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 boathouse 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.
Father Brown's eye roamed round the room, which seemed to have been just
recently cleaned and tidied, till his gaze found something in a dusty
corner just behind the door. It was a hat hanging on a hat-peg. It was a
white hat, and one very well known to all that village. And yet,
conspicuous as it had always seemed in the street, it seemed only an
example of the sort of little thing a certain sort of man often entirely
forgets, when he has most carefully washed floors or destroyed stained
rags.
"Sir Arthur Vaudrey was shaved here yesterday morning, I think," said
Father Brown in a level voice.
To the barber, a small, bald-headed, spectacled man whose name was
Wicks, the sudden appearance of these two figures out of his own back
premises was like the appearance of two ghosts risen out of a grave
under the floor. But it was at once apparent that he had more to
frighten him than any fancy of superstition. He shrank, we might almost
say that he shrivelled, into a corner of the dark room; and everything
about him seemed to dwindle, except his great goblin spectacles.
"Tell me one thing," continued the priest, quietly. "You had a reason
for hating the squire?"
The man in the corner babbled something that Smith could not hear; but
the priest nodded.
"I know you had," he said. "You hated him; and that's how I know you
didn't kill him. Will you tell us what happened, or shall I?"
There was a silence filled with the faint ticking of a clock in the back
kitchen; and then Father Brown went on.
"What happened was this. When Mr. Dalmon stepped inside your outer shop,
he asked for some cigarettes that were in the window. You stepped
outside for a moment, as shopmen often do, to make sure of what he
meant; and in that moment of time he perceived in the inner room the
razor you had just laid down, and the yellow-white head of Sir Arthur in
the barber's chair; probably both glimmering in the light of that little
window beyond. It took but an instant for him to pick up the razor and
cut the throat and come back to the counter. The victim would not even
be alarmed at the razor and the hand. He died smiling at his own
thoughts. And what thoughts! Nor, I think, was Dalmon alarmed. He had
done it so quickly and quietly that Mr. Smith here could have sworn in
court that the two were together all the time. But there was somebody
who was alarmed, very legitimately, and that was you. You had quarrelled
with your landlord about arrears of rent and so on; you came back into
your own shop and found your enemy murdered in your own chair, with your
own razor. It was not altogether unnatural that you despaired of
clearing yourself, and preferred to clear up the mess; to clean the
floor and throw the corpse into the river at night, in a potato sack
rather loosely tied. It was rather lucky that there were fixed hours
after which your barber's shop was shut; so you had plenty of time. You
seem to have remembered everything but the hat.... Oh, don't be
frightened; I shall forget everything, including the hat."
And he passed placidly through the outer shop into the street beyond,
followed by the wondering Smith, and leaving behind the barber stunned
and staring.
"You see," said Father Brown to his companion, "it was one of those
cases where a motive really is too weak to convict a man and yet strong
enough to acquit him. A little nervous fellow like that would be the
last man really to kill a big strong man for a tiff about money. But he
would be the first man to fear that he would be accused of having done
it.... Ah, there was a thundering difference in the motive of the man
who did do it." And he relapsed into reflection, staring and almost
glaring at vacancy.
"It is simply awful," groaned Evan Smith. "I was abusing Dalmon as a
blackmailer and a blackguard an hour or two ago, and yet it breaks me
all up to hear he really did this, after all."
The priest still seemed to be in a sort of trance, like a man staring
down into an abyss. At last his lips moved and he murmured, more as if
it were a prayer than an oath: "Merciful God, what a horrible revenge!"
His friend questioned him, but he continued as if talking to himself.
"What a horrible tale of hatred! What a vengeance for one mortal worm to
take on another! Shall we ever get to the bottom of this bottomless
human heart, where such abominable imaginations can abide? God save us
all from pride; but I cannot yet make any picture in my mind of hate and
vengeance like that."
"Yes," said Smith; "and I can't quite picture why he should kill Vaudrey
at all. If Dalmon was a blackmailer, it would seem more natural for
Vaudrey to kill him. As you say, the throat-cutting was a horrid
business, but----"
Father Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep.
"Oh, _that_!" he corrected hastily. "I wasn't thinking about that. I
didn't mean the murder in the barber's shop, when--when I said a
horrible tale of vengeance. I was thinking of a much more horrible tale
than that; though, of course, that was horrible enough, in its way. But
that was much more comprehensible; almost anybody might have done it. In
fact, it was very nearly an act of self-defence."
"_What_?" exclaimed the secretary incredulously. "A man creeps up behind
another man and cuts his throat, while he is smiling pleasantly at the
ceiling in a barber's chair, and you say it was self-defence!"
"I do not say it was justifiable self-defence," replied the other. "I
only say that many a man would have been driven to it, to defend himself
against an appalling calamity--which was also an appalling crime. It
was that other crime that I was thinking about. To begin with, about
that question you asked just now; why should the blackmailer be the
murderer? Well, there are a good many conventional confusions and errors
on a point like that." He paused, as if collecting his thoughts after
his recent trance of horror, and went on in ordinary tones.
"You observe that two men, an older and a younger, go about together and
agree on a matrimonial project; but the origin of their intimacy is old
and concealed. One is rich and the other poor; and you guess at
blackmail. You are quite right, at least to that extent. Where you are
quite wrong is in guessing which is which. You assume that the poor man
was blackmailing the rich man. As a matter offset, the rich man was
blackmailing the poor man."
"But that seems nonsense," objected the secretary.
