Chapter 3

“I say,” he said meekly, “there are no gates to this garden, do you
know.”

Valentin’s black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as they did
on principle at the sight of the cassock. But he was far too just a man
to deny the relevance of the remark. “You are right,” he said. “Before
we find out how he came to be killed, we may have to find out how he
came to be here. Now listen to me, gentlemen. If it can be done without
prejudice to my position and duty, we shall all agree that certain
distinguished names might well be kept out of this. There are ladies,
gentlemen, and there is a foreign ambassador. If we must mark it down as
a crime, then it must be followed up as a crime. But till then I can use
my own discretion. I am the head of the police; I am so public that I
can afford to be private. Please Heaven, I will clear everyone of my own
guests before I call in my men to look for anybody else. Gentlemen, upon
your honour, you will none of you leave the house till tomorrow at noon;
there are bedrooms for all. Simon, I think you know where to find my
man, Ivan, in the front hall; he is a confidential man. Tell him to
leave another servant on guard and come to me at once. Lord Galloway,
you are certainly the best person to tell the ladies what has happened,
and prevent a panic. They also must stay. Father Brown and I will remain
with the body.”

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--”

“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien. “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”

“There are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively. Then he
added: “They want you to come to the library and see it.”

Commandant O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling
decidedly sick. As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage;
where were these extravagant amputations going to stop? First one
head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself
bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one. As he
crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon
Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;
and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it
was only a Nationalist paper, called _The Guillotine_, which every week
showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing
features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some
note. But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his
sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect
which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the
grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the
newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw
the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on
Valentin’s table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,
the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from
under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.
Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of
a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking
enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the
man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The
second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that
morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin’s men were still
seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed
to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O’Brien’s
sensibilities in the least, went up to the second head and examined it
with his blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,
fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the face,
which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal type, had been
much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.

“Good morning, Commandant O’Brien,” said Valentin, with quiet
cordiality. “You have heard of Brayne’s last experiment in butchery, I
suppose?”

Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he
said, without looking up:

“I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too.”

“Well, it seems common sense,” said Valentin, with his hands in his
pockets. “Killed in the same way as the other. Found within a few yards
of the other. And sliced by the same weapon which we know he carried
away.”

“Yes, yes; I know,” replied Father Brown submissively. “Yet, you know, I
doubt whether Brayne could have cut off this head.”

“Why not?” inquired Dr. Simon, with a rational stare.

“Well, doctor,” said the priest, looking up blinking, “can a man cut off
his own head? I don’t know.”

O’Brien felt an insane universe crashing about his ears; but the doctor
sprang forward with impetuous practicality and pushed back the wet white
hair.

“Oh, there’s no doubt it’s Brayne,” said the priest quietly. “He had
exactly that chip in the left ear.”

The detective, who had been regarding the priest with steady and
glittering eyes, opened his clenched mouth and said sharply: “You seem
to know a lot about him, Father Brown.”

“I do,” said the little man simply. “I’ve been about with him for some
weeks. He was thinking of joining our church.”

The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode towards
the priest with clenched hands. “And, perhaps,” he cried, with a
blasting sneer, “perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money
to your church.”

“Perhaps he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is possible.”

“In that case,” cried Valentin, with a dreadful smile, “you may indeed
know a great deal about him. About his life and about his--”

Commandant O’Brien laid a hand on Valentin’s arm. “Drop that slanderous
rubbish, Valentin,” he said, “or there may be more swords yet.”

But Valentin (under the steady, humble gaze of the priest) had already
recovered himself. “Well,” he said shortly, “people’s private opinions
can wait. You gentlemen are still bound by your promise to stay; you
must enforce it on yourselves--and on each other. Ivan here will tell
you anything more you want to know; I must get to business and write to
the authorities. We can’t keep this quiet any longer. I shall be writing
in my study if there is any more news.”

“Is there any more news, Ivan?” asked Dr. Simon, as the chief of police
strode out of the room.

“Only one more thing, I think, sir,” said Ivan, wrinkling up his grey
old face, “but that’s important, too, in its way. There’s that old
buffer you found on the lawn,” and he pointed without pretence of
reverence at the big black body with the yellow head. “We’ve found out
who he is, anyhow.”

“Indeed!” cried the astonished doctor, “and who is he?”

“His name was Arnold Becker,” said the under-detective, “though he went
by many aliases. He was a wandering sort of scamp, and is known to have
been in America; so that was where Brayne got his knife into him. We
didn’t have much to do with him ourselves, for he worked mostly in
Germany. We’ve communicated, of course, with the German police. But,
oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker,
whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it necessary to
guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it’s a rum thing, gentlemen, but
when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my
life. If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes,
I’d have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass. Then, of
course, I remembered his twin brother in Germany, and following up the
clue--”

The explanatory Ivan stopped, for the excellent reason that nobody was
listening to him. The Commandant and the doctor were both staring at
Father Brown, who had sprung stiffly to his feet, and was holding his
temples tight like a man in sudden and violent pain.

“Stop, stop, stop!” he cried; “stop talking a minute, for I see half.
Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all?
Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. I could paraphrase
any page in Aquinas once. Will my head split--or will it see? I see
half--I only see half.”

He buried his head in his hands, and stood in a sort of rigid torture
of thought or prayer, while the other three could only go on staring at
this last prodigy of their wild twelve hours.

