Eugene Thrush was a regular reader of the journal on which Dr. Baumgartner heaped heavy satire, its feats of compression, its genius for headlines, and the delicious expediency of all its views, which enabled its editorial column to face all ways and bow where it listed, in the universal joint of popularity, were points of irresistible appeal to a catholic and convivial sense of humour. He read the paper with his early cup of tea, and seldom without a fat internal chuckle between the sheets.
That Saturday morning, however, Mr. Thrush was not only up before the paper came, but for once he took its opinion seriously on a serious matter. It said exactly what he wished to think about the Hyde Park murder: that the murderer would prove to be the author of a similar crime, committed in the previous month of March, when the Upton boy must have been safe at school. If that were so, it was manifestly absurd to connect the lad with a mystery which merely happened to synchronise with that of his own disappearance — absurd, even if he were shown to have been somewhere near the scene of the murder, somewhere about the time of its perpetration.
That much, though no more, had, however, been fairly established overnight. It was a conclusion to which Mullins, with the facile conviction of his class, had jumped on the slender evidence of the asthma cigarette alone; but before midnight Thrush himself had been forced to admit its extreme probability. There was a medicine cork as well as an asthma cigarette; the medicine cork had been found very much nearer the body; in fact, just across the pathway, under a shrub on the other side of the fence. It was Mullins, who had made both discoveries, who also craved permission to ring up Dr. Bompas, late at night, to ask if there was any particular chemist to whom he sent his patients with their prescriptions. Dr. Bompas was not at home, which perhaps was just as well but his man gave the name of Harben, in Oxford Street. Harbens, rung up in their turn, found that they certainly had made up one of the doctor’s prescriptions on the Wednesday, for a young Mr. Upton, and, within half an hour, had positively identified the cork found by Mullins in Hyde Park. It was still sticky with the very stuff which had put poor Pocket asleep.
Yet Thrush could not or would not conceive any actual connection between a harmless schoolboy and an apparently cold-blooded crime. He resisted the idea on more grounds than he felt disposed to urge in argument with his now strangely animated factotum. It was still a wide jump to a detestable conclusion, but he confined his criticism to the width of the jump. The cork and the cigarette might be stepping-stones, but at least one more was wanted to justify the slightest suspicion against the missing boy. Let it be shown that he had carried firearms on the Wednesday night, and Thrush undertook to join his satellite on the other side; but his mental bias may be gauged from the fact that he made no mention of the boy’s mother’s dream.
Mullins found him not only up, shaved and booted, but already an enthusiastic convert to the startling theory of a sensation journalist, and consequently an irritable observer of the saturnine countenance which darkened to a tinge of distinct amusement over the leaded type.
“So you don’t think there’s much in it, Mullins?”
“I shouldn’t say there was anything at all, sir.”
“Yet I suppose you remember the very similar occurrence in Holland Walk?”
“Oh yes, sir, but it was a case of suicide.”
“I don’t agree.”
“But surely, sir, the jury brought it in suicide?”
“The coroner’s jury did — in spite of the coroner — but it may come before another jury yet, Mullins! I remember the case perfectly; the medical evidence was that the shot had been fired at arm’s length. That isn’t the range at which we usually bring ourselves down! Then there was nothing to show that the man ever possessed a pistol, or even the price of one; he was so stony it would have gone up the spout long before. The very same point crops up in the case of this poor boy. Who says he ever had a revolver in his life? His father tells me explicitly that he never had; I happened to ask the question,” added Thrush, without explaining in what connection.
“Well, sir,” said Mullins, with respect enough in his tone, “you talk about jumping to conclusions, but it strikes me the gentlemen who write for the papers could give me some yards and a licking, sir!”
This was a sprightly speech for Mullins; but it was delivered with the very faintest of deferential smiles, and Mr. Thrush shook his spectacles without one at all.
