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

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 [pg 283] 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 made 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 [pg 284] 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.”

“I sat down to watch Baumgartner, his house,” replied Thrush. “The merit of those quiet little streets is that there are always apartments of sorts, though not always the most admirable sort, to be had in half the houses. There was quite a choice bang opposite Baumgartner's, and I'd taken a front room before you were through Hammersmith. Of course I explained that I had lost a last train, and the landlady's son embarrassed me with pyjamas of inadequate dimensions. Well, I sat at the front window all night, for no better reasons than my strong feeling about the doctor's writings, and your daughter's disbelief in his yarn about her brother. Soon after five in the morning the old bird came out, [pg 285] and I was after him like knife. I tracked him to Knightsbridge without much difficulty, excepting the one of avoiding being spotted, but there that happened by the merest accident. He was passing under the scaffolding outside the church they're pulling down there, and he's so tall he knocked his hat off. I admit I was too close. He saw, and must have recognised me; but I shouldn't have recognised him if I hadn't seen him start out. He was wearing a false beard and spectacles!”

“That's proof positive,” said ingenuous Mr. Upton, under his breath.

“Well, I confess it's something like it in this case; but it was a very awkward moment for me. I hadn't to let him see I knew him, nor yet that I was following him, and the only way was to abandon the chase as openly as possible. It was then I decided that it was no use leaving poor old Mullins in pawn to the police. I redeemed him without delay. We went back to my new rooms together, which I needn't tell you I liked so much that I brought a suit-case and took them for a week. Of course, as we had lost the run of Baumgartner, the next best thing was to watch for his return. Mullins took that on while I got some sleep; when I awoke the Park Lane murder was the latest, and I won't say I didn't suspect who'd done it. Perhaps I didn't tell you he had his camera with him as [pg 286] well as beard and goggles, and all three figured in the first reports.”

“But all this time you had no idea my boy was in the house?”

“None whatever; we saw the girl once or twice, but that was all until I wired last night. What I never saw myself was Baumgartner's return; but in the afternoon I sent Mullins round to another road to try and get a room overlooking the place from the back. Well, the houses were too much class for that; but one was empty, and he got the key and risked going back to prison for the cause! Suffice it that he set eyes on both man and boy before I sent that wire.”

“And you left my son in that murderer's clutches a minute longer than you could help?” It was a previous incarnation of Pocket's father that broke in with this.

“You must remember in the first place that I couldn't be in the least sure it was your son; in the second, if murder had been intended, murder would have been done with as little delay in his case as in the others; thirdly, that we've nothing to show that Dr. Baumgartner is an actual murderer at all, but, fourthly, that to raid his place was the way to make him one. Poor Mullins, too, as the original Sherlock of the show, was desperately against calling in the police under any circumstances. [pg 287] He assured me there was no sign of bad blood about the house, until the small hours, and then he saw your son make his escape. I told him he should have collared the lad, but he lost sight of him in the night and preferred to keep an eye on that poor desperate doctor.”

Thrush treated this part of his narrative with the peculiar confidence which most counsel reserve for the less satisfactory aspects of their case. But Mr. Upton was not in a mood to press a point of grievance against anybody. And the name of Mullins reminded him that his curiosity on a very different point had not been gratified.

“Why on earth did you have Mullins run in?” he inquired, with characteristic absence of finesse.

“I'm not very proud of it,” replied Thrush. “It didn't come off, you see.”

“But whatever could the object have been?”

“I must have a damn-it if I'm to tell you that,” said Thrush; and the ironmaster concluded that he meant a final drink, from the action which he suited to the oath. “It was one way that occurred to me of putting salt on the lad.”

“Tony?”

“Yes.”

“You puzzle me more and more.”

“Well, you see, I gathered that he was a particularly honourable boy, of fine sensibilities, and [pg 288] yet Mullins thought he had shot this man by accident and was lying low. I only thought that, if that were so, the news of an innocent man's arrest would bring him into the open as quick as anything. Mullins proving amenable to terms, and having really been within a hundred miles of both murders at the time they were committed, the rest was elementary. But what's the good of talking about it? It didn't come off.”

“It very nearly did! I can tell you that straight from Tony; he was going to give himself up yesterday morning, if he hadn't accidentally satisfied himself of his own innocence.”

Mr. Upton said more than this, but it was the explicit statement of fact that alone afforded Thrush real consolation. His spectacled eyes blinked keenly behind their flashing lenses; the button of a nose underneath twitched as though it scented battle once again; and the drink with the opprobrious name was suddenly put down unfinished.

“If only I could find that camera!” he cried. “It's the touchstone of the whole thing, mark my words. If it's an accomplice who did this thing, he's got it; even if not——”

He stood silenced by a sudden thought, a gleam of light that illumined his whole flushed face.

“Mullins!” he roared. Mullins was on the spot with somewhat suspicious alacrity. “Get the [pg 289] almanac, Mullins, and look up Time of High Water at London Bridge to-day!”

He himself flopped down behind the telephone to ring up the cab-office in Bolton Street. But it takes time even for a Eugene Thrush to consume all but three large whiskies and sodas; and the afternoon was already far advanced.