A Case in Camera
VI
"Well, you know what the first question is," said Hubbard.
"Let's have it," Philip replied. "Better not take anything for granted."
"Very well. About that other morning. What were you doing down below all
that time?"
"Moving furniture," Philip replied.
"Moving ... what for?"
"I'll show you that presently."
"Good.... Next, when you did come up again, what made you march straight
up to Rooke in the way you did?"
"Because he had that pistol in his pocket."
"How did you know he had a pistol in his pocket?"
"Because I saw him put it there."
"Because--you say you saw----?"
"I saw everything--practically everything that happened."
The blue eyes stared. "How ... but you say you're going to show us.
What's the next? Ah yes--After you'd fooled about with that candle and
liqueur-jar you went into the studio and we followed you. You hadn't
even put the candle out; I had to take it from you if you remember.
Well, the next thing you did was to tell us you were going to tell us
all about it. But you never did."
"Steady on, Cecil--that wasn't the next thing I did."
"What was, then?"
"I drew the studio blinds."
Hubbard nodded. "So you did. The police were getting those chaps down. I
remember."
"That wasn't my reason."
"Then what was?"
"Well, I'll show you that too presently. But let me make something else
clear first. I was all excited and upset, and really didn't know half I
was doing. I'd just seen that crash, remember, and one man shoot
another, and then another fellow altogether slide his hand out and pouch
the pistol. It was rather much to spring on a fellow without any warning
at all. I'd simply gone down to get something to drink, you know, not
to----" He failed to find words for it, and motioned to Hubbard to
continue.
"Next," Hubbard went on, "you packed your wife and children off but
refused to go away yourself."
"Naturally. When you get a downright facer like that you want to see it
through."
"And when Rooke here wanted to sweep up the studio you told him not to."
"I did. And not to go into the cellar either."
"But he went into the cellar later?"
"Later--yes. The blinds were drawn then."
"Then are people only to go into the cellar when the blinds are drawn?"
"Oh no, not necessarily. A rug--or a bit of paper or a halfpenny--would
do just as well."
Here Hubbard seemed suddenly to give it up. He leaned back in his chair.
"Here, somebody else carry on for a bit," he puffed, almost as if he had
been running; and instantly I took up the catechism.
"Of course, you mean the hole in the studio floor?" I challenged.
"That's it," said Philip, smiling. "So you discovered that, did you?"
"It had been discovered long before I discovered it," I said.
This time it was Philip's turn to stare. "By whom?" he asked quickly.
"Rooke's here. Ask him to ask his wife."
"Dawdy!" Monty ejaculated, wide-eyed.
"I imagine so. At any rate you might ask her."
"Good--Lord!" said Monty, puffing as the Commander had puffed.
"And," I continued to Philip, "I don't think the blinds were drawn then.
The key was in the cellar door too."
"The devil!" Philip breathed softly. "I didn't bargain for that! It did
occur to me, of course, but I chanced it--never dreamed--I had to do
something, and it seemed safest to be perfectly open...." And then
suddenly he gave an awkward little laugh and met my eyes. "Well,
evidently you know all about it?"
"Indeed I do not."
"What, you're as warm as all that and can't guess the rest!"
I frowned, a little annoyed. It is a little annoying to be told that
something is under your nose that you don't see.
"As for that bullet-hole in the roof----" I hazarded.
"Bullet-hole in the roof? There never was a bullet-hole in the roof. The
branch did that. Westbury had the bullet all right. By the way, I saw
him last Sunday morning. Going great guns. He'll end up as our first
Bolshevist Premier. Quite the biggest crowd in the Park."
Here Monty chuckled. It was he who had first discovered the final effect
of the Case on the House and Estate Agent. He had come upon him one
Sunday morning in the space just within the Marble Arch, standing on a
box and holding forth passionately on social inequalities and equal
opportunities for all. I am afraid he had never got over the unconscious
trouncing Billy Mackwith had administered on that coroner's jury, and
the collapse of his righteous cause, ending in Inspector Webster's
refusal to have him hanging about the Police Station any longer, had
completely upset his mental balance. He declaims from his box until the
opening-time of the public-houses, and then adjourns, box and all, to
the establishment near the Marble Arch Tube Station. Here he is as well
known as he formerly was in the King's Road; but whether he has his
private billiard cue there I do not know.
"Well, I give it up, Philip," I yielded at last. "I claim my single
point, though--that it was news to you that Mrs. Rooke knew."
Philip rose.
"Then come along," he said. "We must get it over before Chummy comes
back. Light the candle, somebody."
He led the way to the cellar door.
VII
"Why, you've changed it all!" was Monty Rooke's first exclamation as
Philip stood there with the candle held at arm's-length.
As for myself, I was looking round the dark, clammy place with a
positive passion of curiosity. That it had been rearranged I knew at
once from Monty's former description of it. The dust-sheeted furniture
and packing-cases had been pushed back against the walls, leaving the
middle of the floor clear, and once more the candlelight barely
penetrated into the gloomy recesses. It showed Philip's face, too,
serious, but not to the complete exclusion of a certain quiet
satisfaction and triumph. And in Hubbard's sailor eyes I fancied I
already saw the dawning of comprehension.
