Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel Read online

  “But I say, old fellow, let’s have a bit of peace in our time, what?”

  The younger Atwater’s voice was almost pleading, Mr. Pinkerton thought.

  “The old boy can’t go on bellowing like a prize bull and drinking like a fish without breaking a blood vessel some time, and then you can have Sally.”

  There was a muttered retort that Mr. Pinkerton missed, and the two young men came in, the older one in the lead. He was quite large, Mr. Pinkerton saw, looking surreptitiously over from his table, nearly as large again, at first sight, as Darcy Atwater; and he was blond like him, except that his blondness was stronger, so that he must have been very much what his father was at his age. Mr. Pinkerton thought further that he would be very much like his father when he was his age, though of course he mightn’t be so much the colour of a boiled lobster if he did not drink-so much.

  As they crossed the dining room, Sir Lionel Atwater looked up from his plate, poured himself an unusually large peg from the whisky bottle beside it, sent a violent splash of soda into his glass, hunched back over his plate and said not a word. Not at least until the fish came. He straightened up as his was put in front of him, sat glowering at it for a moment, and gave it a violent push.

  “It’s dead!” he bellowed. “Take it away! Bury it!”

  Mr. Pinkerton straightened his narrow purple string tie. He had thought it a very tasty bit of fish. He glanced anxiously about, hoping that Mrs. Humpage was not within earshot, or that if she was she wouldn’t bustle in and send them all packing just as Mr. Pinkerton was beginning to find all this extremely interesting.

  The potboy Jo put the deaf and dumb gentleman’s boiled pudding in front of him and came over to Mr. Pinkerton. “Something else, sir?”

  “No, thank you,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “No coffee, sir?”

  Since coffee cost sixpence extra, Mr. Pinkerton shook his head, got up and hurried out into the lounge. Mrs. Humpage, in the office door, closed a large red book and turned quickly, and smiled as she saw Mr. Pinkerton. She beckoned to him.

  “I was looking them up,” she whispered.

  She nodded toward the dining room.

  Mr. Pinkerton blinked.

  “Are they . . . are they in there?” he asked.

  Since it was the first time—except, of course, for the Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard—that he had ever been in the same room with an actual knight of the realm in all his meagre little life, as drab and colourless as Romney Marsh on a leaden winter day, except for the purple patch of Scotland Yard and crime united in the person of his late wife’s former lodger and his one solitary friend in all the world, he did not want Sir Lionel Atwater to turn out to be an imposter.

  “They are that, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said. She opened the big red book and pointed. Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes ran hastily over the letterpress.

  Atwater, Sir Lionel. 1. Jeffrey, heir, unmarried. 2. Darcy, m. Pamela Gwendolyn Watkins, dau. of Sir Wathen Watkins Watkins, Bart., Llangollen, Wales. Seat: Atwater House, Atwater, Bucks.

  “Oh, he’s genuine, sir,” Mrs. Humpage went on. “He’s made pots of money in City companies too, sir. His driver was telling me he was poor as a church mouse once. He went to Australia and came back with a pile, and went in the City. Now he’s director of he don’t know how many companies. The driver says he’s that near he don’t let one of ’em have a farthing. He says that’s why the young one married the Welsh lady—she’s rich in her own right.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Pinkerton. “And the older one . . . is he married?”

  He looked down at the fine type again to cover the light of duplicity that he knew must be visible in his face. He had only tried to deceive the late Mrs. Pinkerton once, and that was when she had used Inspector Bull’s gas fire in his absence to air her own woolen chemises. He had succeeded then, but it had frightened him so much he had never dared try it again. And Mrs. Humpage was certainly quite as shrewd as Mrs. Pinkerton. Perhaps it was because she was so eaten with curiosity herself that she did not notice it.

  “That’s all the trouble, sir,” she whispered, close to Mr. Pinkerton’s ear. “That’s what they’re here for. There’s a lady . . . an American, too, sir.”

  She said it as if that in itself were enough to explain a great deal. Mr. Pinkerton looked up, blinking.

  “I hope you don’t like the Americans, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said, so acidly that for a moment Mr. Pinkerton thought the worst had finally happened.

