MR. EUGENE THRUSH
The remarkable Mr. Thrush was a duly qualified solicitor, who had never
been the man for that orderly and circumscribed profession. The tide of
events which had turned his talents into their present channel, was
known to but few of his many boon companions, and much nonsense was
talked about him and his first career. It was not the case (as anybody
might have ascertained) that he had been struck off the rolls in
connection with the first great scandal in which he was professionally
concerned. Nor was there much more truth in the report that he drank,
in the ordinary interpretation of the term.
It is true, however, that Mr. Thrush had a tall tumbler on his
dressing-table, to help him shave for the evening of that fateful
Friday. He was dressing for an early dinner before a first night. His
dressing-room, in which he also slept in Spartan simplicity, was the
original powder-closet of the panelled library out of which it led.
There was a third room in which his man Mullins prepared breakfast and
spent the day. But the whole was a glorified garret, at the top of such
stairs as might have sent a nervous client back for an escort.
Mullins, with the expression of an undertaker’s mute (a calling he had
followed in his day), was laying out his master’s clothes as mournfully
as though his master were in them, instead of chatting genially as he
shaved.
“I’m sorry to have missed your evidence, Mullins, but if we go into
this case it’s no use letting the police smell the competitive rat too
soon. Inquests are not in my line, and they’d have wondered what the
devil I was doing there, especially as you refrained from saying you
were in my service.”
“I had no call, sir.”
“Quite right, Mullins! An ideal witness, I can see you were. So you’d
only to describe the finding of the body?”
“That was all, sir.”
“And your description was really largely founded on fact?”
Mullins stood like a funereal grenadier at his gentleman’s shaving
elbow. “I told the truth, sir, and nothing but the truth,” said he,
with sombre dignity.
“But not the whole truth, eh, Mullins! What about the little souvenirs
you showed me yesterday?”
“There was no call to name them either, sir. The cheroot-end I must
have picked up a hundred yards away, and even the medicine-cork wasn’t
on the actual scene of the murder.”
“That’s all right, Mullins. I don’t see what they could possibly have
to do with it, myself; and really, but for the fluke of your being the
one to find the body, and picking the first-fruits for what they’re
worth, it’s the last kind of case that I should dream of touching with
a ten-foot pole. By the way, I suppose they won’t require you at the
adjourned inquest?”
“They may not require me, sir, but I should like to attend, if quite
convenient,” replied Mullins deferentially. “The police were very
stingy with their evidence to-day; they’ve still to produce the fatal
bullet, and I should like a sight of that, sir.”
Mr. Thrush did not continue the conversation, possibly because he took
as little real interest as he professed in the case which was being
thrust upon him, but more obviously owing to the necessary care in
shaving the corners of a delightfuly long and mobile mouth. Indeed, the
whole face emerging from the lather, as a cast from its clay, would
have delighted any eye but its own. It was fat and flabby as the rest
of Eugene Thrush; there was quite a collection of chins to shave; and
yet anybody but himself must have recognised the invincible freshness
of complexion, the happy penetration of every glance, as an earnest of
inexhaustible possibilities beneath the burden of the flesh. Great
round spectacles, through which he stared like a wise fish in an
aquarium, were caught precariously on a button of a nose which in
itself might have prevented the superficial observer from taking him
any more seriously than he took himself.
Mr. Upton, who arrived before Thrush was visible, was an essentially
superficial and antipathetic observer of unfamiliar types; and being
badly impressed by the forbidding staircase, he had determined on the
landing to sound his man before trusting him. In the rank undergrowth
of his prejudices there was no more luxuriant weed than an innate
abhorrence of London and all Londoners, which neither the cause of his
visit nor the murky mien of Mullins was calculated to abate. The
library of books in solid bindings, many of them legal tomes, was the
first reassuring feature; another was the large desk, made
business-like with pigeon-holes and a telephone; but Mr. Upton was only
beginning to recover confidence when Eugene Thrush shook it sadly at
his first entry.
It might have been by his face, or his fat, or his evening clothes seen
from the motorist’s dusty tweeds, almost as much as by the misplaced
joviality with which Thrush exclaimed: “I’m sorry to have kept you
waiting, sir, and the worst of it is that I can’t let you keep me!”
