The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (115 page)

The
Inspector nodded. ‘I don’t take any stock in priests or parsons; but I take a lot
of stock in Father Brown,’ he said. ‘I happened to have to do with him in a queer
sort of society jewel case. He ought to have been a policeman instead of parson.’

‘
Oh,
all right,’ said the breathless secretary as he vanished from the room. ‘Let him
come to the lawyer’s too.’

Thus
it happened that, when they hurried across to the neighbouring town to meet Dr Straker
at the solicitor’s office, they found Father Brown already seated there, with
his hands folded on his heavy umbrella, chatting pleasantly to the only
available member of the firm. Dr Straker also had arrived, but apparently only
at that moment, as he was carefully placing his gloves in his top-hat and his
top-hat on a side-table. And the mild and beaming expression of the priest’s
moonlike face and spectacles, together with the silent chuckles of the jolly
old grizzled lawyer, to whom he was talking, were enough to show that the doctor
had not yet opened his mouth to bring the news of death.

‘
A
beautiful morning after all,’ Father Brown was saying. ‘That storm seems to have
passed over us. There were some big black clouds, but I notice that not a drop
of rain fell.’

‘
Not
a drop,’ agreed the solicitor toying with a pen; he was the third partner, Mr. Dyke;
‘there’s not a cloud in the sky now. It’s the sort of day for a holiday.’ Then
he realized the newcomers and looked up, laying down the pen and rising. ‘Ah, Mr.
Harker, how are you? I hear the Admiral is expected home soon.’ Then Harker spoke,
and his voice rang hollow in the room.

‘
I
am sorry to say we are the bearers of bad news. Admiral Craven was drowned before
reaching home.’

There
was a change in the very air of the still office, though not in the attitudes of
the motionless figures; both were staring at the speaker as if a joke had been
frozen on their lips. Both repeated the word ‘drowned’ and looked at each other,
and then again at their informant. Then there was a small hubbub of questions.

‘
When
did this happen?’ asked the priest.

‘
Where
was he found?’ asked the lawyer.

‘
He
was found,’ said the Inspector, ‘in that pool by the coast, not far from the Green
Man, and dragged out all covered with green scum and weeds so as to be almost
unrecognizable. But Dr Straker here has — What is the matter. Father Brown? Are
you ill?’

‘
The
Green Man,’ said Father Brown with a shudder. ‘I’m so sorry ... I beg your pardon
for being upset.’

‘
Upset
by what?’ asked the staring officer.

‘
By
his being covered with green scum, I suppose,’ said the priest, with a rather shaky
laugh. Then he added rather more firmly, ‘I thought it might have been seaweed.’

By
this time everybody was looking at the priest, with a not unnatural suspicion that
he was mad; and yet the next crucial surprise was not to come from him. After a
dead silence, it was the doctor who spoke.

Dr
Straker was a remarkable man, even to look at. He was very tall and angular, formal
and professional in his dress; yet retaining a fashion that has hardly been
known since Mid-Victorian times. Though comparatively young, he wore his brown
beard, very long and spreading over his waistcoat; in contrast with it, his
features, which were both harsh and handsome, looked singularly pale. His good
looks were also diminished by something in his deep eyes that was not squinting,
but like the shadow of a squint. Everybody noticed these things about him,
because the moment he spoke, he gave forth an indescribable air of authority.
But all he said was:

‘
There
is one more thing to be said, if you come to details, about Admiral Craven being
drowned.’ Then he added reflectively, ‘Admiral Craven was not drowned.’

The
Inspector turned with quite a new promptitude and shot a question at him.

‘
I
have just examined the body,’ said Dr Straker, ‘the cause of death was a stab through
the heart with some pointed blade like a stiletto. It was after death, and even
some little time after, that the body was hidden in the pool.’

