I may have gone out of my head."
He passed over the picture of the door.
It looked to Jimmy like two doors, nearly at right angles, in the same door-frame and hung from the same hinges.
Haynes looked at it and said tolerantly,
"Didn't know you went in for trick photography."
He picked up a reading glass and examined it in detail.
"A futile but highly competent job.
You covered half the film and exposed with the door closed, and then exposed for the other half of the film with the door open.
A neat job of matching, though.
You've a good tripod."
"I held the camera in my hand," said Jimmy, with restraint.
"You couldn't do it that way, Jimmy," objected Haynes.
"Don't try to kid me."
"I'm trying not to fool myself," said Jimmy. He was very pale.
He handed over the other enlargement. "What do you see in this?"
Haynes looked. Then he jumped.
He read through what was so plainly photographed on the pages of a diary that hadn't been before the camera.
Then he looked at Jimmy in palpable uneasiness.
"Got any explanation?" asked Jimmy.
He swallowed.
"I—haven't any."
He told what had happened to date, baldly and without any attempt to make it reasonable.
Haynes gaped at him.
But before long the lawyer's eyes grew shrewd and compassionate.
As noted hitherto, he had a number of unlikely hobbies, among which was a loud insistence on a belief in a fourth dimension and other esoteric ideas, because it was good fun to talk authoritatively about them.
But he had common sense, had Haynes, and a good and varied law practice.
Presently he said gently,
"If you want it straight, Jimmy ... I had a client once.
She accused a chap of beating her up.
It was very pathetic.
She was absolutely sincere. She really believed it.
But her own family admitted that she'd made the marks on herself—and the doctors agreed that she'd unconsciously blotted it out of her mind afterward."
"You suggest," said Jimmy composedly, "that I might have forged all that to comfort myself with, as soon as I could forget the forging.
I don't think that's the case, Haynes.
What possibilities does that leave?"
Haynes hesitated a long time.
He looked at the pictures again, scrutinizing especially the one that looked like a trick shot.
"This is an amazingly good job of matching," he said wrily.
"I can't pick the place where the two exposures join.
Some people might manage to swallow this, and the theoretic explanation is a lot better. The only trouble is that it couldn't happen."
Jimmy waited.
Haynes went on awkwardly,
"The accident in which Jane was killed. You were in your car.
You came up behind a truck carrying structural steel.
There was a long slim girder sticking way out behind, with a red rag on it.
The truck had airbrakes. The driver jammed them on just after he'd passed over a bit of wet pavement. The truck stopped.
Your car slid, even with the brakes locked.—It's nonsense, Jimmy!"
"I'd rather you continued," said Jimmy, white.
"You—ran into the truck, your car swinging a little as it slid. The girder came through the windshield.
It could have hit you.