The Camera Fiend, E. W. Hornung [important of reading books txt] 📗

earnestly. “On the other hand, I shouldn't be surprised if his asthma were to prove his best friend.”[pg 115]

“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?”

[pg 116]

“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 [pg 117] 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 [pg 118] 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.”

[pg 119]

“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 [pg 120] 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.”

Thrush gave up trying to take the other out of himself, since his boldest statements were allowed to pass unchallenged, unless they dealt with the one subject on the poor man's mind. The cessation of his voice, however, caused a twinge of conscience in the bad listener; he made a mental grab at the last phrase, and was astonished to find it germane to his own thoughts.

[pg 121]

“That's the second time you've mentioned luck, Mr. Thrush!”

“When was the first?”

“You spoke of Friday as an unlucky day, as God knows this one is to me! Are you of a superstitious turn of mind?”

“Not seriously.”

“You don't believe in dreams, for example?”

“That's another question,” said Thrush, his spectacles twinkling to colossal rubies as he sipped his Santenay. “Why do you ask?”

“If you're a disbeliever it's no use my telling you.”

“Perhaps I'm neither one thing nor the other.”

“Have you ever known a mystery solved through a dream?”

“I've heard of one,” said Thrush, with a significant stress upon the verb; “that's the famous old murder in the Red Barn a hundred years ago. The victim's mother dreamed three nights running that her missing daughter was buried in the Red Barn, and there she was all the time. There may have been other cases.”

“Cases in which a parent has dreamt of an absent child, at the very time at which something terrible has happened to that child?”

“Any amount of those.”

The father's voice had trembled with the question. Thrush put down his glass as he gave his answer, [pg 122] and his spectacled eyes fixed themselves in a more attentive stare.

“Do you think they're all coincidences?” demanded Mr. Upton hoarsely.

“Some of them may be, but certainly not all,” was the reply. “That would be the greatest coincidence of the lot!”

“I hardly like to tell you why I ask,” said Mr. Upton, much agitated; for he could be as emotional as most irascible men.

“You've been dreaming about the boy?”

“Not I; but my poor wife has; that was one reason why I daren't tell her he had disappeared.”

“Why? What was the dream?”

“That she saw him—and heard a shot.”

“A shot!”

Thrush looked as though he had heard one himself, but only until he had time to think.

“She says she did hear one,” added Mr. Upton, “and that she wasn't dreaming at all.”

“But when was this?”

“Between six and seven yesterday morning.” This time Thrush did not move a muscle of his face; it only lit up like a Chinese lantern, and again he was quick to quench the inner flame; but now the coincidence was complete. Coincidences, however, had nothing to say to the A. V. M. system, neither was Eugene Thrush the man to jump to [pg 123] wild conclusions on the strength of one. He asked whether the boy