Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall tumbler on his dressing-table, to help him shave for the evening of that fateful Friday. He was dressing for an early dinner before a first night. His dressing-room, in which he also slept in Spartan simplicity, was the original powder-closet of the panelled library out of which it led. There was a third room in which his man Mullins prepared breakfast and spent the day. But the whole was a glorified garret, at the top of such stairs as might have sent a nervous client back for an escort.

  Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker’s mute (a calling he had followed in his day), was laying out his master’s clothes as mournfully as though his master were in them, instead of chatting genially as he shaved.

  “I’m sorry to have missed your evidence, Mullins, but if we go into this case it’s no use letting the police smell the competitive rat too soon. Inquests are not in my line, and they’d have wondered what the devil I was doing there, especially as you refrained from saying you were in my service.”

  “I had no call, sir.”

  “Quite right, Mullins! An ideal witness, I can see you were. So you’d only to describe the finding of the body?”

  “That was all, sir.”

  “And your description was really largely founded on fact?”

  Mullins stood like a funereal grenadier at his gentleman’s shaving elbow. “I told the truth, sir, and nothing but the truth,” said he, with sombre dignity.

  “But not the whole truth, eh, Mullins! What about the little souvenirs you showed me yesterday?”

  “There was no call to name them either, sir. The cheroot-end I must have picked up a hundred yards away, and even the medicine-cork wasn’t on the actual scene of the murder.”

  “That’s all right, Mullins. I don’t see what they could possibly have to do with it, myself; and really, but for the fluke of your being the one to find the body, and picking the first-fruits for what they’re worth, it’s the last kind of case that I should dream of touching with a ten-foot pole. By the way, I suppose they won’t require you at the adjourned inquest?”

  “They may not require me, sir, but I should like to attend, if quite convenient,” replied Mullins deferentially. “The police were very stingy with their evidence to-day; they’ve still to produce the fatal bullet, and I should like a sight of that, sir.”

  Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took as little real interest as he professed in the case which was being thrust upon him, but more obviously owing to the necessary care in shaving the corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the whole face emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would have delighted any eye but its own. It was fat and flabby as the rest of Eugene Thrush; there was quite a collection of chins to shave; and yet anybody but himself must have recognised the invincible freshness of complexion, the happy penetration of every glance, as an earnest of inexhaustible possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. Great round spectacles, through which he stared like a wise fish in an aquarium, were caught precariously on a button of a nose which in itself might have prevented the superficial observer from taking him any more seriously than he took himself.

  Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the landing to sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate abhorrence of London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his visit nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The library of books in solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the first reassuring feature; another was the large desk, made business-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only beginning to recover confidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at his first entry.

  It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen from the motorist’s dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can’t let you keep me!”

  This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception one had to come up to London to incur. “Then I’ll clear out!” said he, and would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous effect.

  Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare of kindly consternation.

  “I really am rather rushed,” said he; “but I can give you four minutes, if that’s any good to you.”

  Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, Mr. Upton would have said four hours or four days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would have been no good to him; but the precise term of minutes, together with a seemlier but not less decisive manner, had already quickened the business man’s respect for another whose time was valuable. This is by no means to say that Thrush had won him over in a breath. But the following interchange took place rapidly.

  “I understand you’re a detective, Mr. Thrush?”

  “Hardly that, Mr. —— I’ve left your card in the other room.”

  “Upton is my name, sir.”

  “I don’t aspire to the official designation, Mr. Upton, an inquiry agent is all I presume to call myself.”

  “But you do inquire into mysteries?”

  “I’ve dabbled in them.”

  “As an amateur?”

  “A paid amateur, I fear.”

  “I come on a serious matter, Mr. Thrush — a very serious matter to me!”

  “Pardon me if I seem anything else for a moment; as it happens, you catch me dabbling, or rather meddling, in a serious case which is none of my business, but strictly a matter for the police, only it happens to have come my way by a fluke. I am not a policeman, but a private inquisitor. If you want anything or anybody ferreted out, that’s my job and I should put it first.”

  “Mr. Thrush, that’s exactly what I do want, if only you can do it for me! I had reason to fear, from what I heard this morning, that my youngest child, a boy of sixteen, had disappeared up here in London, or been decoyed away. And now there can be no doubt about it!”

  So, in about one of the allotted minutes, Thrush was trusted on grounds which Mr. Upton could not easily have explained; but the time was up before he had concluded a briefly circumstantial report of the facts within his knowledge.

  “When can I see you again?” he asked abruptly of Thrush.

  “When? What do you mean, Mr. Upton?”

  “The four minutes must be more than up.”

  “Go on, my dear sir, and don’t throw good time after bad. I’m only dining with a man at his club. He can wait.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Thrush.”

  “More good time! How do you know the boy hasn’t turned up at school or at home while you’ve been fizzing in a cloud of dust?”

