Then, with an abrupt return to his old manner, Dr Marlin said, “But, Mr Dobbs, this tragic accident doesn’t affect the result of my demonstration. Here is an ink-pad and some paper. I suggest that you take the finger-prints of the corpse and compare them with those in your pocket.”
My uncle seemed taken aback for a moment, but he complied, while Dr Marlin took me to the house for some dry clothes. On my return my uncle was putting his magnifying-glass back in his pocket. “There isn’t any doubt,” he said. “The two sets of prints are identical.”
“Yes,” said Dr Marlin, “Now, I suggest that you two gentlemen retire to the dark-room in the house to develop your pictures, while I telephone the police about the accident. When you have examined the films, come out on the verandah. We will all have a drink together, and then, Mr Dobbs, I shall be most happy to receive your cheque for $500,000!”
It would have been more decent, I thought to wait at least until Ali’s dead body had been taken away, but my uncle disagreed and we retired to the dark-room. My hands were shaking as I put my film in the developer.
As the image appeared, I gave a shudder. In the dim red light we saw the rope extending twenty feet in the air with Ali clinging to the top. We printed enlargements, and when they were fixed my uncle turned on the light and examined them with his glass. “It’s Ali, all right,” he said. “What we saw, Jimmy, wasn’t any hallucination.”
We went out to the veranda. I gave a loud cry and my stomach turned over. There at the top of the cliff in a pool of blood lay Dr Clive Marlin, stabbed to death and with a knife in his heart.
I was nearly overcome with the succession of shocks. For an instant so was my uncle, but he drew himself together. Glancing at his watch, he took out a notebook. “One ten p.m.” he said. “I’d better write it down.”
I looked at my own watch. “It’s 1.15,” I said; “your watch must have stopped.”
“No, it’s still going. Didn’t the water affect your watch, Jimmy?”
“No, it’s waterproof, and, anyway, water wouldn’t make a watch run faster.”
Just then a police car, followed by the hearse for Ali, drove up. Two police got out, stiffened as they saw the body of Dr Marlin, then turned to stare at us.
An hour later, after the police had been reinforced by their superior officers, my uncle and I were summoned to a room in the house, where a police inspector and his sergeant were questioning Mustapha and Juan, the overseer. As we entered I gasped, for Mustapha, who supposedly spoke only Hindustani, was, in fluent Spanish, pouring out a flood of accusations against my uncle and me.
According to him we were desperate criminals who had not hesitated to murder Dr Marlin when he demanded the reward for demonstrating the Indian rope trick. “They want the five hundred thousand dollars for themselves!” he shouted. “They didn’t know I understand English. I heard them talking about it on the way to the wharf!”
With horror I remembered my uncle’s conversation. The police looked ominous, and I remembered stories of accused persons in Latin America who had not been held for trial, but who had been shot out-of-hand “while attempting to escape”.
But my uncle remained cool, and said in Spanish. “Inspector, before we do anything else, let us find out the correct time.” The police, puzzled but courteous, compared watches, and we found that my uncle’s and mine were both fast – his by seven minutes and mine my twelve. “I thought so,” he said to me.
Turning to the police he said, “My nephew and I were developing pictures when Dr Marlin was killed. Unless one of the workmen did it, the only person who could have killed him was this man – Mustapha!”
Juan broke in, “But, Señor, I and all my men were working together, by Dr Marlin’s orders, at the far side of the house. We saw this man – Mustapha – the entire time seated in his upstairs room. We could see him through the window.”
“I don’t doubt it,” my uncle said, “but Mustapha could have been in two places at the same time.”
“Surely you don’t think he left his astral body upstairs for an alibi while he went down to the cliff to kill Dr Marlin?” I asked.
“Something of the sort, Jimmy… Inspector, I suggest that we search this man’s room at once.”
Mustapha objected vehemently, but was overruled. In the room my uncle’s eyes fell on a closed door. It was locked, and Mustapha insisted that he had lost the key; but the police soon forced the door open. I gasped, for seated on the floor of a small closet was Mustapha.
My uncle gave a tug, and the figure collapsed like an over-sized doll. “A very fine dummy,” my uncle said as he parted the clothes at the back. “See, the figure is entirely hollow. Clever but not quite original. Walter Gibson reports that Houdini designed a similar hollow dummy for one of his illusions shortly before he died.”
Turning to the dejected Mustapha, my uncle said with authority, “Your only chance is to tell the truth! Isn’t this what happened? You killed Dr Marlin in self-defence when he tried to kill you because you knew that he had murdered Ali!”
Mustapha started and nodded vigorously, “As God is my witness, that is the truth!… But how did you know?”
“I missed it at the time, but Dr Marlin made a slip when we were taking the finger-prints. He said, ‘You may think that Ali had a twin brother?’ Already, before the demonstration, Dr Marlin was thinking of Ali in the past tense.”
“But, Señor Dobbs,” the police inspector objected, “how could Dr Marlin have murdered this Ali? Do you believe in magic?”
“There was no magic at all, Inspector. The whole rope trick was only a ‘stage illusion,’ but quite an elaborate one. But Dr Marlin made one mistake. He forgot about the watches. When I learned that Jimmy’s watch and mine had suddenly become erratic, I guessed part of the truth.”
“How so, Señor Dobbs?”
“I’ll start at the beginning and describe what I think happened,” my uncle replied. “Mustapha can correct me if I go wrong on details. But let’s go and sit on the veranda, as this will take some time.”
On the veranda my uncle resumed, “There are really two parts to the Indian Rope Trick-both universally considered impossible. The first is to make a rope rise miraculously in the air. The second is to make the boy suddenly disappear from the top and have him reappear at a distant spot.
“There can be no doubt that this morning something like a rope really did rise in the air – the photographs prove it. Now, there is no way to make a rope do that, but this ‘rope’ must have had as a core either a wire or chain of magnetic metal. Isn’t that so Mustapha?”
Receiving a nod, my uncle continued, “The fact that both Jimmy’s watch and mine behaved erratically could mean only one thing – that they had been exposed to a strong magnetic field and had become magnetized. This gave me the clue. As you know, while opposite poles of a magnet attract each other, similar poles repel each other with equal force. I remember at the exposition in San Francisco in 1939 seeing an exhibit where a metal bowl was made to float in the air by a powerful electro-magnetic field underneath. Later I read that mediums used this method to make metal tables rise from the floor during fake seances. Perhaps Dr Marlin first got his idea there.”
Mustapha nodded again, as my uncle continued, “Dr Marlin made his ‘rope’ a chain or wire of highly magnetized metal covered with a thin layer of hemp. Under the ground in the field he had built a very large system of electro-magnets designed to project a cone of force. When the current was turned on magnetic repulsion raised the ‘rope’ above the ground as if by magic.”
“But, Uncle Edward,” I objected, “if it’s as easy as that, why hasn’t someone done it before?”