Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard

By Zenith Brown and Leslie Ford

Carlotta Rathbone was awfully elegant, dreadfully chic and terribly dead -- as Mr. Pinkerton discovers when he stumbles over her body in a dimly lighted London street.
Her friends were bought; her enemies were legion, and paramount among them was Archibald Biddle, a social-climbing novelist who had used Carlotta and then tried to drop her. Biddle is Scotland Yard's prime suspect -- until he panics and begins to tell too much about London's international set. Then the killer strikes again...

"By far the best of David Frome’s stories about Mr. Pinkerton...and that’s saying a great deal"—New York Times

"Unsurpassed." —Saturday Review "This is by far the best of David Frome's stories about Mr. Pinkerton, and that is saying a great deal, for all of them have been worthy of high rank”—THE NEW YORK TIMES "No fan would think of missing Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard." -- Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781479435975

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Table of Contents

MR. PINKERTON GROWS A BEARD

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

MR. PINKERTON GROWS A BEARD

ZENITH BROWN

(writing as Leslie Ford)

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1935, 1963 by Zenith Brown.

All rights reserved.

Published by Wildside Press LLC

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

CHAPTER 1

During 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.

CHAPTER 2

It was on a Sunday, exactly ten days before what the press simply and unanimously called the great fog, that Mr. Evan Pinkerton made up his mind to it and went from one room to another in his drab cheerless house in Golders Green, carefully locking each window. That it was a Sunday, and just ten days before the fog, Mr. Pinkerton later remembered very precisely. During the next fortnight he looked back many times, with a memory sharpened by various emotions, at each happening in the series of events that he had plunged into. For on various occasions it seemed highly probable to Mr. Pinkerton that he would shortly not be able to look back at all, by reason of the violent cessation of his being, or that at best he would be so totally insane as to make looking back not worth his while. And it was the apparently simple business of closing up his house that catapulted Mr. Pinkerton into the most mystifying and amazing adventure that he had ever had . . . and he had had many, in the company—usually reluctant—of his friend Inspector Bull of New Scotland Yard.

Mr. Pinkerton went from room to room, drawing each shade to precisely that point at which the pale February sun could not filter through and fade the red and green turkey carpets, but also at which burglars casually passing by would not immediately recognize that the house was deserted. It was a point on which the late Mrs. Pinkerton had been most firm. Mr. Pinkerton, possibly in answer to some deep atavistic urge that made primitive man offer sacrifices to propitiate the dead, and keep them happily but firmly on the other side, did as many of the things Mrs. Pinkerton had insisted upon as were possible without interfering too greatly with his freedom as a widower. Or possibly it was because he had never actually brought himself to believe that Mrs. Pinkerton had really shuffled off her material being. There was always the ghastly possibility, to his mind, that if he wasn’t distinctly careful about it he might come back to Golders Green some day and find her sitting in the kitchen, grey and vinegary, waiting to nag at him and reduce him again to the wretched unhappy state of bondage in which he had always lived since he was a small boy. First as the charity ward of two determined maternal aunts in Wales, second as an underfed, underpaid undermaster in a Welsh school, and third as scullery and pot boy in her boarding house there in Golders Green.

Not that he had minded all of it. Since the day that a raw recruit to the Metropolitan Police had come up from Wiltshire to take the converted box room on the top storey, it had been rather exciting, now that he could look back on it and forget the scullery end. When their lodger became a member of the C.I.D. of New Scotland Yard he moved into Mrs. Pinkerton’s first floor front, and lived among her massive mahogany furnishings, the only person Mr. Pinkerton had ever seen who would not have been completely overwhelmed by them. Large, tawny and deliberate, Inspector Bull lived there placidly, going out each day to a world of assorted crime that glowed in the dark winter of Mr. Pinkerton’s existence like the tropic sun. It glowed so brightly that purple patches began to flower dangerously in the waste land of his grey little soul. No one ever knew it, of course. He continued to carry his wife’s lodgers their kippers, cold toast and tea and polish their boots—polishing all the rest of them quickly so that he could linger over the stout regulation boots of Inspector Bull. But it emboldened him to get off to the cinema more often, with pennies he saved by walking to the Edgeware market, where kippers were a ha’penny cheaper.

