The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (112 page)

They
all stared at him, but in a frowning fashion, like men trying to follow a sharp
new turn of the argument; and it was he who resumed the argument.

‘
From
the first minute I entered that big empty bar or saloon, I knew what was the matter
with all this business was emptiness; solitude; too many chances for anybody to
be alone. In a word, the absence of witnesses. All we knew was that when we
came in, the manager and the barman were not in the bar. But when were they in
the bar? What chance was there of making any sort of time-table of when anybody
was anywhere? The whole thing was blank for want of witnesses. I rather fancy
the barman or somebody was in the bar just before we came; and that’s how the
Scotchman got his Scotch whisky. He certainly didn’t get it after we came. But
we can’t begin to inquire whether anybody in the hotel poisoned poor Raggley’s
cherry brandy, till we really know who was in the bar and when. Now I want you
to do me another favour, in spite of this stupid muddle, which is probably all
my fault. I want you to collect all the people involved in this room — I think
they’re all still available, unless the Asiatic has gone back to Asia — and
then take the poor Scotchman out of his handcuffs, and bring him in here, and
let him tell us who did serve him with whisky, and who was in the bar, and who
else was in the room, and all the rest. He’s the only man whose evidence can
cover just that period when the crime was done. I don’t see the slightest
reason for doubting his word.’

‘
But
look here,’ said Greenwood. ‘This brings it all back to the hotel authorities; and
I thought you agreed that the manager isn’t the murderer. Is it the barman, or
what?’

‘
I
don’t know,’ said the priest blankly. ‘I don’t know for certain even about the manager.
I don’t know anything about the barman. I fancy the manager might be a bit of a
conspirator, even if he wasn’t a murderer. But I do know there’s one solitary
witness on earth who may have seen something; and that’s why I set all your
police dogs on his trail to the ends of the earth.’

The
mysterious Scotchman, when he finally appeared before the company thus assembled,
was certainly a formidable figure; tall, with a hulking stride and a long
sardonic hatchet face, with tufts of red hair; and wearing not only an Inverness
cape but a Glengarry bonnet, he might well be excused for a somewhat acrid
attitude; but anybody could see he was of the sort to resist arrest, even with
violence. It was not surprising that he had come to blows with a fighting fellow
like Raggley. It was not even surprising that the police had been convinced, by
the mere details of capture, that he was a tough and a typical killer. But he
claimed to be a perfectly respectable farmer, in Aberdeenshire, his name being
James Grant; and somehow not only Father Brown, but Inspector Greenwood, a
shrewd man with a great deal of experience, was pretty soon convinced that the
Scot’s ferocity was the fury of innocence rather than guilt.

‘
Now
what we want from you, Mr Grant,’ said the Inspector gravely, dropping without further
parley into tones of courtesy, ‘is simply your evidence on one very important
fact. I am greatly grieved at the misunderstanding by which you have suffered,
but I am sure you wish to serve the ends of justice. I believe you came into
this bar just after it opened, at half-past five, and were served with a glass
of whisky. We are not certain what servant of the hotel, whether the barman or
the manager or some subordinate, was in the bar at the time. Will you look
round the room, and tell me whether the bar-attendant who served you is present
here.’

‘
Aye,
he’s present,’ said Mr Grant, grimly smiling, having swept the group with a shrewd
glance. ‘I’d know him anywhere; and ye’ll agree he’s big enough to be seen. Do
ye have all your inn-servants as grand as yon?’

The
Inspector’s eye remained hard and steady, and his voice colourless and continuous;
the face of Father Brown was a blank; but on many other faces there was a
cloud; the barman was not particularly big and not at all grand; and the manager
was decidedly small.

‘
We
only want the barman identified,’ said the Inspector calmly. ‘Of course we know
him; but we should like you to verify it independently. You mean . . .?’ And he
stopped suddenly.

‘
Weel,
there he is plain enough,’ said the Scotchman wearily; and made a gesture, and with
that gesture the gigantic Jukes, the prince of commercial travellers, rose like
a trumpeting elephant; and in a flash had three policemen fastened on him like
hounds on a wild beast.