Father
Brown was regarding Dr Straker with a very lively eye, such as he seldom turned
upon anybody; and when the group in the office began to break up, he managed to
attach himself to the medical man for a little further conversation, as they went
back down the street. There had not been very much else to detain them except
the rather formal question of the will. The impatience of the young secretary
had been somewhat tried by the professional etiquette of the old lawyer. But
the latter was ultimately induced, rather by the tact of the priest than the
authority of the policeman, to refrain from making a mystery where there was no
mystery at all. Mr Dyke admitted, with a smile, that the Admiral’s will was a
very normal and ordinary document, leaving everything to his only child Olive;
and that there really was no particular reason for concealing the fact.

The
doctor and the priest walked slowly down the street that struck out of the town
in the direction of Craven House. Harker had plunged on ahead of him with all his
native eagerness to get somewhere; but the two behind seemed more interested in
their discussion than their direction. It was in rather an enigmatic tone that
the tall doctor said to the short cleric beside him:

‘
Well,
Father Brown, what do you think of a thing like this?’

Father
Brown looked at him rather intently for an instant, and then said:

‘
Well,
I’ve begun to think of one or two things; but my chief difficulty is that I only
knew the Admiral slightly; though I’ve seen something of his daughter.’

‘
The
Admiral,’ said the doctor with a grim immobility of feature, ‘was the sort of man
of whom it is said that he had not an enemy in the world.’

‘
I
suppose you mean,’ answered the priest, ‘that there’s something else that will not
be said.’

‘
Oh,
it’s no affair of mine,’ said Straker hastily but rather harshly. ‘He had his moods,
I suppose. He once threatened me with a legal action about an operation; but I
think he thought better of it. I can imagine his being rather rough with a
subordinate.’

Father
Brown’s eyes were fixed on the figure of the secretary striding far ahead; and as
he gazed he realized the special cause of his hurry. Some fifty yards farther
ahead the Admiral’s daughter was dawdling along the road towards the Admiral’s
house. The secretary soon came abreast of her; and for the remainder of the
time Father Brown watched the silent drama of two human backs as they diminished
into the distance. The secretary was evidently very much excited about
something; but if the priest guessed what it was, he kept it to himself. When
he came to the corner leading to the doctor’s house, he only said briefly: ‘I
don’t know if you have anything more to tell us.’

‘
Why
should I?’ answered the doctor very abruptly; and striding off, left it uncertain
whether he was asking why he should have anything to tell, or why he should
tell it.

Father
Brown went stumping on alone, in the track of the two young people; but when he
came to the entrance and avenues of the Admiral’s park, he was arrested by the action
of the girl, who turned suddenly and came straight towards him; her face unusually
pale and her eyes bright with some new and as yet nameless emotion.

‘
Father
Brown,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I must talk to you as soon as possible. You must
listen to me, I can’t see any other way out.’

‘
Why
certainly,’ he replied, as coolly as if a gutter-boy had asked him the time. ‘Where
shall we go and talk?’

The
girl led him at random to one of the rather tumbledown arbours in the grounds; and
they sat down behind a screen of large ragged leaves. She began instantly, as
if she must relieve her feelings or faint.

‘
Harold
Harker,’ she said, ‘has been talking to me about things. Terrible things.’

The
priest nodded and the girl went on hastily. ‘About Roger Rook. Do you know about
Roger?’

‘
I’ve
been told,’ he answered, ‘that his fellow-seamen call him The Jolly Roger, because
he is never jolly; and looks like the pirate’s skull and crossbones.’

‘
He
was not always like that,’ said Olive in a low voice. ‘Something very queer must
have happened to him. I knew him well when we were children; we used to play
over there on the sands. He was harum-scarum and always talking about being a
pirate; I dare say he was the sort they say might take to crime through reading
shockers; but there was something poetical in his way of being piratical. He
really was a Jolly Roger then. I suppose he was the last boy who kept up the
old legend of really running away to sea; and at last his family had to agree
to his joining the Navy. Well . . . ’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown patiently.

