Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

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.