The Complete Father Brown Mysteries [Annotated, With Introduction, Rare Additional Material] (5 page)

When
this spirit of the captain spoke in Valentin he was obeyed like a bugle. Dr. Simon
went through to the armoury and routed out Ivan, the public detective’s private
detective. Galloway went to the drawing-room and told the terrible news tactfully
enough, so that by the time the company assembled there the ladies were already
startled and already soothed. Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist
stood at the head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like
symbolic statues of their two philosophies of death.

Ivan,
the confidential man with the scar and the moustaches, came out of the house like
a cannon ball, and came racing across the lawn to Valentin like a dog to his
master. His livid face was quite lively with the glow of this domestic detective
story, and it was with almost unpleasant eagerness that he asked his master’s
permission to examine the remains.

“
Yes;
look, if you like, Ivan,” said Valentin, “but don’t be long. We must go in and thrash
this out in the house.”

Ivan
lifted the head, and then almost let it drop.

“
Why,”
he gasped, “it’s — no, it isn’t; it can’t be. Do you know this man, sir?”

“
No,”
said Valentin indifferently; “we had better go inside.”

Between
them they carried the corpse to a sofa in the study, and then all made their way
to the drawing-room.

The
detective sat down at a desk quietly, and even without hesitation; but his eye was
the iron eye of a judge at assize. He made a few rapid notes upon paper in front
of him, and then said shortly: “Is everybody here?”

“
Not
Mr. Brayne,” said the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, looking round.

“
No,”
said Lord Galloway in a hoarse, harsh voice. “And not Mr. Neil O’Brien, I fancy.
I saw that gentleman walking in the garden when the corpse was still warm.”

“
Ivan,”
said the detective, “go and fetch Commandant O’Brien and Mr. Brayne. Mr. Brayne,
I know, is finishing a cigar in the dining-room; Commandant O’Brien, I think,
is walking up and down the conservatory. I am not sure.”

The
faithful attendant flashed from the room, and before anyone could stir or speak
Valentin went on with the same soldierly swiftness of exposition.

“
Everyone
here knows that a dead man has been found in the garden, his head cut clean from
his body. Dr. Simon, you have examined it. Do you think that to cut a man’s
throat like that would need great force? Or, perhaps, only a very sharp knife?”

“
I
should say that it could not be done with a knife at all,” said the pale doctor.

“
Have
you any thought,” resumed Valentin, “of a tool with which it could be done?”

“
Speaking
within modern probabilities, I really haven’t,” said the doctor, arching his painful
brows. “It’s not easy to hack a neck through even clumsily, and this was a very
clean cut. It could be done with a battle-axe or an old headsman’s axe, or an
old two-handed sword.”

“
But,
good heavens!” cried the Duchess, almost in hysterics, “there aren’t any two-handed
swords and battle-axes round here.”

Valentin
was still busy with the paper in front of him. “Tell me,” he said, still writing
rapidly, “could it have been done with a long French cavalry sabre?”

A
low knocking came at the door, which, for some unreasonable reason, curdled everyone’s
blood like the knocking in Macbeth. Amid that frozen silence Dr. Simon managed
to say: “A sabre — yes, I suppose it could.”

“
Thank
you,” said Valentin. “Come in, Ivan.”

The
confidential Ivan opened the door and ushered in Commandant Neil O’Brien, whom he
had found at last pacing the garden again.

The
Irish officer stood up disordered and defiant on the threshold. “What do you want
with me?” he cried.

“
Please
sit down,” said Valentin in pleasant, level tones. “Why, you aren’t wearing your
sword. Where is it?”

“
I
left it on the library table,” said O’Brien, his brogue deepening in his disturbed
mood. “It was a nuisance, it was getting —”

“
Ivan,”
said Valentin, “please go and get the Commandant’s sword from the library.” Then,
as the servant vanished, “Lord Galloway says he saw you leaving the garden just
before he found the corpse. What were you doing in the garden?”

The
Commandant flung himself recklessly into a chair. “Oh,” he cried in pure Irish,
“admirin’ the moon. Communing with Nature, me bhoy.”

A
heavy silence sank and endured, and at the end of it came again that trivial and
terrible knocking. Ivan reappeared, carrying an empty steel scabbard. “This is
all I can find,” he said.

“
Put
it on the table,” said Valentin, without looking up.

There
was an inhuman silence in the room, like that sea of inhuman silence round the dock
of the condemned murderer. The Duchess’s weak exclamations had long ago died
away. Lord Galloway’s swollen hatred was satisfied and even sobered. The voice
that came was quite unexpected.

“
I
think I can tell you,” cried Lady Margaret, in that clear, quivering voice with
which a courageous woman speaks publicly. “I can tell you what Mr. O’Brien was doing
in the garden, since he is bound to silence. He was asking me to marry him. I
refused; I said in my family circumstances I could give him nothing but my
respect. He was a little angry at that; he did not seem to think much of my respect.
I wonder,” she added, with rather a wan smile, “if he will care at all for it
now. For I offer it him now. I will swear anywhere that he never did a thing
like this.”

Lord
Galloway had edged up to his daughter, and was intimidating her in what he imagined
to be an undertone. “Hold your tongue, Maggie,” he said in a thunderous
whisper. “Why should you shield the fellow? Where’s his sword? Where’s his
confounded cavalry —”

He
stopped because of the singular stare with which his daughter was regarding him,
a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for the whole group.