When Father Brown’s hands fell they showed a face quite fresh and
serious, like a child’s. He heaved a huge sigh, and said: “Let us get
this said and done with as quickly as possible. Look here, this will
be the quickest way to convince you all of the truth.” He turned to the
doctor. “Dr. Simon,” he said, “you have a strong head-piece, and I heard
you this morning asking the five hardest questions about this business.
Well, if you will ask them again, I will answer them.”

Simon’s pince-nez dropped from his nose in his doubt and wonder, but
he answered at once. “Well, the first question, you know, is why a man
should kill another with a clumsy sabre at all when a man can kill with
a bodkin?”

“A man cannot behead with a bodkin,” said Brown calmly, “and for this
murder beheading was absolutely necessary.”

“Why?” asked O’Brien, with interest.

“And the next question?” asked Father Brown.

“Well, why didn’t the man cry out or anything?” asked the doctor;
“sabres in gardens are certainly unusual.”

“Twigs,” said the priest gloomily, and turned to the window which looked
on the scene of death. “No one saw the point of the twigs. Why should
they lie on that lawn (look at it) so far from any tree? They were not
snapped off; they were chopped off. The murderer occupied his enemy
with some tricks with the sabre, showing how he could cut a branch in
mid-air, or what-not. Then, while his enemy bent down to see the result,
a silent slash, and the head fell.”

“Well,” said the doctor slowly, “that seems plausible enough. But my
next two questions will stump anyone.”

The priest still stood looking critically out of the window and waited.

“You know how all the garden was sealed up like an air-tight chamber,”
went on the doctor. “Well, how did the strange man get into the garden?”

Without turning round, the little priest answered: “There never was any
strange man in the garden.”

There was a silence, and then a sudden cackle of almost childish
laughter relieved the strain. The absurdity of Brown’s remark moved Ivan
to open taunts.

“Oh!” he cried; “then we didn’t lug a great fat corpse on to a sofa last
night? He hadn’t got into the garden, I suppose?”

“Got into the garden?” repeated Brown reflectively. “No, not entirely.”

“Hang it all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn’t.”

“Not necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. “What is the
nest question, doctor?”

“I fancy you’re ill,” exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; “but I’ll ask the
next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?”

“He didn’t get out of the garden,” said the priest, still looking out of
the window.

“Didn’t get out of the garden?” exploded Simon.

“Not completely,” said Father Brown.

Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. “A man gets out of a
garden, or he doesn’t,” he cried.

“Not always,” said Father Brown.

Dr. Simon sprang to his feet impatiently. “I have no time to spare on
such senseless talk,” he cried angrily. “If you can’t understand a man
being on one side of a wall or the other, I won’t trouble you further.”

“Doctor,” said the cleric very gently, “we have always got on very
pleasantly together. If only for the sake of old friendship, stop and
tell me your fifth question.”

The impatient Simon sank into a chair by the door and said briefly: “The
head and shoulders were cut about in a queer way. It seemed to be done
after death.”

“Yes,” said the motionless priest, “it was done so as to make you assume
exactly the one simple falsehood that you did assume. It was done to
make you take for granted that the head belonged to the body.”

The borderland of the brain, where all the monsters are made, moved
horribly in the Gaelic O’Brien. He felt the chaotic presence of all
the horse-men and fish-women that man’s unnatural fancy has begotten. A
voice older than his first fathers seemed saying in his ear: “Keep out
of the monstrous garden where grows the tree with double fruit. Avoid
the evil garden where died the man with two heads.” Yet, while these
shameful symbolic shapes passed across the ancient mirror of his Irish
soul, his Frenchified intellect was quite alert, and was watching the
odd priest as closely and incredulously as all the rest.

Father Brown had turned round at last, and stood against the window,
with his face in dense shadow; but even in that shadow they could see
it was pale as ashes. Nevertheless, he spoke quite sensibly, as if there
were no Gaelic souls on earth.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you did not find the strange body of Becker in
the garden. You did not find any strange body in the garden. In face
of Dr. Simon’s rationalism, I still affirm that Becker was only partly
present. Look here!” (pointing to the black bulk of the mysterious
corpse) “you never saw that man in your lives. Did you ever see this
man?”

He rapidly rolled away the bald, yellow head of the unknown, and put in
its place the white-maned head beside it. And there, complete, unified,
unmistakable, lay Julius K. Brayne.

“The murderer,” went on Brown quietly, “hacked off his enemy’s head and
flung the sword far over the wall. But he was too clever to fling the
sword only. He flung the head over the wall also. Then he had only to
clap on another head to the corpse, and (as he insisted on a private
inquest) you all imagined a totally new man.”

“Clap on another head!” said O’Brien staring. “What other head? Heads
don’t grow on garden bushes, do they?”

“No,” said Father Brown huskily, and looking at his boots; “there
is only one place where they grow. They grow in the basket of the
guillotine, beside which the chief of police, Aristide Valentin, was
standing not an hour before the murder. Oh, my friends, hear me a minute
more before you tear me in pieces. Valentin is an honest man, if being
mad for an arguable cause is honesty. But did you never see in that
cold, grey eye of his that he is mad! He would do anything, anything, to
break what he calls the superstition of the Cross. He has fought for
it and starved for it, and now he has murdered for it. Brayne’s crazy
millions had hitherto been scattered among so many sects that they did
little to alter the balance of things. But Valentin heard a whisper that
Brayne, like so many scatter-brained sceptics, was drifting to us; and
that was quite a different thing. Brayne would pour supplies into the
impoverished and pugnacious Church of France; he would support six
Nationalist newspapers like _The Guillotine_. The battle was already
balanced on a point, and the fanatic took flame at the risk.