Murder by Reflection (20 page)

“Oh, all right,” said Doc, relieved. “Then it'll be O.K., I guess.”

“Well, can you arrange for me to see the house? I'd rather do this piece of work before young Heron returns.”

Doc again felt himself as the dispenser of leave. “There's no difficulty in that. My doubt was whether I ought to allow it. I'm satisfied that I should. As to the keys, I have them. Meet me tomorrow at the house and I'll show you over.”

Doc couldn't resist a certain feeling of superiority that it was he who had never been invited to the house who could now show over his friend who had been there as a guest more than once. And with the feeling of superiority there came, naturally, the sense that the situation was really all right, for was it not in his own hands?

They met the next day at the house. Doc felt a slight twinge of disappointment that it was Kermit who knew his way about. To the sensible suggestion that he might take a photo of the great hall came the reply, “Taken before. I want to take the big upstairs north room which I didn't have a chance at, last time. That was the place where he worked. Then he gave up. He told me last time I was there he wasn't getting anywhere with his research, and, I understand, he acted on that and ceased to use that room as a laboratory. Still I want to see it. I believe a clue might lie there.”

They had reached the room's door. Doc opened it. Kermit was loaded with his apparatus.

“Um, she had it done up finely, didn't she!” Doc was standing looking at the great bed with its ivory satin curtains and white plumes. Kermit had given an exclamation when he saw the room, which he had last seen as Arnoldo's laboratory, transformed into a queenly bedchamber. But he checked himself and remarked, “A fine design at the bed-head, too,” looking at the mural of white birds on their blue-and-silver ground. He bent closer, “Very ingenious, you see.”

The wall had been scarred and pocked by some old fixtures and the drawings had been made so as to disguise these marks and holes.

“The peacock's tail follows the fanned-out pattern of some semicircular fixture and, you see, the eyes of these water-birds bending down, each pair is drawn exactly where there is the print of a brace of nails or screws.”

“True enough,” said Doc; “and just like these very rich folk. They'll pull down and rebuild three-quarters of the house and then, over a square yard of wall they won't have the damaged plaster taken off and replaced, but will touch it up so and try to disguise that it's all scratched and punctured.”

“Well, perhaps they were in a hurry,” Kermit suggested.

Doc agreed, “That's another feature of the rich. When they want something done, it must be done instanter.”

Leaving plutocratic psychology to the observer of human nature, Kermit turned to rigging up his camera. It was more elaborate than that which he had used when photographing in the hall at the visit when he had been invited to make some studies of the place. Nor, when he had finished mounting it, did he seem inclined to make an exposure and have done with it.

“And why do you want first to take the bed-head?” asked Doc. The camera was close up by the bed, pointing at the bed-head. “It's not a bad little mural, but why not take it in with a picture of the whole room?”

Kermit's reply was to go to the windows and draw shut the massive, heavily lined curtains. After pulling one, he said, “Good,” switched on the light and pulled the rest. The light was needed. Evidently Mrs. Heron had slept so poorly that the windows had been made lightproof.

“Now,” he remarked to Doc, “I want to take a long exposure. It's rather an experimental form of photography.”

“Are you trying to photograph the ghost?” Doc felt a little eerie with the large empty house around him and standing in the actual darkened death-chamber. He felt a joke was called for.

But Kermit only answered absently, “I'm not looking for ghosts. Perhaps, though, I'm looking for prints.”

“Prints! You'll never find them that way.”

Doc was, he felt, far more knowledgeable about crime than Kermit could be. Surely attempts at forgery, purloining, theft of mails, such things were in his province, not in a retired portrait-photographer's! But what, anyway, had actually been said about crime! That suspicion was as groundless as ghosts. He was sorry that he had humored the old Hermit. Doctors were the men to decide if everything was O.K., and he and Dr. Hertz had agreed that nothing but “natural causes” had been present here.

“How long will that be cooking?” he asked, nodding at the camera brooding on the wall.

“Take me around the house,” replied Kermit. “It should be done by the time we have strolled around.”

