Homicide House

by Zenith Brown

  Bull looked at Dan McGrath, coming in through the long windows from the balcony, with a twinkle in his eye. He had asked him to look after Mr. Pinkerton, not start sapping his moral fibre, as they said.

  “No, no, stay where you are.” Mr. Pinkerton was attempting to scramble out of the sofa and the dilemma he was in. “I won’t disturb you.”

  He turned to Dan. “I just dropped up to say there’ll be an inquest tomorrow at nine o’clock, sir. We’ll have to ask you to appear.”

  He turned back to Mr. Pinkerton. “What did you find out at the florist’s in Tottenham Court Road this afternoon?”

  Mr. Pinkerton inwardly shook his head. There was something very frustrating in the omnipresence and omniscience of New Scotland Yard. “Just that it was Pegott sent the flowers to Mrs. Winship the other day,” he said meekly.

  Bull nodded. “And who was the man who spoke to you outside the Corner House?”

  “I don’t know. I—I never saw him before. ‘The wicked shall be repaid—and the good.’ That’s what he said to me, Chief Inspector—just that. He—he was quite mad, I expect.”

  Bull looked at him intently.

  “Mrs. Winship has had another of her attacks today,” he said after an instant. “I’ve been talking to the staff. Pegott came in from lunch a bit before three o’clock yesterday. There was no one in the kitchen except the three maids getting ready for tea. The porter, James Belcher, had gone to the chemist’s to get some medicine for Mrs. Winship. Miss Grimstead was minding the telephone and filling out forms with a representative from the estate agents.”

  He turned to Dan. “No one saw the man you say you saw, Mr. McGrath, at Pegott’s door there. Either come in or go out. You’re quite sure you did see such a man?”

  “Quite, Inspector,” Dan said.

  “Mary and I heard him talking to somebody,” Mr. Pinkerton put in, nodding at Dan. “We’d been listening for him. We were going to ask him in for tea.”

  “I’d like you both to come to the inquest,” Bull said. “He may show up there. And your man too, Pinkerton. Both of you take a look round.”

  He nodded and started out. Dan McGrath took a step toward him.

  “Say, before you go, Inspector,” he said, “Mr. Pinkerton and I’ve been trying to figure things out. We’ve got a couple of ideas—”

  “I expect you have, sir,” Bull said patiently. He took out his watch and looked at it. “I’d be very glad to hear them, but not now. I’ve got to be at Headquarters in fifteen minutes. Pegott’s young lady Sophie Barnes is being brought in to question. I expect she’ll be able to tell us something more about him.”

  He looked down at Mr. Pinkerton. He had led them to Sophie Barnes, but there was no use telling him so. He was already a bit above himself, lolling there like an Indian potentate in his coat of many colors.

  “I’ll see you both in the morning. Good night.”

  Mr. Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles and looked at Dan. “I expect I should have told him about Eric and the ironmongers.” He shook his head regretfully. “But I expect he knows about it anyway. I’m afraid I’m very stupid. I—I should have known that postmen don’t take time out for tea.”

  He was a little hurt that his friend should have had him trailed like a common felon. “I—I’m afraid I’m a bit of a cat’s-paw,” he said, taking another sip of his beer. It was a source of constant inferiority to him that he really abominated the bitter stuff. He would much rather have had a cup of strong hot tea, but he did not want Dan McGrath to know he couldn’t take it, as the Americans said.

  Dan did not at the moment appear to be concerned with his likes or dislikes. He had turned back to the window and was looking out across the Square, his brows drawn together.

  “I’d swear she was out there, watching for him,” he said with sudden vehemence. “My busting in is what put the kibosh on it. The whole thing’s screwy, Mr. P., but it’s got to be that way to make any sense at all. Scott Winship must come back there—for some reason or another.”

  Mr. Pinkerton sat up among his pillows, which were Dan’s, brought from the box room at the end of the hall. He blinked his eyes and swallowed in sudden excitement.

