A Case in Camera
Chummy Smith was Chummy Smith and a pal, and they would be damned if
they would see him in the cart till things were much clearer than they
were. So I simply leaned back and amused myself with mental pictures.
They were jumbled pictures, but I knew I was sharing them with the other
two. I seemed to see their East Coast Base, with planes homing in the
evening and the M.L.'s suddenly appearing out of the mists and dropping
anchor in the tideway. I seemed to see the rubber-coated and
white-mufflered figures striding up the jetty to that Mess they spoke of
and loudly demanding drinks and food and hot baths. I imagined the
mechanics filling up the tanks and the Duty Officer swearing at the snow
and slush as he stamped up and down the 'drome. And, faint and
ineffectual as my pictures were, they still had a little of the magic of
that life in which gayety and tragedy came so close and the chances of
life and death were so intertwined.
I also guessed what a purist in the matter of picking up pistols might
find himself up against if he pushed his purism inconveniently far.
Esdaile took the plunge even more quickly than I expected. I saw the
little effort with which he pulled himself together.
"Well, it's no good beating about the bush," he said. "We all know how
things are. The question is what's to be done."
I don't think he realized, as he pulled out his pipe, that that was now
hardly the question at all. Already the question was, not what was to be
done, but exactly how it was to be done.
XII
For, if he had realized, he could hardly have overlooked the immensely
important point he did overlook. It was left to me to draw his attention
to this point.
For when one man kills another, it necessarily follows that one man has
been, killed _by_ another. And it further follows that, if you decide to
shield the killer because he is your friend, you are inevitably forced
into an unfriendly attitude towards the victim. What about the victim
and his rights in the matter?
You may believe it or not, but until this moment I don't think this
aspect of the affair had occurred either to Hubbard or Esdaile. All had
been Chummy. More than this: so exclusively had Chummy occupied their
thoughts that they had forgotten the ordinary physical fact that a
bullet fired into a man's body makes a hole--the same ugly kind of hole
whether the person who makes it is your friend or not. Loyalty to
friendship in the teeth of the Law is not always the simple thing it
sounds. Among the various facts that faced us was one inescapable one,
namely, that a man called Maxwell was at that moment lying in a mortuary
awaiting a post-mortem examination.
Esdaile was frowning and clawing his jaw. The realization was sinking in
now all right.
"What had you thought of doing with the pistol anyway?" I asked.
"To tell you the truth I hadn't thought," he admitted. "I should say the
bottom of the river's the best place for it. But as you say, you can't
drop that poor devil's bullet-hole into the river. Does nobody know
anything about him?"
Nobody did. Maxwell might have been Chummy's best friend or worst enemy,
a good fellow, a rotter, any one kind of all the kinds of men there are.
"Chummy was in Gallipoli. Anybody ever hear of a Maxwell with him
there?"
Nobody had.
Then Esdaile took another line. For a moment it seemed quite a hopeful
one.
"Well, look at it this way." He tried to evade the inevitable. "It's all
very well for Monty to talk out of his hat about there not being murders
enough, but what earthly right have we to assume that this was a murder
at all? None, I say. Far more likely to have been an accident. Accidents
do happen. Chummy wasn't the kind of man to deliberately do another
fellow in. It must have been an accident."
But at this moment I remembered Philip's own words that morning in the
studio: "Anybody would say it was an accident, wouldn't they? It looked
like an accident, I mean? It wouldn't occur to anybody who saw it that
it wasn't?" Those were rather remarkable words. They had meant, if they
had meant anything at all, that even then Philip had had his reasons
for supposing it had _not_ been an accident. Now that a thunderclap had
revealed that one of the men who had come down on the roof was Chummy,
he apparently wanted it to be an accident again.
And by the way, how, at that particular moment, had Philip come to be in
possession of an opinion on the matter at all? This was the point I have
mentioned as being on Rooke's mind also. So far, in telling his story,
Esdaile had taken as his starting-point the moment when he had got
possession of the pistol from Monty; but what about the antecedent
mystery? How in the first place had he discovered that Monty had the
pistol? Why had he walked practically straight to Monty the moment he
had ascended from the cellar? The whole series of incidents, from first
to last, had passed while he had been still down in the cellar; how then
could he know anything whatever about them?
Then I remembered that only a series of diversions had turned Hubbard
away from his express purpose in coming to Lennox Street that
evening--the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar. First had come the
shock of learning that one of the men was Chummy Smith; then Joan
Merrow's implication in the affair had sidetracked us; and then had come
the pistol and Monty. These things were all very well, but they brought
us no nearer to the solution of the first puzzle of all. Why had Esdaile
behaved as he had behaved when he had rejoined us with a jar of curaçao
in one hand and a lighted candle in the other?