‘
Well,’
she admitted, caught in one of her rare moments of mirth, ‘I suppose poor Roger
found it disappointing. Naval officers so seldom carry knives in their teeth or
wave bloody cutlasses and black flags. But that doesn’t explain the change in him.
He just stiffened; grew dull and dumb, like a dead man walking about. He always
avoids me; but that doesn’t matter. I supposed some great grief that’s no
business of mine had broken him up. And now — well, if what Harold says is true,
the grief is neither more nor less than going mad; or being possessed of a
devil.’

‘
And
what does Harold say?’ asked the priest.

‘
It’s
so awful I can hardly say it,’ she answered. ‘He swears he saw Roger creeping behind
my father that night; hesitating and then drawing his sword . . . and the
doctor says father was stabbed with a steel point ... I can’t believe Roger Rook
had anything to do with it. His sulks and my father’s temper sometimes led to
quarrels; but what are quarrels? I can’t exactly say I’m standing up for an old
friend; because he isn’t even friendly. But you can’t help feeling sure of some
things, even about an old acquaintance. And yet Harold swears that he — ’

‘
Harold
seems to swear a great deal,’ said Father Brown.

There
was a sudden silence; after which she said in a different tone: ‘Well, he does swear
other things too. Harold Harker proposed to me just now.’

‘
Am
I to congratulate you, or rather him?’ inquired her companion.

‘
I
told him he must wait. He isn’t good at waiting.’ She was caught again in a
ripple of her incongruous sense of the comic: ‘He said I was his ideal and his ambition
and so on. He has lived in the States; but somehow I never remember it when he
is talking about dollars; only when he is talking about ideals.’

‘
And
I suppose,’ said Father Brown very softy, ‘that it is because you have to decide
about Harold that you want to know the truth about Roger.’

She
stiffened and frowned, and then equally abruptly smiled, saying: ‘Oh, you know too
much.’

‘
I
know very little, especially in this affair,’ said the priest gravely. ‘I only know
who murdered your father.’ She started up and stood staring down at him stricken
white. Father Brown made a wry face as he went on: ‘I made a fool of myself
when I first realized it; when they’d just been asking where he was found, and
went on talking about green scum and the Green Man.’

Then
he also rose; clutching his clumsy umbrella with a new resolution, he addressed
the girl with a new gravity.

‘
There
is something else that I know, which is the key to all these riddles of yours; but
I won’t tell you yet. I suppose it’s bad news; but it’s nothing like so bad as
the things you have been fancying.’ He buttoned up his coat and turned towards
the gate. ‘I’m going to see this Mr Rook of yours. In a shed by the shore, near
where Mr Harker saw him walking. I rather think he lives there.’ And he went
bustling off in the direction of the beach.

Olive
was an imaginative person; perhaps too imaginative to be safely left to brood over
such hints as her friend had thrown out; but he was in rather a hurry to find
the best relief for her broodings. The mysterious connection between Father Brown’s
first shock of enlightenment and the chance language about the pool and the
inn, hag-rode her fancy in a hundred forms of ugly symbolism. The Green Man
became a ghost trailing loathsome weeds and walking the countryside under the
moon; the sign of the Green Man became a human figure hanging as from a gibbet;
and the tarn itself became a tavern, a dark subaqueous tavern for the dead
sailors. And yet he had taken the most rapid method to overthrow all such nightmares,
with a burst of blinding daylight which seemed more mysterious than the night.

For
before the sun had set, something had come back into her life that turned her whole
world topsy-turvy once more; something she had hardly known that she desired
until it was abruptly granted; something that was, like a dream, old and
familiar, and yet remained incomprehensible and incredible. For Roger Rook had
come striding across the sands, and even when he was a dot in the distance, she
knew he was transfigured; and as he came nearer and nearer, she saw that his
dark face was alive with laughter and exultation. He came straight toward her,
as if they had never parted, and seized her shoulders saying: ‘Now I can look
after you, thank God.’