The secret of Father Brown
"Is he having a party?" asked Underhill. "The garden seems to be
illuminated."
"No," answered Bagshaw. "It's a hobby of his, and I believe he prefers
to do it when he's alone. He likes playing with a little plant of
electricity that he works from that bungalow or hut over there, where he
does his work and keeps his papers. Buller, who knows him very well,
says the coloured lamps are rather more often a sign he's not to be
disturbed."
"Sort of red danger signals," suggested the other.
"Good Lord! I'm afraid they are danger signals!" and he began suddenly
to run.
A moment after Underhill saw what he had seen. The opalescent ring of
light, like the halo of the moon, round the sloping sides of the pond,
was broken by two black stripes or streaks which soon proved themselves
to be the long, black legs of a figure fallen head downwards into the
hollow, with the head in the pond.
"Come on," cried the detective sharply, "that looks to me like----"
His voice was lost, as he ran on across the wide lawn, faintly luminous
in the artificial light, making a bee-line across the big garden for the
pool and the fallen figure. Underhill was trotting steadily in that
straight track, when something happened that startled him for the
moment. Bagshaw, who was travelling as steadily as a bullet towards the
black figure by the luminous pool, suddenly turned at a sharp angle and
began to run even more rapidly towards the shadow of the house.
Underhill could not imagine what he meant by the altered direction. The
next moment, when the detective had vanished into the shadow of the
house, there came out of that obscurity the sound of a scuffle and a
curse; and Bagshaw returned lugging with him a little struggling man
with red hair. The captive had evidently been escaping under the shelter
of the building, when the quicker ears of the detective had heard him
rustling like a bird among the bushes.
"Underhill," said the detective, "I wish you'd run on and see what's up
by the pool. And now, who are you?" he asked, coming to a halt. "What's
your name?"
"Michael Flood," said the stranger in a snappy fashion. He was an
unnaturally lean little man, with a hooked nose too large for his face,
which was colourless, like parchment, in contrast with the ginger colour
of his hair. "I've got nothing to do with this. I found him lying dead
and I was scared; but I only came to interview him for a paper."
"When you interview celebrities for the Press," said Bagshaw, "do you
generally climb over the garden wall?"
And he pointed grimly to a trail of footprints coming and going along
the path towards the flower bed.
The man calling himself Flood wore an expression equally grim.
"An interviewer might very well get over the wall," he said, "for I
couldn't make anybody hear at the front door. The servant had gone out."
"How do you know he'd gone out?" asked the detective suspiciously.
"Because," said Flood, with an almost unnatural calm, "I'm not the only
person who gets over garden walls. It seems just possible that you did
it yourself. But, anyhow, the servant did; for I've just this moment
seen him drop over the wall, away on the other side of the garden, just
by the garden door."
"Then why didn't he use the garden door?" demanded the cross-examiner.
"How should I know?" retorted Flood. "Because it was shut, I suppose.
But you'd better ask him, not me; he's coming towards the house at this
minute."
There was, indeed, another shadowy figure beginning to be visible
through the fire-shot gloaming, a squat, square-headed figure, wearing a
red waistcoat as the most conspicuous part of a rather shabby livery. He
appeared to be making with unobtrusive haste towards a side-door in the
house, until Bagshaw halloed to him to halt. He drew nearer to them very
reluctantly, revealing a heavy, yellow face, with a touch of something
Asiatic which was consonant with his flat, blue-black hair.
Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood. "Is there anybody in
this place," he said, "who can testify to your identity?"
"Not many, even in this country," growled Flood. "I've only just come
from Ireland; the only man I know round here is the priest at St.
Dominic's Church--Father Brown."
"Neither of you must leave this place," said Bagshaw, and then added to
the servant: "But you can go into the house and ring up St. Dominic's
Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind coming round here at
once. No tricks, mind."
