“Now, in just a moment I want to point out to you why that one remark in itself proves the case against Harding. But for the time being here is all I thought about it: ‘That’s wrong. That’s Wilbur Emmet posing as Harding in the audience. And, since Emmet would no more think of being funny at Chesney’s expense than Harding would—by the temple of Eleusis,
that
remark is prearranged too.’ Even those words were a part of the show; and back we went to the old question, ‘What person or persons spoke? What was said?’
“I’m not going ahead of myself, gents. I’m telling you the thing just as it unfolded. This was how my trend of ideas went when Elliot first told me the story. I didn’t dare, at first, give him too much hope that Harding was guilty——”
Dr. Chesney stared at them.
“Hope?” he demanded, with a suspicious blink. “What hope? Why should he hope Harding was guilty?”
Dr. Fell cleared his throat with a long rumbling noise.
“Ahem,” he said. “A slip of the tongue. Shall I go on?
“But even at this point, shutting our minds firmly against motive, against any other consideration except the mere mechanics of the crime, it was obvious that Harding could have played Dr. Nemo’s part.
“Look at our time-schedule. In the twenty seconds’ complete darkness between the time the lights were switched out and the time Chesney opened the double-doors, Emmet could have slipped through the window into the Music Room. He could then take the camera from Harding, who slipped out through the same window to put on Dr. Nemo’s disguise. The substitution of places would take no more than two or three seconds. Even so, forty seconds more elapsed before Dr. Nemo entered the office. That gives Harding nearly a full minute to put on his disguise; and Professor Ingram will tell you the remarkable list of things that can be done in one minute.
“After thirty seconds in the office, Nemo goes out. Next consider the switch back again, when Harding returns; how will this fit our time-schedule?
“Now, at this point I had not yet seen the film. But Elliot quoted Harding’s testimony to me. Harding said: ‘Just after this top-hatted bloke stepped out of the picture, I looked up, and stepped back, and shut off the camera.’ In other words, that’s what Wilbur Emmet (posing as Harding) really did. He stopped filming just as soon as Dr. Nemo left the office. But why? The performace was not yet over, you know. Marcus Chesney still had to flop forward, in his dramatic pretense of death, and then get up and close the double-doors. Chesney was giving them plenty of time for the change back.
“It seemed clear that Emmet, after the departure of Nemo, immediately ‘stepped back’—past the line of the others’ vision—and slipped out of the Music Room to meet Harding. That would be their plan, Marcus Chesney’s plan. But Harding (if my theory were correct) had an interesting variation of it. He would just have finished giving Chesney a poisoned capsule. (Of course there never was more than one capsule at any time. This debate about a second capsule is unnecessary. If it had been arranged that Harding should play the part of Dr. Nemo, why should there have been a second capsule? There was only one: the one with which Harding had previously been entrusted, and which he had loaded with prussic acid.) After this, then, Harding would be ready for his next variation of the plan.
“At Nemo’s exit, Wilbur Emmet stops filming and slips out through the Music Room window. Harding, needing only a few seconds to strip off his disguise as opposed to putting it on, is waiting. Propped in the shadow behind a tree, and just beyond that narrow grass border, is a poker which has been waiting there for hours. Harding—his Nemo disguise flung in a heap by the office window—is now waiting by that tree. He beckons Emmet there. He takes the camera. He points in pantomime towards the house. As Emmet turns, Harding, with his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, strikes with the poker. He then slips back through the Music Room before the lights go on. Time (as Professor Ingram has estimated it) fifty seconds.”
Professor Ingram was rattling the dice in their cup. He frowned, shaking his head.
“Fair, I grant you. He would have had enough time. But didn’t the man run an insane risk?”
“No,” said Dr. Fell. “He ran no risk at all.”
“But suppose somebody—I or anybody else—had put the lights on too soon? Suppose the lights had been put on before he got back to the Music Room?”
