Homicide House
MR. PINKERTON RETURNS
by ZENITH BROWN
writing as David Frome
WILDSIDE PRESS
Homicide House: A Mr. Pinkerton Mystery
Copyright © 1949. renewed 1977, by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
1
THE fragrance of burning leaves rose in the quiet golden haze that hung over Godolphin Square. It stirred a mute nostalgia in the heart of the little grey Welshman sitting under the plane trees on the dilapidated bench between a pile of forgotten rubble and the soot-grimed rhododendrons straggling out into the ragged unkempt path. Mr. Evan Pinkerton did not really belong in Godolphin Square. It was still the exclusive West End of London, in spite of the sagging wattle fence that had replaced the iron palings, taken for munitions, and the four bombed-out houses that made a broad gap between the chimney pots on the north side. On the south side the houses were as they had always been, simple and elegant, with only a few of them converted into exclusive service flats.
Mr. Pinkerton had come to one of them—No. 4 Godolphin Square—for two quite simple reasons. The first was that his own house in Golders Green had got an incendiary bomb on the roof. The second was that No. 4 Godolphin Square was part of Pinkerton Estates, and so, curiously enough, was Mr. Pinkerton himself. In fact, Mr. Pinkerton was Pinkerton Estates, although he still did not entirely believe it. It was as incredible to him as it was to everybody else, including Miss Myrtle Grimstead, the lady manager of No. 4 Godolphin Square. She would never, of course, have put him in a maid’s room on the third and top story, to share a bath with the chef and the permanent valet, if she had had any idea of who he was. Miss Grimstead had taken a long look at the estate agent’s order for a flat and free maintenance, when Mr. Pinkerton had timidly presented it, and a single very brisk one at the little man. Some impoverished hanger-on, Miss Grimstead had decided; a distant relative no doubt.
But Mr. Pinkerton was happy enough on the third floor. It made him a little more confident that the late Mrs. Pinkerton, from whom he had inherited the Pinkerton Estates, would not suddenly rematerialize, wispy-haired and vinegary-cheeked, by the sheer force of the agony of seeing him squander her substance. Never having allowed him more than a sixpence at a time, even out of his own earnings, she would hardly care to see him rioting away her whole property. Mr. Pinkerton knew very well she would never have left it to him at all if she could have brought herself to lay out sixpence for a will form at the corner stationer’s.
But on the whole he was happier outside the house than in it. Down in the square, he was at least out of range of Miss Myrtle Grimstead’s managerial eye. The straggling rhododendrons also concealed him from the eternal scrutiny of Miss Caroline Winship, who sat all day at the window of her flat on the first floor, brooding over the ruins of her bombed-out house across the Square. He felt reasonably happy there on the dilapidated bench, and reasonably secure; and when it rained, he could go to the cinema.
That it was not raining today was unusual for several reasons. One was that it had rained all through August. Another was that if it had not just stopped, Mr. Pinkerton would not have been in the Square to see Daniel McGrath. That was something he would not have liked to miss. Daniel McGrath, coming resolutely, was in search of a dream, and no one in all London knew more about dreams than the little Welshman sitting there on the wooden bench behind the rhododendrons in Godolphin Square. He had two of his own. One was Scotland Yard, in the tawny and stolid person of J. Humphrey Bull, his only friend, his wife’s former lodger in Golders Green, and now a chief inspector of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Metropolitan Police. The other was the cinema, where, on rainy days and in the least expensive seat available, Mr. Pinkerton sat with breathless enchantment, not untouched with envy, viewing the life and loves of those strange and fascinating people, the Americans. He knew more about them, their habits and their language, than they did themselves.
In the pale golden haze of the late autumn afternoon, Mr. Pinkerton was unaware that his two dreams were poised, in full bud, ready to burst into the most extraordinary fruition.
Daniel McGrath came swinging along into Godolphin Square. Mr. Pinkerton saw him first as he turned to the left, glancing up at the numbers uniformly inscribed on the broad elliptical fanlights over the painted Adam doorways. The first being, as Mr. Pinkerton knew, illegibly dimmed, it was not until he reached the third house that he made a prompt about-face and set back toward the right and the north side of the Square. Having no business of his own and being inveterately curious about other people’s, Mr. Pinkerton watched. A devotee of New Scotland Yard, he liked to make deductions about people, their character and intent, in which he was almost invariably and sometimes notably incorrect, as the time he had mistaken the Bermondsey dog poisoner for the curate’s wife and would have helped her catch a miserable little terrier if it had not fortunately bitten him and got away. Now, even at some distance, he recognized that there was something peculiar about the young man in the Square. He was a stranger, obviously, hunting for a particular house. Then, as he came nearer, Mr. Pinkerton straightened up on his bench, his watery grey eyes brightening behind his lozenge-shaped steel-rimmed spectacles. It was no wonder the young man looked peculiar; Mr. Pinkerton recognized the reason for it instantly. He was an American. It stood out all over him. His whole air was quite unmistakable: the free and untrammelled way he swung along, imperturbable and unconcerned, as at ease and at home as if he owned the entire place.
Not that Mr. Pinkerton regarded that as offensive, as some people did. Never having been truly at ease or at home in any part of the constricted universe he had moved in, it was the one thing that could stir a momentary envy in his timorous heart. His childhood had been rigorously regimented by a pair of dour Welsh aunts. The unfortunate interregnum between them and Mrs. Pinkerton had been a nightmare spent as an underfed, underpaid undermaster in a small Welsh school, a nightmare so unforgettable that never without trembling did he see two or more small boys unaccompanied by their parents or keepers. His release from all of it had come too late. Even Mrs. Pinkerton’s last and unintended act of grace in leaving him the free and presumably sole arbiter of himself and some £75,000 in cash and property had been too late for him ever to get over what had gone before. Nevertheless, the sight of anybody young and untrod on, serene, calmly sure the world was a friendly and decent place and as much his as anybody else’s, had an extraordinary effect on him; it lifted vicariously the colorless load of his inferiority.
He felt it now, watching Daniel McGrath coming along, looking up at the street numbers, and he sat boldly erect, ignoring the fact that the rhododendron branches no longer protected him from Miss Caroline Winship’s brooding gaze. The young man had come to an empty hole in the row of houses, two doors from Miss Winship’s own. He stopped and looked ahead, then back again, as if shocked; as if a hole where a house had been had not been part of what he had expected to find. Mr. Pinkerton adjusted his spectacles and waited anxiously. The young man went back and looked up again at Number 19, then came on, almost running, it seemed to Mr. Pinkerton, his long legs covered the space so quickly.
“Oh, dear!” Mr. Pinkerton thought suddenly. “The house he’s hunting for isn’t there any more. It’s—it’s destroyed. And he didn’t know it.”
He got up from his bench. The young man had gone back again and was counting up once more, slowly, stopping to look about him, as if in a bewildered daze. If McGrath had been an Englishman—or if he himself had been one—Mr. Pinkerton would never in the world have done what he did do. He scurried across the garden to the flimsy gate in the wattle fence, opened it and hurried along to where the young man was standing, looking over the four-foot wall erected to keep passers-by from plunging down into the ruins of what had been Miss Caroline Winship’s basement kitchen area. Ferns and the white silk seed-pods of willow herb grew there now, sprung miraculously out of the brick and rubble of the blast-shredded walls.
Mr. Pinkerton looked over too, glancing anxiously at