The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (110 page)

‘
God
damn your soul!’ roared Mr Raggley, with a less broad theological outlook. ‘Do you
mean that Englishmen mustn’t drink English beer, because wine was forbidden in
a damned desert by that dirty old humbug Mahomet?’

In
an instant the Inspector of Police had reached the middle of the room with a stride.
For, the instant before that, a remarkable change had taken place in the
demeanour of the Oriental gentleman, who had hitherto stood perfectly still,
with steady and shining eyes. He now proceeded, as his friend had said, to set
an example in truly Christian self-control and brotherhood by reaching the wall
with the bound of a tiger, tearing down one of the heavy knives hanging there
and sending it smack like a stone from a sling, so that it stuck quivering in
the wall exactly half an inch above Mr Raggley’s ear. It would undoubtedly have
stuck quivering in Mr Raggley, if Inspector Greenwood had not been just in time
to jerk the arm and deflect the aim. Father Brown continued in his seat,
watching the scene with screwed-up eyes and a screw of something almost like a
smile at the corners of his mouth, as if he saw something beyond the mere
momentary violence of the quarrel.

And
then the quarrel took a curious turn; which may not be understood by everybody,
until men like Mr John Raggley are better understood than they are. For the red-faced
old fanatic was standing up and laughing uproariously as if it were the best
joke he had ever heard. All his snapping vituperation and bitterness seemed to
have gone out of him; and he regarded the other fanatic, who had just tried to
murder him, with a sort of boisterous benevolence.

‘
Blast
your eyes,’ he said, ‘you’re the first man I’ve met in twenty years!’

‘
Do
you charge this man, Sir?’ said the Inspector, looking doubtful.

‘
Charge
him, of course not,’ said Raggley. ‘I’d stand him a drink if he were allowed any
drinks. I hadn’t any business to insult his religion; and I wish to God all you
skunks had the guts to kill a man, I won’t say for insulting your religion, because
you haven’t got any, but for insulting anything — even your beer.’

‘
Now
he’s called us all skunks,’ said Father Brown to Greenwood, ‘peace and harmony seem
to be restored. I wish that teetotal lecturer could get himself impaled on his
friend’s knife; it was he who made all the mischief.’

As
he spoke, the odd groups in the room were already beginning to break up; it had
been found possible to clear the commercial room for the commercial travellers,
and they adjourned to it, the potboy carrying a new round of drinks after them on
a tray. Father Brown stood for a moment gazing at the glasses left on the counter;
recognizing at once the ill-omened glass of milk, and another which smelt of
whisky; and then turned just in time to see the parting between those two
quaint figures, fanatics of the East and West. Raggley was still ferociously
genial; there was still something a little darkling and sinister about the
Moslem, which was perhaps natural; but he bowed himself out with grave gestures
of dignified reconciliation; and there was every indication that the trouble
was really over.

Some
importance, however, continued attached, in the mind of Father Brown at least, to
the memory and interpretation of those last courteous salutes between the combatants.
Because curiously enough, when Father Brown came down very early next morning,
to perform his religious duties in the neighbourhood, he found the long saloon
bar, with its fantastic Asiatic decoration, filled with a dead white light of
daybreak in which every detail was distinct; and one of the details was the
dead body of John Raggley bent and crushed into a corner of the room, with the
heavy-hilted crooked dagger rammed through his heart.

Father
Brown went very softly upstairs again and summoned his friend the Inspector; and
the two stood beside the corpse, in a house in which no one else was as yet stirring.
‘We mustn’t either assume or avoid the obvious,’ said Greenwood after a
silence, ‘but it is well to remember, I think, what I was saying to you yesterday
afternoon. It’s rather odd, by the way, that I should have said it — yesterday
afternoon.’

‘
I
know,’ said the priest, nodding with an owlish stare.

‘
I
said,’ observed Greenwood, ‘that the one sort of murder we can’t stop is murder
by somebody like a religious fanatic. That brown fellow probably thinks that if
he’s hanged, he’ll go straight to Paradise for defending the honour of the Prophet.’