  “I was to have a wire at the hotel I always stop at; there’s nothing there; but the first thing they told me was that my boy had been for a bed which they couldn’t give him the night before last. I did let them have it! But it seems the manager was out, and his understrappers had recommended other hotels; they’ve just been telephoning to them all in turn, but at every one the poor boy seems to have fared the same. Then I’ve been in communication with these infernal people in St. John’s Wood, and with the doctor, but none of them have heard anything. I thought I’d like to do what I could before coming to you, Mr. Thrush, but that’s all I’ve done or know how to do. Something must have happened!”

  “It begins to sound like it,” said Thrush gravely.

  “But there are happenings and happenings; it may be only a minor accident. One moment!”

  And he returned to the powder-closet of its modish day, where Mullins was still pursuing his ostensibly menial avocation. What the master said was inaudible in the library, but the man hurried out in front of him, and was heard clattering down the evil stairs next minute.

  “In less than an hou
r,” explained Thrush, “he will be back with a list of the admissions at the principal hospitals for the last forty-eight hours. I don’t say there’s much in it; your boy had probably some letter or other means of easier indentification about him; but it’s worth trying.”

  “It is, indeed!” murmured Mr. Upton, much impressed.

  “And while he is trying it,” exclaimed Eugene Thrush, lighting up as with a really great idea, “you’ll greatly oblige me by having a whisky-and-soda in the first place.”

  “No, thank you! I haven’t had a bite all day. It would fly to my head.”

  “But that’s its job; that’s where it’s meant to fly,” explained the convivial Mr. Thrush, preparing the potion with practised hand. Baited with a biscuit it was eventually swallowed, and a flagging giant refreshed by his surrender. It made him like his new acquaintance too well to bear the thought of detaining him any more.

  “Go to your dinner, man, and let me waylay you later!”

  “Thank you, I prefer to keep you now I’ve got you, Mr. Upton! My man begins his round by going to tell my pal I can’t dine with him at all. Not a word, I beg! I’ll have a bite with you instead when Mullins gets back, and in a taxi that won’t be long.”

  “But do you think you can do anything?”

  The question floated in pathetic evidence on a flood of inarticulate thanks.

  “If you give me time, I hope so,” was the measured answer. “But the needle in the hay is nothing to the lost unit in London, and it will take time. I’m not a magazine detective, Mr. Upton; if you want a sixpenny solution for soft problems, don’t come to me!”

  At an earlier stage the ironmaster would have raised his voice and repeated that this was a serious matter; even now he looked rather reproachfully at Eugene Thrush, who came back to business on the spot.

  “I haven’t asked you for a description of the boy, Mr. Upton, because it’s not much good if we’ve got to keep the matter to ourselves. But is there anything distinctive about him besides the asthma?”

  “Nothing; he was never an athlete, like my other boys.”

  “Come! I call that a distinction in itself,” said Mr. Thrush, smiling down his own unathletic waistcoat. “But as a matter of fact, nothing could be better than the very complaint which no doubt unfits him for games.”

  “Nothing better, do you say?”

  “Emphatically, from my point of view. It’s harder to hide a man’s asthma than to hide the man himself.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  It was impossible to tell whether Thrush had thought of it before that moment. The round glasses were levelled at Mr. Upton with an inscrutable stare of the marine eyes behind them.

  “I suppose it has never affected his heart?” he inquired nonchalantly; but the nonchalance was a thought too deliberate for paternal perceptions quickened as were those of Mr. Upton.

  “Is that why you sent round the hospitals, Mr. Thrush?”

  “It was one reason, but honestly not the chief.”

  “I certainly never thought of his heart!”

  “Nor do I think you need now, in the case of so young a boy,” said Thrush earnestly. “On the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprised if his asthma were to prove his best friend.”

  “It owes him something!”

  “Do you know what he does for it?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mr. Upton, remembering the annoying letter he seemed to have received some weeks before. “He smokes, against his doctor’s orders.”

  “Do you mean tobacco?”

  “No — some stuff for asthma.”

  “In cigarettes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the name?”

  “I have it here.”

  The offensive letter was not only produced, but offered for inspection after a precautionary glance. Thrush was on his feet to receive it in outstretched hand. Already he looked extraordinarily keen for his bulk, but the reading of the letter left him alive and alert to the last superfluous ounce.

  “But this is magnificent!” he cried, with eyes as round as their glasses.

  “I confess I don’t see why.”

  “Cigarettes d’Auvergne!”

  “Some French rubbish.”

  “The boy has evidently been dependent on them?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “And this man Bompas made him give them all up?”

  “So he has the impudence to say.”

  “Is it possible you don’t see the importance of all this?”

  Mr. Upton confessed incompetence unashamed.

