Death Locked In

by Douglas G. Greene (ed)

  “No,” said the priest quietly, “it has begun to snow.”

  And, indeed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, foreseen by the man of chestnuts, began to drift across the darkening window-pane.

  “Well,” said Angus heavily. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, and rather jumpy business at that. The fact is. Flambeau, within a stone’s throw of your house is a fellow who badly wants your help; he’s perpetually being haunted and threatened by an invisible enemy—a scoundrel whom nobody has even seen.” As Angus proceeded to tell the whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, beginning with Laura’s story, and going on with his own, the supernatural laugh at the corner of two empty streets, the strange distinct words spoken in an empty room, Flambeau grew more and more vividly concerned, and the little priest seemed to be left out of it, like a piece of furniture. When it came to the scribbled stamp-paper pasted on the window, Flambeau rose, seeming to fill the room with his huge shoulders.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said. “I think you had better tell me the rest on the nearest road to this man’s house. It strikes me, somehow, that there is no time to be lost.”

  “Delighted,” said Angus, rising also, “though he’s safe enough for the present, for I’ve set four men to watch the only hole to his burrow.”

  The turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them with the docility of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheerful way, like one making conversation, “How quick the snow gets thick on the ground.”

  As they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with silver, Angus finished his story; and by the time they reached the crescent with the towering flats, he had leisure to turn his attention to the four sentinels. The chestnut seller, both before and after receiving a sovereign, swore stubbornly that he had watched the door and seen no visitor enter. The policeman was even more emphatic. He said he had had experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn’t so green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he looked out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all three men gathered round the gilded commissionaire, who still stood smiling astride of the porch, the verdict was more final still.

  “I’ve got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in these flats,” said the genial and gold-laced giant, “and I’ll swear there’s been nobody to ask since this gentleman went away.”

  The unimportant Father Brown, who stood back, looking modestly at the pavement, here ventured to say meekly, “Has nobody been up and down stairs, then, since the snow began to fall? It began while we were all round at Flambeau’s.”

  “Nobody’s been in here, sir, you can take it from me.” said the official, with beaming authority.

  “Then I wonder what that is?” said the priest, and stared at the ground blankly like a fish.

  The others all looked down also; and Flambeau used a fierce exclamation and a French gesture. For it was unquestionably true that down the middle of the entrance guarded by the man in gold lace, actually between the arrogant, stretched legs of that colossus, ran a stringy pattern of grey footprints stamped upon the white snow.

  “God!” cried Angus involuntarily, “the Invisible Man!” Without another word he turned and dashed up the stairs, with Flambeau following; but Father Brown still stood looking about him in the snow-clad street as if he had lost interest in his query.

  Flambeau was plainly in a mood to break down the door with his big shoulders: but the Scotchman, with more reason, if less intuition, fumbled about on the frame of the door till he found the invisible button; and the door swung slowly open.

  It showed substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crimson shafts of sunset, and one or two of the headless machines had been moved from their places for this or that purpose, and stood here and there about the twilit place. The green and red of their coats were all darkened in the dusk: and their likeness to human shapes slightly increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of them all, exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay something that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle. But it was not red ink.

  With a French combination of reason and violence Flambeau simply said “Murder!” and, plunging into the flat, had explored every corner and cupboard of it in five minutes. But if he expected to find a corpse he found none. Isidore Smythe was not in the place, either dead or alive. After the most tearing search the two men met each other in the outer hall, with streaming faces and staring eyes. “My friend,” said Flambeau, talking French in his excitement, “not only is your murderer invisible, but he makes invisible also the murdered man.”

  Angus looked round at the dim room full of dummies, and in some Celtic corner of his Scotch soul a shudder started. One of the life-size dolls stood immediately overshadowing the blood stain, summoned, perhaps, by the slain man an instant before he fell. One of the high-shouldered hooks that served the thing for arms, was a little lifted, and Angus had suddenly the horrid fancy that poor Smythe’s own iron child had struck him down. Matter had rebelled, and these machines had killed their master. But even so, what had they done with him?

  “Eaten him?” said the nightmare at his ear; and he sickened for an instant at the idea of rent, human remains absorbed and crushed into all that acephalous clockwork.

  He recovered his mental health by an emphatic effort, and said to Flambeau, “Well, there it is. The poor fellow has evaporated like a cloud and left a red streak on the floor. The tale does not belong to this world.”

  “There is only one thing to be done,” said Flambeau, “whether it belongs to this world or the other. I must go down and talk to my friend.”

  They descended, passing the man with the pail, who again asseverated that he had let no intruder pass, down to the commissionaire and the hovering chestnut man, who rigidly reasserted their own watchfulness. But when Angus looked round for his fourth confirmation he could not see it, and called out with some nervousness, “Where is the policeman?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Father Brown, “that is my fault. I just sent him down the road to investigate something—that I just thought worth investigating.”

  “Well, we want him back pretty soon,” said Angus abruptly, “for the wretched man upstairs has not only been murdered, but wiped out.”

  “How?” asked the priest.

