by G. K. Datlow
“What’s that?” snapped Mr Taylor, and his nostrils swelled visibly.
“I might have done it,” went on Father Brown, “nisi me constringeret ecclesiae auctoritas. Anybody, but for the one true morality, might be tempted to accept so obvious, so simple a social solution. I might have done it; you might have done it; the Mayor or the muffin-man might have done it. The only person on this earth I can think of, who probably would not have done it, is the private inquiry agent whom Bruce had just engaged at five pounds a week, and who hadn’t yet had any of his money.”
The secretary was silent for a moment; then he snorted and said: “If that’s the offer in the letter, we’d certainly better see whether it’s a forgery. For really, we don’t know that the whole tale isn’t as false as a forgery. The fellow admits himself that the disappearance of his hunch-backed giant is utterly incredible and inexplicable.”
“Yes,” said Father Brown; “that’s what I like about Muggleton. He admits things.”
“All the same,” insisted Taylor, his nostrils vibrant with excitement. “All the same, the long and the short of it is that he can’t prove that his tall man in the scarf ever existed or does exist; and every single fact found by the police and the witnesses proves that he does not exist. No, Father Brown. There is only one way in which you can justify this little scallywag you seem to be so fond of. And that is by producing his Imaginary Man. And that is exactly what you can’t do.”
“By the way,” said the priest, absent-mindedly, “I suppose you come from the hotel where Bruce has rooms, Mr Taylor?”
Taylor looked a little taken aback, and seemed almost to stammer. “Well, he always did have those rooms; and they’re practically his. I haven’t actually seen him there this time.”
“I suppose you motored down with him,” observed Brown; “or did you both come by train?”
“I came by train and brought the luggage,” said the secretary impatiently. “Something kept him, I suppose. I haven’t actually seen him since he left Yorkshire on his own a week or two ago.”
“So it seems,” said the priest very softly, “that if Muggleton wasn’t the last to see Bruce by the wild sea-waves, you were the last to see him, on the equally wild Yorkshire moors.”
Taylor had turned quite white, but he forced his grating voice to composure: “I never said Muggleton didn’t see Bruce on the pier.”
“No; and why didn’t you?” asked Father Brown. “If he made up one man on the pier, why shouldn’t he make up two men on the pier? Of course we do know that Bruce did exist; but we don’t seem to know what has happened to him for several weeks. Perhaps he was left behind in Yorkshire.”
The rather strident voice of the secretary rose almost to a scream. All his veneer of society suavity seemed to have vanished.
“You’re simply shuffling! You’re simply shirking! You’re trying to drag in mad insinuations about me, simply because you can’t answer my question.”
“Let me see,” said Father Brown reminiscently. “What was your question?”
“You know well enough what it was; and you know you’re damned well stumped by it. Where is the man with the scarf? Who has seen him? Whoever heard of him or spoke of him, except that little liar of yours? If you want to convince us, you must produce him. If he ever existed, he may be hiding in the Hebrides or off to Callao. But you’ve got to produce him, though I know he doesn’t exist. Well then! Where is he?”
“I rather think he is over there,” said Father Brown, peering and blinking towards the nearer waves that washed round the iron pillars of the pier; where the two figures of the agent and the old fisher and preacher were still dark against the green glow of the water. “I mean in that sort of net thing that’s tossing about in the sea.”
With whatever bewilderment, Inspector Grinstead took the upper hand again with a flash, and strode down the beach.
“Do you mean to say,” he cried, “that the murderer’s body is in the old boy’s net?”
Father Brown nodded as he followed down the shingly slope; and, even as they moved, little Muggleton the agent turned and began to climb the same shore, his mere dark outline a pantomime of amazement and discovery.
“It’s true, for all we said,” he gasped. “The murderer did try to swim ashore and was drowned, of course, in that weather. Or else he did really commit suicide. Anyhow, he drifted dead into Old Brimstone’s fishing-net, and that’s what the old maniac meant when he said he fished for dead men.”
The Inspector ran down the shore with an agility that outstripped them all, and was heard shouting out orders. In a few moments the fishermen and a few bystanders, assisted by the policemen, had hauled the net into shore, and rolled it with its burden on to the wet sands that still reflected the sunset. The secretary looked at what lay on the sands and the words died on his lips. For what lay on the sands was indeed the body of a gigantic man in rags, with the huge shoulders somewhat humped and bony eagle face; and a great red ragged woollen scarf or comforter, sprawled along the sunset sands like a great stain of blood. But Taylor was staring not at the gory scarf or the fabulous stature, but at the face; and his own face was a conflict of incredulity and suspicion.
The Inspector instantly turned to Muggleton with a new air of civility.
“This certainly confirms your story,” he said. And until he heard the tone of those words, Muggleton had never guessed how almost universally his story had been disbelieved. Nobody had believed him. Nobody but Father Brown.
Therefore, seeing Father Brown edging away from the group, he made a movement to depart in his company; but even then he was brought up rather short by the discovery that the priest was once more being drawn away by the deadly attractions of the funny little automatic machines. He even saw the reverend gentleman fumbling for a penny. He stopped, however, with the penny poised in his finger and thumb, as the secretary spoke for the last time in his loud discordant voice.
