Authors: G.K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (130 page)
BOOK: The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material]
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"Mr. 'Wicks," said the Colonel, with an introductory gesture, "is the best modern expert in all matters of financial fraud. It is sheer luck that he happens to be a J.P. in this district."
Inspector Beltane gave a gulp and then gasped. "You don't mean to say Father Brown was right."
"I have known it happen," said Colonel Grimes, with moderation.
"If Father Brown said that Sir Archer Anderson is a colossal swindler, he was most certainly right," said Mr. Wicks. "I needn't give you all the steps of the proof here; in fact it will be wiser to give only the earlier stages of it even to the police--and the swindler. We must watch him carefully; and see that he takes no advantage of any mistake of ours. But I think we'd better go round and have a rather more candid interview with him than you seem to have had; an interview in which the poacher and the junk-shop will not perhaps be so exclusively prominent. I think I can let him know enough of what we know to wake him up, without running any risk of libel or damages. And there is always the chance he will let something out, in the very attempt to keep it in. Come, we have heard very disquieting rumours about the business, and want this or that explained on the spot. That is our official position at present." And he sprang up, as if with the mere alertness or restlessness of youth.
The second interview with Sir Archer Anderson was certainly very different in its tone, and especially in its termination. They had gone there without any final determination to challenge the great banker; but they soon found that it was he who was already determined to challenge them. His white moustaches were curled like silver sabres; his white pointed beard was thrust forward like a spike of steel. Before any of them had said more than a few sentences, he stood up and struck the table.
"This is the first time that the Casterville and County Bank has been referred to in this fashion; and I promise you it shall be the last. If my own reputation did not already stand too high for such grotesque calumnies, the credit of the institution itself would alone have made them ludicrous. Leave this place, gentlemen, and go away and amuse yourselves with exposing the High Court of Chancery or inventing naughty stories about the Archbishop of Canterbury."
"That is all very well," said Wicks, with his head at an angle of pertinacity and pugnacity like a bulldog, "but I have a few facts here, Sir Archer, which you will be bound sooner or later to explain."
"To say the least of it," said the Colonel in a milder tone, "there are a good many things that we want to know rather more about."
The voice of Father Brown came in like something curiously cool and distant, as if it came from another room, or from the street outside, or at least from a long way off.
"Don't you think, Colonel, that we know now all that we want to know?"
"No," said the Colonel shortly, "I am a policeman. I may think a great deal and think I am right. But I don't know it."
"Oh," said Father Brown, opening his eyes wide for a moment. "I don't mean what you think you know."
"Well, I suppose it's the same as what you think you know," said Grimes rather gruffly.
"I'm awfully sorry," said Father Brown penitently, "but what I know is quite different."
The air of doubt and difference, in which the small group moved off, leaving the haughty financier apparently master of the field after all, led them to drift once more to the restaurant, for an early tea, a smoke and some attempt at an explanation all round.
"I always knew you were an exasperating person," said the policeman to the priest, "but I have generally had some sort of wild guess about what you meant. My impression at this moment is that you have gone mad."
"It's odd you should say that," said Father Brown; "because I've tried to discover my own deficiencies in a good many directions, and the only thing I think I really know about myself is that I am not mad. I pay the penalty, of course, in being dull. But I have never to my knowledge lost touch with reality; and it seems queer to me that men so brilliant as you are can lose it so quickly."
"What do you mean--reality?" demanded Grimes after a bristling silence.
"I mean common sense," said Father Brown, with one of the explosions so rare in him that it sounded like a gun. "I've said already that I'm out of my depth, about all this financial complexity and corruption. But, hang it all, there is a way of testing things by human beings. I don't know anything about finance; but I have known financiers. In a general way, I've known fraudulent financiers. But you must know much more about them than I do. And yet you can swallow an impossibility like that."
"An impossibility like what?" enquired the staring Colonel.
Father Brown had suddenly leaned across the table, with piercing eyes fixed on Wicks, with an intensity he rarely showed.
"Mr. Wicks, you ought to know better. I'm only a poor parson, and of course I know no better. After all, our friends the police do not often meet bankers; except when a casual cashier cuts his throat. But you must have been perpetually interviewing bankers; and especially bankrupt bankers. Haven't you been in this precise position twenty times before? Haven't you again and again had the pluck to throw the first suspicions on very solid persons, as you did this afternoon? Haven't you talked to twenty or thirty financiers who were crashing, just about a month or two before they crashed?"
"Well, yes," said Mr. Wicks slowly and carefully, "I suppose I have."
"Well," asked Father Brown, "did any single one of the others ever talk like that?"
The little figure of the lawyer gave the faintest imperceptible start; so that one could say no more than that he was sitting up a shade straighter than before.
"Did you ever in your born days," asked the priest with all his new thrusting emphasis, "know a handler of hanky-panky finance who got on the high horse at the first flash of suspicion; and told the police not to dare to meddle with the secrets of his sacred bank? Why, it was like asking the Chief Constable to raid his bank and arrest him on the spot. Well, you know about these things and I don't. But I'd risk a long bet that every single dubious financier you have ever known has done exactly the opposite. Your first queries would have been received not with anger but amusement; if it ever went so far, it would have ended in a bland and complete answer to every one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine questions you had to ask. Explanations! They swim in explanations! Do you suppose a slippery financier has never been asked questions before?"
