by Zenith Brown
Homicide House
MR. PINKERTON RETURNS
by ZENITH BROWN
writing as David Frome
WILDSIDE PRESS
Homicide House: A Mr. Pinkerton Mystery
Copyright © 1949. renewed 1977, by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
1
THE fragrance of burning leaves rose in the quiet golden haze that hung over Godolphin Square. It stirred a mute nostalgia in the heart of the little grey Welshman sitting under the plane trees on the dilapidated bench between a pile of forgotten rubble and the soot-grimed rhododendrons straggling out into the ragged unkempt path. Mr. Evan Pinkerton did not really belong in Godolphin Square. It was still the exclusive West End of London, in spite of the sagging wattle fence that had replaced the iron palings, taken for munitions, and the four bombed-out houses that made a broad gap between the chimney pots on the north side. On the south side the houses were as they had always been, simple and elegant, with only a few of them converted into exclusive service flats.
Mr. Pinkerton had come to one of them—No. 4 Godolphin Square—for two quite simple reasons. The first was that his own house in Golders Green had got an incendiary bomb on the roof. The second was that No. 4 Godolphin Square was part of Pinkerton Estates, and so, curiously enough, was Mr. Pinkerton himself. In fact, Mr. Pinkerton was Pinkerton Estates, although he still did not entirely believe it. It was as incredible to him as it was to everybody else, including Miss Myrtle Grimstead, the lady manager of No. 4 Godolphin Square. She would never, of course, have put him in a maid’s room on the third and top story, to share a bath with the chef and the permanent valet, if she had had any idea of who he was. Miss Grimstead had taken a long look at the estate agent’s order for a flat and free maintenance, when Mr. Pinkerton had timidly presented it, and a single very brisk one at the little man. Some impoverished hanger-on, Miss Grimstead had decided; a distant relative no doubt.
But Mr. Pinkerton was happy enough on the third floor. It made him a little more confident that the late Mrs. Pinkerton, from whom he had inherited the Pinkerton Estates, would not suddenly rematerialize, wispy-haired and vinegary-cheeked, by the sheer force of the agony of seeing him squander her substance. Never having allowed him more than a sixpence at a time, even out of his own earnings, she would hardly care to see him rioting away her whole property. Mr. Pinkerton knew very well she would never have left it to him at all if she could have brought herself to lay out sixpence for a will form at the corner stationer’s.
But on the whole he was happier outside the house than in it. Down in the square, he was at least out of range of Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s managerial eye. The straggling rhododendrons also concealed him from the eternal scrutiny of Miss Caroline Winship, who sat all day at the window of her flat on the first floor, brooding over the ruins of her bombed-out house across the Square. He felt reasonably happy there on the dilapidated bench, and reasonably secure; and when it rained, he could go to the cinema.
That it was not raining today was unusual for several reasons. One was that it had rained all through August. Another was that if it had not just stopped, Mr. Pinkerton would not have been in the Square to see Daniel McGrath. That was something he would not have liked to miss. Daniel McGrath, coming resolutely, was in search of a dream, and no one in all London knew more about dreams than the little Welshman sitting there on the wooden bench behind the rhododendrons in Godolphin Square. He had two of his own. One was Scotland Yard, in the tawny and stolid person of J. Humphrey Bull, his only friend, his wife’s former lodger in Golders Green, and now a chief inspector of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Metropolitan Police. The other was the cinema, where, on rainy days and in the least expensive seat available, Mr. Pinkerton sat with breathless enchantment, not untouched with envy, viewing the life and loves of those strange and fascinating people, the Americans. He knew more about them, their habits and their language, than they did themselves.
In the pale golden haze of the late autumn afternoon, Mr. Pinkerton was unaware that his two dreams were poised, in full bud, ready to burst into the most extraordinary fruition.
