With a single motion the shiny, sleek, black wig and the black moustache disappeared into a small handbag at his side. The whole character, and even the features of the face, seemed to change as suddenly, and the broad, bland, smiling face of our old friend Mr Beck presented itself to the eyes of the astonished German, who shrank back in his corner of the seat in astonishment at the sudden revelation. But Mr Beck quietly ignored his astonishment.
‘As you seem interested in this kind of thing,’ he said, ‘I will tell you the story of one of the most curious cases I have ever had to deal with. You are the very first to hear the story. Indeed, it is so new that it hasn’t yet got the right ending to it. Perhaps you have heard of the Thornvale murder in England? No! Then I’ll begin at the beginning.’
He began at the beginning and told the story clearly and vividly as it was told at the inquest. The German listened with most flattering interest and surprise.
‘When I found that golf ball,’ Mr Beck went on, ‘it gave me an idea. Do you know anything of golf?’
‘I play a little,’ the other confessed.
‘Then you will understand that from the place where I found his ball I knew that the murdered man—I told you his name was Hawkins—Samuel Hawkins—never got as far as the second green. If he had, his ball would not have been lying where I found it. He would have holed it out and gone on.
‘It was plain, therefore, he must have been murdered just after he played that shot—murdered somewhere between the tee and the green of the second hole. I went back to the deep bunker I told you of that guarded the second green, and I found there traces of a struggle.
‘They had been cunningly obliterated, but to a detective’s eye they were plain enough. The sand was smoothed over the footprints, but here and there the long grass and wild flowers had been torn away by a desperate grasp. I even found a faint bloodstain on one of the stones. Then, of course, I guessed what had happened. The man had been murdered in the bunker of the second green and carried under cover of the ridge to the bunker of the seventeenth. That, you see, disposed of the alibi of Mr Bolton, who had left him early in the game.’
‘Oh, no!’ interrupted the German, with eager interest in the story, ‘you told me that Mr Bolton was at the hotel from half-past seven, and the watch of the murdered man showed the murder had been committed at half-past eight.’
Mr Beck looked at the German with manifest admiration. ‘Forgive me for mentioning it. You would have made a first-class detective if you hadn’t gone into another line of business. I should have told you that the evidence of the watch had been faked.’
‘Faked!’ queried the other, with a blank look on his face.
‘Oh! I see. Being a German, of course you don’t understand our slang phrases. I examined the watch, and I found that though the glass had been violently broken, the dial was not even scratched. The spring had been snapped, not by the blow but by overwinding. It was pretty plain to me the murderer had done the trick. He first put the hands on to half-past eight and then broke the spring, and so made his alibi. He got the watch to perjure itself. Neat, wasn’t it?’
The German merely grunted. He was plainly impressed by the devilish ingenuity of the murderer.
‘Besides,’ Mr Beck went on placidly, ‘to make quite sure, I laid a trap for Mr Bolton which worked like a charm. The night of the murder I went into his room and tore one of the buttons out of his waistcoat. The next day I mentioned at dinner that I had found a button in the second bunker where, if I guessed rightly, he and only he knew the murder was really committed. It was a lie, of course. But it caught the truth. That same evening Mr Bolton burnt the waistcoat. It was a light cotton affair that burnt like paper. The glass buttons he cut off with a knife and buried. That looked bad, didn’t it?’
‘Very bad,’ the German agreed. He was more deeply interested than ever. ‘Did you arrest the man, then?’
‘Not then.’
‘But why?’
‘I wanted to make quite sure of my proofs. I wanted to lay my hands on the receipts for the diamonds which I believed he had stolen. I told you of those, didn’t I?’
‘Oh, yes, you told me of those. Did you search for them?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t find them. I searched Mr Bolton’s room, and searched his clothes carefully, but I couldn’t find a trace of the papers.’
Again the German grunted. He seemed somehow pleased at the failure. Possibly the quiet confidence of this cock-sure detective annoyed him.
