Read Online The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley - Free Book Online

had switched on the exhaust fan (which I hadn’t known existed) and was examining the sticky residue in the guts of the projector. The smoke and the fumes had dissipated and with them, the fear of an explosion.
    “No great harm done, I think,” he told me. “Not more than a few frames burnt. Do you have scissors?”
    “No,” I said. I had recently ruined a perfectly good pair of scissors by using them to cut a piece of zinc in a failed experiment intended to retrieve fingerprints from a downspout by an acid etching process of my own invention.
    “Anything else sharp?” Dogger asked.
    Somewhat shamefaced, I pulled from a drawer Father’s prized Thiers-Issard hollow-ground straight razor: one I had borrowed in the past, which had come in so handy that I was thinking of asking for one of my own next Christmas.
    “Ah,” Dogger said. “So
that’s
where it got to.”
    “I took care to keep it in its case,” I pointed out. “Accidents, and so forth.”
    “Very wise,” Dogger said. He did not mention returning the thing to Father, as many people would have done. That’s another of the things I love about Dogger: He’s not a snitch.
    “To begin with, we cut out the damaged section,” Dogger explained, “then scrape the emulsion off the film at the two fresh ends.”
    “You sound as if you’ve done this before,” I remarked casually, keeping a close eye on him.
    “I have, Miss Flavia. Showing ciné films of an instructional nature to hordes of uninterested men was once a not insubstantial part of my responsibility.”
    “Meaning?” I asked.
    Dogger’s memory was always a puzzle. There were times when he could see his own past only, as Saint Paul puts it, “through a glass darkly,” and yet at other times as if through a highly polished window.
    I have often thought how maddening it must be for him: like trying to view the moon with a telescope through tattered clouds on a windy night.
    “Meaning,” Dogger said, “that we shall have this film repaired hubble-de-shuff. Ah! Here we are—most satisfactory.”
    He held out a length of the repaired film for my inspection, flexing it and giving the new join a good hard snap. It seemed as good as new.
    “You’re a wizard, Dogger!” I told him, and he did not contradict me.
    “Shall we give it a try?” he asked.
    “Why not?” I said. My fears had vanished with the smoke.
    Having scraped the melted muck out of the projector—I suggested using Father’s razor again, but Dogger wouldn’t hear of it—we reloaded the film, switched off the lights, and watched closely as the flickering black-and-white images brought Harriet back to life.
    Here she was again, hauling herself once more from thecockpit of
Blithe Spirit
, Father strolling self-consciously towards the camera.
    “Hullo!” I said suddenly. “Who’s that?”
    “Your father,” he said. “It’s just that he’s younger.”
    “No—behind him. In the window.”
    “I didn’t see anyone,” Dogger said. “Let’s back things up.”
    He reversed the projector. He seemed more familiar with the controls than I had been.
    “Just there—look,” I insisted. “In the window.”
    It happened so quickly. No wonder he had missed it.
    As Father approached the camera, there was a mere shifting of the light in an upstairs window—and then it was gone.
    “A man—in shirtsleeves. Tie and braces. Papers in his hand.”
    “You’ve a sharper eye than I have, Miss Flavia,” he said. “It was too quick for me. We shall have another look.”
    With infinitely patient fingers he reversed the film again. “Yes,” he said. “I see him now. Quite distinct: shirtsleeves, tie, braces, papers in his hand—hair parted in the middle.”
    “I think you’re right,” I said. “Let’s take another squint.”
    Dogger smiled and ran the scene again.
    Was I seeing what I was seeing? Or was my imagination playing up on me?
    But it wasn’t the man in the film that interested me so much as his