‘My dear Professor Openshaw, no men have disappeared.’
Father Brown gazed back at his host with equal steadiness and spoke with equal distinctness. Nevertheless, the Professor required the words repeated, and they were repeated as distinctly. ‘I say that no men have disappeared.’
After a moment’s silence, he added, ‘I suppose the hardest thing is to convince anybody that 0+0+0=0. Men believe the oddest things if they are in a series; that is why Macbeth believed the three words of the three witches; though the first was something he knew himself; and the last something he could only bring about himself. But in your case the middle term is the weakest of all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You saw nobody vanish. You did not see the man vanish from the boat. You did not see the man vanish from the tent. All that rests on the word of Mr Pringle, which I will not discuss just now. But you’ll admit this; you would never have taken his word yourself, unless you had seen it confirmed by your clerk’s disappearance; just as Macbeth would never have believed he would be king, if he had not been confirmed in believing he would be Cawdor.’
‘That may be true,’ said the Professor, nodding slowly. ‘But when it was confirmed, I knew it was the truth. You say I saw nothing myself. But I did; I saw my own clerk disappear. Berridge did disappear.’
‘Berridge did not disappear,’ said Father Brown. ‘On the contrary.’
‘What the devil do you mean by “on the contrary”?’
‘I mean,’ said Father Brown, ‘that he never disappeared. He appeared.’
Openshaw stared across at his friend, but the eyes had already altered in his head, as they did when they concentrated on a new presentation of a problem. The priest went on: ‘He appeared in your study, disguised in a bushy red beard and buttoned up in a clumsy cape, and announced himself as the Rev. Luke Pringle. And you had never noticed your own clerk enough to know him again, when he was in so rough-and-ready a disguise.’
‘But surely,’ began the Professor.
‘Could you describe him for the police?’ asked Father Brown. ‘Not you. You probably knew he was clean-shaven and wore tinted glasses; and merely taking off those glasses was a better disguise than putting on anything else. You had never seen his eyes any more than his soul; jolly laughing eyes. He had planted his absurd book and all the properties; then he calmly smashed the window, put on the beard and cape and walked into your study; knowing that you had never looked at him in your life.’
‘But why should he play me such an insane trick?’ demanded Openshaw.
‘Why, because you had never looked at him in your life,’ said Father Brown; and his hand slightly curled and clinched, as if he might have struck the table, if he had been given to gesture. ‘You called him the Calculating Machine, because that was all you ever used him for. You never found out even what a stranger strolling into your office could find out, in five minutes’ chat: that he was a character; that he was full of antics; that he had all sorts of views on you and your theories and your reputation for “spotting” people. Can’t you understand his itching to prove that you couldn’t spot your own clerk? He has nonsense notions of all sorts. About collecting useless things, for instance. Don’t you know the story of the woman who bought the two most useless things: an old doctor’s brass-plate and a wooden leg? With those your ingenious clerk created the character of the remarkable Dr Hankey; as easily as the visionary Captain Wales. Planting them in his own house—‘
‘Do you mean that place we visited beyond Hampstead was Berridge’s own house?’ asked Openshaw.
‘Did you know his house—or even his address?’ retorted the priest. ‘Look here, don’t think I’m speaking disrespectfully of you or your work. You are a great servant of truth and you know I could never be disrespectful to that. You’ve seen through a lot of liars, when you put your mind to it. But don’t only look at liars. Do, just occasionally, look at honest men—like the waiter.’
‘Where is Berridge now?’ asked the Professor, after a long silence.
‘I haven’t the least doubt,’ said Father Brown, ‘that he is back in your office. In fact, he came back into your office at the exact moment when the Rev. Luke Pringle read the awful volume and faded into the void.’
There was another long silence and then Professor Openshaw laughed; with the laugh of a great man who is great enough to look small. Then he said abruptly:
‘I suppose I do deserve it; for not noticing the nearest helpers I have. But you must admit the accumulation of incidents was rather formidable. Did you never feel just a momentary awe of the awful volume?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Father Brown. ‘I opened it as soon as I saw it lying there. It’s all blank pages. You see, I am not superstitious.’
