THE FOURTH CASE
The boy and girl sat long and late in the open window at the back of
the house. The room would have been in darkness but for a flood of
moonlight pouring over them. The only light in the house was in the
room above, and they only saw its glimmer on the garden when a casual
cloud hid the moon; but once Pocket had crept out into the garden to
steal a look at the lighted window itself; and what he saw was the
shadow of a huge bent head smoking a huge bent pipe, and dense clouds
of shadow floating up the wall and over the ceiling.
It seemed hours since they had heard footstep or other sound upstairs
or anywhere. There had been a brisk interval—and then an end—of more or
less distant hansom-bells and motor-horns. There was no longer even a
certain minute intermittent trembling of trifles on the walnut-tables,
to which Pocket had become subconsciously accustomed in that house, so
that he noticed its absence more than the thing itself. It was as
though the whole town was at rest, and the tunnels under the town, and
every single soul above or below ground, but those two white faces in
the moonlight, and perhaps one other overhead.
Pocket wondered; it was so long since a single sound had come down to
their ears. He wanted to steal out and look up again. Phillida was
against it; perhaps she was wondering too. Pocket, as usual, saw what
he did see so very vividly, in his mind’s eye, that he shivered and was
asked if he felt cold. The whispered debate that followed was the
longest conversation they had that night. The window was not shut as a
result of it, but Pocket fetched his overcoat on tiptoe, and it just
went over both their shoulders, when the chairs were drawn as near
together as they would go.
The ragged little garden was brimming over with moonlight from wall to
wall. The unkempt grass looked pale and ghostly, like the skin of some
monstrous wolf. The moon rolled high in the sky and clouds flew above
and below the moon, varying in pace as well. Yet it was a still night,
and Pocket did not think that he had broken the stillness, until the
door burst open behind them, and Baumgartner stood there, holding his
lamp aloft. The wick was turned too high, the flame ran up the chimney
in the draught, and for an instant a demoniac face flared up behind it.
Then the chimney cracked, and fell in a tinkling shower, and the doctor
was seen whirling a naked tongue of fire about his head. The boy drew
back as the lamp flew through the open window, within an inch of his
nose, and crashed upon the path outside.
The trio stood without a word in the moonbeams; but the doctor was
breathing hard through his teeth, like a man wrestling with himself;
and at last he laughed sardonically as though he had won.
“A lamp like that’s a dangerous thing,” said he, with a kind of forced
solemnity and a shake of the head; “you never know what may happen when
a lamp does that! I’m glad the window was open; it didn’t go very near
my young fellow, I hope?”
And he took Pocket playfully by the ear, but pinched it so hard that
the boy could have screamed with pain.
“It would have served you right,” continued the doctor, before Pocket
could find his tongue, “for sitting up so late, and keeping a young
lady from her bed to bear you company. Come, Phillida! I shall have
another word with you, young fellow.”
The two words to the girl were in a different key from all the rest.
They were tolerant, conciliatory, tenderly persuasive. The rest was
suavely sinister; it made her hesitate; but Pocket had the presence of
mind to bid her a cheery good-night, and she went, closely followed by
Baumgartner.
Posted once more at the open door, the boy heard Baumgartner on the
next flight, soothing and affectionate still, allaying her fears; and
his own surged into his throat. He looked wildly about him, and an
idea came. He opened the front door wide, and then stole back through
the conservatory into the moonlight. He heard Baumgartner coming down
before he gained the garden. He tore to the end of it, and cowered in
the shadow of the far wall.
The doctor came running into the moonlit room, but not for a minute; it
looked as though he had run out first into the road. In the room he lit
the gas, and Pocket saw him have a look in all the corners, but hardly
the look of a seeker who expects to find. Some long moments he stood
out horribly at the open window, gazing straight at the spot where the
fugitive crouched a few inches out of the moonlight and hugged the
revolver in his pocket. He seemed to see nothing to bring him out that
way, for he closed that window and put out the gas. The trembling
watcher heard the front door shut soon after, and saw another light in
Baumgartner’s room the minute after that, and the blind drawn down. But
on the blind there lagged a cloud-capped shadow till the doctor’s pipe
was well in blast.