  “I never heard of these cigarettes before; they’re an imported article; you can’t get them everywhere, I’ll swear! Your boy has got to rely on them; he’s out of reach of the doctor who’s forbidden them; he’ll try to get them somewhere! If he’s been trying in London, I’ll find out where before I’m twenty-four hours older!”

  “But how can you?” asked Mr. Upton, less impressed with the possibility than by this rapid if obvious piece of reasoning.

  “A. V. M.!” replied Eugene Thrush, with cryptic smile.

  “Who on earth is he?”

  “Nobody; it’s the principle on which I work.”

  “A. V. M.?”

  “Otherwise the old nursery game of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.”

  Again Mr. Upton had to prevent himself by main force from declaring it all no laughing matter; but his silence was almost bellicose.

  “You divide things into two,” explained Thrush, “and go on so dividing them until you come down to the indivisible unit which is the answer to the riddle. Animal or Vegetable? Vegetable or Mineral? Northern or Southern Hemisphere? Ah! I thought your childhood was not so very much longer ago than mine.”

  Mr. Upton had shrugged an impatient recognition of the game.

  “In this case it’s Chemists Who Do Sell D’Auvergne Cigarettes and Chemists Who Don’t. Then — Chemists Who Do and Did Yesterday, and Chemists Who Do but Didn’t! But we can probably improve on the old game by playing both rounds at once.”

  “I confess I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Upton, “though there seems some method in the madness.”

  “It’s all the method I’ve got,” rejoined Thrush frankly. “But you shall see it working, for unless I’m much mistaken this is Mullins back sooner than I expected.”

  Mullins it was, and with the negative information expected and desired, though the professional melancholy of his countenance might have been the precursor of the worst possible news. The hospitals on his rapid round had included Charing Cross, St. Thomas’s, St. George’s, and the Royal Free; but he had telephoned besides to St. Mary’s and St. Bartholomew’s. At none of these institutions had a young gentleman of the name of Upton, or of unknown name, been admitted in the last forty-eight hours. Mullins, however, looked as sympathetically depressed as though no news had lost its proverbial value; and he had one of those blue-black faces that lend themselves to the look, his chin being in perpetual mourning for the day before.

  “Don’t go, Mullins! I’ve another job for you,” said Eugene Thrush. “Take the telephone directory and the London directory, and sit you down at my desk. Look up ‘chemists’ under ‘trades’; there are pages of them. Work through the list with the telephone directory, and ring up every chemist who’s on the telephone, beginning with the ones nearest in, to ask if he keeps d’Auvergne Cigarettes for asthma. Make a note of the first few who do; go round to them all in turn, and be back here at nine with a box from each. Complain to each of the difficulty of getting ‘em elsewhere — say you wonder there’s so little demand — and with any luck you should find out whether and to whom they’ve sold any since Wednesday evening.”

  “But surely that’s the whole point?” suggested the ironmaster.

  “It’s the next point,” said Thrush. “The first is to divide the chemists of London into the Animals who keep the cigarettes and the Vegetables who don’t. I should really like to play the next round myself,
but Mullins must do something while we’re out.”

  “While we’re out, Mr. Thrush?”

  “My dear Mr. Upton, you’re going to step across into the Cafe Royal with me, and have a square meal before you crack up!”

  “And what about your theatre?” asked Mr. Upton, to whom resistance was a physical impossibility, when they had left the sombre Mullins entrenched behind telephone and directories.

  “The theatre! I was only going out of curiosity to see the sort of tripe that any manager has the nerve to serve up on a Friday in June; but I’m not going to chuck the drama that’s come to me!”

  The ironmaster dined with his head in a whirl. It was a remarkably good dinner that Thrush ordered, if as inappropriate to the occasion as to his own weight. His guest, however, knew no more what he was eating or drinking than he knew the names of the people in diamonds and white waistcoats who stared at the distraught figure in the country clothes. It even escaped his observation that the obese Thrush was an unblushing gourmet with a cynical lust for Burgundy. The conscious repast of Mr. Upton consisted entirely of the conversation of Eugene Thrush, and of that conversation only such portions as exploited his professional theories, and those theories only as bearing on the case in hand. He was merely bored when Thrush tried to distract him with some account of the murder in which he himself was only interested because his myrmidon happened to have discovered the body. What was the murder of some ragamuffin in Hyde Park to a man from the country who had lost his son?

  “I don’t see how your theory can work there,” he sighed, out of pure politeness, when Thrush paused to punish the wine.

  “It should work all right,” returned Thrush. “You take an absolutely worthless life; what do you do it for? It must be one of two motives: either you have a grudge against the fellow or his existence is a menace to you. Revenge or fear; he wants your money, or he’s taken your wife! But what revenge can there be upon a poor devil without the price of a bed on his indescribable person? He hasn’t anything to bless himself with, and he makes it a bit too hot for somebody who has, eh? So you whittle it down. And then perhaps by sheer luck you run your blade into the root of the matter.”