A Case in Camera
This last I did over our second liqueur.
VI
I quite realize that we can't all be Glenfields. I don't suppose it
would do to have the world so over-oxygenated--for he is the oxygen as
against the democratic nitrogen of our modern atmosphere. He was
probably right in calling my scrupulous objections pedantic, but I
confess that his power would affright me did I not trust him in the main
to use it rightly. If he chose to send a note to a Secretary of State
requesting that special permission for a civilian to be excepted from
the Regulations should be given and slightly antedated, it was highly
unlikely that he would be refused. That at any rate need no longer be a
weight on my mind. As far as the Regulations were concerned Charles
Valentine Smith had now probably very little to fear.
But was the contravention of the Regulations the real point of our Case
after all? By keeping Smith out of Court were we not in reality making
the larger issue quite dreadfully simple? Had Smith killed Maxwell any
the less dead that certain strings could be conveniently pulled on his
behalf? And why had Glenfield been so certain that my painter-friend,
who twice had been on the point of taking the rest of us completely
into his confidence, had now changed his mind, was "pulling out," and
intended to tell us nothing at all?
On this point I was to receive still further mystification during that
very week-end.
For, returning home that night, lighter of heart than I had been
for many days, I found a small registered packet from Esdaile
himself. The packet contained a key. His request, after Joan's
house-and-servant-hunting commissions, was quite a modest one. He wanted
me to go to his house, to post on to him a certain set of sketches the
locality of which he minutely described, and then when I had a moment of
time to go on to Dadley's, in the King's Road, and to ascertain for
myself how he was getting on with the framing of a couple of pictures.
He was sorry to bother me, but Rooke had behaved rather like an ass, and
Mollie and the kids sent their love.
His commission was no bother to me; indeed, I found the latter part of
it rather interesting. I had no desire to exchange further words with
the "Chelsea Auctioneer," as Glenfield had described Westbury, but I
confess that I had a curiosity about him. I had probably queered his
pitch if he hoped to get Smith into Court on a technical point and then
to fly off at score about bullets, pistols and pocket-patting at the
foot of ladders; but I did not know what other means of making himself a
nuisance he might not have. Old Dadley might be able to tell me. Dadley
probably knew Inspector Webster as well.
But I could not now see Dadley till Monday, and as for the visit to
Lennox Street, Sunday afternoon would do for that. Sunday morning I
intended to spend in writing the first of those articles for the
_Circus_. I went to bed, slept well, rose early, and was at my desk
betimes.
Those two articles, and the numerous subsequent ones I wrote, need not
detain us here. Indeed, just as you will have to take the legal aspects
of our Case largely on Mackwith's word, so for the journalistic side of
it I refer you to Lord Glenfield and his group of papers. But it is
possible that you may remember something of the wave of opinion we set
in motion, for it is not so very long ago. Deliberately I sought, and
successfully obtained, correspondence--a correspondence that embraced,
directly or obliquely, practically every side of the subject, from the
personality of famous pilots to the constitution of the new Ministry of
the Air. We have, of course, the general balance of our papers to
consider, but within those limits I fairly let myself go. And if you
tell me that I did all this to save Charles Valentine Smith from the
hands of justice, I answer that I did it because ten short years have
made the air and everything connected with it as important to us as the
sea. If you tell me that I did it because I was Philip Esdaile's friend,
I reply that I did it because I was just beginning to see on what a hair
our destiny might hang if a new and gigantic industry, suddenly hung up
in mid-career, should be left unsupported, unrecognized, unencouraged.
If you charge me that I did it because of Joan and her happiness, I
retort that I was by this time wholly convinced that Hay and Hubbard
were right, that the next attack on one nation by another would come
with appalling swiftness, would be directed at civilian nerves as much
as at uniformed bodies, would be the beginning of the thousand years in
which the Devil is to be unchained, and the sooner the public realized
the situation the better.
So I wrote my first article, read it over, decided that it was pretty
much what was wanted, and lunched lightly at home, as is my Sunday
custom. Then, at about three o'clock, I put Esdaile's letter into my
pocket and set out for Lennox Street.
VII
As I walked along the Cromwell Road I could not but be put in mind of
the last occasion when I had called at Esdaile's studio--that midday
when I had found all locked up, Rooke departed, and had run him to earth
in his old quarters in Jubilee Place. I have spoken of Mrs. Cunningham
as an enigmatic sort of person, possibly as much an enigma to herself as
to others, and inspiring more of compassion and kindness than of that
other feeling that is supposed to be akin to these. Now I could not help
wondering about her again. What had made her so suddenly break off with
Monty? Had she had a reason, or none? I suppose there are these
sensitive plants whose own interior moods and feelings outweigh all the
logic of outward events, so that a flurry of nerves becomes a motive,
and an intuition grounds for immediate action. Monty had spoken of her
as having been on the verge of hysteria on that afternoon when her
Jacobean wardrobe had been carried down into Esdaile's cellar. It was
within a few days of that that she had definitely announced her
intention of not marrying again. I repeat, that as I left the Cromwell
Road and turned down by South Kensington Station, I could not help
remembering all this and wondering. I was still wondering when I turned
into Lennox Street.
