Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “But that’s absurd!” cried Mr. Upton bluntly. “I’m not going to leave a young girl like you alone in the day of battle, murder and sudden death! You needn’t necessarily come with us, as long as you don’t stay here. Have you no other relatives in London?”

  “None anywhere that I know much about.”

  “That doesn’t matter. It’s time they knew more about you. I’ll hunt them up in the motor, if they’re anywhere within a hundred miles, but you simply must let me take their place meanwhile.”

  He was a masterful man enough; it did not require the schoolboy’s added supplications to bring about an eventual compromise. The idea had indeed been Pocket’s originally, but his father had taken it up more warmly than he could have hoped. It was decided that they should return to their hotel without Phillida, but to send the car back for her later in the morning, as it would take her some time to pack her things and leave the deserted house in some semblance of order.

  But her packing was a very small matter, and she left it to the end; most of the time at her disposal was spent in a hurried investigation of the dead man’s effects, more especially of his store of negatives in the dark-room. The only incriminating plates, however, were the one she had already seen on its discovery by Pocket the day before and another of a man lying in a heap in the middle of a road. This one had been put to dry openly in the rack, the wood of which was still moist from the process. Phillida only held it up to the light an instant, and then not only smashed both these negatives, but poured boiling water on the films and floated them down the sink. The bits of glass she put in the dust-bin with those of the broken lamp, and had hardly done so when the first policeman arrived to report the fatality. He was succeeded by a very superior officer, who gained admittance and asked a number of questions concerning the deceased, but in a perfunctory manner that suggested few if any expectations from the replies. Neither functionary made any secret of his assumption that the latest murder was but another of the perfectly random series which had already thrilled the town, but on which no light was likely to be shed by the antecedents of the murdered men. A third official came to announce that the inquest was to be opened without delay, at two o’clock that afternoon, and to request Phillida to accompany him to the mortuary for the formal identification of the deceased.

  That was a dread ordeal, and yet she expected a worse. She had steeled herself to look upon a debased image of the familiar face, and she found it startlingly ennobled and refined. Death had taken away nothing here, save the furrows of age and the fires of madness, and it had given back the look of fine courage and of sane integrity which the girl was just old enough to associate with the dead man’s prime. She was thankful to have seen him like this for the last time. She wished that all the world could see him as he was, so noble and so calm, for then nobody would ever suspect that which she herself would find it easier to disbelieve from this hour.

  “You do identify him, I suppose, miss?” the officer whispered, impressed by her strange stare.

  “Oh, yes!” said Phillida. “But he looks as I have not seen him look for years. There are worse things than death!”

  She said the same thing to Mr. Upton at luncheon in his private sitting-room at the hotel, whereupon he again assured her that he had no desire to know a dead man’s secrets. He had found his boy; that was quite enough for him, and he was able to deliver himself the more freely on the subject since Pocket was not at table, but in bed making up for lost sleep. Not only had he succeeded in finding his son, but he had found him without the aid of police or press, and so not more than a dozen people in the world knew that he had ever disappeared. Mr. Upton explained why he had deemed it essential to keep the matter from his wife’s ears, and added almost equally good reasons for continuing to hush it up on the boy’s account if only it were possible to do so; but would it be possible to Phillida to exclude from her evidence at the inquest all mention of so recent a visitor at her uncle’s house? Phillida promised to do her best, and it proved not only possible but easy. She was questioned as to the habits of the deceased so far as they explained his presence on the Embankment at such a very early hour, but that was all. Asked if she knew of a single person who could conceivably have borne such a grudge against Dr. Baumgartner as to wish to take his life, the witness answered in the negative, and the coroner bowed as much as to say that of course they all knew the character of the murder, but he had put the question for form’s sake. The only one which caused her a moment’s hesitation arose from a previous answer, which connected the doctor’s early ramblings with his hobby of instantaneous photography. Had he his camera with him that morning? Phillida thought so. Why? Well, he always did take it out, and it certainly was not in the house. Mr. Upton wiped his forehead, for he knew that his boy’s name had been on the tip of the witness’s tongue. And there was a sensation in court as well; for here at last was a bone for the detectives, who obtained a minute description of the missing camera, but grumbled openly that they had not heard of it before.

  “They never told me they hadn’t got it,” explained Phillida to the coroner, who made her his courteous bow, and permitted her to leave the court on the conclusion of her evidence.

  On the stairs Mr. Upton paid her compliments that made her wince as much as the crude grip of his hand; but he was tact itself compared with his friend Mr. Thrush, who sought an interview in order to ply the poor girl there and then with far more searching questions than she had been required to answer upon oath. She could only look at Mr. Upton in a way that secured his peppery intervention in a moment. The two men had scarcely seen each other since the morning, and the ironmaster thought they had enough to say to each other without bothering Miss Platts just then; they accordingly adjourned to Glasshouse Street, and Phillida was to have gone on to the hotel; but she made them drop her at a shop near Sloane Square on the pretext of seeing about her mourning.

