The Best British Mysteries III

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.

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.

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.

Sens. They were halfway to Paris already. Why didn’t they stay with him and enjoy the pleasures of the capital? If they stayed on with him to the terminus, he would treat them to a meal at Maxim’s. And pay for a stay in a luxurious hotel for the night, if only they would stay on the train. Who wanted to finish their day in dreary old Sens? He would even offer to take their picture with his new camera – immortalise them on Dr Marey’s new celluloid film. His pleas boiled in his brain, but remained unspoken, and the elderly couple descended slowly from the carriage, and were gone. The heavy camera box felt like an unbearable burden on his lap.

But their departure left him with an idea – a final defence. He surreptitiously turned the camera around on his lap until the two lenses in the front of the box pointed across the carriage at his tormentor. Though the stock inside the box was brittle, unlike the new celluloid, he had to hope it might work. He peered in the viewfinder set in the top, looking steadily at the image inverted in the little brass frame. Strangely, the intervention of the lenses between him and the man calmed him, as though the lens had captured and reduced the man to manageable proportions. He was able for the first time to look directly at him. No longer were his eyes so demonic, his posture so threatening. He was simply a tall, nondescript man sitting on a train, bored by the long journey, and anxious to return to his family in Paris.

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…’

Potter, almost dozing off at the drone of Gaston’s monologue on the causes of madness, suddenly realised the doctor was making a suggestion about his search for Le Prince.

‘You know, it is no surprise to me that this man you are seeking…’

‘Le Prince.’

‘…Le Prince, disappeared. Little is known about the effects of cyanide on those who indulge in the science of photography.’

Potter frowned.

‘What has cyanide to do with this case, doctor? Are you suggesting that Le Prince had been poisoned?’

Doctor Gaston smiled. ‘Let me explain. About forty years ago, a man called Archer discovered that a substance called collodion made an excellent surface for photographic images. In order to fix this image, a solution was required, and most photographers used a weak solution of cyanide of potassium, silver nitrate, and water. Unfortunately, this solution is highly poisonous, and should not be allowed to touch broken skin, nor should the fumes be inhaled. Many people have died as a result of their interest in taking photographs.’

Potter remembered Albert Le Prince’s comment about his brother’s use of collodion, and being immersed in chemicals.

‘What are the symptoms of cyanide poisoning?’

‘Initially, headaches, faintness, anxiety. Often the sufferer has a burning sensation in his mouth. Later, he will suffer attacks of excitement, anxiety, and increased heart rate.’

‘And finally?’

‘Coma, convulsions, paralysis…and death. Inevitably – death.’

‘You seem to know a lot about the subject.’

‘Oh yes. I have been making a study of the progression of the symptoms, and have observed several research subjects in this very house.’

Potter shuddered at the apparent callousness of the doctor, and his reference to the demented, poisoned souls as simply subjects for his research.

‘Then, if he did jump from the train that day, what were his chances?’

The doctor sighed.

‘If he tried to hide somewhere, and the later stages of cyanide poisoning took effect – heart arrhythmia, respiratory depression – then he undoubtedly would have died a lonely and painful death.’

‘And I am wasting my time. Fancy imagining him pursued and murdered by rivals, when in fact he was simply being persecuted by his own deranged imagination.’

‘Not in the least. Our chance meeting has provided you with the most likely fate for the unfortunate Monsieur Le Prince. Break it to his wife gently.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Please, there is a village a kilometre down the road, Monsieur Potter – Pont-sur-Vanne – I will arrange for my assistant to take you there in the carriage.’

When Potter made a token protest at the inconvenience, Dr Gaston brushed it aside.

‘It is better you do not stay here tonight. My patients can be…unsettled by strangers.’

So it was that Potter readily agreed to the doctor’s offer of transport as he now felt his search was over. He thought it likely that Le Prince, doped with accidental cyanide poisoning, had fallen from the train and been killed. At the very least, he would have been seriously injured, and perhaps had crawled away into the woods only to succumb to cyanide and the elements soon afterwards. He shivered at the thought that Le Prince’s fate could easily have been his own.

It was thus with some relief that he took his leave of the doctor and his forbidding residence, looking back only briefly to see the man standing in front of the portico, lit by the flickering lantern he held above his head. Then Potter sighed and settled back in his seat, looking forward to finding a warm dry hotel in the nearby village.

Dr Gaston, lantern in hand, waved goodbye to the Englishman, then mounted the steps back into his domain. He closed the creaky front door of the asylum against the elements. Taking a bunch of keys from his pocket, he carefully locked the door, turned, and crossed the vast, echoing hallway. The darkness hung heavy, like the cobwebs that adorned the upper of the high ceiling, but the lantern cast enough light for the doctor to see his way. Besides, he knew the house like the back of his hand now. To one side of the still imposing staircase that curved up into the darkness of the upper floors there was a secret door made to resemble the wall in which it was cut. He fumbled another key on the ring into the lock and stepped through the door, closing it behind him.

He heard a very familiar shriek. Descending the stairs that took him down to part of the warren of cellars under the chateau, he stopped at another locked door. The moaning came from behind this door. There was a shutter in the upper part of the door, and he slid it gently back. He looked at his latest research subject, and felt firm in his resolution to harbour the secret of his existence. The worth to science, and to Gaston’s reputation, would be inestimable. He watched as the lunatic repeated his strange compulsion over and over again.

The man with the bushy Dundreary whiskers, now somewhat obscured by the full growth of beard on his chin, stared wide-eyed in terror at the illuminated square cast on the wall of his cell. He appeared transfixed by what he saw. In the corner of the room lay an oak box, bound with brass. Unfortunately, the brass had not saved the contents of the box from destruction in some sort of accident. One that Gaston now knew as the man’s leap from the Paris train. The box rattled when shaken, but the man refused to relinquish it.

The occupant of the room screamed, and the doctor slid the shutter closed. He knew the cycle was now going to be repeated over again. And he longed to know what the man saw on the wall, where there was only a feeble square of light cast by the lamp he insisted on keeping burning all hours of the day and night. A blank patch of yellow light that terrified him. The doctor shook his head in bewilderment.

Louis sat mesmerised by the projected image of his persecutor on the wall. It was as real as reality itself. Like so many times before, the tall, thin man in the Inverness cape was sitting opposite him on the train, fixing him with his steely eyes. They were alone in the carriage. Slowly, that eternal, predatory leer formed on his face, and his silent lips formed the words, ‘Give me the camera, Monsieur Le Prince.’ Louis’s heart sank. He could not take his eyes off the man, trying as he had done so many times to fix the man’s features with his gaze. But the image was blurred, and lost in shadow, like a poorly developed photograph, sitting hopelessly in a tray of fixative. The only hope was to add more cyanide of potassium to it. He stared, knowing what was coming next, anticipating the inevitable.

The image shook, just as the camera had when the train had braked sharply, and the tall, thin man threw himself at Louis. The man’s face filled the screen as Louis swung the camera at his head, a sickening crunch jarring him to the elbow. Then the image shifted jerkily to a shot of the carriage door, swinging open, and he was enveloped in the flapping wings of the man’s cape. Under the dead weight of the body, Le Prince plunged into the darkness. He screamed.