  “Father,” said Flambeau, after a pause, “upon my soul I believe it is more in your department than mine. No friend or foe has entered the house, but Smythe is gone, as if stolen by the fairies. If that is not supernatural, I—”

  As he spoke they were all checked by an unusual sight; the big blue policeman came round the corner of the crescent, running. He came straight up to Brown.

  “You’re right, sir,” he panted, “they’ve just found poor Mr. Smythe’s body in the canal down below.”

  Angus put his hand wildly to his head, “Did he run down and drown himself?” he asked.

  “He never came down. I’ll swear,” said the constable, “and he wasn’t drowned either, for he died of a great stab over the heart.”

  “And yet you saw no one enter?” said Flambeau in a grave voice.

  “Let us walk down the road a little,” said the priest.

  As they reached the other end of the crescent he observed abruptly, “Stupid of me! I forgot to ask the policeman something. I wonder if they found a light brown sack.”

  “Why a light brown sack?” asked Angus, astonished.

  “Because if it was any other colored sack, the case must begin over again,” said Father Brown; “but if it was a light brown sack, why, the case is finished.”

  “I am pleased to hear it,” said Angus with hearty irony. “It hasn’t begun, so far as I am concerned.”

  “You must tell us all about it,” said Flambeau with a strange heavy simplicity, like a child.

  Unconsciously they were walking with quickening steps down th
e long sweep of road on the other side of the high crescent. Father Brown leading briskly, though in silence. At last he said with an almost touching vagueness, “Well, I’m afraid you’ll think it so prosy. We always begin at the abstract end of things, and you can’t begin this story anywhere else.

  “Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlormaid, and so on,’ though the parlormaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, ‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the. Lady will remember the butler, the parlormaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question literally, even when you get it answered truly. When those four quite honest men said that no man had gone into the Mansions, they did not really mean that no man had gone into them.

  They meant no man whom they could suspect of being your man. A man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.”

  “An invisible man?” inquired Angus, raising his red eyebrows.

  “A mentally invisible man,” said Father Brown.

  A minute or two after he resumed in the same unassuming voice, like a man thinking his way. “Of course you can’t think of such a man, until you do think of him. That’s where his cleverness comes in. But I came to think of him through two or three little things in the tale Mr. Angus told us. First, there was the fact that this Welkin went for long walks. And then there was the vast lot of stamp paper on the window. And then, most of all, there were the two things the young lady said—things that couldn’t be true. Don’t get annoyed,” he added hastily, noting a sudden movement of the Scotchman’s head; “she thought they were true. A person can’t be quite alone in a street a second before she receives a letter. She can’t be quite alone in a street when she starts reading a letter just received. There must be somebody pretty near her; he must be mentally invisible.”

  “Why must there be somebody near her?” asked Angus. “Because,” said Father Brown, “barring carrier-pigeons, somebody must have brought her the letter.”

  “Do you really mean to say,” asked Flambeau, with energy, “that Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady?”

  “Yes,” said the priest. “Welkin carried his rival’s letters to his lady. You see, he had to.”

  “Oh, I can’t stand much more of this, “ exploded Flambeau. “Who is this fellow? What does he look like? What is the usual get up of a mentally invisible man?”

  “He is dressed rather handsomely in red, blue and gold,” replied the priest promptly with precision, “and in this striking, and even showy, costume he entered Himalaya Mansions under eight human eyes; he killed Smythe in cold blood, and came down into the street again carrying the dead body in his arms—’’

  “Reverend Sir,” cried Angus, standing still, “are you raving mad, or am I?”

  “You are not mad,” said Brown, “only a little unobservant.

  You have not noticed a man as this, for example.”

  He took three quick strides forward, and put his hand on the shoulder of an ordinary passing postman who had bustled by them unnoticed under the shade of the trees.

  “Nobody ever notices postmen somehow,” he said thoughtfully; “yet they have passions like other men, and even carry large bags where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.” The postman, instead of turning naturally, had ducked and tumbled against the garden fence. He was a lean fair-bearded man of very ordinary appearance, but as he turned an alarmed face over his shoulder, all three men were fixed with an almost fiendish squint.

  Flambeau went back to his sabers, purple rugs and Persian cat, having many things to attend to. John Turnbull Angus went back to the lady at the shop, with whom that imprudent young man contrives to be extremely comfortable. But Father Brown walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known.

  The Adventure of the Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds by Ellery Queen (Manfred B. Lee, 1905—1971; Frederic Dannay, 1905—1982)

  Ellery Queen was, as most mystery fans know, the pseudonym of Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, as well as the monicker of the detective in most of their books. Ellery also solved cases in the movies, in four different television series, in comic books, and for nine years on the radio. Like the early Queen novels, each episode of the radio Adventures of Ellery Queen stopped just before the solution to issue a challenge to the audience to solve the crime. Quite a Jew of the radio plays, including “The Man Who Could Double the Size of Diamonds, “ involved the unraveling of an impossible crime. It is fair to give warning that the disappearance of the diamonds involves a cunning bit of misdirection, but even with that clue we doubt that you will be able to beat Ellery to the solution.