At the cinema Mr. Pinkerton’s life scaled to dizzy heights. Seated in the stuffy smoke-filled gallery of the local theatre, watching Passion’s Hirelings, he was his own man for two hours at a stretch. He learned many things there. Life among the Americans, for example, was an open breathing book to him. He had never met an American, but he knew well that they were a glamorous, incredibly rich, lawless and sinful race, very apt to shoot on sight if indeed they waited that long. From time to time Mr. Pinkerton actually found himself viewing Life through the double barrel of a sawed-off shotgun as with a pair of opera glasses hired for 6d. from the young lady usher.

The zenith, however, came on those rare occasions when Inspector Bull in his room reached for the buzzing telephone—not included in the 25/- a week for bed and breakfast—bellowed into it that he was on his way, and allowed Mr. Pinkerton to follow him through the mazes of violent crime until they came out at the other end and the papers carried a few words: . . . was hanged in Pentonville this morning. Mr. Pinkerton had a collection of such clippings, neatly laid away with his pass book and a copy of Mrs. Pinkerton’s death certificate.

Finally Mrs. Pinkerton had gone to her eternal reward, though Mr. Pinkerton piously hoped she had not been held to anything so meagre as what she actually merited. In particular he hoped that the one act of not making out a sixpenny will form could be put on the credit side because of the £ 75,000 it automatically provided him with, instead of on the debit side of excessive penuriousness where it actually belonged. And still Mr. Pinkerton never spent sixpence of it for the cinema, or threepence for an ice at the Corner House, without expecting to see her materialize suddenly at his side and snatch her £ 75,000 up into the astral plane. In any case he spent very little, for the simple reason that he was a Welshman, and it never occurred to him to spend money in any but the most cautious fashion.

Mr. Pinkerton opened the door of the first floor front and gazed wistfully at the big room with its mammoth mahogany wardrobes and huge double bed. He had occupied it himself from the day Inspector Bull left it for a semi-detached villa in Hampstead. That was after the dreadful business in Caithness Road. They had pursued the Fulham Road antique dealer to the mountains of Wales, and caught him there just as he was about to slay a girl with cornflower eyes and golden hair. She was Mrs. Bull now, and in a sense it was because of her that he stood wistfully looking round the room, feeling more lonely and old and unimportant than he had done since that rainy night at the Simeon Temperance Hostelry for Men in Oxford.

Perhaps even before that, because this was a loneliness that was going to last. His friendship with the Bulls could never be quite the same, because they’d not have the time for him any more. He had realized that for some time now. Actually he had nothing against babies. People had to have them, as Mr. Pinkerton knew as well as anybody else. That did not change the fact that they took time—and room. In fact the room in Hampstead that he and the Bulls had always regarded as his own was now a nursery, with an extraordinary lot of lacy cots, baskets, wooly animals and gee gees of various sizes sitting about, waiting for their young owner to arrive and take possession. And his place under the plane tree would be a shady spot for the pram.

True, Margaret had made it perfectly clear that the day bed in Inspector Bull’s den was always at his disposal. Being a woman she had no way of knowing that that was like telling a minor canon he could pitch a tent in the centre of the bishop’s private tennis court and make himself quite at home.

It wasn’t the same. They would be nice to him, of course, but nevertheless he’d be in the way. Instead of talking about crime with Inspector Bull in front of the fire, Mr. Pinkerton would have to watch the man from Scotland Yard on his great hands and knees on the parlour floor playing puffer. It was a dismal prospect. He wasn’t jealous of the baby; it wasn’t that. It was just that already he