Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1During the whole day a dense fog had held London in its murky grip. The street lamps were saffron halos swimming overhead in a sea of misty opacity audibly riddled by policemen’s whistles, bicycle bells, hooters, shouting bus drivers. The buses crawled tortoise-slow and quite empty along the slippery roads. Practically all London had taken to the Underground like homing moles.

In Bedford Square a young man, somewhat the worse for a series of champagne cocktails at a private dining club in Portland Place, hugged the iron palings on the wrong side of the wicket into Mr. Archibald Biddle’s area and attempted to go to sleep. He gave every sign of being entirely oblivious to the small man in grey with a grey face and a slightly furtive air who had walked round the Square at least twice within the half hour. Nor did he move when Eglantine Jebb, Mr. Biddle’s housemaid, on her way up the area stairs, bumped into him and shrieked loudly for help.

The Honorable Lovat Gwatley-Wells blinked one eye and went back to sleep.

Jebb peered at him through the fog.

“As I live!” she said. She raised a cautioning foot at Mr. Mogridge, who was clattering up the area steps to her aid.

“It’s Mr. Gwatley-Wells—’e’s fast asleep!”

She giggled nervously. “But ’e did give me a turn, ’e fair did.”

Mr. Mogridge nodded thoughtfully. “ ’E’s been drinking again, is what it is,” he said from the middle step. Mr. Mogridge was Mr. Biddle’s valet-butler, and a man of some experience in the ways of gentlemen.

Jebb peered admiringly into Mr. Gwatley-Wells’s face, which was chiefly adorned by a tiny blond mustache on a very weak upper lip.

“It’s a wonder ’e ever found ’is way ’ere, in all this fog.”

“Fog don’t make any difference to a gentleman that’s been drinking,” Mogridge said with dignity. “I personally ’ad a young gentleman that couldn’t never find ’is way ’ome till ’e was mat befuddled ’e ’ad to rely on ’is instincts for guidance. ’E was as like Mr. Gwatley-Wells as two peas.”

Jebb was drawing away from the protecting arm that Mr. Mogridge had put about her neat shoulders when the white Adam door opened above them into an oblong of pale yellow mist. It dimly framed the tall and elegant figure of Mr. Archibald Biddle, author of The Pale Princess, Dawn and Daphne and Columbine’s Lover.

“I say,” Mr. Biddle said. “What is this ghastly row going on out hyah?”

His voice was pitched at a nice point between utter indifference and petulant irritation.

“It’s nothing at all, sir,” Mogridge said hastily. “Only Mr. Gwatley-Wells, sir.”

“Gwatley-Wells? What the devil is he doing in the dustbin?”

“He’s not precisely in the dustbin, sir. He’s standing up very properly, sir.”

A second dim figure appeared in the indistinct yellow glow and came out onto the narrow stoop. Carlotta Rathbone peered over the rail, one hand clinging daintily to the polished brass knob at the top step.

“It’s the horse in him, Archibald,” she observed. “All the Gwatley-Wellses sleep standing in stalls. Give him a bag of oats and leave him alone. We’ll die of vapours if we stand out here listening to Lovat snore.”

“In that case we’d better bring him in,” Mr. Biddle said. “The R.S.P.C.A.’ll be after us. Or put a blanket over him. Bring him in, Mogridge.”

As Mr. Biddle peered out into the fog the bright smile on his face disappeared suddenly, and a look that was not at all amused came into his eyes.

“I say, Carlotta—look . . . that’s not—”

“Don’t be absurd.”

Carlotta Rathbone peered at the small grey figure passing silently through the fog in front of them, and turned back into the warmth of the yellow light. She shivered involuntarily. The fog had penetrated into the warm security of Archibald Biddle’s gold and white Chinese foyer. She glanced in the gilt mirror and pressed her bright yellow curls into place.

“My God, I look a hundred,” she thought. She composed her face into a smile, just gracious enough and arch enough to disguise the lines at the corners of her mouth.

“You do have the most poisonous notions, don’t you, darling. What in Heaven’s name would Simon be doing, wandering about in the fog . . . in England?”

Archibald Biddle raised his eyeglass, inserted it, and looked silently at her for a moment with a glint of something extraordinarily malevolent in his eyes.

“I must say, Carlotta, that sometimes you appear to me to be practically devoid of ordinary intelligence.”

He flicked the monocle out of his eye and brushed his hands fastidiously with a green lawn handkerchief from the breast pocket of his elaborately striped jacket.

“Not, my dyah, that one expects startling intelligence from a woman, unless one is a fool of the most sanguinary sort. But there is a certain low cunning among women and Americans that passes for intelligence. I must say, Carlotta, that you seem singularly devoid of that, lately. In other words, my dyah, you’ve been acting like a complete fool.”

The beautiful surface of Mrs. Rathbone’s smile did not quiver. A faint pink stained the sensitive skin under her carefully arched, delicately pencilled eyebrows.

She took a cigarette out of the carved emerald quartz box (gift of the fat wife of a Chicago meat-packer) on the Louis Quinze table, and waited with it poised in her white hands a moment. When Archibald Biddle made no move to extend the gold lighter (gift of the scrawny wife of a manufacturer of American agricultural machinery) with which he had just lighted his own cigarette, she tossed it casually into the fire.