Daniel McGrath came swinging along into Godolphin Square. Mr. Pinkerton saw him first as he turned to the left, glancing up at the numbers uniformly inscribed on the broad elliptical fanlights over the painted Adam doorways. The first being, as Mr. Pinkerton knew, illegibly dimmed, it was not until he reached the third house that he made a prompt about-face and set back toward the right and the north side of the Square. Having no business of his own and being inveterately curious about other people’s, Mr. Pinkerton watched. A devotee of New Scotland Yard, he liked to make deductions about people, their character and intent, in which he was almost invariably and sometimes notably incorrect, as the time he had mistaken the Bermondsey dog poisoner for the curate’s wife and would have helped her catch a miserable little terrier if it had not fortunately bitten him and got away. Now, even at some distance, he recognized that there was something peculiar about the young man in the Square. He was a stranger, obviously, hunting for a particular house. Then, as he came nearer, Mr. Pinkerton straightened up on his bench, his watery grey eyes brightening behind his lozenge-shaped steel-rimmed spectacles. It was no wonder the young man looked peculiar; Mr. Pinkerton recognized the reason for it instantly. He was an American. It stood out all over him. His whole air was quite unmistakable: the free and untrammelled way he swung along, imperturbable and unconcerned, as at ease and at home as if he owned the entire place.
Not that Mr. Pinkerton regarded that as offensive, as some people did. Never having been truly at ease or at home in any part of the constricted universe he had moved in, it was the one thing that could stir a momentary envy in his timorous heart. His childhood had been rigorously regimented by a pair of dour Welsh aunts. The unfortunate interregnum between them and Mrs. Pinkerton had been a nightmare spent as an underfed, underpaid undermaster in a small Welsh school, a nightmare so unforgettable that never without trembling did he see two or more small boys unaccompanied by their parents or keepers. His release from all of it had come too late. Even Mrs. Pinkerton’s last and unintended act of grace in leaving him the free and presumably sole arbiter of himself and some £75,000 in cash and property had been too late for him ever to get over what had gone before. Nevertheless, the sight of anybody young and untrod on, serene, calmly sure the world was a friendly and decent place and as much his as anybody else’s, had an extraordinary effect on him; it lifted vicariously the colorless load of his inferiority.
He felt it now, watching Daniel McGrath coming along, looking up at the street numbers, and he sat boldly erect, ignoring the fact that the rhododendron branches no longer protected him from Miss Caroline Winship’s brooding gaze. The young man had come to an empty hole in the row of houses, two doors from Miss Winship’s own. He stopped and looked ahead, then back again, as if shocked; as if a hole where a house had been had not been part of what he had expected to find. Mr. Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles and waited anxiously. The young man went back and looked up again at Number 19, then came on, almost running, it seemed to Mr. Pinkerton, his long legs covered the space so quickly.
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought suddenly. “The house he’s hunting for isn’t there any more. It’s—it’s destroyed. And he didn’t know it.”
He got up from his bench. The young man had gone back again and was counting up once more, slowly, stopping to look about him, as if in a bewildered daze. If McGrath had been an Englishman—or if he himself had been one—Mr. Pinkerton would never in the world have done what he did do. He scurried across the garden to the flimsy gate in the wattle fence, opened
it and hurried along to where the young man was standing, looking over the four-foot wall erected to keep passers-by from plunging down into the ruins of what had been Miss Caroline Winship’s basement kitchen area. Ferns and the white silk seed-pods of willow herb grew there now, sprung miraculously out of the brick and rubble of the blast-shredded walls.
Mr. Pinkerton looked over too, glancing anxiously at the young man staring down into the area, his jaw tight, his lean figure motionless as a statue.
“Are—are you—looking for somebody?”
Mr. Pinkerton said it, and then died a sudden trembling agony of apprehension. He was being grossly and inexcusably officious, and maybe by some horrible mischance the man was not an American, but somebody in the disguise of one—or, if he was one, perhaps not a friendly one. He might be different from all the others of his race Mr. Pinkerton had known—there had been two, actually, and in the flesh, not film. He might resent people prying into his personal affairs. Mr. Pinkerton sidled a few steps away along the wall. The young man was turning his head, slowly, like somebody struck a dull blow behind the ear. His frosty blue eyes, curiously light in a lean face suntanned the color of juice from a green walnut, were blank and unseeing. Mr. Pinkerton retreated another step along the wall.
“I—I’m very sorry,” he said hastily. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“Intrude? You’re not intruding.”