“You are forgetting Chesney himself,” said Dr. Fell sadly. “You are forgetting that man practically planned his own murder. He above all people wanted Harding to get safely back to home base before the lights went on. It would have ruined
his
scheme, it would have made him a laughing stock, had Harding been caught. That must be prevented. You recall, as I said a moment ago, that Chesney treated you to more of the show—sitting there quietly at his table for a while, and then falling forwards on his face: obviously an impromptu bit of business, since no questions are asked about it in the list—he treated you to more of the show after Nemo’s exit. That was to give Harding time. It seems clear that Harding gave some prearranged signal, like a cough, to let Chesney know he was back in the Music Room. Then Chesney wound up the show by closing the doors. It might have taken Harding as short or as long a time as he liked to break Emmet’s skull. It might have taken him twenty seconds or a hundred and twenty. But Chesney would not end the show until he was back.”
“Damn his soul!” suddenly roared Joe Chesney, bringing his fist down on the card-table so that the backgammon board jumped. “Then he was simply playing a sure thing the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“Go on,” said Professor Ingram quietly.
Dr. Fell sniffed. “That, then, was the position this morning. And, as you can understand, I was very eager to get a look at that film—the film I thought Emmet had taken. Harding, just before I got my first great setback, was beginning to appear in curious if not definitely sinister colours. He was a research chemist. He could have manufactured prussic acid at any time. He alone of those in the case, would have known the trick of putting on and taking off rubber gloves in an instant. I do not know whether you have ever tried this experiment. To get the gloves on is comparatively easy, provided they are powdered inside. But to get them off in a hurry is almost impossible unless you know the trick. You cannot get them off by pulling at the fingers in the ordinary way; you will only split the gloves to blazes or stand yanking away at the fingers while you swear. You must roll them from the wrist, as these were found neatly rolled; and I exhibited about them an interest which seemed to surprise Inspector Elliot.
“But the image of Harding as the murderer came out with a clear, hard stamp before we had even seen the film. It became plain from a conversation Elliot had with Miss Wills in the room over Stevenson’s chemist-shop. I overheard that conversation, gentlemen. I listened without dignity and without shame. There was a sheet hung between double-doors, between the sitting-room and the bedroom; and behind that sheet in the bedroom I (if you image the manoeuvre possible) lurked.
“Up to this time I knew nothing of Harding except what I had been told by Elliot. But now, by thunder, I was beginning to know something! Elliot had assured me that Harding had never even heard of Sodbury Cross until he met Miss Wills on the Mediterranean trip. I found, on the contrary, that he had known her long before that; that he had known her before the poisonings at Mrs. Terrys; and that she used to go up to London to meet him. Kindly do not look so startled, gentlemen,” said Dr. Fell testily; “and restrain any impulse you may have, Dr. Chesney, to whang those fire-irons at my head. Even the maids in the house know it. Ask them.
“But the real information was the insight it gave into two sides of Mr. George Harding’s character. You could not blame him, of course, for wanting to go a crooked way in hiding his previous acquaintance with her from her family, though it seemed rather an elaborate, florid manner of going about it. I could not blame him for that. But I could blame him, and Inspector Elliot could have murdered him, for suggesting meltingly that he needed a holiday anyway; that he could do with a trip abroad; and that she had better pay the expenses of his trip while he was meeting her family. But that was not all. Gentlemen, I stood in the chemist’s bedroom and I was (if this can be credited) struck dumb. I saw visions and I heard voices. I thought I sniffed Wainewright’s scented locks. I thought the ghost of Warren Waite sat in the rocking-chair. I thought I saw, outside the window like banshees, the magnetic eyes of Richeson and the great bald skull of Pritchard.
“But there was another side to this. Whatever else George Harding was, he was a magnificent actor. Now, I had heard about that little scene at Pompeii. One moment: never mind how I heard about it. But, if what I had just learned by eavesdropping at the chemist’s were true, just think for a moment what that Pompeian scene meant! Think of Harding, innocent staunch, heroic, standing among you and letting you tell
him
about Sodbury Cross. Think of the way he introduced the subject of poisoners and prodded your wits until you told him: ‘I suppose it was easy to get away with wholesale poisoning in those days.’ Think of his start of surprise, the hasty way in which he put away the guide-book with a confused apology, when he realised he had blundered up against a sore subject with you. Think of——
“Well, it need not be stressed. But let the scene remain in your mind as a kind of symbol of everything that followed. It forms a neat small painting of Harding’s mind. For at the complete and minute hypocrisy of everything he said and did there, the way he pushed, pulled, dragged, and posed, I saw him (in my ghostly company) received with welcome beside Holy Willie Palmer.