  “Oh, no, no,” he said hurriedly. As a matter of fact he did like the Americans very much indeed. For they, in the persons of the cinema, made up for the dreary wasteland of his life when Inspector Bull was not in it. He knew a great deal about them. He had sat through “Satan in Satin” twice on successive days, and would have gone again if the lady usher hadn’t misunderstood his motives and suggested supper the second night. But under the sharp eye of Mrs. Humpage he could never admit it.

  “I hope not, sir,” Mrs. Humpage said comfortably. Then she added, as if that would finish it if the other fact hadn’t, “She’s divorced.”

  As Mr. Pinkerton knew, however, from the cinema and the picture papers that all Americans are divorced, not only once but many times, and that whole American states are set aside where divorce is all they do, except gamble and shoot gangsters, it did not really surprise him.

  “However,” said Mrs. Humpage reluctantly, “I must say she’s very nice appearing, and quiet, and keeps her clothes on, which is more than you can say for Englishwomen these days, in their shorts and things. Why, sir, if you’d see Rye on a summer’s day, it would fair make you blush, sir.”

  Mr. Pinkerton had not seen Rye on a summer’s day, but he had seen Brighton, and it had, made him blush, even though the cinema had quite prepared him for anything or so he would have thought.

  “Do you . . . know her?” he ventured.

  “Ah,” Mrs. Humpage said. “She lives here.”

  A certain triumph was in her voice, as if the lady in question, along with the Landgate, and the half-timbered Tudor houses lining the cobbled streets, and the priest hole in the smokeroom fireplace, were one of the things that made old Rye what it was.

  “She’s got a cottage, sir, just up the street. She paints—if you can call the daubs she makes on canvas painting, sir. And I expect some people do; at any rate, a gentleman from London bought the whole boiling last December and there was a piece in the London papers about her. And I must say that if you’re far enough away from them they make you feel the way you feel sometimes when you come along the street when the sun comes out, after it’s been raining. But that’s not what I for one want if I was to buy an oil painting. You see what I mean, sir.”

  Mr. Pinkerton nodded. He saw very well. In fact he felt much the same way about it.

  “And the lumps she paints for women!” Mrs. Humpage laughed suddenly. “Well, that’s neither here nor there, as they say.”

  She jerked a plump thumb toward the dining room.

  “They don’t want him to marry her, and you can see why they don’t. There’s too many Americans in England as it is.”

  “And is he? . . .” Mr. Pinkerton began, tentatively. He straightened his lozenge-shaped steel-rimmed spectacles nervously. He didn’t want Mrs. Humpage to think he was curious, precisely. Nevertheless. . . . Fortunately Mrs. Humpage was a woman who only wanted a conversational inch promptly to take an ell.

  “Indeed, sir, you know what young men are these days.” A certain righteous indignation appeared in her tones. “She’s got him wound round her finger. He’s been coming down here all summer and autumn, sitting in there, sending first Jo and then Kathleen with notes, and her pretending she won’t see him.”

  Mrs. Humpage gave a polite snort.

  “Not likely, if you hear me, sir. Just leading him on. And him a crashing fool. He’s been here three weeks this time. The phone from London ringing every five minutes, and him not answering it, telling Kathleen to say first he’s in A
frica and next he’s in Sweden, and then going in himself and saying they can go to the devil. You’d be surprised, sir, where a woman like that can lead a man to. But here they come, sir.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Mrs. Humpage bustled out into the lounge.

  “I hope your ladyship enjoyed your dinner,” she said. She curtseyed very nicely, Mr. Pinkerton thought, in spite of her ample figure, and in spite of everything she had just finished saying.

  Sir Lionel Atwater grunted, morosely. Lady Atwater smiled. “Very nice, thank you,” she said. “Shall we sit here, dear, for our coffee?”

  Sir Lionel grunted again, and sat down. His daughter-in-law sat beside him on the leather sofa, his wife sat beside him on the other side. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated for just an instant, and then slipped, as quietly as a rabbit, into a chair beside the potted rubber plant in the majolica jardinière that the late Mr. Humpage had bought from a writer who once lived in Rye. He knew that, because Mrs. Humpage had, she told him, watered it with her tears when Humpage fell down the steps by the Ypres Castle public and broke his neck at the bottom.

