The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (91 page)

“
There
it is again!” she cried.

For
a moment they all saw something — something that cleared the lady of the charges
of lying and hysteria not uncommonly brought against her. Thrust out of the
slate-blue darkness without, the face was pale, or, perhaps, blanched by pressure
against the glass; and the great, glaring eyes, encircled as with rings, gave
it rather the look of a great fish out of the dark-blue sea nosing at the
port-hole of a ship. But the gills or fins of the fish were a coppery red; they
were, in truth, fierce red whiskers and the upper part of a red beard. The next
moment it had vanished.

Devine
had taken a single stride towards the window when a shout resounded through the
house, a shout that seemed to shake it. It seemed almost too deafening to be distinguishable
as words; yet it was enough to stop Devine in his stride, and he knew what had
happened.

“
Necklace
gone!” shouted John Bankes, appearing huge and heaving in the doorway, and almost
instantly vanishing again with the plunge of a pursuing hound.

“
Thief
was at the window just now!” cried the detective, who had already darted to the
door, following the headlong John, who was already in the garden.

“
Be
careful,” wailed the lady, “they have pistols and things.”

“
So
have I,” boomed the distant voice of the dauntless John out of the dark garden.

Devine
had, indeed, noticed as the young man plunged past him that he was defiantly brandishing
a revolver, and hoped there would be no need for him to so defend himself. But
even as he had the thought, came the shock of two shots, as if one answered the
other, and awakened a wild flock of echoes in that still suburban garden. They
flapped into silence.

“
Is
John dead?” asked Opal in a low, shuddering voice.

Father
Brown had already advanced deeper into the darkness, and stood with his back to
them, looking down at something. It was he who answered her.

“
No,”
he said; “it is the other.”

Carver
had joined him, and for a moment the two figures, the tall and the short, blocked
out what view the fitful and stormy moonlight would allow. Then they moved to
one side and, the others saw the small, wiry figure lying slightly twisted, as
if with its last struggle. The false red beard was thrust upwards, as if
scornfully at the sky, and the moon shone on the great sham spectacles of the
man who had been called Moonshine.

“
What
an end,” muttered the detective, Carver. “After all his adventures, to be shot almost
by accident by a stockbroker in a suburban garden.”

The
stockbroker himself naturally regarded his own triumph with more solemnity, though
not without nervousness.

“
I
had to do it,” he gasped, still panting with exertion. “I’m sorry, he fired at me.”

“
There
will have to be an inquest, of course,” said Carver, gravely. “But I think there
will be nothing for you to worry about. There’s a revolver fallen from his hand
with one shot discharged; and he certainly didn’t fire after he’d got yours.”

By
this time they had assembled again in the room, and the detective was getting his
papers together for departure. Father Brown was standing opposite to him, looking
down at the table, as if in a brown study. Then he spoke abruptly:

“
Mr.
Carver, you have certainly worked out a very complete case in a very masterly way.
I rather suspected your professional business; but I never guessed you would
link everything up together so quickly — the bees and the beard and the spectacles
and the cipher and the necklace and everything.”

“
Always
satisfactory to get a case really rounded off.” said Carver.

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown, still looking at the table. “I admire it very much.” Then he
added with a modesty verging on nervousness: “It’s only fair to you to say that
I don’t believe a word of it.”

Devine
leaned forward with sudden interest. “Do you mean you don’t believe he is Moonshine,
the burglar?”

“
I
know he is the burglar, but he didn’t burgle,” answered Father Brown. “I know he
didn’t come here, or to the great house, to steal jewels, or get shot getting
away with them. Where are the jewels?”

“
Where
they generally are in such cases,” said Carver. “He’s either hidden them or passed
them on to a confederate. This was not a one-man job. Of course, my people are
searching the garden and warning the district.”

“
Perhaps,”
suggested Mrs. Bankes, “the confederate stole the necklace while Moonshine was looking
in at the window.”

