by Zenith Brown
Bull turned to Louise Winship, sitting white as death itself on the sofa, the nurse beside her almost vulgarly alive in contrast to the woman leaning back, one transparent hand gripping her throat as if she also expected a recurrent attack of her own malady, waiting for it in fear and despair.
“Mrs. Winship,” he said soberly. “You have never told anybody the truth about this matter.”
A muffled hacking sound and the thud of heavy blows came through the window, falling like a hollow period punctuating his quiet accusation. A shuddering groan came from Caroline Winship’s lips. “They’re stealing my mantelpiece . . .” She lunged forward and threw up the window. The hacking sounds of the pickaxes came clearly across the Square.
“It’s time for you to tell the truth now, Mrs. Winship.” Bull looked steadily down at her. “When your husband left the farm in Kent, you knew he was not coming back—not for some time. Did you not, Mrs. Winship?”
Louise Winship gripped her throat more tightly with her frail bloodless hand, and bent her head forward in assent.
“More than that. You knew he was going to sell the picture. He had got your permission to sell it. Had he not?”
“Yes.” She breathed the word rather than spoke it.
“You knew he had sold it and gone to Paris. That’s why you waited in Kent until the day before the dealer was to come to take the picture. Because you thought your husband had the money, and had got safely to the Continent.”
Through the open window the hack-crash-thud of the men across the Square stopped momentarily, and continued again with a new rhythm. Dan McGrath looked over there past the plane trees. The carved Adam mantelpiece was gone. It stood against the wall at the foot of the staircase going fantastically on up to the open sky. The fragile pink damask torn from the overmantel hung on the delicate ornamental stair rail, flapping in the breeze. A crowd of onlookers had materialized almost in a moment, standing along the road and on the benches in the garden. He recognized the maid Sarah and the day porter from Number 4. The rest seemed to have sprung up like mushrooms on the lawn after a warm rainy night. Two policemen in uniform stood on either side of the premises at Number 22. The workmen were hacking methodically at the plaster covering the solid chimney shaft.
“Why did you not tell your sister here that you had sold the picture, Mrs. Winship?”
Miss Caroline Winship was motionless in the yellow chair.
“I—I couldn’t.”
A fit of coughing choked her. She clutched her handkerchief to her mouth.
“You were ill, the night you came from Kent. Your sister called in Mr. Sidney Copeland, a surgeon who had tended your husband.”
Dan went across the room to Mary and took her hand. She looked up at him, her face pale, as Bull’s slow and inexorable voice went on.
“These facts are recorded in Inspector Pulham’s report and elaborated on in his private notes. You did come to Mrs. Winship, at eight-fifteen o’clock the night she arrived from Kent, did you not, Mr. Copeland? And while you were there, Mrs. Winship was seized with one of her asthmatic attacks?”
Copeland spoke reluctantly. “If I remember correctly, that is so. It was a long time ago.”
“Too long,” Caroline Winship said. Her gaze across the Square was unwavering. Her voice had a hollow quality of doom, above the hollow pick-pick-pick of iron points echoing across the trees.
“Too long for a woman to suffer,” Bull said quietly. He turned back to Louise Winship. “You were married to Scott Winship from 22 Godolphin Square on the twenty-second of January 1925. The roses that you get—have got each year, except during the war—come on the sixteenth of October—which is the day you married him in 1924, secretly, in the Registry Office in Oxford. You wore three red roses. Scott Winship had no money to buy more. Mr. Elliot Winship here stood for his brother. He is the only person, presumably, who knew you were married to him then.”
Elliot Winship flushed as she looked round at him. “Sorry, old girl. I’d really got to tell him, you know. Police, and all that. Awkward, you know, withholding information, and all that sort of thing.”
Dan McGrath could hear the voices of the men working across the Square, and the hack-crash, hack-crash—hack-crash, hack-crash like incidental discords, hardly heard at moments, sharply audible at others. He looked down at Mary, took her hand and held it tight—a taut and frightened orphan of a storm that should never have touched her life at all.
