“Stand back,” Erdington snapped. He stayed on his knees for another few moments, looking curiously at Acrise’s puffed, distorted face, bluish around the mouth. Then he stood up.
“He’s dead.”
There was a murmur of surprise and horror, and now they all drew back, as men do instinctively from the presence of death.
“Heart attack?” somebody said.
Quarles moved to his side. “I’m a private detective, Sir James. Lord Acrise feared an attempt on his life, and asked me to come along here.”
“You seem to have done well so far,” Erdington said drily.
“May I look at the body?”
“If you wish.”
As Quarles bent down, he caught the smell of bitter almonds. “There’s a smell like prussic acid, but the way he died precludes cyanide, I think. He seemed to become very drunk during dinner, and his speech was slurred. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“I’m a brain surgeon, not a physician.” Erdington stared at the floor. “Nitro benzene?”
“That’s what I thought. We shall have to notify the police.”
Quarles went to the door and spoke to a disturbed Albert. Then he returned to the room and clapped his hands.
“Gentlemen. My name is Francis Quarles, and I am a private detective. Lord Acrise asked me to come here tonight because he had received a threat that this would be his last evening alive. The threat said, ‘I shall be there, and I shall watch with pleasure as you squirm in agony.’ Lord Acrise has been poisoned. It seems certain that the man who made the threat is in this room.”
“Gliddon,” a voice said. Snewin had divested himself of the white smock and red nightcap, and now appeared as his customary respectable self.
“Yes. This letter, and others he had received, were signed with the name of James Gliddon, a man who bore a grudge against Lord Acrise which went back nearly half a century. Gliddon became a professional smuggler and crook. He would now be in his late sixties.”
“But dammit, man, this Gliddon’s not here.” That was the General, who took off his wig and beard. “Lot of tomfoolery.”
In a shamefaced way the other members of the Santa Claus Club removed their facial trappings. Marley took off his chains and the lady discarded her cloak of tinsel.
Quarles said, “Isn’t he here? But Lord Acrise is dead.”
Snewin coughed. “Excuse me, sir, but would it be possible for my colleagues from our local dramatic society to retire?”
“Everybody must stay in this room until the police arrive,” Quarles said grimly. “The problem, as you will all realize, is how the poison was administered. All of us ate the same food, drank the same wine. I sat next to Lord Acrise, and I watched as closely as possible to make sure of this. After dinner some of you smoked cigars or cigarettes, but not Lord Acrise.”
“Just a moment.” It was Roddy Davis who spoke. “This sounds fantastic, but wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said that when you’d eliminated all other possibilities, even a fantastic one must be right? Supposing poison in powder form was put on to Acrise’s food? Through the pepper pots, say …”
Erdington was shaking his head, but Quarles unscrewed both salt and pepper pots and tasted their contents. “Salt and pepper,” he said briefly. “Hello, what’s this.”
“It’s Acrise’s napkin,” Endell said. “What’s remarkable about that?”
“It’s a napkin, but not the one Acrise used. He wiped his mouth half a dozen times on his napkin, and wiped his greasy fingers on it too, when he’d gnawed a turkey bone. He must certainly have left grease marks on it. But look at this napkin.”
He held it up, and they saw that it was spotless. Quarles said softly, “The murderer’s mistake.”
Quarles turned to Erdington. “Sir James and I agree that the poison used was probably nitro benzene. This is deadly as a liquid, but it is also poisonous as a vapour—isn’t that so?”
Erdington nodded. “You’ll remember the case of the unfortunate young man who used shoe polish containing nitro benzene on damp shoes, put them on and wore them, and was killed by the fumes.”
“Yes. Somebody made sure that Lord Acrise had a napkin that had been soaked in nitro benzene but was dry enough to use. The same person substituted the proper napkin, the one belonging to the restaurant, after Acrise was dead.”
“That means the napkin must still be here,” Davis said.
“It does.”
“Then I vote that we submit to a search!”
“That won’t be necessary,” Quarles said. “Only one person here fulfils all the qualifications of the murderer.”
“James Gliddon?”
“No. Gliddon is almost certainly dead, as I found out when I made enquiries about him. But the murderer is somebody who knew about Acrise’s relationship with Gliddon, and tried to be clever by writing those letters to lead us along a wrong track.” He paused. “Then the murderer is somebody who had the opportunity of coming in here before dinner, and who knew exactly where Acrise would be sitting.”
There was a dead silence in the room.
Quarles said, “He removed any possible suspicion from himself, as he thought, by being absent from the dinner table, but he arranged to come in afterwards to exchange the napkins. He probably put the poisoned napkin into the clothes he discarded. As for motive, longstanding hatred might be enough, but he is also somebody who knew that he would benefit handsomely when Acrise died … stop him, will you?”
But the General, with a tackle reminiscent of the days when he had been the best wing three-quarter in the country, had already brought to the floor Lord Acrise’s secretary, Snewin.
