The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (30 page)

“
This
is very serious,” said Father Brown, gathering his errant hat and umbrella and standing
up; “in point of fact I was just putting your case before this gentleman, and
his view —”

“
Has
been largely altered,” said the scientist gravely. “I do not think this young lady
is so Celtic as I had supposed. As I have nothing else to do, I will put on my
hat and stroll down town with you.”

In
a few minutes all three were approaching the dreary tail of the MacNabs’ street:
the girl with the stern and breathless stride of the mountaineer, the criminologist
with a lounging grace (which was not without a certain leopard-like swiftness),
and the priest at an energetic trot entirely devoid of distinction. The aspect
of this edge of the town was not entirely without justification for the
doctor’s hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses
stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the
afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was
of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the
MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood
up like demon hands held up in astonishment, and as Mrs MacNab ran down the
street to meet them with lean hands similarly spread, and her fierce face in
shadow, she was a little like a demon herself. The doctor and the priest made
scant reply to her shrill reiterations of her daughter’s story, with more
disturbing details of her own, to the divided vows of vengeance against Mr
Glass for murdering, and against Mr Todhunter for being murdered, or against
the latter for having dared to want to marry her daughter, and for not having
lived to do it. They passed through the narrow passage in the front of the
house until they came to the lodger’s door at the back, and there Dr Hood, with
the trick of an old detective, put his shoulder sharply to the panel and burst
in the door.

It
opened on a scene of silent catastrophe. No one seeing it, even for a flash, could
doubt that the room had been the theatre of some thrilling collision between
two, or perhaps more, persons. Playing-cards lay littered across the table or
fluttered about the floor as if a game had been interrupted. Two wine glasses
stood ready for wine on a side-table, but a third lay smashed in a star of
crystal upon the carpet. A few feet from it lay what looked like a long knife
or short sword, straight, but with an ornamental and pictured handle, its dull
blade just caught a grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the
black trees against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of
the room was rolled a gentleman’s silk top hat, as if it had just been knocked
off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see it still
rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of potatoes, but corded
like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter, with a scarf across his mouth,
and six or seven ropes knotted round his elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were
alive and shifted alertly.

Dr
Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the whole scene of
voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the carpet, picked up the tall
silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It
was so much too large for him that it almost slipped down on to his shoulders.

“
Mr
Glass’s hat,” said the doctor, returning with it and peering into the inside with
a pocket lens. “How to explain the absence of Mr Glass and the presence of Mr
Glass’s hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man with his clothes. That hat is
of a stylish shape and systematically brushed and burnished, though not very new.
An old dandy, I should think.”

“
But,
good heavens!” called out Miss MacNab, “aren’t you going to untie the man first?”

“
I
say ‘old’ with intention, though not with certainty” continued the expositor; “my
reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair of human beings falls
out in very varying degrees, but almost always falls out slightly, and with the
lens I should see the tiny hairs in a hat recently worn. It has none, which
leads me to guess that Mr Glass is bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched
and querulous voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear
lady, patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common
in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years.
Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly tall. I
might rely in some degree on the story of his previous appearance at the
window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I have more exact indication.
This wineglass has been smashed all over the place, but one of its splinters
lies on the high bracket beside the mantelpiece. No such fragment could have
fallen there if the vessel had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively
short man like Mr Todhunter.”

“
By
the way,” said Father Brown, “might it not be as well to untie Mr Todhunter?”

“
Our
lesson from the drinking-vessels does not end here,” proceeded the specialist. “I
may say at once that it is possible that the man Glass was bald or nervous through
dissipation rather than age. Mr Todhunter, as has been remarked, is a quiet
thrifty gentleman, essentially an abstainer. These cards and wine-cups are no
part of his normal habit; they have been produced for a particular companion.
But, as it happens, we may go farther. Mr Todhunter may or may not possess this
wine-service, but there is no appearance of his possessing any wine. What,
then, were these vessels to contain? I would at once suggest some brandy or
whisky, perhaps of a luxurious sort, from a flask in the pocket of Mr Glass. We
have thus something like a picture of the man, or at least of the type: tall,
elderly, fashionable, but somewhat frayed, certainly fond of play and strong
waters, perhaps rather too fond of them. Mr Glass is a gentleman not unknown on
the fringes of society.”

“
Look
here,” cried the young woman, “if you don’t let me pass to untie him I’ll run outside
and scream for the police.”

“
I
should not advise you, Miss MacNab,” said Dr Hood gravely, “to be in any hurry to
fetch the police. Father Brown, I seriously ask you to compose your flock, for
their sakes, not for mine. Well, we have seen something of the figure and quality
of Mr Glass; what are the chief facts known of Mr Todhunter? They are substantially
three: that he is economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has
a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the
kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that the faded
finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the
unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the two
typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand, the respectable
man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture with a scent for a
mystery. These two men have met here today and have quarrelled, using blows and
a bare weapon.”