This touched a raw nerve in the ironmaster, as the kind of reception
one had to come up to London to incur. “Then I’ll clear out!” said he,
and would have been as good as his word but for its instantaneous
effect.
Thrush had pulled out a gold watch after a stare of kindly
consternation.
“I really am rather rushed,” said he; “but I can give you four minutes,
if that’s any good to you.”
Now, at first sight, before a word was spoken, Mr. Upton would have
said four hours or four days of that boiled salmon in spectacles would
have been no good to him; but the precise term of minutes, together
with a seemlier but not less decisive manner, had already quickened the
business man’s respect for another whose time was valuable. This is by
no means to say that Thrush had won him over in a breath. But the
following interchange took place rapidly.
“I understand you’re a detective, Mr. Thrush?”
“Hardly that, Mr.——I’ve left your card in the other room.”
“Upton is my name, sir.”
“I don’t aspire to the official designation, Mr. Upton, an inquiry
agent is all I presume to call myself.”
“But you do inquire into mysteries?”
“I’ve dabbled in them.”
“As an amateur?”
“A paid amateur, I fear.”
“I come on a serious matter, Mr. Thrush—a very serious matter to me!”
“Pardon me if I seem anything else for a moment; as it happens, you
catch me dabbling, or rather meddling, in a serious case which is none
of my business, but strictly a matter for the police, only it happens
to have come my way by a fluke. I am not a policeman, but a private
inquisitor. If you want anything or anybody ferreted out, that’s my job
and I should put it first.”
“Mr. Thrush, that’s exactly what I do want, if only you can do it for
me! I had reason to fear, from what I heard this morning, that my
youngest child, a boy of sixteen, had disappeared up here in London, or
been decoyed away. And now there can be no doubt about it!”
So, in about one of the allotted minutes, Thrush was trusted on grounds
which Mr. Upton could not easily have explained; but the time was up
before he had concluded a briefly circumstantial report of the facts
within his knowledge.
“When can I see you again?” he asked abruptly of Thrush.
“When? What do you mean, Mr. Upton?”
“The four minutes must be more than up.”
“Go on, my dear sir, and don’t throw good time after bad. I’m only
dining with a man at his club. He can wait.”
“Thank you, Mr. Thrush.”
“More good time! How do you know the boy hasn’t turned up at school or
at home while you’ve been fizzing in a cloud of dust?”
“I was to have a wire at the hotel I always stop at; there’s nothing
there; but the first thing they told me was that my boy had been for a
bed which they couldn’t give him the night before last. I did let them
have it! But it seems the manager was out, and his understrappers had
recommended other hotels; they’ve just been telephoning to them all in
turn, but at every one the poor boy seems to have fared the same. Then
I’ve been in communication with these infernal people in St. John’s
Wood, and with the doctor, but none of them have heard anything. I
thought I’d like to do what I could before coming to you, Mr. Thrush,
but that’s all I’ve done or know how to do. Something must have
happened!”
“It begins to sound like it,” said Thrush gravely.
“But there are happenings and happenings; it may be only a minor
accident. One moment!”
And he returned to the powder-closet of its modish day, where Mullins
was still pursuing his ostensibly menial avocation. What the master
said was inaudible in the library, but the man hurried out in front of
him, and was heard clattering down the evil stairs next minute.
“In less than an hour,” explained Thrush, “he will be back with a list
of the admissions at the principal hospitals for the last forty-eight
hours. I don’t say there’s much in it; your boy had probably some
letter or other means of easier indentification about him; but it’s
worth trying.”
“It is, indeed!” murmured Mr. Upton, much impressed.
“And while he is trying it,” exclaimed Eugene Thrush, lighting up as
with a really great idea, “you’ll greatly oblige me by having a
whisky-and-soda in the first place.”
“No, thank you! I haven’t had a bite all day. It would fly to my head.”
“But that’s its job; that’s where it’s meant to fly,” explained the
convivial Mr. Thrush, preparing the potion with practised hand. Baited
with a biscuit it was eventually swallowed, and a flagging giant
refreshed by his surrender. It made him like his new acquaintance too
well to bear the thought of detaining him any more.
“Go to your dinner, man, and let me waylay you later!”
“Thank you, I prefer to keep you now I’ve got you, Mr. Upton! My man
begins his round by going to tell my pal I can’t dine with him at all.
Not a word, I beg! I’ll have a bite with you instead when Mullins gets
back, and in a taxi that won’t be long.”
