The Father Brown Megapack

by G. K. Datlow

  “Reminds me of somebody making runs at cricket,” said the Lieutenant.

  “That young man,” said the lawyer, “is rather annoyed that the law cannot move quite so quickly as he does. Fortunately Miss Craven understands our professional difficulties and delays. She has kindly assured me that she still has confidence in my slowness.”

  “I wish,” said the doctor, suddenly, “that I had as much confidence in his quickness.”

  “Why, what do you mean?” asked Rook, knitting his brows; “do you mean that Harker is too quick?”

  “Too quick and too slow,” said Dr Straker, in his rather cryptic fashion. “I know one occasion at least when he was not so very quick. Why was he hanging about half the night by the pond and the Green Man, before the Inspector came down and found the body? Why did he meet the Inspector? Why should he expect to meet the Inspector outside the Green Man?”

  “I don’t understand you,” said Rook. “Do you mean that Harker wasn’t telling the truth?”

  Dr Straker was silent. The grizzled lawyer laughed with grim good humour. “I have nothing more serious to say against the young man,” he said, “than that he made a prompt and praiseworthy attempt to teach me my own business.”

  “For that matter, he made an attempt to teach me mine,” said the Inspector, who had just joined the group in front. “But that doesn’t matter. If Dr Straker means anything by his hints, they do matter. I must ask you to speak plainly, doctor. It may be my duty to question him at once.”

  “Well, here he comes,” said Rook, as the alert figure of the secretary appeared once more in the doorway.

  At this point Father Brown, who had remained silent and inconspicuous at the tail of the procession, astonished everybody very much; perhaps especially those who knew him. He not only walked rapidly to the front, but turned facing the whole group with an arresting and almost threatening expression, like a sergeant bringing soldiers to the halt.

  “Stop!” he said almost sternly. “I apologize to everybody; but it’s absolutely necessary that I should see Mr Harker first. I’ve got to tell him something I know; and I don’t think anybody else knows; something he’s got to hear. It may save a very tragic misunderstanding with somebody later on.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked old Dyke the lawyer.

  “I mean the bad news,” said Father Brown.

  “Here, I say,” began the Inspector indignantly; and then suddenly caught the priest’s eye and remembered strange things he had seen in other days. “Well, if it were anyone in the world but you I should say of all the infernal cheek—”

  But Father Brown was already out of hearing, and a moment afterwards was plunged in talk with Harker in the porch. They walked to and fro together for a few paces and then disappeared into the dark interior. It was about twelve minutes afterwards that Father Brown came out alone.

  To their surprise he showed no dispostion to re-enter the house, now that the whole company were at last about to enter it. He threw himself down on the rather rickety seat in the leafy arbour, and as the procession disappeared through the doorway, lit a pipe and proceeded to stare vacantly at the long ragged leaves about his head and to listen to the birds. There was no man who had a more hearty and enduring appetite for doing nothing.

  He was, apparently, in a cloud of smoke and a dream of abstraction, when the front doors were once more flung open and two or three figures came out helter-skelter, running towards him, the daughter of the house and her young admirer Mr Rook being easily winners in the race. Their faces were alight with astonishment; and the face of Inspector Burns, who advanced more heavily behind them, like an elephant shaking the garden, was inflamed with some indignation as well.

  “What can all this mean?” cried Olive, as she came panting to a halt. “He’s gone!”

  “Bolted!” said the Lieutenant explosively. “Harker’s just managed to pack a suitcase and bolted! Gone clean out of the back door and over the garden-wall to God knows where. What did you say to him?”

  “Don’t be silly!” said Olive, with a more worried expression. “Of course you told him you’d found him out, and now he’s gone. I never could have believed he was wicked like that!”

  “Well!” gasped the Inspector, bursting into their midst. “What have you done now? What have you let me down like this for?”

  “Well,” repeated Father Brown, “what have I done?”

  “You have let a murderer escape,” cried Burns, with a decision that was like a thunderclap in the quiet garden; “you have helped a murderer to escape. Like a fool I let you warn him; and now he is miles away.”

