by Zenith Brown
At the moment Mr. Pinkerton was getting off his bus to walk through from Oxford Street to Godolphin Square, however, a postman was in communication with Chief Inspector Bull in Battersea. Bull was in his car in front of the house in Pilkington Crescent where Arthur Pegott’s mother, her lined face stained with tears, sat with two friends drinking tea behind the drawn faded blinds, still stunned and unable to believe.
“My Arthur was always such a good lad, sir.” It was a cry from the womb that Bull had heard many times—of men who murdered as well as men who had been murdered, of thieves and worse than thieves—and it was always a sobering thing, moving him to a compassion his job had taught him to resist or be blinded when it was most necessary to see. He listened now to Detective-Constable Weedham’s report. At the Corner House a man had come up to Mr. Pinkerton and whispered something to him. Mr. Pinkerton, apparently terrified, had jumped into a taxicab. Weedham had lost him, there being no other cab in sight. He had got the cab number.
“Forget it, man,” Bull said patiently. “He’ll not take it far.”
He spoke through long acquaintance with the habits of his deceased landlady’s relict. The fact, for instance, that he had been impelled to take a taxi at all was important.
“Who was the man who spoke to him ?”
Weedham had had his eyes on Mr. Pinkerton, the street was crowded, and the man had disappeared at once. Bull scowled. He was genuinely fond of the little grey Welshman, and genuinely worried. The pseudo-postman had been an attempt to protect him, assigned the instant the American, after his curious luncheon at Mr. Elliot Winship’s, had told Bull about the lozenge-shaped spectacles caught in the inside folds of the afghan that Mrs. Bull had herself knitted for Mr. Pinkerton. Bull hesitated. There was no doubt of the little man’s instinct for nosing out the salient figures in a spot of trouble—or their nosing him out, Bull had never been quite sure which.
“Did you see the man at all who spoke to him?”
From his position, Weedham could not see him sufficiently to make any identification, and the man had disappeared at once. Bull sighed patiently. The idea that he had more than once was in his mind again: arrest and detention—for withholding vital information—until they had got whoever it was who had apparently tried to get Mr. Pinkerton out of the way and had got Pegott out of the way. He started to tell Weedham to go to Godolphin Square and take the little man into custody the minute he appeared. He changed his mind as an idea occurred to him.
“Carry on where you are,” he said. “See if you can pick up the man who spoke to him. I’ll take care of Mr. Pinkerton myself.”
As he said “Godolphin Square” to his driver, his placid blue eyes had what might almost have been called a twinkle in them.
But Mr. Pinkerton had already left Godolphin Square. He had, in fact, not quite reached the top of it when he saw Eric Dalrymple-Hughes coming toward him, not from the flats but from the garden through the gate in the wattle fence. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated only a moment. The memory of his abortive visit to the florist, which he was aware would probably have turned out even worse had he asked the questions instead of Mary, had dampened his confidence in himself as a private investigator. But he had promised Mary. At least, he had in a way promised her.
“The wicked shall be repaid—and the good,” he said to himself. “I must stop saying that,” he added hastily. Still, there was no doubt in his mind as to which category included Eric Dalrymple-Hughes. He scurried across to the opposite side of the road, went a short way along a side street and waited until the young man appeared in the road headed toward Oxford Street. Mr. Pinkerton hurried back and set out on his own side, keeping fairly abreast of Dalrymple-Hughes across the road. The black Homburg hat and the square elegant shoulders were simple to follow. The young man never looked back, and Mr. Pinkerton, dodging in and out in the crowds, had only one real anxiety. That was lest Eric Dalrymple-Hughes’s destination should turn out to be some gilded den of iniquity. He would then have had no idea of what to do, his experience in that field being greatly limited.
Not that Old Bond Street was likely to be the center of such activities, but Old Bond Street led into New Bond Street. Mr. Pinkerton more than a little anxious, came to an abrupt stop on the heels of an irritated lady in front of him and to the equal irritation of the man behind him. Dalrymple-Hughes had turned into a shop three doors ahead. Mr. Pinkerton edged along and stopped, blinking, acutely disappointed. The most fevered and puritanical imagination could hardly convert the shop he had entered into a den of any sort. The worn sign over the door was its own sufficient accolade of solid respectability.