‘But,’ Mr Beck went on, placid as ever, ‘I tried a guess. You may remember, Herr Raphael, that when Mr Bolton came back from the golf links he posted a letter immediately. I had a notion that he stuck the receipts in the envelope and posted it addressed to himself at some post-office to be left till called for. Wasn’t a bad guess, was it?’
‘A very good guess.’
‘Then I did a little bit of forgery.’
‘You what?’
‘Did a little bit of forgery. I forged the name of Mr Bolton’s partner to a telegram to say that five thousand pounds were urgently needed. That, I knew, was likely to make Mr Bolton gather up the receipts and start for Amsterdam. We went to Liverpool together and I changed to an elderly lady. I saw him as an able-bodied seaman pick up his own letter at the Liverpool Post-Office. I came over with him in the boat to Rotterdam. As a French journalist I saw him as a stout German get into this very carriage and—here I am!’
It was a very lame ending to an exciting story. The stout German plainly thought so. He had listened with flattering eagerness almost to the end; now he leant back in the corner of his seat suppressing a yawn.
‘It is a very amusing story,’ he said slowly. ‘But, my friend, you must be thirsty with much talking. I in my bag have a flask of excellent schnapps, you shall of it taste.’
A small black bag rested on the seat beside him. He laid his hand on the fastening.
‘It is no use,’ Mr Beck interrupted, ‘no use, Mr Bolton. I have taken the revolver out of the bag and have it with my own in my pocket. The game is up, I think. I have put my cards on the table. What do you say?’
Suddenly Mr Bolton broke into a loud, harsh laugh that ended in a sob. ‘You are a fiend, Beck,’ he shouted, ‘a fiend incarnate. What do you mean to do?’
‘To take you back with me to London. I have a man in the next carriage to look after you. No use worrying about extradition. You have a return ticket, I suppose; so have I. There will be a train leaving as we arrive. Meanwhile, if you don’t mind—’ He took a neat pair of handcuffs from his pocket and held them out with an ingratiating smile.
Mr Bolton drew back a little. For a moment it seemed as if he would spring at the detective’s throat. But the steady, fearless eyes held him. He put his hands out submissively and the steel bracelets clicked on his wrists.
They had only to cross the platform to reach the return train that was just starting. But Mr Beck found time to plunge into the telegraph office and scribble three words to Mag Hazel’s address:
‘All right.—Beck.’
The Finger of Stone
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was another excessively accomplished all-rounder whose other achievements now seem less significant than the creation of a fictional detective. He was a theologian, critic, journalist and much else besides. He converted to Catholicism, and some campaigners have put him forward as a candidate for sainthood, prompting a fierce debate as to whether or not he was guilty of anti-Semitism.
There is much less room for argument about his importance in the history of detective fiction. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Father Brown was second only to Sherlock Holmes in the pantheon of notable British detectives, although his fate a hundred years later was to be transformed into the unlikely hero of a lightweight daytime television series. Chesterton’s influence on the genre wa
s recognised when, in 1930, Anthony Berkeley invited him to become President of the Detection Club. He enjoyed walking, and a tramp across the Yorkshire moors with a priest called Father O’Connor was the prelude to his creation of Father Brown. Here, a walking tour in France supplies the context for the story.
