A Case in Camera
houses we're building in Wimbledon or where I live in Lennox Place
there? Let 'em break their necks if they want, but not on my roof! The
world isn't going to stop for a broken neck or two. I _don't_ think!"
"Well, tell us all about it, Harry," somebody said; and Mr. Westbury,
taking the middle of a small circle, did so.
I am not going to trouble you with all he said, but only with as much as
I saw fit to make a mental note of. At this stage of our Case he was
simply a vain and interfering busybody, who had had a rather better view
of things than anybody else. But first of all I noted the obstinacy with
which he dwelt on the fact that Monty Rooke had been first on the roof,
several minutes before the arrival of the police. There was, of course,
nothing in this, excepting always Westbury's dull insistence on it.
Next, he described in detail the bringing-down of the two men. There was
nothing remarkable here either, except that the living one had "kept on
moving his hand all the time like this"--illustrated by an aimless
fluttering of the right hand, now a few inches this way, now a few
inches that.
But I had an involuntary start when Mr. Westbury pompously announced
that he "had offered himself to Inspector Webster as a witness in case
he should be wanted." It was, of course, just what such a fellow would
do, if only out of vain officiousness, and I don't quite know why I
didn't like the sound of it. I had gone into that Saloon Bar to glean,
if possible, what people at large thought of flying over London, what
their temper would be if there were very much of this, and similar
things; but instead I had apparently hit on some sort of a human
bramble, who hooked himself on everywhere with a tenacity out of all
proportion to the value of any fruit he was likely to bear, and who
would scratch unpleasantly when you tried to dislodge him. There was
nothing to be uneasy about, but the whole of the events of that morning
were so far inexplicable, and to that extent intimidating.
"Yes, me and Inspector Webster will probably be having a talk about
things this evening," Mr. Westbury continued with hearty relish. "We're
neighbors in Lennox Place, the very street behind Lennox Street--you can
see right across from my bedroom window. So I had my choice of two good
views in a manner of speaking.... Five-and-twenty to two. Not worth
while going home for lunch now. May as well be hung for a sheep as a
lamb. I wonder if they've got a snack of anything here?"
If they had I have not the least doubt he got it.
III
Musingly I mounted an eastward-bound bus and sought my office. The more
I thought things over the less able I became to shake off the sense of
accumulating trifles, of gathering events. And it was as I passed
through Pimlico that yet another incident, temporarily forgotten, came
back into my mind. This was the curious way in which Esdaile had
snapped--it had been a snap--when Rooke had wanted to sweep up the
broken picture-glass, to draw the studio blinds back again, and to
return the bottle of curaçao to its place in the cellar. "You've done
enough for one morning," Esdaile had said. What had Monty done that was
"enough"?
Now I have known Monty Rooke, as I told you, for a dozen years, and in
that time I have learned not to be surprised at anything he does
provided it is sufficiently out of the way, unprofitable to himself, and
unlike anything an ordinary person would have done. I will give you an
instance of what I mean.
A year or two before there had arrived one night at his studio a bundle
of washing, fresh from the laundry. This bundle, on being opened, had
proved to contain a fully-developed infant girl of a fortnight old, no
doubt the pledge of some unknown laundrymaid's betrayed trust. As a joke
you will see the possibilities of this, particularly in the merry
Chelsea Arts Club; but don't imagine that Monty was a butt. What he did
was enough to dispel that idea. He had immediately wanted to adopt the
foundling, and would certainly have done so but for the strong
dissuasion of his friends; whereupon he had made a drawing instead, a
drawing quite singular for its wistfulness and emotion and depth, of the
infant just as it had arrived, with the newly-ironed shirts and socks
for its cot, deriving none knew whence, cast for none knew what part in
Life, save for Monty friendless, the close of one obscure drama but the
beginning of another.
That was Monty, our little friend of the warm, unprofitable impulses,
the shy and easily daunted manner, but also of the quiet persistence of
purpose that kept him afloat in his seas of petty difficulties and
enabled him once in a while to produce a drawing or a painting that you
returned to again and again, a bit of philosophy that cut clean down to
the quick of things, or--an indiscretion that it would hardly have
occurred to one in a million to commit.
What was there between him and Esdaile now?
IV
The moment I reached the office I rang up the _Record_, our evening
sheet. But their reporters were still out, and nobody could yet tell me
anything about the accident I didn't already know. Willett, my young
colleague on the _Circus_, did not propose to give the story exceptional
treatment.
"If the thing caught fire in the air we'll let it alone," he said.
"Fire's too much of a bugbear. We want the joy-riding idiot and the
lunatic who stunts over towns. I'm for letting it alone, but we'll wait
and see what the others do."
He was quite right. On its merits as Publicity it looked as if we should
hear little more of the Case. I settled down to my work.
