“Not . . . exactly,” he said. “Just that Mrs. Humpage said she couldn’t see why Sir Lionel Atwater didn’t settle the family differences at their own home, instead of bringing them to hers.”
“I see,” Inspector Kirtin said again. As that was more than Mr. Pinkerton had done, he looked up at the head of the Rye police with new interest. Inspector Kirtin turned to Bull.
“I expect that was about this American young lady that Mr. Jeffrey Atwater has been running down here all year to see.”
Bull nodded.
“Village gossip says the old gentleman went off the deep end about it. Disinherited him in favour of the younger son. Not the jewels, but his money.”
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton blinked. Then he remembered abruptly where he had heard of Sir Lionel Atwater. He was possessor, of course, of the famous Atwater jewels, historical precious stones of fabulous value, the envy of collectors the world over. Mr. Pinkerton’s spine tingled suddenly with excitement as he wondered what difference that might make.
“He made the money himself,” Inspector Kirtin went on, “and it wasn’t entailed. Besides being an American, the lady is divorced.”
He added that—exactly like Mrs. Humpage—as if the two together were sufficient reason for anything.
Mr. Pinkerton felt an unfamiliar and quite unreasonable heat generating under the narrow confines of his celluloid collar.
“Indeed, Inspector, she’s a very nice-appearing young woman,” he heard himself saying, to his own astonishment. Consternation, even as he saw the mild blue gaze of the man from Scotland Yard resting on him.
“Was she here?” Bull asked.
Mr. Pinkerton nodded. He had done it again, he thought unhappily.
“Lord Atwater sent for her, apparently,” he added.
Just as he glanced apologetically at Inspector Bull there was an appalling commotion from down in the lounge. Both of the policemen were out of the room in an instant. Mr. Pinkerton, standing there too surprised to move, heard their heavy boots clattering on the uneven stairs. He crept to the door and looked down. In the centre of a little knot of stolid police uniforms was the drenched disheveled figure of the deaf and dumb gentleman, his worn Bond Street tweeds looking even larger for him than they had before. His face was pale, and so completely terrified that Mr. Pinkerton, who realized exactly how he felt, felt a sudden pang of compassion for him.
“What’s the matter with him—can’t ’e talk?” the policeman who had hold of his arm demanded.
“So you won’t talk, eh?” was the way they would say it in America, Mr. Pinkerton thought; and then they would fetch out a length of rubber hose and start beating him, before they put him in a room and turned on the heat so that his heart would shrivel to one-tenth its normal size. He shuddered. Surely, in spite of the iron cage and skull of Rye’s most famous murderer that stood in the draughty stair corner of the town hall along with the town stocks, they wouldn’t do anything of the sort here. He stepped out into the narrow crooked landing. Perhaps if he shouted down that the gentleman was deaf and dumb . . . But the tow-thatched potboy Jo was ahead of him.
He tugged at Inspector Bull’s coattails. “ ’E’s a deef mute, sir,” he said.
Inspector Kirtin flashed around. “He’s what?”
“ ’E’s deef and dumb, sir.”
The policeman dropped the man’s arm. “Then what’s ’e climbin’ down the drainpipe for, I’d like to know, sir?”
The deaf and dumb gentleman stood looking on helplessly.
Inspector Kirtin nodded toward the little office. “Take him in there. Where’s Mrs. Humpage?”
“She’s up looking after ’er lydyship,” Jo said promptly.
“Get her down here.”
They ought to call Mr. McPherson, Mr. Pinkerton thought; it was he who brought the deaf and dumb gentleman. Then, for some reason he could not quite put a name to, he decided it would be far better if he minded his own business.
Along from the other wing he heard Mrs. Humpage’s solid step. He slipped back into his room and waited, one ear at the door, until she had got down into the lounge, and popped out onto the landing again.
The voice of Mrs. Humpage came up, brisk and hot.
“I’ll thank you, Tom Kirtin, not to be insulting my guests! When you’ve got the man that did in the poor gentleman caught red-handed with the weapon in his hand! . . . And you have to go hunting up mysteries, disturbing innocent people. A poor afflicted gentleman like Mr. Ross.”
Mr. Pinkerton peered down. She was standing there, hands on hips, facing them down like a lot of schoolboys. Only, Mr. Pinkerton knew well, schoolboys are not faced down so easily, not at any rate the young ruffians he had tried to teach.
“Anybody with a grain of sense could see who murdered poor Sir Lionel, pretending he’d heard him crying for help. Nobody else heard him. Her ladyship staying in the very next room! Him pretending he didn’t know who Sir Lionel was, innocent as a babe. Acting so pitiful-like. I saw through him—sneaking off to his room when Sir Lionel’s party came, slipping down to dinner and hiding his head in his food so none would notice him, hiding under the rubber plant, begrudging sixpence for coffee to cover himself up with!”
Mr. Pinkerton shrank back against the dark oak-panelled wall, struck his head against a copper warming-pan and jumped nervously.
“Who’s that, ma’am?” Inspector Kirtin asked.
“He calls himself Pinkerton,” Mrs. Humpage said skeptically.
In the sharp silence that dinned in Mr. Pinkerton’s sizzling ears he could almost see Inspector Kirtin’s dubious glance at Bull. The dreadful idea occurred to him that perhaps they would think the Inspector was an impostor too. After all, he was registered as Mr. Briscoe. Mr. Pinkerton shook his head. What if they were both put in the old grey stone tower of Ypres Castle? He had seen the leg irons there, and the tiny barred windows set in the thick lichen-stained walls overlooking the sands to the English Channel.
“This man was trying to climb down the drainpipe,” Inspector Kirtin said.
“And who wouldn’t?” Mrs. Humpage demanded. “Knowing a bloody murderer was loose in the house and the police acting like characters in a shilling shocker? The poor gentleman can’t hear or talk. He most likely thought there was a fire.”
Mr. Pinkerton leaned cautiously over the precarious stair rail. He would have liked to go down, but he didn’t quite dare, not with Mrs. Humpage standing there speaking her mind in such a determined and unrestrained fashion. Then he saw a pale little face peep out of the dining room, and Kathleen crept up behind her employer. Mrs. Humpage turned, and folded the girl in her large arms.
“There, love—don’t be frightened. It’s that man in Number Five, is what it is.”
Mr. Pinkerton saw Kathleen’s eyes turn up the stairs.
“Oh, no, madam—not him!” she cried. “He couldn’t ever. He’s a very kind gentleman.”
Mr. Pinkerton took a deep breath. There must be, he thought stoutly, and undoubtedly was, some quite proper explanation for the young man she’d let out of her garret. In the pictures there would be—and who was he to say the cinema was not true to life? If the man in “The Devil’s Daughter” had turned out to be her own father, then it was not unlikely that the young man was Kathleen’s brother. Though what her brother could be doing, going about in his stocking feet looking like a desperado of the first water, at precisely the moment after most bloody murder had been done, Mr. Pinkerton was unable to say.
“It just happens, ma’am,” Inspector Kirtin said stiffly,