Читать книгу Mr. Pinkerton at the Old Angel - Zenith Brown - Страница 6

Mrs. Humpage bustled out into the lounge.

“I hope your ladyship enjoyed your dinner,” she said. She curtseyed very nicely, Mr. Pinkerton thought, in spite of her ample figure, and in spite of everything she had just finished saying.

Sir Lionel Atwater grunted, morosely. Lady Atwater smiled. “Very nice, thank you,” she said. “Shall we sit here, dear, for our coffee?”

Sir Lionel grunted again, and sat down. His daughter-in-law sat beside him on the leather sofa, his wife sat beside him on the other side. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated for just an instant, and then slipped, as quietly as a rabbit, into a chair beside the potted rubber plant in the majolica jardinière that the late Mr. Humpage had bought from a writer who once lived in Rye. He knew that, because Mrs. Humpage had, she told him, watered it with her tears when Humpage fell down the steps by the Ypres Castle public and broke his neck at the bottom.

And being there, he even went so far as to order coffee to retain his seat when the deaf and dumb gentleman, who wasn’t having any, was practically sent to his room by Mrs. Humpage. Another man, the one who had come the evening before with the deaf and dumb gentleman, came in, glanced about the lounge and went along to the dining room. Mrs. Humpage bustled about a moment and followed him. Mr. Pinkerton heard her voice: “It’s a bit nasty out this evening, sir.”

There was not, as Mr. Pinkerton knew, anything but an affirmative answer to that. The man apparently thought no answer at all was needed, because he made none. Mrs. Humpage bustled back in a moment, and put a shovelful of coals on the fire with her own hands. In another moment, the two sons of Sir Lionel and Lady Atwater came out of the dining room and stood in front of the fire, until Sir Lionel thundered at them did they think they were a couple of bloody salamanders. Darcy Atwater grinned and moved. Jeffrey Atwater stayed where he was. As it was really just Mr. Pinkerton and the fire he was standing between, no one complained again.

Mr. Pinkerton, who had not taken his eyes off the three people on the leather sofa, suddenly blinked his eyes and straightened his steel-rimmed spectacles. A small mouse, almost too decrepit to move, poked his head out from under the sofa just at Lady Atwater’s feet. She looked down. Mr. Pinkerton expected her to scream, but she didn’t. She glanced at her husband, slipped her hand into the pocket of her tweed jacket, brought it out, bent down quietly and dropped a bit of biscuit on the floor. The mouse retired, and crept out again.

Suddenly Sir Lionel came to life. “Dammit, madam, are you feeding a mouse?”

He glared at Lady Atwater, and then glared across the room at Mr. Pinkerton. “Dammit, sir, this place is full of mice!”

And at just that moment, as Mr. Pinkerton sat there, completely paralyzed, the door of the Old Angel opened suddenly, and in out of the blustering night came a very large man. He was dressed in a cinnamon-brown tweed suit and overcoat, which gave him rather the appearance of an outsize cinnamon bear, and he had a large and very placid red face with guileless blue eyes and large tawny mustaches.

Mr. Pinkerton, sitting in the shelter of the rubber plant, stared incredulously, tried desperately to still his shaking hands, made an agitated attempt to get to his feet, and found that his knees sagged like catgut that had been a fortnight in the rain.

The large tawny man put down his bag, took off his hat, shaking the rain from it onto the floor, looked calmly round the lounge, his eyes meeting the little Welshman’s paralyzed gaze without the slightest sign of recognition, and stepped with heavy deliberation, bending so as not to shatter the stout oak door beam with his skull, into Mrs. Humpage’s office. Mr. Pinkerton heard him say, rather louder than was necessary, he thought, “Have you got a room, ma’am? Briscoe is the name.”

It occurred to Mr. Pinkerton, for the second time within two hours, that he had lost his wits. He reached his trembling fingers down and gave his leg a sharp pinch just to make sure he was still in possession of his ordinary faculties, and winced. Then, through the office door he saw the large man open the register, glance down it, and sign with a flourish, and heard Mrs. Humpage say, “Jo—show Mr. Briscoe to Number Six. Will you have a bite of supper, sir?”

And then, just as the horrid truth that the best, and indeed the solitary, friend that he had in the world, namely Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of the C. I. D., was deliberately cutting him absolutely and incredibly dead, began to react on the dead fish in pink sauce in Mr. Pinkerton’s grey little stomach with the force of a wicked Channel crossing, the large voice of Sir Lionel Atwater rose.

“Dammit, Jeffrey, is she coming, or isn’t she? Am I expected to cool my heels the rest of the winter?”

And as the cuckoo sprang out of the Swiss clock on the chimney piece and sounded eight smooth notes, the inn door opened again and a young woman with hair the colour of ashy gold in a knot at the nape of her neck came in, in a camel’s-hair coat buttoned up under her pointed chin and a brown felt hat with a little red and green feather in the band. Mr. Pinkerton, his mind torn distressfully between so many things happening all at the same time, looked quickly from the delicate sun-tanned face to her silken ankles and neatly shod feet, and knew instantly that this was the American lady.

She stood there for a moment, her dark eyes meeting Jeffrey Atwater’s across the lounge. Storm warnings that even Mr. Pinkerton could sense went up like tiny flags in every eye in the room, and deepened the alarming purple behind the white walrus fangs of Sir Lionel Atwater. Lady Atwater hastily slipped another bit of biscuit to the old mouse under the sofa, and sat there, a little pale. Mr. Darcy Atwater’s face brightened. “I say!” he exclaimed; and turned quickly as his wife shot him a glance that Mr. Pinkerton could only describe as significant.

Then Jeffrey Atwater moved out to meet the girl. She could not, Mr. Pinkerton thought, be over twenty-two or three, if she was that; though he knew, of course, from the advertisements in the papers that she might be practically in her grave and still not look it.

“This is Mrs. Bruce, Mother,” Jeff Atwater said stiffly. “And my father, Sally. This is my sister-in-law, and this is Darcy.”

Mr. Pinkerton, staring in utter fascination from his place by the rubber plant, noticed that not one of them moved to shake hands with her, except Darcy Atwater—and one look from the big dark Welsh girl made that abortive in the extreme.

Sally Bruce, he decided, must have lived abroad a long time. She didn’t move her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth, because oddly enough she wasn’t chewing any, and she said, “How do you do,” in a slightly husky and very pleasant voice, Mr. Pinkerton thought, instead of “Pleased to meetcha,” in a loud nasal one.

Sir Lionel balanced his weight on his knuckles and made two amphibian attempts to rise. Pamela 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.