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.
4
Mr. Pinkerton sat down on the edge of his oak settle and bit the nail of his left forefinger. If only he knew what was up, he thought dejectedly. Whatever could the man from Scotland Yard be doing here, under a name not his own, when he was supposed to be in Brighton? Whatever could be the matter with the girl Kathleen? It occurred to him suddenly together with the thought that it should have occurred to him before—that she spoke of Jeffrey Atwater as “Poor Mr. Jeffrey,” as if she knew him quite well—even better, Mr. Pinkerton thought, than he would do, no matter how many weeks he’d spent at the Old Angel.
Then through the old walls behind the oak panelling he heard Sir Lionel’s voice.
“He hasn’t got a bent farthing, madam. Have you thought of that, madam?”
The slightly husky voice of the girl Sally Bruce answered.
“I had one very rich husband. Sir Lionel. That was the trouble with him. But don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to marry your son. It was his idea from the first, not mine.”
“And what’s wrong with my son, madam!”
“Nothing but his family,” said the cool husky voice.
For a moment Mr. Pinkerton, utterly aghast, thought the noises he then heard were the old gentleman’s death rattle . . . except that he knew only very wicked people swore while they were dying. Then, the atmosphere apparently clearing, he heard, “By Gad, madam! I like that!”
Then all sound was closed off again, and Mr. Pinkerton sat, bewildered and blinking. The wind howled down the chimney and buffeted at the casement windows. Mr. Pinkerton glanced at his fire. It was dying in the grate. He shivered. He didn’t dare go downstairs. He looked dismally at his bed. Then, after a long time, he undressed his meagre frame, put on a pair of pyjamas that had a red band with a yellow bird looking like the Prussian eagle embroidered on it, turned off the light and got into bed, leaving the door unlatched on the off chance that Inspector Bull might come.
He lay there a long time, waiting, his heart shrinking smaller and colder in his chest. Then at last he went to sleep, and suddenly, in the middle of a series of astonishing events that he knew were certainly the stuff of dreams, since he walked through them the hero of each, he woke up, the gooseflesh standing on every half-frozen inch of his epidermis.
The thin sound of the gilded quarterboys on the church clock striking three came through the silent night. In the pale light that came from the casement window—light only in relation to the Stygian blackness of the panelled room—Mr. Pinkerton’s eyes, barely protruding above the musty eiderdown, were turned toward the Tudor chimney-piece. The only sound was a rat, gnawing again, as if it had been alarmed and stopped for a moment in the old walls. Then, even before Mr. Pinkerton heard anything, the rat stopped again. He could hear its lumbering tread in the wattles. Then Mr. Pinkerton saw a thin sliver of light in the solid wall, and the panel through which Kathleen had come so abruptly opened, so silently that the little man thought he must be dreaming again. Then he saw the round yellow ball of light from an electric torch bounce on the floor into nothingness. The light tread of stockinged feet touched his ears. In the glimmer of light from the casement, he saw a dark figure creeping toward the door, and, for a bare instant, it illuminated the thin pale face of a young man he had never seen before.
It was not even in that brief light a particularly attractive face. Its pallor, the tense drawn expression, even in the dim shadows, was apparent to Mr. Pinkerton. He could not hear the man’s feet on the rug, but he could hear his taut breath as he caught it sharply, his hand on the latch. Mr. Pinkerton lay still as an old mouse himself, not daring to breathe. As the latch clicked, and the door opened and closed, he looked back at the dark open panel. He heard a quick breath there, saw a white figure high in the dark strip behind it, heard bare feet, and saw the panel close.
Mr. Pinkerton had a sudden sick feeling in his stomach. The maid Kathleen was letting the young man out of the garret where her room was. But she couldn’t, he thought desperately, have mistaken the stairs a second time . . .
Just then, as Mr. Pinkerton was staring through the dark at the closed panel, before he could think what to think, he heard a long laboured and choking groan, shaking through the old hostel like the anguished cry of a ghost long dead . . . except that it was not a ghost. He sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the eiderdown up against his scrawny chest with freezing hands. The wind moaned outside, rattling at the casements, hitting with hard gloved hands at the seaward side of the house overlooking the salts. The groan sounded again.
Mr. Pinkerton, his heart too cold to feel how cold his feet were, slipped out of bed and turned on his light. He then put on his plaid carpet slippers, got his overcoat out of the wardrobe, put it on and stood, trembling. Through the panels came that terrifying sound again—and palpably weaker. In a flash of something, perhaps intuition, or even recognition, perhaps only the doubts and alarms precipitated suddenly by the fish with the pink sauce in his upper colon, the little Welshman knew it was Sir Lionel Atwater he had heard. The thought flashed into his mind that he had had a stroke, then, just as his younger son had said he would do. Mr. Pinkerton opened his door and stood a confused instant at the top of the staircase.
The old inn was like a rabbit warren, he knew. There must be some way to get to the room beyond without going
