Boldly, he began to turn the brass handle set in the side of the oak box.
The carriage was gradually emptying, as at each station the train stopped and people got up and left. He spoke to as many of his fellow passengers as possible within the limitations of his schoolboy French, and their reticence. Some of the people he spoke to travelled on the line regularly, but none could recall Le Prince as he described him – a tall, dark man with luxuriant Dundreary whiskers carrying a large box with brass fittings.
‘Six mois auparavant? Non, c’est impossible. There are times I cannot even recall my own wife’s name. Though that can be an advantage sometimes. Eh, monsieur?’
Potter was glad when the toothless and odorous peasant who wished to regale him with his amatory exploits on market days finally reached his stop. He looked out at the station, wondering if Le Prince had got this far.
Sens. An elegantly dressed man got on and sat opposite him.
The rain was teeming down now, and heavy droplets of water tracked slowly across the window. First they ran diagonally, driven by the forward motion of the train. He was only half aware of them out of the corner of his eye, for his gaze was still mainly on the inverted image in the viewfinder. He cranked the handle knowing that the film would soon be finished, fearing that the spell might then be broken. There was a burning sensation in his mouth and throat, and he craved a drink to soothe it. His heart was pounding once again in his chest, and he felt faint. He glanced up, and the man’s eyes once again glowed murderously. He had to avert his gaze, and saw that the gobs of rainwater on the window were tracking almost vertically.
The train was coming to a halt.
The binding of the brakes woke Albert Potter from a doze, and he grasped the moquette-covered arm of his seat tightly as the carriage juddered to a halt. The elegant man opposite pitched forwards involuntarily.
He held his arm protectively round his moving-picture camera as the train lurched to a stop. And in the viewfinder he saw the tall, thin man leaping towards him across the carriage, his Inverness cape flapping like the wings of a bat. There was only one more thing he could do.
Potter looked out of the window onto darkness, seeing nothing more than his own reflection. On this occasion the image was of perplexity.
‘Monsieur. Please, why have we stopped? There is no station.’
The elegantly dressed Parisian opposite, who had nearly been thrown into Potter’s lap by the motion of the train, brushed off the dust that had settled on his grey, fur-trimmed pilot coat from the rack above his head and smiled wearily. He explained with a resigned nod of his coiffured head that the train always stopped here.
‘It is for another train – where the lines cross. The driver knows he must stop, but it seems the signal always comes as a surprise to him. Hence the…’
A vague Gallic wave of his wrist finished the sentence, describing with a twirl of the fingers the abrupt stop to which they had come. Potter could well imagine that it would have thrown an unwary passenger facing the rear of the train out of his seat. He was glad his fellow traveller had braced himself, and done nothing more than steady himself with a hand on Potter’s knee.
It was as he settled back in his seat that he realised the Frenchman had said something quite important. Potter lunged for his travelling bag, and staggered to his feet just as he felt the train start up again. Under the astonished gaze of the man, he flung open the carriage door and dropped down into the darkness.
He stumbled as he fell down onto the trackside, twisting his ankle. It buckled under him, and both his carpetbag and camera flew from his grasp, and disappeared into the darkness. He continued to tumble head over heels down the slippery embankment, bushes tearing at his clothes. His fall was broken by his landing on something soft in the damp gully at the bottom of the slope. It was his own bag, which had burst open to disgorge his clothes into the gully. A dress shirt drifted away from him on the rising water in the muddy channel. He sat up, wiped the rain out of his eyes, and watched the lights of the train gliding away from him. He was now committed to his course of action.
Potter picked himself up out of the muddy ditch, and realised what a mad thing he had done. But he still reckoned it could be no less than Le Prince had done six months before. If the police had not been able to find any trace of him getting off at the stations down the line between Dijon and Paris, it stood to reason that this must have been the only possible place that Le Prince could have alighted. The elegant Parisian had said the train always stopped here. While it had stood waiting in the dark for the passage of another train on the down line, Le Prince must have, for whatever reason, jumped down from the carriage with his bag and moving-picture camera. Had he been fleeing from someone, and what had been his pursuer’s motive?
Potter turned up the collar of his muddied overcoat, hefted his bag, and clambered out of the gully. He found himself on a rutted, country road, and stood at the roadside, debating which way to follow it. Where would Le Prince have gone? While he stood considering this dilemma, he was aware of a glimmer of light flickering through the trees to his left, and thought at first it was a carriage coming his way. He determined to hail it, and hoped the driver would stop for a mud-covered madman who had just jumped off the Paris train in the middle of nowhere. Then he realised the apparent movement of the light was caused by the swaying of trees, whipped back and forth by the driving wind. The yellowish light was coming from the windows of a large house set far back in thick woodland.
He decided he needed to get out of the pouring rain, and walked along the road a few hundred yards until he found the driveway to the house. Two crumbling pillars loomed out of the darkness, both leaning at too precarious an angle to support the wrought-iron gates properly. These hung open, their bottom edges dug deep into the weed-covered driveway, clearly not having been moved for years. There was no indication on the pillars as to the name of the house, nor its owners. Potter hoped that, whoever they were, they would take pity on a damp and hungry traveller.
The driveway was as unkempt as the gateway, and Potter’s only hope that the place was actually inhabited rested on the fact that he had seen lights in the upper rooms from the road. And as he approached the gloomy facade of the edifice, he was relieved to see at least one light still shining from one of the windows above the main portico. He was not so sure about wanting to place himself at the mercy of the inhabitants when he heard an unearthly scream emanating from the darkness above him.
When Potter had asked Doctor Gaston whether a tall, dark-haired man had appeared on the doorstep of his asylum six months ago, much in the same way he had done this night, Gaston had stared pensively into space for a long time. His eyes, when they had returned to stare at Potter, glittered darkly.
‘I am afraid not. People very rarely choose to visit us voluntarily, you understand.’ He had smiled knowingly, and by way of further explanation waved his hand to take in the dark, desolate chateau. ‘The relatives of those patients who…’ He strove to find a suitable word, one not tainted with the stain of incarceration, ‘…those patients…residing with us, pay as much as they can. But the upkeep of the chateau is so crippling that it is difficult to maintain it to the standards of its former residents…’