Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  Mr. Pinkerton remembered how he had involuntarily reached up and touched his bruised scalp, and glanced nervously at the door he’d been at such pains to lock before he’d gone to bed the night before. If Pegott’s murderer had taken the key, he would still have got it. There was no flat in the house he could not creep into any time he had a mind. A cold shiver had gone rippling through the grey fluid of his meagre spine.

  “What must I do, sir?”

  “You must tell Chief Inspector Bull when he comes,” Mr. Pinkerton had said. “He’ll be here today. You must tell him at once. It’s—not safe for—for anybody. But don’t tell anyone else. Not Sarah or the porters or the chef—”

  “No fear, sir.”

  He had tried to wipe the dismay off his face as he saw it reflected on hers.

  “The chef’s that balmy he’d not hear me if I did. But it’s a —a wicked thought, sir, isn’t it?”

  It was indeed, and Mr. Pinkerton was faced with a certain reluctant sense of his own responsibility. He wondered if he ought not to find Bull and tell him himself, immediately, before anything else could happen at Number 4 Godolphin Square. He had the uneasy feeling that he had been a quixotic fool not to have told Bull about his own incident, and about Scott Winship and the picture. But the grim satisfaction, if he might think of it as such, that a least part of his conclusions were damningly corroborated by the disappearance of the girl’s key gave him heart. It was conclusive proof that the murderer of Pegott was undoubtedly familiar with the interior workings of Number 4 Godolphin Square—probably even personally known to Arthur Pegott—or to them all.

  As he passed the postman on his way to the top of the Square, Mr. Pinkerton, his small grey ego supported and prodded on, had given up his role of sedentary theorist. He had a slight tendency to shiver at his temerity, and what he might possibly be doing, but he kept stoutly along until he came to Tottenham Court Road, and hesitated only a moment before he opened the door of Guillaume, Florist. Inside he stopped short, blinking with dismay as he recognized the girl at the end of the counter. He sidled back hastily, reaching for the door, but he was too late; Mary Winship turned her head. As she saw him, her face became as waxy white as the tin pot of gardenias on the counter beside her.

  “Mr. Pinkerton!”

  He could see the words framed on her lips, and there was a startled look in her eyes that she suppressed quickly, trying to smile at him.

  He swallowed, moistened his lips and managed to speak. “Oh, hello, Mary. I just dropped in to get a few . . .”

  He went up to the counter, looking around the small shop desperately. Chrysanthemums, he noticed, were six shillings each, and roses half a crown. It was absurd for him to be buying flowers anyway. Tomatoes were three-and-six a pound. “. . . a few figs,” he said, spotting the box next to the tomatoes, and before he realized that the two-shilling sign meant they were two shillings each. He had an awful vision of Mrs. Pinkerton rending her shroud in horror. “I mean, a fig,” he said hastily.

  “No—that’s not true, is it.” She shook her head at him. “You’re here for the same reason I am. To find out about the— the flowers.”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded unhappily. “It—it was just an idea I’d got, thinking it over.”

  “Something, miss?” The woman behind the counter turned from the cash register as her other customer moved away. “Sophie!” she called over her shoulder, through the door into the rear of the shop. “The gentleman wants some figs.”

  “One fig,” said Mr. Pinkerton nervously. “One will be quite sufficient.”

  He looked at the girl in the faded blue smock. Her eyes were red and so was her nose, and her sullen mouth twitched at the corners as she took one fig out of the box and put it in a small paper bag. The woman waited impatiently for Mary to make up her mind.

  “I wanted to ask you about some flowers that were sent my mother the night before last. Three red roses. Mrs. Scott Winship, Four Godolphin Square.”

  The girl taking Mr. Pinkerton’s reluctant four sixpences dropped one of them. She got down on her knees to get it from under the wooden counter, and scrambled to her feet.

  “Get on with your work, Sophie.”

  The girl edged past Mary and vanished into the back room.

  “Winship?” The manageress opened her dog-eared order book. “Delivered at a quarter past six, miss. I hope there were no complaints. We can’t accept responsibility for flowers after they’re received and signed for.”

