The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (87 page)

“
You
are right,” said Bagshaw after a pause. “If you saw that, it certainly looks as
if it had something to do with it.”

“
And
if it had anything to do with it,” said the priest very gently, “it looks as if
there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that is Mr. Michael Flood,
who entered the garden over the wall in an irregular fashion, and then tried to
leave it in the same irregular fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me
believe in his innocence.”

“
Let
us go into the house,” said Bagshaw abruptly.

As
they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way, Bagshaw fell back
a pace or two and spoke to his friend.

“
Something
odd about that servant,” he said. “Says his name is Green, though he doesn’t look
it; but there seems no doubt he’s really Gwynne’s servant, apparently the only
regular servant he had. But the queer thing is, that he flatly denied that his
master was in the garden at all, dead or alive. Said the old judge had gone out
to a grand legal dinner and couldn’t be home for hours, and gave that as his
excuse for slipping out.”

“
Did
he,” asked Underhill, “give any excuse for his curious way of slipping in?”

“
No,
none that I can make sense of,” answered the detective. “I can’t make him out. He
seems to be scared of something.”

Entering
by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of the entrance hall, which
ran along the side of the house and ended with the front door, surmounted by a
dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned pattern. A faint, grey light was beginning
to outline its radiation upon the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured
sunrise; but what light there was in the hall came from a single, shaded lamp,
also of an antiquated sort, that stood on a bracket in a corner. By the light
of this Bagshaw could distinguish the debris of which Brown had spoken. A tall
palm, with long sweeping leaves, had fallen full length, and its dark red pot
was shattered into shards. They lay littered on the carpet, along with pale and
gleaming fragments of a broken mirror, of which the almost empty frame hung
behind them on the wall at the end of the vestibule. At right angles to this
entrance, and directly opposite the side-door as they entered, was another and
similar passage leading into the rest of the house. At the other end of it
could be seen the telephone which the servant had used to summon the priest;
and a half-open door, showing, even through the crack, the serried ranks of
great leather-bound books, marked the entrance to the judge’s study.

Bagshaw
stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments at his feet.

“
You’re
quite right,” he said to the priest; “there’s been a struggle here. And it must
have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer.”

“
It
seemed to me,” said Father Brown modestly, “that something had happened here.”

“
Yes;
it’s pretty clear what happened,” assented the detective. “The murderer entered
by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let him in. There was a death
grapple, possibly a chance shot, that hit the glass, though they might have
broken it with a stray kick or anything. Gwynne managed to free himself and
fled into the garden, where he was pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy
that’s the whole story of the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round
the other rooms.”

The
other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed significantly
to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer of the library desk.

“
Looks
as if he was expecting this,” he said; “yet it seems queer he didn’t take it with
him when he went out into the hall.”

Eventually
they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front door. Father Brown
letting his eye rove around in a rather absent-minded fashion. The two corridors,
monotonously papered in the same grey and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize
the dust and dingy floridity of the few early Victorian ornaments, the green
rust that devoured the bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the
frame of the broken mirror.

“
They
say it’s bad luck to break a looking-glass,” he said. “This looks like the very
house of ill-luck. There’s something about the very furniture —”

“
That’s
rather odd,” said Bagshaw sharply. “I thought the front door would be shut, but
it’s left on the latch.”

There
was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front garden, a narrower
and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a curiously clipped hedge
with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the shadow of which some broken
steps peeped out.

Father
Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few moments after
he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet voice in conversation
above their heads, as if he were talking to somebody at the top of a tree. The detective
followed, and found that the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a
broken bridge, over-hanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It
just curled round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of
coloured lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some abandoned
architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches across the lawn.
Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find anybody in the small
hours between night and morning; but he was not looking at the details of it
just then. He was looking at the man who was found.

As
the man stood with his back turned — a small man in light grey clothes — the one
outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of hair, as yellow and radiant
as the head of a huge dandelion. It was literally outstanding like a halo, and
something in that association made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily
turned on them, rather a shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an
oval face of the mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly with
a powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of a
pugilist.

“
This
is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand,” said Father Brown, as calmly as
if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.

“
Whoever
he is,” said Bagshaw, “I must trouble him to come with me and answer a few questions.”

Mr.
Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it came to the answering
of questions. There, in that corner of the old garden, as the grey twilight
before dawn began to creep over the heavy hedges and the broken bridge, and
afterwards in a succession of circumstances and stages of legal inquiry that
grew more and more ominous, he refused to say anything except that he had
intended to call on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had not done so because he could
not get anyone to answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was
practically open, he snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was somewhat late,
he snarled. The little that he said was obscure, either because he really knew
hardly any English, or because he knew better than to know any. His opinions
seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency
of his poetry for those who could follow it; and it seemed possible that his
business with the judge, and perhaps his quarrel with the judge, had been
something in the anarchist line. Gwynne was known to have had something of a
mania about Bolshevist spies, as he had about German spies. Anyhow, one coincidence,
only a few moments after his capture, confirmed Bagshaw in the impression that
the case must be taken seriously. As they went out of the front gate into the
street, they so happened to encounter yet another neighbour, Duller, the cigar
merchant from next door, conspicuous by his brown, shrewd face and the unique
orchid in his buttonhole; for he had a name in that branch of horticulture.
Rather to the surprise of the rest, he hailed his neighbour, the poet, in a
matter-of-fact manner, almost as if he had expected to see him.