“
Are
you going to take those ropes off?” asked the girl stubbornly.

Dr
Hood replaced the silk hat carefully on the side table, and went across to the captive.
He studied him intently, even moving him a little and half-turning him round by
the shoulders, but he only answered:

“
No;
I think these ropes will do very well till your friends the police bring the handcuffs.”

Father
Brown, who had been looking dully at the carpet, lifted his round face and said:
“What do you mean?”

The
man of science had picked up the peculiar dagger-sword from the carpet and was examining
it intently as he answered:

“
Because
you find Mr Todhunter tied up,” he said, “you all jump to the conclusion that Mr
Glass had tied him up; and then, I suppose, escaped. There are four objections
to this: First, why should a gentleman so dressy as our friend Glass leave his
hat behind him, if he left of his own free will? Second,” he continued, moving
towards the window, “this is the only exit, and it is locked on the inside.
Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no
wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive.
Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the
blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer
would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a
pretty complete story.”

“
But
the ropes?” inquired the priest, whose eyes had remained open with a rather vacant
admiration.

“
Ah,
the ropes,” said the expert with a singular intonation. “Miss MacNab very much wanted
to know why I did not set Mr Todhunter free from his ropes. Well, I will tell
her. I did not do it because Mr Todhunter can set himself free from them at any
minute he chooses.”

“
What?”
cried the audience on quite different notes of astonishment.

“
I
have looked at all the knots on Mr Todhunter,” reiterated Hood quietly. “I happen
to know something about knots; they are quite a branch of criminal science.
Every one of those knots he has made himself and could loosen himself; not one
of them would have been made by an enemy really trying to pinion him. The whole
of this affair of the ropes is a clever fake, to make us think him the victim
of the struggle instead of the wretched Glass, whose corpse may be hidden in
the garden or stuffed up the chimney.”

There
was a rather depressed silence; the room was darkening, the sea-blighted boughs
of the garden trees looked leaner and blacker than ever, yet they seemed to have
come nearer to the window. One could almost fancy they were sea-monsters like
krakens or cuttlefish, writhing polypi who had crawled up from the sea to see
the end of this tragedy, even as he, the villain and victim of it, the terrible
man in the tall hat, had once crawled up from the sea. For the whole air was
dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human
things, because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker
wound.

The
face of the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent and even comic,
had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It was not the blank curiosity
of his first innocence. It was rather that creative curiosity which comes when
a man has the beginnings of an idea. “Say it again, please,” he said in a
simple, bothered manner; “do you mean that Todhunter can tie himself up all
alone and untie himself all alone?”

“
That
is what I mean,” said the doctor.

“
Jerusalem!”
ejaculated Brown suddenly, “I wonder if it could possibly be that!”

He
scuttled across the room rather like a rabbit, and peered with quite a new impulsiveness
into the partially-covered face of the captive. Then he turned his own rather
fatuous face to the company. “Yes, that’s it!” he cried in a certain
excitement. “Can’t you see it in the man’s face? Why, look at his eyes!”

Both
the Professor and the girl followed the direction of his glance. And though the
broad black scarf completely masked the lower half of Todhunter’s visage, they did
grow conscious of something struggling and intense about the upper part of it.

“
His
eyes do look queer,” cried the young woman, strongly moved. “You brutes; I believe
it’s hurting him!”

“
Not
that, I think,” said Dr Hood; “the eyes have certainly a singular expression. But
I should interpret those transverse wrinkles as expressing rather such slight
psychological abnormality —”

“
Oh,
bosh!” cried Father Brown: “can’t you see he’s laughing?”

“
Laughing!”
repeated the doctor, with a start; “but what on earth can he be laughing at?”

“
Well,”
replied the Reverend Brown apologetically, “not to put too fine a point on it, I
think he is laughing at you. And indeed, I’m a little inclined to laugh at myself,
now I know about it.”

“
Now
you know about what?” asked Hood, in some exasperation.

“
Now
I know,” replied the priest, “the profession of Mr Todhunter.”

He
shuffled about the room, looking at one object after another with what seemed to
be a vacant stare, and then invariably bursting into an equally vacant laugh, a
highly irritating process for those who had to watch it. He laughed very much
over the hat, still more uproariously over the broken glass, but the blood on
the sword point sent him into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned
to the fuming specialist.

“
Dr
Hood,” he cried enthusiastically, “you are a great poet! You have called an uncreated
being out of the void. How much more godlike that is than if you had only
ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts are rather commonplace and
comic by comparison.”

“
I
have no notion what you are talking about,” said Dr Hood rather haughtily; “my facts
are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete. A place may be permitted to
intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer the term), but only because the
corresponding details cannot as yet be ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass
—”

“
That’s
it, that’s it,” said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly, “that’s the first
idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so extremely absent. I suppose,”
he added reflectively, “that there was never anybody so absent as Mr Glass.”