“I beg your pardon,” he began.
“I’m curious to know if you are at all acquainted with Miss Danbury’s family history,” the scientist went on. “Meanwhile, Mr. Hatch, take the cab, and go straight and measure the precise width of the bruise on Pittman’s lips; also, see Mr. Willing, if he is able to receive you, and ask him what he can give you as to Miss Danbury’s history—I mean her family, her property, her connections, all about everything. Meet me at my house in a couple of hours.”
Hatch went out, leaving them together. When he reached the scientist’s home The Thinking Machine was just coming out.
“I’m on my way to see Mr. George Parsons, the so-called copper king,” he volunteered. “Come along.”
From that moment came several developments so curious, and bizarre, and so widely disassociated that Hatch could make nothing of them at all. Nothing seemed to fit into anything else. For instance, The Thinking Machine’s visit to Mr. Parsons’ office.
“Please ask Mr. Parsons if he will see Mr. Van Dusen?” he requested of an attendant.
“What about?” the query came from Mr. Parsons.
“It is a matter of life and death,” the answer went back.
“Whose?” Mr. Parsons wanted to know.
“His!” The scientist’s answer was equally short.
Immediately afterward The Thinking Machine disappeared inside. Ten minutes later he came out, and he and Hatch went off together, stopping at a toy shop to buy a small, high-grade, hard-rubber ball; and later at a department store to purchase a vicious-looking hatpin.
“You failed to inform me, Mr. Hatch, of the measurement of the bruise?”
“Precisely one and a quarter inches.”
“Thanks! And what did Mr. Willing say?”
“I didn’t see him as yet. I have an appointment to see him in an hour from now.”
“Very well,” and The Thinking Machine nodded his satisfaction. “When you see him, will you be good enough to tell him, please, that I know—I know, do you understand?—who killed Miss Danbury, and Sumner, and Pittman. You can’t make it too strong. I know—do you understand?”
“Do you know?” Hatch demanded quickly.
“No,” frankly. “But convince him that I do, and add that tomorrow at noon I shall place the extraordinary facts I have gathered in possession of the police. At noon, understand; and I know!” He was thoughtful a moment. “You might add that I have informed you that the guilty person is a person of high position, whose name has been in no way connected with the crimes—that is, unpleasantly. You don’t know that name; no one knows it except myself. I shall give it to the police at noon to-morrow.”
“Anything else?”
“Drop in on me early to-morrow morning, and bring Mr. Mallory.”
* * *
Events were cyclonic on that last morning. Mallory and Hatch had hardly arrived when there came a telephone message for the detective from police headquarters. Mrs. Cecelia Montgomery was there. She had come in voluntarily, and asked for Mr. Mallory.
“Don’t rush off now,” requested The Thinking Machine, who was puttering around among the retorts, and microscopes and what not on his worktable. “Ask them to detain her until you get there. Also, ask her just what relationship existed between Miss Danbury and Henry Sumner.” The detective went out; the scientist turned to Hatch. “Here is a hatpin,” he said. “Some time this morning we shall have another caller. If, during the presence of that person in this room, I voluntarily put anything to my lips, a bottle, say, or anything is forced upon me, and I do not remove it in just thirty seconds, you will thrust this hatpin through my cheek. Don’t hesitate.”
“Thrust it through?” the reporter repeated. An uncanny chill ran over him as he realized the scientist’s meaning. “Is it absolutely necessary to take such a chance to—”
“I say if I don’t remove it!” The Thinking Machine interrupted shortly. “You and Mallory will be watching from another room; I shall demonstrate the exact manner of the murders.” There was a troubled look in the reporter’s face. “I shall be in no danger,” the scientist said simply. “The hatpin is merely a precaution if anything should go wrong.”
After a little Mallory entered, with clouded countenance.
“She denies the murders,” he announced, “but admits that the hand prints in blood are hers. According to her yarn, she searched Miss Danbury’s room and Sumner’s room after the murders to find some family papers which were necessary to establish claims to some estate—I don’t quite understand. She hurt her hand in Miss Danbury’s room, and it bled a lot, hence the hand print. From there she went straight to Sumner’s room, and presumably left the smudge there. It seems that Sumner was a distant cousin of Miss Danbury’s—the only son of a younger brother who ran away years ago after some wild escapade, and came to this country. George Parsons, the copper king, is the only other relative in this country. She advises us to warn him to be on his guard—seems to think he will be the next victim.”
“He’s already warned,” said The Thinking Machine, “and he has gone West on important business.”
Mallory stared.
“You seem to know more about this case than I do,” he sneered.
“I do,” asserted the scientist, “quite a lot more.”
