The Camera Fiend, E. W. Hornung [important of reading books txt] 📗
- Author: E. W. Hornung
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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 seat, 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 [pg 277] 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 hi 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 [pg 278] 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.
[pg 279]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!”
[pg 280]“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 [pg 281] 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, [pg 282] 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
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