The Father Brown Megapack

by G. K. Datlow

  The Inspector went; but came back again after a surprisingly short interview, and found his clerical friend turning over some papers that seemed to be a sort of dossier of the stormy career of John Raggley.

  “This is a rum go,” said the Inspector. “I thought I should spend hours cross-examining that slippery little toad there, for we haven’t legally got a thing against him. And instead of that, he went to pieces all at once, and I really think he’s told me all he knows in sheer funk.”

  “I know,” said Father Brown. “That’s the way he went to pieces when he found Raggley’s corpse apparently poisoned in his hotel. That’s why he lost his head enough to do such a clumsy thing as decorate the corpse with a Turkish knife, to put the blame on the nigger, as he would say. There never is anything the matter with him but funk; he’s the very last man that ever would really stick a knife into a live person. I bet he had to nerve himself to stick it into a dead one. But he’s the very first person to be frightened of being charged with what he didn’t do; and to make a fool of himself, as he did.”

  “I suppose I must see the barman too,” observed Greenwood.

  “I suppose so,” answered the other. “I don’t believe myself it was any of the hotel people—well, because it was made to look as if it must be the hotel people… But look here, have you seen any of this stuff they’ve got together about Raggley? He had a jolly interesting life; I wonder whether anyone will write his biography.”

  “I took a note of everything likely to affect an affair like this,” answered the official. “He was a widower; but he did once have a row with a man about his wife; a Scotch land-agent then in these parts; and Raggley seems to have been pretty violent. They say he hated Scotchmen; perhaps that’s the reason… Oh, I know what you are smiling grimly about. A Scotchman… Perhaps an Edinburgh man.”

  “Perhaps,” said Father Brown. “It’s quite likely, though, that he did dislike Scotchmen, apart from private reasons. It’s an odd thing, but all that tribe of Tory Radicals, or whatever you call them, who resisted the Whig mercantile movement, all of them did dislike Scotchmen. Cobbett did; Dr Johnson did; Swift described their accent in one of his deadliest passages; even Shakespeare has been accused of the prejudice. But the prejudices of great men generally have something to do with principles. And there was a reason, I fancy. The Scot came from a poor agricultural land, that became a rich industrial land. He was able and active; he thought he was bringing industrial civilization from the north; he simply didn’t know that there had been for centuries a rural civilization in the south. His own grandfather’s land was highly rural but not civilized… Well, well, I suppose we can only wait for more news.”

  “I hardly think you’ll get the latest news out of Shakespeare and Dr Johnson,” grinned the police officer. “What Shakespeare thought of Scotchmen isn’t exactly evidence.”

  Father Brown cocked an eyebrow, as if a new thought had surprised him. “Why, now I come to think of it,” he said, “there might be better evidence, even out of Shakespeare. He doesn’t often mention Scotchmen. But he was rather fond of making fun of Welshmen.”

  The Inspector was searching his friend’s face; for he fancied he recognized an alertness behind its demure expression. “By Jove,” he said. “Nobody thought of turning the suspicions that way, anyhow.”

  “Well,” said Father Brown, with broad-minded calm, “you started by talking about fanatics; and how a fanatic could do anything. Well, I suppose we had the honour of entertaining in this bar-parlour yesterday, about the biggest and loudest and most fat-headed fanatic in the modern world. If being a pig-headed idiot with one idea is the way to murder, I put in a claim for my reverend brother Pryce-Jones, the Prohibitionist, in preference to all the fakirs in Asia, and it’s perfectly true, as I told you, that his horrible glass of milk was standing side by side on the counter with the mysterious glass of whisky.”

  “Which you think was mixed up with the murder,” said Greenwood, staring. “Look here, I don’t know whether you’re really serious or not.”

  Even as he was looking steadily in his friend’s face, finding something still inscrutable in its expression, the telephone rang stridently behind the bar. Lifting the flap in the counter Inspector Greenwood passed rapidly inside, unhooked the receiver, listened for an instant, and then uttered a shout; not addressed to his interlocutor, but to the universe in general. Then he listened still more attentively and said explosively at intervals, “Yes, yes… Come round at once; bring him round if possible… Good piece of work… Congratulate you.”

  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. Ive 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 murde
rer. 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 seen 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 Brown 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.

  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 phe
nomenal. 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.