Two Against Scotland Yard: A Mr. Pinkerton Mystery

by Zenith Brown

  Bull would not have been English if he had not had at heart much the same belief.

  “Had they quarrelled at all that day he was killed?”

  “Rather.”

  “When?”

  “When they were dressing to go to Windsor for dinner.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, I didn’t hear it all, but I heard him say if she left the top off the toothpaste again she could leave his house. And stay.”

  For the first time Bull felt some sympathy for the dead man.

  “Was he always cross?”

  “No. Sometimes he was lovely, when they pleased him. His wife and daughter. Mostly they’d just set themselves up to provoke him.”

  “But still, it’s quite another thing to say she killed him.”

  Miss Gaskin’s lips set and her eyes gleamed.

  “So she and Peskett could go away together. They did it. He’s not a driver. He’s above that. And she was always as nice as pie to him. Never treated him like a servant.”

  That, Bull found by careful questioning, was the total reason for Miss Gaskin’s belief. As it came out in the course of the questioning that she was out of work he added, to some sound advice about anonymous letters, one of the Crown’s pound notes. Of Mrs. Copeins and Miss Gaskin, he thought, one was a much better judge of character than the other. Which it was he had little doubt, though he hated to admit it to himself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mr. Oliver Peskett was in his room over the garage that George Colton had built in what had been the side garden of his home. Now and then he looked up from the work he was doing and listened intently. Once he heard steps on the pavement below. He moved quickly from the door and thrust the tools he was working with under his jacket lying on the table. He stepped to the small casement window overlooking the court yard and peered through the curtains. He waited until he saw the retreating figure of the fishmonger’s boy, and then went quietly and quickly back to his work. A few minutes later he brushed the fine wood dust from the floor in front of the door leading down into the garage, and put the brace and bit and screw-driver into the drawer of his wardrobe. He washed his hands in the bowl in a corner of the room and put on a grey tweed coat and soft hat.

  Oliver Peskett had very much the air of a man who wasn’t quite sure in his own mind if everything was, as he would have said, O. K. He examined the small book he had taken from his bureau and put it in his waistcoat pocket. He looked around the room and finally, with something of a devil-may-care shrug of his shoulders, opened the door and went out. He locked it and put the key in his pocket. He went down a few steps, stopped, and with a curious calculating smile at the corners of his mouth came back up the steps and unlocked the door again. He did not go inside; he merely pressed the catch of the Yale lock and closed the door. Then he tried it. He went downstairs still smiling.

  When he came out into the street his face was normally serious and he was apparently unconcerned with the possible consequences of leaving his door unlocked for anyone who cared to enter while he was away.

  He glanced very naturally down the road before turning up into it. No one was in sight except a postman with his letter sack by the pillar-box on the corner. Peskett kept on. At Sloane-square he entered the Underground and took a ticket to Piccadilly-circus. From Piccadilly-circus he walked by a roundabout way to Covent-garden. At Covent-garden he entered the Tube. He got off at Holborn and took a bus to Tottenham Court-road. At Tottenham Court-road he took a second bus, which he left at Camden-town.

  At Camden-town Oliver Peskett, without even a glance around him, walked directly to the Camden-town branch of the Midland Provincial Bank, and deposited a roll of notes which he dragged out of his coat pocket. Not far from him stood a postman who had come in just after him, and who proceeded to engage a young clerk in conversation about the M.C.C. in South Africa. The postman thought the M.C.C, were getting too old. The clerk thought Jack Hobbs could still get his centuries as well as anybody, and could do so even if he had a broken leg. The postman thought nevertheless it was time for the youngsters to have a chance. The clerk demanded, “Where are the youngsters?” At that point Peskett pocketed his pass book and went out; and the postman changed the subject abruptly and asked to see the manager. The clerk looked at him with open mouth.