"But hang it all, you generalise too much," said Grimes. "You seem to be quite captivated with your vision of the perfect swindler. But after all even swindlers are not perfect. It doesn't prove much that one bankrupt banker broke down and lost his nerve."
"Father Brown is right," said Wicks, interceding suddenly after a period of digestive silence. "It's quite true that all that swagger and flamboyant defiance couldn't be the very first line of defence for a swindle. But what else could it be? Respectable bankers don't throw out the banner and blow the trumpet and draw the sword, at a moment's notice, any more than disreputable bankers."
"Besides," said Grimes, "why should he get on the high horse at all? Why should he order us all out of the bank, if he has nothing to hide?"
"Well," said Father Brown very slowly, "I never said he had nothing to hide."
The meeting broke up in a silent, dazed disorder, in which the pertinacious Beltane hooked the priest by the arm for an instant and held him.
"Do you or do you not mean," he asked harshly, "that the banker is not a suspect?"
"No," said Father Brown, "I mean that the suspect is not a banker."
As they filed out of the restaurant, with movements much more vague and groping than were normal to any of them, they were brought up short by a shock and noise in the street outside. It first gave the impression of people breaking windows all along the street; but an instant of nervous recovery enabled them to localise it. It was the gilt glass-doors and windows of the pompous building they had entered that morning; the sacred enclosure of the Casterville and County Bank, that was shaken from within by a din like a dynamite explosion, but proving to be in fact only the direct dynamic destructiveness of man. The Chief Constable and the Inspector darted through the shattered glass-doorways to the dark interior, and returned with faces fixed in astonishment; even more assured and stolid for being astonished.
"There's no doubt about it now," said the Inspector, "he's clubbed the man we left to watch to the ground with a poker; and hurled a cash-box so as to catch in the waistcoat the first man who came in to find out the trouble. He must be a wild beast."
Amid all the grotesque bewilderment, Mr. Wicks the lawyer turned with a gesture of apology and compliment and said to Father Brown, "Well, Sir, you have completely convinced me. He is certainly an entirely new rendering of the absconding banker."
"Well, you must send our men in to hold him at once," said the Constable to the Inspector; "or he'll break up the whole town."
"Yes," said Father Brown, "he's a pretty violent fellow; it's his great temptation. Think how he used his gun blindly as a club on the game-keeper, bringing it down again and again; but never having even the sense to fire. Of course, that is the sort of man who mismanages most things, even murders. But he does generally manage to break prison."
His companions gazed on him with faces that seemed to grow rounder and rounder with wonder; but they got no enlightenment out of his own round and commonplace countenance, before he turned away and went slowly down the street.
"And so," said Father Brown, beaming round at the company over a very mild lager in the restaurant, and looking rather like Mr. Pickwick in a village club; "and so we come back again to our dear old rustic tale of the poacher and the gamekeeper after all. It does so inexpressibly raise my spirits dealing with a cosy fireside crime instead of all this blank bewildering fog of finance; a fog really full of ghosts and shadows. Well, of course you all know the old, old story. At your mothers' knees you have heard it; but it is so important, my friends, to keep those old stories clear in our minds as they were told to us. This little rural tale has been told often enough. A man is imprisoned for a crime of passion, shows a similar violence in captivity, knocks down a warder and escapes in a mist on the moor. He has a stroke of luck; for he meets a gentleman who is well-dressed and presentable, and he forces him to change clothes."
"Yes, I've heard that story often," said Grimes frowning. "You say it is important to remember the story.”
"It is important to remember the story," said Father Brown, "because it is a very clear and correct account of what did not happen."
"And what did happen?" demanded the Inspector.
"Only the flat contrary," said Father Brown. "A small but neat emendation. It was not the convict who set out looking for a well-dressed gentleman, that he might disguise himself in his clothes. It was the gentleman who set out on the moor looking for a convict; that he might enjoy the ecstasy of wearing a convict's clothes. He knew there was a convict loose on the moor; and he ardently wanted his clothes. He probably knew also that there was a well-organised scheme for picking up the convict and rushing him rapidly off the moor. It is not quite certain what part Denis Hara and his gang played in this business; or whether they were cognisant only of the first plot or of the second. But I think it probable they were working for the poacher's friends, and merely in the interest of the poacher, who had very wide public sympathy among the poorer population. I prefer to think that our friend the well-dressed gentleman effected his own little transformation scene by his own native talents. He was a very well-dressed gentleman, being clad in very fashionable gents' suitings, as the tailors say; also with beautiful white hair and moustaches etc. which he owed rather to the barber than the tailor. He had found this very complete costume useful at many times of his life; and you must remember he had only appeared for a very short time as yet, in this particular town and bank. On hailing at last the figure of the convict whose clothes he coveted, he verified his information that he was a man of much the same general figure as himself; and the rest consisted merely of covering the convict with the hat, the wig, the whiskers, the splendid raiment, until the warder he knocked on the head would hardly have known him. Then our brilliant financier put on the convict's clothes; and felt, for the first time for months and perhaps years, that he had escaped and was free.
BOOK: The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material]
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