by G. K. Datlow
“The police may prove something now they have got the suspicion,” said Dr Mulborough. “What I don’t understand is why you ever began to suspect. Why in the world should you suspect that very blameless black-coated gentleman?”
Father Brown smiled faintly. “I suppose in one sense,” he said, “it was a matter of special knowledge; almost a professional matter, but in a peculiar sense. You know our controversialists often complain that there is a great deal of ignorance about what our religion is really like. But it is really more curious than that. It is true, and it is not at all unnatural, that England does not know much about the Church of Rome. But England does not know much about the Church of England. Not even as much as I do. You would be astonished at how little the average public grasps about the Anglican controversies; lots of them don’t really know what is meant by a High Churchman or a Low Churchman, even on the particular points of practice, let alone the two theories of history and philosophy behind them. You can see this ignorance in any newspaper; in any merely popular novel or play.
“Now the first thing that struck me was that this venerable cleric had got the whole thing incredibly mixed up. No Anglican parson could be so wrong about every Anglican problem. He was supposed to be an old Tory High Churchman; and then he boasted of being a Puritan. A man like that might personally be rather Puritanical; but he would never call it being a Puritan. He professed a horror of the stage; he didn’t know that High Churchmen generally don’t have that special horror, though Low Churchmen do. He talked like a Puritan about the Sabbath; and then he had a crucifix in his room. He evidently had no notion of what a very pious parson ought to be, except that he ought to be very solemn and venerable and frown upon the pleasures of the world.
“All this time there was a subconscious notion running in my head; something I couldn’t fix in my memory; and then it came to me suddenly. This is a Stage Parson. That is exactly the vague venerable old fool who would be the nearest notion a popular playwright or play-actor of the old school had of anything so odd as a religious man.”
“To say nothing of a physician of the old school,” said Mulborough good-humouredly, “who does not set up to know much about being a religious man.”
“As a matter of fact,” went on Father Brown, “there was a plainer and more glaring cause for suspicion. It concerned the Dark Lady of the Grange, who was supposed to be the Vampire of the Village.
I very early formed the impression that this black blot was rather the bright spot of the village. She was treated as a mystery; but there was really nothing mysterious about her. She had come down here quite recently, quite openly, under her own name, to help the new inquiries to be made about her own husband. He hadn’t treated her too well; but she had principles, suggesting that something was due to her married name and to common justice. For the same reason, she went to live in the house outside which her husband had been found dead. The other innocent and straightforward case, besides the Vampire of the Village, was the Scandal of the Village, the parson’s profligate son. He also made no disguise of his profession or past connection with the acting world. That’s why I didn’t suspect him as I did the parson. But you’ll already have guessed a real and relevant reason for suspecting the parson.”
“Yes, I think I see,” said the doctor, “that’s why you bring in the name of the actress.”
“Yes, I mean his fanatical fixity about not seeing the actress,” remarked the priest. “But he didn’t really object to seeing her. He objected to her seeing him.”
“Yes, I see that,” assented the other. “If she had seen the Rev. Samuel Horner, she would instantly have recognized the very unreverend actor Hankin, disguised as a sham parson with a pretty bad character behind the disguise. Well, that is the whole of this simple village idyll, I think. But you will admit I kept my promise; I have shown you something in the village considerably more creepy than a corpse; even a corpse stuffed with poison. The black coat of a parson stuffed with a blackmailer is at least worth noticing and my live man is much deadlier than your dead one.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, settling himself back comfortably in the cushions. “If it comes to a little cosy company on a railway journey, I should prefer the corpse.”
The Donnington Affair
Written with Max Pemberton
It was natural, of course, that we should think of calling in expert opinion on the tragedy; or, at least, something subtler than the passing policeman. But I could think of few people or none whom it would be useful to consult thus privately. I remembered an investigator who had taken some interest in Southby’s original trouble; merely because I remembered the curious surname of Shrike; but report told me that he had since grown rich and retired, and was now yachting inaccessibly among the Pacific Islands.
My old friend Brown, the Roman priest at Cobhole, who had often given me good advice in small problems, had wired that he feared he could not come down, even for an hour. He merely added—what, I confess, I thought inconsequent—that the key might be found in the sentence, that “Mester was the cheeriest soul possible.”
Superintendent Matthews still carries weight with any considering person who has actually talked to him; but he is naturally in most cases officially reticent, and in some cases officially slow.
Sir Borrow seemed stricken rigid by this final tragedy; a thing pardonable enough in a very old man who, whatever his faults, had never had anything but tragedy upon tragedy out of his own blood and name.
Wellman can be trusted with anything up to the Crown jewels; but not with an idea. Harriet is far too good a woman to be a good detective. So I was left with my unsatisfied appetite for expert advice. I think the others shared it to some extent; I think we wished a man different from all of us would walk into the room, a man of the world outside us, a man of wider experience, a man of experience so wide—if it were possible—that he should know even one case that was like our own. Certainly none of us had the wildest suspicion of who the man would be.
