Kabanata Kabanata 12 · The Three Tools of Death

. The Three Tools of Death

Both by calling and conviction Father Brown knew better than most of us,

that every man is dignified when he is dead. But even he felt a pang of

incongruity when he was knocked up at daybreak and told that Sir Aaron

Armstrong had been murdered. There was something absurd and unseemly

about secret violence in connection with so entirely entertaining and

popular a figure. For Sir Aaron Armstrong was entertaining to the point

of being comic; and popular in such a manner as to be almost legendary.

It was like hearing that Sunny Jim had hanged himself; or that Mr.

Pickwick had died in Hanwell. For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist,

and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himself

on dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political and

social speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and “loud laughter”; his

bodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and

he dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal

or even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperous

total abstainer.

The established story of his conversion was familiar on the more

puritanic platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawn

away from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out of

both and become (as he modestly put it) what he was. Yet his wide

white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at the numberless

dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it hard to believe,

somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as either a

dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most seriously merry

of all the sons of men.

He had lived on the rural skirt of Hampstead in a handsome house, high

but not broad, a modern and prosaic tower. The narrowest of its narrow

sides overhung the steep green bank of a railway, and was shaken by

passing trains. Sir Aaron Armstrong, as he boisterously explained, had

no nerves. But if the train had often given a shock to the house, that

morning the tables were turned, and it was the house that gave a shock

to the train.

The engine slowed down and stopped just beyond that point where an angle

of the house impinged upon the sharp slope of turf. The arrest of most

mechanical things must be slow; but the living cause of this had been

very rapid. A man clad completely in black, even (it was remembered)

to the dreadful detail of black gloves, appeared on the ridge above

the engine, and waved his black hands like some sable windmill. This in

itself would hardly have stopped even a lingering train. But there came

out of him a cry which was talked of afterwards as something utterly

unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts that are horridly distinct

even when we cannot hear what is shouted. The word in this case was

“Murder!”

But the engine-driver swears he would have pulled up just the same if he

had heard only the dreadful and definite accent and not the word.

The train once arrested, the most superficial stare could take in many

features of the tragedy. The man in black on the green bank was Sir

Aaron Armstrong’s man-servant Magnus. The baronet in his optimism had

often laughed at the black gloves of this dismal attendant; but no one

was likely to laugh at him just now.

So soon as an inquirer or two had stepped off the line and across the

smoky hedge, they saw, rolled down almost to the bottom of the bank, the

body of an old man in a yellow dressing-gown with a very vivid

scarlet lining. A scrap of rope seemed caught about his leg, entangled

presumably in a struggle. There was a smear or so of blood, though very

little; but the body was bent or broken into a posture impossible to any

living thing. It was Sir Aaron Armstrong. A few more bewildered moments

brought out a big fair-bearded man, whom some travellers could salute

as the dead man’s secretary, Patrick Royce, once well known in Bohemian

society and even famous in the Bohemian arts. In a manner more vague,

but even more convincing, he echoed the agony of the servant. By the

time the third figure of that household, Alice Armstrong, daughter of

the dead man, had come already tottering and waving into the garden, the

engine-driver had put a stop to his stoppage. The whistle had blown and

the train had panted on to get help from the next station.

Father Brown had been thus rapidly summoned at the request of Patrick

Royce, the big ex-Bohemian secretary. Royce was an Irishman by birth;

and that casual kind of Catholic that never remembers his religion

until he is really in a hole. But Royce’s request might have been less

promptly complied with if one of the official detectives had not been a

friend and admirer of the unofficial Flambeau; and it was impossible to

be a friend of Flambeau without hearing numberless stories about Father

Brown. Hence, while the young detective (whose name was Merton) led

the little priest across the fields to the railway, their talk was more

confidential than could be expected between two total strangers.

