LITMIR.BIZ

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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 of 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?”

      “A day or so,” Mr. Pinkerton said nervously.

      “Me too.”

      Mr. Pinkerton edged closer to his stairs and scurried up them. At the top he glanced back. Mr. McPherson had moved quickly across to Mrs. Humpage’s office and was looking through the register—acting, Mr. Pinkerton thought, considerably more like a Pinkerton’s man than a traveller in sweepers.

      Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. It really was most odd. In fact, the more he saw of the Old Angel and its guests, the odder the whole place appeared.

      He gained his door and went in. The maid Kathleen was there, turning down his bed. She still looked pale and shaken, or so Mr. Pinkerton thought at first. Then, in a brief instant, he realized that she had not been turning down his bed for more than half a moment. She had been listening at the panel wall. Through it he could hear the sound of voices, not loud or violent—not, at any rate, except when Sir Lionel Atwater had the floor.

      The girl folded the yellow rayon bedspread.

      “I put your sheets on wrong side out, sir,” she said. “But I didn’t change them. It’s bad luck, and we don’t want any—not any more than we’ve got.”

      Mr. Pinkerton blinked at her. The dead sound in her cheery little voice—“Kathleen’s a ray of sunlight in this old-world place, sir,” Mrs. Humpage had said—made him fairly shudder.

      “Has . . . the other gentleman come, sir?” she asked suddenly.

      “Mr. McPherson?” Mr. Pinkerton asked.

      “Not him.” She said it almost contemptuously. “The Mr. Fleetwood that Mr. Atwater was telephoning to when they first came, sir. Oh, dear—that’s him now, I expect.”

      Mr. Pinkerton could hear the bell in the lounge jangling violently.

      “Oh, dear!” the girl said again. “Poor young lady—poor Mr. Jeffrey! Oh sir, I do feel so badly!”

      She buried her face for a moment in the damp pillow she’d lifted to fluff and made odd little sounds as if she’d got a very bad cold. Mr. Pinkerton straightened his tie nervously. What if Inspector Bull should pop in, or Mrs. Humpage, and find the child crying in his room? He felt himself, as Chrissie the Bulls’ cook-general used to say, going fair queer all over.

      She put the pillow down and turned indignantly to him.

      “Oh, sir, what right have people got going about making other people miserable?” she demanded hotly.

      “I . . . I’m sure I don’t know, miss,” Mr. Pinkerton said hurriedly.

      Downstairs the bell rang again, more imperatively still. Kathleen looked from one side to the other as if trying to find some way to escape.

      “I expect I’ve got to answer it, sir,” she said. She picked up the hot copper water can and went out.

      Mr. Pinkerton heard a crisp arrogant voice come up the crooked old stairs.

      “Has everybody gone to sleep in this damned place? Here, girl—fetch my luggage in out of the rain.”

      “Yes, sir,” Kathleen said. “Are you Mr. Fleetwood, sir?”

      “I’m glad I’m at least expected,” the arrogant voice said.

      “Is Sir Lionel Atwater in?”

      “Just a moment, sir.” Mr. Pinkerton heard the bell ring again. “Jo, show this gentleman upstairs. In Number Four, sir.”

      Mr. Pinkerton looked out shamelessly through the crack in the door. A tall pompous man, a tweed greatcoat over his dinner jacket, his black hair receded so that he had a broad, very ample forehead, was standing at the bottom of the steps.

      “Here, boy—just ask for Mr. Darcy Atwater. Tell him privately to come down a moment. Hurry along.”

      He tossed the boy a coin. Mr. Pinkerton could see him looking at it, and noted that he actually did hurry. Then he closed his door quickly as he saw, coming down the opposite steps, the unmistakable cinnamon-brown trouser legs of Inspector Bull, alias Mr. Briscoe.

      4

      Mr. Pinkerton sat down on the edge of his oak settle and bit the nail of his left forefinger. If only he knew what was up, he thought dejectedly. Whatever could the man from Scotland Yard be doing here, under a name not his own, when he was supposed to be in Brighton? Whatever could be the matter with the girl Kathleen? It occurred to him suddenly together with the thought that it should have occurred to him before—that she spoke of Jeffrey Atwater as “Poor Mr. Jeffrey,” as if she knew him quite well—even better, Mr. Pinkerton thought, than he would do, no matter how many weeks he’d spent at the Old Angel.

      Then through the old walls behind the oak panelling he heard Sir Lionel’s voice.

      “He hasn’t got a bent farthing, madam. Have you thought of that, madam?”

      The slightly husky voice of the girl Sally Bruce answered.

      “I

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