  And being there, he even went so far as to order coffee to retain his seat when the deaf and dumb gentleman, who wasn’t having any, was practically sent to his room by Mrs. Humpage. Another man, the one who had come the evening before with the deaf and dumb gentleman, came in, glanced about the lounge and went along to the dining room. Mrs. Humpage bustled about a moment and followed him. Mr. Pinkerton heard her voice: “It’s a bit nasty out this evening, sir.”

  There was not, as Mr. Pinkerton knew, anything but an affirmative answer to that. The man apparently thought no answer at all was needed, because he made none. Mrs. Humpage bustled back in a moment, and put a shovelful of coals on the fire with her own hands. In another moment, the two sons of Sir Lionel and Lady Atwater came out of the dining room and stood in front of the fire, until Sir Lionel thundered at them did they think they were a couple of bloody salamanders. Darcy Atwater grinned and moved. Jeffrey Atwater stayed where he was. As it was really just Mr. Pinkerton and the fire he was standing between, no one complained again.

  Mr. Pinkerton, who had not taken his eyes off the three people on the leather sofa, suddenly blinked his eyes and straightened his steel-rimmed spectacles. A small mouse, almost too decrepit to move, poked his head out from under the sofa just at Lady Atwater’s feet. She looked down. Mr. Pinkerton expected her to scream, but she didn’t. She glanced at her husband, slipped her hand into the pocket of her tweed jacket, brought it out, bent down quietly and dropped a bit of biscuit on the floor. The mouse retired, and crept out again.

  Suddenly Sir Lionel came to life. “Dammit, madam, are you feeding a mouse?”

  He glared at Lady Atwater, and then glared across the room at Mr. Pinkerton. “Dammit, sir, this place is full of mice!”

  And at just that moment, as Mr. Pinkerton sat there, completely paralyzed, the door of the Old Angel opened suddenly, and in out of the blustering night came a very large man. He was dressed in a cinnamon-brown tweed suit and overcoat, which gave him rather the appearance of an outsize cinnamon bear, and he had a large and very placid red face with guileless blue eyes and large tawny mustaches.

  Mr. Pinkerton, sitting in the shelter of the rubber plant, stared incredulously, tried desperately to still his shaking hands, made an agitated attempt to get to his feet, and found that his knees sagged like catgut that had been a fortnight in the rain.

  The large tawny man put down his bag, took off his hat, shaking the rain from it onto the floor, looked calmly round the lounge, his eyes meeting the little Welshman’s paralyzed gaze without the slightest sign of recognition, and stepped with heavy deliberation, bending so as not to shatter the stout oak door beam with his skull, into Mrs. Humpage’s office. Mr. Pinkerton heard him say, rather louder than was necessary, he thought, “Have you got a room, ma’am? Briscoe is the name.”

  It occurred to Mr. Pinkerton, for the second time within two hours, that he had lost his wits. He reached his trembling fingers down and gave his leg a sharp pinch just to make sure he was still in possession of his ordinary faculties, and winced. Then, through the office door he saw the large man open the register, glance down it, and sign with a flourish, and heard Mrs. Humpage say, “Jo—show Mr. Briscoe to Number Six. Will you have a bite of supper, sir?”

  And then, just as the horrid truth that the best, and indeed the solitary, friend that he had in the world, namely Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of the C. I. D., was deliberately cutting him absolutely and incredibly dead, began to react on the dead fish in pink sauce in Mr. Pinkerton’s grey little stomach with the force of a wicked Channel crossing, the large voice of Sir Lionel Atwater rose.

  “Dammit, Jeffrey, is she coming, or isn’t she? Am I expected to cool my heels the rest of the winter?”

  And as the cuckoo sprang out of the Swiss clock on the chimney piece and sounded eight smooth notes, the inn door opened again and a young woman with hair the colour of ashy gold in a knot at the nape of her neck came in, in a camel’s-hair coat buttoned up under her pointed chin and a brown felt hat with a little red and green feather in the band. Mr. Pinkerton, his mind torn distressfully between so many things happening all at the same time, looked quickly from the delicate sun-tanned face to her silken ankles and neatly shod feet, and knew instantly that this was the American lady.