It was a sunny afternoon, now well on towards summer, and as I walked up
the path I noticed that Esdaile's grass already needed cutting. I
remember thinking how jolly it must be at Santon that afternoon. Inside,
as I opened the door, I found the floor strewn with the usual clutter of
leaflets and circulars, coal-merchants' post-cards, announcements of
dairies and window-cleaning firms. I turned them over and found nothing
of importance among them. Then I passed to the annexe and the studio.
Before he had left, Esdaile had evidently set the place more or less in
order, but, judging from the veil of dust that lay over everything, he
had made no arrangements for having his house visited in his absence. I
suppose Mollie's two maids had found fresh jobs by this time. The
shuttering-up of the French window gave the alcove a vacant and dreary
sort of look, which was not improved by a slight fall of soot that had
come down the chimney and lay spread out over the hearth. In the studio
the dark blue blinds were drawn, pictures stood with their faces turned
to the walls, and those on the easels were wholly or partially covered
with hanging valances of newspapers.
The sketches I had come to fetch formed a small separate parcel which I
had no difficulty in finding. Nevertheless, to make sure they were the
right ones, I sat down in an old double armchair with a frayed tapestry
seat and unfastened the string that bound the brown paper. They were the
required ones, and I replaced the paper and tied the string again. Then
I continued to sit in the chair, not consciously thinking, with the
bundle of sketches on my knees.
I dare say it was the indigo twilight in which I sat that brought back
to me the last time I had seen those blinds drawn. You will remember
that I had myself helped to draw them when the shuffling of feet on the
roof had warned us that the police were about to carry the two men down
into the garden. I gave a slight shiver, but as much at the rather
drowsy air of the place as at the recollection itself. The studio would
certainly be none the worse for half an hour's ventilation and sunlight.
I was in no great hurry to leave. I rose from the tapestried chair,
unfastened the blind-cords from the cleats, and began to pull back the
blinds. The first one I drew back showed me that the broken roof-pane
had been replaced by one of a different make of glass. I pulled back the
remaining blinds, and then sought the long hooked pole that was used to
draw down the upper portion of the wall-window.
It was as I crossed to the corner where this pole stood that my foot
caught on the corner of a loose rug, tripping me slightly. As I did not
fall I took no notice of this for the moment, but found the pole, pulled
down the window, and let in the needed air. Only as I was replacing the
pole did I notice the small round hole in the floor that the turning up
of the rug had disclosed.
Now there are times when one does not so much think as leap to an
instantaneous conclusion. Be it a right one or a wrong one, it possesses
you like a flash for the infinitesimal portion of time it endures. In
this merest flash of time my eyes had flown aloft. A hole in the floor,
and another hole in the roof!... A new roof-pane might have been put in
since, but I knew accurately in which portion of the old pane that
shattered star with the small round hole in the middle of it had been.
In that moment of time I saw the whole picture again--the star, that
gray snowslide made by the bodies of the two men, the little wavering,
creeping shadows of the broken mulberry branch. The hole in the middle
of the star had been approximately over the hole in the floor that the
moving of the rug had revealed.
"Then why," I cried excitedly to myself, "didn't he find the bullet? How
did it come to be found in another house? If it went through the floor
it ought to have been in his cellar--if he looked--if he isn't
lying----"
And then, in another almost simultaneous flash, "Could there have been
_two_ bullets? There were seven left in the pistol--the magazine carries
eight--but you can get a ninth in if you place it in the chamber
itself----"
All this, I say, crossed my mind in one hundredth part of the time it
has taken you to read it.
And then came the drop. I was all wrong. That hole in the floor wasn't a
bullet-hole at all. You can get a clean round bullet-hole in glass, but
not in a floorboard. Neither does any pistol make a hole with a neat
little rim of yellow metal glinting inside it.
I assure you I was already on my hands and knees by the side of that
hole. It was five-eighths of an inch in diameter, perfectly round, with,
as I say, that lining of what I at first took to be brass. I inserted my
little finger, but the lining was firmly fixed. It did not run through
the thickness of the board, but occupied perhaps an eighth of an inch
about a third of the way down it. And the removal of my finger, clearing
away a little grime, revealed something else. I lay down with my eye
close to the hole. The ring was not of brass, but of gold.
Breathlessly I rose and looked about for an instrument. A screwdriver
on the window-ledge caught my eye. Yes, a screwdriver would do. I seized
it and crouched on the floor again. I worked for perhaps a minute. At
the end of that time the slender circle of metal was loose in the palm
of my hand.
Even without the tiny initials engraved inside it I should have known