Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel

by Zenith Brown

  “Well, you see,” he said, “Kathleen was telling me about what her husband, that’s the Ogle chap, overheard in the chimney cupboard. Lady Atwater was giving Sir Lionel what for, as we say. It was after Mr. Fleetwood had seen him. So you see, he wasn’t the last person to see him at all, and Lady Atwater isn’t being . . . well—”

  “Entirely frank,” Mrs. Bruce suggested, with a faintly ironic light in her grey eyes.

  “I expect that is it.” Mr. Pinkerton agreed, reluctantly. However, he had thought of a stronger way of putting it himself.

  Sally Bruce bit her red lower lip thoughtfully.

  “I wonder,” she said slowly.

  “Oh, I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, at all,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “All I mean is,” she replied, “it doesn’t sound like her, does it?”

  Her clear eyes met his soberly.

  “I don’t know what the facts are. But you see, that wasn’t the way she managed him—by giving him what for. That was the one way he couldn’t be managed. If everything people say about him is true.”

  “But . . . I’m sure Kathleen wasn’t telling me an untruth,” Mr. Pinkerton protested.

  “She told you?”

  He nodded.

  “And her husband had told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, don’t you see,” she cried quickly, “Harry Ogle may have been telling an . . . an untruth! Or he may have been mistaken! Oh, don’t you see? It just doesn’t sound like Lady Atwater at all—she just couldn’t have done it! And it does sound most frightfully like . . .”

  She stopped, her high cheeks flushing warmly.

  Mr. Pinkerton understood instantly. “Like Mrs. Darcy Atwater,” he finished eagerly. “Of course it does. But what would she . . .”

  He stopped and stared at her. “Well, for goodness sake!” he cried.

  He sat there, completely deflated, trying mechanically in his own mind to readjust the pawns in the game of life and death that was being played in the old house on the western cliff of the rocky island town in the Marsh.

  “But . . . that doesn’t make sense,” he said at last. “It really doesn’t. Because last night, she thought somebody was trying to murder her. She let out the most awful screech, in the middle of the night. She’d got herself barricaded in her room, the lights on and her window shut tight. If she’d done it herself she wouldn’t have been so dreadfully afraid, would she?”

  He looked into her impersonal grey eyes.

  “It depends on what she’s afraid of,” Sally Bruce said quietly.

  Mr. Pinkerton blinked.

  “Dear me,” he said weakly.

  “I think you’d better rush along and tell your friend the Inspector about it,” she went on. “It’s too much for me, but I don’t believe people just quit running true to form that way.”

  Mr. Pinkerton picked up his hat. She opened the door and stood watching him hurry breathlessly across the Square to Watchbell Street.

  A few moments later he dashed breathlessly still into the Old Angel, and came to an abrupt stop. Inspector Kirtin was in the lounge, with Detective-Sergeant York. Between them was the tall figure in the worn Bond Street tweeds of Mr. Ross. Mr. Pinkerton blinked, looked a second time and blinked again. One of his wrists was linked inconspicuously to Sergeant York’s. The elbow of his other arm rested on the arm of his chair, his head was bent forward despondently in his hand.

  Mr. Pinkerton looked about for Bull. He was nowhere in sight. He then glanced discreetly into Mrs. Humpage’s office. He was not there either. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated, greatly worried and perplexed. Perhaps, he thought then, glancing furtively at the silent trio in front of the casement windows opening on the end of Watchbell Street, perhaps it wasn’t as important as he had thought. Then he thought of what Kathleen had said—“I keep hearing that poor lady scream. I’m so frightened!”—and he knew it was important. And whatever Mr. Ross had done, it hadn’t changed that at all.

  He glanced again at Inspector Kirtin’s broad back and Mr. Ross’s bent head, and slipped quickly along the panelled passage to the door of the parlour lounge. He heard men’s voices from inside, glanced back nervously, and opened the door. Then he stood there, petrified with embarrassment. It wasn’t Inspector Bull at all that he had interrupted. It was Jeffrey Atwater and his brother Darcy. They were standing close together in front of the fire. Darcy Atwater stopped talking abruptly when the little man’s face appeared in the doorway, but Mr. Pinkerton’s stricken ears had already caught three words of what he had been saying: “. . . to have half.”

  They both turned startled faces to the astonished little Welshman. Then Darcy Atwater grinned.