“Jno. L. Turnipseed & Sons Ltd.,” Mr. Pinkerton read. “Iron-Mongers. By Appointment. Founded 1796.”
Mr. Pinkerton peered in through the murky window. Dalrymple-Hughes had put his stick and lemon-colored gloves on the counter and was looking about him. Mr. Pinkerton, seeing the man who came to wait on him, realized that any inquiries he might make after Eric had left would get short shrift. The sons of Jno. L. Turnipseed did not look as if they would encourage inquiries about their customers or their purchases. He peered deeper into the gloom into which Dalrymple-Hughes had gone to the rear of the shop. Insignificant as he was, he could not hope to barge boldly in without the young man’s noticing him eventually, so he stayed where he was. When Dalrymple-Hughes came out carrying a small parcel, Mr. Pinkerton was waiting for him, faithful to his task if slightly depressed by it.
Two hours later, in his own room on the third floor of Number 4 Godolphin Square, he was even more depressed. His feet hurt also. He took off his solid black boots and put on his slippers. He would have liked very much to put his feet up on something, but Mrs. Pinkerton had never allowed it, and it was folly to give too many hostages to a fickle jade. Dalrymple-Hughes had worn him completely out. Following him to Turnipseed’s had been one thing. Following him from there to Camden Town to a second ironmonger’s had been too much, even if they had gone by bus part of the way. Mr. Pinkerton sat down on his sofa, leaned his head back against the crocheted antimacassar and closed his eyes. He then opened them quickly as someone knocked on his door.
“Oh, dear!” he thought as he said “Come in” wearily. It was the first time in his life that he had not sprung eagerly up to admit his so infrequent callers.
“Hi, there, oldtimer.”
Dan McGrath opened the door and came cheerfully in. He stopped short. “Hello—you’re pooped.”
“I expect I am,” Mr. Pinkerton agreed tentatively. “I’ve— I’ve had a rather difficult day.”
He blinked his eyes. There was something suspiciously like tears in them as he thought Dan McGrath was going to burst into laughter. But he did not.
“You sure look it,” he said. He sat down as if he belonged there, or at least had come to stay. “What happened? Come on, Mr. P. Tell old McGrath all about it.”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked again. There really were tears in his eyes this time. It was the first occasion in all his life that anybody had ever called him Mr. P. It was a friendly thing, and Mr. Pinkerton badly wanted a friend.
“Come on,” Dan said. “Put your dogs up here and tell your old chum all about it.”
He pushed up the only other chair in the room, lifted Mr. Pinkerton’s surprised feet into it, and sank back into his own chair. “What’s the dope?”
Mr. Pinkerton sat rigid for a moment, his feet barely touching the worn tapestry seat. But nothing happened. There was no blowing of trumpets, no mouldier than usual smell in the place, no vinegary-cheeked apparition materialized in the cupboard door. He took a deep breath.
“The wicked shall be repaid—and the good,” he said happily.
Mr. McGrath uncrossed one leg and crossed the other. “Okay,” he said, staring a little. “Okay.” He groaned inwardly. “If this guy isn’t nuts,” he thought, “I am. And this is the character that that damn Chief Inspector says I’m to ride herd on from here out.”
“I mean, that’s what the man s
aid,” Mr. Pinkerton explained hastily.
“I hope he’s right,” Dan said amiably. “Now suppose you tell me what you’ve been doing.”
16
INSPECTOR BULL knocked on the door of Miss Caroline Winship’s flat on the first floor of Number 4 Godolphin Square, and waited with a feeling of comfortable complacency that he would ordinarily have been the first to suspect. He had, to the best of his belief, knocked up a century. Two of his problems, worrisome nuisances at any time but especially so when he had got a murder on his hands, were, if not solved, at least merged into one which he expected would thereby take care of itself. Instead of two gifted amateurs (the Assistant Commissioner’s expression) diligently mucking up the tracks he was laboriously and painstakingly trying to sort out and follow, he had managed to set them to minding and circumventing each other. With the American looking after him, Mr. Pinkerton could be counted on to keep out of dangerous trouble, and with Mr. Pinkerton to occupy McGrath’s waking hours, Bull confidently hoped the same for him. Which only proved him to be a human and not a Papal Bull, hence lacking the virtue of infallibility.