4. The Green Man
A young man in knickerbockers, with an eager sanguine profile, was playing golf against himself on the links that lay parallel to the sand and sea, which were all growing grey with twilight. He was not carelessly knocking a ball about, but rather practising particular strokes with a sort of microscopic fury; like a neat and tidy whirlwind. He had learned many games quickly, but he had a disposition to learn them a little more quickly than they can be learnt. He was rather prone to be a victim of those remarkable invitations by which a man may learn the Violin in Six Lessons—or acquire a perfect French accent by a Correspondence Course. He lived in the breezy atmosphere of such hopeful advertisement and adventure. He was at present the private secretary of Admiral Sir Michael Craven, who owned the big house behind the park abutting on the links. He was ambitious, and had no intention of continuing indefinitely to be private secretary to anybody. But he was also reasonable; and he knew that the best way of ceasing to be a secretary was to be a good secretary. Consequently he was a very good secretary; dealing with the ever-accumulating arrears of the Admiral’s correspondence with the same swift centripetal concentration with which he addressed the golf-ball. He had to struggle with the correspondence alone and at his own discretion at present; for the Admiral had been with his ship for the last six months, and, though now returning, was not expected for hours, or possibly days.
With an athletic stride, the young man, whose name was Harold Harker, crested the rise of turf that was the rampart of the links and, looking out across the sands to the sea, saw a strange sight. He did not see it very clearly; for the dusk was darkening every minute under stormy clouds; but it seemed to him, by a sort of momentary illusion, like a dream of days long past or a drama played by ghosts, out of another age in history.
The last of the sunset lay in long bars of copper and gold above the last dark strip of sea that seemed rather black than blue. But blacker still against this gleam in the west, there passed in sharp outline, like figures in a shadow pantomime, two men with three-cornered cocked hats and swords; as if they had just landed from one of the wooden ships of Nelson. It was not at all the sort of hallucination that would have come natural to Mr Harker, had he been prone to hallucinations. He was of the type that is at once sanguine and scientific; and would be more likely to fancy the flying-ships of the future than the fighting ships of the past. He therefore very sensibly came to the conclusion that even a futurist can believe his eyes.
His illusion did not last more than a moment. On the second glance, what he saw was unusual but not incredible. The two men who were striding in single file across the sands, one some fifteen yards behind the other, were ordinary modern naval officers; but naval officers wearing that almost extravagant full-dress uniform which naval officers never do wear if they can possibly help it; only on great ceremonial occasions such as the visits of Royalty. In the man walking in front, who seemed more or less unconscious of the man walking behind, Harker recognized at once the high-bridged nose and spike-shaped beard of his own employer the Admiral. The other man following in his tracks he did not know. But he did know something about the circumstances connected with the ceremonial occasion. He knew that when the Admiral’s ship put in at the
adjacent port, it was to be formally visited by a Great Personage; which was enough, in that sense, to explain the officers being in full dress. But he did also know the officers; or at any rate the Admiral. And what could have possessed the Admiral to come on shore in that rig-out, when one could swear he would seize five minutes to change into mufti or at least into undress uniform, was more than his secretary could conceive. It seemed somehow to be the very last thing he would do. It was indeed to remain for many weeks one of the chief mysteries of this mysterious business. As it was, the outline of these fantastic court uniforms against the empty scenery, striped with dark sea and sand, had something suggestive of comic opera; and reminded the spectator of Pinafore.
