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 of his tawny mustache. “All right, Pinkerton,” he said placidly. “You just pop along and put on some clothes.”
Mr. Pinkerton waited anxiously. Then, as Bull had apparently finished, he ventured timidly, “May I come back, please, Inspector?”
“I’ll send along for you when I want you,” Bull said. “And don’t make any more trouble if you can help it,” he added, as the little man raised the latch on the stout oak door.
Mr. Pinkerton slipped through the room like a rabbit through the brambles, not daring to cast so much as a side-wise look at the horrified silent group huddled in front of the Tudor fireplace. As Mr. Fleetwood rose quickly to his feet, evidently thinking, until Inspector Bull’s burly figure appeared in the door also, that Mr. Pinkerton was making a getaway, the little man made a final bolt through the door and down the crooked stairs and up to his own room. There he banged the door behind him, his heart beating like an anvil.
He sat on the edge of his bed, shivering like a dead leaf in the rain. Then he slipped off his overcoat and reached for his socks. As he did there was a quick tap on the panel, and it slid open instantly. Mr. Pinkerton grabbed for the bed-clothes and held them up to his chin, his present fear of being caught again, red-handed, in his incredible nightwear, banishing the horrible imaginings of the pursuing Atwaters.
The maid Kathleen put her blue-black curly head into the room.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered. But she did not go back, or close the panel. Instead, to Mr. Pinkerton’s dismay, she came brazenly into the room and closed the panel behind her. She was fully dressed, with an old red cardigan over her brown uniform.
“Has something . . . dreadful happened, sir?” she whispered.
Mr. Pinkerton nodded, clutching the eiderdown closer about his neck and drawing his bare feet up under him like a trussed turkey.
“Sir Lionel Atwater is dead.” he stammered.
The girl’s pale frightened face underwent the most extraordinary change, as if a storm had crossed it and left only relief from some consuming fear.
“Oh,” she breathed. She sat down weakly on the oak settle by the fire, completely unconscious of the ludicrous little figure of her unwilling host clinging to his modesty.
“You see, sir, people can’t go on forever making people miserable, can they?”
Her voice went up like a little prayer on the shrine of “Somehow good will triumph over water and o’er mud.” Mr. Pinkerton’s heart lower than the proverbial under side of a snake, went lower still.
“But he . . . he was murdered!” he stammered.
The girl’s jaw dropped, her red hands resting on the oak seat clutched at it in a sudden spasm so that her knuckles stood out white and awful.
“With one of those old silver skewers from the dresser in the dining room,” Mr. Pinkerton blurted out.
She stared at him, the blood drained