“As far as I can see,” said Mr. Merton candidly, “there is no sense

to be made of it at all. There is nobody one can suspect. Magnus is a

solemn old fool; far too much of a fool to be an assassin. Royce has

been the baronet’s best friend for years; and his daughter undoubtedly

adored him. Besides, it’s all too absurd. Who would kill such a cheery

old chap as Armstrong? Who could dip his hands in the gore of an

after-dinner speaker? It would be like killing Father Christmas.”

“Yes, it was a cheery house,” assented Father Brown. “It was a cheery

house while he was alive. Do you think it will be cheery now he is

dead?”

Merton started a little and regarded his companion with an enlivened

eye. “Now he is dead?” he repeated.

“Yes,” continued the priest stolidly, “he was cheerful. But did he

communicate his cheerfulness? Frankly, was anyone else in the house

cheerful but he?”

A window in Merton’s mind let in that strange light of surprise in which

we see for the first time things we have known all along. He had often

been to the Armstrongs’, on little police jobs of the philanthropist;

and, now he came to think of it, it was in itself a depressing house.

The rooms were very high and very cold; the decoration mean and

provincial; the draughty corridors were lit by electricity that was

bleaker than moonlight. And though the old man’s scarlet face and silver

beard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in turn, it did

not leave any warmth behind it. Doubtless this spectral discomfort in

the place was partly due to the very vitality and exuberance of its

owner; he needed no stoves or lamps, he would say, but carried his own

warmth with him. But when Merton recalled the other inmates, he was

compelled to confess that they also were as shadows of their lord.

The moody man-servant, with his monstrous black gloves, was almost a

nightmare; Royce, the secretary, was solid enough, a big bull of a

man, in tweeds, with a short beard; but the straw-coloured beard was

startlingly salted with grey like the tweeds, and the broad forehead was

barred with premature wrinkles. He was good-natured enough also, but it

was a sad sort of good-nature, almost a heart-broken sort--he had the

general air of being some sort of failure in life. As for Armstrong’s

daughter, it was almost incredible that she was his daughter; she was so

pallid in colour and sensitive in outline. She was graceful, but there

was a quiver in the very shape of her that was like the lines of an

aspen. Merton had sometimes wondered if she had learnt to quail at the

crash of the passing trains.

“You see,” said Father Brown, blinking modestly, “I’m not sure that the

Armstrong cheerfulness is so very cheerful--for other people. You say

that nobody could kill such a happy old man, but I’m not sure; ne nos

inducas in tentationem. If ever I murdered somebody,” he added quite

simply, “I dare say it might be an Optimist.”

“Why?” cried Merton amused. “Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?”

“People like frequent laughter,” answered Father Brown, “but I don’t

think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very

trying thing.”

They walked some way in silence along the windy grassy bank by the rail,

and just as they came under the far-flung shadow of the tall Armstrong

house, Father Brown said suddenly, like a man throwing away a

troublesome thought rather than offering it seriously: “Of course, drink

is neither good nor bad in itself. But I can’t help sometimes feeling

that men like Armstrong want an occasional glass of wine to sadden

them.”

Merton’s official superior, a grizzled and capable detective named

Gilder, was standing on the green bank waiting for the coroner, talking

to Patrick Royce, whose big shoulders and bristly beard and hair towered

above him. This was the more noticeable because Royce walked always

with a sort of powerful stoop, and seemed to be going about his small

clerical and domestic duties in a heavy and humbled style, like a

buffalo drawing a go-cart.

He raised his head with unusual pleasure at the sight of the priest, and

took him a few paces apart. Meanwhile Merton was addressing the

older detective respectfully indeed, but not without a certain boyish

impatience.

“Well, Mr. Gilder, have you got much farther with the mystery?”

“There is no mystery,” replied Gilder, as he looked under dreamy eyelids

at the rooks.

“Well, there is for me, at any rate,” said Merton, smiling.

“It is simple enough, my boy,” observed the senior investigator,

stroking his grey, pointed beard. “Three minutes after you’d gone for

Mr. Royce’s parson the whole thing came out. You know that pasty-faced

servant in the black gloves who stopped the train?”

“I should know him anywhere. Somehow he rather gave me the creeps.”

