‘And what is that about?’ asked his companion, smiling.
‘Well,’ said the young man, ‘it was something that happened to me just before I found that poor fellow’s body; only the catastrophe drove it out of my head. I suppose it’s hard to remember a little romantic idyll when you’ve just come on top of a tragedy. But as I went down the lanes leading to the Colonel’s old place, I met his daughter walking with Dr Valentine. She was in mourning of course, and he always wore black as if he were going to a funeral; but I can’t say that their faces were very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me and then she told me they were married and living in a little house on the outskirts of the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice. This rather surprised me, because I knew that her old father’s will had left her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by saying I was going along to her father’s old place and had half expected to meet her there. But she only laughed and said, “Oh, we’ve given up all that. My husband doesn’t like heiresses.” And I discovered with some astonishment they really had insisted on restoring the property to poor Donald; so I hope he’s had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly. There was never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his father was not very wise. But it was in connection with that that she said something I didn’t understand at the time; but now I’m sure it must be as you say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that was entirely altruistic: “I hope it’ll stop that red-haired fool from fussing any more about the will. Does he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man in a summer-house for a legacy like that?” Then she laughed again and said, “My husband isn’t killing anybody except in the way of business. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on the secretary.” Now, of course, I see what she meant.’
‘I see part of what she meant, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘What did she mean exactly by the secretary fussing about the will?’
Fiennes smiled as he answered. ‘I wish you knew the secretary, Father Brown. It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no holding him, after something had really happened. I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr Valentine, you may be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery. The secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed the crime; and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I say that he became on the spot the greatest of all amateur detectives? Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic intellectual pride and scorn than Colonel Druce’s private secretary over the police investigating Colonel Druce’s death. I tell you it was a joy to see him. He strode about with an abstracted air, tossing his scarlet crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was his demeanour during these days that made Druce’s daughter so wild with him. Of course he had a theory. It’s just the sort of theory a man would have in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He’d be better fun and less bother in a book.’
‘What was his theory?’ asked the other.
‘Oh, it was full of pep,’ replied Fiennes gloomily. ‘It would have been glorious copy if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He said the Colonel was still alive when they found him in the summer-house and the doctor killed him with the surgical instrument on pretence of cutting the clothes.’
‘I see,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose he was lying flat on his face on the mud floor as a form of siesta.’
‘It’s wonderful what hustle will do,’ continued his informant. ‘I believe Floyd would have got his great theory into the papers at any rate, and perhaps had the doctor arrested, when all these things were blown sky high as if by dynamite by the discovery of that dead body lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that’s what we come back to after all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody will ever know the whole story.’
There was a silence, and then the priest said modestly, ‘I rather think I know the whole story.’
Fiennes stared. ‘But look here,’ he cried, ‘how do you come to know the whole story, or to be sure it’s the true story? You’ve been sitting here a hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really know what happened already? If you’ve really come to the end, where in the world do you begin? What started you off with your own story?’
Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first exclamation was like an explosion.
‘The dog!’ he cried. ‘The dog, of course! You had the whole story in your hands in the business of the dog on the beach, if you’d only noticed the dog properly.’
Fiennes stared still more. ‘But you told me before that my feelings about the dog were all nonsense, and the dog had nothing to do with it.’
‘The dog had everything to do with it,’ said Father Brown, ‘as you’d have found out if you’d only treated the dog as a dog and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men.’
He paused in an embarrassed way for a moment, and then said, with a rather pathetic air of apology:
‘The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about the poor dog at all. To begin with a small point, about his barking at the lawyer or growling at the secretary. You asked how I could guess things a hundred miles away; but honestly it’s mostly to your credit, for you described people so well that I know the types. A man like Traill who frowns usually and smiles suddenly, a man who fiddles with things, especially at his throat, is a nervous, easily embarrassed man. I shouldn’t wonder if Floyd, the efficient secretary, is nervy and jumpy too; those Yankee hustlers often are. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cut his fingers on the shears and dropped them when he heard Janet Druce scream.
