The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (13 page)

Mr.
Smythe, however, made no allusion to the ultimate ground of their antagonism, but
said simply and explosively, “Has Miss Hope seen that thing on the window?”

“
On
the window?” repeated the staring Angus.

“
There’s
no time to explain other things,” said the small millionaire shortly. “There’s some
tomfoolery going on here that has to be investigated.”

He
pointed his polished walking-stick at the window, recently depleted by the bridal
preparations of Mr. Angus; and that gentleman was astonished to see along the
front of the glass a long strip of paper pasted, which had certainly not been
on the window when he looked through it some time before. Following the
energetic Smythe outside into the street, he found that some yard and a half of
stamp paper had been carefully gummed along the glass outside, and on this was
written in straggly characters, “If you marry Smythe, he will die.”

“
Laura,”
said Angus, putting his big red head into the shop, “you’re not mad.”

“
It’s
the writing of that fellow Welkin,” said Smythe gruffly. “I haven’t seen him for
years, but he’s always bothering me. Five times in the last fortnight he’s had
threatening letters left at my flat, and I can’t even find out who leaves them,
let alone if it is Welkin himself. The porter of the flats swears that no suspicious
characters have been seen, and here he has pasted up a sort of dado on a public
shop window, while the people in the shop —”

“
Quite
so,” said Angus modestly, “while the people in the shop were having tea. Well, sir,
I can assure you I appreciate your common sense in dealing so directly with the
matter. We can talk about other things afterwards. The fellow cannot be very
far off yet, for I swear there was no paper there when I went last to the
window, ten or fifteen minutes ago. On the other hand, he’s too far off to be
chased, as we don’t even know the direction. If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Smythe,
you’ll put this at once in the hands of some energetic inquiry man, private
rather than public. I know an extremely clever fellow, who has set up in
business five minutes from here in your car. His name’s Flambeau, and though his
youth was a bit stormy, he’s a strictly honest man now, and his brains are worth
money. He lives in Lucknow Mansions, Hampstead.”

“
That
is odd,” said the little man, arching his black eyebrows. “I live, myself, in Himylaya
Mansions, round the corner. Perhaps you might care to come with me; I can go to
my rooms and sort out these queer Welkin documents, while you run round and get
your friend the detective.”

“
You
are very good,” said Angus politely. “Well, the sooner we act the better.”

Both
men, with a queer kind of impromptu fairness, took the same sort of formal farewell
of the lady, and both jumped into the brisk little car. As Smythe took the
handles and they turned the great corner of the street, Angus was amused to see
a gigantesque poster of “Smythe’s Silent Service,” with a picture of a huge headless
iron doll, carrying a saucepan with the legend, “A Cook Who is Never Cross.”

“
I
use them in my own flat,” said the little black-bearded man, laughing, “partly for
advertisements, and partly for real convenience. Honestly, and all above board,
those big clockwork dolls of mine do bring your coals or claret or a timetable
quicker than any live servants I’ve ever known, if you know which knob to
press. But I’ll never deny, between ourselves, that such servants have their
disadvantages, too.

“
Indeed?”
said Angus; “is there something they can’t do?”

“
Yes,”
replied Smythe coolly; “they can’t tell me who left those threatening letters at
my flat.”

The
man’s motor was small and swift like himself; in fact, like his domestic service,
it was of his own invention. If he was an advertising quack, he was one who believed
in his own wares. The sense of something tiny and flying was accentuated as
they swept up long white curves of road in the dead but open daylight of
evening. Soon the white curves came sharper and dizzier; they were upon ascending
spirals, as they say in the modern religions. For, indeed, they were cresting a
corner of London which is almost as precipitous as Edinburgh, if not quite so
picturesque. Terrace rose above terrace, and the special tower of flats they
sought, rose above them all to almost Egyptian height, gilt by the level
sunset. The change, as they turned the corner and entered the crescent known as
Himylaya Mansions, was as abrupt as the opening of a window; for they found
that pile of flats sitting above London as above a green sea of slate. Opposite
to the mansions, on the other side of the gravel crescent, was a bushy enclosure
more like a steep hedge or dyke than a garden, and some way below that ran a
strip of artificial water, a sort of canal, like the moat of that embowered
fortress. As the car swept round the crescent it passed, at one corner, the
stray stall of a man selling chestnuts; and right away at the other end of the
curve, Angus could see a dim blue policeman walking slowly. These were the only
human shapes in that high suburban solitude; but he had an irrational sense
that they expressed the speechless poetry of London. He felt as if they were
figures in a story.