“It was also on the sixteenth October,” Bull said, “that this announcement appeared in The Times.” He took a faded newspaper clipping out, holding it in his hand. “This was also in Inspector Pulham’s private papers—an entry he added almost ten years after everyone else at Scotland Yard had forgotten Scott Winship.”
“I—I have always been sorry,” Louise Winship whispered. “I’ve never forgiven myself.”
“Nor have you ever been forgiven, Mrs. Winship,” Bull said evenly. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that the flowers that have been sent you for so long—the few primroses that came on your birthday in April, and the three roses on your wedding day— were ordered to be sent to you on those days, and paid for, for twenty-five years in advance, on the day your husband bought his ticket to Paris. Confidential instructions with bank notes to cover the charges were posted in London on that day. The florist received them the next morning, October third, and the order was entered on his books that day.”
The frail color that had risen to Louise Winship’s cheeks drained out of them.
“You mean—he did not intend to come back to me? Oh, no, no!”
“Not exactly,” Inspector Bull said. “The shop they were ordered from was bombed during the blitz. They stopped coming then. They began again when the florist’s daughter opened up the shop, and being an honest woman, carried on. the obligations that she had records left for. It was Pegott who sent the roses the other day—on the wrong day. It was Pegott who told Sophie Barnes, the girl in the florist’s shop, to change the address from Twenty-two Godolphin Square to Four Godolphin Square. He had—guessed by then that Scott Winship did not know your present address or that Number Twenty-two had been destroyed in the war.”
The quality of the rhythmic sound coming from across the Square changed abruptly. It was no longer the hollow hack and thud of the falling plaster but the ringing metallic note of iron on harder substance. Dan looked over. The plaster was gone. Left was the blurred pink of the solid brick and mortar, and he heard the clank of the sledge hammer striking the chisels into it, picking the iron mortar away piece by piece—each resounding blow translated, quivering, through Caroline Winship’s rigid body, tearing away the substance of her heart as it tore away the solid substance of her property.
“Pegott came here to join Miss Grimstead’s staff with one thing in mind,” Bull said. “His father was a stonemason, and he’d listened to his father’s stories. He knew about Scott Winship, and he’d learned by eavesdropping about the picture Winship had sold for ten thousand pounds. In his father’s ledger there’s an entry for additional labor at Twenty-two Godolphin Square not included in a contract for repairs to the area and rear foundations. September twenty-eight, 1925, there’s an entry ‘Remove mantel and brick from hall fireplace chimney, first floor,’ and on October third there’s an entry ‘Replace same.’ The day before that second date was the day Scott Winship came up from Kent and took the American dealer to the house to view and buy the picture. Miss Caroline Winship was staying in Richmond. The servants were away. The house was closed while Pegott senior was making repairs to the foundations.
“Sophie Barnes thought Pegott, the valet, talked wildly about a fortune he was about to make. She thought he was fooling her, but she also thought he was going to marry her, so she listened. Pegott knew he couldn’t hope to manage alone, especially with Miss Winship watching the house to see that her mantel and staircase weren’t carried off by collectors. He went to see Mr. Elliot Winship on the pretext of selling him some of his father’s moulds,
but couldn’t get to see him. He finally decided on Dalrymple-Hughes as a relative who might be able to persuade Miss Winship, I expect, to allow the search. Because Pegott was a cunning man, and he had put several things together. He believed that a picture worth ten thousand pounds had got walled up in the house there. He’d got a good deal of information, by prying and eavesdropping. He’d told Mr. McGrath his father always thought a mistake had been made—by which he meant his father had not thought Scott Winship had taken the picture away.
“Pegott was ready to act. When Mr. McGrath came here, he made the mistake—as others did, and natural under all the circumstances—of connecting him with the picture. But when Pegott found out from Mr. McGrath what that book about lost paintings was saying, he became frightened, or suspicious. He had taken the book from Mr. McGrath, and learned, or believed he had learned, that the picture was a fake. It was that noon that he lunched with Dalrymple-Hughes. I presume he then sold his ‘interest’ in the picture—namely, his information that the picture might be concealed, walled up in the masonry, in Twenty-two Godolphin Square—to Dalrymple-Hughes, who had drawn a cheque payable to Pegott for one hundred pounds, reducing his own balance to some three pounds.
