Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  “Except that I’m not hunting it,” Dan said. “I take it you’re Miss Winship’s uncle?”

  “Right you are, I’m Elliot Winship,” the man said. “I’m looking for the valet de chambre. What’s his name?”

  “Pegott?”

  “That’s it. You’ve not seen him about, have you?”

  “He was here at breakfast.”

  Elliot Winship moved away from the valet’s door and came closer to Dan. He appeared to have quiet greyish eyes, a lean sensitive face and sandy hair touched with grey.

  “My niece spent the night with me,” he said. “Seems to have got it into her head you’re some sort of a detective.”

  “No,” Dan said patiently. “Just a gifted amateur.”

  Elliot Winship laughed. “Oh, I say, that does make it bad, doesn’t it? Makes a pair of us mucking things up. And my niece. Seems to think this valet fellow’s got something up his sleeve. Something to do with my brother.”

  In the uncertain light his face appeared to sober as he looked up at Dan.

  “I say, you’re not really here trying to kick up a row about something we’d all be most happy to forget, are you?”

  “No, Mr. Winship,” Dan said deliberately. “I’m really not.”

  Elliot Winship’s face cleared instantly. “Relieved to hear it, old fellow. Very. Thought it was all nonsense. Perhaps we ought to consult with each other. Come round and lunch with me, will you? Tomorrow? Fifty-three Saint Giles’s Terrace. Delighted to see you. One o’clock.”

  He stepped into the waiting lift. “Cheerioh,” he said smiling. He pressed the button to close the door. Dan smiled back. He was relieved himself. With a brother who was obviously intelligent and pleasant, there was at least a strong likelihood that Scott Winship could not be a complete louse. Concluding that, he went back again in his mind to the misgivings that had been quietly developing there about the wisdom of meeting Scott Winship in the solid flesh. Maybe it would be wiser to let well enough alone. He had thought that a dozen times when he had been convinced that anything he was going to learn about Mary Winship’s father was bound to be pretty discreditable.

  At the pub opposite the Green Parrot he had had another and graver misgiving that was now deeply underlined by his meeting with Scott Winship’s brother. In point of fact, whatever he said or believed, he actually was kicking up a row about something they all wanted to forget. He’d denied it to Caroline Winship out in the Square, and again to Elliot Winship, and to himself in pretending it was for Mary and her mother, to save them from Pegott’s machinations. The truth was that he was playing along with Pegott, no matter what else he thought he was doing. And now that he knew Eric Dalrymple-Hughes was in it somewhere, there was no point in deceiving himself any longer.

  He stood in the dimly lighted hall thinking it over, and decided suddenly to go out, take a walk, get a drink and think matters over a little further. He pressed the lift button and waited for the long slow ascent. To his surprise, the lift was there before he could get a cigarette out of the pack. Elliot Winship could not have gone down more than one floor. However, he reflected, there was nothing surprising about that. After all, he had relatives in the house. He got in the lift and went down and out into the Square and paced around the unkempt garden —being, consequently, not in his room when Mr. Evan Pinkerton knocked on his door to invite him to tea with Mary Winship.

  What, he thought, striding around the damp paths, was he actually doing? There was only one thing he had any real concern with. In a few words, he should get on with his own business, which—also in a few words—was to marry Mary Winship. It was the best way to start protecting her. No fact, known or unknown, about her father and his past or his present, was going to affect his feeling about her. What he had accomplished so far was make the girl and her whole family sore at him. As a courting technique, he thought with a sardonic grin, it might be original, but it was hardly likely to be effective. It was quarter to six when he came back to Number 4. As he rode up to the third floor what he should do was clear in his mind. He should get hold of Pegott and do what he should have done in the morning, namely, scare the living daylights out of him.

  Thinking he was even going to enjoy doing it, he closed the lift door and looked down the hall. The lights were on now. Mr. Pinkerton was in; he could see the faint glow through the old-fashioned keyhole under his doorknob. There was no light in Pegott’s room. He went over to it and stopped at the door, listening. On the floor below he could hear the maid taking the tea trays away.

