“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!”