The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (38 page)

“
She
retraced her steps in equal secrecy and the door closed behind her again. I was
about to climb the fence and follow, when I realized that the detective fever that
had lured me into the adventure was rather undignified; and that in a more authoritative
capacity I already held all the cards in my hand. I was just turning away when
a new noise broke on the night. A window was thrown up in one of the upper
floors, but just round the corner of the house so that I could not see it; and
a voice of terrible distinctness was heard shouting across the dark garden to
know where Lord Falconroy was, for he was missing from every room in the house.
There was no mistaking that voice. I have heard it on many a political platform
or meeting of directors; it was Ireton Todd himself. Some of the others seemed
to have gone to the lower windows or on to the steps, and were calling up to
him that Falconroy had gone for a stroll down to the Pilgrim’s Pond an hour
before, and could not be traced since. Then Todd cried ‘Mighty Murder!’ and
shut down the window violently; and I could hear him plunging down the stairs
inside. Repossessing myself of my former and wiser purpose, I whipped out of
the way of the general search that must follow; and returned here not later
than eight o’clock.

“
I
now ask you to recall that little Society paragraph which seemed to you so painfully
lacking in interest. If the convict was not keeping the shot for Todd, as he
evidently wasn’t, it is most likely that he was keeping it for Lord Falconroy;
and it looks as if he had delivered the goods. No more handy place to shoot a
man than in the curious geological surroundings of that pool, where a body
thrown down would sink through thick slime to a depth practically unknown. Let
us suppose, then, that our friend with the cropped hair came to kill Falconroy
and not Todd. But, as I have pointed out, there are many reasons why people in
America might want to kill Todd. There is no reason why anybody in America
should want to kill an English lord newly landed, except for the one reason
mentioned in the pink paper — that the lord is paying his attentions to the
millionaire’s daughter. Our crop-haired friend, despite his ill-fitting clothes,
must be an aspiring lover.

“
I
know the notion will seem to you jarring and even comic; but that’s because you
are English. It sounds to you like saying the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter
will be married in St George’s, Hanover Square, to a crossing-sweeper on
ticket-of-leave. You don’t do justice to the climbing and aspiring power of our
more remarkable citizens. You see a good-looking grey-haired man in evening-dress
with a sort of authority about him, you know he is a pillar of the State, and
you fancy he had a father. You are in error. You do not realize that a
comparatively few years ago he may have been in a tenement or (quite likely) in
a jail. You don’t allow for our national buoyancy and uplift. Many of our most
influential citizens have not only risen recently, but risen comparatively late
in life. Todd’s daughter was fully eighteen when her father first made his
pile; so there isn’t really anything impossible in her having a hanger-on in
low life; or even in her hanging on to him, as I think she must be doing, to
judge by the lantern business. If so, the hand that held the lantern may not be
unconnected with the hand that held the gun. This case, sir, will make a
noise.”

“
Well,”
said the priest patiently, “and what did you do next?”

“
I
reckon you’ll be shocked,” replied Greywood Usher, “as I know you don’t cotton to
the march of science in these matters. I am given a good deal of discretion here,
and perhaps take a little more than I’m given; and I thought it was an excellent
opportunity to test that Psychometric Machine I told you about. Now, in my
opinion, that machine can’t lie.”

“
No
machine can lie,” said Father Brown; “nor can it tell the truth.”

“
It
did in this case, as I’ll show you,” went on Usher positively. “I sat the man in
the ill-fitting clothes in a comfortable chair, and simply wrote words on a blackboard;
and the machine simply recorded the variations of his pulse; and I simply
observed his manner. The trick is to introduce some word connected with the
supposed crime in a list of words connected with something quite different, yet
a list in which it occurs quite naturally. Thus I wrote ‘heron’ and ‘eagle’ and
‘owl’, and when I wrote ‘falcon’ he was tremendously agitated; and when I began
to make an ‘r’ at the end of the word, that machine just bounded. Who else in
this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman
like Falconroy except the man who’s shot him? Isn’t that better evidence than a
lot of gabble from witnesses — if the evidence of a reliable machine?”

“
You
always forget,” observed his companion, “that the reliable machine always has to
be worked by an unreliable machine.”

“
Why,
what do you mean?” asked the detective.

“
I
mean Man,” said Father Brown, “the most unreliable machine I know of. I don’t want
to be rude; and I don’t think you will consider Man to be an offensive or inaccurate
description of yourself. You say you observed his manner; but how do you know
you observed it right? You say the words have to come in a natural way; but how
do you know that you did it naturally? How do you know, if you come to that,
that he did not observe your manner? Who is to prove that you were not
tremendously agitated? There was no machine tied on to your pulse.”

“
I
tell you,” cried the American in the utmost excitement, “I was as cool as a cucumber.”

“
Criminals
also can be as cool as cucumbers,” said Brown with a smile. “And almost as cool
as you.”

“
Well,
this one wasn’t,” said Usher, throwing the papers about. “Oh, you make me tired!”

“
I’m
sorry,” said the other. “I only point out what seems a reasonable possibility. If
you could tell by his manner when the word that might hang him had come, why shouldn’t
he tell from your manner that the word that might hang him was coming? I should
ask for more than words myself before I hanged anybody.”

Usher
smote the table and rose in a sort of angry triumph.