‘
Well,
all that was simple enough,’ said Father Brown to his friend afterwards. ‘As I told
you, the instant I entered the empty bar-room, my first thought was that, if
the barman left the bar unguarded like that, there was nothing in the world to
stop you or me or anybody else lifting the flap and walking in, and putting
poison in any of the bottles standing waiting for customers. Of course, a
practical poisoner would probably do it as Jukes did, by substituting a
poisoned bottle for the ordinary bottle; that could be done in a flash. It was
easy enough for him, as he travelled in bottles, to carry a flask of cherry
brandy prepared and of the same pattern. Of course, it requires one condition;
but it’s a fairly common condition. It would hardly do to start poisoning the
beer or whisky that scores of people drink; it would cause a massacre. But when
a man is well known as drinking only one special thing, like cherry brandy,
that isn’t very widely drunk, it’s just like poisoning him in his own home.
Only it’s a jolly sight safer. For practically the whole suspicion instantly
falls on the hotel, or somebody to do with the hotel; and there’s no earthly
argument to show that it was done by anyone out of a hundred customers that
might come into the bar: even if people realized that a customer could do it.
It was about as absolutely anonymous and irresponsible a murder as a man could
commit.’

‘
And
why exactly did the murderer commit it?’ asked his friend.

Father
Brown rose and gravely gathered the papers which he had previously scattered in
a moment of distraction.

‘
May
I recall your attention,’ he said smiling, ‘to the materials of the forthcoming
Life and Letters of the Late John Raggley? Or, for that matter, his own spoken words?
He said in this very bar that he was going to expose a scandal about the management
of hotels; and the scandal was the pretty common one of a corrupt agreement
between hotel proprietors and a salesman who took and gave secret commissions,
so that his business had a monopoly of all the drink sold in the place. It
wasn’t even an open slavery like an ordinary tied house; it was a swindle at
the expense of everybody the manager was supposed to serve. It was a legal
offence. So the ingenious Jukes, taking the first moment when the bar was empty,
as it often was, stepped inside and made the exchange of bottles; unfortunately
at that very moment a Scotchman in an Inverness cape came in harshly demanding whisky.
Jukes saw his only chance was to pretend to be the barman and serve the customer.
He was very much relieved that the customer was a Quick One.’

‘
I
think you’re rather a Quick One yourself,’ observed Greenwood; ‘if you say you smelt
something at the start, in the mere air of an empty room. Did you suspect Jukes
at all at the start?’

‘
Well,
he sounded rather rich somehow,’ answered Father Brown vaguely. ‘You know when a
man has a rich voice. And I did sort of ask myself why he should have such a disgustingly
rich voice, when all those honest fellows were fairly poor. But I think I knew
he was a sham when I saw that big shining breast-pin.’

‘
You
mean because it was sham?’ asked Greenwood doubtfully.

‘
Oh,
no; because it was genuine,’ said Father Brown.

Professor
Openshaw always lost his temper, with a loud bang, if anybody called him a Spiritualist;
or a believer in Spiritualism. This, however, did not exhaust his explosive
elements; for he also lost his temper if anybody called him a disbeliever in
Spiritualism. It was his pride to have given his whole life to investigating
Psychic Phenomena; it was also his pride never to have given a hint of whether
he thought they were really psychic or merely phenomenal. He enjoyed nothing so
much as to sit in a circle of devout Spiritualists and give devastating
descriptions of how he had exposed medium after medium and detected fraud after
fraud; for indeed he was a man of much detective talent and insight, when once
he had fixed his eye on an object, and he always fixed his eye on a medium, as
a highly suspicious object. There was a story of his having spotted the same
Spiritualist mountebank under three different disguises: dressed as a woman, a
white-bearded old man, and a Brahmin of a rich chocolate brown. These recitals
made the true believers rather restless, as indeed they were intended to do;
but they could hardly complain, for no Spiritualist denies the existence of fraudulent
mediums; only the Professor’s flowing narrative might well seem to indicate
that all mediums were fraudulent.

But
woe to the simple-minded and innocent Materialist (and Materialists as a race are
rather innocent and simple-minded) who, presuming on this narrative tendency,
should advance the thesis that ghosts were against the laws of nature, or that
such things were only old superstitions; or that it was all tosh, or,
alternatively, bunk. Him would the Professor, suddenly reversing all his scientific
batteries, sweep from the field with a cannonade of unquestionable cases and
unexplained phenomena, of which the wretched rationalist had never heard in his
life, giving all the dates and details, stating all the attempted and abandoned
natural explanations; stating everything, indeed, except whether he, John
Oliver Openshaw, did or did not believe in Spirits, and that neither
Spiritualist nor Materialist could ever boast of finding out.

Professor
Openshaw, a lean figure with pale leonine hair and hypnotic blue eyes, stood exchanging
a few words with Father Brown, who was a friend of his, on the steps outside
the hotel where both had been breakfasting that morning and sleeping the night
before. The Professor had come back rather late from one of this grand
experiments, in general exasperation, and was still tingling with the fight
that he always waged alone and against both sides.

‘
Oh,
I don’t mind you,’ he said laughing. ‘You don’t believe in it even if it’s true.
But all these people are perpetually asking me what I’m trying to prove. They
don’t seem to understand that I’m a man of science. A man of science isn’t trying
to prove anything. He’s trying to find out what will prove itself.’