  Phillida had promised to drive straight back to Trafalgar Square and order tea for herself if Tony had not appeared; but she did not drive straight back. She had a curious desire to see the place where the murder had been committed. It had come upon her at the inquest, while listening to the constable who had found the body, her predecessor in the witness-box. She had failed to follow his evidence. He had described that portion of his beat which had brought him almost on the scene of the murder, almost at the moment of its commission. It included only the short section of Cheyne Walk between Oakley Street and Cheyne Row. The houses at this point are divided from the Embankment by the narrow garden which contains the Carlyle statue. He had turned up Cheyne Row, at the back of the statue, but before turning he had noticed a man on the seat facing the river on the far side of the garden. The man was sitting down, but he was said to have turned round and watched the policeman as he passed along Cheyne Walk. There might have been a second man lying on that seat, or crouching on the flags between the seat and the parapet, but he would have been invisible from the beat. Not another creature was in sight anywhere. Yet the policeman swore that he had not proceeded a dozen yards up Cheyne Row before the shot was fired. He had turned round actually in time to see the puff of smoke dispersing over the parapet. It was all he saw. He had found the deceased lying in a heap, nearer the seat than the parapet, but between the two. Not another soul did he see, or had he seen. And he had not neglected to look over the parapet into the river, and along the foreshore in both directions, without discovering sign or trace of human being.

  Such was the story which Phillida found so hard to credit that she proceeded to the spot in order to go over the ground for her own satisfaction. This did not make it easier to understand. It had come on to rain heavily while she was in the shop; the shining Embankment was again practically deserted, and she was able to carry out her experiment without exciting observation. She took a dozen steps up Cheyne Row, pretended she heard the shot, turned sharp round, and quite realised that from where she was the body could not have been seen, hidden as it must have been by the sea
t, which itself was almost hidden by the long and narrow island of enclosed garden. But a running man could have been seen through the garden, even if he stooped as he ran, and the murderer must have run like the wind to get away as he had done. The gates through the garden, back and front of the statue, had not been opened for the day when the murder took place, so Phillida in her turn made a half-circuit of the island to get to the spot where the body had been found, but without taking her eyes off the spot until she reached it. No! It was as she had thought all along; by nothing short of a miracle could the assassin have escaped observation if the policeman had eyes in his head and had acted as he swore he had done. He might have dashed into the garden, when the policeman was at his furthest point distant, if the gates had been open as they were now; but they had been locked, and he could not have scaled them unobserved. Neither would it have been possible to take a header into the river with the foreshore as described by the same witness. Yet the murderer had either done one of these things, or the flags of the Embankment had opened and swallowed him.

  The girl stood on the very spot where the murdered man must have fallen, and in her utter perplexity it was no longer the tragedy but the problem which engrossed her mind. What had happened, had happened; but how could it have happened? She raised her umbrella and peered through the rain at a red pile of many-windowed flats; had that Argus of the hundred eyes been sleeping without one of them open at the time? Her own eyes fell as far as the black statue in the narrow garden, standing out in the rain, like the greenery about its granite base, as though the blackened bronze were polished marble. How lifelike the colossal scholar in his homely garb! How scornful and how shrewd the fixed eternal gaze across his own old Father Thames! It assumed another character as the girl gazed in her turn, she seemed to intercept that stony stare, to distract it from the river to herself, and to her fevered fancy the grim lips smiled contemptuously on her and her quandary. He knew — he knew — those grim old eyes had seen it all, and still they stared and smiled as much as to say: “You are looking the wrong way! Look where I am looking; that way lies the truth you are poor fool enough to want to know!”

  And Phillida turned her back towards the shiny statue, and looked over the wet parapet, almost expecting to see something, but never dreaming of what she actually saw. The tide, which must have been coming in that early morning, was now going out, and between the Embankment masonry and the river there was again a draggled ribbon of shelving foreshore, black as on some volcanic coast; and between land and water, at a point that would necessarily have been submerged for the last eight or nine hours, a small object was being laid more bare by every receding wavelet. It was black and square, perhaps the size of two large cigar-boxes side by side; and it had one long, thin, reddish tentacle, finishing in a bulb that moved about gently in the rain-pocked water.

  Phillida felt the parapet strike cold and wet through her rain-coat sleeves as she leant far over to make doubly sure what she object was; but indeed she had not a moment’s doubt but that it was the missing camera of the murdered man.

  AFTER THE FAIR

  Mr. Upton was dumfoundered when the top-floor door in Glasshouse Street was opened before Eugene Thrush could insert his key; for it was the sombre Mullins who admitted the gentleman as though nothing had happened to him except a fairly recent shave.

  “I thought he was in prison?” exclaimed the ironmaster when the two were closeted.

  “Do you ever read your paper?”

  “I haven’t looked at one since Plymouth.”

  “Well, I howked him out first thing yesterday morning.”

  “You did, Thrush?”

  “Why not? I had need of the fellow, and that part of the game was up.”