“The gentlemen on this paper have a knack of lighting on the truth, however,” he remarked; “it may be by fair means, or it may be by foul, but they have a way of getting there before the others start.”
Mullins remarked with quiet confidence that they were not going to do it this time. His position was, briefly, that he could not bring himself to believe in two separate mysteries, at one and the same time and place, with no sort of connection between them.
“That would be too much of a coincidence,” said Mullins, sententiously.
Thrush looked at him for a moment.
“But life’s one long collection of coincidences! That’s what I’m always telling you; the mistake is to look on them as anything else. Don’t you call it a bit of a coincidence that both these men should meet their death at the very hour of the morning when you’re on your way over here from Netting Hill, and in much the same degree of latitude, which you’ve got to cross somewhere or other on your way? Yet who has the nerve to say you must have gone through Holland Walk that other morning, and been mixed up in that affair because you are in this?”
“I don’t admit I’m mixed up in anything,” replied Mullins, with some warmth.
“I mean as a witness of sorts. I was merely reducing your argument to the absurd, Mullins; you didn’t take me literally, did you? It’s no use talking when we both seem to have made up our minds; but I’m always ready to unmake mine if you show me that young Mr. Upton carried a pistol, Mullins! Now I should like my breakfast, Mullins, and you must be roaring inside for yours. The man who’s been knocking up chemists all night is the man to whom breakfast is due; get your own and then mine, and after that you can tell me how you got on.”
Anything more genial than the garrulous banter of Eugene Thrush, at his best, it was impossible to encounter or incur; he had been, however, for a few minutes at his worst, and it was difficult to see why the pendulum should have swung so suddenly to the other extreme. Mullins went about his business with his usual sleek solemnity. But Thrush was yet another man the moment he was alone. His face was a sunny background for ideas, misgivings, and half-formed plans, one after the other, whirling like clouds across a crimson sky. But the sky was clear whenever Mullins was in the room. And at the breakfast-table there was not a cloud.
“To come back to those chemists, and this shop-to-shop canvassing,” resumed Thrush, as Mullins poured out his tea; “how many have you done, and how many have we still to do between us?”
Mullins produced a pocket-book that did him credit, and consulted notes as neat.
“Rung up when you were out at dinner — seventeen. Kept Cigarettes d’Auvergne — one. That was Thornycroft’s in Shaftesbury Avenue, where I’d just been when I met you down below in the street. In the night I knocked up other eight-and-twenty, all either in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square or else on the line of the Park.”
“Poor devils! I suppose you urged a pretty bad case?”
“A matter of life or death.”
“Well?”
“Three more kept them, not counting Harbens: one in Knightsbridge, one in New Bond Street, and one a little way down the Brompton Road.”
“Much demand in any of those quarters?”
“Only in the Brompton Road; a literary gentleman has a box regularly every week, and two in the autumn. Pringle, his name is.”
“I know him; so he’s as breathless as his own yarns, is he?” murmured Thrush, to his buttered egg. “But has one of these apothecaries sold a box of d’Auvergnes since Wednesday afternoon?”
“Two have,” said Mullins, “b
ut one was to Mr. Pringle.”
Thrush levelled inquiring spectacles.
“How did you worm that out, Mullins?”
“By changing my tune a bit, sir. I started asking if they knew anybody who could recommend the cigarettes from personal experience, as we were only trying them on hearsay.”
“Very smart of you, Mullins! And one wheezy novelist is the only consumer?”
“That’s right, sir, but the man in Knightsbridge sold a box on Thursday to a doctor.”
“Did you get the name?”
“Bone-Gardner, I think it was a Dr. Otto Bone-Gardner.”
“Baumgartner, I expect you mean!” cried Thrush, straightening a wry face to spell the name. “I’ve heard of an Otto Baumgartner, though I can’t say when or where. What’s his address?”
“He couldn’t tell me, sir; or else he wouldn’t. Suppose he thought I’d be turning the doctor out next. Old customer, I understood he was.”
