“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.
CHAPTER XX.
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?”