“
And
that,” he cried, “is just what I’m going to give you. I tried the machine first
just in order to test the thing in other ways afterwards and the machine, sir, is
right.”

He
paused a moment and resumed with less excitement. “I rather want to insist, if it
comes to that, that so far I had very little to go on except the scientific experiment.
There was really nothing against the man at all. His clothes were ill-fitting,
as I’ve said, but they were rather better, if anything, than those of the
submerged class to which he evidently belonged. Moreover, under all the stains
of his plunging through ploughed fields or bursting through dusty hedges, the man
was comparatively clean. This might mean, of course, that he had only just
broken prison; but it reminded me more of the desperate decency of the
comparatively respectable poor. His demeanour was, I am bound to confess, quite
in accordance with theirs. He was silent and dignified as they are; he seemed
to have a big, but buried, grievance, as they do. He professed total ignorance
of the crime and the whole question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience
for something sensible that might come to take him out of his meaningless
scrape. He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had
helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you
would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world
except that little finger on the dial that pointed to the change of his pulse.

“
Then,
sir, the machine was on its trial; and the machine was right. By the time I came
with him out of the private room into the vestibule where all sorts of other people
were awaiting examination, I think he had already more or less made up his mind
to clear things up by something like a confession. He turned to me and began to
say in a low voice: ‘Oh, I can’t stick this any more. If you must know all
about me — ’

“
At
the same instant one of the poor women sitting on the long bench stood up, screaming
aloud and pointing at him with her finger. I have never in my life heard
anything more demoniacally distinct. Her lean finger seemed to pick him out as
if it were a pea-shooter. Though the word was a mere howl, every syllable was
as clear as a separate stroke on the clock.

“‘
Drugger
Davis!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve got Drugger Davis!’

“
Among
the wretched women, mostly thieves and streetwalkers, twenty faces were turned,
gaping with glee and hate. If I had never heard the words, I should have known by
the very shock upon his features that the so-called Oscar Rian had heard his real
name. But I’m not quite so ignorant, you may be surprised to hear. Drugger Davis
was one of the most terrible and depraved criminals that ever baffled our police.
It is certain he had done murder more than once long before his last exploit
with the warder. But he was never entirely fixed for it, curiously enough
because he did it in the same manner as those milder — or meaner — crimes for
which he was fixed pretty often. He was a handsome, well-bred-looking brute, as
he still is, to some extent; and he used mostly to go about with barmaids or
shop-girls and do them out of their money. Very often, though, he went a good
deal farther; and they were found drugged with cigarettes or chocolates and
their whole property missing. Then came one case where the girl was found dead;
but deliberation could not quite be proved, and, what was more practical still,
the criminal could not be found. I heard a rumour of his having reappeared
somewhere in the opposite character this time, lending money instead of
borrowing it; but still to such poor widows as he might personally fascinate,
but still with the same bad result for them. Well, there is your innocent man,
and there is his innocent record. Even, since then, four criminals and three
warders have identified him and confirmed the story. Now what have you got to
say to my poor little machine after that? Hasn’t the machine done for him? Or
do you prefer to say that the woman and I have done for him?”

“
As
to what you’ve done for him,” replied Father Brown, rising and shaking himself in
a floppy way, “you’ve saved him from the electrical chair. I don’t think they
can kill Drugger Davis on that old vague story of the poison; and as for the
convict who killed the warder, I suppose it’s obvious that you haven’t got him.
Mr Davis is innocent of that crime, at any rate.”

“
What
do you mean?” demanded the other. “Why should he be innocent of that crime?”

“
Why,
bless us all!” cried the small man in one of his rare moments of animation, “why,
because he’s guilty of the other crimes! I don’t know what you people are made
of. You seem to think that all sins are kept together in a bag. You talk as if
a miser on Monday were always a spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man
you have here spent weeks and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of
money; that he used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst; that he
turned up afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted — let us admit,
for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I will tell you
what he didn’t do. He didn’t storm a spiked wall against a man with a loaded
gun. He didn’t write on the wall with his own hand, to say he had done it. He
didn’t stop to state that his justification was self-defence. He didn’t explain
that he had no quarrel with the poor warder. He didn’t name the house of the
rich man to which he was going with the gun. He didn’t write his own, initials
in a man’s blood. Saints alive! Can’t you see the whole character is different,
in good and evil? Why, you don’t seem to be like I am a bit. One would think
you’d never had any vices of your own.”

The
amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the door of his private
and official room was hammered and rattled in an unceremonious way to which he
was totally unaccustomed.

The
door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to the conclusion
that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after he began to think he
was mad himself. There burst and fell into his private room a man in the
filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby
green shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a
tiger’s. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a
matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself,
and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided
himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he
thought he had never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above
all, he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like that
speak to him first.

“
See
here, old man Usher,” shouted the being in the red handkerchief, “I’m getting tired.
Don’t you try any of your hide-and-seek on me; I don’t get fooled any. Leave go
of my guests, and I’ll let up on the fancy clockwork. Keep him here for a split
instant and you’ll feel pretty mean. I reckon I’m not a man with no pull.”

The
eminent Usher was regarding the bellowing monster with an amazement which had dried
up all other sentiments. The mere shock to his eyes had rendered his ears,
almost useless. At last he rang a bell with a hand of violence. While the bell
was still strong and pealing, the voice of Father Brown fell soft but distinct.