The Camera Fiend Part 30

AFTER THE FAIR

Mr. Upton was dumfoundered when the top-floor door in Gla.s.shouse 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 gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 sc.r.a.pe, 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,_ G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 p.a.w.n 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 cla.s.s 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."