“Okay,” Drake said, “thirty minutes,” and drove away.
Mason turned to MacGregor. “Let’s go,” he said.
“We’ll work through an opening in the hedge down here about twenty yards,” he said. “I’ll lead the way.”
Casting black, grotesque shadows in the moonlight, the three moved quietly along the hedge. MacGregor led the way through the opening. Inside the grounds, he paused to listen, then whispered, “Just where do you want to go?”
“The room that Eversel went to when he returned to the house,” Mason said. “Paul Drake told me it was a darkroom.”
“It is. It wasn’t built as a darkroom, but it’s been fixed over. He has a lot of equipment there, does quite a bit of amateur photography.”
“Let’s go,” Mason said.
“Do you want me to take you all the way up?”
“Yes.”
MacGregor said, “Be as quiet as possible. If we use flashlights, cover them with your hand and let as much light as you need work out through your spread fingers. Angus might see lights shining on the windows.”
“All right,” Mason said. “Let’s go.”
They crossed the moonlit yard, entered a basement door. MacGregor led the way across the cement floor to a flight of stairs. The door at the head of the stairs was unlocked. They entered a back hallway, passed through a kitchen, and reached a flight of stairs near the back of the house. MacGregor piloted them to an upper corridor and down the corridor to a door. “That,” he said, “is the room. Don’t turn on any lights.”
“We won’t,” Mason promised.
“Where,” MacGregor asked, “do you want me?”
“Someplace on the lower floor,” Mason said, “where you can keep watch but can manage to get back to your room in case anything happens. If anyone drives through the gate, slam the nearest door, and slam it hard, then go back to your room. Keep your ears open. If you hear any commotion, come running. Keep in the character of a servant who has been asleep, was wakened by the commotion, and is loyal to his employer, unless I give you a signal. In that case, come out in the open and take orders from me.”
“Okay,” MacGregor said quietly. “I’ll slam that kitchen door. You can hear that from here if you are listening.”
“We’ll listen,” Mason said.
MacGregor retraced his steps down the hallway. Mason turned the knob of the door and entered the room.
It had evidently been a small bedroom at one time. Now it had been completely done over. The windows were darkened. A battery of light switches led to safe lights, enlarging cameras, wired printing boxes, and electrical washers. Shelves were well filled with photographic supplies. A long sink ran the entire length of the room, divided into various tanks for developing, printing, and washing. A long shelf held graduates and photographic chemicals.
Mason said quietly, “I think we can turn on a light here, Della. The room is lightproof.” He experimented with the switches, finally located one which controlled a shielded white light.
“What,” she asked, “are you looking for, Chief?”
Mason said, “I think they came here to develop a photograph. After that photograph was developed, it was probably printed in an enlarging camera. We’ll look around and see what we can find.”
Della Street said, “Here is a file of negatives, Chief.”
“How are they listed?” Mason asked. “By dates or subjects?”
“Subjects,” she said, “alphabetical order.”
Mason said, “This room is too darned orderly to be a good darkroom. Look around for a wastebasket, Della. Hang it, it doesn’t look as though the place had been used for a month, and yet they must have developed a picture here.”
Della said, “You don’t think Eversel killed him, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said.
“I’ve been wondering about that Farr woman,” she said. “Do you believe her story, Chief?”
Mason said, “There’s no particular reason why I should. She first came to the office with a lie which she had ingeniously worked out — but she’s our client, Della. You can’t keep clients from lying, but that doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility to see they get a square deal.”
“Do you think she...”
“That she what?” Mason asked as her voice trailed away into silence.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Della said. “Forget it. We’ll see what we can find here. I can talk about Mae Farr later.”
Mason said, “We’re licked before we start. Hang it, I never saw such an orderly darkroom.”
“We might try running through those negative files,” she said.
“Yes, we could,” Mason agreed dubiously. “I don’t think we’d get anywhere.”
“What’s that big thing that looks like a toy freight car?” Della Street asked.
“Horizontal enlarging camera,” Mason said, “nine inch condensers, takes up to a five-by-seven negative. That screen over there on the track holds the enlarging paper. Let’s find the switch for that enlarger, Della. I want to see about how much of a blowup there was on the last negative in there.”
Mason clicked switches near the work shelf, turning on first a red light in a printing box, then a white light, then, on his third attempt, clicking the huge bulb of the enlarger into light.
Della Street gave a quick, involuntary gasp.
On the white surface of the easel which held the enlarging paper was thrown the image of an enlarged negative, held in the big enlarging camera. Save for the fact that blacks and whites were reversed, it was as though they stood looking down through the skylight of a yacht into a cabin beneath.
A man, with his face half turned as though he had twisted it suddenly to look upward, was struggling with a woman whose face was concealed from the camera. Much of her body was shielded by the man’s body. Her arms and legs showed in arrested motion as though the figures had suddenly been frozen into immobility.
Mason said, “That’s it, Della.”
“I don’t understand, Chief.”
Mason said, “Wentworth wasn’t shot when he was struggling with Mae Fair. What she saw wasn’t the flash of a shot, but the flash of a bulb that was synchronized with the shutter of a camera. Those flash bulbs are instantaneous, just a quick burst of light synchronized to the fraction of a second with a camera shutter.”
“Then you mean...”
“That Eversel took that picture,” Mason said. “You can figure for whom he took it and what he wanted with it.”
“And that’s why no one heard the shot?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know that in advance, Chief?”
“I suspected it,” Mason said. “Gosh, I’d like to mix up some developer, put in a sheet of bromide paper, and pull a print of that negative. We could—”
His words were interrupted by the reverberating boom of a slamming door on the lower floor.
Mason looked at Della Street. “In case you don’t know it,” he said quietly, “this is a felony.”
“Of course I know it,” she said. “What do you think I’ve been working in a law office for?”
Mason grinned, pulled up the slide in the enlarging camera, took out the negative holder, removed the negative, and slipped it in his pocket. He switched out the lights and said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
They ran on tiptoe down the corridor to the back stairs, down the back stairs and through the kitchen to the basement.
MacGregor was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. “Eversel just drove into the garage,” he said quietly.
“Can you get Miss Street out of the grounds?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know,” MacGregor said. “I can if something occupies his attention. If he happens to be looking out of the window, we’re sunk — it’s moonlight, you know.”