AFTER THE FAIR
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!”
“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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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.