The
little car shot up to the right house like a bullet, and shot out its owner
like a bomb shell. He was immediately inquiring of a tall commissionaire in
shining braid, and a short porter in shirt sleeves, whether anybody or anything
had been seeking his apartments. He was assured that nobody and nothing had
passed these officials since his last inquiries; whereupon he and the slightly bewildered
Angus were shot up in the lift like a rocket, till they reached the top floor.

“
Just
come in for a minute,” said the breathless Smythe. “I want to show you those Welkin
letters. Then you might run round the corner and fetch your friend.” He pressed
a button concealed in the wall, and the door opened of itself.

It
opened on a long, commodious ante-room, of which the only arresting features, ordinarily
speaking, were the rows of tall half-human mechanical figures that stood up on
both sides like tailors’ dummies. Like tailors’ dummies they were headless; and
like tailors’ dummies they had a handsome unnecessary humpiness in the
shoulders, and a pigeon-breasted protuberance of chest; but barring this, they
were not much more like a human figure than any automatic machine at a station
that is about the human height. They had two great hooks like arms, for carrying
trays; and they were painted pea-green, or vermilion, or black for convenience
of distinction; in every other way they were only automatic machines and nobody
would have looked twice at them. On this occasion, at least, nobody did. For
between the two rows of these domestic dummies lay something more interesting
than most of the mechanics of the world. It was a white, tattered scrap of
paper scrawled with red ink; and the agile inventor had snatched it up almost
as soon as the door flew open. He handed it to Angus without a word. The red
ink on it actually was not dry, and the message ran, “If you have been to see
her today, I shall kill you.”

There
was a short silence, and then Isidore Smythe said quietly, “Would you like a little
whiskey? I rather feel as if I should.”

“
Thank
you; I should like a little Flambeau,” said Angus, gloomily. “This business seems
to me to be getting rather grave. I’m going round at once to fetch him.”

“
Right
you are,” said the other, with admirable cheerfulness. “Bring him round here as
quick as you can.”

But
as Angus closed the front door behind him he saw Smythe push back a button, and
one of the clockwork images glided from its place and slid along a groove in the
floor carrying a tray with syphon and decanter. There did seem something a trifle
weird about leaving the little man alone among those dead servants, who were
coming to life as the door closed.

Six
steps down from Smythe’s landing the man in shirt sleeves was doing something with
a pail. Angus stopped to extract a promise, fortified with a prospective bribe,
that he would remain in that place until the return with the detective, and
would keep count of any kind of stranger coming up those stairs. Dashing down
to the front hall he then laid similar charges of vigilance on the commissionaire
at the front door, from whom he learned the simplifying circumstances that there
was no back door. Not content with this, he captured the floating policeman and
induced him to stand opposite the entrance and watch it; and finally paused an
instant for a pennyworth of chestnuts, and an inquiry as to the probable length
of the merchant’s stay in the neighbourhood.

The
chestnut seller, turning up the collar of his coat, told him he should probably
be moving shortly, as he thought it was going to snow. Indeed, the evening was growing
grey and bitter, but Angus, with all his eloquence, proceeded to nail the
chestnut man to his post.

“
Keep
yourself warm on your own chestnuts,” he said earnestly. “Eat up your whole stock;
I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you a sovereign if you’ll wait here
till I come back, and then tell me whether any man, woman, or child has gone
into that house where the commissionaire is standing.”