There were no more shadows after that. The moon moved round to the
right, and set behind the next house. The sky grew pale, and the
lighted blind paler still, until Baumgartner drew it up before putting
out his light. Pocket was now too stiff to stir; but it was not
necessary; the doctor had scarcely looked out. There was a twitter of
sparrows all down the road, garden answering to garden. The sun came up
behind Pocket’s wall, behind the taller houses further back. And
Baumgartner reappeared at his window for one instant in his cap.
The front door shut again.
Down the garden ran Pocket without the least precaution now. There was
a gravel passage between the tradesmen’s entrance, on the detached side
of the house, and the garden wall. This passage was closed by a gate,
and the gate was locked, but Pocket threw himself over it almost in his
stride and darted over into the open road.
Just then it was a perfectly empty road, but for a gaunt black figure
stalking away in the distance. An overwhelming curiosity urged the boy
to follow, but an equal dread of detection kept him cowering in
gateways, until Baumgartner took the turning past the shops without a
backward glance. Pocket promptly raced to that corner, and got another
glimpse of his leader before he vanished round the next. So the
spasmodic chase continued over a zigzag course; but at every turn the
distance between them was a little less. Neither looked round, and once
the boy’s feet were actually on the man’s shadow; for half the streets
were raked with level sunlight, but the other half were ladders of
dusk with rungs of light at the gaps between the houses. All were
dustier, dirtier, and emptier than is ever the case by night or day,
because this was neither one nor the other, though the sun was up to
make the most of dust, dirt, and emptiness. It was before even the
cleansing hour of the scavenger and the water-cart. A dead cat was
sprawling horribly in one deserted reach of wood-paving. And a
motor-car at full speed in a thoroughfare calling itself King’s Road,
which Pocket was about to cross, had at all events the excuse of a
visible mile of asphalt to itself.
Pocket drew back to let it pass, without looking twice at the car
itself, which indeed was disguised out of knowledge in the promiscuous
mire of many countries; but the red eyes behind the driver’s goggles
were not so slow. Down went his feet on clutch and brake without a
second’s interval; round spun the car in a skid that tore studs from
the tyres, and fetched her up against the kerb with a shivered wheel.
Pocket started forward with a cry; but at that moment a ponderous step
fell close behind him; his arm was seized, and he was dragged in
custody across the road.
“Your boy, I think!” cried one whom he had never seen before, and did
not now, being locked already in the motorist’s arms.
“When did you find him?” the father asked when he was man enough, still
patting Pocket’s shoulders as if he were a dog.
“Only last night when I wired.”
“And where?”
“In the house where you and I couldn’t make ourselves heard.”
The schoolboy flared up through all his emotion.
“Why, I never saw you before this minute!”
“Well, I’ve had my eye on you, more or less, for a day or two.”
“Then why didn’t you wire before?” demanded Mr. Upton, quite ready to
mask his own emotion with a little heat. “I didn’t get it till after
nine o’clock—too late for the evening train—but I wasn’t going to waste
three hours with a forty-horser eating its head off! So here I am, on
my way to the address you gave.”
“It was plumb opposite Baumgartner’s. I mounted guard there the very
night you left. He came out twenty minutes ago, and your boy after
him!”
“But what does it all mean, Thrush? What on earth were you doing there,
my dear boy?”
The notes of anger and affection were struck in ludicrously quick
succession; but the first was repeated on the boy’s hang-dog admission
that he had been hiding.
“Hiding, Tony?”
Thrush himself seemed surprised at the expression. “But at all events
we found you better employed,” he said to Pocket, “and the sooner we
all take up the chase again the more chance we shall have of laying
this rascal by the heels.”
“Take it up, then!” snapped Mr. Upton. “Jump into the motor, and bring
the brute to me when you’ve got him! I want to speak to my boy.”
He did not realise the damage done to his car, or listen to a word that
passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of
his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his
head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket
told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple
facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner’s complicity in the Hyde
Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in
Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces of the same handiwork, and
yet declared his conviction that the actual hand was not Dr.
Baumgartner’s at all.
“But why should you think he had an accomplice, Tony?”
“He was unarmed the other morning. I’m quite positive of that. And his
niece, who lives with him, has never seen a firearm of any kind in the
house.”
“Well, he’s villain enough to hang, if ever there was one! It’s time we
laid hold of him. Where’s Mr. Thrush? I thought you’d taken him on in
the car?”
