‘Yes,’ said Father Brown very gently, ‘which mystery?’
‘The mystery of how the murderer got away,’ answered the other. ‘The instant people were admitted to the pier next morning, I was released from my prison and went racing back to the entrance gates, to inquire who had left the pier since they were opened. Without bothering you with details, I may explain that they were, by a rather unusual arrangement, real full-size iron doors that would keep anybody out (or in) until they were opened. The officials there had seen nobody in the least resembling the assassin returning that way. And he was a rather unmistakable person. Even if he had disguised himself somehow, he could hardly have disguised his extraordinary height or got rid of the family nose. It is extraordinarily unlikely that he tried to swim ashore, for the sea was very rough; and there are certainly no traces of any landing. And, somehow, having seen the face of that fiend even once, let alone about six times, something gives me an overwhelming conviction that he did not simply drown himself in the hour of triumph.’
‘I quite understand what you mean by that,’ replied Father Brown. ‘Besides, it would be very inconsistent with the tone of his original threatening letter, in which he promised himself all sorts of benefits after the crime . . . there’s another point it might be well to verify. What about the structure of the pier underneath? Piers are very often made with a whole network of iron supports, which a man might climb through as a monkey climbs through a forest.’
‘Yes, I thought of that,’ replied the private investigator; ‘but unfortunately this pier is oddly constructed in more ways than one. It’s quite unusually long, and there are iron columns with all that tangle of iron girders; only they’re very far apart and I can’t see any way a man could climb from one to the other.’
‘I only mentioned it,’ said Father Brown thoughtfully, ‘because that queer fish with the long whiskers, the old man who preaches on the sand, often climbs up on to the nearest girder. I believe he sits there fishing when the tide comes up. And he’s a very queer fish to go fishing.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’
‘Well,’ said Father Brown very slowly, twiddling with a button and gazing abstractedly out to the great green waters glittering in the last evening light after the sunset. ‘Well ... I tried to talk to him in a friendly sort of way — friendly and not too funny, if you understand, about his combining the ancient trades of fishing and preaching; I think I made the obvious reference; the text that refers to fishing for living souls. And he said quite queerly and harshly, as he jumped back on to his iron perch, ‘Well, at least I fish for dead bodies.”’
‘Good God!’ exclaimed the detective, staring at him.
‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘It seemed to me an odd remark to make in a chatty way, to a stranger playing with children on the sands.’
After another staring silence his companion eventually ejaculated: ‘You don’t mean you think he had anything to do with the death.’
‘I think,’ answered Father Brown, ‘that he might throw some light on it.’
‘Well, it’s beyond me now,’ said the detective. ‘It’s beyond me to believe that anybody can throw any light on it. It’s like a welter of wild waters in the pitch dark; the sort of waters that he ... that he fell into. It’s simply stark staring unreason; a big man vanishing like a bubble; nobody could possibly ... Look here!’ He stopped suddenly, staring at the priest, who had not moved, but was still twiddling with the button and staring at the breakers. ‘What do you mean? What are you looking like that for? You don’t mean to say that you . . . that you can make any sense of it?’
‘It would be much better if it remained nonsense,’ said Father Brown in a low voice. ‘Well, if you ask me right out — yes, I think I can make some sense of it.’
There was a long silence, and then the inquiry agent said with a rather singular abruptness: ‘Oh, here comes the old man’s secretary from the hotel. I must be off. I think I’ll go and talk to that mad fisherman of yours.’
‘Post hoc propter hoc?’ asked the priest with a smile.
‘Well,’ said the other, with jerky candour, ‘the secretary don’t like me and I don’t think I like him. He’s been poking around with a lot of questions that didn’t seem to me to get us any further, except towards a quarrel. Perhaps he’s jealous because the old man called in somebody else, and wasn’t content with his elegant secretary’s advice. See you later.’
And he turned away, ploughing through the sand to the place where the eccentric preacher had already mounted his marine nest; and looked in the green gloaming rather like some huge polyp or stinging jelly-fish trailing his poisonous filaments in the phosphorescent sea.