  “I have helped a few murderers in my time, it is true,” said Father Brown; then he added, in careful distinction, “not, you will understand, helped them to commit the murder.”

  “But you knew all the time,” insisted Olive. “You guessed from the first that it must be he. That’s what you meant about being upset by the business of finding the body. That’s what the doctor meant by saying my father might be disliked by a subordinate.”

  “That’s what I complain of,” said the official indignantly. “You knew even then that he was the—”

  “You knew even then,” insisted Olive, “that the murderer was—”

  Father Brown nodded gravely. “Yes,” he said. “I knew even then that the murderer was old Dyke.”

  “Was who?” repeated the Inspector and stopped amid, a dead silence; punctuated only by the occasional pipe of birds.

  “I mean Mr Dyke, the solicitor,” explained Father Brown, like one explaining something elementary to an infant class. “That gentleman with grey hair who’s supposed to be going to read the will.”

  They all stood like statues staring at him, as he carefully filled his pipe again and struck a match. At last Burns rallied his vocal powers to break the strangling silence with an effort resembling violence.

  “But, in the name of heaven, why?”

  “Ah, why?” said the priest and rose thoughtfully, puffing at his pipe. “As to why he did it… Well, I suppose the time has come to tell you, or those of you who don’t know, the fact that is the key of all this business. It’s a great calamity; and it’s a great crime; but it’s not the murder of Admiral Craven.”

  He looked Olive full in the face and said very seriously: “I tell you the bad news bluntly and in few words; because I think you are brave enough, and perhaps happy enough, to take it well. You have the chance, and I think the power, to be something like a great woman. You are not a great heiress.”

  Amid the silence that followed it was he who resumed his explanation.

  “Most of your father’s money, I am sorry to say, has gone. It went by the financial dexterity of the grey-haired gentleman named Dyke, who is (I grieve to say) a swindler. Admiral Craven was murdered to silence him about the way in which he was swindled. The fact that he was ruined and you were disinherited is the single simple clue, not only to the murder, but to all the other mysteries in this business.” He took a puff or two and then continued.

  “I told Mr Rook you were disinherited and he rushed back to help you. Mr Rook is a rather remarkable person.”

  “Oh, chuck it,” said Mr Rook with a hostile air.

  “Mr Rook is a monster,” said Father Brown with scientific calm. “He is an anachronism, an atavism, a brute survival of the Stone Age. If there was one barbarous superstition we all supposed to be utterly extinct and dead in these days, it was that notion about honour and independence. But then I get mixed up with so many dead superstitions. Mr Rook is an extinct animal. He is a plesiosaurus. He did not want to live on his wife or have a wife who could call him a fortune-hunter. Therefore he sulked in a grotesque manner and only came to life again when I brought him the good news that you were ruined. He wanted to work for his wife and not be kept by her. Disgusting, isn’t it? Let us turn to the brighter topic of Mr Harker.

  “I told Mr Harker you were disinherited and he rushed away in a sort of panic. Do not be too hard o
n Mr Harker. He really had better as well as worse enthusiasms; but he had them all mixed up. There is no harm in having ambitions; but he had ambitions and called them ideals. The old sense of honour taught men to suspect success; to say, ‘This is a benefit; it may be a bribe.’ The new nine-times-accursed nonsense about Making Good teaches men to identify being good with making money. That was all that was the matter with him; in every other way he was a thoroughly good fellow, and there are thousands like him. Gazing at the stars and rising in the world were all Uplift. Marrying a good wife and marrying a rich wife were all Making Good. But he was not a cynical scoundrel; or he would simply have come back and jilted or cut you as the case might be. He could not face you; while you were there, half of his broken ideal was left.