‘
But
he hasn’t found out yet,’ said Father Brown.

‘
Well,
I have some little notions of my own, that are not quite so negative as most people
think,’ answered the Professor, after an instant of frowning silence; ‘anyhow,
I’ve begun to fancy that if there is something to be found, they’re looking for
it along the wrong line. It’s all too theatrical; it’s showing off, all their
shiny ectoplasm and trumpets and voices and the rest; all on the model of old
melodramas and mouldy historical novels about the Family Ghost. If they’d go to
history instead of historical novels, I’m beginning to think they’d really find
something. But not Apparitions.’

‘
After
all,’ said Father Brown, ‘Apparitions are only Appearances. I suppose you’d say
the Family Ghost is only keeping up appearances.’

The
Professor’s gaze, which had commonly a fine abstracted character, suddenly fixed
and focused itself as it did on a dubious medium. It had rather the air of a
man screwing a strong magnifying-glass into his eye. Not that he thought the
priest was in the least like a dubious medium; but he was startled into attention
by his friend’s thought following so closely on his own.

‘
Appearances!’
he muttered, ‘crikey, but it’s odd you should say that just now. The more I learn,
the more I fancy they lose by merely looking for appearances. Now if they’d
look a little into Disappearances — ’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, ‘after all, the real fairy legends weren’t so very much about
the appearance of famous fairies; calling up Titania or exhibiting Oberon by
moonlight. But there were no end of legends about people disappearing, because
they were stolen by the fairies. Are you on the track of Kilmeny or Thomas the
Rhymer?’

‘
I’m
on the track of ordinary modern people you’ve read of in the newspapers,’ answered
Openshaw. ‘You may well stare; but that’s my game just now; and I’ve been on it
for a long time. Frankly, I think a lot of psychic appearances could be
explained away. It’s the disappearances I can’t explain, unless they’re psychic.
These people in the newspaper who vanish and are never found — if you knew the
details as I do ... and now only this morning I got confirmation; an extraordinary
letter from an old missionary, quite a respectable old boy. He’s coming to see
me at my office this morning. Perhaps you’d lunch with me or something; and I’d
tell the results — in confidence.’

‘
Thanks;
I will — unless,’ said Father Brown modestly, ‘the fairies have stolen me by then.’

With
that they parted and Openshaw walked round the corner to a small office he rented
in the neighbourhood; chiefly for the publication of a small periodical, of
psychical and psychological notes of the driest and most agnostic sort. He had
only one clerk, who sat at a desk in the outer office, totting up figures and
facts for the purposes of the printed report; and the Professor paused to ask
if Mr Pringle had called. The clerk answered mechanically in the negative and
went on mechanically adding up figures; and the Professor turned towards the
inner room that was his study. ‘Oh, by the way, Berridge,’ he added, without
turning round, ‘if Mr Pringle comes, send him straight in to me. You needn’t
interrupt your work; I rather want those notes finished tonight if possible.
You might leave them on my desk tomorrow, if I am late.’

And
he went into his private office, still brooding on the problem which the name of
Pringle had raised; or rather, perhaps, had ratified and confirmed in his mind.
Even the most perfectly balanced of agnostics is partially human; and it is
possible that the missionary’s letter seemed to have greater weight as
promising to support his private and still tentative hypothesis. He sat down in
his large and comfortable chair, opposite the engraving of Montaigne; and read
once more the short letter from the Rev. Luke Pringle, making the appointment
for that morning. No man knew better than Professor Openshaw the marks of the
letter of the crank; the crowded details; the spidery handwriting; the
unnecessary length and repetition. There were none of these things in this
case; but a brief and businesslike typewritten statement that the writer had
encountered some curious cases of Disappearance, which seemed to fall within
the province of the Professor as a student of psychic problems. The Professor
was favourably impressed; nor had he any unfavourable impression, in spite of a
slight movement of surprise, when he looked up and saw that the Rev. Luke
Pringle was already in the room.

‘
Your
clerk told me to come straight in,’ said Mr Pringle apologetically, but with a broad
and rather agreeable grin. The grin was partly masked by masses of reddish-grey
beard and whiskers; a perfect jungle of a beard, such as is sometimes grown by
white men living in the jungles; but the eyes above the snub nose had nothing
about them in the least wild or outlandish. Openshaw had instantly turned on
them that concentrated spotlight or burning-glass of sceptical scrutiny which
he turned on many men to see if they were mountebanks or maniacs; and, in this
case, he had a rather unusual sense of reassurance. The wild beard might have
belonged to a crank, but the eyes completely contradicted the beard; they were
full of that quite frank and friendly laughter which is never found in the
faces of those who are serious frauds or serious lunatics. He would have
expected a man with those eyes to be a Philistine, a jolly sceptic, a man who
shouted out shallow but hearty contempt of ghosts and spirits; but anyhow, no
professional humbug could afford to look as frivolous as that. The man was
buttoned up to the throat in a shabby old cape, and only his broad limp hat
suggested the cleric; but missionaries from wild places do not always bother to
dress like clerics.