  “I want to know who sent them.”

  “That’s no business of ours, miss.” The woman closed the book sharply.

  “I know,” Mary said quietly. “I thought you might help me. My mother’s been getting flowers from you for years. Primroses in April, roses in October—”

  “I’m sorry, miss.” There was a truculent finality in the way the woman pushed the order book closer to the cash desk and shut her lips together. She was defensively stony-eyed as she said, “We’ve got many standing orders. No one’s ever made a complaint before.”

  “I’m not complaining. I’m just asking. My mother gets the flowers, not during the war—”

  “Our records are mostly gone, miss. We were in Oxford Street before we were bombed out. My father was killed, and his two assistants. I was working in Plymouth. I’ve just opened here again last year. It’s not been easy, miss. And we don’t give out information about our orders anyway.”

  The woman included Mr. Pinkerton in a glance of stony resentment, and turned as the bell over the shop door rang. “Something for you, madam?”

  Mr. Pinkerton plucked at Mary’s sleeve. “I think we’d best go,” he whispered nervously. “Let’s go have a cup of tea.”

  The woman was still watching them out of a corner of her eye. It was an abortive venture.

  “She—she seems to think I’m blaming her,” Mary said. They stood in the street outside the shop, defeated and dejected. Then they both turned quickly at the low call behind them.

  “Miss! Oh, miss!”

  The shop assistant, in the doorway of the hall leading to the upper floors of the building, motioned them to come to one side of the shop front, out of sight of the woman inside.

  “It’s all my fault, miss,” she whispered. “I sent the roses. Arthur Pegott rang me up and told me to and he’d give me money, but he never did, miss. I paid for them myself. That’s why she’s so cross about it. He came all around me, miss. Two months it was, he came to the shop and pretended he was going to open up at one of the posh hotels and wanted a girl like me to manage for him. He took me to the pictures and the dog races. I told him everything I could think of. She has got some old order books, and I let him look at them when she was at market. When I rang him up yesterday morning, he said I could whistle for my six shillings. He was going to Canada where the girls were smarter and not such silly fools. And now he’s dead. And I was a silly fool.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Mary said. “And I’m sorry about Pegott.”

  She took a ten-shilling note out of her bag and put it in the girl’s pocket.

  “Oh, no, miss. That’s not what I want.” She thrust the note back into Mary’s hand. “I’d not be happy if I was to take it, miss. It’s just that I meant nobody any harm. I’ve got to run, miss—she’ll have a proper fit if she sees me here.”

  She ducked back into the doorway and disappeared. Mr. Pinkerton and Mary Winship stood looking silently at each other.

  “Why on earth should Pegott have sent my mother the roses, Mr. Pinkerton?” she asked at last.

  The little grey man shook his head. He was as bewildered as she was. They walked along for some time in silence.

  “I’ve no idea at all,” Mr. Pinkerton said then. “Unless—”

  He stopped. The only idea that he had in fact got was too preposterous.

  “Unless he’s seen my father send them? But—he’s only been at the flat this summer. Do you think he knew my father before he came?”

  They had come to a small t
ea shop in Charing Cross Road. Mary stopped abruptly just inside the door, delaying the wearylooking postman about to come in behind them.

  “Do you think that’s why he came to the flat, Mr. Pinkerton?”

  “Two, sir?” An efficient woman in a red dress motioned them to a table in the center of thé room. “One, sir?” She seated the postman beside Mr. Pinkerton at the same table.

  “You know, there was something odd about Pegott,” Mary Winship said. “He listened at doors. Eric caught him at ours once.”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded. He was as oblivious to the postman sitting by him as Mary Winship was, and glanced at him at all only because he could not recall, thinking fleetingly about it, ever having seen a postman sitting down.

  “So did I,” Mr. Pinkerton said. “The afternoon Mr. McGrath spoke to me. Or rather the afternoon I spoke to Mr. McGrath.”

  Two bright spots grew in Mary Winship’s cheeks. “I’d rather not talk about Mr. McGrath.” The waitress put the pots of tea and hot water down in front of her. “Milk?”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded again. He was distressed at the abrupt dismissal of his friend the American. He must have done something regrettably offensive, from the blue-black sparks shooting out of her eyes before she picked up the teapot and changed the subject.