  “I did not tell the Admiral; but somebody did. Word came to him somehow, during the last grand parade on board, that his friend the family lawyer had betrayed him. He was in such a towering passion that he did what he could never have done in his sense; came straight on shore in his cocked hat and gold lace to catch the criminal; he wired to the police station, and that was why the Inspector was wandering round the Green Man. Lieutenant Rook followed him on shore because he suspected some family trouble and had half a hope he might help and put himself right. Hence his hesitating behaviour. As for his drawing his sword when he dropped behind and thought he was alone, well that’s a matter of imagination. He was a romantic person who had dreamed of swords and run away to sea; and found himself in a service where he wasn’t even allowed to wear a sword except about once in three years. He thought he was quite alone on the sands where he played as a boy. If you don’t understand what he did, I can only say, like Stevenson, ‘you will never be a pirate.’ Also you will never be a poet; and you have never been a boy.”

  “I never have,” answered Olive gravely, “and yet I think I understand.”

  “Almost every man,” continued the priest musing, “will play with anything shaped like a sword or dagger, even if it is a paper knife. That is why I thought it so odd when the lawyer didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Burns, “didn’t what?”

  “Why, didn’t you notice,” answered Brown, “at that first meeting in the office, the lawyer played with a pen and not with a paper-knife; though he had a beautiful bright steel paper-knife in the pattern of a stiletto? The pens were dusty and splashed with ink; but the knife had just been cleaned. But he did not play with it. There are limits to the irony of assassins.”

  After a silence the Inspector said, like one waking from a dream: “Look here… I don’t know whether I’m on my head or my heels; I don’t know whether you think you’ve got to the end; but I haven’t got to the beginning. Where do you get all this lawyer stuff from? What started you out on that trail?”

  Father Brown laughed curtly and without mirth.

  “The murderer made a slip at the start,” he said, “and I can’t think why nobody else noticed it. When you brought the first news of the death to the solicitor’s office, nobody was supposed to know anything there, except that the Admiral was expected home. When you said he was drowned, I asked when it happened and Mr Dyke asked where the corpse was found.”

  He paused a moment to knock out his pipe and resumed reflectively: “Now when you are simply told of a seaman, returning from the sea, that he had drowned, it is natural to assume that he had been drowned at sea. At any rate, to allow that he may have been drowned at sea. If he had been washed overboard, or gone down with his ship, or had his body ‘committed to the deep’, there would be no reason to expect his body to be found at all. The moment that man asked where it was found, I was sure he knew where it was found. Because he had put it there. Nobody but the murderer need have thought of anything so unlikely as a seaman being drowned in a landlocked pool a few hundred yards from the sea. That is why I suddenly felt sick and turned green, I dare say; as green as the Green Man. I never can get used to finding myself suddenly sitting beside a murderer. So I had to turn it off by talking in parables; but the parable meant something, after all. I said that the body was covered with green scum, but it might just as well have been seaweed.”

  It is fortunate that tragedy can never kill comedy and that the two can run side by side; and that while the only acting partner of the business of Messrs Willis, Hardman and Dyke blew his brains out when the Inspector entered the house to arrest him, Olive and Roger were calling to each other across the sands at evening, as they did when they were children together.

  The Pursuit of Mr Blue

  Along a seaside parade on a sunny afternoon, a person with the depressing name of Muggleton was moving with suitable gloom. There was a horseshoe of worry in his forehead, and the numerous groups and strings of entertainers stretched along the beach below looked up to him in vain for applause. Pierrots turned up their pale moon faces, like the white bellies of dead fish, without improving his spirits; niggers with faces entirely grey with a sort of grimy soot were equally unsuccessful in filling his fancy with brighter things. He was a sad and disappointed man. His other features, besides the bald brow with its furrow, were retiring and almost sunken; and a certain dingy refinement about them made more incongruous the one aggressive ornament of his face. It was an outstanding and bristling military moustache; and it looked suspiciously like a false moustache. It is possible, indeed, that it was a false moustache. It is possible, on the other hand, that even if it was not false it was forced. He might almost have grown it in a hurry, by a mere act of will; so much was it a part of his job rather than his personality.

  For the truth is that Mr Muggleton was a private detective in a small way, and the cloud on his brow was due to a big blunder in his professional career; anyhow it was connected with something darker than the mere possession of such a surname. He might almost, in an obscure sort of way, have been proud of his surname; for he came of poor but decent Nonconformist people who claimed some connection with the founder of the Muggletonians; the only man who had hitherto had the courage to appear with that name in human history.