  “Mr. Mc—I mean, Dan,” he said. His voice shook a little. “Why don’t we go and see? He might come tonight. If he had had to kill Pegott, it’s perhaps—well, the way you lawyers put it. Time is of the essence. Maybe Scott Winship goes there and watches this house—and that’s why he can slip in here when the porter’s out on errands. Maybe he even stays there. There are plenty of walls he can hide behind, if he goes upstairs—the way you saw him come down. Maybe—maybe he’s over there now —just waiting—”

  Mr. Pinkerton disengaged his feet from the afghan and put on his slippers, looking excitedly up at Dan McGrath. His face fell then.

  “Well, it’s not impossible, you know,” he said timidly. “And I know I’d not be much use to anybody. But I could—I could stop out in the street, and—and whistle if anybody came.”

  He put two fingers in his mouth and gave a loud clear whistle.

  “Of course, if it were Miss Caroline, I’d probably be too nervous to make much noise,” he said sheepishly. “But if it were anybody else . . . Shouldn’t we try it, Dan? It’d not do any harm if it turned out to be a—a washup—would it, really?”

  Dan McGrath was shaking his head. Not at the idea, because it was one he had had for some moments entirely on his own. But letting the little Welshman go with him was a horse of a different color. He’d promised Bull to keep Mr. Pinkerton out of trouble. As the stark gaunt angles of the ruined house across the Square loomed vividly in his mind he was seeing again the dark slinking figure creeping down the staircase, and hearing again the hollow echo of the dislodged rubble as it dropped into the area under the street.

  “No, Mr. P.,” he said calmly. “Get that idea out of your head, and but quick, my friend. There’s no use sticking your neck out. Remember what happened to Pegott?”

  Mr. Pinkerton sat back on the sofa, crestfallen. He felt he had imposed on Dan’s friendship, but he was rather disappointed, nevertheless, at his friend’s lack of daring and initiative.

  “Of course, if you’d rather just go to bed—” he could not help saying.

  “Right,” McGrath said cheerfully. “That’s what we’re both going to do.”

  “I do wish I’d found out what Eric bought at the ironmongers’,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “Probably a bolt for his door, if he’s found out Betty’s key is missing,” Dan replied, and was more right than he knew at the moment.

  17

  IT WAS two hours later when he slipped quietly out of his own room and down the stairs. He stopped in the middle of the hall. Mary Winship was coming slowly up from the first floor. She looked tired and exhausted, very pale and very lovely.

  “Mary!” He went quickly toward her.

  She stopped, her hand on the newel post, and looked at him. She was too worn out to remember that he had offended her the night before.

  “How is your mother, Mary?”

  “She’s better now. She’s asleep at last.”

  “Mary—I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, it’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Aunt Caroline says you’ve been to the police.”

  “Did you want me not to go?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “No. But I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it till I’ve got to—that my father—” She turned her head away.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry, Mary.” He wanted to put his arms around her and comfort her if he could. But she seemed too remote and her despair too private and personal for him to intrude upon.

  “I was over at Copey’s when Miss Grimstead rang for him to come to Mother,” she said. “He told me you could never tell what brain injuries might do. Oh, if I only had some money of my own and could get somebody not connected with the police to find him, and put him somewhere where he could be taken care of, if
he’s ill—I talked to my Uncle Elliot tonight. I’m going to see him again tomorrow.”

  She shook her head like somebody shaking off a bad dream.

  “I’m so confused, between what I’ve wanted to believe and what I’ve got to believe. All my—my fairy castles seem to be collapsing at my feet.”

  “If I’m one, I haven’t collapsed.”

  Dan grinned at her suddenly, grinning at his own effrontery as well. McGrath, the castle in Old Spain. She looked up at him quickly and laughed herself, half laughing and half crying too from sheer exhaustion.

  “Oh, Mary!” She was in his arms then, not at all remote, the weight of her despair lifted with the enchantment of another heart to share it. “I’m going to take you away from here, Mary.”

  “Not yet. Not now.” She drew away from him and turned her head, listening down the stairs. “Aunt Caroline will be shocked,” she said. “I’ve got to go to bed.”

