way.
“It’s—it’s about your cousin, Miss Winship—she mustn’t go to Paris tonight.” He blurted it out breathlessly. “You’ve got to stop her. She really mustn’t go.”
That Eric Dalrymple-Hughes thought he had taken leave of his senses was perfectly apparent, even to Mr. Pinkerton. He did not stare at him precisely, but he looked at him a moment as if not quite sure he was actually there. Then he raised his brows.
“And just what business of yours is it whether my cousin goes to Paris or does not go to Paris, Mr.—Mr. Pinkerton, I believe?”
“Yes, I’m Mr. Pinkerton. I live on the third floor. And it’s not really any business of mine. But there’s an American coming here—to the flats, I mean—”
“An American?” Mr. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes gave another slight start. “I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” he said briefly.
“Oh, I know you don’t. But it’s quite true. I met him in front of your Aunt’s house this afternoon, and he was looking for your cousin. He didn’t know where she lived now, and I told him. He’s got a room here, the box room, and he wants to see her. So you see she—she mustn’t go to Paris just now. Your Aunt thinks he knows her father, Mr. Scott Winship, but I’m sure he doesn’t at all. He was just asking if he’d come back. And he never said Mr. Winship was here, or that he’d seen him. He just asked—”
Mr. Dalrymple-Hughes was examining the tip of his cigarette with studied unconcern. “Why should he be interested in my deceased uncle?”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Mr. Pinkerton. “He’s not interested in your uncle. It’s your cousin Mary. He came all the way from America to see her, so she mustn’t go off like this. She’s simply—”
He stopped. The young man was regarding him with a skeptical, puzzled, half-amused and half-not-amused-at-all eye that was discouraging in the extreme. It was plain that the idea of anyone so much as crossing the road to see his cousin was too bizarre for him to consider seriously. Mr. Pinkerton almost gave up.
“At least let me speak to Mary Winship before she goes? Do that, will you?”
He was so in earnest that he knew he sounded absurd, pleading this way about such an incomprehensible matter, and knowing that pleading would not be enough he made a sudden desperate gamble. “You said—I heard you tell Mary you needed cash. I can let you have some. I could let you have a hundred pounds—or two hundred. If you’ll bring Mary up and let me talk to her, I’ll—I’ll give you the money.”
It was not only a gamble. For Mr. Evan Pinkerton, who never spent a sixpence without misgivings or a pound without cold chills, it was more than that; it was fantastic. Eric Dalrymple-Hughes stood looking at him. What he was thinking Mr. Pinkerton had no way of telling. There was nothing on the handsome conceited young face that had any meaning for him, friendly or unfriendly.
He stood simply staring for an instant, said then, quite coolly, “I’ll see what I can do,” turned on his heel and went back into his own apartment.
Mr. Pinkerton started up stairs. He was not even thinking of the two hundred pounds. He was too numb with a horrible sense of guilt at having ruined Dan McGrath’s mission to Godolphin Square, and of defeat at having failed to make Mary Winship’s cousin see the truth. If only he had kept out of it, Mr. Pinkerton thought again wretchedly; if only he had let Miss Caroline Winship think it was the Town and Country planning people, and never mentioned the American. But it was too late now.
He took his dejected way up the stairs to the second floor and on up the narrower flight to the third, let himself into the meagre bed-sitting room that was his own, and stood inside the door a moment. Besides being miserable, he was extremely confused. Again he thought, they couldn’t be sending Mary Winship away on account of the American they didn’t know, so they must be sending her away because they thought her father was coming back, or was back already. Was it only her Aunt Caroline, then, or was it her mother too? He tried to think back, recalling Mrs. Scott Winship standing stone-still by the door when he repeated the ill-starred question. All he could remember was the sudden clap of silence, and the intense motionlessness of the two sisters before Miss Caroline said, “Go to your room, Louise.” Then there was Miss Winship’s telephone call to Sidney Copeland. Between all that and now—it had been twenty-five minutes past seven when he left the tea shop after his compote of starling—they had decided, or Miss Caroline had decided, to send Mary away and had arranged to send her. And she was going on the night boat—unless he could stop her some way. And why? He kept asking it with no possible means of answering.
He tried to think as he stood there in the pleasant darkness of the shabby room. The curtains had not been drawn, and the two French windows that opened out onto the narrow ledge forming a sort of balcony, behind the parapet made by the stone coping to hide the mansard windows of the attic storey and maintain the even classical lines of the Adam square, shone softly silver from the outside light. He went across the room and stepped out on the ledge.
Through the ragged branches of the intervening plane trees he could see the gaunt ruins of Miss Winship’s house. The dim orange light from the street lamp threw it into a softly ghostly relief above the black empty spaces where the houses had gone from either side of it. Someone was moving along the street in front. Mr. Pinkerton could make out the dark figure of a man moving slowly along. He passed the house, and a moment later he came back. As he stopped again, Mr. Pinkerton had a fleeting impression that there was something familiar in the outline of his body or the movement of it, as if the man was someone he had seen, and now somehow recognized but could not identify. It was so puzzling that he watched him intently— so intently that he blinked with astonishment when the man was suddenly no longer there. He seemed to have disappeared, quite literally, as if he had dissolved not into the shadows but as a part of them. He had been there, darkly visible; then he was not there, and the space in front of the house, and the whole street, was empty. It was as eerie and uncanny as the shadowy ruin of the house itself.
Mr. Pinkerton leaned forward, peering intently through the murky penumbra cast up through the settling haze by the orange overglow of the street lights. Suddenly he stiffened, every grey fibre of his nervous system quivering, as alert as if he heard again the shrill blast of the midnight siren warning of the approach of terror and death. Someone was in the room behind him. Was it the sound of a stealthy breath drawn or expelled? Or was it the slithering sound of a footstep in the dark room across the worn Brussels carpet? Or a garment brushing against the chair or the table? He could not tell, except that it was something, and something furtive and frightening, and it was there very close, inside the long open window behind him. He tried to swallow, to clear the sudden pounding in his ears, but his throat was dry. His hands were icy as he tried to grip the stone coping, drawing back not to see the street four floors below, paralyzed with a fear so horrible that it curdled everything inside him. When he tried to speak no sound came past his parched lips, and his cry for help was only a hoarse choked breath. As he tried to turn and look into the blackness of the room and cry out, he knew nothing more except a hideous woolly darkness as something thick and soft flashed over his head and a brutal stranglehold fastened about his throat, thrusting back his chin, as he slid down into a vast blinding nauseating abyss, down and down, with the high-pitched echo of something sounding crazily like the hoot of a taxi-horn bursting in his ears before the crash of a thousand lights and the blackness of oblivion. Mr. Pinkerton slumped down on the lead gutter pipe.
Wait. The hooting taxi-horn thrusting in the knife blade of fear stayed the arms of the dark figure standing over him, murderous and intent. Wait. Wait till it passes and the street is empty again. But it was not passing. It was stopping at Number 4 Godolphin Square. The dark figure was motionless, arms reached down to lift the body and cast it over the raised coping.