***
Three young men on a walking-tour came to a halt outside the little town of Carillon, in the south of France; which is doubtless described in the guide books as famous for its fine old Byzantine monastery, now the seat of a university; and for having been the scene of the labours of Boyg. At that name, at least, the reader will be reasonably thrilled; for he must have seen it in any number of newspapers and novels. Boyg and the Bible are periodically reconciled at religious conferences; Boyg broadens and slightly bewilders the minds of numberless heroes of long psychological stories, which begin in the nursery and nearly end in the madhouse. The journalist, writing rapidly his recurrent reference to the treatment meted out to pioneers like Galileo, pauses in the effort to think of another example, and always rounds off the sentence either with Bruno or with Boyg. But the mildly orthodox are equally fascinated, and feel a glow of agnosticism while they continue to say that, since the discoveries of Boyg, the doctrine of the Homoousian or of the human conscience does not stand where it did; wherever that was. It is needless to say that Boyg was a great discoverer, for the public has long regarded him with the warmest reverence and gratitude on that ground. It is also unnecessary to say what he discovered; for the public will never display the faintest curiosity about that. It is vaguely understood that it was something about fossils, or the long period required for petrifaction; and that it generally implied those anarchic or anonymous forces of evolution supposed to be hostile to religion. But certainly none of the discoveries he made while he was alive was so sensational, in the newspaper sense, as the discovery that was made about him when he was dead. And this, the more private and personal matter, is what concerns us here.
The three tourists had just agreed to separate for an hour, and meet again for luncheon at the little café opposite; and the different ways in which they occupied their time and indulged their tastes will serve for a sufficient working summary of their personalities. Arthur Armitage was a dark and grave young man, with a great deal of money, which he spent on a conscientious and continuous course of self-culture, especially in the matter of art and architecture; and his earnest aquiline profile was already set towards the Byzantine monastery, for the exhaustive examination of which he had already prepared himself, as if he were going to pass an examination rather than to make one. The man next him, though himself an artist, betrayed no such artistic ardour. He was a painter who wasted most of his time as a poet; but Armitage, who was always picking up geniuses, had become in some sense his patron in both departments. His name was Gabriel Gale; a long, loose, rather listless man with yellow hair; but a man not easy for any patron to patronize.
He generally did as he liked in an abstracted fashion; and what he very often liked to do was nothing. On this occasion he showed a lamentable disposition to drift towards the café first; and having drunk a glass or two of wine, he drifted not into the town but out of it, roaming about the steep bare slope above, with a rolling eye on the rolling clouds; and talking to himself until he found somebody else to talk to, which happened when he put his foot through the glass roof of a studio just below him on the steep incline. As it was an artist’s studio, however, their quarrel fortunately ended in an argument about the future of realistic art; and when he turned up to lunch, that was the extent of his acquaintance with the quaint and historic town of Carillon.
The name of the third man was Garth; he was shorter and uglier and somewhat older than the others, but with a much livelier eye in his hatchet face; he stepped much more briskly, and in the matter of a knowledge of the world, the other two were babies under his charge. He was a very able medical practitioner, with a hobby of more fundamental scientific inquiry; and for him the whole town, university and studio, monastery and café, was only the temple of the presiding genius of Boyg. But in this case the practical instinct of Dr Garth would seem to have guided him rightly; for he discovered things considerably more startling than anything the antiquarian found in the Romanesque arches or the poet in the rolling clouds. And it is his adventures, in that single hour before lunch, upon which this tale must turn.
The café tables stood on the pavement under a row of trees opposite the old round gate in the wall, through which could be seen the white gleam of the road up which they had just been walking. But the steep hills were so high round the town that they rose clear above the wall, in a more enormous wall of smooth and slanting rock, bare except for occasional clumps of cactus. There was no crack in that sloping wilderness of stone except the rather shallow and stony bed of a little stream. Lower down, where the stream reached the level of the valley, rose the dark domes of the basilica of the old monastery; and from this a curious stairway of rude stones ran some way up the hill beside the water-course, and stopped at a small and solitary building looking little more than a shed made of stones. Some little way higher the gleam of the glass roof of the studio, with which Gale had collided in his unconscious wanderings, marked the last spot of human habitation in all those rocky wastes that rose about the little town.
Armitage and Gale were already seated at the table when Dr Garth walked up briskly and sat down somewhat abruptly.
‘Have you fellows heard the news?’ he asked.
He spoke somewhat sharply, for he was faintly annoyed by the attitudes of the antiquarian and the artist, who were deep in their own dreamier and less practical tastes and topics. Armitage was saying at the moment:
‘Yes, I suppose I’ve seen to-day some of the very oldest sculpture of the veritable Dark Ages. And it’s not stiff like some Byzantine work; there’s a touch of the true grotesque you generally get in Gothic.’
