The bastard blabbered.
“Yeah, I know you’re trying to frame me with that photo. Nice trick! It’ll serve as a plausible piece of evidence perfect for pinning the crime on me. But are you really okay with that?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Don’t you know better? If you bring out that photo, the only path left is mutual destruction!”
Sorry, I don’t quite understand.
‘Seeing him so confident, it seems he’s sure that I know…’
‘Would the original ‘me’ have known that for sure?’
‘About the danger I’d face if I revealed this photo?’
My head grew complicated.
It didn’t seem like sheer bluff.
‘If I release this photo, will someone retaliate against me? Or will some issue tied to my past blow up?’
Various conjectures came to mind, but I couldn’t be sure of anything.
Only one thing was certain to me now.
‘Either way, I can’t catch the culprit without this photo.’
Grand Duke Katrin and Wilhelm, the Grand Duke’s Son.
To corner those two, circumstantial evidence alone wasn’t enough.
Irrefutable physical evidence was absolutely necessary.
The photo was the only physical evidence I had.
‘If I can’t catch him here, I might have to give up on catching Taylor John and saving Lure forever.’
“If you were in your right mind, you’d never release that photo!”
“Sorry, but.”
I interrupted the culprit as I spoke.
“I’ve never been in my right mind to begin with.”
“What…!”
I didn’t want to engage with him any longer.
I turned to the people and shouted.
“Everyone! Aren’t you curious what evidence of murder is hidden in the photo?”
A lukewarm response came back.
They all kept an eye on Grand Duke Katrin, yet seemed dying of curiosity about what the photo was.
“I’ll show you soon, but first let me explain. About the secret hidden in these two photos.”
I said with a wide grin.
It was going to be quite a long story.
The photos I had were two in total.
In the first photo, Wilhelm and Christine stood facing forward and smiling.
In the second, the two sat leaning on a sofa, their faces close together in a affectionate pose.
The interval between the two photos was roughly thirty-odd minutes.
“I secured the diary of the photographer who took the photos at that time. According to the diary, the photographer remained in the darkroom for about 30 minutes after taking the first photo to develop and replace the silver plate. This darkroom was sealed off deep inside the photo studio with thick double doors to block even a single ray of light.”
No light, not even sound would have leaked in.
“Furthermore… it is said that this developing work was assisted by the photographer’s close friend, who was also the lover of the Grand Duke’s Son in the photo.”
In other words.
“During that empty 30 minutes, Wilhelm, the Grand Duke’s Son, was completely alone.”
And the incident occurred in that interval.
“30 minutes later, the photographer and the lover returned.”
The second photo was taken.
“The two photos capture before and after the incident respectively.”
At first glance, both photos seem unremarkable.
But if you compare the two photos like a spot-the-difference game, oddities reveal themselves one by one.
One.
In the second photo, the color of the left side of the velvet sofa is noticeably darker.
Two.
In the first photo, there seems to be nothing behind the velvet sofa, but looking closely at the second photo, a metal support stand placed behind the sofa is visible behind the seated person.
Three.
In the first photo, nine daffodils were arranged in a vase.
In the second photo, the vase has been removed, and the nine daffodils are held in Wilhelm the Grand Duke’s Son’s hand.
On close inspection, some daffodils have developed black spots that weren’t there before.
Four.
What appeared as just a black shape in the first photo, when examined in the second photo, can be recognized as the shape of a person covered in cloth, i.e., a corpse.
This wasn’t simply a difference in photo size.
Five.
The invitation from Madame Moss that was tucked in the front pocket of the Grand Duke’s Son’s jacket has disappeared.
“Well, let’s just skip the fifth one. Who knows if he moved it from the front pocket to an inside pocket? But as for the remaining four clues…”
I turned to the people and asked.
“What do you think? Do you know what incident took place between the taking of these two photos?”
Silence.
In fact, it was only natural.
Rather, if someone had caught on immediately, that would have been more frustrating.
‘I went through so much trouble to figure this out.’
Not to mention racking my brains with Walter for days, it was only after obtaining Ms. Seori’s diary that I finally uncovered the truth.
Still, outwardly like a genius detective who caught on in a flash of intuition, I shook my head dismissively.
“If you don’t understand, I’ll explain.”
First.
The subtle darkening of the left side of the velvet sofa.
“It’s unlikely the sofa faded in just 30 minutes. In fact, this is a secret easily noticed by anyone who has touched velvet fabric.”
Velvet fabric has a nap.
Brushing it in the direction of the nap makes it lighter, brushing against it makes it darker.
