He dismissed the company with a curt command and as they made their hurried exits, jocularly congratulated Shine as the man who had pulled off a successful hoax. But the photographer showed no responsive pride, on the contrary he looked rather shamefaced and denied the charge. He’d meant to take a picture, no funny business or fooling about it—but—he rubbed his hand over his tousled hair and grinned sheepishly. He was sleepy, that’s what had been the matter, just plain doped with sleep so he didn’t know what he was doing.
“Well, how do you account for the picture?” said Rawson. “Are you one of these people who can take spirit photographs?”
Shine wasn’t that—there was only one way of accounting for it. He hadn’t opened the shutter and the picture was one of those he had taken of Miss Saunders the day of his arrival.
“Of course,” he said, staring perplexedly at the carpet. “I’d swear I opened the shutter and I’d swear I closed it after I got my wits back. But there you are—you can’t take a picture of a dead woman and I had a lot of her on that film. That’s how it came about, being waked up sudden by Mr. Williams and trying to pretend I was on the job, and being naturally rattled by all that’s transpired here. Oh, you can understand it!”
“You’d taken her like that—coming through a doorway?”
He’d taken two or three like that—he couldn’t be sure how many. But he did remember posing her at both the front and rear entrances of the living-room, trying to get effects of a dark background with her figure dimly suggested and the light on her face. It was evidently one of those pictures, must have been the last he’d done, but he couldn’t trust his memory on any small points. He’d been more shocked than he had any idea of but he knew it now.
He described his amazement at having seen it in the negative. He said he couldn’t believe his eyes and hadn’t mentioned it as he thought he was “seeing things” what with the murder and all the excitement. And he couldn’t study it or compare it with those on the rest of the film because it was gone. After they’d taken Stokes away and he’d got the women quieted down he’d turned to the sheet—and there it was, blank as it is now and the negative melted. As for the explosion of the powder, that was easy to explain, and he told of his precautions in unlatching the door. Any light air could have swung it open and as he was sinking to sleep, he had felt a breeze blowing in from the entrance. Rawson verified this; a wind had arisen that had kept him on the qui vive in the kitchen, moving the curtains and making the doors creak.
So that was that! Nobody’s brains, nobody’s deductive powers, or perspicacity or psychological insight had brought them to the goal. The bungling of a sleepy man had done the trick.
They were talking it over when the sound of Flora’s voice stopped them. She was standing in the doorway very white and very calm. Stokes was asking for them. Yes, she nodded in answer to Rawson’s look, he was quite himself. The doctor had wanted him to wait till he was stronger but he had insisted:
“He says he must speak now while his mind is clear. He seems to know it won’t last and he can’t rest till he’s told everything.”