He followed Doc to the door and as they passed out switched off the lights, leaving the white chamber in darkness. Then by the light that came from the door he stepped back into the room. A click came from the camera and he rejoined Doc at the door, closed it, and accompanied him on the tour. They had finished their round in a quarter of an hour.

“It somehow looks bigger than it is,” Doc remarked, “with all these mirrors always making each corridor look as though it went on as much again. And this grand staircase seems to wind on and repeat itself like a snake.”

“I think, though,” said Kermit, “these opposing mirrors in this hall give the best effect: where you actually are, seems only a step in an interminable staircase.”

He stood looking into the gradually greening dusk down which they could see pair upon pair of themselves growing less and less recognizable until they could only be sure that a couple of human beings were down there in that tunnel and well of drowning light.

“It's like looking back at one's ancestors and down to one's descendants,” he reflected aloud.

“Come,” said Doc. “You'll be hypnotizing yourself, like that. Anyhow, if you like looking down an imaginary passage, I've got to keep here in the present. The midday mail'll be in soon. We must hurry!”

“I expect by now the camera has formed its own views,” said Kermit, and led the way up the stairs to the closed chamber. As soon as the curtains were drawn back he dismantled his camera.

“Aren't you going to take any more of the rooms?” queried Doc.

“We'll wait to see how these come out. If they don't develop, well, it won't be worth while.”

Chapter XV

They developed, however. Two days after, Doc had a call from the Hermit.

“Do you want to take more?”

“No; these have come out sufficiently well that I don't think there'll be need for any more. Come up and see what there is to show.”

“I'll be along this evening.”

Doc couldn't think what it was that he would see when he arrived. His curiosity was roused. Why had the Hermit wanted to photograph that rather fancy mural? Of course he had some odd suspicion. But Doc now felt sure that though he might have found something to interest an odd researcher there'd be nothing of value for a practical mind. But Kermit was a good man at photoing. There'd be some little oddity waiting for him. Doc liked any little interest provided that it didn't last too long. The car had chugged up to the road's limit. Doc swung out, clambered up the ladder-like pathway, and found the Hermit working in his laboratory.

“Ah, come and see the photo I wanted to show you.” He reached over and picked out of a rack a photographic plate. “I didn't make a print; the negative shows clearly enough.”

Doc stood at his friend's shoulder looking at the plate which he was holding to the light. He scanned it all over until he was quite sure.

“Why, it's simply clouded. Light must have gotten in.”

“Light did get at it. But the plate isn't clouded. Look closely. It's
striated
.”

“I'm in the dark.”

“So was the camera, but it picked up enough.”

“Oh, drop it; what
is
here?”

“Well, those streaks are lines made by radiations. They are made by some substance radiating, some radioactive material.”

“Your camera was pointed all the while at that mural at the bed-head. That bit of interior decoration design couldn't be radiant—never saw a less fiery composition.” Doc chuckled uneasily, even defensively; he felt some oncoming unpleasantness. Exhumation of buried suspicions is always unpleasant for one who has a fine and healthy power of repression.

“Nevertheless,” went on Kermit, “that cool-looking painting was shooting out that amount of radiation. Now, with this before us, here are the other facts which throw further”—he chose the word deliberately—“dark light on the problem which you think closed but which I feel certain the evidence now collected in this room must reopen.

“Let me run over the steps we have gone together so far: First, why did I ask you whether I might take photos of the house? For two reasons: You asked me to see that young man. I visited his laboratory. When I first went there he was experimenting with some quite powerful, new, small X-ray tubes. At that very time I was myself interested in a piece of work of which you once saw traces. Do you recall the dicyanine screens?”

“Those crimson plates?”

“Well, I completed that piece of work. I won't take you into that. It isn't necessary—at least not yet. Briefly, what it did was to make me sure, through a photograph that she let me take of her, that Mrs. Heron, though she might be a nervously dyspeptic type, was not going to have serious organic trouble—at least for a considerable time—not, at least, that basic serious trouble which we call cancer.”

Doc was now pretty rigid. The exhumation was complete.

