The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (123 page)

‘
What
exactly do you mean?’ asked the priest, looking him gravely full in the face.

‘
I
mean,’ said Henry Sand, ‘that you have shown me the murder and I think I could show
you the murderers.’

Father
Brown was silent and the other went on rather jerkily.

‘
You
said people sometimes wrote love-messages on trees. Well, as a fact, there are some
of them on that tree; there are two sort of monograms twisted together up there
under the leaves — I suppose you know that Lady Sand was the heiress of this
place long before she married; and she knew that damned dandy of a secretary
even in those days. I guess they used to meet here and write their vows upon
the trysting-tree. They seem to have used the trysting-tree for another purpose
later on. Sentiment, no doubt, or economy.’

‘
They
must be very horrible people,’ said Father Brown.

‘
Haven’t
there been any horrible people in history or the police-news?’ demanded Sand with
some excitement. ‘Haven’t there been lovers who made love seem more horrible
than hate? Don’t you know about Bothwell and all the bloody legends of such
lovers?’

‘
I
know the legend of Bothwell,’ answered the priest. ‘I also know it to be quite legendary.
But of course it’s true that husbands have been sometimes put away like that.
By the way, where was he put away? I mean, where did they hide the body?’

‘
I
suppose they drowned him, or threw him in the water when he was dead,’ snorted the
young man impatiently.

Father
Brown blinked thoughtfully and then said: ‘A river is a good place to hide an imaginary
body. It’s a rotten bad place to hide a real one. I mean, it’s easy to say
you’ve thrown it in, because it might be washed away to sea. But if you really
did throw it in, it’s about a hundred to one it wouldn’t; the chances of it
going ashore somewhere are enormous. I think they must have had a better scheme
for hiding the body than that — or the body would have been found by now. And
if there were any marks of violence — ’

‘
Oh,
bother hiding the body,’ said Henry, with some irritation; ‘haven’t we witness enough
in the writing on their own devilish tree?’

‘
The
body is the chief witness in every murder,’ answered the other. ‘The hiding of the
body, nine times out of ten, is the practical problem to be solved.’

There
was a silence; and Father Brown continued to turn over the red dressing-gown and
spread it out on the shining grass of the sunny shore; he did not look up. But,
for some time past he had been conscious that the whole landscape had been changed
for him by the presence of a third party; standing as still as a statue in the
garden.

‘
By
the way,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘how do you explain that little guy with
the glass eye, who brought your poor uncle a letter yesterday? It seemed to me he
was entirely altered by reading it; that’s why I wasn’t surprised at the suicide,
when I thought it was a suicide. That chap was a rather low-down private
detective, or I’m much mistaken.’

‘
Why,’
said Henry in a hesitating manner, ‘why, he might have been — husbands do sometimes
put on detectives in domestic tragedies like this, don’t they? I suppose he’d
got the proofs of their intrigue; and so they — ’

‘
I
shouldn’t talk too loud,’ said Father Brown, ‘because your detective is detecting
us at this moment, from about a yard beyond those bushes.’

They
looked up, and sure enough the goblin with the glass eye was fixing them with that
disagreeable optic, looking all the more grotesque for standing among the white
and waxen blooms of the classical garden.

Henry
Sand scrambled to his feet again with a rapidity that seemed breathless for one
of his bulk, and asked the man very angrily and abruptly what he was doing, at the
same time telling him to clear out at once.

‘
Lord
Stanes,’ said the goblin of the garden, ‘would be much obliged if Father Brown would
come up to the house and speak to him.’

Henry
Sand turned away furiously; but the priest put down his fury to the dislike that
was known to exist between him and the nobleman in question. As they mounted
the slope, Father Brown paused a moment as if tracing patterns on the smooth
tree-trunk, glanced upwards once at the darker and more hidden hieroglyph said
to be a record of romance; and then stared at the wider and more sprawling letters
of the confession, or supposed confession of suicide.