“For d’Auvergne Cigarettes?”
“I didn’t inquire.”
“My good fellow, that’s the whole point! I’ll go myself and ask for the asthma cigarettes that Dr. Baumgartner always has; if they say he never had them before, that’ll be talking. His being a doctor looks well. But I’m certain I know his name; you might look it up in Who’s Who, and read out what they say.”
And Mullins did so with due docility, albeit with queer gulps at barbaric mouthfuls such as the list of battle-fields on which Dr. Baumgartner had fought in his martial youth; the various Universities whereat he had studied psychology and theology in an evident reaction of later life; even the titles of his subsequent publications, which contained some long English words, but were given in German too. A copious contribution concluded with the information that photography and billiards were the doctor’s recreations, and that he belonged to a polysyllabically unpronounceable Berlin club, and to one in St. James’s which Mullins more culpably miscalled the Parthenian.
“Parthenon!” said Thrush, as though he had bitten on a nerve. “But what about his address?”
“There’s no getting hold of that address,” said Mullins, demoralised and perspiring. “It’s not given here either.”
“Well, the chemist or the directory will supply that if we want it, but I’m afraid he sounds a wheezy old bird. The author of ‘Peripatetic Psychology’ deserves to have asthma all his nights, and ‘After this Life’ smacks of the usual Schopenhauer and Lager. No, we won’t build on Dr. Baumgartner, Mullins; but we’ll go through the chemists of London with a small tooth-comb, from here to the four-mile radius.”
Thrush had finished breakfast, and Mullins was beginning to clear away, when a stormy step was heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton with a panic-stricken face. He was colourless almost to the neck, but he denied that he had any news, though not without a pregnant glance at Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the Londoners, but City men above all others, till Thrush and he should be alone together. The incidental diatribe was no mere padding, either; it was the sincere utterance of a passionately provincial soul. Nobody in all London, he declared, and apparently without excepting Mr. Thrush, cared a twopenny curse what became of his poor boy. In view of the fact that the present company alone knew of his disappearance, and not so very many more of the boy’s existence, this was an extravagantly sweeping statement. But the distracted man had a particular instance to bear him out; he had been to see his boy’s friends’ father, “a swine called Knaggs,” that very morning at his house in St. John’s Wood.
“Rather early, wasn’t it?” suggested Thrush, whose manner was more softly sympathetic than it had been the night before. The change was slight, and yet marked. He was more solicitous.
“Early!” cried Mr. Upton. “Haven’t I lost my boy, and wasn’t it these Cockney cads who turned him adrift in London? I ought to have gone to them last night. I wish I had, when my blood was up after your dinner; for I don’t mind telling you now, Mr. Thrush, that in spite of your hospitality I was none too pleased at your anxiety to get rid of me afterwards. It made me feel like doing a little bit for the boy on my own; but I’d called once on my way into town, and only seen a servant then, so I thought I’d make sure of putting salt on somebody by waiting till this morning.”
The visitor paused to look harder than ever at Mullins, and Thrush seized the opportunity to offer an apology for his abrupt behaviour in the street.
“I confess I showed indecent haste,” said he; “but Mullins and I had our night’s work cut out, and he at any rate has not had his boots off since you saw him.”
“Hasn’t he?” cried Mr. Upton, in remorseful recognition of an unsuspected devotion; “then I’ll say what I’ve got to say in front of him, for you’re both my friends, and I’ll unsay all I said just now. Bear with my temper, both of you, if you can, for I feel beside myself about the boy! It was all I could do to keep my hands off that smug little lump of London inhumanity! Kept me waiting while he finished his breakfast, he did, and then came in polishing a hat as sleek as himself, and saying ‘Rather early!’ — just as you set me off by saying yourself a minute ago.”
“But he seems to have told you something, Mr. Upton?”