“
Why
was Moonshine looking in at the window?” asked Father Brown quietly. “Why should
he want to look in at the window?”

“
Well,
what do you think?” cried the cheery John.

“
I
think,” said Father Brown, “that he never did want to look in at the window.”

“
Then
why did he do it?” demanded Carver. “What’s the good of talking in the air like
that? We’ve seen the whole thing acted before our very eyes.”

“
I’ve
seen a good many things acted before my eyes that I didn’t believe in,” replied
the priest. “So have you, on the stage and off.”

“
Father
Brown,” said Devine, with a certain respect in his tones, “will you tell us why
you can’t believe your eyes?”

“
Yes,
I will try to tell you,” answered the priest. Then he said gently:

“
You
know what I am and what we are. We don’t bother you much. We try to be friends with
all our neighbours. But you can’t think we do nothing. You can’t think we know
nothing. We mind our own business; but we know our own people. I knew this dead
man very well indeed; I was his confessor, and his friend. So far as a man can,
I knew his mind when he left that garden to-day; and his mind was like a glass
hive full of golden bees. It’s an under-statement to say his reformation was
sincere. He was one of those great penitents who manage to make more out of penitence
than others can make out of virtue. I say I was his confessor; but, indeed, it
was I who went to him for comfort. It did me good to be near so good a man. And
when I saw him lying there dead in the garden, it seemed to me as if certain
strange words that were said of old were spoken over him aloud in my ear. They
might well be; for if ever a man went straight to heaven, it might be he.”

“
Hang
it all,” said John Bankes restlessly, “after all, he was a convicted thief.”

“
Yes,”
said Father Brown; “and only a convicted thief has ever in this world heard that
assurance: ‘This night shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.’”

Nobody
seemed to know what to do with the silence that followed, until Devine said, abruptly,
at last:

“
Then
how in the world would you explain it all?”

The
priest shook his head. “I can’t explain it at all, just yet,” he said, simply. “I
can see one or two odd things, but I don’t understand them. As yet I’ve nothing
to go on to prove the man’s innocence, except the man. But I’m quite sure I’m right.”

He
sighed, and put out his hand for his big, black hat. As he removed it he remained
gazing at the table with rather a new expression, his round, straight-haired
head cocked at a new angle. It was rather as if some curious animal had come
out of his hat, as out of the hat of a conjurer. But the others, looking at the
table, could see nothing there but the detective’s documents and the tawdry old
property beard and spectacles.

“
Lord
bless us,” muttered Father Brown, “and he’s lying outside dead, in a beard and spectacles.”
He swung round suddenly upon Devine. “Here’s something to follow up, if you
want to know. Why did he have two beards?”

With
that he bustled in his undignified way out of the room; but Devine was now devoured
with curiosity, and pursued him into the front garden.

“
I
can’t tell you now,” — said Father Brown. “I’m not sure, and I’m bothered about
what to do. Come round and see me to-morrow, and I may be able to tell you the whole
thing. It may already be settled for me, and — did you hear that noise?”

“
A
motor-car starting,” remarked Devine.

“
Mr.
John Bankes’s motor-car,” said the priest. “I believe it goes very fast.”

“
He
certainly is of that opinion.” said Devine, with a smile.

“
It
will go far, as well as fast, to-night,” said Father Brown.

“
And
what do you mean by that?” demanded the other.

“
I
mean it will not return,” replied the priest. “John Bankes suspected something of
what I knew from what I said. John Bankes has gone and the emeralds and all the
other jewels with him.”

Next
day, Devine found Father Brown moving to and fro in front of the row of beehives,
sadly, but with a certain serenity.

“
I’ve
been telling the bees,” he said. “You know one has to tell the bees! ‘Those singing
masons building roofs of gold.’ What a line!” Then more abruptly. “He would
like the bees looked after.”

“
I
hope he doesn’t want the human beings neglected, when the whole swarm is buzzing
with curiosity,” observed the young man. “You were quite right when you said
that Bankes was gone with the jewels; but I don’t know how you knew, or even what
there was to be known.”