“And I suppose we may add,” he said, “that the monstrous and imbecile charges against me are also at an end.”
“My dear sir,” said the priest, “I never made any charges against you. I’m not such a fool as to suppose you were likely to murder your master in Yorkshire and then come down here to fool about with his luggage. All I said was that I could make out a better case against you than you were making out so vigorously against poor Mr Muggleton. All the same, if you really want to learn the truth about his business (and I assure you the truth isn’t generally grasped yet), I can give you a hint even from your own affairs. It is rather a rum and significant thing that Mr Bruce the millionaire had been unknown to all his usual haunts and habits for weeks before he was really killed. As you seem to be a promising amateur detective, I advise you to work on that line.”
“What do you mean?” asked Taylor sharply.
But he got no answer out of Father Brown, who was once more completely concentrated on jiggling the little handle of the machine, that made one doll jump out and then another doll jump after it.
“Father Brown,” said Muggleton, his old annoyance faintly reviving: “Will you tell me why you like that fool thing so much?”
“For one reason,” replied the priest, peering closely into the glass puppet-show. “Because it contains the secret of this tragedy.”
Then he suddenly straightened himself; and looked quite seriously at his companion.
“I knew all along,” he said, “that you were telling the truth and the opposite of the truth.”
Muggleton could only stare at a return of all the riddles.
“It’s quite simple,” added the priest, lowering his voice. “That corpse with the scarlet scarf over there is the corpse of Braham Bruce the millionaire. There won’t be any other.”
“But the two men—” began Muggleton, and his mouth fell open.
“Your description of the two men was quite admirably vivid,” said Father Brown. “I assure you I’m not at all likely to forget it. If I may say so, you have a literary talent; perhaps
journalism would give you more scope than detection. I believe I remember practically each point about each person. Only, you see, queerly enough, each point affected you in one way and me in exactly the opposite way. Let’s begin with the first you mentioned. You said that the first man you saw had an indescribable air of authority and dignity. And you said to yourself, ‘That’s the Trust Magnate, the great merchant prince, the ruler of markets.’ But when I heard about the air of dignity and authority, I said to myself, ‘That’s the actor; everything about this is the actor,’ You don’t get that look by being President of the Chain Store Amalgamation Company. You get that look by being Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost, or Julius Caesar, or King Lear, and you never altogether lose it. You couldn’t see enough of his clothes to tell whether they were really seedy, but you saw a strip of fur and a sort of faintly fashionable cut; and I said to myself again, ‘The actor.’
“Next, before we go into details about the other man, notice one thing about him evidently absent from the first man. You said the second man was not only ragged but unshaven to the point of being bearded. Now we have all seen shabby actors, dirty actors, drunken actors, utterly disreputable actors. But such a thing as a scrub-bearded actor, in a job or even looking round for a job, has scarcely been seen in this world. On the other hand, shaving is often almost the first thing to go, with a gentleman or a wealthy eccentric who is really letting himself go to pieces. Now we have every reason to believe that your friend the millionaire was letting himself go to pieces. His letter was the letter of a man who had already gone to pieces. But it wasn’t only negligence that made him look poor and shabby. Don’t you understand that the man was practically in hiding? That was why he didn’t go to his hotel; and his own secretary hadn’t seen him for weeks. He was a millionaire; but his whole object was to be a completely disguised millionaire. Have you ever read ‘The Woman in White’? Don’t you remember that the fashionable and luxurious Count Fosco, fleeing for his life before a secret society, was found stabbed in the blue blouse of a common French workman? Then let us go back for a moment to the demeanour of these men. You saw the first man calm and collected and you said to yourself, ‘That’s the innocent victim’; though the innocent victim’s own letter wasn’t at all calm and collected. I heard he was calm and collected; and I said to myself, ‘That’s the murderer.’ Why should he be anything else but calm and collected? He knew what he was going to do. He had made up his mind to do it for a long time; if he had ever had any hesitation or remorse he had hardened himself against them before he came on the scene—in his case, we might say, on the stage. He wasn’t likely to have any particular stage-fright. He didn’t pull out his pistol and wave it about; why should he? He kept it in his pocket till he wanted it; very likely he fired from his pocket. The other man fidgeted with his pistol because he was nervous as a cat, and very probably had never had a pistol before. He did it for the same reason that he rolled his eyes; and I remember that, even in your own unconscious evidence, it is particularly stated that he rolled them backwards. In fact, he was looking behind him. In fact, he was not the pursuer but the pursued. But because you happened to see the first man first, you couldn’t help thinking of the other man as coming up behind him. In mere mathematics and mechanics, each of them was running after the other—just like the others.”
“What others?” inquired the dazed detective.
“Why, these,” cried Father Brown, striking the automatic machine with the little wooden spade, which had incongruously remained in his hand throughout these murderous mysteries. “These little clockwork dolls that chase each other round and round for ever. Let us call them Mr Blue and Mr Red, after the colour of their coats. I happened to start off with Mr Blue, and so the children said that Mr Red was running after him; but it would have looked exactly the contrary if I had started with Mr Red.”