“Well,” drawled Gilder, “when the train had gone on again, that man had

gone too. Rather a cool criminal, don’t you think, to escape by the very

train that went off for the police?”

“You’re pretty sure, I suppose,” remarked the young man, “that he really

did kill his master?”

“Yes, my son, I’m pretty sure,” replied Gilder drily, “for the trifling

reason that he has gone off with twenty thousand pounds in papers that

were in his master’s desk. No, the only thing worth calling a difficulty

is how he killed him. The skull seems broken as with some big weapon,

but there’s no weapon at all lying about, and the murderer would have

found it awkward to carry it away, unless the weapon was too small to be

noticed.”

“Perhaps the weapon was too big to be noticed,” said the priest, with an

odd little giggle.

Gilder looked round at this wild remark, and rather sternly asked Brown

what he meant.

“Silly way of putting it, I know,” said Father Brown apologetically.

“Sounds like a fairy tale. But poor Armstrong was killed with a giant’s

club, a great green club, too big to be seen, and which we call the

earth. He was broken against this green bank we are standing on.”

“How do you mean?” asked the detective quickly.

Father Brown turned his moon face up to the narrow façade of the house

and blinked hopelessly up. Following his eyes, they saw that right at

the top of this otherwise blind back quarter of the building, an attic

window stood open.

“Don’t you see,” he explained, pointing a little awkwardly like a child,

“he was thrown down from there?”

Gilder frowningly scrutinised the window, and then said: “Well, it is

certainly possible. But I don’t see why you are so sure about it.”

Brown opened his grey eyes wide. “Why,” he said, “there’s a bit of rope

round the dead man’s leg. Don’t you see that other bit of rope up there

caught at the corner of the window?”

At that height the thing looked like the faintest particle of dust

or hair, but the shrewd old investigator was satisfied. “You’re quite

right, sir,” he said to Father Brown; “that is certainly one to you.”

Almost as he spoke a special train with one carriage took the curve

of the line on their left, and, stopping, disgorged another group

of policemen, in whose midst was the hangdog visage of Magnus, the

absconded servant.

“By Jove! they’ve got him,” cried Gilder, and stepped forward with quite

a new alertness.

“Have you got the money!” he cried to the first policeman.

The man looked him in the face with a rather curious expression and

said: “No.” Then he added: “At least, not here.”

“Which is the inspector, please?” asked the man called Magnus.

When he spoke everyone instantly understood how this voice had stopped

a train. He was a dull-looking man with flat black hair, a colourless

face, and a faint suggestion of the East in the level slits in his eyes

and mouth. His blood and name, indeed, had remained dubious, ever since

Sir Aaron had “rescued” him from a waitership in a London restaurant,

and (as some said) from more infamous things. But his voice was as vivid

as his face was dead. Whether through exactitude in a foreign language,

or in deference to his master (who had been somewhat deaf), Magnus’s

tones had a peculiarly ringing and piercing quality, and the whole group

quite jumped when he spoke.

“I always knew this would happen,” he said aloud with brazen blandness.

“My poor old master made game of me for wearing black; but I always said

I should be ready for his funeral.”

And he made a momentary movement with his two dark-gloved hands.

“Sergeant,” said Inspector Gilder, eyeing the black hands with wrath,

“aren’t you putting the bracelets on this fellow; he looks pretty

dangerous.”

“Well, sir,” said the sergeant, with the same odd look of wonder, “I

don’t know that we can.”

“What do you mean?” asked the other sharply. “Haven’t you arrested him?”

A faint scorn widened the slit-like mouth, and the whistle of an

approaching train seemed oddly to echo the mockery.

“We arrested him,” replied the sergeant gravely, “just as he was coming

out of the police station at Highgate, where he had deposited all his

master’s money in the care of Inspector Robinson.”

Gilder looked at the man-servant in utter amazement. “Why on earth did

you do that?” he asked of Magnus.

“To keep it safe from the criminal, of course,” replied that person

placidly.

“Surely,” said Gilder, “Sir Aaron’s money might have been safely left

with Sir Aaron’s family.”

