Homicide House: A Mr. Pinkerton Mystery. Zenith Brown
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He could hear the lift coming up now. You get them warm quick. He picked up the afghan folded over the arm of the sofa, opened it up, threw it over Mr. Pinkerton, and stopped abruptly, staring. A curved metal bow was sticking up through the knitted material. He lifted it quickly and turned it over. Hanging from the coverlet on the inside, the bows caught in the soft woolen stitches, were Mr. Pinkerton’s spectacles.
Dan McGrath stared down at them. Wait a minute, McGrath. Wait just one minute.
He heard the lift stop and the door clang open, and stood there still staring down at the knitted comforter and the spectacles still hanging to it. He glanced out into the hall as it flashed into his mind that it might be a good idea to have a witness, if this meant what he thought it did. It was not Mason there, it was Miss Myrtle Grimstead; and prompted by a quick impulse he put the afghan back, flattened the bows and bunched the soft material together.
“Oh, Mr. McGrath—is there something?” Miss Grimstead had seen him through the open door and came hurrying along the hall. “Mason had to go out for a taxi. One of my people is going to Paris—”
She came to an abrupt halt in the doorway. “There! I knew it! I told him so not two hours ago. I said, Mr. Pinkerton, you are—”
“I know,” Dan said. “But let’s get a doctor, shall we? Quick?”
Miss Grimstead’s triumph transformed itself instantly into brisk and cheerful efficiency. “What a pity,” she said. “We’ll get him to hospital immediately. He wants rest and care.”
“He wants a doctor,” Dan said. “My friend Mr. Pinkerton wants a doctor. Right away. And I want the police, Miss Grimstead. I’ll settle for a doctor first.”
Miss Grimstead, bending down to take the faded cloth cover off Mr. Pinkerton’s sagging couch, flashed rigidly erect. “The police? Mr. McGrath!” Her blue eyes were bulging, her pink powdered cheeks mottled. “What do you mean? Are you mad?”
“I’m pretty mad, Miss Grimstead. I’m going to be a whole lot madder if there isn’t a doctor here in about five minutes.”
Miss Grimstead’s eyes were sharp points of calculation.
“Very well,” she said stiffly. “I’ll call a doctor. I’d like to say first you’re making a great mistake. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but this is England. Not America. Mr. Pinkerton wants care. He’s got neither family nor friends here—”
“Oh, yes.” Dan gave her a frosty smile. “You’re forgetting me. And remember that doctor we were talking about? Isn’t there a doctor in the house?”
Miss Grimstead’s face was still more mottled. “It happens there is. Not professionally. He’s a surgeon, here making a social call. However, I’ll ask him if he cares to step up and see Mr. Pinkerton. Mr. Sidney Copeland is a very busy man . . .”
He listened to her departing feet pepper the worn hall carpet. Miss Grimstead was very angry. He looked thoughtfully down at the bunched bit of knitted wool concealing the lozenge-shaped spectacles. If they had been on the outside of the thing, it was conceivable that they could have fallen off as the little guy staggered out into the fresh air. But they were folded up on the inside.
He looked at the grey pinched face. Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes were closed. There was pain in the haggard lines about his nose and in the blind naked look about his eyes. Dan bent over him, looking more closely. There was a dark scratch on the left side of his nose. He took out his handkerchief and touched it carefully. The scratch was fresh. He had just put his hand out to touch what looked like a good-sized lump on the side of Mr. Pinkerton’s head when he started at the sound of a voice behind him.
“What seems to be the trouble here?”
It was not the voice that was startling but the approach, which had been silent and very prompt, and must have been by foot up the stairs; the lift had not come up. He looked around. Mr. Sidney Copeland was a precise middle-aged man, clean and antiseptic-looking, pleasant on the whole, or looking as if he might be under other circumstances. He seemed tired, but so did almost everyone else Dan had seen. He had good brown eyes and a solid chin and firm mouth, sandy hair greying, slightly stooped shoulders, and wore a neatly brushed threadbare black suit. He glanced at Mr. Pinkerton on the couch, and back. Of the two, he seemed more intently interested in Dan McGrath.
“I found him out on the balcony. It looks to me like somebody’s conked him on the bean.”
Mr. Copeland put his fingers on Mr. Pinkerton’s wrist, passed his hand delicately over the swollen area at the side of his head, lifted up his eyelids and let them close.
“Should he go to the hospital?”
Copeland spoke with composed deliberateness. “Possibly. He seems to have got rather a nasty crack. It’s best to leave him here till he regains consciousness. His pulse is retarded, but it’s reasonably strong.”
Mr. Copeland, Dan thought, was at least reasonably casual.
“You found him out on the balcony?”
“Right.”
“And—you think somebody had—er, conked him on the bean. If I understand you, I presume you know what you’re saying? Isn’t it conceivable he may have fallen and struck his head?”
All right, McGrath. Why don’t you show him the spectacles folded up inside the wool comforter and see what he says to that? Dan wondered. It was the normal thing to do. But as the surgeon moved over to look out onto the ledge, the rigid lines of his back were even more skeptical, and to Dan even more positively offensive, than the brief smile that had been on his lips.
When he turned back from the window he regarded Dan with open amusement.
“Isn’t it simpler to assume he walked up the stairs, and feeling a bit faint went directly out for a breath of air? Had a touch of vertigo, stumbled and struck his head on the pipe? Miss Grimstead tells me he’s not been particularly fit recently.”
“Seedy, I believe,” Dan said.
Copeland glanced at him sharply. “Precisely. I believe in your country, Mr.—McGrath, is it?—it’s fairly common to find people conked on the bean, as you put it. You’re in England now, Mr. McGrath. However, I was already aware you’re a young man who enjoys making mysteries without regard to the feelings of the people they presumably affect.”
Dan stared at him. “What—sorry, I don’t get it, sir. I don’t know what you’re—what mysteries am I supposed to have made around here? Except this if you call it a mystery?”
The sudden angry light that kindled in the surgeon’s brown eyes was a startling change from his precise and passionless detachment.
“You’re the American who was making inquiries of this man,” he jerked his hand toward Mr. Pinkerton, on the couch, stirring a little, his breath coming more easily, “over the road this afternoon. Are you not?”
Dan stared with blank incredulity.
“I have no idea what your game is, Mr. McGrath, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll clear out of here. And if Scott Winship is in London, and has even a shred of decency left in him, Miss Caroline Winship’s solicitors will be very glad to hear from him. You may tell him that Miss Winship expressly forbids him to attempt to communicate with his daughter—either in person or through you. She’s left London and isn’t expected back for some time. If it’s money he wants, tell him—”
Dan took a step forward. “Wait a minute.”
“We’ve waited long enough, Mr. McGrath. Tell him that so far as the family are concerned he is dead and buried. His daughter thinks so, and she is to continue to think so. So far as all of us are concerned, Scott Winship is dead.”
He moved abruptly over to his patient. Dan, watching in stupefied silence, saw his long fingers tremble as they rested on the little man’s pulse, his eyes, focussed on the watch-face