breath because of having sprinted up the stairs when they’d heard the explosion.
The sight of Parsons standing there struck St. Ives dumb, I believe. The professor knew that Parsons was lurking roundabout, because I’d told him, but here, at the Apple? And what had Parsons to do with the explosion, and what had I to do with Parsons?
There was no use this time in Parsons’s simply muttering, “Good day,” and seeing us all out the door. It was time for talking turkey, as Captain Bowker would have put it. Once again, I was the man with the information. I told them straight off about the insurance agent.
“And he knew my name?” said St. Ives, cocking his head.
“That’s right. He seemed to know...” I stopped and glanced at Parsons, who was listening closely.
St. Ives continued for me. “He made sure who you were, and he found out that you had suspicions about what was going on at the icehouse, and then he left. And a moment later the basket arrived.”
I nodded and started to tell the story my way, to put the right edge on it, but St. Ives turned to Parsons and, without giving me half a chance, said, “See here. We’re not playing games anymore. I’m going to tell you, flat out and without any beating about the bush, that we know about Lord Kelvin’s machine being stolen. A baby could piece that business together, what with the debacle down on the Embankment, the flying iron and all. What could that have been but an electromagnet of astonishing strength? There’s no use your being coy about it any longer. I’ve got a sneaking hunch what they’ve done with it, too. Let’s put everything straight. I’ll tell you what I know, and you tell me what you know, and together maybe we’ll see to the bottom of this murky well.”
Parsons held his hands out in a theatrical gesture of helplessness. “I’m down here to catch a fish,” he said. “It’s you who are throwing bombs through the window. You seem to attract those sorts of things—bombs and bullets.”
St. Ives gave Parsons a weary glance. Then he said to me, “This agent, Jack, what did he look like?”
“Tall and thin, and with a hook nose. He was bald under his hat, and his hair stuck out over his ears like a chimney sweep’s brush.”
Parsons looked as though he’d been electrocuted. He started to say something, hesitated, started up again, and then, pretending that it didn’t much matter to him anyway, said, “Stooped, was he?”
I nodded.
“Tiny mouth, like a bird?”
“That’s right.”
Parsons sagged. It was a gesture of resignation. We waited him out. “That wasn’t any insurance agent.”
The news didn’t surprise anyone. Of course it hadn’t been an insurance agent. St. Ives had seen that at once. The man’s mind is honed like a knife. Insurance agents don’t send bombs around disguised as fruit baskets. We waited for Parsons to tell us who the man was, finally, to quit his tiresome charade, but he stood there chewing it over in his mind, calculating how much he could say.
Parsons is a good man. I’ll say that in the interests of fair play. He and St. Ives have had their differences, but they’ve both of them been after the same ends, just from different directions. Parsons couldn’t abide the notion of people being shot at, even people who tired him as much as I did. So in the end, he told us:
“It was a man named Higgins.”
“Leopold Higgins!” cried St. Ives. “The ichthyologist. Of course.” St. Ives somehow always seemed to know at least half of everything—which is a lot, when you add it up.
Parsons nodded wearily. “Oxford man. Renegade academician. They’re a dangerous breed when they go feral, academics are. Higgins was a chemist, too. Came back from the Orient with insane notions about carp. Insisted that they could be frozen and thawed out, months later, years. You could keep them in a deep freeze, he said. Some sort of glandular excretion, as I understand it, that drained water out of the cells, kept them from bursting when they froze. He was either an expert in cryogenics or a lunatic. It’s your choice. He was clearly off his head, though. I think it was opium that did it. He claimed to dream these things.
“Anyway, it was a glandular business with carp. That was his theory. All of it, mind you, was wrapped up in the notion that it was these secretions that were the