There was only one thing about the arrangement that disturbed Bull, not as a law-enforcement officer but as a man who had once collected Dresden and Chelsea shepherdesses until he found one more exquisite not made of porcelain and married her. It was the American’s sardonic rejoinder when he made his appeal to him to look after the little Welshman.
“Why not?” McGrath had said. “Whoever said three’s a crowd ?”
It had taken Bull a few moments to understand what he meant, even though he knew about the girl. McGrath had explained why he was in London when he had given his summary of what had happened since he had been there. On the other hand, Mr. Pinkerton had been underfoot, and rather a help, in fact, when Inspector Bull was courting Margaret. Still, Americans, he understood, had thrown off chaperones, with other Old World impediments, and he had not seen the girl herself.
He saw her now as she opened the door of her aunt’s apartments.
“I’m Inspector Bull of New Scotland Yard,” he said.
Knowing something about the Americans, he was a little surprised that this was the girl one of them had crossed the Atlantic to find again. There was nothing startling or flamboyant about her. She had a delicate pointed face and a soft crown of dark curly hair, very little lip rouge, and no bright red lacquer on her fingernails. Her eyes were beautiful, he could see that. And she was alive, intensely alive, just then, poised like a dark flame in the doorway, taut with some inner emotion, controlled but very evident. Fear, or anxiety—he could not tell which.
“I’d like to speak to your mother, Miss Winship.”
“I’m sorry. My mother’s ill. She has asthma. She’s had a terrible attack this afternoon.”
He looked at her closely. That was it, then. It hadn’t seemed to him the stark, smiting sort of fear his appearance or the sound of his name sometimes produced in a house of trouble.
“Can you come back later?” she asked.
He started to nod and move away. Some instinct deterred him. Some quality in the atmosphere, or in the girl herself, as tangible as the acrid odor of a fire smoldering in the cellar, seeping up through the cracks and rat holes of a dilapidated house.
“Your aunt, then, Miss Winship. I’m sorry to disturb you, but my business is urgent.”
“She’s got spirit,” he thought as she tightened her grip on the door, blocking his way, indignant sparks shooting out of her blue-black eyes. Then as abruptly she released the door and drew it open.
“Come in,” she said curtly. She stepped aside. “My aunt’s with my mother. Mr. Copeland, of Wimpole Street, is with her too. We’ve sent for her own doctor. I’ll tell my aunt you’re here.”
Bull looked about him in the sitting room. Luxurious but shabby, their own furniture and objects, not the management’s, the room but not its contents refurbished since the war. Four windows overlooking the garden in the Square. A door on either side of the one he’d come through from the foyer. It was through the door on the right that Mary Winship had gone, and in the brief opening of it before she had closed it again he could hear the hideous gasping struggle the asthmatic woman was making to get her breath, and the murmuring voices of people with her. Then as Miss Caroline Winship appeared, Bull suppressed an involuntary step backwards at the speechlessly silent but deadly rebuke on the woman’s face. Her heavy-lidded eyes were burning brilliantly. She closed the door quietly and motioned her cane toward a chair.
“You wished to see me, Inspector?”
“I’m sorry to—”
“Get on with it, please. What do you want?”
She sat rigidly upright in the faded yellow satin chair.
“I want to know what you knew about Arthur Pegott, Miss Winship.”
“Nothing whatever, Inspector. Except that he was an unpleasant and obsequious servant who was remarkably efficient at his job, and remarkably well-trained compared with the rest of the staff we put up with here. About his private life I know nothing at all.”
“I want to know in particular, Miss Winship, if he had any connection with your brother-in-law?”
“My—”
“Mr. Scott Winship,” Bull said evenly. He was a mild but also a stubborn man.
As she settled back in the yellow chair, releasing her grip on her stick, she reminded him of a heroic figure by Epstein if one could be thought of as becoming animate and settling into a chair.
“I see,” Miss Winship said. Her voice mirrored a faint light that moved in her eyes. Was it some kind of ever so polite contempt? Bull wondered. He was not sure. “Aren’t you belaboring a dead horse, Inspector?” she inquired slowly.
