He began to draw rough designs with the point of his stumpy umbrella on the strip of sand.
“Let’s see; how does the row of shops run? First, the butcher’s; well, of course, a butcher would be an ideal performer with a large carving-knife. But you saw Vaudrey come out, and it isn’t very probable that he stood in the outer shop while the butcher said: ‘Good morning. Allow me to cut your throat! Thank you. And the next article, please?’ Sir Arthur doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who’d have stood there with a pleasant smile while this happened. He was a very strong and vigorous man, with rather a violent temper. And who else, except the butcher, could have stood up to him? The next shop is kept by an old woman. Then comes the tobacconist, who is certainly a man, but I am told quite a small and timid one. Then there is the dressmaker’s, run by two maiden ladies, and then a refreshment shop run by a man who happens to be in hospital and who has left his wife in charge. There are two or three village lads, assistants and errand boys, but they were away on a special job. The refreshment shop ends the street; there is nothing beyond that but the inn, with the policeman between.”
He made a punch with the ferrule of his umbrella to represent the policeman, and remained moodily staring up the river. Then he made a slight movement with his hand and, stepping quickly across, stooped over the corpse.
“Ah,” he said, straightening himself and letting out a great breath. “The tobacconist! Why in the world didn’t I remember that about the tobacconist?”
“What is the matter with you?” demanded Smith in some exasperation; for Father Brown was rolling his eyes and muttering, and he had uttered the word “tobacconist” as if it were a terrible word of doom.
“Did you notice,” said the priest, after a pause, “something rather curious about his face?”
“Curious, my God!” said Evan, with a retrospective shudder. “Anyhow, his throat was cut. ...”
“I said his face,” said the cleric quietly. “Besides, don’t you notice he has hurt his hand and there’s a small bandage round it?”
“Oh, that has nothing to do with it,” said Evan hastily. “That happened before and was quite an accident. He cut his hand with a broken ink-bottle while we were working together.”
“It has something to do with it, for all that,” replied Father Brown.
There was a long silence, and the priest walked moodily along the sand, trailing his umbrella and sometimes muttering the word “tobacconist,” till the very word chilled his friend with fear. Then he suddenly lifted the umbrella and pointed to a boat-house among the rushes.
“Is that the family boat?” he asked. “I wish you’d just scull me up the river; I want to look at those houses from the back. There’s no time to lose. They may find the body; but we must risk that.”
Smith was already pulling the little boat upstream towards the hamlet before Father Brown spoke again. Then he said:
“By the way, I found out from old Abbott what was the real story about poor Vaudrey’s misdemeanour. It was a rather curious story about an Egyptian official who had insulted him by saying that a good Moslem would avoid swine and Englishmen, but preferred swine; or some such tactful remark. Whatever happened at the time, the quarrel was apparently renewed some years after, when the official visited England; and Vaudrey, in his violent passion, dragged the man to a pig-sty on the farm attached to the country house and threw him in, breaking his arm and leg and leaving him there till next morning. There was rather a row about it, of course, but many people thought Vaudrey had acted in a pardonable passion of patriotism. Anyhow, it seems not quite the thing that would have kept a man silent under deadly blackmail for decades.”
“Then you don’t think it had anything to do with the story we are considering?” asked the secretary, thoughtfully.
“I think it had a thundering lot to do with the story I am considering now,” said Father Brown.
They were now floating past the low wall and the steep strips of back garden running down from the back doors to the river. Father Brown counted them carefully, pointing with his umbrella, and when he came to the third he said again:
“Tobacconist! Is the tobacconist by any chance... .? But I think I’ll act on my guess till I know. Only, I’ll tell you what it was I thought odd about Sir Arthur’s face.”
“And what was that?” asked his companion, pausing and resting on his oars for an instant.
“He was a great dandy,” said Father Brown, “and the face was only half-shaved . . . . Could you stop here a moment? We could tie up the boat to that post.”
A minute or two afterwards they had clambered over the little wall and were mounting the steep cobbled paths of the little garden, with its rectangular beds of vegetables and flowers.
“You see, the tobacconist does grow potatoes,” said Father Brown. “Associations with Sir Walter Raleigh, no doubt. Plenty of potatoes and plenty of potato sacks. These little country people have not lost all the habits of peasants; they still run two or three jobs at once. But country tobacconists very often do one odd job extra, that I never thought of till I saw Vaudrey’s chin. Nine times out of ten you call the shop the tobacconist’s, but it is also the barber’s. He’d cut his hand and couldn’t shave himself; so he came up here. Does that suggest anything else to you?”