“Yes, I begin to see,” said Muggleton; “and I suppose all the rest fits in. The family likeness, of course, cuts both ways, and they never saw the murderer leaving the pier—”
“They never looked for the murderer leaving the pier,” said the other. “Nobody told them to look for a quiet clean-shaven gentleman in an astrakhan coat. All the mystery of his vanishing revolved on your description of a hulking fellow in a red neckcloth. But the simple truth was that the actor in the astrakhan coat murdered the millionaire with the red rag, and there is the poor fellow’s body. It’s just like the red and blue dolls; only, because you saw one first, you guessed wrong about which was red with vengeance and which was blue with funk.”
At this point two or three children began to straggle across the sands, and the priest waved them to him with the wooden spade, theatrically tapping the automatic machine. Muggleton guessed that it was mainly to prevent their straying towards the horrible heap on the shore.
“One more penny left in the world,” said Father Brown, “and then we must go home to tea. Do you know, Doris, I rather like those revolving games, that just go round and round like the Mulberry-Bush. After all, God made all the suns and stars to play Mulberry-Bush. But those other games, where one must catch up with another, where runners are rivals and run neck and neck and outstrip each other; well—much nastier things seem to happen. I like to think of Mr Red and Mr Blue always jumping with undiminished spirits; all free and equal; and never hurting each other. ‘Fond lover, never, never, wilt thou kiss—or kill.’ Happy, happy Mr Red!
He cannot change; though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever will thou jump; and he be Blue.
Reciting this remarkable quotation from Keats, with some emotion, Father Brown tucked the little spade under one arm, and giving a hand to two of the children, stumped solemnly up the beach to tea.
The Crime of the Communist
Three men came out from under the lowbrowed Tudor arch in the mellow facade of Mandeville College, into the strong evening sunlight of a summer day which seemed as if it would never end; and in that sunlight they saw something that blasted like lightning; well-fitted to be the shock of their lives.
Even before they had realized anything in the way of a catastrophe, they were conscious of a contrast. They themselves, in a curious quiet way, were quite harmonious with their surroundings. Though the Tudor arches that ran like a cloister round the College gardens had been built four hundred years ago, at that moment when the Gothic fell from heaven and bowed, or almost crouched, over the cosier chambers of Humanism and the Revival of Learning—though they themselves were in modern clothes (that is in clothes whose ugliness would have amazed any of the four centuries) yet something in the spirit of the place made them all at one. The gardens had been tended so carefully as to achieve the final triumph of looking careless; the very flowers seemed beautiful by accident, like elegant weeds; and the modern costumes had at least any picturesqueness that can be produced by being untidy. The first of the three, a tall, bald, bearded maypole of a man, was a familiar figure in the Quad in cap and gown; the gown slipped off one of his sloping shoulders. The second was very square-shouldered, short and compact, with a rather jolly grin, commonly clad in a jacket, with his gown over his arm. The third was even shorter and much shabbier, in black clerical clothes. But they all seemed suitable to Mandeville College; and the indescribable atmosphere of the two ancient and unique Universities of England. They fitted into it and they faded into it; which is there regarded as most fitting.
The two men seated on garden chairs by a little table were a sort of brilliant blot on this grey-green landscape. They were clad mostly in black and yet they glittered from head to heel, from their burnished top-hats to their perfectly polished boots. It was dimly felt as an outrage that anybody should be so well-dressed in the well-bred freedom of Mandeville College. The only excuse was that they were foreigners. One was an American, a millionaire named Hake, dressed in the spotlessly and sparklingly gentlemanly manner known only to the rich of New York. The other, who added to all these things the outrage of an astrakhan overcoat (to say nothing of a pair of
florid whiskers), was a German Count of great wealth, the shortest part of whose name was Von Zimmern. The mystery of this story, however, is not the mystery of why they were there. They were there for the reason that commonly explains the meeting of incongruous things; they proposed to give the College some money. They had come in support of a plan supported by several financiers and magnates of many countries, for founding a new Chair of Economics at Mandeville College. They had inspected the College with that tireless conscientious sightseeing of which no sons of Eve are capable except the American and the German. And now they were resting from their labours and looking solemnly at the College gardens. So far so good.
The three other men, who had already met them, passed with a vague salutation; but one of them stopped; the smallest of the three, in the black clerical clothes.
“I say,” he said, with rather the air of a frightened rabbit, “I don’t like the look of those men.”
“Good God! Who could?” ejaculated the tall man, who happened to be the Master of Mandeville. “At least we have some rich men who don’t go about dressed up like tailors’ dummies.”
“Yes,” hissed the little cleric, “that’s what I mean. Like tailors’ dummies.”
“Why, what do you mean?” asked the shorter of the other men, sharply.
“I mean they’re like horrible waxworks,” said the cleric in a faint voice. “I mean they don’t move. Why don’t they move?”
Suddenly starting out of his dim retirement, he darted across the garden and touched the German Baron on the elbow. The German Baron fell over, chair and all, and the trousered legs that stuck up in the air were as stiff as the legs of the chair.
