Albert Pinnegar is murdered by Miss Frost in a killing that turns a seemingly plausible newspaper report into a revelation of her concealed violence. The crime’s aftermath exposes the false trail surrounding his death and connects it to the murder of Daisy Branning and Miss Frost’s attempt to kill Sunday Small.

Causes and Background

When Sunday Small disappears, Tom Branning voices his fear that Pinnegar may have taken her. A passer-by interrupts Tom and Lady Huntley with a newspaper report that Pinnegar has been found dead in his cottage, stabbed in the heart. The report places the death on the previous night, but initially presents it as the outcome of a quarrel with a rent collector.

Miss Frost later gives the killing a different motive. In her account, Pinnegar had broken her heart and rejected her. She says she stabbed him but could not bring herself to torture him, so his death was swift. Her confession establishes both her responsibility and the personal grievance behind the crime; the newspaper’s wage dispute had made another suspect appear more likely.

Disclosure and Course

The first account reaches Tom and Lady Huntley while they are trying to discover where Sunday has gone. It says that Pinnegar had tried to cheat a rent collector out of his wages, that the two men argued, and that a passer-by saw the rent collector through the cottage window. Police have taken that man into custody, leaving Tom and Lady Huntley with the immediate relief that Pinnegar can no longer harm Sunday, but no answer to her disappearance.

The truth emerges when Miss Frost confronts Sunday. She claims responsibility for Pinnegar’s death and describes stabbing him in the heart. The disclosure transforms a reported crime into part of the direct threat Sunday faces: Miss Frost says she has also killed Daisy Branning, whom she pushed into the canal, and turns her attention to Sunday. The murders are therefore connected not by the newspaper’s apparent dispute over wages, but by Miss Frost’s hostility and her fixation on those she blames for losing Pinnegar or her position.

Investigation and Aftermath

The police account changes after they learn that Miss Frost was seen running from Pinnegar’s cottage with a knife. Tom later reports that the authorities had already concluded the detained rent collector was not the killer and had released him. The evidence of Miss Frost leaving the cottage corrects the initial theory and confirms that the arrest arose from circumstantial appearances rather than the actual identity of the murderer.

After Pinnegar’s death, police attention also helps locate Miss Frost. Tom explains that, once he learned Pinnegar was dead, he suspected her; a policeman then mentioned that she had been sleeping rough in derelict pit cottages on the way to Bedworth. This leads to the discovery of Sunday, who has been held by Miss Frost. The murder thus becomes a clue in the search for Sunday as well as the revelation of the danger she is in.

Narrative Significance

The delayed disclosure gives the murder two distinct meanings. At first, Pinnegar’s death seems to remove a danger Sunday feared, while the rent collector’s arrest offers a ready explanation. Miss Frost’s confession overturns both impressions: the person responsible is someone from Sunday’s past, and the killing is one part of a larger pattern that includes Daisy’s death and Sunday’s abduction.

Pinnegar’s murder also links the story’s separate losses through Miss Frost’s own account. She presents his rejection as the reason she killed him, but her claim that she spared him a prolonged death sits beside her account of Daisy’s killing and her threat to Sunday. The contrast reveals the limits of her stated grievance as an explanation: it accompanies, rather than contains, the wider violence she has committed.