“Whether Pegott thought Scott Winship had returned and was trying to get his picture again, I do not know—and whether Dalrymple-Hughes thought he had to act quickly or not at all, is only surmise. But he bought himself a sledge hammer and cold chisel yesterday afternoon. It was the chisel that Miss Mary Winship stumbled over on the stairs last night. It and the sledge hammer have been identified as resembling those sold yesterday to a man of his description. And that he was afraid, we know from his having bought bolts and put them on his doors. He brought the sledge hammer down to this flat with him, not, of course, as he is said to have told Miss Winship, for protection, which is absurd, but because he planned to get up early—he had set his aunt’s alarm—go over to Number Twenty-two and go to work to find the picture. He was sure, from what Pegott had told him, and from what he had himself picked up around here, that the picture was there; and presumably he did not know that it was suspected to be a forgery. He had been brutally killed, of course, before the alarm went off to wake him.”
“The picture is not a forgery,” Miss Caroline Winship said coldly. She did not move her body or turn her head. “The picture is not a forgery.”
“You have known all along that the picture really is in the house over there, Miss Winship,” Bull said quietly. “You must have known it, of course. The senior Pegott received his fee from you. Inspector Pulham suspected that. He suspected, however, with nothing he could legally demand a search warrant for. No crime had been done in the disappearance of the picture. You had paid back the dealer; you had closed the door. Pulham came to that conclusion after a number of years of watching the art dealers’ sales, and collectors’ and museums’ acquisitions, here and abroad. You knew that, did you not, Miss Winship?”
“I am not a fool,” Caroline Winship said steadily. She did not move until Louise Winship’s horrified gasp. She moved her head then for an instant and shot her sister a single glance before she turned back to take up again her brooding vigil.
“Inspector Pulham,” Bull went on slowly, “had Mr. Sidney Copeland’s report on Scott Winship. He had serious head injuries from the war. The prognosis was unfavorable. Recurrent attacks of amnesia were to be expected. For a long time Pulham expected Scott Winship would return home, as he’d returned when he escaped from the military hospitals where he’d been a patient. Later, Pulham concluded Winship would come back when the five thousand pounds were gone—come back for the picture, to sell it again. It was Scott Winship’s return that Pulham was waiting for after he retired from the Force, and up to the time he was killed on Home Guard duty in the blitz.”
He took two steps to Miss Winship’s chair and looked out over the garden at his men. As he looked back at her, and spoke to her, her gaze stayed, unwavering, on the house.
“It is Scott Winship’s return over there, Miss Winship, that all the staff here, and your sister, the policemen who patrol the Square, Mr. Copeland, all of them, think you are waiting for, as you sit here, always, at this window.”
“It is false,” Caroline Winship said. She struck her stick violently on the floor. “False. That is not why I have sat here. My picture is there. It was my picture. It was the only valuable picture in the whole collection—and my father gave it to her! He had no right. I took care of my father. She was too weak and sickly to take care of him. I took care of Scott Winship, after the first war, when he ran away from the hospital and crept back, lost, his mind blank!”
She was rising, her cheeks darkly flushed and mottled, staring with a kind of dreadful agony across the Square. Dan McGrath saw that the workmen had gone through the brick. A gaping black hole in the pink blurred chimney column was opening. A man with a crowbar was prying loose a section of the solid wall. The sledge hammers rose and fell. The senior Pegott, he thought, with sudden irrelevance, put his bricks together to stay forever.
Caroline Winship’s breath came in labored gasps.
“Yes,” Inspector Bull said slowly. His voice was sombre. “I know. I know you took care of him when he was ill. But you’ve not sat here because of your picture, Miss Winship. It was not because of your picture—or the picture you thought should have belonged to you—that they’d got to tear you away from that staircase the morning the house was bombed out. It was because you were not at Richmond on October second. You were not at Richmond at all—and you were in that house when Scott Winship came there with the dealer, and later when he came back from the bank and told you he’d sold the picture, and that he and his wife were going to Paris to live. But Scott Winship did not get to Paris . . .”