Mr. Biddle’s brows contracted a little.

“And I should also like to say, Carlotta, that if you are going to throw cigarettes away, I should be most happy if you’ll buy yourself a packet of gaspers. These cigarettes cost me tuppence ha’penny apiece.”

“Not you, darling. You’ve never in your life paid anything for anything.”

Mr. Biddle yawned. “Need we go into that again, Carlotta?”

“No, darling.”

Mrs. Rathbone hesitated.

“I merely think it worth while to point out to you that you can’t forever go on being—to be utterly frank, Archibald—such an unbelievable rotter. Not without being caught out—sometime.”

Mrs. Rathbone smiled pleasantly. The glint in Mr. Biddle’s eyes was more noticeable.

“I’m simply telling you, Archibald, that you can’t go on using people as you would characters in a book and then chucking them into the dustbin at the end of three hundred pages.”

A faint grey line circled Archibald Biddle’s thin mouth. Mrs. Rathbone’s smile deepened.

“You are such a perfectly poisonous coward, aren’t you, darling. I mean, really. You aren’t brave when it comes to Simon, are you? You’re just so inordinately conceited that you think you shan’t get caught.”

Mr. Biddle abruptly tossed half a tuppence ha’penny cigarette into the fire.

“You’re a fool, Carlotta,” he said quietly.

Mrs. Rathbone nodded. “But you didn’t think so when you wrote Dawn and Daphne.”

“You were a fool then, but you were a beautiful one.”

She looked steadily at him a moment, and nodded again. “I must have been a really colossal fool, Archibald—even more than I am now. Because, my love, I’m now going out . . . and I shouldn’t be surprised if I happened quite by chance to meet Simon, before I’ve got over being annoyed at being called a fool . . . or if he and I couldn’t come to eminently satisfactory terms.”

Archibald Biddle was silent a moment. “Is that a threat, Carlotta?” he said coolly.

“A threat?”

Mrs. Rathbone shook her head.

“I’m forty-five years old, Archibald. And you’re . . . what?”

“Fifty,” Mr. Biddle said.

“Fifty-six?”

Mrs. Rathbone crossed the room to pick up the mink coat lying on a gold satin striped love seat. As she put it round her shoulders her nostrils quivered suddenly and she cast a quick glance round the room. The faint flush in her cheeks deepened.

“By the way, Archibald,” she said pleasantly. “I thought you might be interested to know that at Rumpelmayer’s the other afternoon a couple of young men were commenting on the extraordinary number of remaindered copies of Columbine’s Lover that are now cluttering up the second-hand stalls. If I were you, darling, I’d send Mogridge out to buy in a couple of thousand. Otherwise people are going to get curious about how you keep all this up.”

A dull flush darkened Archibald Biddle’s lean-cut face. For a moment Carlotta Rathbone thought that the careful non-chalance of one of England’s leading contemporary novelists was breaking. She took another cigarette and struck a wax vesta on the box on the table.

Mr. Biddle smiled.

“We’re being rather absurd, Carlotta. You must surely know that you’re the only woman for me.”

He shrugged elegantly tailored shoulders.

“Others may . . . come and go. But you—”

He stepped towards her with almost youthful impulsiveness.

Mrs. Rathbone held up her hand, smiling.

“No, it won’t quite do, Archibald. Especially as I’m sure Brenda Nash is getting horribly faint in the cupboard.”

She walked to the elaborate shell corniced book case in the corner near the fireplace and tapped on a panel. The shelves of books swung open. A white-haired woman stepped out, eyes sparkling, a cool smile on an extraordinarily lovely face.

“Thanks,” she said. “It was rather stuffy, you know, Mrs. Rathbone.”

Carlotta Rathbone’s smile remained charmingly intact. “I’m sure it must have been,” she said. “By the way, Archie, what did happen to Lovat. Did they bring him in?”

Brenda Nash’s face changed suddenly. “Lovat?”

“Oh, didn’t you hear? He was out by the area. Waiting for you, I should have thought. At least he’d gone to sleep against the palings. Possibly knows how long you normally stay. Well, I really mustn’t keep you.”

She looked at the round-bellied porcelain clock on the mantel. It was ten minutes of five.

“Good-bye, Miss Nash. Good-bye, Archibald. No, don’t come out. I’ll try to manage Lovat.”

Mrs. Rathbone smiled brightly and went out. Her smile faded with each step. In the hall she looked in the mirror again. The smile revived automatically.

Mogridge opened the door.

“Did Mr. Gwatley-Wells decide . . . not to come in?”

“He expressed a desire for both of us to proceed at once to Leamington Spa, madam. Apparently mistaking me for Mr. Biddle.”

“Really? And where is he now?”

“Leamington Spa, madam, as far as I know. Shall I call a taxi, madam?”

Mrs. Rathbone shook her head. She stood on the steps for a minute, looking down into the fog, turned and looked back once at the house behind her as if for a last time, shivered a little, wondered why she should have done it, for the fog was not really cold, and went down the steps. When P. C. Wood stumbled over her on the far side of Bedford Square not long afterwards, she was quite dead.