Meanwhile the priest was serenely watching the serene approach of the secretary; conspicuous even from afar, in that popular crowd, by the clerical neatness and sobriety of his top-hat and tail-coat. Without feeling disposed to take part in any feuds between the secretary and the inquiry agent, Father Brown had a faint feeling of irrational sympathy with the prejudices of the latter. Mr Anthony Taylor, the secretary, was an extremely presentable young man, in countenance, as well as costume; and the countenance was firm and intellectual as well as merely good-looking. He was pale, with dark hair coming down on the sides of his head, as if pointing towards possible whiskers; he kept his lips compressed more tightly than most people. The only thing that Father Brown’s fancy could tell itself in justification sounded queerer than it really looked. He had a notion that the man talked with his nostrils. Anyhow, the strong compression of his mouth brought out something abnormally sensitive and flexible in these movements at the sides of his nose, so that he seemed to be communicating and conducting life by snuffling and smelling, with his head up, as does a dog. It somehow fitted in with the other features that, when he did speak, it was with a sudden rattling rapidity like a gatling-gun, which sounded almost ugly from so smooth and polished a figure.
For once he opened the conversation, by saying: ‘No bodies washed ashore, I imagine.’
‘None have been announced, certainly,’ said Father Brown.
‘No gigantic body of the murderer with the woollen scarf,’ said Mr Taylor.
‘No,’ said Father Brown.
Mr Taylor’s mouth did not move any more for the moment; but his nostrils spoke for him with such quick and quivering scorn, that they might almost have been called talkative.
When he did speak again, after some polite commonplaces from the priest, it was to say curtly: ‘Here comes the Inspector; I suppose they’ve been scouring England for the scarf.’
Inspector Grinstead, a brown-faced man with a grey pointed beard, addressed Father Brown rather more respectfully than the secretary had done.
‘I thought you would like to know, sir,’ he said, ‘that there is absolutely no trace of the man described as having escaped from the pier.’
‘Or rather not described as having escaped from the pier,’ said Taylor. ‘The pier officials, the only people who could have described him, have never seen anybody to describe.’
‘Well,’ said the Inspector, ‘we’ve telephoned all the stations and watched all the roads, and it will be almost impossible for him to escape from England. It really seems to me as if he couldn’t have got out that way. He doesn’t seem to be anywhere.’
‘He never was anywhere,’ said the secretary, with an abrupt grating voice, that sounded like a gun going off on that lonely shore.
The Inspector looked blank; but a light dawned gradually on the face of the priest, who said at last with almost ostentatious unconcern:
‘Do you mean that the man was a myth? Or possibly a lie?’
‘Ah,’ said the secretary, inhaling through his haughty nostrils, ‘you’ve thought of that at last.’
‘I thought of that at first,’ said Father Brown. ‘It’s the first thing anybody would think of, isn’t it, hearing an unsupported story from a stranger about a strange murderer on a lonely pier. In plain words, you mean that little Muggleton never heard anybody murde
ring the millionaire. Possibly you mean that little Muggleton murdered him himself.’
‘Well,’ said the secretary, ‘Muggleton looks a dingy down-and-out sort of cove to me. There’s no story but his about what happened on the pier, and his story consists of a giant who vanished; quite a fairy-tale. It isn’t a very creditable tale, even as he tells it. By his own account, he bungled his case and let his patron be killed a few yards away. He’s a pretty rotten fool and failure, on his own confession.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown. ‘I’m rather fond of people who are fools and failures on their own confession.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ snapped the other.
‘Perhaps,’ said Father Brown, wistfully, ‘it’s because so many people are fools and failures without any confession.’
Then, after a pause, he went on: ‘But even if he is a fool and a failure, that doesn’t prove he is a liar and a murderer. And you’ve forgotten that there is one piece of external evidence that does really support history. I mean the letter from the millionaire, telling the whole tale of his cousin and his vendetta. Unless you can prove that the document itself is actually a forgery, you have to admit there was some probability of Bruce being pursued by somebody who had a real motive. Or rather, I should say, the one actually admitted and recorded motive.’