‘
There
is that, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘It would be very reasonable, so to speak,
of our Moslem friend to have stabbed him. And you may say we don’t know of
anybody else yet, who could at all reasonably have stabbed him. But . . . but I
was thinking . . . ’ And his round face suddenly went blank again and all speech
died on his lips.

‘
What’s
the matter now?’ asked the other.

‘
Well,
I know it sounds funny,’ said Father Brown in a forlorn voice. ‘But I was thinking
... I was thinking, in a way, it doesn’t much matter who stabbed him.’

‘
Is
this the New Morality?’ asked his friend. ‘Or the old Casuistry, perhaps. Are the
Jesuits really going in for murder?’

‘
I
didn’t say it didn’t matter who murdered him,’ said Father Brown. ‘Of course the
man who stabbed him might possibly be the man who murdered him. But it might be
quite a different man. Anyhow, it was done at quite a different time. I suppose
you’ll want to work on the hilt for finger-prints; but don’t take too much
notice of them. I can imagine other reasons for other people sticking this knife
in the poor old boy. Not very edifying reasons, of course, but quite distinct
from the murder. You’ll have to put some more knives into him, before you find
out about that.’

‘
You
mean — ’ began the other, watching him keenly.

‘
I
mean the autopsy,’ said the priest, ‘to find the real cause of death.’

‘
You’re
quite right, I believe,’ said the Inspector, ‘about the stabbing, anyhow. We must
wait for the doctor; but I’m pretty sure he’ll say you’re right. There isn’t
blood enough. This knife was stuck in the corpse when it had been cold for
hours. But why?’

‘
Possibly
to put the blame on the Mahommedan,’ answered Father Brown. ‘Pretty mean, I admit,
but not necessarily murder. I fancy there are people in this place trying to
keep secrets, who are not necessarily murderers.’

‘
I
haven’t speculated on that line yet,’ said Greenwood. ‘What makes you think so?’

‘
What
I said yesterday, when we first came into this horrible room. I said it would be
easy to commit a murder here. But I wasn’t thinking about all those stupid weapons,
though you thought I was. About something quite different.’

For
the next few hours the Inspector and his friend conducted a close and thorough investigation
into the goings and comings of everybody for the last twenty-four hours, the
way the drinks had been distributed, the glasses that were washed or unwashed,
and every detail about every individual involved, or apparently not involved.
One might have supposed they thought that thirty people had been poisoned, as
well as one.

It
seemed certain that nobody had entered the building except by the big entrance that
adjoined the bar; all the others were blocked in one way or another by the repairs.
A boy had been cleaning the steps outside this entrance; but he had nothing
very clear to report. Until the amazing entry of the Turk in the Turban, with
his teetotal lecturer, there did not seem to have been much custom of any kind,
except for the commercial travellers who came in to take what they called ‘quick
ones’; and they seemed to have moved together, like Wordsworth’s Cloud; there
was a slight difference of opinion between the boy outside and the men inside
about whether one of them had not been abnormally quick in obtaining a quick
one, and come out on the doorstep by himself; but the manager and the barman
had no memory of any such independent individual. The manager and the barman knew
all the travellers quite well, and there was no doubt about their movements as
a whole. They had stood at the bar chaffing and drinking; they had been
involved, through their lordly leader, Mr Jukes, in a not very serious altercation
with Mr Pryce-Jones; and they had witnessed the sudden and very serious
altercation between Mr Akbar and Mr Raggley. Then they were told they could
adjourn to the Commercial Room and did so, their drinks being borne after them
like a trophy.

‘
There’s
precious little to go on,’ said Inspector Greenwood. ‘Of course a lot of officious
servants must do their duty as usual, and wash out all the glasses; including
old Raggley’s glass. If it weren’t for everybody else’s efficiency, we
detectives might be quite efficient.’