‘Now dogs hate nervous people. I don’t know whether they make the dog nervous too; or whether, being after all a brute, he is a bit of a bully; or whether his canine vanity (which is colossal) is simply offended at not being liked. But anyhow there was nothing in poor Nox protesting against those people, except that he disliked them for being afraid of him. Now I know you’re awfully clever, and nobody of sense sneers at cleverness. But I sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this case; a dog barks at a man and a man runs away from a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple enough to see the fact; that the dog barked because he disliked the man and the man fled because he was frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and they needed none. But you must read psychological mysteries into it and suppose the dog had super-normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of doom. You must suppose the man was running away, not from the dog but from the hangman. And yet, if you come to think of it, all this deeper psychology is exceedingly improbable. If the dog really could completely and consciously realise the murderer of his master, he wouldn’t stand yapping as he might at a curate at a tea-party; he’s much more likely to fly at his throat. And on the other hand, do you really think a man who had hardened his heart to murder an old friend and then walk about smiling at the old friend’s family, under the eyes of his old friend’s daughter and post-mortem doctor – do you think a man like that would be doubled up by mere remorse because a dog barked? He might feel the tragic irony of it; it might shake his soul, like any other tragic trifle. But he wouldn’t rush madly the length of a garden to escape from the only witness whom he knew to be unable to talk. Peo
ple have a panic like that when they are frightened, not of tragic ironies, but of teeth. The whole thing is simpler than you can understand.
‘But when we come to that business by the seashore, things are much more interesting. As you stated then, they were much more puzzling. I didn’t understand that tale of the dog going in and out of the water; it didn’t seem to me a doggy thing to do. If Nox had been very much upset about something else, he might possibly have refused to go after the stick at all. He’d probably go off nosing in whatever direction he suspected the mischief. But when once a dog is actually chasing a thing, a stone or a stick or a rabbit, my experience is that he won’t stop for anything but the most peremptory command, and not always for that. That he should turn around because his mood changed seems to me unthinkable.’
‘But he did turn around,’ insisted Fiennes, ‘and came back without the stick.’
‘He came back without the stick for the best reason in the world,’ replied the priest. ‘He came back because he couldn’t find it. He whined because he couldn’t find it. That’s the sort of thing a dog really does whine about. A dog is a devil of a ritualist. He is as particular about the precise routine of a game as a child about the precise repetition of a fairy-tale. In this case something had gone wrong with the game. He came back to complain seriously of the conduct of the stick. Never had such a thing happened before. Never had an eminent and distinguished dog been so treated by a rotten old walking-stick.’
‘Why, what had the walking-stick done?’ inquired the young man.
‘It had sunk,’ said Father Brown.
Fiennes said nothing, but continued to stare, and it was the priest who continued:
‘It had sunk because it was not really a stick, but a rod of steel with a very thin shell of cane and a sharp point. In other words, it was a sword-stick. I suppose a murderer never got rid of a bloody weapon so oddly and yet so naturally as by throwing it into the sea for a retriever.’
‘I begin to see what you mean,’ admitted Fiennes; ‘but even if a sword-stick was used, I have no guess of how it was used.’
‘I had a sort of guess,’ said Father Brown, ‘right at the beginning when you said the word summer-house. And another when you said that Druce wore a white coat. As long as everybody was looking for a short dagger, nobody thought of it; but if we admit a rather long blade like a rapier, it’s not so impossible.’
He was leaning back, looking at the ceiling, and began like one going back to his own first thoughts and fundamentals.
‘All that discussion about detective stories like the Yellow Room, about a man found dead in sealed chambers which no one could enter, does not apply to the present case, because it is a summer-house. When we talk of a Yellow Room, or any room, we imply walls that are really homogeneous and impenetrable. But a summer-house is not made like that; it is often made, as it was in this case, of closely interlaced but still separate boughs and strips of wood, in which there are chinks here and there. There was one of them just behind Druce’s back as he sat in his chair up against the wall. But just as the room was a summer-house, so the chair was a basket-chair. That also was a lattice of loopholes. Lastly, the summer-house was close up under the hedge; and you have just told me that it was really a thin hedge. A man standing outside it could easily see, amid a network of twigs and branches and canes, one white spot of the Colonel’s coat as plain as the white of a target.
