The innocence of Father Brown
did kill his master?”
“Yes, my son, I’m pretty sure,” replied Gilder drily, “for the trifling
reason that he has gone off with twenty thousand pounds in papers that
were in his master’s desk. No, the only thing worth calling a difficulty
is how he killed him. The skull seems broken as with some big weapon,
but there’s no weapon at all lying about, and the murderer would have
found it awkward to carry it away, unless the weapon was too small to be
noticed.”
“Perhaps the weapon was too big to be noticed,” said the priest, with an
odd little giggle.
Gilder looked round at this wild remark, and rather sternly asked Brown
what he meant.
“Silly way of putting it, I know,” said Father Brown apologetically.
“Sounds like a fairy tale. But poor Armstrong was killed with a giant’s
club, a great green club, too big to be seen, and which we call the
earth. He was broken against this green bank we are standing on.”
“How do you mean?” asked the detective quickly.
Father Brown turned his moon face up to the narrow façade of the house
and blinked hopelessly up. Following his eyes, they saw that right at
the top of this otherwise blind back quarter of the building, an attic
window stood open.
“Don’t you see,” he explained, pointing a little awkwardly like a child,
“he was thrown down from there?”
Gilder frowningly scrutinised the window, and then said: “Well, it is
certainly possible. But I don’t see why you are so sure about it.”
Brown opened his grey eyes wide. “Why,” he said, “there’s a bit of rope
round the dead man’s leg. Don’t you see that other bit of rope up there
caught at the corner of the window?”
At that height the thing looked like the faintest particle of dust
or hair, but the shrewd old investigator was satisfied. “You’re quite
right, sir,” he said to Father Brown; “that is certainly one to you.”
Almost as he spoke a special train with one carriage took the curve
of the line on their left, and, stopping, disgorged another group
of policemen, in whose midst was the hangdog visage of Magnus, the
absconded servant.
“By Jove! they’ve got him,” cried Gilder, and stepped forward with quite
a new alertness.
“Have you got the money!” he cried to the first policeman.
The man looked him in the face with a rather curious expression and
said: “No.” Then he added: “At least, not here.”
“Which is the inspector, please?” asked the man called Magnus.
When he spoke everyone instantly understood how this voice had stopped
a train. He was a dull-looking man with flat black hair, a colourless
face, and a faint suggestion of the East in the level slits in his eyes
and mouth. His blood and name, indeed, had remained dubious, ever since
Sir Aaron had “rescued” him from a waitership in a London restaurant,
and (as some said) from more infamous things. But his voice was as vivid
as his face was dead. Whether through exactitude in a foreign language,
or in deference to his master (who had been somewhat deaf), Magnus’s
tones had a peculiarly ringing and piercing quality, and the whole group
quite jumped when he spoke.
“I always knew this would happen,” he said aloud with brazen blandness.
“My poor old master made game of me for wearing black; but I always said
I should be ready for his funeral.”
And he made a momentary movement with his two dark-gloved hands.
“Sergeant,” said Inspector Gilder, eyeing the black hands with wrath,
“aren’t you putting the bracelets on this fellow; he looks pretty
dangerous.”
“Well, sir,” said the sergeant, with the same odd look of wonder, “I
don’t know that we can.”
“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply. “Haven’t you arrested him?”
A faint scorn widened the slit-like mouth, and the whistle of an
approaching train seemed oddly to echo the mockery.
“We arrested him,” replied the sergeant gravely, “just as he was coming
out of the police station at Highgate, where he had deposited all his
master’s money in the care of Inspector Robinson.”
Gilder looked at the man-servant in utter amazement. “Why on earth did
you do that?” he asked of Magnus.
“To keep it safe from the criminal, of course,” replied that person
placidly.
“Surely,” said Gilder, “Sir Aaron’s money might have been safely left
with Sir Aaron’s family.”
The tail of his sentence was drowned in the roar of the train as it went
rocking and clanking; but through all the hell of noises to which that
unhappy house was periodically subject, they could hear the syllables of
Magnus’s answer, in all their bell-like distinctness: “I have no reason
to feel confidence in Sir Aaron’s family.”
All the motionless men had the ghostly sensation of the presence of some
new person; and Merton was scarcely surprised when he looked up and saw
the pale face of Armstrong’s daughter over Father Brown’s shoulder. She
was still young and beautiful in a silvery style, but her hair was of so
dusty and hueless a brown that in some shadows it seemed to have turned
totally grey.
“Be careful what you say,” said Royce gruffly, “you’ll frighten Miss
Armstrong.”
“I hope so,” said the man with the clear voice.