The tail of his sentence was drowned in the roar of the train as it went

rocking and clanking; but through all the hell of noises to which that

unhappy house was periodically subject, they could hear the syllables of

Magnus’s answer, in all their bell-like distinctness: “I have no reason

to feel confidence in Sir Aaron’s family.”

All the motionless men had the ghostly sensation of the presence of some

new person; and Merton was scarcely surprised when he looked up and saw

the pale face of Armstrong’s daughter over Father Brown’s shoulder. She

was still young and beautiful in a silvery style, but her hair was of so

dusty and hueless a brown that in some shadows it seemed to have turned

totally grey.

“Be careful what you say,” said Royce gruffly, “you’ll frighten Miss

Armstrong.”

“I hope so,” said the man with the clear voice.

As the woman winced and everyone else wondered, he went on: “I am

somewhat used to Miss Armstrong’s tremors. I have seen her trembling off

and on for years. And some said she was shaking with cold and some she

was shaking with fear, but I know she was shaking with hate and wicked

anger--fiends that have had their feast this morning. She would have

been away by now with her lover and all the money but for me. Ever since

my poor old master prevented her from marrying that tipsy blackguard--”

“Stop,” said Gilder very sternly. “We have nothing to do with your

family fancies or suspicions. Unless you have some practical evidence,

your mere opinions--”

“Oh! I’ll give you practical evidence,” cut in Magnus, in his hacking

accent. “You’ll have to subpoena me, Mr. Inspector, and I shall have to

tell the truth. And the truth is this: An instant after the old man was

pitched bleeding out of the window, I ran into the attic, and found

his daughter swooning on the floor with a red dagger still in her hand.

Allow me to hand that also to the proper authorities.” He took from his

tail-pocket a long horn-hilted knife with a red smear on it, and handed

it politely to the sergeant. Then he stood back again, and his slits of

eyes almost faded from his face in one fat Chinese sneer.

Merton felt an almost bodily sickness at the sight of him; and he

muttered to Gilder: “Surely you would take Miss Armstrong’s word against

his?”

Father Brown suddenly lifted a face so absurdly fresh that it looked

somehow as if he had just washed it. “Yes,” he said, radiating

innocence, “but is Miss Armstrong’s word against his?”

The girl uttered a startled, singular little cry; everyone looked at

her. Her figure was rigid as if paralysed; only her face within its

frame of faint brown hair was alive with an appalling surprise. She

stood like one of a sudden lassooed and throttled.

“This man,” said Mr. Gilder gravely, “actually says that you were found

grasping a knife, insensible, after the murder.”

“He says the truth,” answered Alice.

The next fact of which they were conscious was that Patrick Royce strode

with his great stooping head into their ring and uttered the singular

words: “Well, if I’ve got to go, I’ll have a bit of pleasure first.”

His huge shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus’s

bland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish.

Two or three of the police instantly put their hands on Royce; but to

the rest it seemed as if all reason had broken up and the universe were

turning into a brainless harlequinade.

“None of that, Mr. Royce,” Gilder had called out authoritatively. “I

shall arrest you for assault.”

“No, you won’t,” answered the secretary in a voice like an iron gong,

“you will arrest me for murder.”

Gilder threw an alarmed glance at the man knocked down; but since that

outraged person was already sitting up and wiping a little blood off a

substantially uninjured face, he only said shortly: “What do you mean?”

“It is quite true, as this fellow says,” explained Royce, “that Miss

Armstrong fainted with a knife in her hand. But she had not snatched the

knife to attack her father, but to defend him.”

“To defend him,” repeated Gilder gravely. “Against whom?”

“Against me,” answered the secretary.

Alice looked at him with a complex and baffling face; then she said in a

low voice: “After it all, I am still glad you are brave.”

“Come upstairs,” said Patrick Royce heavily, “and I will show you the

whole cursed thing.”