I had not actually expected that Hubbard would ring me up, but I was not
greatly surprised when, at about four o'clock, he did so. He wanted to
know whether I could go round to the Admiralty at once. That we must
have a talk at the earliest possible moment was a foregone conclusion. I
therefore replied that I would be on my way in ten minutes, and, hastily
swallowing the cup of tea that had been placed on my desk and telling
Willett to carry on, I took up my hat and stick, sought the lift,
threaded my way through the _Record's_ carts and bicycles and boarded a
passing motor-bus in Fleet Street.
I had no very clear notion of the nature of the job that kept Hubbard in
town that spring, and that had caused him to envy Esdaile his luck in
being able to get away into the country. Indeed, I can tell you very
little about the organization of that mysterious Service that moves,
familiar yet isolated, in our midst. I understood that originally he had
been a torpedo man, but had later been drafted into the Inventions
branch. It is quite possible that the scope of his work had been
expressly left rather ill-defined. So many amazing extemporizations had
to be hurriedly made and applied.
Still, these war-improvisations have to be overhauled afterwards, so
that it may be seen which disappear with the emergency, and which are to
be permanently incorporated in the strategy of the future; and I knew
that one at any rate of Hubbard's tasks was to explain to a certain
Parliamentary Committee a number of technical and basic facts that have
a way of not varying very much however the political situation may
change.
I found him alone in his room on the third floor. The screen just within
the door was so disposed that, in the spot to which your eyes naturally
turned on entering, the officer you had come to see was not. They are
old in cunning in the Senior Service, and I had never seen Hubbard at
work before. His voice came to me from quite a different part of the
room, and I had the feeling that if I had been a stranger there would
have been a moment in which I should have been pretty thoroughly looked
up and down.
"Come in and take a pew," he said. "Hope I haven't fetched you away from
anything important. But I couldn't stop to talk this morning. I only got
rid of my By-election Blighters half an hour ago. Well----"
And, as I sat down in the chair at the end of his desk, he plunged
straight into the matter by asking me how long I had known Esdaile.
Now how long you have known a man, in the sense of how well you know
him, is not always simply a matter of time. I have told you how humdrum
my own War services were. They had not included those incredible moments
of intensified action that may more truly reveal a man to you than years
of desultory familiarity. It was plainly something of this kind that
Hubbard had in his mind now. He frowned as he trifled with a
paper-weight.
"No, it's absolutely unaccountable," he broke out suddenly, putting the
paper-weight down with a slap. "He's not that kind of man. It simply
doesn't fit in."
"His behavior this morning, you mean?"
"Yes. It was another man altogether. Why, before I knew Esdaile well I
remember I bet him a supper that he'd drop his palette on the
quarter-deck when the first shell came over. Well, it came, and half the
bridge was wrecked, and he never turned a hair. Just carried on with
that sketch of Hopkins at the range-finder. Absolutely undefeated
sportsman. So why should he behave as he did this morning?"
Hereupon--though not as throwing very much light on the question after
all--I told Hubbard of my own surmise with regard to Rooke. He looked
rather quickly up.
"What, little Queerfellow? He's--er--all right, isn't he? What about
him? Tell me about him."
This too I told him as well as I was able. And I may say that I noted
with pleasure, as perhaps the real beginning of a valued friendship,
that there did not seem to be any question in Hubbard's mind as to what
kind of man I was myself. He was quite content to accept my summing-up
of Monty.
"So it's between 'em, you think, whatever it is?"
"Or else I give it up," I replied.
"I wonder if you're right," he mused.... "But then," he added suddenly,
"what about all that time he spent in the cellar?"
From that point our conversation took for a time a curious little turn.
For Hubbard, while seeming to have no explanation that as a sensible man
he must not reject as fantastic, seemed nevertheless to be reluctant to
let something go. He seemed to hint and to dismiss and then to hint
again, to come to the brink of saying something and then to leave it
unsaid after all. And again I had the feeling that though he had known
Philip Esdaile for only two years as against my twenty, in some things
he might be the familiar and I the outsider.
Then again he seemed to decide to take a risk. He spoke to the
paper-weight in his palm.
"You don't happen to know anything about these new sound-appliances, do
you?" he asked.
"No. Which are they?"
"Oh, there are a lot of 'em," he answered again, half evasively.
"There's sound-ranging, of course. Then there's the hydrophone. And as a
matter of fact the best brains in the world to-day are trying to cut-out
sound--aeroplane propellers and so on.... What I mean is Esdaile's not
hearing anything. I suppose it's just possible that he didn't. All a
matter of where the sound-wave hits. You remember the broken windows in
the Strand when Fritz used to come over and drop his eggs? First a
broken one, then two or three whole ones, then broken ones again, all
along the street? Well, this might have been one of those dumb
intervals. Otherwise he _must_ have heard. And I should have thought
he'd have felt the vibration too."
"He's admitted he thought he heard something."
"Pooh, there was no mistaking it. If he didn't recognize it we can take
it he didn't hear it. If we believe him, of course."
"Don't you believe him?"
"Yes," Hubbard answered without a moment's hesitation.
"Then----?"
"Oh, I suppose it means I'm on the wrong track," Hubbard replied.