The second figure was much more singular; somewhat singular in appearance, despite his correct lieutenant’s uniform, and still more extraordinary in behaviour. He walked in a strangely irregular and uneasy manner; sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly; as if he could not make up his mind whether to overtake the Admiral or not. The Admiral was rather deaf and certainly heard no footsteps behind him on the yielding sand; but the footsteps behind him, if traced in the detective manner, would have given rise to twenty conjectures from a limp to a dance. The man’s face was swarthy as well as darkened with shadow, and every now and then the eyes in it shifted and shone, as if to accent his agitation. Once he began to run and then abruptly relapsed into a swaggering slowness and carelessness. Then he did something which Mr Harker could never have conceived any normal naval officer in His Britannic Majesty’s Service doing, even in a lunatic asylum. He drew his sword.
It was at this bursting-point of the prodigy that the two passing figures disappeared behind a headland on the shore. The staring secretary had just time to notice the swarthy stranger, with a resumption of carelessness, knock off a head of sea-holly with his glittering blade. He seemed then to have abandoned all idea of catching the other man up. But Mr Harold Harker’s face became very thoughtful indeed; and he stood there ruminating for some time before he gravely took himself inland, towards the road that ran past the gates of the great house and so by a long curve down to the sea.
It was up this curving road from the coast that the Admiral might be expected to come, considering the direction in which he had been walking, and making the natural assumption that he was bound for his own door. The path along the sands, under the links, turned inland just beyond the headland arid solidifying itself into a road, returned towards Craven House. It was down this road, therefore, that the secretary darted, with characteristic impetuosity, to meet his patron returning home. But the parton was apparently not returning home. What was still more peculiar, the secretary was not returning home either; at least until many hours later; a delay quite long enough to arouse alarm and mystification at Craven House.
Behind the pillars and palms of that rather too palatial country house, indeed, there was expectancy gradually changing to uneasiness. Gryce the butler, a big bilious man abnormally silent below as well as above stairs, showed a certain restlessness as he moved about the main front-hall and occasionally looked out of the side windows of the porch, on the white road that swept towards the sea. The Admiral’s sister Marion, who kept house for him, had her brother’s high nose with a more sniffy expression; she was voluble, rather rambling, not without humour, and capable of sudden emphasis as shrill as a cockatoo. The Admiral’s daughter Olive was dark, dreamy, and as a rule abstractedly silent, perhaps melancholy; so that her aunt generally conducted most of the conversation, and that without reluctance. But the girl also had a gift of sudden laughter that was very engaging.
‘I can’t think why they’re not here already,’ said the elder lady. ‘The postman distinctly told me he’d seen the Admiral coming along the beach; along with that dreadful creature Rook. Why in the world they call him Lieutenant Rook—‘
‘Perhaps,’ suggested the melancholy young lady, with a momentary brightness, ‘perhaps they call him Lieutenant because he is a Lieutenant.’
‘I can’t think why the Admiral keeps him,’ snorted her aunt, as if she were talking of a housemaid. She was very proud of her brother and always called him the Admiral; but her notions of a commission in the Senior Service were inexact.
‘Well, Roger Rook is sulky and unsociable and all that,’ replied Olive, ‘but of course that wouldn’t prevent him being a capable sailor.’
‘Sailor!’ cried her aunt with one of her rather startling cockatoo notes, ‘he isn’t my notion of a sailor. The Lass that Loved a Sailor, as they used to sing when I was young… Just think of it! He’s not gay and free and whats-its-name. He doesn’t sing chanties or dance a hornpipe.’
‘Well,’ observed her niece with gravity. ‘The Admiral doesn’t very often dance a hornpipe.’
‘Oh, you know what I mean—he isn’t bright or breezy or anything,’ replied the old lady. ‘Why, that secretary fellow could do better than that.’
Olive’s rather tragic face was transfigured by one of her good and rejuvenating waves of laughter.
‘I’m sure Mr Harker would dance a hornpipe for you,’ she said, ‘and say he had learnt it in half an hour from the book of instructions. He’s always learning things of that sort.’
She stopped laughing suddenly and looked at her aunt’s rather strained face.
‘I can’t think why Mr Harker doesn’t come,’ she added.
‘I don’t care about Mr Harker,’ replied the aunt, and rose and looked out of the window.
