The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (98 page)

“
I
know what you are thinking,” said Father Brown, with a smile, “and it seems entirely
logical. Here we have Vaudrey, with some ugly story in his past — a mysterious
stranger come to haunt him, and getting whatever he wants out of him. In plain
words, you think Dalmon is a blackmailer.”

“
I
do,” said the other; “and a rotten thing to think, too.”

Father
Brown reflected for a moment and then said: “I think I should like to go up to the
house now and have a talk to Dr. Abbott.”

When
he came out of the house again an hour or two afterwards, he may have been
talking to Dr. Abbott, but he emerged in company with Sybil Rye, a pale girl
with reddish hair and a profile delicate and almost tremulous; at the sight of
her, one could instantly understand all the secretary’s story of her shuddering
candour. It recalled Godiva and certain tales of virgin martyrs; only the shy can
be so shameless for conscience’s sake. Smith came forward to meet them, and for
a moment they stood talking on the lawn. The day which had been brilliant from
daybreak was now glowing and even glaring; but Father Brown carried his black
bundle of an umbrella as well as wearing his black umbrella of a hat; and seemed,
in a general way, buttoned up to breast the storm. But perhaps it was only an
unconscious effect of attitude; and perhaps the storm was not a material storm.

“
What
I hate about it all,” Sybil was saying in a low voice, “is the talk that’s beginning
already; suspicions against everybody. John and Evan can answer for each other,
I suppose; but Dr. Abbott has had an awful scene with the butcher, who thinks
he is accused and is throwing accusations about in consequence.”

Evan
Smith looked very uncomfortable; then blurted out: “Look here, Sybil, I can’t say
much, but we don’t believe there’s any need for all that. It’s all very beastly,
but we don’t think there’s been — any violence.”

“
Have
you got a theory, then?” said the girl, looking instantly at the priest.

“
I
have heard a theory,” he replied, “which seems to me very convincing.”

He
stood looking rather dreamily towards the river; and Smith and Sybil began to talk
to each other swiftly, in lowered tones. The priest drifted along the river
bank, ruminating, and plunged into a plantation of thin trees on an almost
overhanging bank. The strong sun beat on the thin veil of little dancing leaves
like small green flames, and all the birds were singing as if the tree had a
hundred tongues. A minute or two later, Evan Smith heard his own name called
cautiously and yet clearly from the green depths of the thicket. He stepped
rapidly in that direction and met Father Brown returning. The priest said to
him, in a very low voice:

“
Don’t
let the lady come down here. Can’t you get rid of her? Ask her to telephone or something;
and then come back here again.”

Evan
Smith turned with a rather desperate appearance of carelessness and approached the
girl; but she was not the sort of person whom it is hard to make busy with small
jobs for others. In a very short time she had vanished into the house and Smith
turned to find that Father Brown had once more vanished into the thicket. Just
beyond the clump of trees was a sort of small chasm where the turf had subsided
to the level of the sand by the river. Father Brown was standing on the brink
of this cleft, looking down; but, either by accident or design, he was holding
his hat in his hand, in spite of the strong sun pouring on his head.

“
You
had better see this yourself,” he said, heavily, “as a matter of evidence. But I
warn you to be prepared.”

“
Prepared
for what?” asked the other

“
Only
for the most horrible thing I ever saw in my life,” said Father Brown.

Even
Smith stepped to the brink of the bank of turf and with difficulty repressed a cry
rather like a scream.

Sir
Arthur Vaudrey was glaring and grinning up at him; the face was turned up so that
he could have put his foot on it; the head was thrown back, with its wig of
whitish yellow hair towards him, so that he saw the face upside down. This made
it seem all the more like a part of a nightmare; as if a man were walking about
with his head stuck on the wrong way. What was he doing? Was it possible that
Vaudrey was really creeping about, hiding in the cracks of field and bank, and
peering out at them in this unnatural posture? The rest of the figure seemed
hunched and almost crooked, as if it had been crippled or deformed but on
looking more closely, this seemed only the foreshortening of limbs fallen in a
heap. Was he mad? Was he? The more Smith looked at him the stiffer the posture
seemed.

“
You
can’t see it from here properly,” said Father Brown, “but his throat is cut.”

Smith
shuddered suddenly. “I can well believe it’s the most horrible thing you’ve seen,”
he said. “I think it’s seeing the face upside down. I’ve seen that face at
breakfast, or dinner, every day for ten years; and it always looked quite pleasant
and polite. You turn it upside down and it looks like the face of a fiend.”

“
The
face really is smiling,” said Father Brown, soberly; “which is perhaps not the least
part of the riddle. Not many men smile while their throats are being cut, even
if they do it themselves. That smile, combined with those gooseberry eyes of
his that always seemed standing out of his head, is enough, no doubt, to explain
the expression. But it’s true, things look different upside down. Artists often
turn their drawings upside down to test their correctness. Sometimes, when it’s
difficult to turn the object itself upside down (as in the case of the
Matterhorn, let us say), they have been known to stand on their heads, or at
least look between their legs.”

The
priest, who was talking thus flippantly to steady the other man’s nerves, concluded
by saying, in a more serious tone: “I quite understand how it must have upset
you. Unfortunately, it also upset something else.”

“
What
do you mean?”

“
It
has upset the whole of our very complete theory,” replied the other; and he began
clambering down the bank on to the little strip of sand by the river.

“
Perhaps
he did it himself,” said Smith abruptly. “After all, that’s the most obvious sort
of escape, and fits in with our theory very well. He wanted a quiet place and
he came here and cut his throat.”