I have explained that when poor Evelyn’s body was found it was clad in a dressing-gown, as if she had been suddenly summoned from her room, and the door of the Priest’s Room stood open. Acting on I know not what impulse, I had closed it to; and, so far as I know, it was not opened again till it was opened from within. I confess that for me that opening was terrible.
Sir Borrow, Wellman, and I were alone in the chamber of slaughter. At least we were alone till a total stranger strolled into the room, without even pulling the peaked cap off his head. He was a sturdy man, stained with travel, especially as regards his leggings, which were loaded with clay and slime of innumerable ditches. But he was entirely unconcerned, which is more than I was. For, despite his extra dirt and his extra impudence, I recognised him as the fugitive convict, Mester, whose letter I had so foolishly passed on to his fellow convict. He entered the room with his hands in his pockets, and whistling. Then the whistling ceased, and he said:
“You seem to have shut the door again. I suppose you know it’s not easy to open again on this side.”
Through the broken window which gave upon the garden I could see Superintendent Matthews standing passively among the shrubs, with his broad back to the house. I walked to the window, and also whistled, but in a far more practical spirit. And yet, I know not why I should call it practical, for the superintendent, who must have heard me, did not turn his head, nor so much as shift a shoulder.
“I shouldn’t worry poor old Matthews,” said the man in the peaked cap in a friendly tone, “he is one of the best men in the service, and he must be awfully tired. I expect I can answer nearly all the questions that he could.” And he relighted a cigarette.
“Mr. Mester,” I replied with some heat, “I was sending for the superintendent to arrest you!”
“Quite so,” he answered, throwing his wax match out of the window. “Well, he won’t!”
He was gazing at me with a grave stolidity. And yet I fancy that the gravity of his full face had less effe
ct on me than the large, indifferent back of the policeman.
The man called Mester resumed.
“I mean that my position here may not be quite what you suppose. It’s true enough I assisted the young fellow to escape; but I don’t imagine you know why I did it. It is an old rule in our profession—”
Before he could finish I had uttered a cry.
“Stop!” I cried out. “Who is that behind the door?”
I could see, by the very movement of Mester’s mouth, that he was just about to answer, “What door?” But before the lips could move he also was answered. And from behind the sealed door of the secret chamber came the noise of something that was alive, if it were not human, or was moving, if it were not alive.
“What is in the Priest’s Room?” I cried, and looked round for something with which to break down the door. I had half lifted the piece of jagged iron bar for the purpose. And then the horrid part it had played in that night overwhelmed me, and I fell against the door and beat on it with feeble hands, only repeating, “What is in the Priest’s Room?” It was the awful fact that a voice, obscure but human, answered from behind the closed door, “The Priest!”
The heavy door was opened very slowly, apparently pushed by a hand no stronger than my own. The same voice which had said “The Priest,” said in rather simpler tones, “Whom else did you expect?” The door swung out slowly to the full compass of its hinges, and revealed the black silhouette of a stumpy, apologetic person, with a big hat and a bad umbrella. He was in every way a very unromantic and inappropriate person to be in the Priest’s Room, save in the accidental detail of being a priest.
He walked straight up to me before I could cry: “You have come, after all!”
He shook my hand, and, before he dropped it, looked at me with a steady and singular expression, sad, and yet rather serious than sad. I can only say it was the face we wear at the funeral of one dear as a friend, not that we wear by the deathbed of any directly dear to us.
“I can at least congratulate you,” said Father Brown.
I think I put my hand wildly through my hair. I am sure I answered:
“And what is there in this nightmare on which I can be congratulated?”
He answered me with the same solid face:
“On the innocence of the woman who will be your wife.”
“No one,” I cried indignantly, “has attempted to connect her with the matter.”
He nodded gravely, as if in assent.
“That was the danger, doubtless,” he said with a slight sigh, “but she’s all right now, thank God. Isn’t she?” And as if to give the last touch to the topsyturvydom, he turned to ask his question of the man in the peaked cap.
“Oh, she’s safe enough!” said the man called Mester.
I cannot deny that there was suddenly lifted off my heart a load of doubt, which I had never known was there. But I was bound to pursue the problem.
“Do you mean, Father Brown,” I asked, “that you know who was the guilty person?”
“In a sense, yes,” he answered. “But you must remember that in a murder case the guiltiest person is not always the murderer.”
“Well, the guiltiest person, then,” I cried impatiently. “How are we to bring the guiltiest person to punishment?”
“The guiltiest person is punished,” said Father Brown.
