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 su