“That’s for you to say, Miss Winship. I’m told you were out in the Square the other night. A man was at your house opposite here. My informant got the impression you were there to see him.”
“You’re holding me responsible for the impressions Mr. McGrath picks up, Inspector?” Her heavy brows lifted ironically. “He’s a very impetuous young man.”
“I dare say, ma’am. But the valet Pegott offered to take him to see your brother-in-law, Miss Winship. And the picture. I expect you know what I’m referring to.”
“I should, Inspector, since it cost me six thousand pounds— to prevent the dealer from prosecuting. I sold two farms in Kent to find the cash.”
Bull nodded. “You can’t be expected to have any very friendly feelings for Scott Winship, ma’am?”
Miss Caroline Winship drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “You may say that, Inspector.” She pronounced each word distinctly. “You might say a great deal more. I’m a violent and vengeful woman. I have an antediluvian reverence for the sanctity of private property and the inviolability of contracts. Scott Winship respected neither.”
Bull hesitated an instant. “Do you remember Sergeant Pulham of the Yard, Miss Winship?”
She thought a moment, and nodded. “Yes, I do. He was very helpful with the American dealer. It was he who suggested the extra thousand pounds—as a heart balm, I presume. Twelve hundred was agreed on, but he returned me two hundred the dealer had given him—what he called Sergeant Pulham’s ‘cut,’ I believe. I was surprised then that there were honest men.”
“Sergeant Pulham always expected Scott Winship to come back to that house—as he’d done when he was ill before.”
Bull watched her intently beneath the surface of his placid gaze.
She put her hand out, gripped her stick, drew herself forward and to her feet. Her brown eyes were brilliant burning coals, her mouth shut for an instant like a vise. When she spoke her voice was tense with subdued passion.
“I don’t know what Sergeant Pulham expected, sir. But I will tell you this. I am not afraid of my brother-in-law—if, as I do not believe, he is alive. I who have the most reason to be am the only person who is not afraid. Look at my sister—is it love that brings on these horrible attacks that nearly kill her whenever she
thinks he is near? What happens to men whose brains are injured, Inspector? Do they become admirable creatures, or do they become tigers feeding on the human heart?”
Miss Caroline Winship struck the carpet with the ferrule of her stick.
“You ask me if Pegott had any connection with Scott Winship, Inspector Bull. I do not know what company he keeps. It may be ghouls and monsters and evil things. It may be thieves and valets. But I have no fear of him, Inspector—dead or alive.”
“Why do you keep your house on the opposite side of the Square, Miss Winship? You have had large offers for the ground it’s on. You’ve tried to get a license to rebuild it just as it was before it was bombed out. I’m told—by people in this house, Miss Winship—that you sit here watching it day after day.”
Her burning eyes were fixed on his for a moment. Then she said, with extraordinary calm, “You may say it’s my reverence for the sanctity of private property, Inspector.” The ironic overtone struck him with the violence of another unspoken rebuke as she turned back toward her sister’s door. “You will excuse me now. I’ve told you I am a vengeful and determined woman. Good afternoon, Inspector. Let yourself out when you wish to go.”
Bull stood for a moment where he was. Then he turned and looked across the Square to the naked ruins of the house, softened in the early evening dusk. It was a trap baited to the death. An impressionable man in spite of his stolid tawny bulk, Bull felt a faint shudder course along his spine.
He went out into the hall and up two flights to Mr. Pinkerton’s room, knocked on the door and opened it, and stood staring.
“Pinkerton!” he said.
His former landlord, clad in his bright pink-and-purple dressing gown, was stretched full length on the sofa, lolling like a sybaritic rabbit against the pillows propped under his head, his stocking feet sticking out from under the green and red afghan Margaret Bull had knitted for him. As if that were not sufficiently incredible, he was smoking an American cigarette, and on the chair pulled up beside him was a glass of beer. It was a scene of debauchery such as Inspector Bull had never hoped to see, having known the late Mrs. Pinkerton’s high and rigid standards of propriety and total abstinence. Tobacco was an evil in any form, but a cigarette was a coffin nail straight from the foundries of the archfiend himself.