The young man spoke like a bewildered automaton as his gaze turned back to the ruins of the house in front of him. His eyes travelled slowly up the graceful curve of the stone staircase that swept, fantastically supporting one weather-stained pale grey plastered wall rather than being supported by it, up to the transverse hall on the first floor, curving there at the end of the hall and sweeping on up, its delicate ornamental brass railing still intact, to the open sky. Over the transverse hall a portion of attic roof still remained to make it all look like some forgotten stage set, left standing when the play was ended. A central chimney column stood solidly intact behind it, the fireplaces with their carved roses and baskets of fruit and flowers protected from the weather, the faded peach damask still paneling the overmantel.
The young man turned his head slowly back to the little Welshman standing uncertainly and at a discreet distance from him.
“Is this Number Twenty-two Godolphin Square?”
His voice had a lost, unbelieving tone in it, as if he was awed and stricken, and thoroughly sunk, as Mr. Pinkerton imagined he might put it.
“Yes. This is Number Twenty-two.”
The American still spoke out of a bewildered fog. “What happened? Do you know what happened?”
Living at Number 4 Godolphin Square, Mr. Pinkerton knew only too well what had happened. A comparative late-comer, he had been what he believed the Americans would call a natural, to hear the story long after everybody else, each with his own major or minor catastrophe to tell, had heard it, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, from both Miss Caroline Winship and her sister Mrs. Scott Winship. If their accounts differed from Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s, it was not unreasonable, as they had been there and Miss Grimstead had been safely on the opposite side of the Square, where the bombs did not hit; and if the story improved with the telling and retelling, that was natural enough, as Mr. Pinkerton knew from trying to improve his own sorry tale. There was nothing particularly dramatic, basically, about an incendiary bomb in the attic, especially as he was at Inspector Bull’s house in Hampstead that night. But the Winships’ story was different, and having heard it so often from the two sisters, and everyone else, he could tell it almost as vividly as he had been there at the top of the hanging staircase himself.
“Miss Caroline Winship’s a very determined woman,” he ended breathlessly. “She said no Germans would drive her out of the house into a shelter to catch pneumonia. Some people think she ought to have let her sister Mrs. Scott Winship go, even if she didn’t care to herself, because Mrs. Winship isn’t as strong a character as Miss Caroline. (She married a cousin, that’s why the name’s the same.) Some people say that sitting up there in that hall all night, with the whole front of the house blasted in, made her even less strong-minded than she was. They didn’t get out till morning, and even then Miss Caroline refused to go. She hung on to the bannister, and fought like a harpy, Miss Grimstead says, before the police came and dragged her bodily down and out into the street. Oh, she’s a one. She’s— really a one.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked his eyes and adjusted his spectacles.
“Of course it was quite extraordinary. The other three houses you can see went completely down. Miss Winship’s would have done too, only her father had it shored up with those iron girders when he put central heat in before the last war, Miss Caroline says. They used the hall chimney for the flue, and discovered the back part of the house was sagging, so that’s when he had the supports put in.”
He paused and looked up anxiously at the young man, whose mind and gaze seemed to have wandered back to the ruined walls, instead of focussing respectfully on the broad iron transverse support that was what had held up the hanging staircase.
“It was—sort of ironical,” Mr. Pinkerton ended lamely. “I mean, to have escaped the blitz, and everything, and then get it in 1944, when things were—were almost over.”
The young man turned and looked at him then.
“What happened to the—the girl? There was a girl here, wasn’t there?”
He did not seem too sure, but Mr. Pinkerton brightened up at once. Of course, he thought. This was it. The films should have taught him.
“Oh, you mean Mary Winship!” he said. “Oh, she’s all right. She wasn’t here. She—”
“She’s—married, I suppose?”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “She’s not married. I don’t think her aunt would ever let—”
He stopped instantly, realizing that that might be hardly a tactful thing for him to be saying.
“I mean, I think her aunt and her mother sort of depend on her—perhaps more than they should, as a matter of fact,” he finished hurriedly. But the young man did not seem much concerned with the two elder Winship ladies. A light had kindled somewhere in the depths of his blue eyes, making him seem a little less remote and slightly more tractable.