‘I’m not quite sure that I understand you,’ said the Inspector, ‘about the motive.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Father Brown, for the first time stung by impatience into familiarity, ‘everybody’s got a motive in a way. Considering the way that Bruce made his money, considering the way that most millionaires make their money, almost anybody in the world might have done such a perfectly natural thing as throw him into the sea. In many, one might almost fancy, it would be almost automatic. To almost all it must have occurred at some time or other. Mr Taylor might have done it.’
‘What’s that?’ snapped Mr Taylor, and his nostrils swelled visibly.
‘I might have done it,’ went on Father Brown, ‘nisi me constringeret ecclesiae auctoritas. Anybody, but for the one true morality, might be tempted to accept so obvious, so simple a social solution. I might have done it; you might have done it; the Mayor or the muffin-man might have done it. The only person on this earth I can think of, who probably would not have done it, is the private inquiry agent whom Bruce had just engaged at five pounds a week, and who hadn’t yet had any of his money.’
The secretary was silent for a moment; then he snorted and said: ‘If that’s the offer in the letter, we’d certainly better see whether it’s a forgery. For really, we don’t know that the whole tale isn’t as false as a forgery. The fellow admits himself that the disappearance of his hunch-backed giant is utterly incredible and inexplicable.’
‘Yes,’ said Father Brown; ‘that’s what I like about Muggleton. He admits things.’
‘All the same,’ insisted Taylor, his nostrils vibrant with excitement. ‘All the same, the long and the short of it is that he can’t prove that his tall man in the scarf ever existed or does exist; and every single fact found by the police and the witnesses proves that he does not exist. No, Father Brown. There is only one way in which you can justify this little scallywag you seem to be so fond of. And that is by producing his Imaginary Man. And that is exactly what you can’t do.’
‘By the way,’ said the priest, absent-mindedly, ‘I suppose you come from the hotel where Bruce has rooms, Mr Taylor?’
Taylor looked a little taken aback, and seemed almost to stammer. ‘Well, he always did have those rooms; and they’re practically his. I haven’t actually seen him there this time.’
‘I suppose you motored down with him,’ observed Brown; ‘or did you both come by train?’
‘I came by train and brought the luggage,’ said the secretary impatiently. ‘Something kept him, I suppose. I haven’t actually seen him since he left Yorkshire on his own a week or two ago.’
‘So it seems,’ said the priest very softly, ‘that if Muggleton wasn’t the last to see Bruce by the wild sea-waves, you were the last to see him, on the equally wild Yorkshire moors.’
Taylor had turned quite white, but he forced his grating voice to composure: ‘I never said Muggleton didn’t see Bruce on the pier.’
‘No; and why didn’t you?’ asked Father Brown. ‘If he made up one man on the pier, why shouldn’t he make up two men on the pier? Of course we do know that Bruce did exist; but we don’t seem to know what has happened to him for several weeks. Perhaps he was left behind in Yorkshire.’
The rather strident voice of the secretary rose almost to a scream. All his veneer of society suavity seemed to have vanished.
‘You’re simply shuffling! You’re simply shirking! You’re trying to drag in mad insinuations about me, simply because you can’t answer my question.’
‘Let me see,’ said Father Brown reminiscently. ‘What was your question?’
‘You know well enough what it was; and you know you’re damned well stumped by it. Where is the man with the scarf? Who has seen him? Whoever heard of him or spoke of him, except that little liar of yours? If you want to convince us, you must produce him. If he ever existed, he may be hiding in the Hebrides or off to Callao. But you’ve got to produce him, though I know he doesn’t exist. Well then! Where is he?’
‘I rather think he is over there,’ said Father Brown, peering and blinking towards the nearer waves that washed round the iron pillars of the pier; where the two figures of the agent and the old fisher and preacher were still dark against the green glow of the water. ‘I mean in that sort of net thing that’s tossing about in the sea.’
With whatever bewilderment, Inspector Grinstead took the upper hand again with a flash, and strode down the beach.
‘Do you mean to say,’ he cried, ‘that the murderer’s body is in the old boy’s net?’
Father Brown nodded as he followed down the shingly slope; and, even as they moved, little Muggleton the agent turned and began to climb the same shore, his mere dark outline a pantomime of amazement and discovery.
