AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Then shall we move on to the cinema?”
Gardener followed Corndell up the staircase, into the room. He glanced around, impressed. It was long and angular, and stretched across the top floor of the house. The projection booth sat at the far end, while a screen covered the wall nearest to them. The films were placed in racks on the left- and right-hand walls. There was yet another odour in the room that Gardener also failed to place. “What’s that smell?”
After a pause, Reilly replied, “Mothballs.”
“Not quite, Mr Reilly,” said Corndell. “What you can smell is celluloid, a plastic made from camphor and cellulose nitrate. But... as you so rightly point out, it does smell like mothballs, which were actually made from camphor many years ago.” He smiled, and Gardener was growing ever confident that the man’s pomposity would be his undoing. But had he realised it? Was he now playing games?
Gardener strolled slowly around the room, studying each and every one of the films on display. They were contained in a number of silver canisters banded together. He glanced at the titles, recognising some but not all, wondering how many of those featured Chaney. The Hunchback and The Phantom were obvious, as were A Blind Bargain and London After Midnight. But The Dark Eyes of London didn’t ring any bells, nor did The Invisible Ghost, The Black Castle, or Imperfection. He wondered what the value of the whole collection was.
“The last time we were here, you said it had been a life’s work trying to track down lost films from the silent era. I can see what you mean, now. It must have taken y
ou years. How did you manage to find them?”
“It’s my life, Mr Gardener. If it’s something you’re interested in, you’ll pull out all the stops. They’ve cost me a fortune, but they’re worth it. Take this one for instance.” Corndell pulled the reels forward. “London After Midnight–”
Gardener cut him off. “Interesting you should start with that. Isn’t it commonly known among film collectors as the Holy Grail of archivists?”
“That’s one way of describing it.”
“I was reliably informed that the film was destroyed by a fire in the 1960s. So how did you come by it?”
“You’re talking about the fire in Vault 7 at MGM. That very well may have been the last surviving copy that anyone knew of, but my father passed this copy on to me. He had been the proud owner since the Thirties.”
“Know the film well, do you?” asked Gardener.
“Like the back of my hand.” Corndell’s answer was sharp and his expression stern, as if his intelligence had been insulted.
From his inside pocket, Gardener produced the artist impression of the vampire, the one drawn from the eyewitness account on the night Janine Harper was killed. “Then how come you didn’t know who this was the last time we visited?”
“Oh come now, Mr Gardener, it’s hardly a likeness, is it?”
Gardener had to allow the man credit for not hesitating. “We have a witness who’d disagree with you. In fact, when we showed it to him, he knew who it was straight away.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Reilly answered. “That either you don’t know your films as well as you think–”
“I am the last word on Lon Chaney, young man,” shouted Corndell, indignantly.
“Or, I was going to say before you opened your trap, you’re leading us up the garden path.”
“I am leading you nowhere. I am simply answering your questions to the best of my knowledge, as I have always done.”
“If you’re such an authority on Chaney,” challenged Reilly, “why didn’t you know who that was?”
“Because it looks nothing like the character from the film.”
“There is a resemblance, you could have guessed,” suggested Gardener.
“Guess, Mr Gardener? Guess? Where would we be if I were to guess all of my answers? Some innocent person would have been locked up by now, that’s where.”
Gardener ignored Corndell’s outburst, trying to recollect the other connection to the film, Inspector Burke, and the film clip they had first watched at the hotel in Skipton. So far, he had not recognised anything that led him to believe that it had been filmed here. But then again, he hadn’t seen the whole house yet. He walked up and down each side of the room, checking all the films. “Any of these yours, Mr Corndell?”
“They’re all mine,” replied Corndell.
Gardener sighed. “I meant, did you write any of them?”
“How could I have, Mr Gardener? As you can see from the titles and the dates, most, if not all, were written before I was born.”
