Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel

by Zenith Brown

  “He followed the simple procedure of establishing his clients at country inns. It is a little doubtful if he could have done that, at a place such as this, without assistance from some person connected with the inns. I imagine, in this instance, the authorities will have the idea that Mr. McPherson played here on a kind if foolish heart. Mrs. Humpage, I believe, did not know she was harbouring criminals—she thought she was helping refugees persecuted by their own countries.”

  Mr. Pinkerton, sitting as far forward as he could conceivably get, thought of that ten-pound note he had seen Mrs. Humpage take from Mr. Ross, for a week’s lodging, and wondered. Then he thought of her harbouring Kathleen, and protecting her ill-advised marriage to Harry Ogle, and mentally scored a white mark for Mrs. Humpage in spite of his coals.

  “And while both Mr. McPherson and the gentleman known as ‘Mr. Ross,’ who is wanted in his country for forgery and bank-robbery, were in this inn, Sir Lionel Atwater was killed,” Inspector Bull went on deliberately. “McPherson was here—it was in following him, of course, that I came—both to look out for his client from the other shore, and to serve his client Mrs. Darcy Atwater. He was quite familiar with Rye, for he had been back and forth here for a year or more, at Mrs. Atwater’s behest, trying to make out a case against Mrs. Bruce that would further influence Sir Lionel against her.”

  “And she saw him here the night she came.”

  Mr. McPherson spoke quickly.

  “I didn’t talk to her,” he said. “You can ask her. She’ll tell you.”

  “She is dead,” Bull said laconically.

  McPherson’s jaw sagged. Mr. Pinkerton caught the quick furtive glance he cast his client Mr. Ross.

  “Sir Lionel Atwater,” Bull repeated, “was killed. The night he was killed, Mr. McPherson was in this inn. And the gentleman who has been called ‘Mr. Ross’ was in the inn. And furthermore, Sir Lionel Atwater was heard, that same evening, to make a violent and contemptuous reference to ‘foreign scum’.”

  McPherson stared at him, the beads of cold perspiration rising on his forehead; and, as if not understanding precisely but sensing from him what was going on, Mr. Ross stared at him too.

  “Look here,” McPherson said quickly. “You’re not going to pin these—”

  Inspector Bull looked down at him soberly.

  “We don’t pin things on people,” he said. “No. You neither of you killed Sir Lionel, or Harry Ogle, or Mrs. Darcy Atwater.”

  He turned back, again addressing himself to Jeffrey Atwater.

  “It was apparent from the beginning, of course, that no situation outside the situation in the Atwater family was responsible for what has happened here in the last few days. It was, very simply and entirely, that, in a rather odd way, the situation in the Atwater family . . . came here to a blow-up.

  “The deaths of Harry Ogle and of Mrs. Darcy Atwater were hurried, opportunist and cold-blooded attempts on the part of the murderer to silence evidence against him, no more nor less. The business of Harry Ogle’s marriage, his losing his job, his fear that Sir Lionel would cause him to lose his job, was like the McPherson-Ross business. It had nothing whatever to do, beyond useless complication that the police are familiar with, with the deaths of these people. We go back, therefore, to the murder of Sir Lionel Atwater.”

  Mr. Pinkerton mechanically took out his case, and took out his gold-banded pipe with shaking hands.

  “And the key to the murder of Sir Lionel,” Inspector Bull went on soberly, his blue eyes travelling with the utmost mildness from face to face round the Old Angel’s lounge, “has been, from the very beginning, Mrs. Darcy Atwater.—And here again, there was a useless complication . . . useless, that is, from the point of view of any connection with the basic events here. Mrs. Atwater disliked, intensely, the idea of Mr. Jeffrey’s marriage to Mrs. Bruce . . . for she had a reasoned fear that Mrs. Bruce might succeed in reconciling her husband and his father. Mrs. Atwater had, above all, a passion to have her husband—which meant, of course, herself—the head of the family. To prevent old Sir Lionel’s changing his mind about the estate, and to get the Atwater Collection for her husband as head of the family, those were the twin forces which motivated Mrs. Darcy Atwater. And neither of them, oddly enough, had the least connection with all the things that have gone on here.

  “The secondary key to the solution of Sir Lionel’s murder,” he went on deliberately, “was Harry Ogle. He was terrified lest it should be discovered that his wife was here, that they were married, that he would consequently lose his post in the bank. He listened to the Atwaters’ conversations. There is an interior staircase running up and down on either side of the interior stone fireplace; there is an interior window opening into the sitting room that Sir Lionel occupied, a cupboard covering it in the room. When that window was opened, any talk in the room was easily heard from that staircase—And Harry Ogle, listening there the night, and at virtually the exact time, that Sir Lionel was killed, heard a woman—Lady Atwater—giving him ‘what for,’ as he said, after Mr. Fleetwood had left him.