‘
You
probably think all this another hoax. Professor,’ said Mr Pringle, with a sort of
abstract enjoyment, ‘and I hope you will forgive my laughing at your very natural
air of disapproval. All the same, I’ve got to tell my story to somebody who
knows, because it’s true. And, all joking apart, it’s tragic as well as true.
Well, to cut it short, I was missionary in Nya-Nya, a station in West Africa,
in the thick of the forests, where almost the only other white man was the
officer in command of the district, Captain Wales; and he and I grew rather thick.
Not that he liked missions; he was, if I may say so, thick in many ways; one of
those square-headed, square-shouldered men of action who hardly need to think,
let alone believe.

That’s
what makes it all the queerer. One day he came back to his tent in the forest, after
a short leave, and said he had gone through a jolly rum experience, and didn’t
know what to do about it. He was holding a rusty old book in a leather binding,
and he put it down on a table beside his revolver and an old Arab sword he
kept, probably as a curiosity. He said this book had belonged to a man on the
boat he had just come off; and the man swore that nobody must open the book, or
look inside it; or else they would be carried off by the devil, or disappear,
or something. Wales said this was all nonsense, of course; and they had a
quarrel; and the upshot seems to have been that this man, taunted with cowardice
or superstition, actually did look into the book; and instantly dropped it;
walked to the side of the boat — ’

‘
One
moment,’ said the Professor, who had made one or two notes. ‘Before you tell me
anything else. Did this man tell Wales where he had got the book, or who it originally
belonged to?’

‘
Yes,’
replied Pringle, now entirely grave. ‘It seems he said he was bringing it back to
Dr Hankey, the Oriental traveller now in England, to whom it originally belonged,
and who had warned him of its strange properties. Well, Hankey is an able man
and a rather crabbed and sneering sort of man; which makes it queerer still.
But the point of Wales’s story is much simpler. It is that the man who had
looked into the book walked straight over the side of the ship, and was never
seen again.’

‘
Do
you believe it yourself?’ asked Openshaw after a pause.

‘
Well,
I do,’ replied Pringle. ‘I believe it for two reasons. First, that Wales was an
entirely unimaginative man; and he added one touch that only an imaginative man
could have added. He said that the man walked straight over the side on a still
and calm day; but there was no splash.’

The
Professor looked at his notes for some seconds in silence; and then said: ‘And your
other reason for believing it?’

‘
My
other reason,’ answered the Rev. Luke Pringle, ‘is what I saw myself.’

There
was another silence; until he continued in the same matter-of-fact way. Whatever
he had, he had nothing of the eagerness with which the crank, or even the
believer, tried to convince others.

‘
I
told you that Wales put down the book on the table beside the sword. There was only
one entrance to the tent; and it happened that I was standing in it, looking
out into the forest, with my back to my companion. He was standing by the table
grumbling and growling about the whole business; saying it was tomfoolery in
the twentieth century to be frightened of opening a book; asking why the devil
he shouldn’t open it himself. Then some instinct stirred in me and I said he
had better not do that, it had better be returned to Dr Hankey. “What harm
could it do?” he said restlessly. “What harm did it do?” I answered obstinately.
“What happened to your friend on the boat?” He didn’t answer, indeed I didn’t
know what he could answer; but I pressed my logical advantage in mere vanity.
“If it comes to that,” I said, “what is your version of what really happened on
the boat?” Still he didn’t answer; and I looked round and saw that he wasn’t
there.

‘
The
tent was empty. The book was lying on the table; open, but on its face, as if he
had turned it downwards. But the sword was lying on the ground near the other
side of the tent; and the canvas of the tent showed a great slash, as if somebody
had hacked his way out with the sword. The gash in the tent gaped at me; but
showed only the dark glimmer of the forest outside. And when I went across and
looked through the rent I could not be certain whether the tangle of the tall
plants and the undergrowth had been bent or broken; at least not farther than a
few feet. I have never seen or heard of Captain Wales from that day.

‘
I
wrapped the book up in brown paper, taking good care not to look at it; and I brought
it back to England, intending at first to return it to Dr Hankey. Then I saw
some notes in your paper suggesting a hypothesis about such things; and I decided
to stop on the way and put the matter before you; as you have a name for being
balanced and having an open mind.’