The wall tore loose under the crowbar, a great square of brick, held together still by Pegott the stonemason’s art, tearing loose from the chimney face, crashing down to the floor as the workmen jumped back. They moved in again to prize out the sheet metal backing that Dan McGrath could see there. It looked to him at first like some part of the furnace flue. He thought then that it could not be, by the way they were working at it. Or by what he saw then in the rigid transfixed figure of Caroline Winship. She stood there with one hand on the window frame, gripping it so that her knuckles were white under the brown blotched skin. Her breath came in spasms as she watched as if in some horrible enchantment, her brilliant eyes glittering.
The sheet metal backing was coming out as the men prized it loose. It came forward, like an oven door falling open. The men moved back, in some fantastic slow motion, as if themselves seized by some weird enchantment. Dan McGrath stared, catching his breath, his face turning slowly white.
Lodged in the cavity that was exposed was a statue. It was not a picture. It was the statue of a man, kneeling, his torso bent forward, his head between his knees, bent forward kneeling, like some hideous abject worshipper of an evil god, transfixed and mummified in the act of some hideous contrition. But it was not a statue. It was a man. Or it had been a man. Dan could tell that too by the way the workmen and the policemen stood, and the way one of them, after a petrified instant, reached slowly for his cap and took it off, and the others followed one by one. And by the way they moved quickly back as the terrible kneeling figure there seemed to come to some fearful life, moving sideways out of its ghastly crypt, leaning, toppling, falling slowly out and down, down at their feet and onto the floor. Dan McGrath could see it there, the form and figure of a man, for an instant—and then, in an instant, shrunk, shrunk and collapsed into a dark and awful heap on the floor, decay and dissolution. Dust thou art, to dust returneth.
One of the men there not in workman’s clothes moved then, after a long moment, reaching into the cavity that had been Scott Winship’s tomb for twenty-four years—from his daughter’s birth, through her childhood, through a war that had brought her to maturity, always believing he was alive and would one day come back to them. Out of it he brought a small f
lat rectangular object. As he held it, Dan saw something, dark and unshaped, barely more than an amorphous cloud, fall from it. The man was holding in his hand a frame, the frame empty, the picture that it had once held crumbled, disintegrated, a handful of shreds and dust fallen and dispersed.
He turned, looking in mute horror at Caroline Winship.
“He’s mine,” she whispered. “He’s still mine. He belonged to me. The picture belonged to me.” She beat her stick on the floor. “They were plotting to sell it. Even before they went to Kent they were plotting to sell it and go away, and leave me!”
It was like some awful recitation dredged, whispering, up from the bitterest depths of her heart. “That’s why I closed the house. That’s why I let them think I’d be at Richmond for the day. I knew they’d come. I was ready for them—for both of them —and she did not come!”
She wheeled round, her face livid, the heavy eyelids torn open from her brilliant gleaming eyes. Louise Winship shrank back in speechless terror before that glance.
“I hate her! She took him from me . . . She should be dead!”
Miss Caroline Winship threw up her arm, her stick poised. “She shall—”
Her thick body was convulsed, the stick fell from a clawing hand to the floor. She held herself erect, terrible for an instant with hatred and despair, and pitched forward. She lay there, her face purple and suffused, her hands clawing once before they were still.
23
DAN held Mary Winship, white-faced, close in his arms. He did not care to look around the room, in the silence there in which life seemed suspended.
Inspector Bull’s voice was calm and grave.
“And you would have died, Mrs. Winship. You were meant to die when your husband died. You were meant again to die yesterday. Miss Grimstead’s coming up and calling Copeland here was the only thing in the world that saved you. That, and her first stroke last night, after she’d killed Eric Dalrymple-Hughes to save herself, just as she’d done Pegott, and tried to do to Mr. Pinkerton, thinking he knew more than he did, or possibly mistaking him for Pegott.”