  “Let us take these things in order. Mr. Fleetwood sees Sir Lionel, and is instructed by him to start action to persuade Mr. Jeffrey Atwater to leave the country and give up the Collection. Lady Atwater is later overheard quarrelling violently with Sir Lionel. Sir Lionel is, later still, found murdered.

  “But at the outset there is one of those three steps that is psychologically improbable in the extreme . . . namely, that Lady Atwater would be quarrelling violently with her husband. She had lived with him for many years, she knew him thoroughly, she managed him implicitly and absolutely . . . not by quarrelling with him, but by gentleness and tact. She knew well that he could not be quarrelled with; he couldn’t be driven. There was, however, another woman, of a strong, decisive and passionate nature, who might be very likely indeed to quarrel with Sir Lionel, if any point should rise that would rouse her—namely, of course, Mrs. Darcy Atwater. There could hardly, from the first moment at which it was known that Harry Ogle had overheard a woman quarrelling there, be the slightest doubt that he had mistaken the identity of the woman. It was not Lady Atwater, as he’d assumed; it was Mrs. Darcy Atwater.”

  Mr. Pinkerton glanced involuntarily at the American girl, sitting by Jeff Atwater, her hand clasping his.

  “But what reason,” Inspector Bull said, “could she have for quarrelling with him? There could be two. She had discovered that Sir Lionel approved the marriage of his elder son with the American Mrs. Bruce. That is a possibility. But there is a much stronger possibility. It has been Lady Atwater’s belief from the beginning that Lord Atwater did not intend his act of cutting his elder son entirely out of his estate to be permanent. He intended it as a threat, a warning; but he fully planned, eventually, to change his will. Mrs. Atwater was, as a rule, ingratiating to Sir Lionel: his approval of his elder son’s marriage would hardly have caused her to quarrel violently with him. But, if he had changed his mind about the will, if he had told her, when she came in, after Mr. Fleetwood, that he was revoking the will, to give Mr. Jeffrey Atwater what he lawfully deserved, then she would have quarrelled with him very violently indeed.

  “And that,” Inspector Bull continued placidly, “is what happened, for nothing else explains the circumstances, and all the circumstances. She quarrelled violently with him, being overheard by Harry Ogle. She went out and went to her room . . . and she did not know who had killed Sir Lionel Atwater . . . until she heard the inquest the following day. Then she knew.

  “And . . . one other person knew. For Harry Ogle also had heard the inquest.”

  Mr. Evan Pinkerton, on the edge of his chair, rubbed his eyes and tried to still his quickening heart, thinking desperately and totally bewildered.

  Inspector Bull looked steadily down at young Mr. Darcy Atwater.

  “It could hardly have been out of Mr. Darcy Atwater’s mind,” he said slowly, “for some time, but particularly that day, that Sir Lionel was on the point of changing his will.
He had heard him talk to Mrs. Bruce. He had heard him send his elder son home with her. He knew the opinion of Lady Atwater, who knew her husband better than any other person. He has the greatest respect for the acumen of his wife . . . and by all those tokens, being intelligent himself, he could not have been unaware that his father’s intention, to leave the great bulk of his estate to him permanently, was on the verge of being modified.”

  Mr. Pinkerton, stealing a glance at Mr. Darcy Atwater, saw that he was very pale.

  “But Mr. Darcy Atwater is heavily in debt. He had borrowed large sums, probably larger than we were able to discover, on post-obit bonds, payable on his father’s death. He did not have access to his wife’s fortune, as he now has. He could easily see no other way to pay sums, vast for an ordinary person, that he had borrowed on his future, at large rates of interest. And Mrs. Darcy Atwater told him about her interview with his father—I am right, am I not, sir?”

  Darcy Atwater’s voice was choked, his face ghastly white.

  “Oh, I say, Inspector,” he stammered. “I say, that is a bit thick! I—”

  Inspector Bull interrupted soberly.

  “It would be very easy to make a case out against you, sir—only it would be a false case. For you did not kill your father, or the other two. Last night Mrs. Atwater heard some one stirring; and she screamed, thinking she was about to be attacked by the murderer of Sir Lionel. That cry of hers betrayed the fact that she did fear the person who had got up . . . and she was silenced at the earliest possible moment. Not by her husband, who had borrowed money that he had no way of repaying if his father’s will was changed . . . but by the person who had loaned him large sums of money that he had to get back to cover his own heavy losses, and had to get back quickly. By the person who is perjurer as well as murderer; by the person who dropped in Jeffrey Atwater’s path the note written him by Harry Ogle . . . who like Mrs. Atwater had heard him say, under oath, that Sir Lionel had instructed him to take further steps to disinherit his elder son—”

  There was a sudden movement, and running desperate footsteps.