This to the chauffeur, now the centre of the carrion crowd that gathers
about the body of any disabled motor. The chauffeur, a countryman like
his master, was enjoying himself vastly with a surreptitious cigarette
and sardonic mutterings on the cause of his scattered spokes; the facts
being that he had nearly fallen asleep at his wheel, which Mr. Upton
had incontinently taken into his own less experienced hands.
“The car won’t take anybody anywhere to-day,” explained the chauffeur,
with his cigarette behind his back. “I shall have to get a lorry to
take the car.” He held his head on one side suddenly. “There’s a bit o’
tyre trouble for somebody!” he cried, grimly.
Indeed, a sharp crack had come from the direction of the river, not
unlike the bursting of a heavy tyre; but Pocket Upton did not think it
was that. He caught his father’s arm, and whispered in his father’s
ear, and they plunged together into a side street broader than the
asphalt thoroughfare, but with scarcely a break in either phalanx of
drab mediocre dwellings, and not a creature stirring except themselves
and a few who followed. The hog’s back of a still more deserted bridge
arched itself at the foot of the street, its suspension cables showing
against the sky in foreshortened curves. As they ran a peculiarly
shrill whistle cut the morning air like a streak of sound.
“P’lice!” screamed one of those bringing up the rear, and they easily
spurted past father and son, each already contending with his own
infirmity. Mr. Upton was dangerously scarlet in the neck, and Pocket
panting as he had not done for days. In sad labour they drew near the
suspension bridge, to a crescendo accompaniment on the police whistle.
It was evidently being blown on the Embankment to the right of the
bridge, and already with considerable effect. As the pair were about to
pass an intermediate turning on the right, a constable flew across it
on a parallel course, and they altered theirs with one accord. Pocket
panted after the constable, and his father thundered after Pocket, into
a narrow street debouching upon a fenced strip of greenery, not too
dense to hide broad pavement and low parapet on its further side, with
a strip of brown river beyond that, and a skyline of warehouses on the
Surrey shore.
The narrow garden had not been opened for the day. There was a gate
opposite the end of the road, another gate leading out on the
Embankment opposite that. Between the two gates a grimy statue rose
upon a granite pedestal, a meditative figure clad to the heels in some
nondescript garment, and gazing across the river as he sat with a
number of discarded volumes under his chair. It was a peculiarly
lifelike monument, which Pocket would have been just the boy to
appreciate at any other time; even now it struck him for an instant,
before his attention was attracted to the group of commonplace living
people on the Embankment beyond the narrow garden. They were standing
together on the far side of one of the fixed seats. There was the
policeman who had blown the whistle, and a small but motley crew who
had answered to the call. Conspicuous units were a gentleman in
dressing-gown and pyjamas, a couple of chimneysweeps, and a labouring
cyclist on his way to work. They had formed a circle about some hidden
object on the ground; and long before the new-comers could run round
and join them, the schoolboy had steeled himself to look upon another
murdered man. He was in no hurry to look; apart from a natural dread of
death, which he had seen for the first time, and then unwittingly, only
the other morning, it was the murderer and not his victim of whom the
boy was thinking as he arrived last upon the scene. It was Dr.
Baumgartner whom he half expected to see swimming the river or hiding
among the bushes in the enclosed garden; for he was not one of the
group on the Embankment; and how else could he have made his escape?
The point was being discussed as Pocket came into earshot; all he could
see of the fallen man was the soles of his boots upright among living
legs.
“Is he dead?” he asked of one of the chimneysweeps, who was detaching
himself from the group with the air of a man who had seen the best of
the fun.
“Dead as an ’erring,” replied the sweep cheerfully. “Sooicide in the
usual stite o’ mind.”
“Rats!” said the other sweep over a sooty shoulder; “unless ’e shot
’isself first an’ swallered the shooter afterwards! Some’un’s done ’im
in.”
Pocket set his teeth, and shouldered his way into the group. His father
was already in the thick of it, talking to the stout man in spectacles,
who had risen miraculously from the ground and was busy brushing his
trouser-knees. Pocket forced himself on with much the same nutter he
had taken into the Chamber of Horrors, but with an equal determination
to look just once upon Dr. Baumgartner’s latest victim. A loud cry
escaped him when he did look; for the murdered man, and not the
murderer, was Dr. Baumgartner himself.