Father
Brown blinked benevolently at the bee-hives and said:

“
One
sort of stumbles on things, and there was one stumbling-block at the start. I was
puzzled by poor Barnard being shot up at Beechwood House. Now, even when
Michael was a master criminal, he made it a point of honour, even a point of
vanity, to succeed without any killing. It seemed extraordinary that when he
had become a sort of saint he should go out of his way to commit the sin he had
despised when he was a sinner. The rest of the business puzzled me to the last;
I could make nothing out of it, except that it wasn’t true. Then I had a
belated gleam of sense when I saw the beard and goggles and remembered the
thief had come in another beard with other goggles. Now, of course, it was just
possible that he had duplicates; but it was at least a coincidence that he used
neither the old glasses nor the old beard, both in good repair. Again, it was
just possible that he went out without them and had to procure new ones; but it
was unlikely. There was nothing to make him go motoring with Bankes at all; if
he was really going burgling, he could have taken his outfit easily in his
pocket. Besides, beards don’t grow on bushes. He would have found it hard to
get such things anywhere in the time.

“
No,
the more I thought of it the more I felt there was something funny about his having
a completely new outfit. And then the truth began to dawn on me by reason,
which I knew already by instinct. He never did go out with Bankes with any
intention of putting on the disguise. He never did put on the disguise. Somebody
else manufactured the disguise at leisure, and then put it on him.”

“
Put
it on him!” repeated Devine. “How the devil could they?”

“
Let
us go back,” said Father Brown, “and look at the thing through another window —
the window through which the young lady saw the ghost.”

“
The
ghost!” repeated the other, with a slight start.

“
She
called it the ghost,” said the little man, with composure, “and perhaps she was
not so far wrong. It’s quite true that she is what they call psychic. Her only mistake
is in thinking that being psychic is being spiritual. Some animals are psychic;
anyhow, she is a sensitive, and she was right when she felt that the face at
the window had a sort of horrible halo of deathly things.”

“
You
mean — —” began Devine.

“
I
mean it was a dead man who looked in at the window,” said Father Brown. “It was
a dead man who crawled round more than one house, looking in at more than one window.
Creepy, wasn’t it? But in one way it was the reverse of a ghost; for it was not
the antic of the soul freed from the body. It was the antic of the body freed
from the soul.”

He
blinked again at the beehive and continued: “But, I suppose, the shortest explanation
is to take it from the standpoint of the man who did it. You know the man who
did it. John Bankes.”

“
The
very last man I should have thought of,” said Devine.

“
The
very first man I thought of,” said Father Brown; “in so far as I had any right to
think of anybody. My friend, there are no good or bad social types or trades.
Any man can be a murderer like poor John; any man, even the same man, can be a
saint like poor Michael. But if there is one type that tends at times to be
more utterly godless than another, it is that rather brutal sort of business
man. He has no social ideal, let alone religion; he has neither the gentleman’s
traditions nor the trade unionist’s class loyalty. All his boasts about getting
good bargains were practically boasts of having cheated people. His snubbing of
his sister’s poor little attempts at mysticism was detestable. Her mysticism
was all nonsense; but he only hated spiritualism because it was spirituality.
Anyhow, there’s no doubt he was the villain of the piece; the only interest is
in a rather original piece of villainy. It was really a new and unique motive
for murder. It was the motive of using the corpse as a stage property — a sort
of hideous doll or dummy. At the start he conceived a plan of killing Michael
in the motor, merely to take him home and pretend to have killed him in the
garden. But all sorts of fantastic finishing touches followed quite naturally
from the primary fact; that he had at his disposal in a closed car at night the
dead body of a recognized and recognizable burglar. He could leave his
finger-prints and foot-prints; he could lean the familiar face against windows
and take it away. You will notice that Moonshine ostensibly appeared and vanished
while Bankes was ostensibly out of the room looking for the emerald necklace.