Pinkerton waited anxiously. Then, as Bull had apparently finished, he ventured timidly, “May I come back, please, Inspector?”
“I’ll send along for you when I want you,” Bull said. “And don’t make any more trouble if you can help it,” he added, as the little man raised the latch on the stout oak door.
Mr. Pinkerton slipped through the room like a rabbit through the brambles, not daring to cast so much as a side-wise look at the horrified silent group huddled in front of the Tudor fireplace. As Mr. Fleetwood rose quickly to his feet, evidently thinking, until Inspector Bull’s burly figure appeared in the door also, that Mr. Pinkerton was making a getaway, the little man made a final bolt through the door and down the crooked stairs and up to his own room. There he banged the door behind him, his heart beating like an anvil.
He sat on the edge of his bed, shivering like a dead leaf in the rain. Then he slipped off his overcoat and reached for his socks. As he did there was a quick tap on the panel, and it slid open instantly. Mr. Pinkerton grabbed for the bed-clothes and held them up to his chin, his present fear of being caught again, red-handed, in his incredible nightwear, banishing the horrible imaginings of the pursuing Atwaters.
The maid Kathleen put her blue-black curly head into the room.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered. But she did not go back, or close the panel. Instead, to Mr. Pinkerton’s dismay, she came brazenly into the room and closed the panel behind her. She was fully dressed, with an old red cardigan over her brown uniform.
“Has something . . . dreadful happened, sir?” she whispered.
Mr. Pinkerton nodded, clutching the eiderdown closer about his neck and drawing his bare feet up under him like a trussed turkey.
“Sir Lionel Atwater is dead.” he stammered.
The girl’s pale frightened face underwent the most extraordinary change, as if a storm had crossed it and left only relief from some consuming fear.
“Oh,” she breathed. She sat down weakly on the oak settle by the fire, completely unconscious of the ludicrous little figure of her unwilling host clinging to his modesty.
“You see, sir, people can’t go on forever making people miserable, can they?”
Her voice went up like a little prayer on the shrine of “Somehow good will triumph over water and o’er mud.” Mr. Pinkerton’s heart lower than the proverbial under side of a snake, went lower still.
“But he . . . he was murdered!” he stammered.
The girl’s jaw dropped, her red hands resting on the oak seat clutched at it in a sudden spasm so that her knuckles stood out white and awful.
“With one of those old silver skewers from the dresser in the dining room,” Mr. Pinkerton blurted out.
She stared at him, the blood drained completely from her face, and, without the least warning, toppled over in a dead faint. Mr. Pinkerton, blinking, could hardly believe that he had not gone quite mad. He grabbed his overcoat, struggled into it, dashed to the wash-stand and the blue willow jug, splashed the icy water on the girl’s face and rubbed her hands violently. Her eyelids flickered, she struggled up.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered. “Don’t tell them, please—don’t tell them ever!”
She tottered across the room and out the door. Mr. Pinkerton, who had got most of the cold water on his own bare feet, shivered and sneezed. Then he pushed the settle against the panel and the table by the bed in front of the door and got out of his pyjamas into his clothes so fast that the cold perspiration on his brow turned perceptibly warmer. Then he sank down on the side of his bed again and wiped off the perspiration with the corner of the rough homespun sheet.
It didn’t, of course, he was thinking unhappily, take any more extraordinary clarity of mind than it does to put two and two together to make out what the matter with the girl was. Nor did it take more than Mr. Pinkerton had at the moment to realize that that idea had been struggling in his own mind for some time. Kathleen’s young man, furthermore, had had every appearance to him of being a desperate character. However, he thought suddenly, he was definitely not Sir Lionel Atwater’s son and heir. Not unless there was definitely more hanky-panky about than even Mr. Pinkerton was prepared to accept.
He got up, eventually found a kindling or two, lighted his fire again and sat huddled miserably in front of it, wondering why in the first place he had ever been born, and in the second place why, having been born, he had not died. True, Job had had more boils, but Job had not got in bed with Scotland Yard for the dozenth time . . . nor had he, friendless himself, had the awful secret of a friendless little chambermaid thrust into his unwilling hands.
Then, as the fire caught feebly, his spirits rose feebly too. All Bull had got out of him incriminated only Mr. Jeffrey Atwater, who, if Mr. Pinkerton was any judge of young men’s jaws, was quite able to take care of himself. It was Kathleen who wanted help. Mr. Pinkerton straightened his lozenge-shaped spectacles and his narrow shoulders. He had never been very young, himself; and that was why he had got a very good idea of how much more important people like Kathleen were than people like old Atwater, who, as a matter of fact, wasn’t any longer even alive.
He had just got that far when there was a sound of heavy feet on the stairs, and a sharp rap on his door. Somebody then gave it a shove. It stuck against the table.
“He’s got himself barricaded in,” a deep voice said.
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought. All the high resolves ran out of his spirit like eaves-water out of a drain. He jumped up, started to pull the table away from the door, dashed back and pulled the settle away from the panel, and then dashed back to the door.
“I was just dressing, and people . . .” he began, and stopped. It was not what he had meant to say at all, but the heavy-faced sandy-haired man with Bull fortunately noticed nothing. He stepped inside, his eyes fixed enquiringly on the little man. Inspector Bull followed. Then Mr. Pinkerton heard the most incredible thing.
“This is my friend Pinkerton, Inspector Kirtin,” Bull said, with his utmost imperturbability. “He’s been on a number of cases with me—unofficially, but Sir Charles has the greatest confidence in him.”
Mr. Pinkerton swallowed. He knew very well that Bull was adding to himself “. . . to make the worst possible bother at the most inconvenient time possible.” Still, he wasn’t saying it aloud.
Inspector Kirtin shook his limp hand.
“How do you happen to be here, Mr. Pinkerton?”
Mr. Pinkerton, catching his breath desperately, happened also to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the shaving glass in front of the window. He was so frail, so insignificant and watery-eyed, that it startled him again to think of Inspector Bull’s magnanimity in laying himself open by such barefaced perjury.
“Just . . . on a little holiday, Inspector,” he said. “To . . . to take the sea air.”
There was no wonder, he thought as soon as he had said it, that Inspector Kirtin looked skeptical. The wind, howling about the ancient corner of the Old Angel, seemed bent on ripping his flimsy explanation to tatters.
“I don’t have much to do, in town,” he added, blinking apologetically. Though it did seem to him, hastily thinking it over, that it was rather on the disloyal side for Inspector Kirtin as an old Ryer to question anyone’s reasons for coming to the little Tudor town perched on its rock in the Marshes. Perhaps, however, he was not an old Ryer, in which case of course the question would be pertinent.
“I see,” Inspector Kirtin said, though he had not looked that way. “Inspector Bull tells me you noticed an unusual . . . let’s say, atmosphere, in the inn tonight?”
Mr. Pinkerton blinked at his large friend. He could not recall having said any such thing, at least not in those words. He cleared his throat nervously. He should have suspected that Bull’s placid attempt to save his skin would have to be bitterly paid for. Knowing Bull’s