Father Brown Omnibus

by G. K. Chesterton

  Then Inspector Greenwood came back into the outer lounge, like a man who has renewed his youth, sat down squarely on his seat, with his hands planted on his knees, stared at his friend, and said:

  ‘Father Brown, I don’t know how you do it. You seem to have known he was a murderer before anybody else knew he was a man. He was nobody; he was nothing; he was a slight confusion in the evidence; nobody in the hotel saw him; the boy on the steps could hardly swear to him; he was just a fine shade of doubt founded on an extra dirty glass. But we’ve got him, and he’s the man we want.’

  Father Brown had risen with the sense of the crisis, mechanically clutching the papers destined to be so valuable to the biographer of Mr Raggley; and stood staring at his friend. Perhaps this gesture jerked his friend’s mind to fresh confirmations.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got The Quick One. And very quick he was, like quicksilver, in making his get-away; we only just stopped him—off on a fishing trip to Orkney, he said. But he’s the man, all right; he’s the Scotch land-agent who made love to Raggley’s wife; he’s the man who drank Scotch whisky in this bar and then took a train to Edinburgh. And nobody would have known it but for you.’

  ‘Well, what I meant,’ began Father Brown, in a rather dazed tone; and at that instant there was a rattle and rumble of heavy vehicles outside the hotel; and two or three other and subordinate policemen blocked the bar with their presence. One of them, invited by his superior to sit down, did so in an expansive manner, like one at once happy and fatigued; and he also regarded Father Brown with admiring eyes.

  ‘Got the murderer. Sir, oh yes,’ he said: ‘I know he’s a murderer, ‘cause he bally nearly murdered me. I’ve captured some tough characters before now; but never one like this—hit me in the stomach like the kick of a horse and nearly got away from five men. Oh, you’ve got a real killer this time. Inspector.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Father Brown, staring.

  ‘Outside in the van, in handcuffs,’ replied the policeman, ‘and, if you’re wise, you’ll leave him there—for the present.’

  Father Brown sank into a chair in a sort of soft collapse; and the papers he had been nervously clutching were shed around him, shooting and sliding about the floor like sheets of breaking snow. Not only his face, but his whole body, conveyed the impression of a punctured balloon.

  ‘Oh… Oh,’ he repeated, as if any further oath would be inadequate. ‘Oh…I’ve done it again.’

  ‘If you mean you’ve caught the criminal again,’ began Greenwood. But his friend stopped him with a feeble explosion, like that of expiring soda-water.

  ‘I mean,’ said Father Brown, ‘that it’s always happening; and really, I don’t know why. I always try to say what I mean. But everybody else means such a lot by what I say.’

  ‘What in the world is the matter now?’ cried Greenwood, suddenly exasperated.

  ‘Well, I say things,’ said Father Brown in a weak voice, which could alone convey the weakness of the words. ‘I say things, but everybody seems to know they mean more than they say. Once I saw a broken mirror and said “Something has happened” and they all answered, “Yes, yes, as you truly say, two men wrestled and one ran into the garden,” and so on. I don’t understand it, “Something happened,” and “Two men wrestled,” don’t seem to me at all the same; but I dare say I read old books of logic. Well, it’s like that here. You seem to be all certain this man is a murderer. But I never said he was a murderer. I said he was the man we wanted. He is. I want him very much. I want him frightfully. I want him as the one thing we haven’t got in the whole of this horrible case—a witness!’

  They all stared at him, but in a frowning fashion, like men trying to follow a sharp new turn of the argument; and it was he who resumed the argument.

