The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  Potter beamed at the presumed widow, detecting in her voice something of a northern accent. ‘A native of these parts, then?’

  Elizabeth Le Prince smiled coyly and fidgeted a little with the beaded reticule on her lap. She wore a fashionable cream blouse and full skirt of deepest pink, edged in white lace, with a matching bolero jacket. Potter guessed that her dress was a statement of her belief that her husband still lived. No widow’s weeds for this woman. Potter reassured her that it was possible her missing husband was still alive. But his private opinion was that, after six months, perhaps Le Prince, even alive, had no wish to return to his wife. Other attractions, principally female, must have been the cause of his disappearance. Elizabeth Le Prince seemed to read Potter’s mind.

  ‘I am certain that my husband hasn’t left me for another woman, Mr Potter.’

  ‘Albert, please’

  ‘He was - is - entirely faithful to me, Albert. I would know if he had not been.’

  Potter wondered how many women had said that of secretly philandering husbands just before the bombshell landed. But he shelved that line of enquiry for the moment in deference to the woman’s feelings.

  ‘You say that Mr Le Prince was in France on family business? What was that exactly?’

  ‘He was collecting his share of a small inheritance, I believe.’

  So he was not short of cash, and dodging creditors by hiding away somewhere. Quite the opposite - he was a good mark for a robbery, in fact. But if he had been murdered during a robbery, then where was his body, and his baggage? The man had apparently disappeared into the blue - lock, stock and barrel. The Great Maskelyne could not have performed better in his magic act on the stage of the Leeds Hippodrome.

  ‘What was Mr Le Prince working on when he left you...for France, that is? I understand he was a photographer.’

  The woman smiled in a proprietorial manner.

  ‘My husband was...is a genius, Mr Potter. He was making moving pictures.’

  * * * *

  Potter didn’t fancy becoming Dr Gaston’s next guinea pig. Therefore, so as not to be thought mad, he did not tell this doctor of lunatics of Le Prince’s secret work with moving pictures. Until a few days ago, he would have thought anyone mad who had claimed to have seen what he then had with his own eyes.

  In fact, two matters had disturbed Albert Potter about his trip to Leeds. One was that he had missed his surprise rendezvous with Rosalind Wells. She had apparently cut her business short and disappeared God knows where - he hoped not as finally as had Le Prince. And the other - and a much more powerful one, he had to admit - was that of the remarkable images he had watched in the darkened room that had been Louis Le Prince’s workshop. Like any red-blooded male, Potter had seen the jerky simulation of movement that presented itself down the periscope of a hand-cranked machine on the end of Southend Pier. But those flickering cards that always ended frustratingly before the lady had fully disrobed (he guessed because the attendant had removed the last cards of the sequence for his own delectation) - those simulacra were as nothing to the image that Mrs Le Prince had projected onto the wall of the curtained room.

  It had been as though a window had suddenly opened onto the street beyond the blank wall, cleaving it apart. A foggy, greyish window, but a window nonetheless. And Potter sat dumbfounded as the mundane street scene of horse-drawn trams and people - real people scurried across the wall. They moved in a perfect imitation of reality, then jerked back to where they had been and scurried again, following the self-same route as before. Mesmerised, he watched them repeat their passage through time again and again, asking Mrs Le Prince, like some all-powerful God, to cause their movements to be repeated innumerable times until she was afraid the reel of collodion-sensitive paper would buckle and catch fire.

  Sunk in thought as he recalled this phenomenon, Potter picked at the remains of the cold collation that a surly servant had brought him at Dr Gaston’s behest. He left it to the doctor to break the silence.

  ‘You say you followed in the unfortunate Monsieur Le Prince’s footsteps, and they brought you here to my...institution?’

  Potter nodded, and began to explain that he had started by traveling to Dijon, and speaking to the last man known to have seen Louis Le Prince alive. His brother.

  * * * *

  As Albert Potter shook M. Le Prince’s hand at the Dijon station, he was aware of just how uncanny it was to be so exactly repeating the actions of the man he sought. Le Prince’s brother, who coincidentally was named Albert, too, but pronounced in the Continental way, now stood before him seeing him off on the Paris-bound train. He had not been able to help Potter much at all, merely confirming that Louis had been a little nervous and overexcited.

  ‘But I put that down to the, er...camera device he was carrying with him.’

  ‘Camera device?’

  Albert Le Prince grimaced, the wrinkling of his nose conveying the condescension with which he clearly viewed his sibling. Potter had been painfully aware of this enmity from the moment he met Le Prince’s brother. Indeed, it had crossed his mind that Albert Le Prince could be considered a suspect in the possible murder. He would need to check out further whether Louis Le Prince did indeed receive the inheritance he had travelled to Dijon to collect. He turned no more than a polite ear to the man’s prattling.

  ‘My brother was...obsessed with photography. He had a perfectly good job working for his brother-in-law’s engineering firm. They manufactured wallpaper, you know. But he immersed himself in his...hobby of taking pictures. Quite literally immersed more often than not he was up to his elbows in all sorts of smelly and dangerous chemicals. His latest tomfoolery was to do with making these photographs move, like some...peep show.’