  A harassed manager let his glance fall on the postman’s card, and in two minutes Oliver Peskett’s account, under the name of Orrin Perkins as it happened, was brought out. In nine days deposits had been made amounting to £.300. The sums had been presented invariably in the form of one-pound notes, £ 50 at a time. The postman picked up the telephone, called New Scotland Yard and gave Inspector Bull the first welcome news he had heard for some days.

  Mr. Peskett returned to Cadogan-square by a less circuitous route, went out to the garage, climbed the stairs, opened his door, and stood in the doorway. Inspector Bull sat placidly at the window, smoking a cigarette.

  “Good morning, Mr. Peskett,” he said. “Thought I’d come around and have a talk with you. Found the door open, so I walked in.”

  “Morning,” said Peskett. He came in and hung his hat up on the back of the door. “Found the old boy’s diamonds?”

  “Not yet. I thought perhaps you could help me.”

  The chauffeur grinned amiably.

  “Not me,” he said.

  Bull watched him with mild blue eyes.

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought you’d be able to. Tell me about the £300 in the Camden bank.”

  Peskett took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared with badly concealed surprise and chagrin at the Inspector.

  “You see,” Bull went on, “you’ve put quite a lot of money away out there. One pound notes always. Now considering what’s happened, the Criminal Investigation Department would rather like to know where you got it.”

  Peskett grinned as amiably as before, and lighted a second cigarette.

  “Oh, a gift,” he said cheerfully. “A bequest—wealthy old aunt, grandmother, what have you. In fact, Inspector, it’s just none of the what-you-may-call-it’s business.”

  “We’ll have to make it so, I’m afraid,” said Bull as cheerfully. “Now what about it? Better for you in the long run.”

  The chauffeur was silent for an instant. He stood in the centre of the little room, returning Bull’s mild glance with one more calculating than hostile, and not in the least afraid.

  “He knows where he stands,” Bull thought with a glow of satisfaction. There was nothing he liked better than to have people who had done suspicious things show such confidence. It was a sure sign of several things. Bull felt for the first time that he was getting on with his case. He took out his note book.

  “Where did you get the money?”

  Peskett shook his head calmly. “No answer, Chief.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to arrest you as an unregistered alien,” Bull suggested. He tried to get a note of regret in his voice.

  The chauffeur laughed a little.

  “That’s all right with me. That’s not stealing diamonds or shooting a fellow. I’d just as soon go back any way.”

  Bull felt it was very likely. He changed his tactics. Peskett knew as well as he did that so far from putting him out of England it was very necessary to prevent him from going. Get him suspicious, Bull thought; see if he won’t do something.

  “I didn’t say you’d stolen the diamonds,” he said calmly. “Or shot Colton either. Where’s Gates?”

  Peskett seemed both taken aback and surprised.

  “Gates?” he said.

  “That’s right. Gates. Ever heard of him?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of him. I don’t know where the hell he is. He owes me ten quid—hope you find him before you send me off. I’ll be needing it.”

  “I don’t see why you need it. You seem to be doing pretty well.”

  Inspector Bull was rewarded with another pleasant smile.

  “Now look here, Inspector,” the drive
r said. “I don’t know where Gates is—get it? But if I did I wouldn’t tell you. Get that too? I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. Now if you’ll excuse me, you’re wasting your time and mine. I’ve got to take Mrs. Colton to Windsor right after lunch and I’d like to get a bite myself before I start.”

  Bull got up. A faint twinkle lighted his blue eyes an instant.

  “Maybe I am wasting yours,” he said, taking his hat. “I’m going to let the registration business go. But you ought to drop in at Bow-street and get a card. Use me as a reference if you like.”

  “I thought you would, Inspector. Maybe I will.”

  Bull opened the door.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Inspector. Mind your head. The ceiling’s low.”

  “Thanks,” Bull said.

  Peskett closed the door and watched the Inspector from behind the curtain. He saw him get into his car and start the engine, shift into second, then into high. He knew the Inspector had gone.

  Peskett glanced around the room. He hadn’t a doubt it had been searched. He looked around carefully. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. He smiled and washed his hands before going off to have his lunch with Mrs. Coggins and the new maid in the kitchen.