  The more legitimate cause of his annoyance (at least as he himself explained it) was that he had just been present at the bloody murder of a world-famous millionaire, and had failed to prevent it, though he had been engaged at a salary of five pounds a week to do so. Thus we may explain the fact that even the languorous singing of the song entitled, “Won’t You Be My Loodah Doodah Day?” failed to fill him with the joy of life.

  For that matter, there were others on the beach, who might have had more sympathy with his murderous theme and Muggletonian tradition. Seaside resorts are the chosen pitches, not only of pierrots appealing to the amorous emotions, but also of preachers who often seem to specialize in a correspondingly sombre and sulphurous style of preaching. There was one aged ranter whom he could hardly help noticing, so piercing were the cries, not to say shrieks of religious prophecy that rang above all the banjos and castanets. This was a long, loose, shambling old man, dressed in something like a fisherman’s jersey; but inappropriately equipped with a pair of those very long and drooping whiskers which have never been seen since the disappearance of certain sportive Mid-Victorian dandies. As it was the custom for all mountebanks on the beach to display something, as if they were selling it, the old man displayed a rather rotten-looking fisherman’s net, which he generally spread out invitingly on the sands, as if it were a carpet for queens; but occasionally whirled wildly round his head with a gesture almost as terrific as that of the Roman Retiarius, ready to impale people on a trident. Indeed, he might really have impaled people, if he had had a trident. His words were always pointed towards punishment; his hearers heard nothing except threats to the body or the soul; he was so far in the same mood as Mr. Muggleton, that he might almost have been a mad hangman addressing a crowd of murderers. The boys called him Old Brimstone; but he had other eccentricities besides the purely theological. One of his eccentricities was to climb up into the nest of iron girders under the pier and trail his net in the wa
ter, declaring that he got his living by fishing; though it is doubtful whether anybody had ever seen him catching fish. Worldly trippers, however, would sometimes start at a voice in their ear, threatening judgement as from a thundercloud, but really coming from the perch under the iron roof where the old monomaniac sat glaring, his fantastic whiskers hanging like grey seaweed.

  The detective, however, could have put up with Old Brimstone much better than with the other parson he was destined to meet. To explain this second and more momentous meeting, it must be pointed out that Muggleton, after his remarkable experience in the matter of the murder, had very properly put all his cards on the table. He told his story to the police and to the only available representative of Braham Bruce, the dead millionaire; that is, to his very dapper secretary, a Mr Anthony Taylor. The Inspector was more sympathetic than the secretary; but the sequel of his sympathy was the last thing Muggleton would normally have associated with police advice. The Inspector, after some reflection, very much surprised Mr Muggleton by advising him to consult an able amateur whom he knew to be staying in the town. Mr Muggleton had read reports and romances about the Great Criminologist, who sits in his library like an intellectual spider, and throws out theoretical filaments of a web as large as the world. He was prepared to be led to the lonely chateau where the expert wore a purple dressing-gown, to the attic where he lived on opium and acrostics, to the vast laboratory or the lonely tower. To his astonishment he was led to the very edge of the crowded beach by the pier to meet a dumpy little clergyman, with a broad hat and a broad grin, who was at that moment hopping about on the sands with a crowd of poor children; and excitedly waving a very little wooden spade.

  When the criminologist clergyman, whose name appeared to be Brown, had at last been detached from the children, though not from the spade, he seemed to Muggleton to grow more and more unsatisfactory. He hung about helplessly among the idiotic side-shows of the seashore, talking about random topics and particularly attaching himself to those rows of automatic machines which are set up in such places; solemnly spending penny after penny in order to play vicarious games of golf, football, cricket, conducted by clockwork figures; and finally contenting himself with the miniature exhibition of a race, in which one metal doll appeared merely to run and jump after the other. And yet all the time he was listening very carefully to the story which the defeated detective poured out to him. Only his way of not letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing, with pennies, got very much on the detective’s nerves.