The attic, which was the secretary’s private place (and rather a small

cell for so large a hermit), had indeed all the vestiges of a violent

drama. Near the centre of the floor lay a large revolver as if flung

away; nearer to the left was rolled a whisky bottle, open but not quite

empty. The cloth of the little table lay dragged and trampled, and a

length of cord, like that found on the corpse, was cast wildly across

the windowsill. Two vases were smashed on the mantelpiece and one on the

carpet.

“I was drunk,” said Royce; and this simplicity in the prematurely

battered man somehow had the pathos of the first sin of a baby.

“You all know about me,” he continued huskily; “everybody knows how my

story began, and it may as well end like that too. I was called a clever

man once, and might have been a happy one; Armstrong saved the remains

of a brain and body from the taverns, and was always kind to me in his

own way, poor fellow! Only he wouldn’t let me marry Alice here; and it

will always be said that he was right enough. Well, you can form your

own conclusions, and you won’t want me to go into details. That is my

whisky bottle half emptied in the corner; that is my revolver quite

emptied on the carpet. It was the rope from my box that was found on the

corpse, and it was from my window the corpse was thrown. You need not

set detectives to grub up my tragedy; it is a common enough weed in this

world. I give myself to the gallows; and, by God, that is enough!”

At a sufficiently delicate sign, the police gathered round the large man

to lead him away; but their unobtrusiveness was somewhat staggered by

the remarkable appearance of Father Brown, who was on his hands and

knees on the carpet in the doorway, as if engaged in some kind of

undignified prayers. Being a person utterly insensible to the social

figure he cut, he remained in this posture, but turned a bright round

face up at the company, presenting the appearance of a quadruped with a

very comic human head.

“I say,” he said good-naturedly, “this really won’t do at all, you know.

At the beginning you said we’d found no weapon. But now we’re finding

too many; there’s the knife to stab, and the rope to strangle, and the

pistol to shoot; and after all he broke his neck by falling out of a

window! It won’t do. It’s not economical.” And he shook his head at the

ground as a horse does grazing.

Inspector Gilder had opened his mouth with serious intentions, but

before he could speak the grotesque figure on the floor had gone on

quite volubly.

“And now three quite impossible things. First, these holes in the

carpet, where the six bullets have gone in. Why on earth should anybody

fire at the carpet? A drunken man lets fly at his enemy’s head, the

thing that’s grinning at him. He doesn’t pick a quarrel with his feet,

or lay siege to his slippers. And then there’s the rope”--and having

done with the carpet the speaker lifted his hands and put them in his

pocket, but continued unaffectedly on his knees--“in what conceivable

intoxication would anybody try to put a rope round a man’s neck and

finally put it round his leg? Royce, anyhow, was not so drunk as that,

or he would be sleeping like a log by now. And, plainest of all, the

whisky bottle. You suggest a dipsomaniac fought for the whisky bottle,

and then having won, rolled it away in a corner, spilling one half and

leaving the other. That is the very last thing a dipsomaniac would do.”

He scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and said to the self-accused

murderer in tones of limpid penitence: “I’m awfully sorry, my dear sir,

but your tale is really rubbish.”

“Sir,” said Alice Armstrong in a low tone to the priest, “can I speak to

you alone for a moment?”

This request forced the communicative cleric out of the gangway, and

before he could speak in the next room, the girl was talking with

strange incisiveness.

“You are a clever man,” she said, “and you are trying to save Patrick,

I know. But it’s no use. The core of all this is black, and the more

things you find out the more there will be against the miserable man I

love.”

“Why?” asked Brown, looking at her steadily.

“Because,” she answered equally steadily, “I saw him commit the crime

myself.”

“Ah!” said the unmoved Brown, “and what did he do?”

“I was in this room next to them,” she explained; “both doors were

closed, but I suddenly heard a voice, such as I had never heard on

earth, roaring ‘Hell, hell, hell,’ again and again, and then the two

doors shook with the first explosion of the revolver. Thrice again the

thing banged before I got the two doors open and found the room full of

smoke; but the pistol was smoking in my poor, mad Patrick’s hand; and I

saw him fire the last murderous volley with my own eyes. Then he leapt

on my father, who was clinging in terror to the window-sill, and,

grappling, tried to strangle him with the rope, which he threw over his

head, but which slipped over his struggling shoulders to his feet. Then

it tightened round one leg and Patrick dragged him along like a maniac.