“Judge, therefore, my surprise when I heard that she had died quite quickly of leukemia, or some similar, and rapid degeneration of the blood. I knew two other small facts—nothing in themselves, but, taken together, and put beside these which I have mentioned, strangely disturbing, at least to me.”

Doc, it was obvious, was now joining in the state of disturbance.

“The first was that the young man, with some abruptness, terminated his research, ceased to have that room as his laboratory and that shortly after, Mrs. Heron occupied it, and shortly after, again, she dies.”

Doc emitted some sounds which proved attention but did not call for answer.

“My next step was, therefore, to consult with you, asking you to inquire of her doctor whether he was at all surprised at what had taken place. I understand he convinced you that we were busybodies.”

Doc sighed and shifted uneasily. “I couldn't leave the matter there, feeling as I did. Incidentally, young Heron had told me what I guess Dr. Hertz told you, that he, Heron, had himself had functional, not organic, blood trouble through using certain short-wave radiations. I doubt if, then, he even thought of that fact as being able to be used as cover. But you see how handy it proved, indeed how it may actually have made him feel safe, safe to strike. Because, after that, Dr. Hertz would naturally say to any inquiring busy-bodies, that he knew young Heron had had functional blood trouble and that he knew also that Mrs. Heron neither had any such trouble—but a trouble quite common at her age—nor was she exposed to such radiations. He was calling regularly and there were nurses in the house. Everything was medically aboveboard. Young Heron could not be shooting at her with blood-pressure-raising rays.

“The safest place is where the last shot hit, says the motto. The safest defense—as a conjurer shows you the hand with which he is
not
tricking you—is to consult the family doctor about an odd but not too dangerous illness you have, which is near to, but quite different from the deadly illness you later employ for murder. Dr. Hertz, who, as we know, is young and clever and rather impatient with nonprofessionals”—Doc winced a little—“would naturally be so pleased that he knew of the out-of-the-way blood-pressure wave-length connection that he would be all the more likely to pooh-pooh still another and stranger danger of which he had never heard. The coincidental improbability of there being two such queer link-ups between wave-lengths and disease would keep him from being suspicious, or friendly to the suspicions of others.

“So there was only one thing more to do. You were kind enough to humor me and able to assist me. It was clear to me that there was just a chance that I might get the extra proof, the final link in the chain of evidence which might persuade you to revise your verdict. To get that I would have to photograph the room.”

“But what use could that be? How could you think that would help?”

“I know it must have seemed odd—the veriest and most literal ‘shot in the dark.' But you know I'm always reading up research—the kind of odd bits that don't perhaps ever get built up into general knowledge and out into the textbooks. I seemed to remember an article and some correspondence that appeared some time ago in one of the small journals on radioactive research. It came back into my mind because it was among some that I had lent to young Heron when he was interested in such research, and, when the periodicals were returned and I was refiling them, out of one dropped some cigarette ash. I rather think his mother did not like him smoking about the house and that he smoked when he worked up in his lab. Anyhow, I, who don't smoke, don't like ash interlarded between the pages of my papers. So I opened and shook it out of the seams. Sure enough, where there was quite a little deposit was an article on the subject I was recalling in my mind.”

Stretching back to the laboratory bench, he picked up a small periodical with closely printed double-columned pages. It was open and still on the inner margin could be seen the gray smudge of compressed cigarette ash.

“This communication is really a letter from a correspondent. The writer is reporting certain findings which he has collected on the interesting and insufficiently studied subject of ‘saturation.' He notes that in a number of small country hospitals a curious effect has been observed. It is that when the room used for X-ray work had been in use for some time, the photographs—or skiagraphs—taken there began to show curious markings, striations. The cause of these is pretty clear. In these poorly endowed hospitals, to save expense, the walls were not treated—that is to say, instead of being sheathed in lead, they were simply painted and left as they were, with their original boarding or plaster. Though the X-ray tube would, of course, be in the middle of the room, not directed at the walls, nevertheless, in time, the rays set loose in the room were soaked up by the walls, stored, and then, as it were, re-echoed back, poured out again, until they stained and spoiled the plates which were being exposed in the center of the room.”