“
Hallo,
here we are again,” he said. “Had a long talk with old Gwynne, I suppose?”

“
Sir
Humphrey Gwynne is dead,” said Bagshaw. “I am investigating the case and I must
ask you to explain.”

Buller
stood as still as the lamp-post beside him, possibly stiffened with surprise. The
red end of his cigar brightened and darkened rhythmically, but his brown face
was in shadow; when he spoke it was with quite a new voice.

“
I
only mean,” he said, “that when I passed two hours ago Mr. Orm was going in at this
gate to see Sir Humphrey.”

“
He
says he hasn’t seen him yet,” observed Bagshaw, “or even been into the house.”

“
It’s
a long time to stand on the door-step,” observed Buller.

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown; “it’s rather a long time to stand in the street.”

“
I’ve
been home since then,” said the cigar merchant. “Been writing letters and came out
again to post them.”

“
You’ll
have to tell all that later,” said Bagshaw. “Good night — or good morning.”

The
trial of Osric Orm for the murder of Sir Humphrey Gwynne, which filled the newspapers
for so many weeks, really turned entirely on the same crux as that little talk
under the lamp-post, when the grey-green dawn was breaking about the dark
streets and gardens. Everything came back to the enigma of those two empty
hours between the time when Buller saw Orm going in at the garden gate, and the
time when Father Brown found him apparently still lingering in the garden. He
had certainly had the time to commit six murders, and might almost have
committed them for want of something to do; for he could give no coherent account
of what he was doing. It was argued by the prosecution that he had also the
opportunity, as the front door was unlatched, and the side-door into the larger
garden left standing open. The court followed, with considerable interest, Bagshaw’s
clear reconstruction of the struggle in the passage, of which the traces were
so evident; indeed, the police had since found the shot that had shattered the
glass. Finally, the hole in the hedge to which he had been tracked, had very
much the appearance of a hiding-place. On the other hand. Sir Matthew Blake,
the very able counsel for the defence, turned this last argument the other way:
asking why any man should entrap himself in a place without possible exit, when
it would obviously be much more sensible to slip out into the street. Sir
Matthew Blake also made effective use of the mystery that still rested upon the
motive for the murder. Indeed, upon this point, the passages between Sir
Matthew Blake and Sir Arthur Travers, the equally brilliant advocate for the
prosecution, turned rather to the advantage of the prisoner. Sir Arthur could
only throw out suggestions about a Bolshevist conspiracy which sounded a little
thin. But when it came to investigating the facts of Orm’s mysterious behaviour
that night he was considerably more effective.

The
prisoner went into the witness-box, chiefly because his astute counsel calculated
that it would create a bad impression if he did not. But he was almost as
uncommunicative to his own counsel as to the prosecuting counsel. Sir Arthur
Travers made all possible capital out of his stubborn silence, but did not
succeed in breaking it. Sir Arthur was a long, gaunt man, with a long, cadaverous
face, in striking contrast to the sturdy figure and bright, bird-like eye of
Sir Matthew Blake. But if Sir Matthew suggested a very cocksure sort of cock-sparrow,
Sir Arthur might more truly have been compared to a crane or stork; as he
leaned forward, prodding the poet with questions, his long nose might have been
a long beak.

“
Do
you mean to tell the jury,” he asked, in tones of grating incredulity, “that you
never went in to see the deceased gentleman at all?”

“
No!”
replied Orm shortly.

“
You
wanted to see him, I suppose. You must have been very anxious to see him.
Didn’t you wait two whole hours in front of his front door?”

“
Yes,”
replied the other.

“
And
yet you never even noticed the door was open?”

“
No,”
said Orm.

“
What
in the world were you doing for two hours in somebody’s else’s front garden?” insisted
the barrister; “You were doing something, I suppose?”

“
Yes.”

“
Is
it a secret?” asked Sir Arthur, with adamantine jocularity.

“
It’s
a secret from you,” answered the poet.

It
was upon this suggestion of a secret that Sir Arthur seized in developing his line
of accusation. With a boldness which some thought unscrupulous, he turned the
very mystery of the motive, which was the strongest part of his opponent’s case,
into an argument for his own. He gave it as the first fragmentary hint of some
far-flung and elaborate conspiracy, in which a patriot had perished like one
caught in the coils of an octopus.

“
Yes,”
he cried in a vibrating voice, “my learned friend is perfectly right! We do not
know the exact reason why this honourable public servant was murdered. We shall
not know the reason why the next public servant is murdered. If my learned friend
himself falls a victim to his eminence, and the hatred which the hellish powers
of destruction feel for the guardians of law, he will be murdered, and he will
not know the reason. Half the decent people in this court will be butchered in
their beds, and we shall not know the reason. And we shall never know the
reason and never arrest the massacre, until it has depopulated our country, so
long as the defence is permitted to stop all proceedings with this stale tag
about ‘motive,’ when every other fact in the case, every glaring incongruity,
every gaping silence, tells us that we stand in the presence of Cain.”