Homicide House: A Mr. Pinkerton Mystery. Zenith Brown
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McGrath’s mission to Godolphin Square, and of defeat at having failed to make Mary Winship’s cousin see the truth. If only he had kept out of it, Mr. Pinkerton thought again wretchedly; if only he had let Miss Caroline Winship think it was the Town and Country planning people, and never mentioned the American. But it was too late now.
He took his dejected way up the stairs to the second floor and on up the narrower flight to the third, let himself into the meagre bed-sitting room that was his own, and stood inside the door a moment. Besides being miserable, he was extremely confused. Again he thought, they couldn’t be sending Mary Winship away on account of the American they didn’t know, so they must be sending her away because they thought her father was coming back, or was back already. Was it only her Aunt Caroline, then, or was it her mother too? He tried to think back, recalling Mrs. Scott Winship standing stone-still by the door when he repeated the ill-starred question. All he could remember was the sudden clap of silence, and the intense motionlessness of the two sisters before Miss Caroline said, “Go to your room, Louise.” Then there was Miss Winship’s telephone call to Sidney Copeland. Between all that and now—it had been twenty-five minutes past seven when he left the tea shop after his compote of starling—they had decided, or Miss Caroline had decided, to send Mary away and had arranged to send her. And she was going on the night boat—unless he could stop her some way. And why? He kept asking it with no possible means of answering.
He tried to think as he stood there in the pleasant darkness of the shabby room. The curtains had not been drawn, and the two French windows that opened out onto the narrow ledge forming a sort of balcony, behind the parapet made by the stone coping to hide the mansard windows of the attic storey and maintain the even classical lines of the Adam square, shone softly silver from the outside light. He went across the room and stepped out on the ledge.
Through the ragged branches of the intervening plane trees he could see the gaunt ruins of Miss Winship’s house. The dim orange light from the street lamp threw it into a softly ghostly relief above the black empty spaces where the houses had gone from either side of it. Someone was moving along the street in front. Mr. Pinkerton could make out the dark figure of a man moving slowly along. He passed the house, and a moment later he came back. As he stopped again, Mr. Pinkerton had a fleeting impression that there was something familiar in the outline of his body or the movement of it, as if the man was someone he had seen, and now somehow recognized but could not identify. It was so puzzling that he watched him intently— so intently that he blinked with astonishment when the man was suddenly no longer there. He seemed to have disappeared, quite literally, as if he had dissolved not into the shadows but as a part of them. He had been there, darkly visible; then he was not there, and the space in front of the house, and the whole street, was empty. It was as eerie and uncanny as the shadowy ruin of the house itself.
Mr. Pinkerton leaned forward, peering intently through the murky penumbra cast up through the settling haze by the orange overglow of the street lights. Suddenly he stiffened, every grey fibre of his nervous system quivering, as alert as if he heard again the shrill blast of the midnight siren warning of the approach of terror and death. Someone was in the room behind him. Was it the sound of a stealthy breath drawn or expelled? Or was it the slithering sound of a footstep in the dark room across the worn Brussels carpet? Or a garment brushing against the chair or the table? He could not tell, except that it was something, and something furtive and frightening, and it was there very close, inside the long open window behind him. He tried to swallow, to clear the sudden pounding in his ears, but his throat was dry. His hands were icy as he tried to grip the stone coping, drawing back not to see the street four floors below, paralyzed with a fear so horrible that it curdled everything inside him. When he tried to speak no sound came past his parched lips, and his cry for help was only a hoarse choked breath. As he tried to turn and look into the blackness of the room and cry out, he knew nothing more except a hideous woolly darkness as something thick and soft flashed over his head and a brutal stranglehold fastened about his throat, thrusting back his chin, as he slid down into a vast blinding nauseating abyss, down and down, with the high-pitched echo of something sounding crazily like the hoot of a taxi-horn bursting in his ears before the crash of a thousand lights and the blackness of oblivion. Mr. Pinkerton slumped down on the lead gutter pipe.
Wait. The hooting taxi-horn thrusting in the knife blade of fear stayed the arms of the dark figure standing over him, murderous and intent. Wait. Wait till it passes and the street is empty again. But it was not passing. It was stopping at Number 4 Godolphin Square. The dark figure was motionless, arms reached down to lift the body and cast it over the raised coping.
“He has seemed seedy lately. I advised him to go to the seashore,” Miss Myrtle Grimstead would say with easy tears when they picked him up from the street and brought him in. “I didn’t mean to upset him. I never thought he’d take it seriously and try to harm himself this way.”
The livid eyes peered secretly down. A sharply drawn breath, again the knife blade of fear. The hands seized the suffocating afghan, thrust it back in its place as the silent feet slipped back through the darkened room and out into the empty hall. The door closed quietly. No one would come. No one ever came. There would be no one until Pegott brought the breakfast tray in the morning—later than to any other room, because the little grey man did not matter. He would stay there, silent and motionless, until it was safe to return. In the morning they would find him down there in the street.
“I never thought he’d do himself harm.” Then Miss Grimstead could weep and explain he really had looked ever so seedy lately. It was her constant explanation for tenants who vacated their flats, whether they married, emigrated to South Africa, or died—it made no difference. They had looked very seedy. Miss Grimstead always recalled it vividly.
4
AS DAN MCGRATH’S taxi skidded into Godolphin Square the driver stopped talking long enough to sound his horn viciously at a man who had slipped out of the shadowy darkness almost under the wheels.
“Number Four you said, sir?” He drew up at the curb and went round to open the door. “And as I was telling the wife just this morning, you voted for the beggars, I didn’t.”
He was a voluble man with politico-domestic grievances; Dan McGrath was an American newly arrived and interested. “—now in America, sir, it’s my understanding . . .”
Dan McGrath listened, the two of them smoking his cigarettes, standing together on the curb in front of Number 4 Godolphin Square, four storeys beneath the stone coping overhead. When he finally came in, Mason the night porter opened the iron grille into the lift, and dropped both arms to his sides in impotent frustration as Miss Myrtle Grimstead came trippingly toward them.
“Oh, Mr. McGrath, I can’t think what you’ll say.” Miss Grimstead was at her most ingratiating worst. “I was so sure one of my people was going on holiday. He’s looked so very seedy lately I’d quite got it into my head he’d be off to the sea for a bit of rest and fresh air.” Her bright toothy smile remained bright, but there was a calculating flicker in her eye that Dan McGrath could hardly miss. “Of course, there may be some mistake. He tells me he’s a friend of yours . . .”
“Who—” Dan McGrath caught himself quickly. “Oh, the little—Mr. Pinkerton. Sure, he’s my pal. Known him for years.” He smiled at Miss Grimstead with easy assurance. In the face of her disparaging skepticism he would have claimed Mr. Pinkerton as brother in arms or in nature. “If it’s his room you were going to give me, skip it. Any place suits me so long as it’s got a bunk in it.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. McGrath.” Miss Grimstead covered her disappointment with a shake of her bright curls. “That is kind of you. You mustn’t think I was trying to inconvenience dear Mr. Pinkerton. He’s such a sweet old thing, so shy and so anxious never to make any trouble. Well, good night, Mr. McGrath. We do like people to be as comfortable as possible, especially the Americans. Poor England . . .”
“Don’t worry about me, Miss Grimstead. Good night.”
The porter stood aside for him to come into the lift.
“Not tryin’ to inconvenience ’im, not ’er she ain’t. Not always tryin’ to get