“I will grow less metaphysical. We next saw the cinema film: and that tore it. The slip was so bad that I thought Harding had done for himself then and there.
“Now, you have all seen that film. But one thing, when we first saw it, some of us tended to overlook. It is this. If we accepted Harding’s story, if we agreed that he had taken the film, if we allowed his alibi and suspected no jiggery-pokery of any kind: allowing all this, then
that film constituted Harding’s eyesight.
“You follow that?” inquired Dr. Fell with great earnestness. “That film constituted what he saw, and all he saw. It was his own version of what had happened in the office. It was as though we had a record, from a kind of picture in his own mind. We could see, therefore, only what Harding himself saw.
“Now, by the testimony of the other witnesses and by Harding’s own testimony, what had happened? Go back to the beginning of Chesney’s show. The grotesque figure in the tall hat steps in at the window. As it walks forward, Harding whispers, ‘Sh-h-h! The Invisible Man!’ And the figure turns round and looks at the audience.
“But what do we get in the film? We see that, the instant the figure appears in the film, it is
in the act
of turning round to look at us. It appears; it turns, and this is our first view of Dr. Nemo. This turn to look at us undoubtedly occurs just after Harding has said, ‘Sh-h-h! The Invisible Man,’ for that is the only time Dr. Nemo looked out at the audience. But how in blazes did Harding come to use those remarkable words, or any words at all? For up to that time we couldn’t see the Invisible Man; and neither could he.
“He couldn’t see the French window at all. He was too far to the left. So we couldn’t see it. We couldn’t see the figure come in; we couldn’t see it until it turned round to look at us. Then how (ask yourselves) did Harding know what Dr. Nemo looked like? How could he give a very apt description of Dr. Nemo before Dr. Nemo had even come within his line of eyesight?
“And the answer is not complicated. Whoever was crouching there with that ciné-camera, that person was an accomplice in the show; he knew already what Dr. Nemo looked like; he had been given that line to whisper; he had seen Chesney’s head turn, knew it was time, and whispered it a few seconds too soon, when the others could see Dr. Nemo but he couldn’t. Since Harding later swore up-hill-and-down-dale that he had said the words, he was therefore an accomplice whether he had taken the film or whether Emmet had taken it. It confirmed my former belief that Emmet had taken the film and Harding had taken the part of Dr. Nemo.
“At the pre-view early this afternoon, I was just about to sing out and announce this. I had already made definite noises when Major Crow stumbled slap over the truth by saying that Marcus Chesney actually planned the way in which the murderer could kill him. It was true, though Crow applied it to something else. But at that very point my case fell down with a crash.
“We got a clear view of Dr. Nemo in the film.
“And he was six feet tall.
“Not only was he six feet tall, but he was positively identified by his walk as Wilbur Emmet.
“And I received a blow in the solar-plexus from which it took several hours to recover.
“I commend to you the virtue of humility. It is a refreshing virtue. I had been so confoundedly sure I was right: not only building my tower but putting mortar on the bricks to stick them together. It was not until we found the Photoflood-bulb container in Miss Wills’s drawer later in the afternoon that I realised: again, once more, and for the umpty-umph time, we had been hocussed by still ANOTHER of Chesney’s ingenious tricks. It was the final one, but it had made Harding’s scheme triply secure.
“Of course, one point had been putting us on brambles for some time. Never mind who the murderer is: whoever he was, why hadn’t he destroyed the film? He had every opportunity to destroy it unobserved. It was lying there openly in an empty room. Anybody could have wrecked it in five seconds by exposing it to the light. No murderer, not even a lunatic, could possibly want the police to pore over a real film of him committing his murder. But it wasn’t touched. If I had had the sense to interpret this plain indication from the first, I should have seen that it was shoved into our hands, pressed on us tenderly, because it wasn’t a film of the real murder at all.
“It was, in fact, the film of a rehearsal which Chesney, Emmet, and Harding had staged that afternoon—the afternoon before the show—with Emmet in the role of Dr. Nemo.