  Mr. Upton showed symptoms of his old irritability under the Thrush mannerism.

  “My good fellow, I wish to goodness you’d explain yourself!”

  “If I cared to be profane,” returned Thrush, mixing drinks in the corner, “I should refer you to the first chapter of the Book of Job. I provided the prisoner, and I’d a perfect right to take him away again. Blessed be the song of the Thrush!”

  “You say you provided him?”

  “In other words, I laid the information against my own man, but only with his own consent.”

  “Well, well, you must have your joke, I suppose. I can afford to put up with it now.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a joke,” returned Thrush, and drank deep while his client sipped. “If it had come off it would have been the coup of my career; as it didn’t — quite — one must laugh it off at one’s own expense. Your son has told you what that poor old sinner made him think he’d done?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would it surprise you to hear that one or two others thought the same thing?”

  “Not you, Thrush?”

  “Not I to quite the same positive extent as my rascal Mullins. He jumped to it from scratch!”

  “He connected Tony with the Park murder?”

  “From the word ‘go.’ ”

  “On the strength of an asthma cigarette and my poor wife’s dream?”

  “No; he didn’t know about the dream. But he refused to believe in two independent mysteries at one time and on one spot. The eternal unities was too many measles for Mullins, though he never heard tell of ‘em in his life.”

  Mr. Upton was no longer irritated by the other’s flippancy. He looked at Thrush with a shining face.

  “And you never told me what was in your minds!”

  “It was poison even in mine; it would have been deadly poison to you, in the state you were in. I say! I’ll wear batting-gloves the next time we shake hands!” and Thrush blew softly on his mangled fingers.

  “You believed he’d done it, and you kept it to yourself,” murmured Mr. Upton, still much impressed. “Tell me, my dear fellow — did you believe it after that interview with Baumgartner in his house?”

  Thrush emptied his glass at once.

  “Don’t remind me of that interview, Mr. Upton; there was the lad on the other side of so much lath-and-plaster, and I couldn’t scent him through it! But he never made a sound, confound him!”

  “Tony’s told me about that; they were whispering, for reasons of their own.”

  “I ought to have seen that old man listening! His ears must have grown before my purblind eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily interesting and circumstantial effort. And to come back to your question, it did fit in with the theory of a fatal accident on your boy’s part; he was frightened to show his face at school after sleeping in the Park, let alone what he was supposed to have done there; and that, he believed, would break his mother’s heart in any case.”

  “By Jove, and so it might! It wouldn’t take much just now,” said Mr. Upton, sadly.

  “So he thought of the ship you wouldn’t let him go out in — and the whole thing fitted in! Of course he had told the old ruffian — saving his presence elsewhere — all about the forbidden voyage; and that gentleman of genius had it ready for immediate use. I’m bound to say he used it on me with excellent effect.”

  “Same here,” said the ironmaster— “though I’d no idea what you suspected. I thought it a conceivable way out of any bad scrape, for that particular boy.”

  “It imposed upon us all,” said Thrush, “but one. I was prepared to believe it if you did, and you believed it because you didn’t know your boy as well as you do now. But Miss Upton, who seems to know him better than anybody else — do you remember how she wouldn’t hear of it for a moment?”

  “I do so, God bless her!”

  “That shook me, or rather it prevented me from accepting what I never had quite accepted in my heart. That’s another story, and you’re only in the mood for one at present; but after seeing Baumgartner on Saturday, I thought I’d like to know a little more about him, not from outsiders but from the inside of his own skull. So I went to the British Museum to have a look at his books. It was after hours for getting books, but I ma
de such representations that they cut their red tape for once; and I soon read enough to wonder whether my grave and reverend seignior was quite all there. Spiritualism one knows, but here was spiritualism with a difference; psychic photography one had heard about, but here was a psychical photographer gone mad or bad! When a gifted creature puts into admirable English his longing to snap-shoot the souls of murderers coming up through the drop, like the clown at Drury Lane, you begin to want him elected to a fauteuil in Broadmoor. Will you believe me when I tell you that I stumbled mentally on the very thing I shall presently prove to have been the truth, and that I dismissed it from my mind as the wildest impossibility?”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to prove it now,” remarked Mr. Upton, who hoped there would be no such proof, for the sake of the girl who had been good to his boy; but that was a private consideration which there was no necessity to express.

  “I shall want another chat with your lad when he’s had his sleep out,” replied Thrush, significantly; “he’s told me quite enough to make me eager for more. But you haven’t told me anything about your own adventures?”

  And he got another drink to help him listen; for as a rule the ironmaster was only succinct when thoroughly irate. But now for once he was both brief and amiable.

  “What have I to tell compared with you?” he asked. “Those damned old wooden walls only cleared the Thames on Sunday morning, and they weren’t near Plymouth when I left last night; but my little aluminium lot broke all her records before I broke one of her wheels. What I want to know is what you did from the time I left on Sunday night to that great moment this morning.”