  “I’ve got Mr. Pinkerton’s—Mr. McGrath’s not in,” she was saying to someone. “Pegott can’t say I’m late today, but I expect he’ll find something else to grumble about.”

  “Not tonight he won’t,” Dan McGrath thought. He put his hand on the doorknob and pushed gently. The door was not locked. He stepped inside, and closed the door behind him as he heard Mr. Pinkerton’s door open.

  “I’ll just see,” he heard Mr. Pinkerton say. “The lift’s up. He must have come in.”

  He heard the little man trot along the hall and knock at the box-room door, wait a moment and knock again.

  “I expect it was someone else,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “He’s probably lurking somewhere in the dark.”

  It was Mary Winship. Dan winced. What she thought of him was more than evident in the tone of her voice, and the fact that what she said happened to be true made it no easier to take.

  “Or he may have stopped to use his fatal charm on Grimstead. Eric’s method. Perhaps he thinks he’ll get some bacon for breakfast. Thanks for tea, Mr. Pinkerton. Oh dear, now I’ve got to go and really explain why I’m not in Paris!”

  Dan heard her light footsteps on the stairs, and Mr. Pinkerton’s door close again. He reached his hand out and switched on the light. He looked slowly around the room, instantly alert. It was much more comfortably furnished than Mr. Pinkerton’s or his own, and at the same time extraordinarily bare. The reason could not have been more evident. Pegott was leaving. His luggage was packed and piled against the wall at the foot of the bed. One small composition-leather despatch case was lying open on the bed waiting for the last moment. He saw a hairbrush, a worn leather toilet kit, a pair of felt slippers, a pair of lavender-and-pink pyjamas in it—and something else, something red, only partly concealed under the neatly folded pyjamas.

  His jaw hardened and there were tight narrow lines at the corners of his chilly blue eyes as he went over to the bed. He knew the name of the book under Pegott’s pyjamas before he took it out. As he pulled it toward him a small can that had been lodged behind it rolled out. Champignons. He put it back, not interested in fancy loot filched from the kitchen larder. The loot he was interested in had come from himself. He opened the other McGrath’s book on missing masterpieces. Written on the flyleaf in a delicate script he had not had light enough to see when he had opened it in front of the jeweller’s window in the Strand was the owner’s name. Caroline M. Winship.

  He closed the book and slipped it into his pocket. That was the story, then. It was not Mrs. Winship who had walked off with the book and got the fastener of his briefcase caught after reading the letter in it. It was the impeccable Peggot in person. It was not only what he could hear but what he could see—and one Dan McGrath should have figured that one out. He thought of himself stupefied with sleep, the book on the table in front of him. It was no wonder that Pegott, having read that letter, should have been so confident he could sell McGrath his wares.

  Dan looked at the luggage piled at the foot of the bed. Sell his wares, and skip. Pegott was all set. He looked slowly around the room again. Was he planning to get out before he served dinner at seven, waiting for Dan outside? Was he going to go through with dinner, pretending nothing was on his mind? He looked over at the wardrobe, the door of it closed, with the key in the lock, glanced around the room again looking for Pegott’s white jacket, went over to the wardrobe, turned the key and opened the deal door.

 
; He let the door loose so sharply that it swung open and banged against the table, and stood there silent and motionless, staring into the wardrobe. The impeccable Peggot had not got far. The permanent valet was not permanent. Pegott was there. The noose around his neck was made of a green and orange tie. The other end was knotted firmly to a brass hook beneath the wardrobe shelf. Pegott lay in a cramped huddle on the wardrobe floor, his swollen tongue protruding from his purple cyanotic face, staring horribly at Dan’s feet.

  The telephone on the stand beside the bed jangled sharply three times. Dan hesitated, and picked it up.

  “Yes?”

  “Pegott!” It was Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s disciplinary voice, not the charming one she reserved for favored guests. “Chef would like you to come down at once, if you don’t mind.”

  “This is McGrath speaking,” Dan said deliberately. “Pegott is dead, Miss Grimstead. This time you have got to call the police.”

  He put the phone down, crossed the room and opened the door.

