seems to be the trouble here?”
It was not the voice that was startling but the approach, which had been silent and very prompt, and must have been by foot up the stairs; the lift had not come up. He looked around. Mr. Sidney Copeland was a precise middle-aged man, clean and antiseptic-looking, pleasant on the whole, or looking as if he might be under other circumstances. He seemed tired, but so did almost everyone else Dan had seen. He had good brown eyes and a solid chin and firm mouth, sandy hair greying, slightly stooped shoulders, and wore a neatly brushed threadbare black suit. He glanced at Mr. Pinkerton on the couch, and back. Of the two, he seemed more intently interested in Dan McGrath.
“I found him out on the balcony. It looks to me like somebody’s conked him on the bean.”
Mr. Copeland put his fingers on Mr. Pinkerton’s wrist, passed his hand delicately over the swollen area at the side of his head, lifted up his eyelids and let them close.
“Should he go to the hospital?”
Copeland spoke with composed deliberateness. “Possibly. He seems to have got rather a nasty crack. It’s best to leave him here till he regains consciousness. His pulse is retarded, but it’s reasonably strong.”
Mr. Copeland, Dan thought, was at least reasonably casual.
“You found him out on the balcony?”
“Right.”
“And—you think somebody had—er, conked him on the bean. If I understand you, I presume you know what you’re saying? Isn’t it conceivable he may have fallen and struck his head?”
All right, McGrath. Why don’t you show him the spectacles folded up inside the wool comforter and see what he says to that? Dan wondered. It was the normal thing to do. But as the surgeon moved over to look out onto the ledge, the rigid lines of his back were even more skeptical, and to Dan even more positively offensive, than the brief smile that had been on his lips.
When he turned back from the window he regarded Dan with open amusement.
“Isn’t it simpler to assume he walked up the stairs, and feeling a bit faint went directly out for a breath of air? Had a touch of vertigo, stumbled and struck his head on the pipe? Miss Grimstead tells me he’s not been particularly fit recently.”
“Seedy, I believe,” Dan said.
Copeland glanced at him sharply. “Precisely. I believe in your country, Mr.—McGrath, is it?—it’s fairly common to find people conked on the bean, as you put it. You’re in England now, Mr. McGrath. However, I was already aware you’re a young man who enjoys making mysteries without regard to the feelings of the people they presumably affect.”
Dan stared at him. “What—sorry, I don’t get it, sir. I don’t know what you’re—what mysteries am I supposed to have made around here? Except this if you call it a mystery?”
The sudden angry light that kindled in the surgeon’s brown eyes was a startling change from his precise and passionless detachment.
“You’re the American who was making inquiries of this man,” he jerked his hand toward Mr. Pinkerton, on the couch, stirring a little, his breath coming more easily, “over the road this afternoon. Are you not?”
Dan stared with blank incredulity.
“I have no idea what your game is, Mr. McGrath, but if you’ll take my advice you’ll clear out of here. And if Scott Winship is in London, and has even a shred of decency left in him, Miss Caroline Winship’s solicitors will be very glad to hear from him. You may tell him that Miss Winship expressly forbids him to attempt to communicate with his daughter—either in person or through you. She’s left London and isn’t expected back for some time. If it’s money he wants, tell him—”
Dan took a step forward. “Wait a minute.”
“We’ve waited long enough, Mr. McGrath. Tell him that so far as the family are concerned he is dead and buried. His daughter thinks so, and she is to continue to think so. So far as all of us are concerned, Scott Winship is dead.”
He moved abruptly over to his patient. Dan, watching in stupefied silence, saw his long fingers tremble as they rested on the little man’s pulse, his eyes, focussed on the watch-face on his own wrist, still burning with suppressed fire. He put Mr. Pinkerton’s hand back under the coverlet.
“I know a hospital nurse, Mrs. Beckwith, I can get to come and spend the night with him till his own medical man can make arrangements. If he wakes and complains of a headache, give him some aspirin. Nothing else. Keep him quiet till she gets here.”
At the door Sidney Copeland turned back. “Miss Grimstead tells me you plan to call the police. If that’s part of your game, by all means do so. You’ll find Scott Winship would much prefer the police to be left out of it. Good night, Mr. McGrath.”
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