  “Another thing,” she said. “Eric’s spent more time than yesterday’s lunch with Pegott. Several times when I’ve gone in his flat Pegott’s been there, smoking a cigarette. He’d sneak it behind him and say ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ I thought it was racing and Pegott was placing his bets for him. But I’m not so sure now.”

  She looked across at Mr. Pinkerton.

  “You could do something for me if you would.”

  “I’d be very happy to.”

  “I’d like to know where Eric goes and what he does all day. I know it sounds underhanded and all that. But I’d—I’d really like to know. He’s still at the flat. He made a brave show last night, about leaving us all, but this morning he’s there—the charming repentant—and Mother and Aunt Caroline accusing me of being hard and unfeeling.”

  Mr. Pinkerton looked at her anxiously. She lowered her eyes, a faint flush growing in her cheeks.

  “I really want to find my father, Mr. Pinkerton,” she said, her apparent irrelevance bridging the gap Mr. Pinkerton’s devious mind had already leaped over.

  “Are you sure, Mary ? I mean—”

  “I know what you mean.” She spoke quietly without raising her eyes. “They told me a lot of things last night I hadn’t known before.”

  She opened her bag, took out a picture and handed it across the table to him. “My uncle gave me that. It’s my father when he was a young man.”

  Mr. Pinkerton looked at a smiling and debonair youngster in the uniform of a major in the last war.

  “I know he’ll have changed, but you can keep it. He was about my uncle’s height, five feet nine or so, and sort of sandy-haired, my uncle says. It may help. I’ve got my own picture of him—in my mind. I’m sure I’d know him any place. If he walked in here now, I know I’d know him.”

  Curiously, Mr. Pinkerton thought, a man was walking in just then. Mr. Pinkerton glanced past Mary’s dark head at him. He was grey-haired, mild and unassuming in appearance, as he hung his hat on the wooden tree by the cashier’s desk and turned to look for an empty place to sit. There was a seat at their table, beside Mary. He glanced at it, then at the postman, solemnly drinking his tea, at Mr. Pinkerton, and at Mary, or at her back which was all he could see. And then, and it seemed extremely odd to Mr. Pinkerton, he turned quietly round again and took his hat off the tree.

  “Here’s a place, sir.” The efficient woman in red held up her hand. The man shook his head silently and went out. The woman looked at the cashier and shrugged.

  “I’m sure I’d recognize him,” Mary was saying. “So you keep that, and give it back to me some time.”

  Mr. Pinkerton looked at the photograph, removed from its original folder, and put it carefully in his coat pocket. He sat there blinking. Something strange and very puzzling seemed to have happened to him. He knew Mary Winship was talking still, about her father, but he seemed to hear her only in the most vague and far-off way. He was held fast in some extraordinary sphere of the most complete unreality. It was as if he had stumbled on some magic phrase, or picked up some magic stone. Something totally inexplicable had materialized, and as inexplicably vanished, as if he had forgot the phrase or dropped the stone.

  “It—it must be the blow on my head,” he thought. “I must have gone a bit balmy. I really must.”

  He could not for the life of him have described his sensation, or anything about it. And it could not have had anything to do with the man who had come into the tea shop and gone out. He did not know the man; he had never seen him before. A hundred Londoners come into tea shops every day, change their mind and go out to go somewhere else. Mr. Pinkerton told himself that very firmly. But an odd feeling of dismay persisted there in the pit of his stomach. It was disturbing in the extreme.

  15

  HE WAS still disturbed, and still unable to rid himself of the persistent feeling of dismay, when he put Mary on her bus in Oxford Street.

  “I promised Copey I’d come and help him this afternoon,” she said. “He’s got to make a speech and his secretary’s got a cold. Poor old Copey. I’m beginning really to feel sorry for him. I used to resent him frightfully. I didn’t know till last night he was my father’s surgeon. His first private patient after he got out of the army. That’s how he met my mother. It’s hard to imagine any man being that faithful for that many years, isn’t it?”