  “My pal!” he said. “Come in, Mr. Davies. I was just telling my brother he could have half the Atwater estate. Damned white of me, what?”

  He looked at Jeffrey Atwater with an embarrassed affectionate grin, and Jeffrey’s face was flushed, his blue eyes full of complex emotion.

  “I’m . . . so sorry,” Mr. Pinkerton stammered painfully. “I’m . . . hunting Inspector Bull. I thought he was here. I’m very sorry, really.”

  He backed out, wondering, with a kind of desperate excitement, whether at last the whole thing wasn’t so clear, so utterly clear, that it was almost blinding. He hurried back to the front lounge. Jo was there, busily engaged in watering the rubber tree—not with his tears but with a long-nosed watering can, one ear cocked toward the three men in the window.

  “Have you seen Inspector Bull?” Mr. Pinkerton whispered breathlessly.

  “ ’E’s upstairs, in ’er Lydyship’s sittin’ room,” the boy whispered back, quite as blandly as a castle butler.

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded, sped up the stairs and along the hall. Mr. Eric Fleetwood was coming out of his room, pushing his handkerchief into his coat sleeve.

  He nodded as the little man stopped.

  “I’m . . . afraid I made a terrible mistake,” Mr. Pinkerton stammered, the words tumbling off his tongue like a handful of hollow marbles. “Have you . . . have you told anyone?”

  Mr. Fleetwood looked down at him with an almost comical twinkle in his eyes.

  “Not a soul,” he said solemnly. “Not a soul. Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t Lady Atwater at all,” Mr. Pinkerton said hurriedly. “I’m . . . I’m sure it wasn’t. I was just . . . just jumping to conclusions.”

  Fleetwood grinned. “No harm done,” he said. “I’ve not breathed it.”

  Mr. Pinkerton took an enormous breath of relief, or rather a breath of enormous relief. He took out his purple handkerchief then, and wiped his glistening forehead.

  “Oh, dear, I am glad!” he said shakily.

  Then he pulled himself together with a great effort.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I want to see Inspector Bull. He’s in Lady Atwater’s room.”

  “I’m just heading in there myself,” Fleetwood said. He patted Mr. Pinkerton’s narrow shoulder.

  “Easy does it,” he said, with a chuckle. “Take a deep breath—one, two, three.”

  He rapped lightly on Lady Atwater’s door. Her gentle “Come in!” came faintly through the stout oak. Fleetwood lifted the latch, and to Mr. Pinkerton’s surprise stood aside for him to go in first. He took a step forward, and stopped, faltering.

  Kathleen was sitting on the sofa beside her former mistress, and she had been crying. Lady Atwater’s frail transparent hand was closed over her red work-roughened hand. Inspector Bull standing at the end of the chimney-piece, his elbow on the old oak mantel, looked up at them soberly. Mr. Pinkerton took a step inside, and stood nervously turning the hard brim of his brown bowler round and round in his hands. Fleetwood started to close the door, glanced back and waited. Mr. Pinkerton could hear the sound of footsteps along the corridor. In an instant Jeffrey Atwater and Darcy appeared.

  As Fleetwood closed the door, Inspector Bull glanced around at each of their faces, his blue eyes resting a little longer, a little more so
berly, on the little grey Welshman than they did on the others.

  “Will you ask Pamela to come in, please, Darcy,” Lady Atwater said quietly.

  Darcy Atwater gave her a startled slightly puzzled look, put the cigarette he had taken back in his case, put the case back in his pocket.

  “Righto,” he said. He put his hand on the latch, and turned back. “I say,” he said earnestly, “you’re not going to give her another dressing down, after last night, are you? I mean, she’s not up to it. She’s jolly well crocked now, I mean, really.”

  “Inspector Bull wants to talk to her, Darcy,” Lady Atwater said calmly. “I think you’ll find she’s quite up to it.”

  He went out. Mr. Pinkerton, through the not quite shut door, heard his steps along the hall and around into the next corridor, and could hear him open his wife’s door, and even his voice as he spoke to her.

  “I say, old thing. That bobbie fellow—”

  The heavy door closing shut him off. Mr. Pinkerton glanced at Bull, wondering if he would particularly care about being called a bobbie fellow. If he did not, there was no indication of it in his stolid face. He was looking at Eric Fleetwood, who was blowing the dust off a quarto volume of the History of London. He had just put it down, and taken up another volume, and raised it to his lips to blow the dust off it, when Mr. Pinkerton heard the door round the corridor smash open, and then heard Darcy Atwater’s scream.

