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 out 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.