‘Well, I’ve seen to-day some of the newest sculpture of the Modern Ages,’ replied Gale, ‘and I fancy they are the veritable Dark Ages. Quite enough of the true grotesque up in that studio, I can tell you.’
‘Have you heard the news, I say?’ rapped out the doctor. ‘Boyg is dead.’
Gale stopped in a sentence about Gothic architecture, and said seriously, with a sort of hazy reverence:
‘Requiescat in pace. Who was Boyg?’
‘Well, really,’ replied the doctor, ‘I did think every baby had heard of Boyg.’
‘Well, I dare say you’ve never heard of Paradou,’ answered Gale. ‘Each of us lives in his little cosmos with its classes and degrees. Probably you haven’t heard of the most advanced sculptor, or perhaps of the latest lacrosse expert or champion chess player.’
It was characteristic of the two men, that while Gale went on talking in the air about an abstract subject, till he had finished his own train of thought, Armitage had a sufficient proper sense of the presence of something more urgent to relapse into silence. Nevertheless, he unconsciously looked down at his notes; at the name of the advanced sculptor he looked up.
‘Who is Paradou?’ he asked.
‘Why, the man I’ve been talking to this morning,’ replied Gale. ‘His sculpture’s advanced enough for anybody. He’s no end of a chap; talks more than I do, and talks very well. Thinks too; I should think he could do everything except sculpt. There his theories get in his way. As I told him, this notion of the new realism—’
‘Perhaps we might drop realism and attend to reality,’ said Dr Garth grimly. ‘I tell you Boyg is dead. And that’s not the worst either.’
Armitage looked up from his notes with something of the vagueness of his friend the poet. ‘If I remember right,’ he said, ‘Professor Boyg’s discovery was concerned with fossils.’
‘Professor Boyg’s discovery involved the extension of the period required for petrifaction as distinct from fossilization,’ replied the doctor stiffly, ‘and thereby relegated
biological origins to a period which permits the chronology necessary to the hypothesis of natural selection. It may affect you as humorous to interject the observation “loud cheers,” but I assure you the scientific world, which happens to be competent to judge, was really moved with amazement as well as admiration.’
‘In fact it was petrified to hear it couldn’t be petrified,’ suggested the poet.
‘I have really no time for your flippancy,’ said Garth. ‘I am up against a great ugly fact.’
Armitage interposed in the benevolent manner of a chairman. ‘We must really let Garth speak; come, doctor, what is it all about? Begin at the beginning.’
‘Very well,’ said the doctor, in his staccato way. ‘I’ll begin at the beginning. I came to this town with a letter of introduction to Boyg himself; and as I particularly wanted to visit the geological museum, which his own munificence provided for this town, I went there first. I found all the windows of the Boyg Museum were broken; and the stones thrown by the rioters were actually lying about the room within a foot or two of the glass cases, one of which was smashed.’
‘Donations to the geological museum, no doubt,’ remarked Gale. ‘A munificent patron happens to pass by, and just heaves in a valuable exhibit through the window. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be done in what you call the world of science; I’m sure it’s done all right in the world of art. Old Paradou’s busts and bas-reliefs are just great rocks chucked at the public and—’
‘Paradou may go to—Paradise, shall we say?’ said Garth, with pardonable impatience. ‘Will nothing make you understand that something has really happened that isn’t any of your ideas and isms? It wasn’t only the geological museum; it was the same everywhere. I passed by the house Boyg first lived in, where they very properly put up a medallion; and the medallion was all splashed with mud. I crossed the market-place, where they put up a statue to him just recently. It was still hung with wreaths of laurel by his pupils and the party that appreciates him; but they were half torn away, as if there had been a struggle, and stones had evidently been thrown, for a piece of the hand was chipped off.’
Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries Page 10