  ‘From the first minute I entered that big empty bar or saloon, I knew what was the matter with all this business was emptiness; solitude; too many chances for anybody to be alone. In a word, the absence of witnesses. All we knew was that when we came in, the manager and the barman were not in the bar. But when were they in the bar? What chance was there of making any sort of time-table of when anybody was anywhere? The whole thing was blank for want of witnesses. I rather fancy the barman or somebody was in the bar just before we came; and that’s how the Scotchman got his Scotch whisky. He certainly didn’t get it after we came. But we can’t begin to inquire whether anybody in the hotel poisoned poor Raggley’s cherry brandy, till we really know who was in the bar and when. Now I want you to do me another favour, in spite of this stupid muddle, which is probably all my fault. I want you to collect all the people involved in this room—I think they’re all still available, unless the Asiatic has gone back to Asia—and then take the poor Scotchman out of his handcuffs, and bring him in here, and let him tell us who did serve him with whisky, and who was in the bar, and who else was in the room, and all the rest. He’s the only man whose evidence can cover just that period when the crime was done. I don’t see the slightest reason for doubting his word.’

  ‘But look here,’ said Greenwood. ‘This brings it all back to the hotel authorities; and I thought you agreed that the manager isn’t the murderer. Is it the barman, or what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the priest blankly. ‘I don’t know for certain even about the manager. I don’t know anything about the barman. I fancy the manager might be a bit of a conspirator, even if he wasn’t a murderer. But I do know there’s one solitary witness on earth who may have seem something; and that’s why I set all your police dogs on his trail to the ends of the earth.’

  The mysterious Scotchman, when he finally appeared before the company thus assembled, was certainly a formidable figure; tall, with a hulking stride and a long sardonic hatchet face, with tufts of red hair; and wearing not only an Inverness cape but a Glengarry bonnet, he might well be excused for a somewhat acrid attitude; but anybody could see he was of the sort to resist arrest, even with violence. It was not surprising that he had come to blows with a fighting fellow like Raggley. It was not even surprising that the police had been convinced, by the mere details of capture, that he was a tough and a, typical killer. But he claimed to be a perfectly respectable farmer, in Aberdeenshire, his name being James Grant; and somehow not only Father Brown, but Inspector Greenwood, a shrewd man with a great deal of experience, was pretty soon convinced that the Scot’s ferocity was the fury of innocence rather than guilt.

  ‘Now what we want from you, Mr Grant,’ said the Inspector gravely, dropping without further parley into tones of courtesy, ‘is simply your evidence on one very important fact. I am greatly grieved at the misunderstanding by which you have suffered, but I am sure you wish to serve the ends of justice. I believe you came into this bar just after it opened, at half-past five, and were served with a glass of whisky. We are not certain what servant of the hotel, whether the barman or the manager or some subordinate, was in the bar at the time. Will you look round the room, and tell me whether the bar-attendant who served you is present here.’

  ‘Aye, he’s present,’ said Mr Grant, grimly smiling, having swept the group with a shrewd glance. ‘I’d know him anywhere; and ye’ll agree he’s big enough to be seen. Do ye have all your inn-servants as grand as yon?’

  The Inspector’s eye remained hard and steady, and his voice colourless and continuous; the face of Father Brown was a blank; but on many other faces there was a cloud; the barman was not particularly big and not at all grand; and the manager was decidedly small.

  ‘We only want the barman identified,’ said the Inspector calmly. ‘Of course we know him; but we should like you to verify it independently. You mean…?’ And he stopped suddenly.

  ‘Weel, there he is plain enough,’ said the Scotchman wearily; and made a gesture, and with that gesture the gigantic Jukes, the prince of commercial travellers, rose like a trumpeting elephant; and in a flash had three policemen fastened on him like hounds on a wild beast.

  ‘Well, all that was simple enough,’ said Father B
rown to his friend afterwards. ‘As I told you, the instant I entered the empty bar-room, my first thought was that, if the barman left the bar unguarded like that, there was nothing in the world to stop you or me or anybody else lifting the flap and walking in, and putting poison in any of the bottles standing waiting for customers. Of course, a practical poisoner would probably do it as Jukes did, by substituting a poisoned bottle for the ordinary bottle; that could be done in a flash. It was easy enough for him, as he travelled in bottles, to carry a flask of cherry brandy prepared and of the same pattern. Of course, it requires one condition; but it’s a fairly common condition. It would hardly do to start poisoning the beer or whisky that scores of people drink; it would cause a massacre. But when a man is well known as drinking only one special thing, like cherry brandy, that isn’t very widely drunk, it’s just like poisoning him in his own home. Only it’s a jolly sight safer. For practically the whole suspicion instantly falls on the hotel, or somebody to do with the hotel; and there’s no earthly argument to show that it was done by anyone out of a hundred customers that might come into the bar: even if people realized that a customer could do it. It was about as absolutely anonymous and irresponsible a murder as a man could commit.’