  “My fault,” he was thinking soberly. It was doubly his fault. He should have called the cops last night. Mr. Pinkerton had not had a heart attack. Pegott had not hanged himself. The shelf in the wardrobe was made of flimsy wood not strong enough to hold the weight of a body that long. The wardrobe was locked on the outside. He had had to turn the key to open it. Attempted murder, and successful murder, within twenty-four hours.

  He looked back at the key in the wardrobe door. If the same hand and the same mind was in both attacks, it was not the hand that had slipped the second time.

  He stood in the doorway, waiting. It was becoming evident that someone did not want Scott Winship found—Scott Winship and his missing masterpiece—or the wretched daub his wife called Art. Or could it be that Scott Winship did not want to be found?

  10

  AS DAN MCGRATH closed Pegott’s door and stood by, waiting until Miss Myrtle Grimstead appeared, he became aware of the mouse-grey figure of Mr. Evan Pinkerton two steps down the stairway, his brown bowler in his hands, pausing there, looking at him across the stair rail. He seemed very unhappy in a dejected sort of way, as if Dan had let him down, or at least definitely not lived up to what he had clearly expected of him. As he blinked his watery grey eyes past him to the door of the valet’s room, Dan thought that might be it. Mr. Pinkerton did not expect him to be on such visiting terms.

  “We—thought we heard you come up,” Mr. Pinkerton said, adjusting his spectacles. It was more in sorrow than in anger, as Dan recognized from his own home life in Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “Pegott is dead, Mr. Pinkerton,” he said.

  The little man blinked at him. “Pegott— Not murdered?”

  As Dan nodded an expression of such aghast dismay came so suddenly over Mr. Pinkerton’s face that it was comic. “Not you—you didn’t—”

  “No. Not me,” Dan said. “But it was somebody.”

  He started to say “Somebody in this house,” and stopped. He did not know that to be a fact, and he had become clearly aware of the necessity of assorting and segregating actual facts, as he actually knew them, from the whole welter of surmise and speculation he had been wading through ever since he had walked into Number 4 Godolphin Square. Fact it was his duty to tell the police when they came. Surmise and speculation it was his privilege to keep to himself.

  “Miss Grimstead is sending for the police.”

  “Nine nine nine,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He came up into the hall. “Nine nine nine,” he repeated with sudden urgency.

  “The little guy is crazy,” Dan McGrath thought.

  Mr. Pinkerton had his brown bowler clutched tightly in both hands. “I mean, you’re to ring up Nine nine nine. That’s Scotland Yard. The communication center. They send a man straight out from the Headquarters.”

  Dan nodded. He could hear the soft whir of the lift making its deliberate ascent. “I guess Miss Grimstead will take care of it. This is probably her now.”

  He heard her snap open the iron grille, and stood in front of the door.

  “What’s—”

  Miss Grimstead started to speak and stopped, her eyes suddenly angry and bright in her pale face, as they glanced from Dan McGrath to the little Welshman.

  “Oh, it’s you two again. Bad luck pieces both of you.”

  She came quickly across the hall. “Where is Pegott? Open the door, Mr. McGrath.”

  Dan shook his head. “Nobody goes in there till the police come, Miss Grimstead. Sorry.”

  Her blue eyes blazed for an instant as she faced him. Mr. Pinkerton shrank a little, glad it was Dan McGrath’s six feet three inches and not his substantially lesser figure there in her way.

  “He may not be dead, Mr. McGrath,” she said quickly and breathlessly.

  “You can count on it,” Dan said coolly. “He’s very dead, Miss Grimstead. Did you send for the police?”

  “Yes.”

  Both Dan McGrath and Mr. Pinkerton knew it was not true as her eyes shifted from one to the other of them.

  “But I’d best ring again. If you’ll let me in—”

  “Not until the police come, Miss Grimstead. Nobody’s going in there until they do. See? So why don’t you run down and ring them. Nine nine nine.”

  She looked at him sharply.

  “If you’d called them in last night when I asked you to, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. They’ll wonder why you didn’t, Miss Grimstead. The way I wonder. The way I wonder why you’re so damned anxious not to call them now.”

