WHAT THE THAMES GAVE UP
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
“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 had not appeared; but she did not drive
straight back. She had a curious desire to see the place where the
murder had been committed. It had come upon her at the inquest, while
listening to the constable who had found the body, her predecessor in
the witness-box. She had failed to follow his evidence. He had
described that portion of his beat which had brought him almost on the
scene of the murder, almost at the moment of its commission. It
included only the short section of Cheyne Walk between Oakley Street
and Cheyne Row. The houses at this point are divided from the
Embankment by the narrow garden which contains the Carlyle statue. He
had turned up Cheyne Row, at the back of the statue, but before turning
he had noticed a man on the seat facing the river on the far side of
the garden. The man was sitting down, but he was said to have turned
round and watched the policeman as he passed along Cheyne Walk. There
might have been a second man lying on that seat, or crouching on the
flags between the seat and the parapet, but he would have been
invisible from the beat. Not another creature was in sight anywhere.
Yet the policeman swore that he had not proceeded a dozen yards up
Cheyne Row before the shot was fired. He had turned round actually in
time to see the puff of smoke dispersing over the parapet. It was all
he saw. He had found the deceased lying in a heap, nearer the seat than
the parapet, but between the two. Not another soul did he see, or had
he seen. And he had not neglected to look over the parapet into the
river, and along the foreshore in both directions, without discovering
sign or trace of human being.
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 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 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.