"No I haven't--that is, I've only changed it back again as it was,"
Philip replied. "I told you I'd been moving furniture that morning....
Well, do you want to lose a bet, Cecil?"
Hubbard spoke oddly quietly. "No. I'll win one," he said.
"Ah! Then you're barred.... Take this, somebody, and you fellows wait
here. I shall be back in a minute."
He thrust into my hand the candle, which he instantly blew out, leaving
us in sudden and pitchy darkness.
I confess to a light creeping of the skin of my face. This may have been
due to the chill, clammy air, to my stimulated imagination, or to both.
Nobody spoke, and so still were the others that I had no difficulty in
doing what in fact I was already doing--putting myself months back,
alone down there, as Esdaile had been alone when he had descended for
the jar of orange curaçao that morning. I seemed to myself to be
standing there waiting for a sound of splintering glass, the muffled
thud of two falling bodies, the faint murmur of half Chelsea running out
of doors. I was conscious that the candle shook in my hand, and suddenly
I wanted to relight it. I am not sure that my fingers did not go to my
pocket for a match.
But it was another light that irradiated us as we stood waiting there--a
soft bright cone that all at once spread down from the ceiling above. Up
went my startled eyes as if at some trick of thaumaturgy, some
imposition on my credulity. Down as if through a funnel streamed that
circular shower of pale brightness, outfanning from its small
orifice--the hole in the floor.
The hole in the floor! It was that to which my thoughts, following that
instinctive movement of my eyes, turned like a flash. The hole in the
floor! With my body still in the cellar, I seemed in some transcendental
way to be upstairs at the same time, stooping over that hole as Audrey
Cunningham had stooped before me. We seemed to be stooping inherently
together, yet at the same time independently, so that, I was able to
watch her. I saw her in my imagination pallid and hysterical, putting
forth one honeysuckle finger half-way to the hole, and then, seized by a
wild and baseless urge to put some torturing fancy to the test, changing
her mind and putting forth another finger--the finger that bore her
engagement-ring.
"_If he does not come before I count a hundred he will not come at
all...._"
"_If I thrust in that finger and anything happens I shall know what to
do...._"
And then her cry as the ring jammed and the finger was withdrawn without
it.
But understand that all this did not take a moment, and that I was still
down in the cellar, looking up at that hypnotizing cone of white light.
The glimpse suddenly vanished, and I heard Esdaile's voice. I had not
heard him come down.
"Stand back a bit," he said, his hand on my sleeve.
Then it was that my eyes fell on the floor.
VIII
On the floor? Rather on the roof itself, for, spread out over the floor,
was a perfect image of that glazed studio roof high above us. The
divisions between the panes were marvelously penciled there, and about
one of them, though not the one I had expected, the browning branches of
the mulberry crept and played. Something darted across and was gone--a
bird.
And it was too late to bet now, for the book was closed. By merely
seeing that the roof-blinds were open, and then pushing away a rug with
his foot, Philip had confounded us all. Again I hardly heard his words:
"House simply a big pinhole camera, you see...." Once more I was seeing
what he had seen that morning so many months ago.
His mild astonishment at witnessing that phenomenon for the first time
(for it was the first time)--
His interested realization of the cause of it as he had stood there with
the bottle of liqueur in his hand----
And then the half-heard shock and the light tremor of the house and the
whole astonishing scene instantly enacted before his eyes!
But I had little time to marvel anew. He was speaking.
"... so down they came, not at this end, but over there, in reverse, you
know. And of course I'd no idea then it was Chummy; didn't learn that
till the afternoon; I simply saw him point that pistol at the other man,
who crumpled up. That was a shock, you understand, but you could have
knocked me down with a feather when I saw another shape crawl across and
pick the pistol up!... Eh? Oh, with the light above they were
silhouettes more or less; we'll send somebody up and try if you like;
but I knew it was Monty the moment I came upstairs and saw him."
"And then---?"
"I'm afraid I can't give you any very clear account of it. Time didn't
seem to exist, if you know what I mean. But I know that all of a sudden
I was moving furniture about, to break up that beastly picture, a bit on
a box top and another bit on a sofa-end and so on. It didn't seem quite
decent, somehow, all spread out dead flat like that. But I don't wonder
you fellows were puzzled."
"But," said Mackwith presently, as we still stood looking at that
moonlike radiance spread across the floor, "why couldn't you tell us all
this sooner?"
"What for?" Philip retorted. "It didn't take me long to realize that I'd
told you a dashed sight too much as it was! I had to have it out with
Monty and Chummy, of course; but the less said after that the better.
Suppose it _had_ been a common Murder Case. I saw it, and could have
hanged a man straight away with a word. You didn't, so why fill you up
with a lot of hearsay? Don't you think I was right?"
"Hush! Listen!"
It was the tinkling of the street door bell. Chummy Smith was back
already.
IX
He had a taxi waiting, and the driver was getting the boxes on as we
reached the annexe again. Philip carried in his hand the jar of orange
curaçao.