“It suggests a good deal,” replied Smith; “but I expect it will suggest a good deal more to you.”
“Does it suggest, for instance,” observed Father Brown, “the only conditions in which a vigorous and rather violent gentleman might be smiling pleasantly when his throat was cut?”
The next moment they had passed through a dark passage or two at the back of the house, and came into the back room of the shop, dimly lit by filtered light from beyond and a dingy and cracked looking-glass. It seemed, somehow, like the green twilight of a tank; but there was light enough to see the rough apparatus of a barber’s shop and the pale and even panic-sticken face of a barber.
Father Brown’s eye roamed round the room, which seemed to have been just recently cleaned and tidied, till his gaze found something in a dusty corner just behind the door. It was a hat hanging on a hat-peg. It was a white hat, and one very well known to all that village. And yet, conspicuous as it had always seemed in the street, it seemed only an example of the sort of little thing a certain sort of man often entirely forgets, when he has most carefully washed floors or destroyed stained rags.
“Sir Arthur Vaudrey was shaved here yesterday morning, I think,” said Father Brown in a level voice.
To the barber, a small, bald-headed, spectacled man whose name was Wicks, the sudden appearance of these two figures out of his own back premises was like the appearance of two ghosts risen out of a grave under the floor. But it was at once apparent that he had more to frighten him than any fancy of superstition. He shrank, we might almost say that he shrivelled, into a corner of the dark room; and everything about him seemed to dwindle, except his great goblin spectacles.
“Tell me one thing,” continued the priest, quietly. “You had a reason for hating the squire?”
The man in the corner babbled something that Smith could not hear; but the priest nodded.
“I know you had,” he said. “You hated him; and that’s how I know you didn’t kill him. Will you tell us what happened, or shall I?”
There was a silence filled with the faint ticking of a clock in the back kitchen; and then Father Brown went on.
“What happened was this. When Mr. Dalmon stepped inside your outer shop, he asked for some cigarettes that were in the window. You stepped outside for a moment, as shopmen often do, to make sure of what he meant; and in that moment of time he perceived in the inner room the razor you had just laid down, and the yellow-white head of Sir Arthur in the barber’s chair; probably both glimmering in the light of that little window beyond. It took but an instant for him to pick up the razor and cut the throat and come back to the counter. The victim would not even be alarmed at the razor and the hand. He died smiling
at his own thoughts. And what thoughts! Nor, I think, was Dalmon alarmed. He had done it so quickly and quietly that Mr. Smith here could have sworn in court that the two were together all the time. But there was somebody who was alarmed, very legitimately, and that was you. You had quarrelled with your landlord about arrears of rent and so on; you came back into your own shop and found your enemy murdered in your own chair, with your own razor. It was not altogether unnatural that you despaired of clearing yourself, and preferred to clear up the mess; to clean the floor and throw the corpse into the river at night, in a potato sack rather loosely tied. It was rather lucky that there were fixed hours after which your barber’s shop was shut; so you had plenty of time. You seem to have remembered everything but the hat . . . . Oh, don’t be frightened; I shall forget everything, including the hat.”
And he passed placidly through the outer shop into the street beyond, followed by the wondering Smith, and leaving behind the barber stunned and staring.
“You see,” said Father Brown to his companion, “it was one of those cases where a motive really is too weak to convict a man and yet strong enough to acquit him. A little nervous fellow like that would be the last man really to kill a big strong man for a tiff about money. But he would be the first man to fear that he would be accused of having done it. ... Ah, there was a thundering difference in the motive of the man who did do it.” And he relapsed into reflection, staring and almost glaring at vacancy.
“It is simply awful,” groaned Evan Smith. “I was abusing Dalmon as a blackmailer and a blackguard an hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me all up to hear he really did this, after all.”
The priest still seemed to be in a sort of trance, like a man staring down into an abyss. At last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if it were a prayer than an oath: “Merciful God, what a horrible revenge!”
His friend questioned him, but he continued as if talking to himself.
“What a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance for one mortal worm to take on another! Shall we ever get to the bottom of this bottomless human heart, where such abominable imaginations can abide? God save us all from pride; but I cannot yet make any picture in my mind of hate and vengeance like that.”