‘Now, you left the geography a little vague; but it was possible to put two and two together. You said the Rock of Fortune was not really high; but you also said it could be seen dominating the garden like a mountain-peak. In other words, it was very near the end of the garden, though your walk had taken you a long way round to it. Also, it isn’t likely the young lady really howled so as to be heard half a mile. She gave an ordinary involuntary cry, and yet you heard it on the shore. And among other interesting things that you told me, may I remind you that you said Harry Druce had fallen behind to light his pipe under a hedge.’
Fiennes shuddered slightly. ‘You mean he drew his blade there and sent it through the hedge at the white spot. But surely it was a very odd chance and a very sudden choice. Besides, he couldn’t be certain the old man’s money had passed to him, and as a fact it hadn’t.’
Father Brown’s face became animated.
‘You misunderstand the man’s character,’ he said, as if he himself had known the man all his life. ‘A curious but not unknown type of character. If he had really known the money would come to him, I seriously believe he wouldn’t have done it. He would have seen it as the dirty thing it was.’
‘Isn’t that rather paradoxical?’ asked the other.
‘This man was a gambler,’ said the priest, ‘and a man in disgrace for having taken risks and anticipated orders. It was probably for something pretty unscrupulous, for every imperial police is more like a Russian secret police than we like to think. But he had gone beyond the line and failed. Now, the temptation of that type of man is to do a mad thing precisely because the risk will be wonderful in retrospect. He wants to say, “Nobody but I could have seized that chance or seen that it was then or never. What a wild and wonderful guess it was, when I put all those things together; Donald in disgrace; and the lawyer being sent for; and Herbert and I sent for at the same time – and then nothing more but the way the old man grinned at me and shook hands. Anybody would say I was mad to risk it; but that is how fortunes are made, by the man mad enough to have a little foresight.” In short, it is the vanity of guessing. It is the megalomania of the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very triviality, of the white speck and the hole in the hedge intoxicated him like a vision of the world’s desire. Nobody clever enough to see such a combination of accidents could be cowardly enough not to use them! That is how the devil talks to the gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have induced that unhappy man to go down in a dull, deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he’d always had expectations. It would be too respectable.’
He paused a moment; and then went on with a certain quiet emphasis.
‘And now try to call up the scene, even as you saw it yourself. As he stood there, dizzy with his diabolical opportunity, he looked up and saw that strange outline that might have been the image of his own tottering soul; the one great crag poised perilously on the other like a pyramid on its point, and remembered that it was called the Rock of Fortune. Can you guess how such a man at such a moment would read such a signal? I think it strung him up to action and even to vigilance. He who would be a tower must not fear to be a toppling tower. Anyhow, he acted; his next difficulty was to cover his tracks. To be found with a sword-stick, let alone a blood-stained sword-stick, would be fatal in the search that was certain to follow. If he left it anywhere, it would be found and probably traced. Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be noticed, and thought noticeable – unless indeed he could think of some more natural way of covering the action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very good one. Being the only one of you with a watch, he told you it was not yet time to return, strolled a little farther and started the game of throwing in sticks for the retriever. But how his eyes must have rolled darkly over all that desolate seashore before they alighted on the dog!’
Fiennes nodded, gazing thoughtfully into space. His mind seemed to have drifted back to a less practical part of the narrative.
‘It’s queer,’ he said, ‘that the dog really was in the story after all.’
‘The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,’ said the priest. ‘All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk, you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catch-words; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested
claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.’ He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. ‘It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery and a pig is a mascot and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: “He was made Man.”’
The young man got up with a little embarrassment, almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy. He called to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy farewells. But he had to call the dog twice, for the dog had remained behind quite motionless for a moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the wolf looked at St Francis.
The Exploding Battleship
Michael Innes
Sitting in front of Florian’s café in Venice, Lady Appleby counted her resources. She began with her remaining traveller’s cheques, went on to Italian banknotes, and ended up with small change. Her husband divided his attention between watching this operation tolerantly – Judith was always extremely businesslike on holidays – and surveying the tourists who thronged the Piazza San Marco.
It was the height of the season. There were Germans fathoms deep in guidebooks, Americans obsessively intent on peering into cameras, and English with their brows furrowed in various degrees of that financial anxiety which Judith herself was evincing. There were also some Italians. These, Appleby thought, appeared agreeably carefree.
Murder in Midsummer Page 17
