Gilbert Chesterton - The Secret of Father Brown

'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.