“
He
didn’t come here at all,” said Father Brown. “At least, not alive, and not by land.
He wasn’t killed here; there’s not enough blood. This sun has dried his hair
and clothes pretty well by now; but there are the traces of two trickles of
water in the sand. Just about here the tide comes up from the sea and makes an
eddy that washed the body into the creek and left it when the tide retired. But
the body must first have been washed down the river, presumably from the village,
for the river runs just behind the row of little houses and shops. Poor Vaudrey
died up in the hamlet, somehow; after all, I don’t think he committed suicide;
but the trouble is who would, or could, have killed him up in that potty little
place?”

He
began to draw rough designs with the point of his stumpy umbrella on the strip of
sand.

“
Let’s
see; how does the row of shops run? First, the butcher’s; well, of course, a butcher
would be an ideal performer with a large carving-knife. But you saw Vaudrey
come out, and it isn’t very probable that he stood in the outer shop while the
butcher said: ‘Good morning. Allow me to cut your throat! Thank you. And the
next article, please?’ Sir Arthur doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who’d
have stood there with a pleasant smile while this happened. He was a very strong
and vigorous man, with rather a violent temper. And who else, except the butcher,
could have stood up to him? The next shop is kept by an old woman. Then comes
the tobacconist, who is certainly a man, but I am told quite a small and timid
one. Then there is the dressmaker’s, run by two maiden ladies, and then a
refreshment shop run by a man who happens to be in hospital and who has left
his wife in charge. There are two or three village lads, assistants and errand
boys, but they were away on a special job. The refreshment shop ends the street;
there is nothing beyond that but the inn, with the policeman between.”

He
made a punch with the ferrule of his umbrella to represent the policeman, and remained
moodily staring up the river. Then he made a slight movement with his hand and,
stepping quickly across, stooped over the corpse.

“
Ah,”
he said, straightening himself and letting out a great breath. “The tobacconist!
Why in the world didn’t I remember that about the tobacconist?”

“
What
is the matter with you?” demanded Smith in some exasperation; for Father Brown was
rolling his eyes and muttering, and he had uttered the word “tobacconist” as if
it were a terrible word of doom.

“
Did
you notice,” said the priest, after a pause, “something rather curious about his
face?”

“
Curious,
my God!” said Evan, with a retrospective shudder. “Anyhow, his throat was cut. ...”

“
I
said his face,” said the cleric quietly. “Besides, don’t you notice he has hurt
his hand and there’s a small bandage round it?”

“
Oh,
that has nothing to do with it,” said Evan hastily. “That happened before and was
quite an accident. He cut his hand with a broken ink-bottle while we were working
together.”

“
It
has something to do with it, for all that,” replied Father Brown.

There
was a long silence, and the priest walked moodily along the sand, trailing his umbrella
and sometimes muttering the word “tobacconist,” till the very word chilled his
friend with fear. Then he suddenly lifted the umbrella and pointed to a
boat-house among the rushes.

“
Is
that the family boat?” he asked. “I wish you’d just scull me up the river; I want
to look at those houses from the back. There’s no time to lose. They may find
the body; but we must risk that.”

Smith
was already pulling the little boat upstream towards the hamlet before Father Brown
spoke again. Then he said:

“
By
the way, I found out from old Abbott what was the real story about poor Vaudrey’s
misdemeanour. It was a rather curious story about an Egyptian official who had
insulted him by saying that a good Moslem would avoid swine and Englishmen, but
preferred swine; or some such tactful remark. Whatever happened at the time,
the quarrel was apparently renewed some years after, when the official visited
England; and Vaudrey, in his violent passion, dragged the man to a pig-sty on
the farm attached to the country house and threw him in, breaking his arm and
leg and leaving him there till next morning. There was rather a row about it,
of course, but many people thought Vaudrey had acted in a pardonable passion of
patriotism. Anyhow, it seems not quite the thing that would have kept a man
silent under deadly blackmail for decades.”

“
Then
you don’t think it had anything to do with the story we are considering?” asked
the secretary, thoughtfully.

“
I
think it had a thundering lot to do with the story I am considering now,” said Father
Brown.

They
were now floating past the low wall and the steep strips of back garden running
down from the back doors to the river. Father Brown counted them carefully, pointing
with his umbrella, and when he came to the third he said again:

“
Tobacconist!
Is the tobacconist by any chance... .? But I think I’ll act on my guess till I know.
Only, I’ll tell you what it was I thought odd about Sir Arthur’s face.”

“
And
what was that?” asked his companion, pausing and resting on his oars for an instant.

“
He
was a great dandy,” said Father Brown, “and the face was only half-shaved. . . .
Could you stop here a moment? We could tie up the boat to that post.”

A
minute or two afterwards they had clambered over the little wall and were mounting
the steep cobbled paths of the little garden, with its rectangular beds of
vegetables and flowers.

“
You
see, the tobacconist does grow potatoes,” said Father Brown. “Associations with
Sir Walter Raleigh, no doubt. Plenty of potatoes and plenty of potato sacks. These
little country people have not lost all the habits of peasants; they still run
two or three jobs at once. But country tobacconists very often do one odd job
extra, that I never thought of till I saw Vaudrey’s chin. Nine times out of ten
you call the shop the tobacconist’s, but it is also the barber’s. He’d cut his
hand and couldn’t shave himself; so he came up here. Does that suggest anything
else to you?”

“
It
suggests a good deal,” replied Smith; “but I expect it will suggest a good deal
more to you.”

“
Does
it suggest, for instance,” observed Father Brown, “the only conditions in which
a vigorous and rather violent gentleman might be smiling pleasantly when his throat
was cut?”

The
next moment they had passed through a dark passage or two at the back of the house,
and came into the back room of the shop, dimly lit by filtered light from
beyond and a dingy and cracked looking-glass. It seemed, somehow, like the green
twilight of a tank; but there was light enough to see the rough apparatus of a
barber’s shop and the pale and even panic-sticken face of a barber.