“Yes,” said Smith; “and I can’t quite picture why he should kill Vaudrey at all. If Dalmon was a blackmailer, it would seem more natural for Vaudrey to kill him. As you say, the throat-cutting was a horrid business, but — — ”
Father Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep.
“Oh, that!” he corrected hastily. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t mean the murder in the barber’s shop, when — when I said a horrible tale of vengeance. I was thinking of a much more horrible tale than that; though, of course, that was horrible enough, in its way. But that was much more comprehensible; almost anybody might have done it. In fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence.”
“What?” exclaimed the secretary incredulously. “A man creeps up behind another man and cuts his throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the ceiling in a barber’s chair, and you say it was self-defence!”
“I do not say it was justifiable self-defence,” replied the other. “I only say that many a man would have been driven to it, to defend himself against an appalling calamity — which was also an appalling crime. It was that other crime that I was thinking about. To begin with, about that question you asked just now — why should the blackmailer be the murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional confusions and errors on a point like that.” He paused, as if collecting his thoughts after his recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary tones.
“You observe that two men, an older and a younger, go about together and agree on a matrimonial project; but the origin of their intimacy is old and concealed. One is rich and the other poor; and you guess at blackmail. You are quite right, at least to that extent. Where you are quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You assume that the poor man was blackmailing the rich man. As a matter of fact, the rich man was blackmailing the poor man.”
“But that seems nonsense,” objected the secretary.
“It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon,” replied the other. “Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing people. Your notion that it’s nonsense rests on two illusions which are both nonsensical. One is, that rich men never want to be richer; the other is, that a man can only be blackmailed for money. It’s the last that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was acting not for avarice, but for vengeance. And he planned the most hideous vengeance I ever heard of.”
“But why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?” inquired Smith.
“It wasn’t on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance,” replied the priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject. “When we found the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and you said it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that the murderer also saw the face upside down, coming behind the barber’s chair?”
“But that’s all morbid extravagance,” remonstrated his companion. “I was quite used to the face when it was the right way up.”
“Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up,” said Father Brown. “I told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables, you had got used to the face of a fiend.”
“What on earth are you driving at?” demanded Smith, impatiently.
“I speak in parables,” replied the other in a rather sombre tone. “Of course, Sir Arthur was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a character which he had made out of a temperament that might also have been turned to good. But those goggling, suspicious eyes; that tight, yet quivering mouth, might have told you something if you had not been so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on which a wound will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if it lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained eyes were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be selfishness. Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages to be a sort of saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride; a pride that was not even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on the surface of his soul festered. And that is the meaning of that old story about throwing the man into the pig-sty. If he’d thrown him then and there, after being called a pig, it might have been a pardonable burst of passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that is just the point. Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years, till he could get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty; and then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic revenge . . . . Oh, my God! he liked his revenges to be appropriate and artistic.”
Smith looked at him curiously. “You are not thinking of the pig-sty story,” he said.
“No,” said Father Brown; “of the other story.” He controlled the shudder in his voice, and went on:
“Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the vengeance fit the crime, consider the other story before us. Had anybody else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he thought a mortal insult? Yes; a woman insulted him.”
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan’s eyes; he was listening intently.
“A girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had once been a sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell of his heart: ‘She shall marry a murderer.’”
They took the road towards the great house and went along by the river for some time in silence, before he resumed: “Vaudrey was in a position to blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long ago; probably he knew of several crimes among the wild comrades of his youth. Probably it was a wild crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest murders are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me li
ke a man who knows remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey’s power and, between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement; letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but the Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man’s mind.
“Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed, not altogether unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found how the tool was to be broken and thrown away. He came upon certain notes of Vaudrey’s in the library which, disguised as they were, told of preparations for giving information to the police. He understood the whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first understood it. The moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband who had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the gallows. That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding off of the story.”
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective of the road, they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott advancing towards them; even in the outline there was a certain agitation. But they were still shaken with their own private apocalypse.
“As you say, hate is a hateful thing,” said Evan at last; “and, do you know, one thing gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon is gone out of me — now I know how he was twice a murderer.”
It was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met the big doctor coming towards them, with his large gloved hands thrown out in a sort of despairing gesture and his grey beard tossing in the wind.
“There is dreadful news,” he said. “Arthur’s body has been found. He seems to have died in his garden.”
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection Page 81