  Inspector Bull, headed for the Embankment, had learned several things. The first and most important was that Peskett, in spite of his sangfroid, was afraid of somebody. He was not afraid of having his room searched, nor was he afraid of some thing. He was afraid, Bull repeated to himself, of somebody. Men with hidden sources of income don’t screw brand new bolts on the inside of their door and then go away and leave their door open for anyone to enter if they wish. Wherefore, reasoned Bull, Peskett is afraid of someone who is going to come when he is in his room. Bull wondered if Peskett would be ready—and who somebody was.

  At his desk in New Scotland Yard Bull had a moment’s conversation with Ames, who had discarded his postman’s uniform.

  “I want you to keep on watching Peskett,” he said. “See who he meets and where, and especially keep an eye on the house and garage when he’s there. Tell me who comes. I’m putting on Waring too; I want one of you there always. Try to get in the garage at night if you can.”

  At the Rainbow in the Strand, over a Lancashire Hot Pot and two pints of bitter, Inspector Bull explained it all to Mr. Pinkerton.

  “It’s one of two things,” he said. “Either the man who held them up is a myth invented by Mrs. Colton and Peskett, and they’re running the show between them, or there was a man who’s in it with Peskett.”

  Mr. Pinkerton blinked his pale grey eyes.

  “And that man is Gates?” he queried.

  “Right.”

  Bull said that more positively than he really felt

  “Where’s the money coming from then?”

  “From Gates. Gates is selling the diamonds.”

  Pinkerton took off his small steel-rimmed spectacles and polished them judicially with his serviette.

  “Then Gates is selling them in small lots,” he said.

  Bull looked at him.

  “Of course,” Mr. Pinkerton repeated complacently. “If he’d got rid of ’em, and got paid all at once, Peskett would jolly well see that he himself got paid all at once. His getting paid in driblets is the surest sign of what Gates is up to.”

  Bull nodded cautiously.

  “But if that’s the case, we’d have got a line on Gates. We know most of the fences who’d handle that type of stuff. Nothing’s turned up, though.”

  Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles, took a small sip of his lemon squash, and tested his vision by peering out of the window onto the house roofs, with first one eye closed and then the other.

  “The trouble with Scotland Yard,” he said at last, with some courage, “is that you’re all prejudiced.”

  Bull waited patiently.

  “What I mean is, why look for a fence when you’re dealing with actual merchants of precious stones? That’s what I mean.”

  Inspector Bull stared at him in as much astonishment as if Pinkerton had charged that the Archbishop of Canterbury had run off with the canon’s vestments.

  “You don’t mean Mr. Steiner, Pinkerton?” he said, with a frown,

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s who I did have in mind.”

  Pinkerton was timid but steadfast.

  “Maybe it is absurd, but it just occurred to me that he’s all mixed up in it, and precious stones do funny things to men. I mean the love of them.”

  Inspector Bull looked at his friend with some severity. “Nonsense, Pinkerton! It’s your chapel training. Here, miss, where’s our bill?”

  He paid the bill and went scowling down the stairs, followed by his little friend.

  “I hope I’ve not . . .”

  “That’s all right, Pinkerton. Nonsense! Get it out of your head. Cheerio, see you tonight.”

  Bull patted Mr. Pinkerton on the shoulder, set off across Fleet-street, and turned up Chancery-lane. Passing the premises of Messrs. Studd, Millington, Studd, Millington and Studd he stopped to look at cinnamon brown tweed displayed in the window. But it didn’t, strangely enough, really interest or even occupy him.

  “Albert Steiner, Albert Steiner, Albert Steiner!” The words kept going crazily through his head. Suddenly he smiled and his eyes fell on the pleased face of a clerk peering through the glass. Bull nodded and went on to Holborn.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Inspector Bull crossed Holborn, undecided whether to take the Underground at Chancery-lane and attend to a small matter in Knightsbridge, or step around to Hatton-garden to see Albert Steiner then and there.