  She smiled for the first time that afternoon. “It’s hard to think of Copey as a romantic heart at all, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded. Considering what Mr. Sidney Copeland had said to McGrath, he must never have had a very high opinion of his first private patient. And not unreasonably, perhaps, considering the opinion Mr. Pinkerton had formed of Scott Winship with far less personal knowledge than his surgeon must have had. The thought quickened the latent anxiety troubling his own conscience. He looked at Mary Winship, the quick smile she gave him as she glanced back from inside the bus before she sat down touching the taut strings of his small grey heart with a poignant and unfamiliar music. In his heightened state it seemed to him that some shadow of despair, malign, almost evil, hung over her dark young head, and that the shining armor of faith she wore was only a delusion bringing her closer to the pit.

  He turned away, blinking his watery grey eyes. “Oh, dear!” he thought. “I’m really daft.”

  He felt gingerly at the bruise on the side of his head, and adjusted his lozenge-shaped spectacles as he glanced hastily about to see if anyone was particularly noticing him. People had been committed for seeing shadows hovering about. But none of the hurrying people jostling each other in the accepted postwar manner seemed concerned with him, and he crossed the road, not because he wanted to cross it but because it was the path of least resistance. The traffic signal had changed, and the crowd surged across, taking him along, stumbling not to be overturned in the middle of the road.

  On the opposite side he disentangled himself and scurried to a protecting shelter at the side of the door into the Corner House. He stopped to catch his breath, and gave suddenly such a start that his head pounded and his brown bowler hat contracted to an iron band gripping it. The man he had seen leave the other tea shop was coming out of the Corner House. The mild faraway look in his eyes changed in an instant as they met Mr. Pinkerton’s directly. He dodged out through the crowd at the entrance to Mr. Pinkerton’s side, and took two steps straight toward him. Mr. Pinkerton’s heart stopped beating for an instant before it started to beat like a woodpecker on a wormy limb. The man’s eyes brightened. He leaned forward, close to Mr. Pinkerton’s dumfounded ear.

  “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good!”

  He intoned the words in a hoarse singsong whisper, and before Mr.
Pinkerton could even sort them out in his bewildered auditory channels, he leaned forward again and prodded the little man’s shoulder sharply with his forefinger.

  “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good!”

  Then Mr. Pinkerton, blinking his eyes desperately, suddently stared about him. The man was gone. He had been absorbed by some fantastic legerdemain into the streams and crosscurrents of the tea-hour mass movement. Mr. Pinkerton licked his dry lips and tried to swallow. The man was gone—gone, that is, if he had ever been there at all. Mr. Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles with a shaking hand, his knees very uncertain. A taxicab drawing up to the kerb let out its passenger, and Mr. Pinkerton made a dash for it. There were few times in his life that he had taken a taxicab when there was a bus, or a bus when he was able to walk, but for once parsimony was a dull jade.

  “Four Godolphin Square, please.”

  He sank back into the seat and closed his eyes.

  “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good!”

  Suddenly he opened his eyes and sat up straighter in the seat. He might have imagined the words. He might even have imagined the prodding forefinger on his shoulder. But he could not have imagined the odor of fresh onions on the man’s breath. They were too scarce. Mr. Pinkerton could not remember when he had smelled, much less tasted, a fresh crisp green onion.

  He leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “You may let me out here, please.” Fortunately the meter still registered ninepence. He was quite willing to expend eleven-pence to be assured of his own continued sanity.

  “The wicked shall be repaid—and the good!”

  “Wot’s that, sir?” The cabbie looked at him in alarm, and then at the tuppeny tip there in his hand. “I tyke you, mister,” he said with a grin. “It’s in ‘eaven I gets my reward.” He chuckled cavernously at his joke and pulled off, leaving Mr. Pinkerton, appalled at himself, on the street corner. He had not meant at all to repeat what the man had said.

  “I really must be more careful,” he thought, nervously glancing about him. It did not occur to him then, or when he got on a bus at the next corner, that for the first time since he had left Godolphin Square there was not a postman anywhere in sight.