‘It’s true, for all we said,’ he gasped. ‘The murderer did try to swim ashore and was drowned, of course, in that weather. Or else he did really commit suicide. Anyhow, he drifted dead into Old Brimstone’s fishing-net, and that’s what the old maniac meant when he said he fished for dead men.’
The Inspector ran down the shore with an agility that outstripped them all, and was heard shouting out orders. In a few moments the fishermen and a few bystanders, assisted by the policemen, had hauled the net into shore, and rolled it with its burden on to the wet sands that still reflected the sunset. The secretary looked at what lay on the sands and the words died on his lips. For what lay on the sands was indeed the body of a gigantic man in rags, with the huge shoulders somewhat humped and bony eagle face; and a great red ragged woollen scarf or comforter, sprawled along the sunset sands like a great stain of blood. But Taylor was staring not at the gory scarf or the fabulous stature, but at the face; and his own face was a conflict of incredulity and suspicion.
The Inspector instantly turned to Muggleton with a new air of civility.
‘This certainly confirms your story,’ he said. And until he heard the tone of those words, Muggleton had never guessed how almost universally his story had been disbelieved. Nobody had believed him. Nobody but Father Brown.
Therefore, seeing Father Brown edging away from the group, he made a movement to depart in his company; but even then he was brought up rather short by the discovery that the priest was once more being drawn away by the deadly attractions of the funny little automatic machines. He even saw the reverend gentleman fumbling for a penny. He stopped, however, with the penny poised in his finger and thumb, as the secretary spoke for the last time in his loud discordant voice.
‘And I suppose we may add,’ he said, ‘that the monstrous and imbecile charges against me are also at an end.’
‘My dear sir,’ said the priest, ‘I never made any charge
s against you. I’m not such a fool as to suppose you were likely to murder your master in Yorkshire and then come down here to fool about with his luggage. All I said was that I could make out a better case against you than you were making out so vigorously against poor Mr Muggleton. All the same, if you really want to learn the truth about his business (and I assure you the truth isn’t generally grasped yet), I can give you a hint even from your own affairs. It is rather a rum and significant thing that Mr Bruce the millionaire had been unknown to all his usual haunts and habits for weeks before he was really killed. As you seem to be a promising amateur detective, I advise you to work on that line.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Taylor sharply.
But he got no answer out of Father Brown, who was once more completely concentrated on jiggling the little handle of the machine, that made one doll jump out and then another doll jump after it.
‘Father Brown,’ said Muggleton, his old annoyance faintly reviving: ‘Will you tell me why you like that fool thing so much?’
‘For one reason,’ replied the priest, peering closely into the glass puppet-show. ‘Because it contains the secret of this tragedy.’
Then he suddenly straightened himself; and looked quite seriously at his companion.
‘I knew all along,’ he said, ‘that you were telling the truth and the opposite of the truth.’
Muggleton could only stare at a return of all the riddles.
‘It’s quite simple,’ added the priest, lowering his voice. ‘That corpse with the scarlet scarf over there is the corpse of Braham Bruce the millionaire. There won’t be any other.’
‘But the two men — ’ began Muggleton, and his mouth fell open.
‘Your description of the two men was quite admirably vivid,’ said Father Brown. ‘I assure you I’m not at all likely to forget it. If I may say so, you have a literary talent; perhaps journalism would give you more scope than detection. I believe I remember practically each point about each person. Only, you see, queerly enough, each point affected you in one way and me in exactly the opposite way. Let’s begin with the first you mentioned. You said that the first man you saw had an indescribable air of authority and dignity. And you said to yourself, “That’s the Trust Magnate, the great merchant prince, the ruler of markets.” But when I heard about the air of dignity and authority, I said to myself, “That’s the actor; everything about this is the actor, “ You don’t get that look by being President of the Chain Store Amalgamation Company. You get that look by being Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost, or Julius Caesar, or King Lear, and you never altogether lose it. You couldn’t see enough of his clothes to tell whether they were really seedy, but you saw a strip of fur and a sort of faintly fashionable cut; and I said to myself again, “The actor.”
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries Collection Page 98