  She stood there for a moment, her dark eyes meeting Jeffrey Atwater’s across the lounge. Storm warnings that even Mr. Pinkerton could sense went up like tiny flags in every eye in the room, and deepened the alarming purple behind the white walrus fangs of Sir Lionel Atwater. Lady Atwater hastily slipped another bit of biscuit to the old mouse under the sofa, and sat there, a little pale. Mr. Darcy Atwater’s face brightened. “I say!” he exclaimed; and turned quickly as his wife shot him a glance that Mr. Pinkerton could only describe as significant.

  Then Jeffrey Atwater moved out to meet the girl. She could not, Mr. Pinkerton thought, be over twenty-two or three, if she was that; though he knew, of course, from the advertisements in the papers that she might be practically in her grave and still not look it.

  “This is Mrs. Bruce, Mother,” Jeff Atwater said stiffly. “And my father, Sally. This is my sister-in-law, and this is Darcy.”

  Mr. Pinkerton, staring in utter fascination from his place by the rubber plant, noticed that not one of them moved to shake hands with her, except Darcy Atwater—and one look from the big dark Welsh girl made that abortive in the extreme.

  Sally Bruce, he decided, must have lived abroad a long time. She didn’t move her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth, because oddly enough she wasn’t chewing any, and she said, “How do you do,” in a slightly husky and very pleasant voice, Mr. Pinkerton thought, instead of “Pleased to meetcha,” in a loud nasal one.

  Sir Lionel balanced his weight on his knuckles and made two amphibian attempts to rise. Pamela Atwater jumped up to help him. He shook her off angrily. “Dammit, Pamela, do you think I’m a cripple?” He did allow his wife to give him a hand nevertheless, and they stood there, the three of them, with Darcy Atwater flanking them, elongating his chin in sheepish embarrassment, a sort of embattled legion, facing the American divorcée and the son and heir of the house of Atwater whom she had got in her toils.

  “We’ll go up,” Sir Lionel said briefly.

  Sally Bruce glanced at Jeff Atwater. He smiled with one side of his mouth, but the sullen angry fire in his blue eyes and the set of his jaw worried Mr. Pinkerton. He felt himself suddenly glad that Inspector Bull was there, even if he was acting in such an extraordinary manner, calling himself Briscoe and not recognizing people that he knew very well.

  Mr. Pinkerton cast a furtive sidelong glance at the Atwaters, climbing the steep narrow old stairs to the first floor, took the last cold gulp of his coffee and slipped out from his chair under the rubber tree. As he did so the deaf and dumb gentleman looked up anxiously. The man who had gone into the dining room came out and stood in front o
f the fire, making odd noises with his tongue in his teeth.

  “Nasty weather we’re having,” he said amiably to Mr. Pinkerton.

  The deaf and dumb gentleman got up, went across the lounge to the opposite staircase and hurried up.

  The man in front of the fire tapped his forehead. “Funny bloke,” he said.

  “He’s . . . he’s deaf and dumb,” Mr. Pinkerton volunteered, timidly. Then he blinked. This was even odder, now that he came to think about it. The man in front of the fire had brought the deaf and dumb gentleman to the inn the evening before, and yet neither of them had acted as if he’d ever seen the other.

  “Too bad I’m not deaf, or some other people here aren’t a bit dumber,” the man said. Then he laughed as if he’d made a very good joke. “McPherson’s my name,” he added.

  “Pinkerton is mine,” Mr. Pinkerton said. He edged toward his own staircase.

  “Not the detective, what?” Mr. McPherson asked. “Ha, ha, ha! That’s rich. I used to be a Pinkerton man myself.”

  “Oh, really,” Mr. Pinkerton said.

  “In the States and Canada. That was a long time ago. I’m travelling in vacuum cleaners now. Aren’t wanting a nice up-to-date little machine to save wear and tear on the little woman and the carpets, what? Ha, ha, ha!”

  Mr. Pinkerton had never liked to be laughed at, certainly not by a traveller in vacuum cleaners. He mustered his small grey dignity.

  “I might, for my London house,” he said.

  “Okay, brother,” Mr. McPherson replied cheerfully—the effect, Mr. Pinkerton presumed, of his days in the States. “Don’t want to miss up on any business these days. Stopping here long?”