‘I use them in my own flat,’ said the little black-bearded man, laughing, ‘partly for advertisement, and partly for real convenience. Honestly, and all above board, those big clockwork dolls of mine do bring you coals or claret or a time-table quicker than any live servants I’ve ever known, if you know which knob to press. But I’ll never deny, between ourselves, that such servants have their disadvantages, too.’
‘Indeed,’ said Angus; ‘is there something they can’t do?’
‘Yes,’ replied Smythe coolly; ‘they can’t tell me who left those threatening letters at my flat.’
The man’s motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his domestic service, it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising quack, he was one who believed in his own wares. The sense of something tiny and flying was accentuated as they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open daylight of evening. Soon the white curves came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending spirals, as they say in the modern religions. For, indeed, they were cresting a corner of London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats they sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by the level sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the crescent known as Himalaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a window; for they found that pile of flats sitting above London as above a green sea of slate. Opposite to the mansions, on the other side of the gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure more like a steep hedge or dyke than a garden, and some way below that ran a strip of artificial water, a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered fortress. As the car swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the stray stall of a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the curve, Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational sense that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if they were figures in a story.
The little car shot up to the right house like a bullet, and shot out its owner like a bomb shell. He was immediately inquiring of a tall commissionaire in shining braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves, whether anybody or anything had been seeking his apartments. He was assured that nobody and nothing had passed these officials since his last inquiries; whereupon he and the slightly bewildered Angus were shot up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor.
‘Just come in for a minute,’ said the breathless Smythe. ‘I want to show you those Welkin letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch your friend.’ He pressed a button concealed in the wall, and the door opened of itself.
It opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting features, ordinarily speaking, were the rows of tall half-human mechanical figures that stood up on both sides like tailors’ dummies. Like tailors’ dummies they were headless; and like tailors’ dummies they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the shoulders, and a pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they were not much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for carrying trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or black for convenience of distinction; in every other way they were only automatic machines and nobody would have looked twice at them. On this occasion, at least, nobody did. For between the two rows of these domestic dummies lay something more interesting than most of the mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of paper scrawled with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost as soon as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red ink on it actually was not dry, and the message ran: ‘If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you.’
There was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly: ‘Would you like a little whisky? I rather feel as if I should.’
‘Thank you; I should like a little Flambeau,’ said Angus, gloomily. ‘This business seems to me to be getting rather grave. I’m going round at once to fetch him.’
‘Right you are,’ said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. ‘Bring him round here as quick as you can.’
But as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a button, and one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid along a groove in the floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter. There did seem something a trifle weird about leaving the little man alone among those dead servants, who were coming to life as the door closed.
Six steps down from Smythe’s landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing something with a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified with a prospective bribe, that he would remain in that place until the return with the detective, and would keep count of any kind of stranger coming up those stairs. Dashing down to the front hall he then laid similar charges of vigilance on the commissionaire at the front door, from whom he learned the simplifying circumstance that there was no back door. Not content with this, he captured the floating policeman and induced him to stand opposite the entrance and watch it; and finally paused an instant for a pennyworth of chestnuts, and an inquiry as to the probable length of the merchant’s stay in the neighbourhood.
The chestnut seller, turning up the collar of his coat, told him he should probably be moving shortly, as he thought it was going to snow. Indeed, the evening was growing grey and bitter, but Angus, with all his eloquence, proceeded to nail the chestnut man to his post.
‘Keep yourself warm on your own chestnuts,’ he said earnestly. ‘Eat up your whole stock; I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a sovereign if you’ll wait here till I come back, and then tell me whether any man, woman, or child has gone into that house where the commissionaire is standing.’
He then walked away smartly, with a last look at the besieged tower.
‘I’ve made a ring round that room, anyhow,’ he said. They can’t all four of them be Mr Welkin’s accomplices.’
Lucknow Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill of houses, of which Himalaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr Flambeau’s semi-official flat was on the ground floor, and presented in every way a marked contrast to the American machinery and cold hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service. Flambeau, who was a friend of Angus, received him in a rococo artistic den behind his office, of which the ornaments were sabres, harque-buses, Eastern curiosities, flasks of Italian wine, savage cooking-pots, a plumy Persian cat, and a small dusty-looking Roman Catholic priest, who looked particularly out of place.
‘This is my friend, Father Brown,’ said Flambeau. ‘I’ve often wanted you to meet him. Splendid weather, this; a little cold for Southerners like me.’
‘Yes, I think it will keep clear,’ said Angus, sitting down on a violet-striped Eastern ottoman.
‘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.’
They 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 shoulder; but the Scotsman, 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 very like red ink spilled 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 simply 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 the 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 rightly 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 coloured 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 the 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 parlour-maid, and so on,” though the parlour-maid 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 parlour-maid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered 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 the
y 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 un-assuming 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 Scotsman’s head; ‘she thought they were true all right, but they couldn’t be 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 decision, ‘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 –’
Murder under the Christmas Tree Page 8