“You don’t happen to know where they are now, do you?” he inquired casually.
“Certainly,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “They live just over the Square. At Number Four. They have the first-floor flats. Indeed, if you’ll look over, you’ll see her aunt, Miss Caroline Winship. She’s always at the window. She’s supposed to have bribed the gardener to cut off some of the branches so she could see across. It annoyed the other residents of the Square. It’s a service flat. I live there too.”
He was aware that he could have sounded a little pettish, as if he had a record of omniscience that he did not care to have questioned, which could not have been further from the truth. It was simply that he had been disappointed at the offhand fashion the inquiry had been put in. It was as impersonal and disinterested as if the young American had got an unpaid bill in his pocket and was instituting a routine inquiry as to the debtor’s whereabouts. A sudden chill struck Mr. Pinkerton. He swallowed painfully, his heart lurching into the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, dear!” he thought. What if that was the case? What if he was just there to make trouble for everybody? He glanced quickly at the American. He was standing there, fishing about in his pocket. To Mr. Pinkerton’s relief it was his pipe he brought out. He looked at it for a moment as if it was something he hadn’t himself expected to find there, and put it in his mouth. He was smiling a little, but not very much, as he turned and glanced across the garden in the direction Mr. Pinkerton had pointed when he said the Winships were at Number 4. Then he looked at Mr. Pinkerton again.
“Thanks,” he said. He added slowly, “Mary Winship. It’s a pretty name. I never knew what it was. All I knew was she lived at Twenty-two Godolphin Square. I came to see her here, a couple of t
imes, but I got cold feet just outside the door. I hung around hoping she’d come out, but she never did. Then my outfit shoved off and I never got back to England again. I guess I’d have gotten up nerve enough if we’d stuck around a little longer, but just an ordinary G. I. punk ringing the bell and asking Can I see the girl with dreamy lashes and curly hair—I guess I figured I’d get booted out on my impertinent behind.”
He gave Mr. Pinkerton a quietly amused smile. “So, thanks a lot, pal. I’ll shove along now, but I’ll be seeing you. McGrath’s my name, Dan McGrath.”
“Pinkerton’s mine,” said Mr. Pinkerton.
Dan McGrath turned to go, and turned back. “By the way, Mr. Pinkerton—do you know if her father ever came back?” “Her father?”
Mr. Pinkerton looked at him blankly.
“I—I didn’t know she had a father. I mean, I thought her mother was a—a widow. I thought her father had been dead a great many years. In fact, I’m quite sure of it—Miss Caroline Winship told me so herself. You’re sure—I mean, we’re talking about the same girl, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Pinkerton.” Dan McGrath was pleasant and imperturbable. “All I know is she lived at Twenty-two Godolphin Square. I met her in an air raid shelter. That was in forty-three. She was with her cousin and they’d gotten separated. She wasn’t the maid—I know that darn well, because I held her hand all night.”
“Oh,” Mr. Pinkerton said. His shattered illusions quickly annealled themselves. Dan McGrath was human after all. He could hold a girl’s hand. He could also grin. The one he gave Mr. Pinkerton as he set off up the road again was proof of that.
Mr. Pinkerton stood blinking after him for a moment before he turned and scurried happily across the Square, his heart fluttering with excitement like the dun-coloured wings of a moth miller rising from a dusty floor.
2
INSIDE the door and halfway up the first flight of green-carpeted stairs, Mr. Pinkerton remembered Miss Caroline Winship. Eternally watching from her window, she must have seen him talking to the American in front of her ruined house. He started hastily down again. His impulse had been to hurry back where he could examine and enjoy the romantic potentials of Dan McGrath’s return to London over a nice hot cup of weak tea in the privacy of his own room. Halfway up the stairs he realized how mistaken he was. He could not see Miss Winship’s door open, or her standing in it like a virulent spider, her web already spun to catch his unsuspecting feet, but he was mortally certain that was the case. He hurried back down again. It was too late. Pegott, the permanent valet, materialized from the shadowy recesses of the lower hall, was blocking his way, his customary insolence more thinly veiled than usual.
