‘Are you all right, Porrick, old chap?’ It was Hartmann, fussing over the fallen businessman.
‘I tripped over something. Kirkwood, are you sure we can’t muster a light in here? I wouldn’t want anyone else to come a cropper. Mademoiselle Eloise, for example.’
‘There may be some candles in the box office. I shall investigate.’ The scrape of phosphor against sandpaper gave a brief moment of match light as Kirkwood located the box office and headed off towards it. The match went out before he reached his destination. But before too long a second was struck, and in its brief flare, the candles were found.
Kirkwood came back holding two lighted candles, one of which he gave to Diaz, the other he waved vaguely towards Porrick, who was sitting on the floor groping blindly around him. ‘I’ve lost the keys. They were in my hand and I dropped them.’
He gave a sudden cry of disgust. His hand had found something unpleasant, it seemed. ‘Bring that candle down here, will you, Kirkwood.’
The accountant moved swiftly to obey. The candle flame flickered and left a swathe of light in its trail, demonstrating the principle of the persistence of vision upon which they all depended for their livelihoods.
And now they could all see what Porrick’s hand had found. A tin box lay on its side, its lid splayed open, the contents tipped out. Waechter felt his mouth twitch up in a tight curl of satisfaction. The animal hadn’t been dead long. Its little legs stuck out stiffly as if it had been frozen in mid bound. Its loathsome snout was stuck open as if it had choked on one last detestable yelp.
‘Scudder!’ cried Porrick.
They came back out blinking into the sorry light. All except for Waechter who kept his eye closed, savouring the darkness in which his imagination flourished. He had enough of a sense of direction to carry him on to the pavement without having to look where he was going. He knew that Porrick was clutching the black tin box. He knew that the dog was inside it. In his mind’s eye, he could see both the outside of the box and its grim contents.
He was aware of a car pulling up at speed in front of them. He opened his eye to see the rear door fly open and the troublesome detective bound out.
‘Konrad Waechter. You will come with us, please. We have some questions we wish to put to you.’
The car they had brought for him was as black as a hearse. He felt that if he accepted the detective’s invitation he would be taken to some dark place from which he would never return. He imagined an oubliette in the basement of Scotland Yard.
Before he got into the car, he tried to catch Berenger’s eye. But his leading man avoided meeting his own singular gaze, so studiously that he must have believed it cursed.
FORTY-THREE
Quinn had Inchball and Macadam escort Waechter to the Special Crimes Department, rather than an interview room. The projector and rheostat were still set up there. It was the most convenient place to show him Totentanz.
‘Vy are you showing me this? I make this film. You think I haff not seen it before?’
‘I would like you to watch the final scene carefully. You are familiar with the final scene?’
‘Off coursse! I tell you, I make this film.’
Quinn walked over to the patch of glowing movement on the wall. At a prearranged moment, Macadam stopped the mechanism, so that a single frozen image was projected on the wall. Quinn pointed to the woman whom he had last seen being led away from Cecil Court as he held her eye in a handkerchief. ‘You see this woman?’
‘Ja.’
‘She is the woman who was attacked last Friday.’
Waechter waited a beat before replying: ‘She vos not attacked.’
‘Her eye was not gouged out of its socket?’
‘Nein.’
‘I held it in my hand.’
‘Zat is vot you beleeff. But it is not vot happened.’
‘Who is she?’
‘She is eine … actress. Her name is Lyudmila Lyudmova.’
‘A Russian?’
‘Off coursse.’
‘I don’t understand. I looked into the empty socket where her eye had been. I saw … I saw the black emptiness there.’
Waechter shrugged. ‘She lost her eye when she vos a child. In Totentanz she has glass eye. You can see. Her eyes do not alvays look … um … too-gehtter.’
‘Well, blow me, she’s boss-eyed!’ exclaimed Inchball.
‘Ja. Is so. There vos no attack. It vos … ein Streich, ein trick, ein gag, ja?’
Suddenly a detail from the night, which had troubled Quinn in his dreams, made sense. ‘Her eye was the wrong colour.’
Waechter let out a rueful laugh. ‘Is true?’
‘Yes. The eye I retrieved was brown. But her eye, the eye on her face, was blue, I believe.’
‘He would not think about that! We are too used to working in black and vite!’
‘He? Are you saying that you are not responsible for this grotesque prank?’
‘No. I knew nothing of it until the night. And then I keep silent because I knew that it had been done for the best of motives. A harmless prank. Maybe it would help to promote our film. But most, I be-leeff, it vos intended to make me lahh-ff.’
‘Make you laugh?’ Inchball’s eyes bulged in disgust.
‘I be-leeff so.’
Quinn turned away from the projected image and faced Waechter. He found his attention focused on the inky pool of blackness that was the Austrian’s eye patch. ‘Why would it make you laugh? Wouldn’t it be more likely to cause you pain?’
Waechter’s hand flew up to his eye patch. ‘Because of this?’ Waechter lifted the patch. Quinn felt his heart hammer. Once again he was going to stare into the potent darkness of an empty eye socket. But even in the chiaroscuro of the semi-darkened room, he could make out that what he expected to see was not there. There was not an absence of an eye, but an eye. The softly spreading beam of the projector revealed Waechter to be the possessor of a full complement of gleaming eyes. ‘I do not lose my eye in a duel. I do not even lose my vision.’
‘But when I asked you about your eye before, you told me that a splinter from a gunshot robbed you of it?’
Waechter shrugged. ‘To me, it vos not any of your business.’
‘So why do you wear the patch?’
‘Symbolisch. I vear this to show how I am damaged.’
‘It is a deception.’
‘No. It is a confession.’
‘So. Who? Who is he? The man who thought you would find this funny.’
‘I do not know for sure. For that reason, I would rather not say. To make accusations mit no foundations, it is not gut.’
‘Berenger? I noticed the way you looked at him when we came to arrest you.’
‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Macadam. ‘May I start the film running again? I am nervous about holding it on one frame for too long in case it combusts.’
‘By all means, Macadam. Run it to the other point we discussed.’
The action moved forward a few frames and juddered to a halt once more. Quinn pointed out the actor playing the director of the lunatic asylum. ‘This is the man who escorted her away. Is he the one responsible?’
‘Zat is Heinrich. Heinrich Klint. He is not responsible.’
Quinn nodded to Macadam to continue running the film. ‘You must have known when you sent this film over that we would see them and recognize them.’
‘It had gone on long enough. It started as an innocent prank.’
‘Wasting police time! They are all three of them culpable. This woman, Lyudmila … Klint. Conspirators in an offence.’