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

Phillida was prepared for anything when she beheld a motor-car at the gate, and the escaped schoolboy getting out with a grown man of shaggy and embarrassed aspect; but she was not prepared for the news they brought her. She was intensely shocked and shaken by it. Her grief and horror were not the less overwhelming for the shame and fear which they replaced in her mind. Yet she remained instinctively on her guard, and a passionate curiosity was the only emotion she permitted herself to express in words.

“But have they no idea who did it? Are they quite sure he didn't do it himself?”

Mr. Upton broke through his heavy embarrassment with no little relief, to dispose of the question of suicide once and for all.

“It's the one thing they are sure about,” said he. “In the first place no weapon was to be found, and we saw no sign of a camera either, though this boy tells me your uncle had his with him when he went out. That's more or less conclusive in itself. But there was a doctor on the spot before we left, and I heard him say the shot couldn't have been fired at very close quarters, and that death must have [pg 268] been instantaneous. So it's no more a suicide than the case in Park Lane yesterday or the one in Hyde Park last week; there's evidently some maniac prowling about at dawn, and shooting down the first person he sees and then vanishing into thin air as maniacs seem to have a knack of doing more effectually than sane men. But the less we jump to conclusions about him—or anybody else—the better.”

The girl was grateful for the covert sympathy of the last remark, and yet it startled her as an index of what must have passed already between father and son. It was a new humiliation that this big bluff man should know as much as the boy whom she had learnt to look upon as a comrade in calamity. Yet she could not expect it to be otherwise.

“What must you think!” she cried, and her great eyes filled and fell again. “Oh! what must you think?”

“It's no good thinking,” he rejoined, with almost a jovial kindness. “We're all three on the edge of a mystery; we must see each other through before we think. Not that I've had time to hear everything yet, but I own I can't make head or tail of what I have heard. I'm not sure that I want to. I like a man's secrets to die with him; it's enough for me to have my boy back again, and to know that you stood by him as you did. It's our turn to [pg 269] stand by you, my dear! He says it wasn't your fault he didn't come away long ago; and it shan't be mine if you stay another hour alone in this haunted house. You've got to come straight back with us to our hotel.”

They happened to be all three standing in the big back room, a haunted chamber if there was one in the house. With his battle-pictures on the walls, his tin of tobacco on the chimney-piece, and the scent of latakia rising from the carpet, the whole room remained redolent of the murdered man; and the window still open, the two chairs near it as they had been overnight, and the lamp lying in fragments on the path outside, brought the last scene back to the boy's mind in full and vivid detail. Yet the present one was in itself more desolate and depressing than any in which Dr. Baumgartner had figured. It might be that the constant menace of that portentous presence had thrown his simple middle-class surroundings, at the time, into a kind of reassuring relief. But it was the case that the morning had already clouded over; the sunshine of the other mornings was sadly missing; and Phillida looked only too eager to fly from the scene, until she declared she never could.

“But that's absurd!” cried Mr. Upton bluntly. “I'm not going to leave a young girl like you alone [pg 270] 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 [pg 271] 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 [pg 272] 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 [pg 273] 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. [pg 274]

“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