Again the strangled syllables, words that sounded like ‘right man’.
She knelt down and whispered straight into his protuberant ear.
‘Oh no, you didn’t hang the right man, Dad. I killed her myself. Not because I was involved with her husband. Men don’t attract me. Not as a service to my mistress, though I’m fond of her, and was glad to be of help. I killed her because I’m your daughter. There is something in me that wants to kill, and gets pleasure from killing when the time comes. It’s in the blood, Dad. I have an appetite for killing. I get it from you.’
The Moving-Picture Mystery by Ian Morson
When the young French doctor returned, Albert Potter thought he looked agitated. Noticing the Englishman’s stare, he begged his guest to excuse his state of mind.
‘You will have to forgive me, Monsieur Potter. I was attending to a patient. He gets a little…agitated when the wind howls in the trees. He thinks it is the Devil come to take him away. I have given him a sedative, and he will sleep now.’
Dr Gaston was a young man in his twenties – too young, Albert Potter thought, to be in charge of even a French lunatic asylum. But then who, with a reputation already earned, or a family to keep, would be prepared to hide himself away in this crumbling mausoleum of a place in the middle of nowhere? The good doctor, on the other hand, seemed to find his charges fascinating, and had explained he was writing a thesis on the causes of neurasthenia and dementia praecox.
‘Now, please, tell me about this man you are seeking.’
Uneasy at the predatory glitter in the doctor’s eyes, Potter tried to pull together in his mind all the events of the last few days. His own actions of the last few hours had not been all that rational, and he did not wish to seem entirely mad. After all, he was supposed to have been making sense of Louis Le Prince’s actions. Potter realised at that very moment that, though he had traced the man’s last journey meticulously, he had not sufficiently researched his habits and peculiarities. Nor his extraordinary invention, and the possible enemies it had created.
His mind drifted back to the meeting that had brought him to this remote asylum on the edge of a village that didn’t even merit a stop on the main steam-train line between Dijon and Paris…
Albert Potter had been recommended to Mrs Le Prince as a young man of good character, forceful manner, and dogged determination who would find her husband if he was to be found. But more important to Potter than all those encomiums was the undisclosed reason for his proposed services – the state of his pocket. He was in dire need of funds. His remuneration as a clerk at the Colonial Office was satisfactory for a single man such as he was at present. But Albert had other ambitions, and they chiefly concerned the beautiful and well-connected Rosalind Wells.
Of course, he was no fool. He knew he was short and ungainly, with a head too big for his body. Indeed he had winced when once he had accidentally overheard Rosalind referring to him, to one of her friends, as ‘that tadpole of a man’. But his ego was as large as his body was small, and when he set his mind to something, he usually got what he wanted. And Rosalind Wells was what he wanted.
So now he found himself in need of funds, and when someone told him of Mrs Le Prince and her search for her missing husband, he had travelled immediately up to Leeds. Private investigation had always piqued his curiosity, and the opportunity for travel this matter afforded was alluring. Besides, Rosalind Wells was in Leeds talking to trade-union organisers for the Fabian Society. Later, he would surprise her with his presence, but first he had to address the matter in hand.
‘You say your husband simply disappeared while on the Dijon-to-Paris train, Madame Le Prince?’
‘I am as English as you are, Mr Potter, so it’s Mrs Le Prince, please. Or indeed, Elizabeth, if you prefer.’
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.