  The Characters

  Ellery Queen the detective

  Nikki Porter his secretary

  Inspector Queen his father

  Sergeant Velie of Inspector Queen ‘s staff

  Professor Lazarus an inventor

  Kenyon an American diamond dealer

  Van Hooten a Dutch diamond dealer

  Bryce a British diamond dealer

  Masset a French lapidary

  Dr. Cook the examining physician

  Setting

  A Diamond Dealer’s Office in New York—

  The Queen Apartment—A Hotel Room

  Scene I: Kenyon’s Office, Maiden Lane

  (Kenyon is laughing very hard. He is a hard-headed business man. Professor Lazarus is an enthusiastic crackpot.)

  Lazarus: . . . and in my wonderful new diamond-manufacturing process—Why are you laughing, Mr. Kenyon?

  Kenyon: (Stops and coughs) Hrrrm! You’re an inventor, you say, Professor Lazarus?

  Lazarus: Inventor, chemist, physicist, explorer into the hidden secrets of Nature . . . yes, Mr. Kenyon, a man of pure science, pure science! That’s why I’ve come to you first, Mr. Kenyon. You’re one of the leading diamond experts on Maiden Lane.

  Kenyon: (Gravely) Thank you, Professor. And you—uh—say you can manufacture diamonds? (He suppresses a laugh.)

  Lazarus: (Excited) It’s a colossal discovery! Are you familiar with the experiments of Moissan—changing pure carbon into artificial diamonds?

  Kenyon: (Tolerantly) Oh, come, professor. Moissan’s process has no commercial future. The cost of making the diamonds is considerably more than the diamonds are worth!

  Lazarus: True, Mr. Kenyon, true. But I’ve gone far beyond Moisan! My new process will revolutionize the diamond industry—change the financial structure of the world!

  Kenyon: (Laughing) Financial structure of the . . . (Wiping the tears away) Sorry, Professor Lazarus. I . . . I’ve got a tickle.

  Lazarus: (Offended) They laughed at Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur and Galileo. Well, laugh! Let ‘em all laugh! (Mutters) They always laugh at a genius. . . .

  Kenyon: (Sharply) See here, man. You expect me to believe you’ve discovered a process by which you can manufacture diamonds at a cost that’s not prohibitive? Fairy tales!

  Lazarus: Mr. Kenyon, give me a perfect diamond, and in seven days I’ll return it to you twice as large!

  Kenyon: The man who could double the size of diamonds! (He laughs again.)

  Lazarus: (Excited) Don’t laugh at me! I’ve done it, I tell you!

  Kenyon: (With mock gravity) Sort of scientific miracle, eh?

  Lazarus: Scientific fact! I’ve discovered one of Nature’s secrets, Mr. Kenyon!

  Kenyon: Professor Lazarus and Mother Nature, Incorporated. Uh . . . how do you accomplish this miracle?

  Lazarus: (Slyly) Aha! Wouldn’t you like to know! But I’ll tell you this. It’s a complex process based upon the introduction
into the molecular structure of perfectly formed natural diamonds certain chemical elements—don’t ask me which ones, I won’t tell you! But by this process I can double the size and weight of the original diamond! I’ve found a way to grow diamonds chemically!

  Kenyon: (Amazed) I believe you’re really serious.

  Lazarus: Serious! I’ve devoted my whole life to it!

  Kenyon: (Thoughtfully) Perhaps I’ve been hasty, Professor. But why come to me? Why not go it alone?

  Lazarus: Because I’m penniless. My life’s savings have gone into perfecting the formula and developing the apparatus. I need financial backing, Mr. Kenyon!

  Kenyon: (Dryly) I should say you need raw material!—in this case, perfect diamonds. Didn’t you say you’ve got to start with natural diamonds?

  Lazarus: Yes, Mr. Kenyon. Now look. I don’t blame you for being skeptical. You’re a business man. So I don’t expect you to take me on faith.

  Kenyon: (Surprised) You mean you’re actually prepared to demonstrate your process, Professor?

  Lazarus: Of course, Mr. Kenyon!

  Kenyon: Under any conditions I may impose on you?

  Lazarus: Absolutely any conditions!

  Kenyon: (Very serious—abruptly) Professor Lazarus, be back here tomorrow!

  Scene 2: The Same, Next Day

  (A slight argument is going on.)

  Van Hooten: (He is a fat Dutch merchant) And I say it is all poppycock!

  Kenyon: It won’t hurt to look, will it, Van Hooten?

  Bryce: (A slim London business man) Kenyon’s right, Van Hooten. You’ve been stuck away in that Amsterdam diamond-exchange of yours so long you’ve grown barnacles. Take a chance, old boy!

  Van Hooten: All right, I take a chance, Mr. Bryce. Doubling the size of diamonds! (Short laugh) I don’t know whether it is to laugh, or to cry.

  Kenyon: Fine! Then you’re with us, too, Bryce?

  Bryce: (Chuckling) Hard to convince, but open to proof. The true British spirit, Kenyon. Yes, I’m with you and Van Hooten. How about you. Monsieur Masset?