A Case in Camera
"But that submarine sketch of yours is the pick of all you've done to my
mind, Esdaile," he was saying. "Old Horne at the periscope, eh? You
caught him to a hair; a snapshot couldn't have been better! And we
bagged that beggar ten minutes later, Norwegian flag and all," he added
with professional satisfaction.
Philip Esdaile gave a quick exclamation.
"By Jove, that just reminds me! The orange curaçao, of course! The very
thing after all that fruit--corrects the acidity, as the doctors say.
We'll have some."
The Commander gave him a sharp look. On the face of it there was no very
evident reason why the torpedoing of a German ship flying the Norwegian
flag should remind Esdaile of orange curaçao, but no doubt there was a
story behind that we others knew nothing of. If ships have to be put
down there is no sense in sending bottles of delectable liqueur to the
bottom of the sea also.
"What!" cried Commander Hubbard, R.N. "You don't mean to say that _you_
had the infernal neck to take your whack----"
A mere wretched wavy-ringed fellow to loot bottle for bottle with his
betters like that!
But Esdaile, with a wink, demanded the key of the cellar from Monty
Rooke, told him to get the liqueur glasses out, and was off.
It was at that moment that the crash came that seemed to bring the whole
of Chelsea running out of doors.
The shrill cry of "The aeroplane! The aeroplane!" was hardly out of the
children's mouths before it was upon us--I don't mean the aeroplane, but
the other thing. Judging from the harsh but muffled roar, the first
installment of the crash, so to speak, which was the plane itself, must
have been a quarter of a mile away; but between that and the second one
there was hardly time to take breath. Simultaneously, as it seemed,
there came a rushing of air, a loud cracking, and a nauseating thud on
the studio roof; and Joan Merrow ran in with the children, one under
either arm and her head down. The street outside was a sudden clatter
of running feet and short spasmodic cries.
"Good God, right on our heads!" the Commander muttered, his eyes aloft.
The next moment he was at the studio door looking for Esdaile.
Had he found him I should not be writing this story. Not finding him, he
assumed command.
"All right. All over now, little fellows. There won't be any more. Mrs.
Esdaile, you ladies will stay just where you are, please. Get on to the
telephone, Mackwith. You other fellows come with me."
He thought it better that somebody should investigate before the women
began to move about too freely.
IV
One order at any rate was superfluous--that to telephone to the police.
Aeroplanes do not crash in Chelsea in the middle of the morning
unobserved. Already the windows on the other side of the street were
packed with faces, and every face was turned in the same direction.
This was towards the torn fabric of a parachute that had lodged partly
on the studio roof, partly in the branches of the mulberry in the
garden.
Hubbard ran out through the French windows and looked up. Tapes trailed
and rippled and fluttered in the merry morning breeze, and the gray silk
ballooned and rose and fell. But the sound of running feet warned
Hubbard not to pause. He strode quickly down the flagged path, shot the
catch of the wrought-iron gate in the faces of the too curious, and
then hurried into the house again. He addressed Rooke, who stood by the
group of shocked women.
"Here, you seem to know this house pretty well. How do we get up there?"
he asked.
"Bathroom window, I should think," Rooke replied. "This way."
The bathroom lay at the end of a short passage on the floor above. The
three of us dashed upstairs. Rooke tried the bathroom door, but found it
locked. "Damn!" he muttered, and then I reminded him that possibly he
had the key of it in his pocket.
It was oddly irritating to watch him try first one key and then another.
We wanted to tell him to make haste, as if he could have made any
greater haste than he was doing. Then luckily he hit on the right one.
The door opened, we sprang across the cork-covered floor, and Rooke
began to tug at the window-catch. The window was one of these
late-Victorian windows with a colored border and white incised stars,
and already the tragic huddle a dozen yards away could be seen,
violently crimson through the red squares and morbidly blue through the
blue ones.
Then, as the sash flew up, all was sunshine again, and the wrecked
parachute and the two men enwrapped in its folds could be seen only too
clearly.
Monty Rooke had a new silver-gray suit on that morning, but already he
had thrown one leg over the sill.
"I'm not so heavy as you fellows," he muttered. "I'm not so sure about
this gutter--give me a hand while I try it. Then I can shin up that
spout over there."
Hubbard took the small, nervous hand in his own beefy fist and let him
down three or four feet. "All right," said Rooke, after a moment's
trial; and, spread-eagled out on the annexe roof, he began to make his
way towards the higher roof of the studio beyond.
"Tapes oughtn't to have fouled like that," I heard the Commander say
under his breath as we watched. "Parachuting's safe enough if you're any
height at all. This breeze, I suppose, and risking the double load.
Wonder they didn't go slap through."
It was, indeed, merely by inches that the two men had missed the
roof-glass. Apparently the parachute, the roof-frame and the mulberry
had shared the shock among them. Not that another fifteen feet would
have made much difference to the poor devils, I couldn't help thinking.