“But do you think you can do anything?”
The question floated in pathetic evidence on a flood of inarticulate
thanks.
“If you give me time, I hope so,” was the measured answer. “But the
needle in the hay is nothing to the lost unit in London, and it will
take time. I’m not a magazine detective, Mr. Upton; if you want a
sixpenny solution for soft problems, don’t come to me!”
At an earlier stage the ironmaster would have raised his voice and
repeated that this was a serious matter; even now he looked rather
reproachfully at Eugene Thrush, who came back to business on the spot.
“I haven’t asked you for a description of the boy, Mr. Upton, because
it’s not much good if we’ve got to keep the matter to ourselves. But is
there anything distinctive about him besides the asthma?”
“Nothing; he was never an athlete, like my other boys.”
“Come! I call that a distinction in itself,” said Mr. Thrush, smiling
down his own unathletic waistcoat. “But as a matter of fact, nothing
could be better than the very complaint which no doubt unfits him for
games.”
“Nothing better, do you say?”
“Emphatically, from my point of view. It’s harder to hide a man’s
asthma than to hide the man himself.”
“I never thought of that.”
It was impossible to tell whether Thrush had thought of it before that
moment. The round glasses were levelled at Mr. Upton with an
inscrutable stare of the marine eyes behind them.
“I suppose it has never affected his heart?” he inquired nonchalantly;
but the nonchalance was a thought too deliberate for paternal
perceptions quickened as were those of Mr. Upton.
“Is that why you sent round the hospitals, Mr. Thrush?”
“It was one reason, but honestly not the chief.”
“I certainly never thought of his heart!”
“Nor do I think you need now, in the case of so young a boy,” said
Thrush earnestly. “On the other hand, I shouldn’t be surprised if his
asthma were to prove his best friend.”
“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?”
“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 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 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.”
“While we’re out, Mr. Thrush?”
“My dear Mr. Upton, you’re going to step across into the Café 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 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.
“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, 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 wild conclusions
on the strength of one. He asked whether the boy was very fond of
shooting in the holidays, as though that might have accounted for the
dream, but his father was not aware that he had ever smelt powder in
his life. He little dreamt what Thrush was driving at! The tone of
subsequent inquiries concerning Mrs. Upton’s health (already mentioned
as the great reason for keeping the affair as long as possible a
secret) sounded purely compassionate to an ear unconsciously aching for
compassion.
“Then that accounts for it,” said Thrush, when he had heard the whole
sad story. There was the faintest ring of disappointment in his tone.
“What do you mean?”
“That anybody as ill as that, more particularly a lady, is naturally
fanciful, I’m afraid.”
“Then you think it a mere delusion, after all?”
“My dear Mr. Upton, it would be presumption to express an opinion
either way. I only say, don’t think too much about that dream. And
since you won’t keep me company in my cups, we may as well rejoin the
faithful Mullins.”
They ran into Mullins, as it happened, in Glasshouse Street, and Mr.
Upton for one would not have recognised him as the same being. His
sepulchral face was alight with news—it was the transformation of the
undertaker’s mute into the wedding guest. And yet he had only one box
of the d’Auvergne Cigarettes to show for his evening’s work, and that
chemist had declared it was the first he had sold for weeks.
Thrush ordered his man upstairs, and took his late guest’s hand as soon
as ever he dared.
“You need a good night’s rest, my dear sir, and it’s no use climbing to
my masthead for nothing. Mullins and I will do best if you don’t mind
leaving us to ourselves for the night; but first thing tomorrow morning
I shall be at your service again, and I hope there will be some
progress to report.”
Mullins was waiting for him with all the lights on, his solemn face
still more strikingly illuminated.
“Look at this, sir, look at this! These are the d’Auvergne Cigarettes!”
“So I perceive.”
“This stump is the stump of a d’Auvergne Cigarette.”
“I hope you enjoyed it, Mullins.”
“I didn’t smoke it, sir!”
“Who did?”
“That’s for you to say, sir; but it’s one of the little things I
collected near the scene of the murder, but took for a common cheroot,
yesterday morning in Hyde Park.”
“Near the actual place?”
Thrush had pounced upon the stump, and was holding it under the
strongest of the electric lamps.
“Under a seat, sir, not above a hundred yards away!”