“Has he not! He began by telling me he was sorry for me, confound him! I could have made him sorrier for himself! He was sorry for me, but what could he do? London was a large place, and ‘we Londoners’ were busy men. I told him so were some of us in the iron-trade, but not too busy to keep an eye on boys who were friends of our boys. He said London life was different; and I said so I could see. They never had spare beds at a moment’s notice, much less for boys who might set fire to the house or — or shoot themselves — —”
His two hearers uttered a simultaneous exclamation, and Mr. Upton stood glancing piteously from one to the other, as though his lad’s death-warrant were written in their faces. Eugene Thrush, however, looked so genuinely distressed that the less legible handwriting on the face of Mullins also attracted less attention.
“Had he anything to shoot himself with?” inquired Thrush, in a curiously gentle voice.
Mr. Upton nodded violently as he moistened his lips.
“He had, after all!” he croaked. “Little as I dreamt it yesterday, my unhappy boy, who had never to my knowledge pulled a trigger in his life before, was going about London with a loaded revolver in his pocket!”
“Had he brought it from school?” asked Thrush, with a covert frown at the transfigured Mullins.
Mr. Upton repeated what he had heard through the young Westminsters, with their father’s opinion of pawnbrokers’ shops as resorts for young schoolboys, of young schoolboys who frequented them, and of parents and guardians who gave them the chance. How the two gentlemen had parted without fisticuffs became the latest mystery to Eugene Thrush, whose only comment was that it behoved him all the more to do something to redeem the capital in the other’s eyes.
“Now we know why my poor wife heard a shot!” was the only rejoinder, in a voice not too broken to make Mullins prick up his ears; it was the first he had heard about the dream.
“I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Upton. We know no more than we knew before. Yet I will own now,” exclaimed Thrush, catching Mullins’s bright eye, “that the coincidence will be tremendous if there’s nothing in it!”
But only half the coincidence was present in the father’s mind; no thought of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist — apologised — and humbly entreated him to take a more hopeful view.
“There may have been an accident, Thrush, but not necessarily a fatal one!”
An accident! Thrush had never thought of that explanation of the public mystery; but evidently Mullins had, judging by his almost fiendish grins and nods behind the poor father’s back. Thrush looked at both men with the troubled frown of a strenuously reasoning being — looked and frow
ned again — frowned and reasoned afresh. And then, all in an instant, the trouble lifted from his face; light had come to him in an almost blinding flash, such as might well obscure the quality of the light; enough for Eugene Thrush that it lit him back to his mystery every bit as brightly as it lit him onward to its solution.
He was even man enough to refrain from reflecting it automatically in his face, as he put a number of apparently irrelevant questions to Mr. Upton about the missing boy. What was his character? what its chief points? Was he a boy with the moral courage of his acts? Would he face their consequences like a man?
“I never knew him tell a lie in his life,” said Mr. Upton, “either to save his own skin or any thing else; and it was a case of their young skins when they got into trouble with me! Poor Tony was the most conscientious of them all, and I hear that’s what they say of him at school.”
Thrush put one or two further questions, and then said he had a clue, though a very slight one, which he was rather in a hurry to follow up himself; and this time the ironmaster went off quietly of his own accord, with a dejected undertaking to be at his hotel when he was wanted.
“I don’t like the look of our friend,” remarked Thrush, looking hard at Mullins when at last they were alone. “He shapes none too well for the strain he’s got to bear; if he cracks up there’ll be a double tragedy, if not a triple one, in that family. We must catch our hare quickly, Mullins, or we may catch him too late.”
Mullins turned on the disagreeable grin that Thrush had so resented a few minutes before; he took no notice of it now.
“You’ll find your man,” said Mullins significantly, “the very moment that I find mine, Mr. Thrush.”
“Meaning they’re the same person?”
“To be sure.”
“That this lad is the actual slayer of the man Holdaway?”
“Surely, sir, it’s as plain as a pikestaff now?”
“Not to me, Mullins — not to me.”
Thrush was twinkling behind his great round goggles.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 326
