When he arrived—on this occasion strictly on time—he found the girl in a calm, even a cheerful mood, and his quick eye detected upon her finger a ring of surprising brilliance that he had not seen before. Dick Gordon had made very good use of his spare time that morning.
“I feel I’m neglecting my business, Elk,” he said after he had led them into the palatial dining-room of the Auto, and had found a cushion for the girl’s back, and had placed her chair exactly where it was least comfortable, “but I guess you’ve got through the morning without feeling my loss.”
“I certainly have,” said Elk. “A very interesting morning. There is a smallpox scare in the East End,” he went on, “and I’ve heard some talk at Headquarters of having the whole staff vaccinated. If there’s one thing that I do not approve of, it is vaccination. At my time of life I ought to be immune from any germ that happens to be going round.”
The girl laughed.
“Poor Mr. Elk! I sympathize with you. Ray and I had a dreadful time when we were vaccinated about five years ago during the big epidemic, although I didn’t have so bad a time as Ray. And neither of us had such an experience as the majority of victims, because we had an excellent doctor, with unique views on vaccination.”
She pulled back the sleeve of her blouse and showed three tiny scars on the underside of the right forearm.
“The doctor said he would put it where it wouldn’t show. Isn’t that a good idea?”
“Yes,” said Elk slowly. “And did he vaccinate your brother the same way?”
She nodded, and then:
“What is the matter, Mr. Elk?”
“I swallowed an olive stone,” said Elk. “I wonder somebody doesn’t start cultivating olives without stones.” He looked out of the window. “You’ve got a pretty fine day for your visit, Miss Bennett,” he said, and launched forth into a rambling condemnation of the English climate.
It seemed hours to Elk before the meal was finished. The girl was going back to Gordon’s house to look at catalogues which Dick Lad ordered to be sent to Harley Terrace by telephone.
“You won’t be coming to the office?” asked Elk. “No: do you think it is necessary?”
“I wanted to see you for ten minutes,” drawled the other, “perhaps a quarter of an hour.”
“Come back to the house.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of coming back to the house,” said Elk. “Perhaps you’ve got a lady’s drawing-room. I remember seeing one as I came through the marble hall, and Miss Bennett would not mind—”
“Why, of course not,” she said. “If I’m in the way, I’ll do anything you wish. Show me your lady’s drawing room.”
When Dick had come back, the detective was smoking, his elbows on the table, his thin, brown hands clasped under his chin, and he was examining, with the eye of a connoisseur, the beautifully carved ceiling.
“What’s the trouble, Elk?” said Gordon as he sat down. “The man under sentence of death is Ray Bennett,” said Elk without preliminary.
XXXIV - THE PHOTO-PLAY
Dick’s face went white.
“How do you know this?”
“Well, there’s a photograph coming along; it will be in London this afternoon; but I needn’t see that. This man under sentence has three vaccination marks on the right forearm.”
There was a dead silence.
“I wondered why you turned the talk to vaccination,” said Dick quietly. “I ought to have known there was something in it. What can we do?”
“I’ll tell you what you can’t do,” said Elk. “You can’t let that girl know. For good and sufficient reasons, Ray Bennett has decided not to reveal his identity, and he must pass out. You’re going to have a rotten afternoon, Captain Gordon,” said Elk gently, “and I’d rather be me than you. But you’ve got to keep up your light-hearted chatter, or that young woman is going to guess that something is wrong.”
“My God! How dreadful!” said Dick in a low voice.
“Yes, it is,” admitted Elk, “and we can do nothing. We’ve got to accept it as a fact that he’s guilty. If you thought any other way, it would drive you mad. And even if he was as innocent as you or I, what chance have we of getting an inquiry or stopping the sentence being carried into execution?”
“Poor John Bennett!” said Dick in a hushed voice.
“If you’re starting to get sentimental,” snarled Elk, blinking furiously, “I’m going into a more practical atmosphere. Good afternoon.”
“Wait. I can’t face this girl for a moment. Come back to the house with me.”
Elk hesitated, and then grudgingly agreed.
Ella could not guess, from their demeanour, the horror that was in the minds of these men. Elk fell back upon history and dates—a prolific and a favourite subject.