But for all this we had to wait. My speculations were suddenly cut
short. There was another ring at the door, and Esdaile rose. But before
going to see who it was this time he took the precaution of once more
putting Monty's pistol away in the escritoire drawer.
It was well for our Case, as a Case, that he did so. We heard voices in
the passage, Esdaile's own tenor and a deeper voice. Then I heard him
say, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in."
The next moment he stood holding the door open for a Police Inspector to
pass.
PART III
WHAT THE WOMEN DID
I
For a great number of years past, innumerable reviewers have been so
kind as to class me as "one of the younger novelists," and with the
passing of time I have acquired a certain affection for the status. But
I have to confess myself unlike my brethren in this--I don't know all
about women. Indeed, twenty Philip Esdailes poking about twenty cellars
are clearer to me than some of the mental processes of such a person as
(say) Miss Joan Merrow. For instance, she once told me that she would be
terrified to go up in a machine. She told me this (as I subsequently
learned) within a very few hours of a side-slip at a few hundred feet
that had fairly "put the wind up" Chummy Smith, her companion in this
(by Philip) strictly forbidden adventure. Some chance remark of her own
revealed all this to me weeks later, and our eyes met, mine sternly
accusing, hers of limpid periwinkle blue. Then she had the effrontery to
take me aside, to put her arm inside mine, and to whisper that she knew
she could "trust" me!
"Trust," indeed!
So, as far as Miss Merrow is my informant for the part of our Case I am
now coming to, you are warned what to expect.
II
Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him
I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a
vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four
hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there
is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches
of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very
poultry of its farmyards. The only tiny thing about it is its church,
and this stands in the middle of a daisied field, not by any means one
of the largest, but that can hardly be less than a hundred acres. There
is a shop-post-office, a short street mostly laithes as big as
airship hangars, an opaque horse-pond, and a single telegraph wire the
posts of which can be seen for miles diminishing away over the Wolds.
The few trees are mostly thorn, all blown one way by the wind and as
stiff and compact as wire mattresses.
And Joan herself fitted into all this Caldecott spaciousness as if she
had been bred and born there. Half a mile away across the young corn you
saw her white sweater at the cliff's edge, and it seemed part of the
whiteness of the screaming seabirds, of the whiteness of the awful
glimpses of chalk where the turf suddenly ended in air, of the crawling
whiteness of the waves far below. And on the shore--but any young girl
is a Nausicaa on any shore. Esdaile has drawn and painted her a score of
times--young neck, fair thick yellow hair, the none-too-small white feet
with the sand disappearing from them as she waded into the anemonied
pools. Sometimes it was no more than a cryptic pencil-line, that, as
you looked at it, suddenly became her uplifted arm and flank, or the
balance of back and hips as she moved across the unsteady white stones.
Sometimes the jotting was more abbreviated still, just a dab or two of
color that placed her against fawn-colored sand or ribbon-grassed water.
But always it was Joan romping as it were her last between the little
Alan and Jimmy she mothered and those other dream-stuff children that
did not call her mother yet.
I feel fairly certain that it was not in the very least on Philip
Esdaile's account that she had given instructions at the Chelsea
post-office for the readdressing of letters. Neither was it, as she had
falsely said, "to save Mr. Rooke the trouble." Both Philip's stupid
letters and Monty's convenience were very minor matters. The really
important thing was her own letters. Some little delay her change of
address was bound to entail; but if, after "1," "2," and "3" there must
be a short pause, "4," "5" and the rest would arrive all in one blissful
bag. And, pending her receipt of them, there was no reason why she
should cease to write letters.
So, accompanied by the letter-case with the new lock on it, down to the
shore she took the children on the first two mornings (which is
something of a journey, by the way), and back in the afternoon she came
to high tea at half-past four. On the first day she did not even trouble
to walk on to the little post-office-shop. But on the second day she
did, returning empty-handed to boiled fowl and white sauce, tall piles
of Santon bread and Santon butter and Santon jam, pints of hot tea from
the luster pot under the haystack cosy, and the children's clamor:--
"I saw a jellyfish as big as a cart-wheel!"
"'N Jimmy found seven starfishes!"
"I found _eight_ starfishes!"
"'N I waded out till the water came right up to here!"
"'N I saw a polar bear----"
"Oh, Jimmy, what a story! You've just made that up this minute!"
This last in bell-voiced reproof from Joan. At twenty she still
corrected and disputed with them as a rather larger equal.
III
They had arrived at Santon at half-past eight on a Thursday night,
and after tea on the Saturday Joan walked up to the little
coastguard-station on the hill. Aeroplanes were not unknown on that wide
uplifted promontory, and it would not in the least surprise her if
presently, say in another week or so, Chummy, finding himself within a
mere fifty miles, were to drop in unannounced. He had in fact said so,
in the last letter but four. He had not been able to see her off at the