The evening light had a long turned from yellow to grey and was now turning almost to white under the widening moonlight, over the large flat landscape by the coast; unbroken by any features save a clump of sea-twisted trees round a pool and beyond, rather gaunt and dark against the horizon, the shabby fishermen’s tavern on the shore that bore the name of the Green Man. And all that road and landscape was empty of any living thing. Nobody had seen the figure in the cocked hat that had been observed, earlier in the evening, walking by the sea; or the other and stranger figure that had been seen trailing after him. Nobody had even seen the secretary who saw them.
It was after midnight when the secretary at last burst in and aroused the household; and his face, white as a ghost, looked all the paler against the background of the stolid face and figure of a big Inspector of Police. Somehow that red, heavy, indifferent face looked, even more than the white and harassed one, like a mask of doom. The news was broken to the two women with such consideration or concealments as were possible. But the news was that the body of Admiral Craven had been eventually fished out of the foul weeds and scum of the pool under the trees; and that he was drowned and dead.
Anybody acquainted with Mr Harold Harker, secretary, will realize that, whatever his agitation, he was by morning in a mood to be tremendously on the spot. He hustled the Inspector, whom he had met the night before on the road down by the Green Man, into another room for private and practical consultation. He questioned the Inspector rather as the Inspector might have questioned a yokel. But Inspector Burns was a stolid character; and was either too stupid or too clever to resent such trifles. It soon began to look as if he were by no means so stupid as he looked; for he disposed of Harker’s eager questions in a manner that was slow but methodical and rational.
‘Well,’ said Harker (his head full of many manuals with titles like ‘Be a Detective in Ten Days’). ‘Well, it’s the old triangle, I suppose. Accident, Suicide or Murder.’
‘I don’t see how it could be accident,’ answered the policeman. ‘It wasn’t even dark yet and the pool’s fifty yards from the straight road that he knew like his own doorstep. He’d no more have got into that pond than he’d go and carefully lie down in a puddle in the street. As for suicide, it’s rather a responsibility to suggest it, and rather improbable too. The Admiral was a pretty spry and successful man and frightfully rich, nearly a millionaire in fact; though of course that doesn’t prove anything. He seemed to be pretty normal and comfortable in his private life too; he’s the last man I sho
uld suspect of drowning himself.’
‘So that we come,’ said the secretary, lowering his voice with the thrill, ‘I suppose we come to the third possibility.’
‘We won’t be in too much of a hurry about that,’ said the Inspector to the annoyance of Harker, who was in a hurry about everything. ‘But naturally there are one or two things one would like to know. One would like to know—about his property, for instance. Do you know who’s likely to come in for it? You’re his private secretary; do you know anything about his will?’
‘I’m not so private a secretary as all that,’ answered the young man. ‘His solicitors are Messrs Willis, Hardman and Dyke, over in Suttford High Street; and I believe the will is in their custody.’
‘Well, I’d better get round and see them pretty soon,’ said the Inspector.
‘Let’s get round and see them at once,’ said the impatient secretary.
He took a turn or two restlessly up and down the room and then exploded in a fresh place.
‘What have you done about the body, Inspector?’ he asked.
‘Dr Straker is examining it now at the Police Station. His report ought to be ready in an hour or so.’
‘It can’t be ready too soon,’ said Harker. ‘It would save time if we could meet him at the lawyer’s.’ Then he stopped and his impetuous tone changed abruptly to one of some embarrassment.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I want… we want to consider the young lady, the poor Admiral’s daughter, as much as possible just now. She’s got a notion that may be all nonsense; but I wouldn’t like to disappoint her. There’s some friend of hers she wants to consult, staying in the town at present. Man of the name of Brown; priest or parson of some sort—she’s given me his address. I don’t take much stock in priests or parsons, but—‘
The Inspector nodded. ‘I don’t take any stock in priests or parsons; but I take a lot of stock in Father Brown,’ he said. ‘I happened to have to do with him in a queer sort of society jewel case. He ought to have been a policeman instead of parson.’
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