  ‘And why exactly did the murderer commit it?’ asked his friend.

  Father Brown rose and gravely gathered the papers which he had previously scattered in a moment of distraction.

  ‘May I recall your attention,’ he said smiling, ‘to the materials of the forthcoming Life and Letters of the Late John Raggley? Or, for that matter, his own spoken words? He said in this very bar that he was going to expose a scandal about the management of hotels; and the scandal was the pretty common one of a corrupt agreement between hotel proprietors and a salesman who took and gave secret commissions, so that his business had a monopoly of all the drink sold in the place. It wasn’t even an open slavery like an ordinary tied house; it was a swindle at the expense of everybody the manager was supposed to serve. It was a legal offence. So the ingenious Jukes, taking the first moment when the bar was empty, as it often was, stepped inside and made the exchange of bottles; unfortunately at that very moment a Scotchman in an Inverness cape came in harshly demanding whisky. Jukes saw his only chance was to pretend to be the barman and serve the customer. He was very much relieved that the customer was a Quick One.’

  ‘I think you’re rather a Quick One yourself,’ observed Greenwood; ‘if you say you smelt something at the start, in the mere air of an empty room. Did you suspect Jukes at all at the start?’

  ‘Well, he sounded rather rich somehow,’ answered Father Brown vaguely. ‘You know when a man has a rich voice. And I did sort of ask myself why he should have such a disgustingly rich voice, when all those honest fellows were fairly poor. But I think I knew he was a sham when I saw that big shining breast-pin.’

  ‘You mean because it was sham?’ asked Greenwood doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, no; because it was genuine,’ said Father Brown.

  3. The Blast of the Book

  Professor Openshaw always lost his temper, with a loud bang, if anybody called him a Spiritualist; or a believer in Spiritualism. This, however, did not exhaust his explosive elements; for he also lost his temper if anybody called him a disbeliever in Spiritualism. It was his pride to have given his whole life to investigating Psychic Phenomena; it was also his pride never to have given a hint of whether he thought they were really psychic or merely phenomenal. He enjoyed nothing so much as to sit in a circle of devout Spiritualists and give devastating descriptions of how he had exposed medium after medium and detected fraud after fraud; for indeed he was a man of much detective talent and insight, when once he had fixed his eye on an object, and he always fixed his eye on a medium, as a highly suspicious object. There was a story of his having spotted the same Spiritualist mountebank under three different disguises: dressed as a woman, a white-bearded old man, and a Brahmin of a rich chocolate brown. These recitals made the true believers rather restless, as indeed they were intended to do; but they could hardly complain, for no Spiritualist denies the existence of fraudulent mediums; only the Professor’s flowing narrative might well seem to indicate that all mediums were fraudulent.

  But woe to the simple-minded and innocent Materialist (and Materialists as a race are rather innocent and simple-minded) who, presuming on this narrative tendency, should advance the thesis that ghosts were against the laws of nature, or that such things were only old superstitions; or that it was all tosh, or, alternatively, bunk. Him would the Professor, suddenly reversing all his scientific batteries, sweep from the field with a cannonade of unquestionable cases and unexplained phenomena, of which the wretched rationalist had never heard in his life, giving all the dates and details, stating all the attempted and abandoned natural explanations; stating everything, indeed, except whether he, John Oliver Openshaw, did or did not believe in Spirits, and that neither Spiritualist nor Materialist could ever boast of finding out.

  Professor Openshaw, a lean figure with pale leonine hair and hypnotic blue eyes, stood exchanging a few words with Father Brown, who was a friend of his, on the steps outside the hotel where both had been breakfasting that morning and sleeping the night before. The Professor had come back rather late from one of this grand experiments, in general exasperation, and was still tingling with the fight that he always waged alone and against both sides.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind you,’ he said laughing. ‘You don’t believe in it even if it’s true. But all these people are perpetually asking me what I’m trying to prove. They don’t seem to understand that I’m a man of science. A man of science isn’t trying to prove anything. He’s trying to find out what will prove itself.’