THE FLYING STARS
G. K. Chesterton
THE SECOND GREATEST ENGLISH DETECTIVE in all of literature, surpassed only by the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, is the gentle and kindly Father Brown. What separates him from most of his crime-fighting colleagues is his view that wrongdoers are souls in need of redemption rather than criminals to be brought to justice. Could there be a better detective to be at the center of a Christmas story? The rather ordinary-seeming Roman Catholic priest possesses a sharp, subtle, sensitive mind, with which he demonstrates a deep understanding of human nature in solving mysteries. “The Flying Stars” was first published in the May 20, 1911, issue of Saturday Evening Post, and subsequently published in the June 1911 issue of Cassell’s Magazine; it was first collected in The Innocence of Father Brown (London, Cassell, 1911).
The Flying Stars
G. K. CHESTERTON
“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CRIME I EVER committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Café Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars, and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of Millet.
“Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the species. I really think my imitation of Dickens’s style was dexterous and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening.”
Flambeau would then proc
eed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it. From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.
The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood the stable, on the other an alley or cloister of laurels led to the larger garden behind. The young lady, having scattered bread for the birds (for the fourth or fifth time that day, because the dog ate it), passed unobtrusively down the lane of laurels and into a glimmering plantation of evergreens behind. Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.
“Oh, don’t jump, Mr. Crook,” she called out in some alarm; “it’s much too high.”
The individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall, angular young man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush, intelligent and even distinguished lineaments, but a sallow and almost alien complexion. This showed the more plainly because he wore an aggressive red tie, the only part of his costume of which he seemed to take any care. Perhaps it was a symbol. He took no notice of the girl’s alarmed adjuration, but leapt like a grasshopper to the ground beside her, where he might very well have broken his legs.
“I think I was meant to be a burglar,” he said placidly, “and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn’t happened to be born in that nice house next door. I can’t see any harm in it, anyhow.”
“How can you say such things?” she remonstrated.
“Well,” said the young man, “if you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.”
“I never know what you will say or do next,” she said.
“I don’t often know myself,” replied Mr. Crook; “but then I am on the right side of the wall now.”
“And which is the right side of the wall?” asked the young lady, smiling.
“Whichever side you are on,” said the young man named Crook.
As they went together through the laurels towards the front garden a motor horn sounded thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of splendid speed, great elegance, and a pale green colour swept up to the front doors like a bird and stood throbbing.
“Hullo, hullo!” said the young man with the red tie. “Here’s somebody born on the right side, anyhow. I didn’t know, Miss Adams, that your Santa Claus was so modern as this.”
“Oh, that’s my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer. He always comes on Boxing Day.”
Then, after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of enthusiasm, Ruby Adams added:
“He is very kind.”
John Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and it was not his fault if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in certain articles in The Clarion or The New Age Sir Leopold had been dealt with austerely. But he said nothing and grimly watched the unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long process. A large, neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some very carefully protected parcel. Rugs enough to stock a bazaar, furs of all the beasts of the forest, and scarves of all the colours of the rainbow were unwrapped one by one, till they revealed something resembling the human form; the form of a friendly, but foreign-looking old gentleman, with a grey goatlike beard and a beaming smile, who rubbed his big fur gloves together.
Long before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch had opened in the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out himself to invite his eminent guest inside. He was a tall, sunburnt, and very silent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, making him look like one of the English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately come from Canada, a big and rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel’s late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.
In the large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leopold and the removal of his wraps. Porch and vestibule, indeed, were unduly large in proportion to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door at one end, and the bottom of the staircase at the other. In front of the large hall fire, over which hung the colonel’s sword, the process was completed and the company, including the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer. That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
“I’ll put ’em back now, my dear,” said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. “I had to be careful of ’em coming down. They’re the three great African diamonds called ‘The Flying Stars,’ because they’ve been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible.”
“Quite natural, I should say,” growled the man in the red tie. “I shouldn’t blame ’em if they had taken ’em. When they ask for bread, and you don’t even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves.”
“I won’t have you talking like that,” cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. “You’ve only talked like that since you became a horrid what’s-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?”
“A saint,” said Father Brown.
“I think,” said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, “that Ruby means a Socialist.”
“A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes,” remarked Crook, with some impatience; “and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.”
“But who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot?”
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. “Does one want to own soot?” he asked.
“One might,” answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. “I’ve heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn’t come, entirely with soot—applied externally.”
“Oh, splendid,” cried Ruby. “Oh, I wish you’d do it to this company.”
<
br /> The boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors. The priest opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens, monkey tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet sunset. The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure standing in the door. He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat, evidently a common messenger. “Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?” he asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully. Mr. Blount started, and stopped in his shout of assent. Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.
“I’m sick at being such a nuisance, colonel,” he said, with the cheery colonial conventions; “but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here tonight on business? In point of fact it’s Florian, that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what.”
“Of course, of course,” replied the colonel carelessly. “My dear chap, any friend of yours. No doubt he will prove an acquisition.”
“He’ll black his face, if that’s what you mean,” cried Blount, laughing. “I don’t doubt he’d black everyone else’s eyes. I don’t care; I’m not refined. I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat.”
“Not on mine, please,” said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.
“Well, well,” observed Crook, airily, “don’t let’s quarrel. There are lower jokes than sitting on a top hat.”
Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial manner: “No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top hat. What is it, pray?”
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 95