"It is much worse than nonsense; but it is not at all uncommon," replied
the other. "Half modern politics consists of rich men blackmailing
people. Your notion that it's nonsense rests on two illusions which are
both nonsensical. One is, that rich men never want to be richer; the
other is, that a man can only be blackmailed for money. It's the last
that is in question here. Sir Arthur Vaudrey was acting not for avarice,
but for vengeance. And he planned the most hideous vengeance I ever
heard of."
"But why should he plan vengeance on John Dalmon?" inquired Smith.
"It wasn't on John Dalmon that he planned vengeance," replied the
priest, gravely.
There was a silence; and he resumed, almost as if changing the subject.
"When we found the body, you remember, we saw the face upside down; and
you said it looked like the face of a fiend. Has it occurred to you that
the murderer also saw the face upside down, coming behind the barber's
chair?"
"But that's all morbid extravagance," remonstrated his companion. "I was
quite used to the face when it was the right way up."
"Perhaps you have never seen it the right way up," said Father Brown. "I
told you that artists turn a picture the wrong way up when they want to
see it the right way up. Perhaps, over all those breakfasts and tea-tables,
you had got used to the face of a fiend."
"What on earth are you driving at?" demanded Smith, impatiently.
"I speak in parables," replied the other in a rather sombre tone "Of
course. Sir Arthur was not actually a fiend; he was a man with a
character which he had made out of a temperament that might also have
been turned to good. But those goggling, suspicious eyes; that tight,
yet quivering mouth, might have told you something if you had not been
so used to them. You know, there are physical bodies on which a wound
will not heal. Sir Arthur had a mind of that sort. It was as if it
lacked a skin; he had a feverish vigilance of vanity; those strained
eyes were open with an insomnia of egoism. Sensibility need not be
selfishness. Sybil Rye, for instance, has the same thin skin and manages
to be a sort of saint. But Vaudrey had turned it all to poisonous pride;
a pride that was not even secure and self-satisfied. Every scratch on
the surface of his soul festered. And _that_ is the meaning of that old
story about throwing the man into the pig-sty. If he'd thrown him then
and there, after being called a pig, it might have been a pardonable
burst of passion. But there was no pig-sty; and that is just the point.
Vaudrey remembered the silly insult for years and years, till he could
get the Oriental into the improbable neighbourhood of a pig-sty; and
then he took, what he considered the only appropriate and artistic
revenge.... Oh, my God! he liked his revenges to be appropriate and
artistic."
Smith looked at him curiously. "You are not thinking of the pig-sty
story," he said.
"No," said Father Brown; "of the other story." He controlled the shudder
in his voice, and went on.
"Remembering that story of a fantastic and yet patient plot to make the
vengeance fit the crime, consider the other story before us. Had anybody
else, to your knowledge, ever insulted Vaudrey, or offered him what he
thought a mortal insult? Yes; a woman insulted him."
A sort of vague horror began to dawn in Evan's eyes; he was listening
intently.
"A girl, little more than a child, refused to marry him, because he had
once been a sort of criminal; had, indeed, been in prison for a short
time for the outrage on the Egyptian. And that madman said, in the hell
of his heart: 'She shall marry a murderer.'"
They took the road towards the great house and went along by the river
for some time in silence, before he resumed: "Vaudrey was in a position
to blackmail Dalmon, who had committed a murder long ago; probably he
knew of several crimes among the wild comrades of his youth. Probably it
was a wild crime with some redeeming features; for the wildest murders
are never the worst. And Dalmon looks to me like a man who knows
remorse, even for killing Vaudrey. But he was in Vaudrey's power and,
between them, they entrapped the girl very cleverly into an engagement;
letting the lover try his luck first, for instance, and the other only
encouraging magnificently. But Dalmon himself did not know, nobody but
the Devil himself did know, what was really in that old man's mind.
"Then, a few days ago, Dalmon made a dreadful discovery. He had obeyed,
not altogether unwillingly; he had been a tool; and he suddenly found
how the tool was to be broken and thrown away. He came upon certain
notes of Vaudrey's in the library which, disguised as they were, told of
preparations for giving information to the police. He understood the
whole plot and stood stunned as I did when I first understood it. The
moment the bride and bridegroom were married, the bridegroom would be
arrested and hanged. The fastidious lady, who objected to a husband who
had been in prison, should have no husband except a husband on the
gallows. That is what Sir Arthur Vaudrey considered an artistic rounding
off of the story."
Evan Smith, deadly pale, was silent; and, far away, down the perspective
of the road, they saw the large figure and wide hat of Dr. Abbott
advancing towards them; even in the outline there was a certain
agitation. But they were still shaken with their own private apocalypse.
"As you say, hate is a hateful thing," said Evan at last; "and, do you
know, one thing gives me a sort of relief. All my hatred of poor Dalmon
is gone out of me--now I know how he was twice a murderer."
It was in silence that they covered the rest of the distance and met the
big doctor coming towards them, with his large gloved hands thrown out
in a sort of despairing gesture and his grey beard tossing in the wind.
"There is dreadful news," he said. "Arthur's body has been found. He
seems to have died in his garden."
"Dear me," said Father Brown, rather mechanically. "How dreadful!"
"And there is more," cried the doctor breathlessly. "John Dalmon went
off to see Vernon Vaudrey, the nephew; but Vernon Vaudrey hasn't heard
of him and Dalmon seems to have disappeared entirely."
"Dear me," said Father Brown. "How strange!"
VI
THE WORST CRIME IN THE WORLD