  ‘But he hasn’t found out yet,’ said Father Brown.

  ‘Well, I have some little notions of my own, that are not quite so negative as most people think,’ answered the Professor, after an instant of frowning silence; ‘anyhow, I’ve begun to fancy that if there is something to be found, they’re looking for it along the wrong line. It’s all too theatrical; it’s showing off, all their shiny ectoplasm and trumpets and voices and the rest; all on the model of old melodramas and mouldy historical novels about the Family Ghost. If they’d go to history instead of historical novels, I’m beginning to think they’d really find something. But not Apparitions.’

  ‘After all,’ said Father Brown, ‘Apparitions are only Appearances. I suppose you’d say the Family Ghost is only keeping up appearances.’

  The Professor’s gaze, which had commonly a fine abstracted character, suddenly fixed and focused itself as it did on a dubious medium. It had rather the air of a man screwing a strong magnifying-glass into his eye. Not that he thought the priest was in the least like a dubious medium; but he was startled into attention by his friend’s thought following so closely on his own.

  ‘Appearances!’ he muttered, ‘crikey, but it’s odd you should say that just now. The more I learn, the more I fancy they lose by merely looking for appearances. Now if they’d look a little into Disappearances—‘

  ‘Yes,’ said Father Brown, ‘after all, the real fairy legends weren’t so very much about the appearance of famous fairies; calling up Titania or exhibiting Oberon by moonlight. But there were no end of legends about people disappearing, because they were stolen by the fairies. Are you on the track of Kilmeny or Thomas the Rhymer?’

  ‘I’m on the track of ordinary modern people you’ve read of in the newspapers,’ answered Openshaw. ‘You may well stare; but that’s my game just now; and I’ve been on it for a long time. Frankly, I think a lot of psychic appearances could be explained away. It’s the disappearances I can’t explain, unless they’re psychic. These people in the newspaper who vanish and are never found—if you knew the details as I do… and now only this morning I got confirmation; an extraordinary letter from an old missionary, quite a respectable old boy. He’s coming to see me at my office this morning. Perhaps you’d lunch with me or something; and I’d tel
l the results—in confidence.’

  ‘Thanks; I will—unless,’ said Father Brown modestly, ‘the fairies have stolen me by then.’

  With that they parted and Openshaw walked round the corner to a small office he rented in the neighbourhood; chiefly for the publication of a small periodical, of psychical and psychological notes of the driest and most agnostic sort. He had only one clerk, who sat at a desk in the outer office, totting up figures and facts for the purposes of the printed report; and the Professor paused to ask if Mr Pringle had called. The clerk answered mechanically in the negative and went on mechanically adding up figures; and the Professor turned towards the inner room that was his study. ‘Oh, by the way, Berridge,’ he added, without turning round, ‘if Mr Pringle comes, send him straight in to me. You needn’t interrupt your work; I rather want those notes finished tonight if possible. You might leave them on my desk tomorrow, if I am late.’

  And he went into his private office, still brooding on the problem which the name of Pringle had raised; or rather, perhaps, had ratified and confirmed in his mind. Even the most perfectly balanced of agnostics is partially human; and it is possible that the missionary’s letter seemed to have greater weight as promising to support his private and still tentative hypothesis. He sat down in his large and comfortable chair, opposite the engraving of Montaigne; and read once more the short letter from the Rev. Luke Pringle, making the appointment for that morning. No man knew better than Professor Openshaw the marks of the letter of the crank; the crowded details; the spidery handwriting; the unnecessary length and repetition. There were none of these things in this case; but a brief and businesslike typewritten statement that the writer had encountered some curious cases of Disappearance, which seemed to fall within the province of the Professor as a student of psychic problems. The Professor was favourably impressed; nor had he any unfavourable impression, in spite of a slight movement of surprise, when he looked up and saw that the Rev. Luke Pringle was already in the room.