“That thought, as you may imagine, filled me with speechless alarm: for I remembered then that one of the flashes broke upon us at the exact moment when you fired the pistol. Such a possibility was horrible to contemplate. The photographs by themselves could give no clue to our conversation or to the events that compelled you, almost against your own will, to fire that fatal shot. If they were found by the police, all would be up with both of us. They might hang ME if they liked: except for Elsie’s sake, I didn’t mind much about that: but for your safety, come what might, I felt I must manage to get hold of them or to destroy them.
“Were the negatives already in the hands of the police? That was now the great question. I read the reports diligently, with all their descriptions of the room, and noticed that while the table, the alcove, the screen, the box, the electrical apparatus, were all carefully mentioned, not a word was said anywhere about the possession of the negatives. Reasoning further upon the description of the supposed murderer as given by the servants, and placarded broadcast in every town in England, I came to the conclusion that the police couldn’t yet have discovered the existence of these negatives: for some of them must surely have photographed my face, however little in focus; while the printed descriptions mentioned only the man’s back, as the servants saw him escaping from the window. The papers said the room was being kept closed till the inquest, for inspection in due time by the coroner’s jury. I made up my mind at once. When the room was opened for the jurors to view it, I must get in there and carry them off, if they caught me in the attempt.
“It was no use trying before the jury had seen the room. But as soon as that was all over, I judged the strictness of the watch upon the premises would be relaxed, and the windows would probably be opened a little to air the place. So on the morning of the inquest, I told the Wilsons casually I’d met you at Torquay and had therefore a sort of interest in learning the result of the coroner’s deliberation. Then I took my bicycle, and rode across to Woodbury. Leaning up my machine against the garden wall, I walked carelessly in at the gate, and up the walk to the library window, as if the place belonged to me. Oh, how my heart beat as I looked in and wondered! The folding halves were open, and the box stood on the table, still connected with the wires that conducted the electrical current. I stood and hesitated in alarm. Were the negatives still there, or had the police discovered them? If they were gone, all was up with you. The game was lost. No jury on earth, I felt sure, would believe my story.
“I vaulted up to the sill. Thank heaven, I was athletic. Not a soul was about: but I heard a noise of muffled voices in the other rooms behind. Treading cat-like across the floor, I turned the key in the lock. A chalk mark still showed the position of the pistol on the ground exactly as you flung it. The box was on the table, and I saw at a glance, the wires which connected it with the battery had never been disconnected. I was afraid of receiving a shock if I touched them with my hands, and I had no time to waste in discovering electrical attachments. So I pulled out my knife, and you can fancy with what trembling hands I cut that wire on either side and released the box from its dangerous connections. I knew only too well the force of that current. Then I took the thing under my arm, leaped from the window once more, and ran across the shrubbery towards the spot where I’d left my bicycle.
“On the way, the thought struck me that if I carried along the camera, all would be up with me should I happen to be challenged. It was the only one of the sort in existence at the time, and the wires at the side would at once suffice to identify it and to arouse the suspicion even of an English policeman. I paused for a moment behind a thick clump of lilacs and tried to pull out the incriminating negatives. Oh, Una, I did it for your sake; but there, terrified and trembling, in hiding behind the bushes, and in danger of my life, with that still more unspeakable danger for yours haunting me always like a nightmare, can you wonder that for the moment I almost felt myself a murderer? The very breezes in the trees made my heart give a jump, and then stand still within me. I got out the first two or three plates with some trifling difficulty, for I didn’t understand the automatic apparatus then as I understand it now: but the fourth stuck hard for a minute; the fifth broke in two; and the sixth—well, the sixth plate baffled me entirely by getting jammed in the clockwork, and refusing to move, either backward or forward.
“At that moment, I either heard or fancied I heard a loud noise of pursuit, a hue and cry behind me. Zeal for your safety had made me preternaturally nervous. I looked about me hurriedly, thrust the negatives I’d recovered into my breast-pocket as fast as ever I could, flung the apparatus away from me with the sixth plate jammed hard in the groove, and made off at the top of my speed for the wall behind me. For there, at that critical point, it occurred to me suddenly that the sixth and last flash of the machine had come and gone just as I stood poising myself on the ledge of the window-sill; and I thought to myself—rightly as it turned out—this additional evidence would only strengthen the belief in the public mind that Mr. Callingham had been murdered by the man whom the servants saw escaping from the window.
“The rest, my child, you know pretty well already. In a panic on your account, I scrambled over the wall, tearing my hands as I went with that nasty-bottle glass, reached my bicycle outside, and made off, not for the country, but for the inn where they were holding the coroner’s inquest. My left hand I had to hold, tied up in my handkerchief to stop the bleeding, in the pocket of my jacket: but I thought this the best way, all the same, to escape detection. And, indeed, instead of being, as I feared, the only man there in bicycling dress and knickerbockers, I found the occasion had positively attracted all the cyclists of the neighbourhood. Each man went there to show his own innocence of fear or suspicion. A good dozen or two of bicyclists stood gathered already in the body of the room in the same incriminating costume. So I found safety in numbers. Even the servants who had seen me disappear through the window, though their eyes lighted upon me more than once, never for a moment seemed to suspect me. And I know very well why. When I stand up, I’m the straightest and most perpendicular man that ever walked erect. But when I poise to jump, I bend my spine so much that I produce the impression of being almost hump-backed. It was that attitude you recognised in me when I jumped from the window just now.”
“Why, Jack,” I cried clinging to him in a perfect whirlwind of wonder, “one can hardly believe it—that was only an hour ago!”
“That was only an hour ago,” Jack answered, smiling. “But as for you, I suppose you’ve lived half a lifetime again in it. And now you know the whole secret of the Woodbury Mystery. And you won’t want to give yourself up to the police any longer.”