  “The doors are all locked, Mr. Eric Fleetwood,” Bull said quietly. “Sir Lionel did not tell you to take such steps. Your testimony was false from the beginning. He told you exactly what he said, later, in the hearing of two people—namely, just the opposite of what you falsely said. Even as Sir Lionel died, he said, in the hearing of a third person: ‘My son . . . my heir’; meaning ‘I want my son to be my heir, in spite of what I have done.’ And you knew that unless he died before he changed his will, your bonds would not only not be paid at once, they would be quite worthless. And you went back . . .”

  Mr. Pinkerton heard the click of another pair of steely handcuffs, and swallowed, blinking his eyes very vigorously, and reached down with nerveless fingers to pick up his pipe, which had fallen with a horrid clatter to the floor.

  CHAPTER 28

  It was the next day that Mr. Pinkerton had to undergo the ordeal of tea in Lady Atwater’s sitting room in the Old Angel, supported, it is true, by Jeffrey Atwater and Mrs. Bruce, and Mr. Darcy Atwater, as well as Inspector Bull of Scotland Yard.

  He balanced a cup and plate and dripping muffin in inadequate hands, trying vainly to look as stolid as the Inspector.

  “I was sitting next to Ogle at the inquest,” Bull was saying. “I should have seen it then. But I thought it was just his own situation that had him shaking. I should have seen it was Fleetwood’s testimony. Then when I heard Fleetwood talking to Mrs. Atwater, I should have got it from that, I expect—each deceiving the other. But when I got Kathleen’s story from her, I knew what it was all about.”

  Lady Atwater shook her old head slowly.

  “It wasn’t ever the way to deal with him, Inspector. I learned that years ago.”

  “I’m afraid I thought it was you, ma’am, for a while,” Bull said, quite shamelessly in Mr. Pinkerton’s opinion.

  Lady Atwater nodded. “I could have done it, many times.”

  She looked at her elder son with a tired smile.

  “I couldn’t understand it. Eric had no reason that I knew for not telling the truth. And yet it had seemed to me all his blustering and calling Sally a vixen meant that he’d been charmed with her.”

  She looked at the future Mrs. Jeffrey Atwater, and smiled. “—As he should have been, naturally.”

  She turned to Darcy.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to have money, darling. There was enough for both of you. I knew you’d do just what you’ve done.”

  Darcy Atwater flushed in embarrassment. “I mean, jolly unfair, what? I mean, I’ve always said so.”

  He grinned sheepishly at his brother and Sally Bruce.

  “I say, mother, I’ve jolly well got to have something more sustainin’ than this to drink their healths in.”

  Lady Atwater, smiling, reached for the bell.

  “I hope nothing will happen to Mrs. Humpage, Inspector,” she said. “She’s really a very kind woman. I believe her story about taking these people in, really.”

  Inspector Bull nodded, with his most deceptive mildness, and that frank look in his eyes that had often made Mr. Pinkerton shudder.

  “I imagine she’ll be all right, ma’am. She’s turned a . . . a sort of unofficial King’s Evidence. She’ll come out all right.”

  “And Kathleen?”

  Bull smiled, quite genuinely.

  “Sergeant York seems to have taken that situation in hand, ma’am,” he said.

  His face clouded suddenly. “There’s just one point I don’t make out, Lady Atwater. Mr. Pinkerton heard your husband say, ‘Foreign scum!’ Did he—”

  The three Atwaters looked at one another for an instant.

  Lady Atwater smiled. “He was just reading the evening paper, Inspector. That was his usual comment.”

  Sally Bruce laughed infectiously.

  “God bless Englonde and ye town of Rye,” she said.

  “And the British Empire,” added Jeff Atwater, with a grin.

  * * * *

  Inspector Bull put Mr. Pinkerton’s suitcase in the boot of the Police car, and settled down beside him. “London,” he said to the driver.

  They sat in silence, the two of them, the big man in cinnamon-brown Harris tweed, and the little man in his grey fifty-shilling overcoat from the Strand. The car gathered speed along the Hastings road over the Marsh, and up the steep hill under the Strand Gate to the ancient town of Winchelsea.

  Inspector Bull took out his pipe.

  “You’ve certainly been a big help to me, Mr. Pinkerton,” he said, placidly.

  Mr. Pinkerton blinked his watery grey eyes, and adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles. He didn’t precisely know how to take it. He never did quite know. Suspecting the worst, he glanced over furtively . . . and drew a special breath of deep relief as he saw the blue vestige of the shadow of a twinkle in Inspector Bulls mild eyes.