  Potter refrained from telling the brother that it was not tomfoolery - he had seen the magic performed himself. He was reminded of the continuous loop that was the film he had watched with Mrs Le Prince. Her husband had trapped a moment in time which could be repeated over and over again, making each action on the screen susceptible to being studied from different angles until every iota of information was drained from it. It would have made his detecting job so much easier if he could have done the same with Le Prince’s disappearance. If someone had been standing at the station, as Potter was now, six months on, at 2.42 p.m. on the sixteenth of September, 1890, taking a moving picture of Le Prince shaking his brother’s hand - as Potter was now - matters might have been different.

  ‘And you think this camera was for taking moving pictures?’

  M. Le Prince snorted. ‘You have not been taken in by my brother’s trickery as well, have you? Of course it could not take moving pictures. You might as well suggest the Mona Lisa could rise from her chair and depart the frame in which she sits. He said there was just one more problem to solve before it worked properly.’

  A supercilious sneer contorted Le Prince’s face, and he tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially.

  ‘There was always just one more problem for Louis to solve. I doubt that this one was the last, though he claimed to have come to a solution.’

  The clanking giant steamed into the station, and for a while the noise of the massive engine’s passing prevented any form of conversation between the two men. Then Albert Le Prince was all hustle and bustle, apparently all too eager to get rid of the meddling Englishman. Should he be added to Potter’s extremely short list of suspects? As he climbed on board the train, Potter felt a hand placed lightly on his arm. He turned to look back, hoping for a last-minute revelation.

  Le Prince grinned fatuously at him. ‘Please try not to disappear like Louis.’

  Potter hung off the rear of the carriage as the train pulled away, irritated by the man’s flippancy. After all, his brother’s body might still be lying unburied by the trackside even now. A final thought occurred to him, and he called out to the receding figure.

  ‘What was the problem he claimed to have solved? Did Louis say?’

  He could barely make o
ut what Albert Le Prince was saying through the echoes of the engine in the cavernous station.

  ‘Yes...new medium...celluloid...from Dr Marey, in Paris.’

  At the time this meant nothing to Potter, and he settled in his seat, trying to put himself inside the mind of Le Prince.

  * * * *

  He knew he was being followed from the moment he boarded the 2.42 p.m. train for Paris. He fingered his stiff celluloid collar, feeling the dampness of his fear. The station at Dijon was bustling with people, and everyone seemed engrossed in their own business. The accidental intersection of all their lives held no significance for anyone. But there was one particular fellow traveller - a tall, thin man enveloped in a long Inverness-cape coat - who was always hovering just on the limits of his vision. He could see the man over his brother’s shoulder, as he shook his hand in farewell. Then, as he made his way to the platform, there was the man again; lurking behind the line of pillars that supported the ornate station roof. As if to confirm his fears, the man turned away just as he fixed him with a stare, tipping his felt bowler over his angular features.

  Then, in a cloud of hissing steam, the engine pulled in, and doors were flung open as the train began to disgorge its passengers. For a moment he lost sight of the man in the milling crowd, and he waved to his brother, then concentrated on seeking out a free seat. He passed his bag to the porter on the steps of the nearest carriage, and pulled himself up on the handrail, keeping the box he was carrying to himself for safety. He suddenly had a sense of being watched, and looked along the length of the train uneasily. Several people were mounting the steps up to the other carriages, rushing now to escape a sudden flurry of rain. There was no sign of the tall, thin man. Then, leaning out of the nearest window, he spotted a flapping cape through the clouds of steam. The man was making a decisive move down the platform in order to get in the same carriage that he himself had chosen. He hugged the exquisitely carpentered box closer to his chest, feeling the metal mount of the lens pressing into him. He hunched his shoulders as he moved along the carriage, trying in vain to hide, for he stood well over six feet.

  The porter was already stowing his other hand baggage - a well-worn carpetbag valise that had survived the rough handling of careless North American porters - on the luggage rack above an empty seat. He didn’t want to sit down - he felt more like getting off the train and running for his life. The porter looked at him curiously, and waved an officious hand at the vacant seat. He recognised the imperious nature of all petty officials from this the country of his birth, and knew he would have to comply. Reluctantly, he sat down, reaching into his pocket for some money - a tip being the inevitable next part of the joint conspiracy. Pleased at his control of the passenger, the porter took the proffered coin and turned his officious attentions to the other sheeplike passengers.

  For a moment he fidgeted nervously, rubbing the irritating open sore on his left hand, making it bleed again. Then he steeled himself to look up from his studious examination of his rain-spattered shoes. The tall, thin man, who had run the length of the platform to get in the same coach, was now sitting himself down right across from him! The man was brushing the rain from the shoulders of his cape, and smiled as their eyes met. And what a smile! Disdain, complicity, pity - all epithets seemed inadequate to describe it. He struggled to find the right word, and eventually settled on the right one.

  Predatory.