As the woman winced and everyone else wondered, he went on: “I am
somewhat used to Miss Armstrong’s tremors. I have seen her trembling off
and on for years. And some said she was shaking with cold and some she
was shaking with fear, but I know she was shaking with hate and wicked
anger--fiends that have had their feast this morning. She would have
been away by now with her lover and all the money but for me. Ever since
my poor old master prevented her from marrying that tipsy blackguard--”
“Stop,” said Gilder very sternly. “We have nothing to do with your
family fancies or suspicions. Unless you have some practical evidence,
your mere opinions--”
“Oh! I’ll give you practical evidence,” cut in Magnus, in his hacking
accent. “You’ll have to subpoena me, Mr. Inspector, and I shall have to
tell the truth. And the truth is this: An instant after the old man was
pitched bleeding out of the window, I ran into the attic, and found
his daughter swooning on the floor with a red dagger still in her hand.
Allow me to hand that also to the proper authorities.” He took from his
tail-pocket a long horn-hilted knife with a red smear on it, and handed
it politely to the sergeant. Then he stood back again, and his slits of
eyes almost faded from his face in one fat Chinese sneer.
Merton felt an almost bodily sickness at the sight of him; and he
muttered to Gilder: “Surely you would take Miss Armstrong’s word against
his?”
Father Brown suddenly lifted a face so absurdly fresh that it looked
somehow as if he had just washed it. “Yes,” he said, radiating
innocence, “but is Miss Armstrong’s word against his?”
The girl uttered a startled, singular little cry; everyone looked at
her. Her figure was rigid as if paralysed; only her face within its
frame of faint brown hair was alive with an appalling surprise. She
stood like one of a sudden lassooed and throttled.
“This man,” said Mr. Gilder gravely, “actually says that you were found
grasping a knife, insensible, after the murder.”
“He says the truth,” answered Alice.
The next fact of which they were conscious was that Patrick Royce strode
with his great stooping head into their ring and uttered the singular
words: “Well, if I’ve got to go, I’ll have a bit of pleasure first.”
His huge shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus’s
bland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish.
Two or three of the police instantly put their hands on Royce; but to
the rest it seemed as if all reason had broken up and the universe were
turning into a brainless harlequinade.
“None of that, Mr. Royce,” Gilder had called out authoritatively. “I
shall arrest you for assault.”
“No, you won’t,” answered the secretary in a voice like an iron gong,
“you will arrest me for murder.”
Gilder threw an alarmed glance at the man knocked down; but since that
outraged person was already sitting up and wiping a little blood off a
substantially uninjured face, he only said shortly: “What do you mean?”
“It is quite true, as this fellow says,” explained Royce, “that Miss
Armstrong fainted with a knife in her hand. But she had not snatched the
knife to attack her father, but to defend him.”
“To defend him,” repeated Gilder gravely. “Against whom?”
“Against me,” answered the secretary.
Alice looked at him with a complex and baffling face; then she said in a
low voice: “After it all, I am still glad you are brave.”
“Come upstairs,” said Patrick Royce heavily, “and I will show you the
whole cursed thing.”
The attic, which was the secretary’s private place (and rather a small
cell for so large a hermit), had indeed all the vestiges of a violent
drama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flung
away; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quite
empty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and a
length of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly across
the windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on the
carpet.
“I was drunk,” said Royce; and this simplicity in the prematurely
battered man somehow had the pathos of the first sin of a baby.
“You all know about me,” he continued huskily; “everybody knows how my
story began, and it may as well end like that too. I was called a clever
man once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remains
of a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in his
own way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn’t let me marry Alice here; and it
will always be said that he was right enough. Well, you can form your
own conclusions, and you won’t want me to go into details. That is my
whisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quite
emptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on the
corpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown. You need not
set detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in this
world. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough!”
At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large man
to lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered by
the remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands and
knees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind of
undignified prayers. Being a person utterly insensible to the social
figure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright round
face up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with a
very comic human head.
“I say,” he said good-naturedly, “this really won’t do at all, you know.
At the beginning you said we’d found no weapon. But now we’re finding
too many; there’s the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and the
pistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of a
window! It won’t do. It’s not economical.” And he shook his head at the
ground as a horse does grazing.
Inspector Gilder had opened his mouth with serious intentions, but
before he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone on
quite volubly.
“And now three quite impossible things. First, these holes in the
carpet, where the six bullets have gone in. Why on earth should anybody
fire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy’s head, the
thing that’s grinning at him. He doesn’t pick a quarrel with his feet,
or lay siege to his slippers. And then there’s the rope”--and having
done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his
pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees--“in what conceivable
intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man’s neck and
finally put it round his leg? Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that,