  The memory of his previous talk with Steiner deterred him from the latter course. If the jeweller were involved in any way with the Colton affair, then it was obvious that he had not been entirely frank with Bull that evening in his flat at Queen’s-gate. Bull knew his own limitations. If Steiner was not being frank, he, Bull, was no match for the dark enigmatic Jew in a battle of wits. Bull admitted that, while being Nordic enough, however, to feel that given time Scotland Yard would be more than enough for him. Nevertheless he decided to postpone his visit to Steiner until he had a little more to go on.

  He had come to the decision and had stepped into the station when a man touched his elbow.

  “Sorry, sir—did you drop this?”

  Bull glanced at the penny box of matches in the man’s hand.

  “Thank you,” he said, and stepped to one side, by the wall.

  “Peskett’s out there now,” the man said quietly.

  Bull nodded and went out. He followed the man and saw him glance to the right as he passed the narrow lane before he continued straight ahead. Bull moved to the corner, keeping near the inside edge of the street, and saw his man.

  Peskett, dressed in dark lounge suit, was talking to a middle-aged man of medium size, wearing a bowler hat and obviously ill at ease. Whatever the situation, it was apparent that the chauffeur had the upper hand. The man glanced cautiously to left and right and nodded.

  Inspector Bull’s bulk and general appearance made it hard for him to shadow a man in even a very crowded thoroughfare. Being perfectly aware of this he crossed the narrow opening of the lane and caught up with Ames, who was examining a fabric trunk on display in front of a leather goods shop a few doors on.

  “Who’s with him?”

  “Don’t know, sir. He was waiting there when we came up. They’d been there about two minutes when I spotted you.”

  “Keep an eye on both of them. Give me a signal when they separate. I’ll try to get a line on him. You stick to Peskett. I don’t want him to see me.”

  “There he goes now, sir!”

  Bull turned to see the chauffeur cross the street and quickly board a bus that was just pulling out.

  “Get on with it!” he said. He went back quickly into the lane.

  The man had disappeared.

  “Couldn’t have had a lot to say,” Bull thought. He w
as mildly annoyed at his miscalculation.

  They must have met for some purpose that took very little time to settle. Still it had to be done personally. Did the man have something to give Peskett? Peskett seemed the aggressor. Should he have arrested the man at once? Bull had the uncomfortable feeling that he had made an error in judgment. Had he even gone so far as to let Gates slip through his fingers?

  Bull grunted in annoyance and, for want of something better to do, continued up the lane to Jockey’s-fields. It then occurred to him for the first time that he was in front of the row of Georgian houses that bound the west side of Gray’s Inn, and that, in other words, he was very near the chambers of the Coltons’ solicitor, Mr. Field. Bull took out his note book and found the number. 8-A. It was a few doors on towards Theobald’s-road. Bull rang the bell and waited.

  Bull had no particular reason for seeing Mr. Field at this time. He was more interested in seeing either Mr. Steiner or the man to whom Peskett was talking; and Inspector Bull was a firm believer in the infallibility of coincidence. He regarded it, in part, as a part of the guide system arranged by Providence for the benefit of harassed policemen. Today he had eaten at the Rainbow for the first time in two months. Instead of taking a bus on Fleet-street he had come up Chancery-lane to Holborn. There he had run into Ames on the trau of the chauffeur. Now that he should so come upon Peskett talking to an unknown man almost at Mr. Field’s door did not seem miraculous to Inspector Bull, who had often said that if you stood for a year in Piccadilly-circus you would see everyone you had ever known. But still less did it seem meaningless. To have disregarded so obvious a pointing hand would have been, in Inspector Bull’s own words—even if millions of other people also used them—”flying in the face of Providence.”

  So Inspector Bull rang, and rang again, and waited. He heard the shuffling of feet. The door opened

  “Mr. Field is not in, sir.”

  Bull stepped into the doorway.

  “I don’t want to see Mr. Field. I want to see you.”