  “Not up here,” Dan said sharply. “I thought you were downstairs—”

  The fact that she was down with her aunt and mother, close to the street and the porters’ room and offices, had been the reassurance he’d given himself ever since Mr. Pinkerton had told him about the missing key.

  “I am, but Aunt Caroline’s taken my room to be next to Mother. Copey and Eric are in hers. So I’m in Eric’s. But it’s quite all right. Come look.”

  She moved over to the door of Eric’s flat. It was at the rear of the house, a small sitting room with a bedroom opening off to the right. “There. You see?” She pointed to the door frame. A shining new brass bolt was fastened to the white painted wood, the other half fastened to the solid door. “I don’t know what Grimstead’s going to say when she finds out about it. Or why Eric thinks he’s in any particular danger. He was working at it when I came up to call him to dinner. He’d not answered the phone.”

  It really was what Dalrymple-Hughes had gone to the ironmongers’ for, after all. Dan examined it critically. It was a solid if amateurish and not very neat job.

  “I suppose it’s on account of Pegott,” Mary said. “I don’t know who told him about Betty’s key. Aunt Caroline heard about it from Sarah at tea. I suppose it’s his conscience. He’s being frightfully mysterious about something or other—I mean, seriously.”

  Dan tried the bolt, and the door with the bolt closed. He went into the bedroom and the bath and looked around. It was the only door to the flat, and the bedroom window opened on an enclosed air shaft down to the kitchen area. There was a second bolt on the bedroom door.

  Dan went back into the sitting room. “I don’t want you to stay here tonight,” he said soberly. “I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Mary said calmly.

  “I am.”

  “I’m not at all. Eric’s always dramatizing himself for his own ends. I’m not nearly as worried about him as I am about—”

  “About?”

  She looked away for an instant. “Aunt Caroline, and my Mother. Aunt Caroline’s frightened. I know she is. She says she’s not, but I know. The way she breathes and sits there. She’s frightened for herself, and for Mother too. That’s why Copey’s there tonight.”

  A soft tap at the door startled them both. Dan unbolted the door and opened it.

  “Oh. Locked in, are you?”

  Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s shock at seeing him and seeing Mary there behind him in Eric’s sitting room went through a kaleidoscopic series of gulps and grimaces to final articulation and a waggish shake of her red-tipped forefinger.

  “You are naughty, aren’t you? And poor old Grimstead, she didn’t mean to intrude. She just came up to see if you were all snug and comfy. But she’ll never breathe a word to anybody.”

  Miss Grimstead’s tongue was moving on syrup-smooth, but she had spotted the bolt and lock fixed to the newly painted door and doorframe.

  “Dear me!” Her managerial eyes sharpened and her lips tightened. “Dear me, it does look as if someone didn’t wish to be disturbed. It does indeed.”

  Miss Grimstead backed out of the doorway with a waggish flutter of her pencilled eyebrows. “Don’t let me disturb you. I should never think of disturbing either of you. But it is naughty of you, isn’t it?”

  She pulled the door shut behind her. There were two bright spots burning in Mary Winship’s pale cheeks. Dan looked at her.

  “Did she know you were here? Or did she come to see Eric?”

  “Eric, I expect. He’s—quite a pet of hers. I doubt if she much cares if I’m snug and comfy.”

  Dan McGrath’s face was still sober as he let himself out the front door into the deserted Square. There was something very curious about the manageress checking on the comfort of her guests twenty minutes before midnight when the rest of the house was in silence, the lights in the halls reduced to a minimum. Mason was nowhere to be seen. Dan had looked for him on his way down to tell him to keep his eye on Mary’s door. The office window was closed. Miss Grimstead had apparently vanished into her own apartments. There was no light under her door that Dan could see as he came down the last flight of heavily carpeted stairs.

  In the street he glanced up at the Winships’ flat. The curtains were drawn, but he could see a narrow ribbon of subdued light down the center of the middle window. Aunt Caroline would hardly be standing watch out in the garden with Mrs. Winship ill enough to need both her and Copeland on hand, and Eric there too.