  Miss Grimstead took a step back, her breath coming quickly, two unhealthy purple splotches dark under the pink powder of her rouged cheeks.

  “You’re—making a mistake, Mr. McGrath.” The muscles of her throat were so constricted that her voice came in a harsh labored whisper. “You don’t understand. I don’t want trouble here. Not for myself—for my people.”

  She put her hand out unsteadily and caught the bannister rail.

  “I shouldn’t have kept him on. I should have made him go.”

  She gripped the rail tightly. “I’ll ring them. I’ll go ring them now.”

  Mr. Pinkerton and Dan McGrath looked silently at one another. Her footsteps, slow at first, quickened until she was almost running before they heard her key fumbling at the lock of one of the flats on the floor below.

  “I’m—afraid she’s upset,” Mr. Pinkerton whispered. He cleared his throat to get his voice in a more normal key. “Would you—would you say she’s—rather frightened? Rather badly frightened?”

  Dan nodded coolly. Mr. Pinkerton glanced tentatively at the doorknob. “I wonder what it is he’s got that she wants to get before the police come ? Do you—do you think we might—”

  “No. Nobody goes in, Mr. Pinkerton. Nobody takes anything out. That’s flat. And how’s your head today?”

  Mr. Pinkerton’s hand began an automatic move upward, but he stopped it, blinking as he looked away from Dan. “I— I would really much prefer it if we made no mention of my head,” he said earnestly. “I really wouldn’t like to make trouble. I—I feel rather sorry for Miss Grimstead.”

  “Yes?” Dan McGrath said. “Me, I feel rather sorry for Pegott.” He looked at the little man with a detached and sombre eye. “I’d feel sorrier if you were in his shoes right now, Mr. Pinkerton. You almost were, you know.”

  “Oh, I think that was a mistake,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “I think somebody thought I knew something I really didn’t know at all.”

  “The whereabouts of Mr. Scott Winship namely.”

  “You are trying to find him, then?” Mr. Pinkerton glanced behind him. “Do you think it’s quite safe?”

  Dan smiled without amusement. “Mr. Pinkerton, I don’t think it’s safe at all. In fact, you can count me out from here on. Personally, I’d be a lot happier if I’d never even heard of the guy.”

  Mr. Pinkerton drew a relieved breath. “I’m glad to know that, Mr. McGrath,” he said sincerely. “Because I—I rather think Mr. Scott Winship
prefers to—to remain incognito, if I can put it that way.”

  Dan grinned at him. “I’ve sort of gathered that myself.”

  “And I think the family rather feel that.”

  “I’m slow, Mr. Pinkerton, but I figured that one too.”

  He reached in his pocket for a cigarette and caught his breath for an instant as his hand touched the book. He’d forgotten it. He glanced at Mr. Pinkerton. The little man was craning his scrawny neck looking over the stair rail and could not have seen the look of surprise on his face. Still, the book was hardly what Grimstead was after. Or was it?

  Mr. Pinkerton had come unobtrusively a few steps closer to him, looking back as if the empty corridor were somehow full of invisible eyes, and lowered his voice as if invisible ears were listening.

  “Do you think it’s just because of the picture?” he whispered. “Because I stopped in at Somerset House. I looked at the will.”

  “His will? Scott Winship’s will?”

  “Sssh.” Mr. Pinkerton put his finger to his lips, glancing behind him again. “No. I mean the elder Winship’s will. Miss Caroline Winship’s father. And I asked Mary. He was the one that left Mrs. Winship the picture. He died not long after they were married. He was an invalid a long time.”

  His face as he looked up at Dan McGrath seemed to brighten a little.

  “I mean, if there was anything—well, odd, about his death—”

  “Was there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Pinkerton said hastily. “I just meant if there was. I just thought—”

  He stopped as Dan looked down at him with wry amusement. It was generally the nicest and mildest little people who dreamed up the wildest and most bloodthirsty solutions for simple problems.

  “You mean, if he’s murdered the old man as well as getting away with the picture, he’d really have a reason for staying incognito, as you call it. That it?”

  “Well, something rather like it,” Mr. Pinkerton said modestly.