“Thank heaven those catalogues have arrived!” said Dick, as, with a sigh of relief, he saw the huge pile of literature on his study table.
“Why ‘thank heaven’?” she smiled.
“Because his conscience is pricking him, and he wants an excuse for working.” Elk came to the rescue.
The strain was one which even he found almost insupportable; and when, after a pleading glance at the other, Dick nodded, he got up with a sense of holiday.
“I’ll be going now, Miss Bennett,” he said. “I expect you’ll be busy all the afternoon furnishing your cottage. I must come down and see it,” he went on, wilfully dense. “Though it struck me that there wouldn’t be much room for new furniture at Maytree.”
So far he got when he heard voices in the hall—the excited voice of a woman, shrill, insistent, hysterical. Before Dick could get to the door, it was flung open, and Lola rushed in.
“Gordon! Gordon! Oh, my God!” she sobbed. “Do you know?”
“Hush!” said Dick, but the girl was beside herself.
“They’ve got Ray! They’re going to hang him! Lew’s dead.”
The mischief was done. Ella carne slowly to her feet, rigid with fear.
“My brother?” she asked, and then Lola saw her for the first time and nodded.
“I found out,” she sobbed. “I had a suspicion, and I wrote…I’ve got a photograph of Phenan. I knew it was Lew at once, and I guessed the rest. The Frog did it! He planned it; months in advance he planned it. I’m not sorry about Lew; I swear I’m not sorry about Lew! It’s the boy. I sent him to his death, Gordon—” And then she broke into a fit of hysterical sobbing.
“Put her out,” said Gordon, and Elk lifted the helpless girl in his arms and carried her into the dining-room.
“True!” Ella whispered the word, and Dick nodded. “I’m afraid it’s true, Ella.”
She sat down slowly.
“I wonder where I can find father,” she said, as calmly as though she were discussing some everyday event.
“You can do nothing. He knows nothing. Do you think it is kind to tell him?”
She searched his face wonderingly.
“I think you’re right. Of course you’re right, Dick. I’m sure you’re right. Father mustn’t know. Couldn’t I see him—Ray, I mean?”
Dick shook his head.
“Ella, if Ray has kept silent to save you from this, all his forbearance, all his courage will be wasted if you go to him.”
Again her lips drooped.
“Yes. It is good of you to think for me.” She put her hand on his, and he felt no tremor. “I don’t know what I can do,” she said. “It is so—stunning. What can I do?”
“You can do nothing, my dear.” His arm went round her and her tired head fell upon his shoulder.
“No, I can do nothing,” she whispered.
Elk came in.
“A telegram for Miss Bennett,” he said. “The messenger just arrived with it. Been redirected from Horsham, I expect.”
Dick took the wire.
“Open it, please,” said the girl. “It may be from father.”
He tore open the envelope. The telegram ran:
“Have printed your picture. Cannot understand the murder. Were you trying take photo-play? Come and see me. Silenski House, Wardour Street.”
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“It is Greek to me,” said Dick. “‘Cannot understand murder’—has your father been trying to take photo-plays?”
“No, dear, I’m sure he hasn’t; he would have told me.”
“What photographs did your father take?”
“It was a picture of trout,” she said, gathering her scattered thoughts; “but he took another picture—in his sleep. He was in the country waiting for a badger, and dozed. He must have pressed the starter; he thought that picture was a failure. It can’t be the trout; it doesn’t mention the trout; it must be the other.”
“We will go to Wardour Street.”
It was Elk who spoke so definitely, Elk who called a cab and hustled the two people into it. When they arrived at Wardour Street, Mr. Silenski was out at lunch, and nobody knew anything whatever about the film, or had authority to show it.
For an hour and a half they waited, fuming, in that dingy office, whilst messengers went in search of Silenski. He arrived at last, a polite and pleasant little Hebrew, who was all apologies, though no apology was called for, since he had not expected his visitors.
“Yes, it is a curious picture,” he said. “Your father, miss, is a very good amateur; in fact, he’s a professional now; and if it is true that he can get these Zoo photographs, he ought to be in the first rank of nature photographers.”