  “Jeff—Bull!”

  His voice, agonized and terrified and frantic, tore through the morning silence of the old inn.

  “Jeffrey!”

  Bull was across the room and out in two long strides, Jeffrey Atwater and Fleetwood at his heels. Mr. Pinkerton, frozen immobile with horror and fright, saw Lady Atwater’s face go pale as death, her hand tighten on the red fist of the little chambermaid. She tried to get up, and sank back on the sofa. Mr. Pinkerton, his head reeling dizzily, ran out into the hall and round the corner. They were standing there, frozen stark in the doorway of Mrs. Darcy Atwater’s room. Mr. Pinkerton hurried along, and pushed in between Jeffrey Atwater and Fleetwood. He stopped there, suddenly ill to his very soul.

  Darcy Atwater was kneeling on the floor, motionless, beside the four-poster bed, Inspector Bull standing over him. Lying across the blankets, still disordered from the night, lay Pamela Atwater, her large limp body sprawled horribly over the big bed. Her head was thrown back, and her black swollen tongue protruded from her mouth. One of her own silk stockings was knotted cruelly round her mottled throat above the opening of her silk blouse.

  Mr. Pinkerton saw Bull wrench it loose. He picked up her wrist quickly, held it for a long hopeless instant. Mr. Pinkerton watching in cold horror saw him lay her hand gently down, reach forward and draw the sheet over her contorted face.

  CHAPTER 27

  Some time later Mr. Evan Pinkerton, still shattered by that awful face on the bed, and still more than a little distraught at the mild but annihilating way Inspector Bull had dismissed him from the scene there, sat on the oak settle in front of his empty grate in his own frigid chamber in the Old Angel. He could hear people moving about in the lounge below. The wind, whistling down the Caen stone chimney, blew the ashes out onto his hearth, rattled the casements, moaned in the leaden eaves-troughs. Mr. Pinkerton stared nervously at the panel. It was only too easy for him, whenever the wind buffeted any part of the ancient house on the cliff, overlooking the grey ruins of Camber Castle out in the Marsh, to hear footsteps in those narrow stairs behind the old oak. He got up eventually, bracing himself to it, pushed at the molding below and tried to open the panel. It was fast shut, at long last, he thought.

  He moved away and sat on the side of his canopied bed, staring unhappily at it. If he had never in the world really thought of himself as a . . . a nervous man, he did so now. It was, in fact, rather more than he could bear, being all alone by himself here in the gloomy room, with dreadful murder stalking unchecked through the house. He got up, opened his door and peered out and down into the lounge. Surely, he thought, there couldn’t be any very great harm in his going down there with the others.

  He slipped quietly out, pulled his door to, crept down the stairs as noiselessly as he could considering the weight of his nearly regulation boots, and stole, as unobtrusively as he could, to his seat under the rubber tree. Detective-Sergeant York was still sitting stolidly there with Mr. Ross. Inspector Kirtin was gone. Mr. Pinkerton could hear them upstairs still. He settled himself nervously and took out the large red morocco case with his name in gold on it that the grateful Chinese gentleman in Limehouse had given him, after one memorable occasion on which he had played a part considerably more flattering to his own small ego than he had in the present instance. He opened it and took out the large and very handsome pipe, with solid gold band, that it contained. It had always made him ill, the few times he had essayed nonchalance in smoking it, but it had a certain air. Furthermore, he could not, for the life of him, think of anything else to do.

  Mr. Pinkerton had just put its substantial stem between his teeth when he took it out again. A car had pulled up in front of the Old Angel, two men got out and came in the door. Mr. Pinkerton blinked. One of them was the man he’d seen in the parlour lounge with Sir Charles Debenham, the Assistant Commissioner, the night before. The other man was his one-time fellow guest at the Old Angel, the former Pinkerton man and present traveller in vacuum cleaners, as well as erstwhile fugitive from Scotland Yard, Mr. McPherson. Mr. Pinkerton glanced again at the handcuffed form of Mr. Ross. He had looked up abruptly as the two came in, and the expression on his face was so unpleasant that Mr. Pinkerton’s pipe nearly fell out of his hands.