‘
I
know,’ said Father Brown, and his mouth took on again the twisted smile. ‘I sometimes
think criminals invented hygiene. Or perhaps hygienic reformers invented crime;
they look like it, some of them. Everybody talks about foul dens and filthy
slums in which crime can run riot; but it’s just the other way. They are called
foul, not because crimes are committed, but because crimes are discovered. It’s
in the neat, spotless, clean and tidy places that crime can run riot; no mud to
make footprints; no dregs to contain poison; kind servants washing out all
traces of the murder; and the murderer killing and cremating six wives and all
for want of a little Christian dirt. Perhaps I express myself with too much
warmth — but look here. As it happens, I do remember one glass, which has
doubtless been cleaned since, but I should like to know more about it.’

‘
Do
you mean Raggley’s glass?’ asked Greenwood.

‘
No;
I mean Nobody’s glass,’ replied the priest. ‘It stood near that glass of milk and
it still held an inch or two of whisky. Well, you and I had no whisky. I happen
to remember that the manager, when treated by the jovial Jukes, had “a drop of
gin”. I hope you don’t suggest that our Moslem was a whisky-drinker disguised
in a green turban; or that the Rev. David Pryce-Jones managed to drink whisky
and milk together, without noticing it.’

‘
Most
of the commercial travellers took whisky,’ said the Inspector. ‘They generally do.’

‘
Yes;
and they generally see they get it too,’ answered Father Brown. ‘In this case, they
had it all carefully carted after them to their own room. But this glass was
left behind.’

‘
An
accident, I suppose,’ said Greenwood doubtfully. ‘The man could easily get another
in the Commercial Room afterwards.’

Father
Brown shook his head. ‘You’ve got to see people as they are. Now these sort of men
— well, some call them vulgar and some common; but that’s all likes and dislikes.
I’d be content to say that they are mostly simple men. Lots of them very good
men, very glad to go back to the missus and the kids; some of them might be
blackguards; might have had several missuses; or even murdered several missuses.
But most of them are simple men; and, mark you, just the least tiny bit drunk.
Not much; there’s many a duke or don at Oxford drunker; but when that sort of
man is at that stage of conviviality, he simply can’t help noticing things, and
noticing them very loud. Don’t you observe that the least little incident jerks
them into speech; if the beer froths over, they froth over with it, and have to
say, “Whoa, Emma,” or “Doing me proud, aren’t you?” Now I should say it’s
flatly impossible for five of these festive beings to sit round a table in the
Commercial Room, and have only four glasses set before them, the fifth man
being left out, without making a shout about it. Probably they would make a
shout about it. Certainly he would make a shout about it. He wouldn’t wait,
like an Englishman of another class, till he could get a drink quietly later.
The air would resound with things like, “And what about little me?” or, “Here,
George, have I joined the Band of Hope?” or, “Do you see any green in my turban,
George?” But the barman heard no such complaints. I take it as certain that the
glass of whisky left behind had been nearly emptied by somebody else; somebody
we haven’t thought about yet.’

‘
But
can you think of any such person?’ ask the other.

‘
It’s
because the manager and the barman won’t hear of any such person, that you dismiss
the one really independent piece of evidence; the evidence of that boy outside
cleaning the steps. He says that a man, who well may have been a bagman, but
who did not, in fact, stick to the other bagmen, went in and came out again
almost immediately. The manager and the barman never saw him; or say they never
saw him. But he got a glass of whisky from the bar somehow. Let us call him,
for the sake of argument, The Quick One. Now you know I don’t often interfere
with your business, which I know you do better than I should do it, or should
want to do it. I’ve never had anything to do with setting police machinery at
work, or running down criminals, or anything like that. But, for the first time
in my life, I want to do it now. I want you to find The Quick One; to follow
The Quick One to the ends of the earth; to set the whole infernal official
machinery at work like a drag-net across the nations, and jolly well recapture
The Quick One. Because he is the man we want.’

Greenwood
made a despairing gesture. ‘Has he face or form or any visible quality except quickness?’
he inquired.