There was a long silence in the twilight turret, and my mind laboured with doubts that were too large for it. At last Mester said gruffly, but not without a kind of good-nature:
“I think you two reverend gentlemen had better go and have a talk somewhere. About Hades, say, or hassocks, or whatever you do talk about. I shall have to look into this by myself. My name is Stephen Shrike; you may have heard of me.”
Even before such fancies had been swallowed up in my sudden fear at the movements in the secret room, I had faced the startling possibility that this escaped convict was really a detective. But I had not dreamed of his being so famous a one. The man who had been concerned for Southby, and since gained colossal prestige, had some claim in the case; and I followed Brown, who had already strolled down towards the entrance of the garden.
“The distinction between Hades and hassocks—” began Father Brown.
“Don’t play the fool!” I said, roughly enough.
“Was not without some philosophical value,” continued the little priest, with unruffled good temper. “Human troubles are mostly of two kinds. There is an accidental kind, that you can’t see because they are so close you fall over as you do over a hassock. And there is the other kind of evil, the real kind. And that a man will go to seek however far off it is—down, down, into the lost abyss.” And he unconsciously pointed his stumpy finger downward towards the grass, which was sprinkled with daisies.
“It was good of you to come, after all,” I said; “but I wish I could make more sense of the things you say.”
“Well,” he replied patiently, “have you made sense of the one thing I did say before I came down?”
“Why, you made some wild statement,” I replied, “that the key of the story was in Mester’s being cheerful, but—why, bless my soul, and so it is the key, in a way!”
“Only the key, so far,” said my companion, “but my first guess seems to have been right. It is not very common to find such sparkling gaiety in people undergoing penal servitude, especially when ruined on a false charge. And it seemed to me that Mester’s optimism was a little overdone. I also suspected that his aviation, and all the rest of it, true or false, were simply meant to make Southby think the escape feasible. But if Mester was such a demon for escaping, why didn’t he escape by himself? Why was he so anxious to lug along a young gentleman who does not seem to have been much use to him? As I was wondering, my eye fell on another sentence in your manuscript.”
“What was that?” I asked.
He took out a scrap of paper on which there were some scribbles in pencil, and read out:
“‘They then crossed an enclosure in which other prisoners were at work.’”
After another pause, he resumed:
“That, of course, was plain enough. What kind of convict prison is it where prisoners work without any warders overseeing or walking about? What sort of warders are they to allow two convicts to climb two walls and go off as if for a picnic? All that is plain. And the conclusion is plainer from many other sentences. ‘It seemed such an impossible thing that he could evade the hue and cry that must attend this flight.’ It would have been impossible if there had been any hue and cry. ‘Evelyn and Harriet heard me eagerly, and the former, I began to suspect, was already in possession of the story.’ How could she be in possession of it so early as that, unless the police cars and telephones helped to send word from Southby? Could the convicts catch a camel or an ostrich? And look at the motor-boat. Do motor-boats grow on trees? No, that’s all simple. Not only was the companion in the escape a police detective, but the whole scheme of the escape was a police scheme, engineered by the highest authorities of the prison.”
“But why?” I asked, staring. “And what has Southby to do with it?”
“Southby had nothing to do with it,” he answered. “I believe he is now hiding in some ditch or wood in the sincere belief that he is a hunted fugitive. But they won’t trouble him any more. He has done their work for them. He is innocent. It was essential that he should be innocent.”
“Oh, I don’t understand all this!” I cried impatiently.
“I don’t understand half of this,” said Father Brown. “There are all sorts of difficulties I will ask you about later. You knew the family. I only say that the sentence about cheerfulness did turn out to be a key-sentence, after all. Now, I want you to concentrate your attention on another key-sentence. ‘We decided that Harriet should go to Bath without loss of time, in case she should be of any assistance there.’ Note that this comes soon after your expression of surprise that someone should have communicated with Evelyn so early. Well, I suppose we none of us
think the governor of the prison wired to her: ‘Have connived at escape of your brother, Convict 99.’ The message must have come in Southby’s name, at any rate.”
I ruminated, looking at the roll of the downs as it rose and repeated itself through every gap in the garden trees; then I said, “Kennington?”
My old friend looked at me for a moment with a look which, this time, I could not analyse.
“Captain Kennigton’s part in the business is unique in my experience,” he said, “and I think we had better return to him later. It is enough that, by your own account, Southby did not give him his confidence.”
I looked again at the glimpses of the downs, and they looked grander but greyer, as my companion went on, like one who can only put things in their proper order.
“I mean the argument here is close, but clear. If she had any secret message from her brother about his escaping, why shouldn’t she have a message about where he was escaping to? Why should she send off her sister to Bath, when she might just as well have been told that her brother wasn’t going there? Surely a young gentleman might more safely say, in a private letter, that he was going to Bath than that he was escaping from prison? Somebody or something must have influenced Southby to leave his destination uncertain. And who could influence Southby except the companion of his flight?”