  The man’s hook of a nose reminded him of the buzzards that drifted on the updrafts over the Yorkshire crags, looking for easy pickings. He hunched in on himself and racked his brain for what his next move should be.

  * * * *

  Despite all his attempts at entering the mind of the man he sought, Albert kept drifting off to his amatory campaign concerning Rosalind Wells. Potter had come across her at a meeting of the Fabians three years earlier, and had been bowled over by her imperious manner. And her shapely figure and big brown eyes. She was somewhat German-looking - a trait that was fashionable amongst the intellectuals with whom Albert fancied he belonged. So Potter had pressed his suit in his usual blunt way. He was at first mortified that she professed not to be aware of this, but that had not deterred him, nor blunted the ardour of his campaign. He had known from the start that he was the perfect match for her - it would just take some time to convince her of the fact. What the eye saw was not always the full picture.

  He gazed admiringly at his own reflection in the window, only half noticing the build-up of dark, heavy clouds outside the carriage. His rather short torso and legs obscured, the image that stared back was of a man with a thick mane of hair and luxuriant moustache and goatee beard. He preened a little, then began to doze off in the stuffy carriage.

  * * * *

  He was beginning to sweat heavily, and his head pounded in rhythm with the thump of the train’s motion along the track. His persecutor sat diagonally opposite him, mocking him with a leer every time he looked up. The sharp-faced man had not removed his curly-brimmed bowler, and a shadow hung over his brow. But it did not conceal the man’s eyes. They glowed like red-hot coals at the fiery base of a furnace.

  He clutched his stiff collar, trying to loosen it as his breathing became more and more difficult. His heart pounded faster in his chest, and his lungs strained to draw in the suddenly thick, clammy air of the railway carriage. He was suffocating - why did the other passengers not feel the same? Everyone else in the carriage seemed oblivious to his condition. In fact, he realised they were blurring out of focus as if seen through a badly adjusted camera lens. He blinked his eyes trying to clear his vision, but it was no use. The only face he could see clearly was that of the tall, thin man opposite as he leaned forward and said something to him. The words were lost in their own echoes, and he squeezed his eyes shut to close out the man’s mocking face. A series of juddering crashes jarred through his body, and he almost cried out loud in fear.

  His eyes flew open.

  Then he realised the commotion was merely the train crossing the familiar set of junctions in the outer suburbs of Dijon. Almost at once the train settled to a more soothing rhythm, and he composed himself. He told himself he was being foolish - it was mere coincidence that this innocent man had seemed to dog his footsteps around the station. Like him, the man had been waiting for the Paris train, so it was only reasonable to assume they would have both been in the same places at the same time. Even the man’s dash for the very carriage he had chosen could be explained by his wish to avoid the downpour which had suddenly swept the uncovered platform further up the stationary train.

  No, he was imagining things, without a doubt.

  In an effort to normalise the situation, he even forced himself to look directly at the man and squeeze a smile onto his parched, dry lips. The man spoke, but again the words did not register:

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I was saying, you look a little pale, a little sickly. Perhaps that box on your lap is restricting your circulation. It does look very heavy. Here, let me take it from you.’

  His loud protests, as he clutched the box even more tightly to his chest, keeping it from the outstretched hands of the man, cut through the other passengers’ indifference. Now everyone in the carriage was giving him a curious and pitying look. His moment of calm was shattered, and he pressed as far back in his seat as possible, wishing for it to swallow him up. His mind raced once more as he plotted a possible escape from the tall, thin man, who was firmly fixed once again in his mind as the destroyer of all his dreams, the thief of all his hopes.

  * * * *

  Potter woke with a start as the train rumbled over a set of points. He had been dreaming, and couldn’t shake off the image of Le Prince being pursued by someone. A man who wanted Le Prince’s invention. If Le Prince had truly created a moving-picture camera, and solved the problem of the medium on which to fix the images, then there would be those who wanted it. Either to claim it as their own, or to stifle it and promote their own invention. Mrs Le Prince had said the
American inventor Edison was working in the same field as her husband.

  If Potter was to solve this riddle, though, he had to work out how Le Prince, or his supposed assailant, come to that, had disappeared into thin air. Potter had got off the train at every station on the way down from Paris to Dijon, and spoken briefly with each stationmaster. Every one had been certain - as they had during the police enquiry only weeks after the disappearance - that no one resembling Louis Le Prince had alighted at their station. Now Potter was travelling back along the same line, no wiser after his interview with Albert Le Prince than he had been at the start of it all.

  * * * *

  As the train rumbled through the peaceful countryside, he felt more and more agitated. The carriage was gradually emptying, as at each station the train stopped, and people got up and left. Soon, he would be left alone with the tall, thin man in his voluminous cape. And he could not begin to imagine what was on the man’s mind, for his dark, glowing eyes betrayed nothing but emptiness. He felt pinned to his seat by their steely gaze, and when the train slowed for the next station, and their final two travelling companions rose to leave, he could do nothing. He wanted to leap up, grasp the elderly couple’s arms, and convince them to stay. Perhaps he could suggest they alter their plans to get out at.. .where was it? He spotted the station sign as the train juddered to a halt.