The street was now a densely-packed mass of faces, all watching Rooke's
progress. Even the whispering had ceased. Then cries of "Make way
there!" were suddenly heard. Fifty yards away a ladder, preceded by a
plump young man in a horsey check coat, was being passed over people's
heads. Every hand that could touch the ladder did so, as if out of some
odd pride of assistance. What anonymous mind had foreseen the need of it
none could have told. Down below Mackwith opened the gate; an Inspector,
followed by a couple of constables and the last relay that bore the
ladder, entered; and Mackwith closed the gate again. The ladder was set
up by the splintered mulberry, and the Inspector and one of the
constables joined Rooke on the roof.
Five minutes later Rooke was down again. Hubbard and I had also
descended. We met him as he came in at the French window.
"Well?" we both demanded at once.
He was agitated, as indeed he had some reason for being. He had had an
unpleasant task. Before replying he advanced to the breakfast-table and
poured himself out some water into the nearest glass. The glass knocked
unsteadily as he set it down again. Then he glanced down at his clothes,
made a movement as if to brush the grime from them, but gave a jerk to
his tie instead.
Nevertheless his news was not all bad. In one particular it was rather
astonishingly good. One of the two men, it appeared, was by no means
fatally hurt--was, indeed, quite likely to pull through.
"Do you know who they are?" Hubbard asked.
Again Monty seemed preoccupied with his clothes. Then we had his
tidings, jerkily and bit by bit.
The plane itself had come down somewhere by the Embankment, and was said
to have caught fire. Parts of the parachute seemed to be singed too.
Both men were civilian flyers; at least neither was in uniform. The
other poor fellow was killed. The ambulance had been sent for, and for
the present there was little more to be done. The police were seeing to
the rest. This was the sum of what Monty told us.
Then we heard the voice of Mackwith, who had come up behind us.
"That's so," he confirmed. "I've just been having a word with the
Inspector about that. He doesn't think anybody here will have to attend
any inquiry or anything; the police evidence ought to be enough. So I
was thinking, Mrs. Esdaile," he turned to Mollie, whose face was still
pale and drawn and who bit the corner of her lip incessantly, "that the
best thing for you to do is to stick to your program just as if this
hadn't happened. You'll do no good staying here. You didn't see
it,"--here Joan Merrow, from the little sofa, raised her head but
dropped it again without speaking--"well, I mean that even Joan didn't
see anything that five hundred other people didn't see just as well.
Rooke may just possibly be wanted, but anyway he'll be here. And as for
Philip----"
He broke off abruptly. Of a sudden we all stared at one another. We had
forgotten all about Philip. Where was he?
If you remember, he had gone down into the cellar to fetch a bottle of
wine. And in performing this simple errand he had been away for close on
half an hour.
Mollie Esdaile, all on edge again, turned swiftly to Monty Rooke.
"Where is he? He did go down there, didn't he? You did give him the
cellar key, didn't you? And nobody heard him go out of the house?"
Well, that was a matter that was very easily ascertained. Already
Hubbard had taken a stride towards the door that led to the cellar.
But he did not reach the door. A footstep was heard behind it and the
turning of a key, and Esdaile entered. In one hand he carried a stone
jar of Dutch curaçao. In the other, arrestively out of place in the
spring sunshine, its flame a dingy orange and its little spiral of
greasy smoke fouling the air, he held a lighted candle in a flat tin
stick.
V
For a moment we all gazed stupidly at that jar and candle; but the next
moment our eyes were fastened on Philip's face.
Now ordinarily Esdaile's face, clean-shaven since 1914, is quite a
pleasant one to look at, lightly browned, and with the savor of the sea
still lingering about it. Nor was it noticeably pale now. Indeed, you
might have said that some inner excitation made it not pale at all. But
there was no disguising the strained tenseness of it. At the same time
he was obviously attempting such a disguise. His features were set in a
would-be-easy smile, but the smile stopped at his eyes. These blinked,
though possibly at the sudden brightness after the obscurity below. And
he spoke without pause or preliminary, as if rehearsing something he had
had time to get letter-perfect but not to make entirely and naturally
his own.
"Did you think I was never coming up?" The mechanical smile was turned
on us all in turn. "I suppose I have been rather a long time. Just
wool-gathering. I apologize to everybody. Where are the
liqueur-glasses?"
There was a dead silence. Was it possible that he had heard nothing,
knew nothing of what had occurred?
Monty Rooke was the first to speak.
"Do you mean to say you didn't hear it?" he blurted out.
Then, as Philip seemed to concentrate that artificial smile suddenly on
him alone, he seemed sorry he had drawn attention to himself.
"And where on earth have _you_ been?" Philip demanded slowly. "What's
the matter with your clothes? Been emptying the dustbins? Here, let me
give you a clean-up, man----"
He got rid of the jar of liqueur, not by putting it down on a table, but
by the simple if unusual expedient of letting it drop through his
fingers, where it made a heavy thump, rolled over on its side, and came
to rest. He stepped forward.
But Rooke, for some reason or other, stepped much more quickly back. He
muttered something about his clothes not mattering--it was only a few
grains of dust, but damp--better let it dry before touching it----
It was at this point that I caught Cecil Hubbard's eye.
Hubbard's is a bright blue eye, with angular lids like little
set-squares and a tiny dark dot in the middle of the blue. That eye may