“I think the third degree will change Mrs. Montgomery’s story some,” the detective declared. “Perhaps she will remember better—”
“She is telling the truth.”
“Then why did she run away? How was it we found her handkerchief in Mr. Willing’s office after the Pittman affair? How was it—”
The Thinking Machine shrugged his shoulders, and was silent. A moment later the door opened, and Martha appeared, her eyes blazing with indignation.
“That man who swore at me over the telephone,” she announced distinctly, “wants to see you, sir.”
Mallory’s keen eyes swept the faces of the scientist and the reporter, trying to fathom the strange change that came over them.
“You are sure, Martha?” asked The Thinking Machine.
“Indeed I am, sir.” She was positive about it. “I’d never forget his voice, sir.”
For an instant her master merely stared at her, then dismissed her with a curt, “Show him in,” after which he turned to the detective and Hatch.
“You will wait in the next room,” he said tersely. “If anything happens, Mr. Hatch, remember.”
The Thinking Machine was sitting when the visitor entered—a middle-aged man, sharp-featured, rather spare, brisk in his movements, and distinctly well groomed. It was Herbert Willing, attorney. In one hand he carried a small bag. He paused an instant, and gazed at the diminutive scientist curiously.
“Come in, Mr. Willing,” The Thinking Machine greeted. “You want to see me about—” He paused questioningly.
“I understand,” said the lawyer suavely, “that you have interested yourself in these recent—er—remarkable murders, and there are some points I should like to discuss with you. I have some papers in my bag here, which”—he opened it—“may be of interest. Some er—newspaper man informed me that you have certain information indicating the person—”
“I know the name of the murderer,” said The Thinking Machine.
“Indeed! May I ask who it is?”
“You may. His name is Herbert Willing.”
Watching tensely Hatch saw The Thinking Machine pass his hand slowly across his mouth as if to stifle a yawn; saw Willing leap forward suddenly with what seemed to be a bottle in his hand; saw him force the scientist back into his chair, and thrust the bottle against his lips. Instantly came a sharp click, and some hideous change came over the scientist’s wizened face. His eyes opened wide in terror, his cheeks seemed to collapse. Instinctively he grasped the bottle with both hands.
For a scant second Willing stared at him, his countenance grown demoniacal; then he swiftly took something else from the small bag, and smashed it on the floor. It was a drinking glass!
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After which the scientist calmly removed the bottle from his lips.
“The broken drinking glass,” he said quietly, “completes the evidence.”
Hutchinson Hatch was lean and wiry, and hard as nails; Detective Mallory’s bulk concealed muscles of steel, but it took both of them to overpower the attorney. Heedless of the struggling trio The Thinking Machine was curiously scrutinizing the black bottle. The mouth was blocked by a small rubber ball, which he had thrust against it with his tongue a fraction of an instant before the dreaded power the bottle held had been released by pressure upon a cunningly concealed spring. When he raised his squinting eyes at last, Willing, manacled, was glaring at him in impotent rage. Fifteen minutes later the four were at police headquarters; Mrs. Montgomery was awaiting them.
“Mrs. Montgomery, why,”—and the petulant pale-blue eyes of The Thinking Machine were fixed upon her face—“why didn’t you go to Concord, as you had said?”
“I did go there,” she replied. “It was simply that when news came of Miss Danbury’s terrible death I was frightened, I lost my head; I pleaded with my friends not to let it be known that I was there, and they agreed. If anyone had searched their house I would have been found; no one did. At last I could stand it no longer. I came to the city, and straight here to explain everything I knew in connection with the affair.”
“And the search you made of Miss Danbury’s room? And of Sumner’s room?”
“I’ve explained that,” she said. “I knew of the relationship between poor Harry Sumner and Violet Danbury, and I knew each of them had certain papers which were of value as establishing their claims to a great estate in England now in litigation. I was sure those papers would be valuable to the only other claimant, who was—”
“Mr. George Parsons, the copper king,” interposed the scientist. “You didn’t find the papers you sought because Willing had taken them. That estate was the thing he wanted, and I dare say by some legal jugglery he would have gotten it.” Again he turned to face Mrs. Montgomery. “Living with Miss Danbury, as you did, you probably held a key to her apartment? Yes. You had only the difficulty then, of entering the hotel late at night, unseen, and that seemed to be simple. Willing did it the night he killed Miss Danbury, and left it unseen, as you did. Now, how did you enter Sumner’s room?”
“It was a terrible place,” and she shuddered slightly. “I went in alone, and entered his room through a window from a fire escape. The newspapers, you will remember, described its location precisely, and—”
“I see,” The Thinking Machine interrupted. He was silent a moment. “You’re a shrewd man, Willing, and your knowledge of natural philosophy is exact if not extensive. Of course, I knew if you thought I knew too much about the murders you would come to me. You did. It was a trap, if that’s any consolation to you. You fell into it. And, curiously enough, I wasn’t afraid of a knife or a shot; I knew the instrument of death you had been using was too satisfactory and silent for you to change. However, I was prepared for it, and—I think that’s all.” He arose.
