Then Mr. Fleetwood took two strides up to him and caught his wrist so that the skewer dropped with a thin horrible clink to the floor. Jeffrey Atwater bent down, lifted his mother and carried her back into the sitting room. Mr. Fleetwood, still holding Mr. Pinkerton’s wrist in a grip of steel, seized him by the scruff of the neck, piloted him across the room, and thrust him down in a chair.
“Get a doctor, Darcy, you fool!” he shouted. “And fetch the police!”
Then Mr. Pinkerton saw, bulking incredibly large in the sitting-room door, the cinnamon-brown figure of Inspector Bull, still in his great cinnamon tweed overcoat and his cinnamon-brown fedora.
“I am the police,” Inspector Bull said calmly. “Quietly, please.”
Mr. Pinkerton, sinking back in the chair, closing his eyes, could feel the tears running down his cheeks. Then he opened his eyes again, not being able to keep them closed any more than the pack can keep from yelping on the scent.
They were all looking at the big man in the door.
“I’m from Scotland Yard,” Inspector Bull said placidly. “I’ll take charge here until Inspector Kirtin comes.”
He turned to Mrs. Humpage. “Get a doctor, ma’am. And get Inspector Kirtin on the phone.”
Mr. Pinkerton saw Mrs. Humpage’s apple cheeks go a little pale.
“—Scotland Yard, sir?”
“Inspector Kirtin of the Rye police, ma’am,” Inspector Bull said, though Mr. Pinkerton knew very well that that was not what she had meant. “And the rest of you step in here and sit down quietly.”
He crossed the room to the huge bed and bent over what had been Sir Lionel Atwater.
Mr. Pinkerton saw Pamela Atwater look at Mr. Fleetwood, who stiffened aggressively.
“Come along, Mr. Fleetwood,” Inspector Bull said. “You know the law, sir. I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
Fleetwood hesitated. “You’re right, Sergeant,” he said. He glanced down at the shrinking little figure in the ridiculous orchid pyjamas. The beak of the embroidered eagle on the red ribbon across Mr. Pinkerton’s scrawny bosom protruded from between the lapels of his overcoat. Mr. Pinkerton tried to cover it up, but Mr. Fleetwood had seen it.
“He’s a dirty Russian rat,” he said hoarsely.
Mr. Pinkerton moistened his very dry lips and swallowed. He looked at Inspector Bull. The blue twinkle he thought he saw in those deceptively mild eyes he knew was a mirage caused by the salt tears in his own.
“I’ll attend to him, sir,” Inspector Bull said. “Step along now, please. Tell Inspector Kirtin I’m in here.”
He closed the door behind them, and stood for a long time looking about the room; at the narrow leaded casement windows, at the débâcle on the bed, at the bloody skewer on the floor, and finally at the little rabbit of a man huddled miserable and speechless in the chair, his overcoat still clutched about his neck to cover up the pseudo decoration on his breast.
“Well, now,” Inspector Bull said, not unkindly. “Let’s have it, Mr. Pinkerton.”
5
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton sat trying to extricate his tongue from the creeping paralysis that had it in a death grip. The times he’d got himself into similar predicaments, though never one as devastatingly incriminating as this, heaven knew, flashed through his mind the way a drowning man’s sins are said to flash through his. And not the actual times themselves, so much, as what Sir Charles Debenham, Assistant Commissioner of the C. I. D., had said about them. “Where there’s smoke, Mr. Pinkerton, you know,” he had said, at least a dozen times. Although he had laughed each time when he said it, nevertheless. . . . Once he had even said, “You’re a crime carrier, Mr. Pinkerton. We lock up typhoid carriers, you know.” Mr. Pinkerton had not been sure that the noise he made then was even meant to be taken as laughter. He had squirmed in his chair most uneasily. It was not, however, as uneasily as he squirmed now. Eventually something that was like his voice came.
“It wasn’t me, Inspector,” he heard himself saying. “—I heard him groaning through the wall.”
He moved his hand vaguely towards the great old chimney-piece and the solid oak linenfold panels flanking it across the room. Inspector Bull, looking at it, scowled faintly.
“There’s something very queer about this whole place,” Mr. Pinkerton said, hurriedly. “Sometimes you can hear, as if you were in the very same room, and sometimes you can’t hear at all. You see, he kept on groaning, and I’d heard the younger son say he’d probably have a stroke any time if he kept on getting angry, and the last time I heard him speak in there he was most frightfully angry, so I thought he’d got a stroke . . . and that, some way, nobody else had heard him. That’s why I came, really it was, Inspector. He was lying there with that thing”—he nodded to the long silver skewer—“in his heart. The light was on up there.” He nodded to the worn velvet canopy with “E R” embroidered in a scroll of tarnished gold threads. “Just as I pulled it out of his body, the light went out. And then Lady Atwater came.”
Bull went over to the bed and bent over the great silent figure in striped pyjamas lying on it.
“Somebody else must have been in the room,” Mr. Pinkerton said, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder. “Maybe they went through a panel somewhere.”
Inspector Bull turned round to look at him, scowling again.
“Oh, dear,” Mr. Pinkerton thought, remembering the line about the person who protests too much.
Bull, looking up at the light again, lifted the dead man’s hand. Wound tightly about it was a worn velvet cord. The dead man’s hand itself had turned on the light, Sir Lionel Atwater thinking perhaps, Bull reflected, that it was a bell cord he had grasped. There was the possibility, in that case, that he could have seen his assailant. Bull turned back to the little man huddled ridiculously in his cheap overcoat, trying to hide his shame in the form of cyclamen-red pyjamas.
“Was he dead?”
Mr. Pinkerton moistened his lips nervously. “No. He was dying.”
“Did he speak?”
Mr. Pinkerton hesitated. The maid Kathleen’s “Poor young lady—poor Mr. Jeffrey!” dinned in his ears.
“Come now, Mr. Pinkerton,” Inspector Bull said mildly. Mr. Pinkerton knew only too well that many people, some of whom were now breaking rock at Dartmoor, had made bad mistakes—sometimes even fatal mistakes—in thinking the big man was as mild, as simple, or as ingenuous as he looked. He huddled a little deeper in his turned-up overcoat collar.
“As a matter of fact, he did,” he said meekly. “But I may have misunderstood him.”
“What did you think he said?”
“It sounded to me,” Mr. Pinkerton admitted wretchedly, “as if he said, ‘My son . . . my heir.’ But that’s Mr. Jeffrey Atwater, and I’m sure he would never have done such a thing, Inspector. I really am.”
Then Mr. Pinkerton thought, very miserably indeed, “Oh, dear, dear—there I go, making it ever so much worse.”
Inspector Bull, in his own presence, had told the Assistant Commissioner, Sir Charles Debenham, that Pinkerton was invariably valuable to him on a case: he just waited till Pinkerton was quite convinced of the innocence of somebody, arrested him, and he promptly confessed. They had laughed at that too, all of them except Mr. Pinkerton. It had none of it seemed very amusing to him then, it seemed less so now.
Bull stood chewing one end