“The sudden darkening of the sofa’s side indicates that a large object moved along that path, leaving a mark on the sofa’s side.”
Of course, this alone might be insufficient evidence.
Wilhelm might have been bored and brushed the side of the sofa in the wrong direction.
But there is another piece of evidence indicating the movement of an object.
That is the second.
The metal support stand that suddenly appeared behind the velvet sofa.
“No matter how much you look, there’s no such object behind the velvet sofa in the first photo. But if you think about it a bit, you can figure out where that object originally was.”
Photos of this era require a long exposure time.
That means subjects must remain stationary in the same pose for a long time.
Since it’s burdensome for a person, a tool is used.
It was a metal support stand used to fix the subject’s pose during the shoot, and it would have originally been behind the Grand Duke’s Son.
This could be deduced from the fact that the stand’s fixed height is taller than Christine’s height.
“But isn’t that strange? Why did the metal support stand, which should have been behind the spot where the Grand Duke’s Son stood on the left, move to behind the sofa?”
If the photographer had moved it because it interfered with the shot, he would have removed it entirely from the frame.
But the metal stand still remained in the photo, only shifted a bit to the right.
“The answer is simple: because a large object was moved through this left path. In the process, the Grand Duke’s Son pushed the obstructing metal stand to the right.”
Now it’s confirmed that an object was carried.
Now the next question.
What exactly was carried?
“One thing is certain: the Grand Duke’s Son must have washed his hands after moving this object.”
The third clue.
The daffodils being transferred to his hand.
“The glass vase in the photo was suddenly removed from the frame. The Grand Duke’s Son holds the daffodils that were in the vase in his hand. But if you look closely, the condition of the daffodils is slightly different from before.”
In the first photo, the daffodils were clearly pure white, but in the second photo, the daffodils have developed black spots.
“The spots are small and not many, but they are a very deep black. You’d think a photographer sensitive to black and white wouldn’t miss them, but according to the photographer’s diary, she didn’t notice anything amiss. That’s because these seemingly deep black spots were not actually black.”
Hmm.
Silver halide photography has one characteristic.
The photography of this era cannot capture the color red.
“The spots on the flowers were actually red.”
The once pure white flowers became dotted with red spots, as if splattered with blood.
“I found it hard to see similar traces on other furniture. They were only on the flowers. So I formed one hypothesis: that the Grand Duke’s Son used the water from the vase to wash the blood off his hands.”
The culprit poured the water from the vase by the window, quickly washed the blood off his hands, and removed the now empty and transparent vase.
And to the returning photographer, he made this excuse.
That he wanted to take a photo holding the flowers.
“The Grand Duke’s Son moved a large object that could get blood on it. What could that object be?”
The fourth and final clue.
The shape of the corpse, which only appeared as a black silhouette in the first photo, is clearly visible as a human form in the second.
“The corpse was covered with a cloth until the post-mortem photography began. That’s customary. But… someone lifted the cloth and then covered it again. The shape of the cloth’s folds changed, and the form became apparent.”
Putting all this together, the conclusion that can be drawn.
“The culprit swapped the corpse that was waiting for post-mortem photography in the photo studio.”
“But that…”
As if unable to hold back any longer, Albrecht cried out with an exasperated expression.
“How was that even possible? Why didn’t the photographer notice that the corpse had been swapped?”
“That’s exactly why I went to the photographer and obtained her diary.”
In it was written the following.
“The photographer had received a sudden request for a post-mortem photo shoot the day before. She declined, saying she couldn’t open the shop in the morning, but the client begged her to take the photo even late in the afternoon.”
Seori, weakening, accepted the request.
But a problem arose.
“The undertaker delivered the corpse to the photo studio that morning. The agreed time for the shoot was clearly late afternoon, and there were still customers in the studio.”
Even though post-mortem photography was in vogue, it was a great burden to face the corpse of a stranger.
Seori left the cloth covering the corpse and placed it in a back corner of the studio.
“Afterwards, the photographer took the two photos of the Grand Duke’s Son and his lover.”
After sending the lover off, she removed the cloth covering the corpse and checked who she was to photograph.
“She was apparently startled. Though she hadn’t heard such a thing during the request, the front of the corpse’s chest was soaked in blood, looking as if it had been murdered.”
But like a professional, the photographer carefully tidied the corpse, made it up brightly, and finished the shoot.
After the shoot, the undertaker came to retrieve the corpse, and Seori sent it back.
For her, it was a day like any other.
“And the next day, the news of Taylor John’s murder was reported in the newspaper.”