“All?” Hatch and Mallory echoed the word. “We don’t understand—”
“Oh!” and The Thinking Machine sat down again. “It’s logic. Miss Danbury was dead—neither shot, stabbed, poisoned, nor choked; ‘absence of air in her lungs,’ the physicians said. Instantly the vacuum bottle suggested itself. That murder, as was the murder of Sumner, was planned to counterfeit suicide, hence the broken goblet on the floor. Incidentally the murder of Sumner informed me that the crimes were the work of a madman, else there was an underlying purpose which might have arisen through a relationship. Ultimately I established that relationship through Professor Meredith, in whom Miss Danbury had confided to a certain extent; at the same time he convinced me of his innocence in the affair.
“Now,” he continued, after a moment, “we come to the murder of Pittman. Pittman learned, and tried to phone me, who the murderer was. Willing heard that message. He killed Pittman, then bound and gagged himself, and waited. It was a clever ruse. His story of being overpowered and drugged is absurd on the face of it, yet he asked us to believe that by leaving a handkerchief of Mrs. Montgomery’s on the floor, that was reeking with drugs. Mr. Hatch can give you more of these details.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m due at a luncheon, where I am to make an address to the Society of Psychical Research. If you’ll excuse me—”
He went out; the others sat staring after him.
The Blue Cross
G. K. Chesterton
Alongside the idea of the infallible detective was an equally popular thread that had developed during the 1890s and flourished in the early 1900s, featuring the gentleman thief or lovable rogue who, over time, becomes something of a heroic villain. The idea may be traced back on the one hand to that of the dashing highwayman—the fictionalisation of Dick Turpin in Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) did much to glamorize the villain—and on the other hand to the poacher-turned-gamekeeper François Vidocq, who had been a criminal for many years before he became an informer in 1809 and subsequently became the first Chief of Police.
The earliest of the heroic villains in crime fiction was the con-man Colonel Clay created by Conan Doyle’s friend and neighbour, Grant Allen, in The Strand, and collected as The African Millionaire (1897). He was soon eclipsed by A. J. Raffles, created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. Hornung in 1898 with the first in a long line of books published as The Amateur Cracksman in 1899. It was Raffles that set the mold for the character that rapidly encouraged a host of imitations, amongst them Thomas Hanshew’s Hamilton Cleek, known as “the Man of the Forty Faces,” Frederick Irving Anderson’s Godahl the Infallible, Frank L. Packard’s Jimmie Dale, known as the Gray Seal, and Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, known as “The Saint”—the list could go on and on.
Amongst them, and rivalling Raffles in both popularity and audacity, was the French rogue Arsène Lupin, known as the “Prince of Thieves,” created by Maurice Leblanc. His stories first appeared in France in 1905 and were soon running in British and American magazines, with the first book in 1907. Lupin is a master of disguise and frequently outwits Ganimard, the detective against whom he pits his wits. Leblanc was an audacious writer. Not only did he introduce Sherlock Holmes into some of the early stories, but he also has Lupin play a trick on the reader in the first story.
I mention all this by way of background because it was as a consequence of another French villain who later turned detective that we first encounter the meek but perceptive Roman Catholic priest Father Brown. In the first story, “The Blue Cross,” G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) parodied the Arsène Lupin stories by having the notorious French thief and master of disguise, Flambeau, come to England pursued by the French detective Aristide Valentin. Both soon discover that neither is a match for the insightful Father Brown, who has as his weapon a deep understanding of human nature. Flambeau would continue to feature in some of the later Father Brown stories but increasingly as a detective rather than a criminal. Chesterton had thus not only created a remarkable detective in the shape of Father Brown, whom Ellery Queen regarded as one of the three greatest detectives in fiction (the others being August Dupin and Sherlock Holmes) but had also used the idea of the gentleman thief to show how those who had chosen the path of villainy can be rescued and put on the right road.
Chesterton created other detectives, including Rupert and Basil Grant in The Club of Queer Trades (1905), Horne Fisher in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), Gabriel Gale in The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Mr. Pond in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937), and a whole panoply of undercover detectives in The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Delightful and fascinating though these are, none eclipsed or became as immortal as Father Brown.
BETWEEN the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous—nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a sl
ight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.
Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.
It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the juge d’instruction upside down and stood him on his head, “to clear his mind”; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to him to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was almost a new sin, and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people’s doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his experiments. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a trap. It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.
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