“
You
old fool!” she said in a low voice without pretence of piety, “what do you suppose
you are trying to prove? I tell you this man was innocent while with me. But if
he wasn’t innocent, he was still with me. If he murdered a man in the garden,
who was it who must have seen — who must at least have known? Do you hate Neil
so much as to put your own daughter —”

Lady
Galloway screamed. Everyone else sat tingling at the touch of those satanic tragedies
that have been between lovers before now. They saw the proud, white face of the
Scotch aristocrat and her lover, the Irish adventurer, like old portraits in a
dark house. The long silence was full of formless historical memories of
murdered husbands and poisonous paramours.

In
the centre of this morbid silence an innocent voice said: “Was it a very long cigar?”

The
change of thought was so sharp that they had to look round to see who had spoken.

“
I
mean,” said little Father Brown, from the corner of the room, “I mean that cigar
Mr. Brayne is finishing. It seems nearly as long as a walking-stick.”

Despite
the irrelevance there was assent as well as irritation in Valentin’s face as he
lifted his head.

“
Quite
right,” he remarked sharply. “Ivan, go and see about Mr. Brayne again, and bring
him here at once.”

The
instant the factotum had closed the door, Valentin addressed the girl with an entirely
new earnestness.

“
Lady
Margaret,” he said, “we all feel, I am sure, both gratitude and admiration for your
act in rising above your lower dignity and explaining the Commandant’s conduct.
But there is a hiatus still. Lord Galloway, I understand, met you passing from
the study to the drawing-room, and it was only some minutes afterwards that he
found the garden and the Commandant still walking there.”

“
You
have to remember,” replied Margaret, with a faint irony in her voice, “that I had
just refused him, so we should scarcely have come back arm in arm. He is a gentleman,
anyhow; and he loitered behind — and so got charged with murder.”

“
In
those few moments,” said Valentin gravely, “he might really —”

The
knock came again, and Ivan put in his scarred face.

“
Beg
pardon, sir,” he said, “but Mr. Brayne has left the house.”

“
Left!”
cried Valentin, and rose for the first time to his feet.

“
Gone.
Scooted. Evaporated,” replied Ivan in humorous French. “His hat and coat are gone,
too, and I’ll tell you something to cap it all. I ran outside the house to find
any traces of him, and I found one, and a big trace, too.”

“
What
do you mean?” asked Valentin.

“
I’ll
show you,” said his servant, and reappeared with a flashing naked cavalry sabre,
streaked with blood about the point and edge. Everyone in the room eyed it as
if it were a thunderbolt; but the experienced Ivan went on quite quietly:

“
I
found this,” he said, “flung among the bushes fifty yards up the road to Paris.
In other words, I found it just where your respectable Mr. Brayne threw it when
he ran away.”

There
was again a silence, but of a new sort. Valentin took the sabre, examined it, reflected
with unaffected concentration of thought, and then turned a respectful face to
O’Brien. “Commandant,” he said, “we trust you will always produce this weapon
if it is wanted for police examination. Meanwhile,” he added, slapping the
steel back in the ringing scabbard, “let me return you your sword.”

At
the military symbolism of the action the audience could hardly refrain from applause.

For
Neil O’Brien, indeed, that gesture was the turning-point of existence. By the time
he was wandering in the mysterious garden again in the colours of the morning
the tragic futility of his ordinary mien had fallen from him; he was a man with
many reasons for happiness. Lord Galloway was a gentleman, and had offered him
an apology. Lady Margaret was something better than a lady, a woman at least,
and had perhaps given him something better than an apology, as they drifted
among the old flowerbeds before breakfast. The whole company was more lighthearted
and humane, for though the riddle of the death remained, the load of suspicion
was lifted off them all, and sent flying off to Paris with the strange
millionaire — a man they hardly knew. The devil was cast out of the house — he
had cast himself out.

Still,
the riddle remained; and when O’Brien threw himself on a garden seat beside Dr.
Simon, that keenly scientific person at once resumed it. He did not get much talk
out of O’Brien, whose thoughts were on pleasanter things.

“
I
can’t say it interests me much,” said the Irishman frankly, “especially as it seems
pretty plain now. Apparently Brayne hated this stranger for some reason; lured
him into the garden, and killed him with my sword. Then he fled to the city,
tossing the sword away as he went. By the way, Ivan tells me the dead man had a
Yankee dollar in his pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne’s, and that seems
to clinch it. I don’t see any difficulties about the business.”

“
There
are five colossal difficulties,” said the doctor quietly; “like high walls within
walls. Don’t mistake me. I don’t doubt that Brayne did it; his flight, I fancy,
proves that. But as to how he did it. First difficulty: Why should a man kill
another man with a great hulking sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket
knife and put it back in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise
or outcry? Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer
no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the evening;
and a rat cannot get into Valentin’s garden anywhere. How did the dead man get
into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same conditions, how did Brayne
get out of the garden?”

“
And
the fifth,” said Neil, with eyes fixed on the English priest who was coming slowly
up the path.

“
Is
a trifle, I suppose,” said the doctor, “but I think an odd one. When I first saw
how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had struck more than once.
But on examination I found many cuts across the truncated section; in other
words, they were struck after the head was off. Did Brayne hate his foe so
fiendishly that he stood sabring his body in the moonlight?”

“
Horrible!”
said O’Brien, and shuddered.

The
little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had waited, with
characteristic shyness, till they had finished. Then he said awkwardly:

“
I
say, I’m sorry to interrupt. But I was sent to tell you the news!”

“
News?”
repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his glasses.

“
Yes,
I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly. “There’s been another murder, you know.”

Both
men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.

“
And,
what’s stranger still,” continued the priest, with his dull eye on the rhododendrons,
“it’s the same disgusting sort; it’s another beheading. They found the second
head actually bleeding into the river, a few yards along Brayne’s road to
Paris; so they suppose that he —”