Gilbert Chesterton: The Scandal of Father Brown

There lay on it something more than the horror of darkness, the horror of sunlight; for the fitful sun painted tree and man in gay colours like a stage property; the tree was in flower and the corpse was hung with a faded peacock-green dressing-gown, and wore on its wagging head a scarlet smoking-cap. Also it had red bedroom-slippers, one of which had fallen off and lay on the grass like a blot of blood.

But neither Flambeau or Father Brown was looking at these things as yet. They were both staring at a strange object that seemed to stick out of the middle of the dead man's shrunken figure; and which they gradually perceived to be the black but rather rusty iron hilt of a seventeenth-century sword, which had completely transfixed the body. They both remained almost motionless as they gazed at it; until the restless Dr Flood seemed to grow quite impatient with their stolidity.

"What puzzles me most," he said, nervously snapping his fingers, "is the actual state of the body. And yet it has given me an idea already."

Flambeau had stepped up to the tree and was studying the sword-hilt through an eye-glass. But for some odd reason, it was at that very instant that the priest in sheer perversity spun round like a teetotum, turned his back on the corpse, and looked peeringly in the very opposite direction. He was just in time to see the red head of Mrs Flood at the remote end of the garden, turned towards a dark young man, too dim with distance to be identified, who was at that moment mounting a motor-bicycle; who vanished, leaving behind him only the dying din of that vehicle. Then the woman turned and began to walk towards them across the garden, just as Father Brown turned also and began a careful inspection of the sword-hilt and the hanging corpse.

"I understand you only found him about half an hour ago," said Flambeau. "Was there anybody about here just before that? I mean anybody in his bedroom, or that part of the house, or this part of the garden — say for an hour beforehand?"

"No," said the doctor with precision. "That is the very tragic accident. My sister-in-law was in the pantry, which is a sort of out-house on the other side; this man Dunn was in the kitchen garden, which is also in that direction; and I myself was poking about among the books, in a room just behind the one you found me in. There are two female servants, but one had gone to the post and the other was in the attic."

"And were any of these people," asked Flambeau, very quietly, "I say any of these people, at all on bad terms with the poor old gentleman?"

"He was the object of almost universal affection," replied the doctor solemnly. "If there were any misunderstandings, they were mild and of a sort common in modern times. The old man was attached to the old religious habits; and perhaps his daughter and son-in-law had rather wider views. All that can have had nothing to do with a ghastly and fantastic assassination like this."

"It depends on how wide the modern views were," said Father Brown, "or how narrow."

At this moment they heard Mrs Flood hallooing across the garden as she came, and calling her brother-in-law to her with a certain impatience. He hurried towards her and was soon out of earshot; but as he went he waved his hand apologetically and then pointed with a long finger to the ground.

"You will find the footprints very intriguing," he said; with the same strange air, as of a funereal showman.

The two amateur detectives looked across at each other. "I find several other things intriguing," said Flambeau.

"Oh, yes," said the priest, staring rather foolishly at the grass.

"I was wondering," said Flambeau, "why they should hang a man by the neck till he was dead, and then take the trouble to stick him with a sword."

"And I was wondering," said Father Brown, "why they should kill a man with a sword thrust through his heart, and then take the trouble to hang him by the neck."

"Oh, you are simply being contrary," protested his friend. "I can see at a glance that they didn't stab him alive. The body would have bled more and the wound wouldn't have closed like that."

"And I could see at a glance," said Father Brown, peering up very awkwardly, with his short stature and short sight, "that they didn't hang him alive. If you'll look at the knot in the noose, you will see it's tied so clumsily that a twist of rope holds it away from the neck, so that it couldn't throttle a man at all. He was dead before they put the rope on him; and he was dead before they put the sword in him. And how was he really killed?"

"I think," remarked the other, "that we'd better go back to the house and have a look at his bedroom — and other things."

"So we will," said Father Brown. "But among other things perhaps we had better have a look at these footprints. Better begin at the other end, I think, by his window. Well, there are no footprints on the paved path, as there might be; but then again there mightn't be. Well, here is the lawn just under his bedroom window. And here are his footprints plain enough."

He blinked ominously at the footprints; and then began carefully retracing his path towards the tree, every now and then ducking in an undignified manner to look at something on the ground. Eventually he returned to Flambeau and said in a chatty manner:

"Well, do you know the story that is written there very plainly? Though it's not exactly a plain story."

"I wouldn't be content to call it plain," said Flambeau. "I should call it quite ugly — "

"Well," said Father Brown, "the story that is stamped quite plainly on the earth, with exact moulds of the old man's slippers, is this. The aged paralytic leapt from the window and ran down the beds parallel to the path, quite eager for all the fun of being strangled and stabbed; so eager that he hopped on one leg out of sheer lightheartedness; and even occasionally turned cartwheels — "

"Stop!" cried Flambeau, angrily. "What the hell is all this hellish pantomime?"

Father Brown merely raised his eyebrows and gestured mildly towards the hieroglyphs in the dust. "About half the way there's only the mark of one slipper; and in some places the mark of a hand planted all by itself."

"Couldn't he have limped and then fallen?" asked Flambeau.

Father Brown shook his head. "At least he'd have tried to use his hands and feet, or knees and elbows, in getting up. There are no other marks there of any kind. Of course the flagged path is quite near, and there are no marks on that; though there might be on the soil between the cracks; it's a crazy pavement."

"By God, it's a crazy pavement; and a crazy garden; and a crazy story!" And Flambeau looked gloomily across the gloomy and storm-stricken garden, across which the crooked patchwork paths did indeed give a queer aptness to the quaint old English adjective.

"And now," said Father Brown, "let us go up and look at his room." They went in by a door not far from the bedroom window; and the priest paused a moment to look at an ordinary garden broomstick, for sweeping up leaves, that was leaning against the wall. "Do you see that?"

"It's a broomstick," said Flambeau, with solid irony.

"It's a blunder," said Father Brown; "the first blunder that I've seen in this curious plot."

They mounted the stairs and entered the old man's bedroom; and a glance at it made fairly clear the main facts, both about the foundation and disunion of the family. Father Brown had felt from the first that he was in what was, or had been, a Catholic household; but was, at least partly, inhabited by lapsed or very loose Catholics. The pictures and images in the grandfather's room made it clear that what positive piety remained had been practically confined to him; and that his kindred had, for some reason or other, gone Pagan. But he agreed that this was a hopelessly inadequate explanation even of an ordinary murder; let alone such a very extraordinary murder as this. "Hang it all," he muttered, "the murder is really the least extra-ordinary part of it." And even as he used the chance phrase, a slow light began to dawn upon his face.