They followed him up a flight of stairs into a big room across which were row upon row of chairs. Facing them as they sat was a small white screen, and behind them an iron partition with two square holes.
“This is our theatre,” he explained. “You’ve no idea whether your father is trying to take motion pictures—I mean photo-plays? If he is, then this scene was pretty well acted, but I can’t understand why he did it. It’s labelled ‘Trout in a Pond’ or something of the sort, but there are no trout here, and there is no pond either!”
There was a click, and the room went black; and then there was shown on the screen a picture which showed in the foreground a stretch of grey, sandy soil, and the dark opening of a burrow, out of which peeped a queer-looking animal.
“That’s a badger,” explained Mr. Silenski. “It looked very promising up to there, and then I don’t know what he did. You’ll see he changed the elevation of the camera.”
As he spoke, the picture jerked round a little to the right, as though it had been pulled violently. And they were looking upon two men, obviously tramps. One was sitting with his head on his hands, the other, close by him, was pouring out whisky into a container.
“That’s Lew Brady,” whispered Elk fiercely, and at that moment the other man looked up, and Ella Bennett uttered a cry.
“It is Ray! Oh, Dick, it is Ray!”
There was no question of it. The light beard he wore melted into the shadows which the strong sunlight cast.
They saw Brady offer him a drink, saw him toss it down and throw the cup back to the man; watched him as his arms stretched in a yawn; and then saw him curl up to sleep, lie back, and Lew Brady standing over him. The prostrate figure turned on to its face, and Lew, stooping, put something in his pocket. They caught the reflection of glass.
“The flask,” said Elk.
And then the figure standing in the centre of the picture spun round. There walked toward him a man. His face was invisible. Never once during that period did he turn his face to that eager audience.
They saw his arm go up quickly, saw the flash of the two shots, watched breathless, spellbound, horrified, the tragedy that followed.
The man stooped and placed the pistol by the side of the sleeping Ray, and then, as he turned, the screen went white.
“That’s the end of the picture,” said Mr. Silenski. “And what it means, heaven knows.”
“He’s innocent! Dick, he’s innocent!” the girl cried wildly. “Don’t you see, it was not he who fired?”
She was half-mad with grief and terror, and Dick caught her firmly by the shoulders, the dumbfounded Silenski gaping at the scene.
“You are going back to my house and you will read! Do you hear, Ella? You’re to do nothing until you hear from me. You are not to go out; you are to sit and read! I don’t care what you read—the Bible, the Police News, anything you like. But you must not think of this business. Elk and I will do all that is possible.”
She mastered her wild terror and tried to smile.
“I know you will,” she said between her chattering teeth. “Get me to your house, please.”
He left Elk to go to Fleet Street to collect every scrap of information about the murder he could from the newspaper offices, and brought the girl back to. Harley Terrace. As he got out of the cab, he saw a man waiting on the steps. It was Joshua Broad. One glance at his face told Dick that he knew of the murder, and he guessed the source.
He waited in the hall until Dick had put the girl in the study, and had collected every illustrated newspaper, every book he could find.
“Lola told me of this business.”
“I guessed so,” said Dick. “Do you know anything about it?”
“I knew these two men started out in the disguise of tramps,” said Broad, “but I understood they were going north. This is Frog work—why?
“I don’t know. Yes, I do,” Dick said suddenly. “The Frog came to Miss Bennett last night and asked her to marry him, promising that he would save her brother if she agreed. But it can hardly be that he planned this diabolical trick to that end.”
“To no other end,” said Broad coolly. “You don’t know Frog, Gordon! The man is a strategist—probably the greatest strategist in the world. Can I do anything?”
“I would ask you to stay and keep Miss Bennett amused—” Dick began.
“I think you might do worse,” said the American quietly.
Ella looked up with a look of pain as the visitor entered the room. She felt that she could not endure the presence of a stranger at this moment, that she would break under any new strain, and she glanced at Dick imploringly.
“If you don’t want me to stay, Miss Bennett,” smiled Broad, “well, I’ll go just as soon as you tell me. But I’ve one piece of information to pass to you, and it is this: that your brother will not die.”