He
then walked away smartly, with a last look at the besieged tower.

“
I’ve
made a ring round that room, anyhow,” he said. “They can’t all four of them be Mr.
Welkin’s accomplices.”

Lucknow
Mansions were, so to speak, on a lower platform of that hill of houses, of which
Himylaya Mansions might be called the peak. Mr. Flambeau’s semi-official flat
was on the ground floor, and presented in every way a marked contrast to the
American machinery and cold hotel-like luxury of the flat of the Silent Service.
Flambeau, who was a friend of Angus, received him in a rococo artistic den
behind his office, of which the ornaments were sabres, harquebuses, Eastern curiosities,
flasks of Italian wine, savage cooking-pots, a plumy Persian cat, and a small
dusty-looking Roman Catholic priest, who looked particularly out of place.

“
This
is my friend Father Brown,” said Flambeau. “I’ve often wanted you to meet him. Splendid
weather, this; a little cold for Southerners like me.”

“
Yes,
I think it will keep clear,” said Angus, sitting down on a violet-striped Eastern
ottoman.

“
No,”
said the priest quietly, “it has begun to snow.”

And,
indeed, as he spoke, the first few flakes, foreseen by the man of chestnuts, began
to drift across the darkening windowpane.

“
Well,”
said Angus heavily. “I’m afraid I’ve come on business, and rather jumpy business
at that. The fact is, Flambeau, within a stone’s throw of your house is a
fellow who badly wants your help; he’s perpetually being haunted and threatened
by an invisible enemy — a scoundrel whom nobody has even seen.” As Angus
proceeded to tell the whole tale of Smythe and Welkin, beginning with Laura’s
story, and going on with his own, the supernatural laugh at the corner of two
empty streets, the strange distinct words spoken in an empty room, Flambeau
grew more and more vividly concerned, and the little priest seemed to be left
out of it, like a piece of furniture. When it came to the scribbled stamp-paper
pasted on the window, Flambeau rose, seeming to fill the room with his huge shoulders.

“
If
you don’t mind,” he said, “I think you had better tell me the rest on the nearest
road to this man’s house. It strikes me, somehow, that there is no time to be
lost.”

“
Delighted,”
said Angus, rising also, “though he’s safe enough for the present, for I’ve set
four men to watch the only hole to his burrow.”

They
turned out into the street, the small priest trundling after them with the docility
of a small dog. He merely said, in a cheerful way, like one making conversation,
“How quick the snow gets thick on the ground.”

As
they threaded the steep side streets already powdered with silver, Angus finished
his story; and by the time they reached the crescent with the towering flats,
he had leisure to turn his attention to the four sentinels. The chestnut seller,
both before and after receiving a sovereign, swore stubbornly that he had
watched the door and seen no visitor enter. The policeman was even more emphatic.
He said he had had experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags;
he wasn’t so green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he
looked out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody. And when all
three men gathered round the gilded commissionaire, who still stood smiling
astride of the porch, the verdict was more final still.

“
I’ve
got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in these flats,” said
the genial and gold-laced giant, “and I’ll swear there’s been nobody to ask
since this gentleman went away.”

The
unimportant Father Brown, who stood back, looking modestly at the pavement, here
ventured to say meekly, “Has nobody been up and down stairs, then, since the
snow began to fall? It began while we were all round at Flambeau’s.”

“
Nobody’s
been in here, sir, you can take it from me,” said the official, with beaming authority.

“
Then
I wonder what that is?” said the priest, and stared at the ground blankly like a
fish.

The
others all looked down also; and Flambeau used a fierce exclamation and a French
gesture. For it was unquestionably true that down the middle of the entrance
guarded by the man in gold lace, actually between the arrogant, stretched legs
of that colossus, ran a stringy pattern of grey footprints stamped upon the
white snow.