  Dan stopped and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He was uneasy. He glanced across the garden at Number 22. It stood out like a single tooth in some disease-blackened gum, the luminous, almost frosty clearness of the night giving it strange dimensions, and a brooding emptiness that he had not felt in it before. Some trick of the light or of his own heightened imagination made it seem to have some quality of movement, as if it were stretching out strange inimical hands through the shadowy strip of trees and dark low-lying shrubs to the house he had just left. He knew it was absurd, and that the animate qualities he was endowing it with were ones it could not possess—the product of the hours he and the little Welshman had discussed it, as well as of the profound uneasiness he felt at leaving Mary back there, no matter how securely bolted behind her door.

  He glanced back at the front door and started. A man was coming out, so quietly Dan had not heard the door open. Nor could he hear it being closed; he was only able to see that it was, and that the man was coming down the steps.

  “Oh.” Sidney Copeland recognized him first. “What are you doing out here?”

  It was an abrupt and irritating demand.

  “Just taking the air,” Dan said. “What are you doing? I thought you were staying to look after Mrs. Winship. Let’s both be rude, shall we?”

  “Mrs. Winship has considerably improved. I have a full day tomorrow. I prefer to sleep in my own bed.”

  “It’s always a good idea,” Dan said. He was sorry as he said it. Copeland wasn’t a bad sort. He was a friend and mainstay to the desolate woman who was Mary’s mother. But somehow he managed to rub McGrath the wrong way. He was too damned British, Dan thought—aware that Copeland undoubtedly thought the same thing about him as an American. Manners might not make man, but they certainly could keep a couple of them from ever getting together.

  “Good night, Mr. McGrath.”

  “Good night, Mr. Copeland.”

  It was ridiculous of both of them—the formal jerk that was the modern counterpart of the bow of another era before two men called in the seconds and arranged to meet at Richmond Deer Park at dawn.

  “And I said he was probably Scott Winship in disguise.” Dan grinned sardonically to himself in the dimly-lit street, and started walking in the opposite direction from that Mr. Sidney Copeland was taking. He heard the staccato echo of his footsteps in the empty Square, and heard his own, a longer and slower beat punctuating Copeland’s precise rapid tread.

  At the bottom of the Square, Dan slowed down and moved across the road to the wattle fence round the center garden. If
Copeland had gone and Mrs. Winship was resting quietly, Aunt Caroline might come out . . . He came to a sagging place in the fence, put one long leg over it into the garden and pulled himself over. He went cautiously and quietly in among the straggling overgrown maze of unclipped shrubbery until he was through it and to the fence at the other side. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it out with his foot on the ground, looking up at the open stairway disappearing into the black imponderable shadows of the projecting portion of the roof. As Mr. Pinkerton had said, anybody could hide up there, waiting, watching—or, if a wanderer, could return with only a frail vestigial memory of a happy childhood to guide him, bewildered, struggling to reconstruct his destroyed life in its destroyed walls.

  The stairway winding gracefully to the hall that had been, and was an open balcony, was empty. Dan followed it with his eyes, up to the second storey from the drawing room floor, trying in his own mind to reconstruct the house as he had seen it when he waited there in the Square during the war, hoping Mary would come out the street door, or that he’d see her look down out of the drawing room window upstairs, or a bedroom window on what he’d call the third floor but the English would call the second. All that was gone now, dissolved and powdered rubble.

  His senses sharpened, suddenly alert. He had heard the same sound before—when the bit of rubble was dislodged and fell down into the dark cavernous hole that had been the cellars below the street; when the man had climbed over the wall before Miss Winship’s voice had come out of the dark, freezing him into a solid stationary lump.

  He went forward as noiselessly as he could, looking for a gate or a low place in the wattle fence. Then exactly what happened Dan McGrath never fully knew. It happened instantaneously. There were dark running figures on the stairway, a subdued shout from out of the black shadows, pounding feet on the hollow stairs, and as McGrath sprang forward to clear the fence, a hand gripped his arm in a vise of steel.