  Mr. McPherson did not look particularly pleased either. His face was flushed and sullen. He shrugged as the man with him took his arm and pushed him down into a chair. Mr. Pinkerton glanced from one of them to the other in bewildered amazement. Then, suddenly, something seemed to have happened to the old inn. The door opened again, Sally Bruce came in. She smiled quickly at the little man by the rubber plant and went into Mrs. Humpage’s office. Mr. Pinkerton, a little open-mouthed, glanced about. Inspector Kirtin was coming down the steps from the Atwaters’ side of the inn. Behind him was Darcy Atwater and his brother, with Mr. Eric Fleetwood. Behind them appeared Kathleen and Inspector Bull, and last the police surgeon.

  Mr. Pinkerton blinked, clutching his gold-banded pipe.

  Inspector Bull gave one glance at Mr. Ross and Mr. McPherson and nodded to the man with them whom Mr. Pinkerton had seen with Sir Charles Debenham. Inspector Kirtin stepped across the lounge and took his place, the man followed Bull into the office. Bull looked out in a moment and signed to Jeffrey Atwater, who left his brother and went over to him. The door closed behind them, leaving Mr. Pinkerton staring still more, a strange feeling of excitement clutching more tenaciously at his heart. The others stood aimlessly about. Darcy Atwater cast a longing glance at the bar, and certainly, Mr. Pinkerton thought, looked as if a bracer would do him no harm. It wouldn’t, however, he realized quickly, have looked very well under the circumstances . . . which is why he was a little surprised, and even shocked, a moment later, when the tow-thatched potboy came out of the dining room bringing him at least a quadruple portion of something in a glass. Darcy Atwater splashed a tiny amount of soda in it and poured it down his throat.

  Mr. Pinkerton glanced anxiously through the smooth pads of the rubber plant to the office door, put his pipe in his mouth again, and took it out. The door opened, Sally Bruce and Jeffrey Atwater came out, followed by Bull and the other man. The American girl’s face was pale. Mr. Pinkerton realized instantly that of course she had not heard till that moment that Pamela Atwater had been killed. There was nothing but horror in her wide grey eyes.

  Bull moved directly over to where Mr. McPherson was still sitting sullenly in his chair. He looked at Mrs. Bruce.

  “Is this the man, miss?” he asked calmly.

  Sally Bruce glanced at Mr. McPherson for a bare instant, and nodde
d. Atwater’s face flushed.

  Bull turned to the traveller in vacuum cleaners.

  “You were employed by Mrs. Darcy Atwater to report on this young lady, were you not?” he asked.

  Mr. McPherson looked, very nearly as stolidly as Bull himself, Mr. Pinkerton thought, barring the slightly sinister expression round his lips, at the American girl.

  “Yes. I was.”

  “That was in your capacity as private detective?”

  Mr. McPherson nodded.

  “And . . . you have another capacity,” Bull said soberly. He turned back, addressing Jeff Atwater. Mr. Pinkerton hastily put his pipe in its case, and the case in his pocket, and edged dangerously far forward in his chair.

  “There was an odd kind of . . . half-coincidence,” Bull said slowly. “I mean, a coincidence that in a way wasn’t one at all, that chanced to bring all of us together here. Three people have been killed, by violence, in this inn. It so happens that they were killed—some of them, at any rate—during the presence here of one well-known criminal, and two lesser criminals. I have been interested, for some time, in working with the Special Branch in . . . Mr. McPherson’s activities. As you all know, there is an arrangement with the French that people may go from Brighton to Calais, for a day return, without the formality of a passport. For some time, even before the papers took it up this summer, it has been known that a number of undesirables from the other side managed to slip past the immigration officials at Brighton. If they looked English at all, and spoke the necessary few words of identification, they could slip through, in the holiday press.”

  Mr. Pinkerton stole a furtive glance at Mr. Ross in his Bond Street tweeds.

  “Some of them had friends in this country to take them in. Others who had money enough needed some kind of an agent in this country to help them after they arrived. Mr. McPherson’s lawful activity as a private enquiry agent, which took him abroad frequently, and his lawful activity as a traveller that took him along the coast from Southampton to Dover, made—as we’ve known for some time—a very good blind for his illegal activity as that kind of an agent for undesirables.