Copyright © 1939, 1967 by Zenith Brown.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      1

      “Lord love you, sir,” said Mrs. Humpage. “Blood has run like water in these sunny streets.”

      The little grey man standing by the south window of his room in the Old Angel dropped the casement curtains from his agitated fingers without turning round, and blinked his watery grey eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. It was not the idea of blood, so much, for he had got definitely used to that, during his long association with his late wife’s number one lodger, Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of New Scotland Yard. It was rather more the idea of the steep, dismal and rainy streets of the little town of Rye being called sunny. Above all it was the sudden appearance of Mrs. Humpage herself, for Mr. Evan Pinkerton had somehow thought he had locked his door. He swallowed, moistened his dry lips, and turned round.

      The proprietress of the Old Angel, buxom and apple-cheeked—so Mr. Pinkerton thought; anyone else would have known it was gin—stood beaming at him from the low, studded oak door. Mr. Pinkerton’s knees shook a little. There was something too masterful about Mrs. Humpage. Something of the iron hand in the velvet glove sort of thing. More literally, something of a very determined woman under a soft and apparently yielding bosom . . . and Mr. Evan Pinkerton had once been married himself, for long painful years, to a determined woman without any disguise whatever.

      “Love you, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said, with brisk cheeriness. “You must be stark frozen. How about a nice bit of fire?”

      And before the little man could stammer that he didn’t want a fire—knowing as well as Mrs. Humpage that it would relentlessly appear in his bill at two shillings—she had bustled in and set a match to the paper in the high grate of the Caen stone fireplace with “1537” carved under the Tudor rose in the centre.

      “We must make you comfortable, sir, mustn’t we?” Mrs. Humpage said, very comfortably herself.

      Her enthusiasm was far warmer than the feeble flame creeping up about the damp edges of the Morning Chronicle and sizzling against the reluctant coals piled sparsely on top.

      “We shall have a time tonight, I’m afraid, sir,” she said. “What with all them people dropping in out of the blue, as they say.”

      Mr. Pinkerton noted the unprofessional concession to the leaden streaming skies and the wind howling the smoke back down the chimney-pots.

      “—Sir Lionel Atwater indeed, sir. Turning the place inside out. I said, ‘If the Old Angel don’t suit you, sir, perhaps the ’all porter can move your traps to the Mermaid,’ I said.”

      Mrs. Humpage, her two feet firmly planted on the hearth, placed her plump arms on her much plumper hips, her whole plump person absorbing at least tuppenny’orth of Mr. Pinkerton’s fire.

      “And he starts banging on the table, and all them poor dears starts running. Now, what I’m askin’ you, sir, being a man, and a gentleman, is why don’t they settle their family differences in their own house, without coming ’ere to upset mine?”

      Mr. Pinkerton moistened his dry grey lips, not moving from his position by the casement.

      “Oh, dear!” he thought. He said, “I’m sure I . . . I don’t ever know, ma’am.”

      “Nor I, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said flatly. Mr. Pinkerton could tell, however, by the relish with which she poked up his fire, knocking the coals to the bottom where the maid could salvage them in the morning, that she had a jolly good idea.

      “Well,” Mrs. Humpage said, “I just wanted to say you’re not to mind them, sir. If they come annoying you, I’ll send them packing to the Mermaid, bag and baggage.”

      She laughed suddenly, a rich and hearty laugh that made Mr. Pinkerton’s small spine chill a little.

      “I said baggage, sir, and which one is a baggage and which one is not, I’ll leave to you, sir!”

      Mr. Pinkerton stood staring helplessly at the stout oak door through which Mrs. Humpage had disappeared with a swish of petticoats. The perspiration stood too, in cold beads on Mr. Pinkerton’s small greyish forehead. He was above all a very modest man, and the mere idea of anybody sending anybody else packing just for him was unnerving; but to send an actual knight of the realm packing for him was utterly shattering.

      He glanced uneasily at the fire sullenly eating up his coal. Mrs. Humpage, of course, had no way of knowing that the solitary reason he’d fled the comfortable fire in the inn parlour was not to be underfoot when the large, pompous, irate man whose name was Sir Lionel Atwater, with the violent beet-red face and snow-white walrus mustaches, suddenly ran entirely amuck, as he seemed on the verge of doing at any moment. Still less could she have known that Mr. Pinkerton was not nearly so terrified of the beet-faced person as at the dreadful idea that the late Mrs. Pinkerton would certainly turn over in her grave at the wanton waste of two shillings. And still more terrifying, even, was the idea that she might get up altogether, absolutely reincarnated through the sheer force of parsimony.

      Though Mrs. Pinkerton on her late unlamented decease had left him the very considerable sum of £ 75,000, by the happy chance of its never occurring to her that the little grey man she had turned from an underpaid, underfed, undermaster in a Welsh school into a potboy and scullery maid at no pay at all in her lodging house in Golders Green could have greater survival value than she, Mr. Pinkerton had never in all his life spent as much as a farthing on a fire just because he was cold. In fact, he had hardly spent anything at all, on anything, without the queasy fear plucking at his viscera that he might look up and see her standing there, handing him sixpence to go fetch a kipper for a lodger’s breakfast . . . and then everything else would turn out to be a dream, including all his glorious associations in the detection of crime with Inspector Bull, and even the large stone memorial he’d bought with Mrs. Pinkerton’s money, on the assumption that it at least would keep her down.

      So Mr. Pinkerton, once accustomed, during Mrs. Pinkerton’s life, to warm his toes and his soul, when he could escape, at the gas fire of her lodger, Inspector Bull of the C. I. D., had ever since warmed his toes at public fires, in inns, and even his meagre posterior, when no one was looking. His soul was still, however, in Inspector Bull’s hands. In fact the only reason he was now at Rye was that Bull was at Brighton, and he had so nearly told Mr. Pinkerton he was a bloody nuisance that Rye was as close to Brighton as he had dared go.

      Standing miserably in front of his two-shilling fire, Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. It had not, so far, been as good an idea as he had thought. Though in some respects the Old Angel was very nice, it had turned out to have one substantial drawback: namely, the middle-aged angel who managed it, and the way she kept popping up when she was least expected. How, for instance, she had ever discovered he was a widower, Mr. Pinkerton did not know. It could not be his weeds, for he had never worn any, except to put a black band about his hat reserved for Sundays, a day on which he never went out. And yet, Mrs. Humpage had told him she was a widow practically the moment he came in the Old Angel’s door.

      Mr. Pinkerton ran his fingers around inside his narrow celluloid collar, and straightened his purple string tie. If she were to send a knight packing for him, it could be compromising in the extreme. Even he could see that. He glanced surreptitiously at his bright new suitcase that the man had said could expand enormously to hold his immediate effects, and that he knew could contract enormously and still hold his entire wardrobe, and went across the room to the old oak cupboard.

      As he swung the door back, a solid panel in the wall by the chimney piece flew open, and a white-faced