‘
Do
those letters remind you of anything?’ he asked. And when his sulky companion shook
his head, he added: ‘They remind me of the writing on that placard that threatened
him with the vengeance of the strikers.’

‘
This
is the hardest riddle and the queerest tale I have ever tackled,’ said Father Brown,
a month later, as he sat opposite Lord Stanes in the recently furnished apartment
of No. 188, the end flat which was the last to be finished before the interregnum
of the industrial dispute and the transfer of work from the Trade Union. It was
comfortably furnished; and Lord Stanes was presiding over grog and cigars, when
the priest made his confession with a grimace. Lord Stanes had become rather
surprisingly friendly, in a cool and casual way.

‘
I
know that is saying a good deal, with your record,’ said Stanes, ‘but certainly
the detectives, including our seductive friend with the glass eye, don’t seem at
all able to see the solution.’

Father
Brown laid down his cigar and said carefully: ‘It isn’t that they can’t see the
solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.’

‘
Indeed,’
said the other, ‘perhaps I can’t see the problem either.’

‘
The
problem is unlike all other problems, for this reason,’ said Father Brown. ‘It seems
as if the criminal deliberately did two different things, either of which might
have been successful; but which, when done together, could only defeat each
other. I am assuming, what I firmly believe, that the same murderer pinned up the
proclamation threatening a sort of Bolshevik murder, and also wrote on the tree
confessing to an ordinary suicide. Now you may say it is after all possible
that the proclamation was a proletarian proclamation; that some extremist
workmen wanted to kill their employer, and killed him. Even if that were true,
it would still stick at the mystery of why they left, or why anybody left, a
contrary trail of private self-destruction. But it certainly isn’t true. None
of these workmen, however, bitter, would have done a thing like that. I know
them pretty well; I know their leaders quite well. To suppose that people like
Tom Bruce or Hogan would assassinate somebody they could go for in the
newspapers, and damage in all sorts of different ways, is the sort of psychology
that sensible people call lunacy. No; there was somebody, who was not an
indignant workman, who first played the part of an indignant workman, and then
played the part of a suicidal employer. But, in the name of wonder, why? If he
thought he could pass it off smoothly as a suicide, why did he first spoil it
all by publishing a threat of murder? You might say it was an afterthought to
fix up the suicide story, as less provocative than the murder story. But it
wasn’t less provocative after the murder story. He must have known he had
already turned our thoughts towards murder, when it should have been his whole
object to keep our thoughts away from it. If it was an after-thought, it was
the after-thought of a very thoughtless person. And I have a notion that this
assassin is a very thoughtful person. Can you make anything of it?’

‘
No;
but I see what you mean,’ said Stanes, ‘by saying that I didn’t even see the problem.
It isn’t merely who killed Sand; it’s why anybody should accuse somebody else
of killing Sand and then accuse Sand of killing himself.’

Father
Brown’s face was knotted and the cigar was clenched in his teeth; the end of it
plowed and darkened rhythmically like the signal of some burning pulse of the brain.
Then he spoke as if to himself:

‘
We’ve
got to follow very closely and very clearly. It’s like separating threads of thought
from each other; something like this. Because the murder charge really rather
spoilt the suicide charge, he wouldn’t normally have made the murder charge.
But he did make it; so he had some other reason for making it. It was so strong
a reason that perhaps it reconciled him even to weakening his other line of
defence; that it was a suicide. In other words, the murder charge wasn’t really
a murder charge. I mean he wasn’t using it as a murder charge; he wasn’t doing
it so as to shift to somebody else the guilt of murder; he was doing it for
some other extraordinary reason of his own. His plan had to contain a
proclamation that Sand would be murdered; whether it threw suspicion on other
people or not. Somehow or other the mere proclamation itself was necessary. But
why?’