While the energetic detective was securing the potential fugitives, his
companion, at his direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of the
tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and, indeed, if the tragedy had
not been tragic it would have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for
the briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with his head in the
pond, where the glow of the artificial illumination encircled the head
with something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The face was gaunt
and rather sinister, the brow bald, and the scanty curls dark grey, like
iron rings; and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in the
temple, Underhill had no difficulty in recognizing the features he had
seen in the many portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was in
evening-dress, and his long, black legs, so thin as to be almost
spidery, were sprawling at different angles up the steep bank from which
he had fallen. As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was
eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like
the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.
Underhill did not know how long he stood staring down at this macabre
figure, when he looked up and saw a group of four figures standing above
him on the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish captive, and
he had no difficulty in guessing the status of the servant in the red
waistcoat. But the fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that
seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It was a stumpy figure
with a round face and a hat like a black halo. He realized that it was,
in fact, a priest; but there was something about it that reminded him of
some quaint old black woodcut at the end of a Dance of Death.
Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:
"I'm glad you can identify this man; but you must realize that he's to
some extent under suspicion. Of course, he may be innocent; but he did
enter the garden in an irregular fashion."
"Well, I think he's innocent myself," said the little priest in a
colourless voice. "But, of course, I may be wrong."
"Why do you think he is innocent?"
"Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion," answered the
cleric. "You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem
to be almost the only person who did. All the best people seem to get
over garden walls nowadays."
"What do you mean by a regular fashion?" asked the detective.
"Well," said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, "I came
in by the front door. I often come into houses that way."
"Excuse me," said Bagshaw, "but does it matter very much how you came
in, unless you propose to confess to the murder?"
"Yes, I think it does," said the priest mildly. "The truth is, that when
I came in at the front door I saw something I don't think any of the
rest of you have seen. It seems to me it might have something to do with
it."
"What did you see?"
"I saw a sort of general smash-up," said Father Brown in his mild voice.
"A big looking-glass broken, and a small palm tree knocked over, and the
pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked to me as if something
had happened."
"You are right," said Bagshaw after a pause. "If you saw that, it
certainly looks as if it had something to do with it."
"And if it had anything to do with it," said the priest very gently, "it
looks as if there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that
is Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the wall in an
irregular fashion, and then tried to leave it in the same irregular
fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me believe in his innocence."
"Let us go into the house," said Bagshaw abruptly.
As they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way, Bagshaw
fell back a pace or two and spoke to his friend.
"Something odd about that servant," he said. "Says his name is Green,
though he doesn't look it; but there seems no doubt he's really Gwynne's
servant, apparently the only regular servant he had. But the queer thing
is, that he flatly denied that his master was in the garden at all, dead
or alive. Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal dinner and
couldn't be home for hours, and gave that as his excuse for slipping
out."
"Did he," asked Underhill, "give any excuse for his curious way of
slipping in?"
"No, none that I can make sense of," answered the detective. "I can't
make him out. He seems to be scared of something."
Entering by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of the
entrance hall, which ran along the side of the house and ended with the
front door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned
pattern. A faint, grey light was beginning to outline its radiation upon
the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise; but what light
there was in the hall came from a single, shaded lamp, also of an
antiquated sort, that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light of
this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which Brown had spoken. A
tall palm, with long sweeping leaves, had fallen full length, and its
dark red pot was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the carpet,
along with pale and gleaming fragments of a broken mirror, of which the
almost empty frame hung behind them on the wall at the end of the
vestibule. At right angles to this entrance, and directly opposite the
side-door as they entered, was another and similar passage leading into
the rest of the house. At the other end of it could be seen the
telephone which the servant had used to summon the priest; and a half-open
door, showing, even through the crack, the serried ranks of great
leather-bound books, marked the entrance to the judge's study.
Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments
at his feet.
"You're quite right," he said to the priest; "there's been a struggle
here. And it must have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer."
"It seemed to me," said Father Brown modestly, "that something had
happened here."
"Yes; it's pretty clear what happened," assented the detective. "The
murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let
him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot, that hit the
glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything.
Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was
pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that's the whole story of
the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms."
The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed
significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer
of the library desk.
"Looks as if he was expecting this," he said; "yet it seems queer he
didn't take it with him when he went out into the hall."
Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front
door. Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absent-minded
fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey
and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of
the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the
bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the
broken mirror.