming to murder her,” Mr. Pinkerton volunteered. He would not normally have done so, but if the usually quite supercilious Mr. Eric Fleetwood was being half-way civil, it was, of course, obligatory on anyone to meet him with half civility at least.
“It’s odd how you can hear all sorts of noises in an old place like that,” Fleetwood said. “I can even hear Lady Atwater, and she’s quiet enough, Lord knows.”
Mr. Pinkerton looked down at the dirty sheep on the salts. Mr. Fleetwood started on along the wall.
“What . . . what time did you leave Sir Lionel Atwater, the other night?” Mr. Pinkerton said at his departing figure, blushing quite crimson at his temerity.
Fleetwood stopped, turned, stared at him for a moment with rather more than a touch of his old manner, and said, a little stiffly, Mr. Pinkerton feared, “Atwater? I didn’t leave him. He doesn’t talk to me when he hasn’t got to.”
“Oh, I . . . I said Sir Lionel Atwater,” Mr. Pinkerton stammered hastily.
“Oh, I see. I didn’t hear you,” Fleetwood said. He stared again at the shabby little man in the cheap grey overcoat and brown bowler hat. Mr. Pinkerton thought for an instant that he was simply going to continue along, without answering such an impertinence. But he said, actually, “It was twelve-thirty, or thereabouts. Why?”
“Why,” Mr. Pinkerton said, “I just wondered. It seemed to me so . . . so terribly important whether you heard her go in after you’d gone?”
Fleetwood stared once more, this time with an expression indicating rather less than politely that he had the impression he was talking with a small, insignificant lunatic.
“Who?” he asked.
“Lady Atwater.”
“Of course not,” Fleetwood said, impatiently. “She was in bed. Didn’t you hear her testimony?”
“Yes,” Mr. Pinkerton said, excitedly. “I heard it. But she was there, just the same. Harry Ogle heard her giving him what for, as he called it, just a few moments before they heard him groan.”
The totality of the expression on the London solicitor’s face was baffling. But that surprise, bewilderment and incredulity, were included in it, Mr. Pinkerton had no doubt.
Fleetwood came back.
“Are you sure?” he asked, still looking down at the little man. He closed his guide-book. “Where did you—”
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “Yes, it’s quite . . . there’s no doubt of it, really.”
Fleetwood nodded slowly. “Well,” he said, “that explains something at least. I wondered a little about Lady Atwater’s . . . I suppose you could say, fortitude—in the face of her husband’s death. But if she’d just been having a knock-down with him . . . Well, cheerio.”
Mr. Pinkerton watched his tall rather pompous figure move up the curving street, past the window of the flower shop, and out of sight. And suddenly, as he stood there, still gazing absently at the empty space where Mr. Fleetwood’s frame had disappeared, he blinked, swallowed, and ran a dry finger round the inside of his narrow celluloid collar, which had all at once got very constricting indeed. For, if one thing was truer and more to the point than another, it was that neither of the Fleetwoods ever got along with Lady Atwater. And even apart from that, he himself had just come, quite accidentally you could call it, into possession of what might easily be a very important bit of evidence, which he should have rushed at once to Inspector Bull with; and not only had he not done that, he had immediately blurted it out, on the very first opportunity, to a man who was a perfect stranger to him . . . to whom he had never said a word in his life.
Why, he thought dismally, had he ever allowed himself to commit such a perfectly appalling indiscretion . . . particularly after all he had already done to Inspector Bull? The mere thought of it literally staggered him.
He steadied his small frame against the retaining wall. Cap Gris Nez was beyond him in the far-off mist. His own nose, immediately in front of him, was quivering like a frightened rabbit’s. He stood there a moment, thinking desperately what he could do to remedy such a really dreadful thing, then scurried up the winding road and retraced his steps through the muddy cobbled streets until he came again to the old pump. He passed the church with its two winging buttresses and crossed hurriedly over the Square, hardly so much as glancing at the ruined tower of Ypres Castle above the Gungarden. He was too much occupied with the necessity of finding Inspector Bull immediately. That seemed to involve the immediate and even grimmer necessity of going alone and unprotected into the police station. He knew people quite well who could walk into police stations without a moment’s qualm, and he also knew quite well that he was not one of them.
Nevertheless, he straightened his string tie, moistened his lips, went quickly down to the door and opened it. The man at the desk did not look up; he was engrossed in examining, with another man in tunic and helmet, the contents of a wicker basket in front of him. Bull was not visible. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated, and took a step backwards. The constable turned then. It was the young chap who had let Mr. Ross slip out the kitchen door. He put down the crumpled mackintosh he had in his hand and grinned at the little man.
“We found them, all right,” he said. “Under a stoop in the Needles. Basket, skirt, mac and all.”
Mr. Pinkerton nodded mechanically. “But the man? Did you get
him?” he asked nervously.
The policeman laughed. “He didn’t get far, sir. As far as the Wish, was all.”
Mr. Pinkerton recollected the row of small tenement dwellings in the lower part of town on the road to Hastings, and the frowsy bed-and-breakfast placards in their windows. However, he reflected hastily, it was not Mr. Ross he was concerned with.
“Inspector Bull isn’t about, is he?” he asked nervously.
“He was here. He’s been gone some little time.”
“Thank you very much,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He backed out, closed the door and hurried back to the street.
CHAPTER 26
As he opened the gate he glanced across the churchyard to Mrs. Bruce’s cottage. She was just coming out, and she hesitated, recognizing him across the Square. He really, he thought, had not got much time to stop and talk to her, but he couldn’t very well just rush along with no explanation of any kind. He crossed the street again and rounded the churchyard wall.
She watched him come, first with a smile, as if he were some scurtling figure of fun, and, as he came nearer, with an expression of dismay and even alarm displacing the amusement on her lovely face.
“Has . . . has something happened?” she asked quickly.
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Pinkerton said ruefully. “It’s me. I’ve been most frightfully indiscreet again. I’m afraid I’ve got Lady Atwater into no end of trouble.”
“Come in—have you time?” she asked.
Bull’s heavy face, rosy in the firelight, came into his mind. “What’s done is done,” he had said.
“Well,” Mr. Pinkerton said, “what’s done is done, I’m afraid.”
He felt his tone was without the philosophical conviction that Bull’s had had. He put his hat on the stool under the mirror in the entry hall and went on into Mrs. Bruce’s cheery little drawing room.
“What have you done?” Sally Bruce asked anxiously.