He
smoked and smouldered away with the same volcanic concentration for five minutes
before he spoke again. ‘What could a murderous proclamation do, besides suggesting
that the strikers were the murderers? What did it do? One thing is obvious; it
inevitably did the opposite of what it said. It told Sand not to lock out his
men; and it was perhaps the only thing in the world that would really have made
him do it. You’ve got to think of the sort of man and the sort of reputation.
When a man has been called a Strong Man in our silly sensational newspapers,
when he is fondly regarded as a Sportsman by all the most distinguished asses
in England, he simply can’t back down because he is threatened with a pistol.
It would be like walking about at Ascot with a white feather stuck in his
absurd white hat. It would break that inner idol or ideal of oneself, which
every man not a downright dastard does really prefer to life. And Sand wasn’t a
dastard; he was courageous; he was also impulsive. It acted instantly like a
charm: his nephew, who had been more or less mixed up with the workmen, cried
out instantly that the threat must be absolutely and instantly defied.’

‘
Yes,’
said Lord Stanes, ‘I noticed that.’ They looked at each other for an instant, and
then Stanes added carelessly: ‘So you think the thing the criminal wanted was…’

‘
The
Lock-out!’ cried the priest energetically. ‘The Strike or whatever you call it;
the cessation of work, anyhow. He wanted the work to stop at once; perhaps the blacklegs
to come in at once; certainly the Trade Unionists to go out at once. That is
what he really wanted; God knows why. And he brought that off, I think, really
without bothering much about its other implication of the existence of Bolshevist
assassins. But then . . . then I think something went wrong. I’m only guessing
and groping very slowly here; but the only explanation I can think of is that
something began to draw attention to the real seat of the trouble; to the
reason, whatever it was, of his wanting to bring the building to a halt. And
then belatedly, desperately, and rather inconsistently, he tried to lay the
other trail that led to the river, simply and solely because it led away from
the flats.’

He
looked up through his moonlike spectacles, absorbing all the quality of the background
and furniture; the restrained luxury of a quiet man of the world; and
contrasting it with the two suitcases with which its occupant had arrived so
recently in a newly-finished and unfurnished flat. Then he said rather abruptly:
‘In short, the murderer was frightened of something or somebody in the flats.
By the way, why did you come to live in the flats? . . . Also by the way, young
Henry told me you made an early appointment with him when you moved in. Is that
true?’

‘
Not
in the least,’ said Stanes. ‘I got the key from his uncle the night before. I’ve
no notion why Henry came here that morning.’

‘
Ah,’
said Father Brown, ‘then I think I have some notion of why he came . . . I thought
you startled him by coming in just when he was coming out.’

‘
And
yet,’ said Stanes, looking across with a glitter in his grey-green eyes, ‘you do
rather think that I also am a mystery.’

‘
I
think you are two mysteries,’ said Father Brown. ‘The first is why you originally
retired from Sand’s business. The second is why you have since come back to
live in Sand’s buildings.’

Stanes
smoked reflectively, knocked out his ash, and rang a bell on the table before him.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I will summon two more to the council. Jackson,
the little detective you know of, will answer the bell; and I’ve asked Henry
Sand to come in a little later.’

Father
Brown rose from his seat, walked across the room and looked down frowning into the
fire-place.

‘
Meanwhile,’
continued Stanes, ‘I don’t mind answering both your questions. I left the Sand business
because I was sure there was some hanky-panky in it and somebody was pinching
all the money. I came back to it, and took this flat, because I wanted to watch
for the real truth about old Sand’s death — on the spot.’

Father
Brown faced round as the detective entered the room; he stood staring at the hearthrug
and repeated: ‘On the spot.’

‘
Mr
Jackson will tell you,’ said Stanes, ‘that Sir Hubert commissioned him to find
out who was the thief robbing the firm; and he brought a note of his
discoveries the day before old Hubert disappeared.’

‘
Yes,’
said Father Brown, ‘and I know now where he disappeared to. I know where the body
is.’