I snatched a knife from the mat, and, rushing between them, managed to

cut the rope before I fainted.”

“I see,” said Father Brown, with the same wooden civility. “Thank you.”

As the girl collapsed under her memories, the priest passed stiffly

into the next room, where he found Gilder and Merton alone with Patrick

Royce, who sat in a chair, handcuffed. There he said to the Inspector

submissively:

“Might I say a word to the prisoner in your presence; and might he take

off those funny cuffs for a minute?”

“He is a very powerful man,” said Merton in an undertone. “Why do you

want them taken off?”

“Why, I thought,” replied the priest humbly, “that perhaps I might have

the very great honour of shaking hands with him.”

Both detectives stared, and Father Brown added: “Won’t you tell them

about it, sir?”

The man on the chair shook his tousled head, and the priest turned

impatiently.

“Then I will,” he said. “Private lives are more important than public

reputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their

dead.”

He went to the fatal window, and blinked out of it as he went on

talking.

“I told you that in this case there were too many weapons and only one

death. I tell you now that they were not weapons, and were not used to

cause death. All those grisly tools, the noose, the bloody knife, the

exploding pistol, were instruments of a curious mercy. They were not

used to kill Sir Aaron, but to save him.”

“To save him!” repeated Gilder. “And from what?”

“From himself,” said Father Brown. “He was a suicidal maniac.”

“What?” cried Merton in an incredulous tone. “And the Religion of

Cheerfulness--”

“It is a cruel religion,” said the priest, looking out of the window.

“Why couldn’t they let him weep a little, like his fathers before him?

His plans stiffened, his views grew cold; behind that merry mask was

the empty mind of the atheist. At last, to keep up his hilarious public

level, he fell back on that dram-drinking he had abandoned long ago. But

there is this horror about alcoholism in a sincere teetotaler: that he

pictures and expects that psychological inferno from which he has warned

others. It leapt upon poor Armstrong prematurely, and by this morning

he was in such a case that he sat here and cried he was in hell, in so

crazy a voice that his daughter did not know it. He was mad for death,

and with the monkey tricks of the mad he had scattered round him death

in many shapes--a running noose and his friend’s revolver and a knife.

Royce entered accidentally and acted in a flash. He flung the knife

on the mat behind him, snatched up the revolver, and having no time to

unload it, emptied it shot after shot all over the floor. The suicide

saw a fourth shape of death, and made a dash for the window. The rescuer

did the only thing he could--ran after him with the rope and tried to

tie him hand and foot. Then it was that the unlucky girl ran in, and

misunderstanding the struggle, strove to slash her father free. At first

she only slashed poor Royce’s knuckles, from which has come all the

little blood in this affair. But, of course, you noticed that he left

blood, but no wound, on that servant’s face? Only before the poor woman

swooned, she did hack her father loose, so that he went crashing through

that window into eternity.”

There was a long stillness slowly broken by the metallic noises of

Gilder unlocking the handcuffs of Patrick Royce, to whom he said: “I

think I should have told the truth, sir. You and the young lady are

worth more than Armstrong’s obituary notices.”

“Confound Armstrong’s notices,” cried Royce roughly. “Don’t you see it

was because she mustn’t know?”

“Mustn’t know what?” asked Merton.

“Why, that she killed her father, you fool!” roared the other. “He’d

have been alive now but for her. It might craze her to know that.”

“No, I don’t think it would,” remarked Father Brown, as he picked up his

hat. “I rather think I should tell her. Even the most murderous blunders

don’t poison life like sins; anyhow, I think you may both be the happier

now. I’ve got to go back to the Deaf School.”

As he went out on to the gusty grass an acquaintance from Highgate

stopped him and said:

“The Coroner has arrived. The inquiry is just going to begin.”

“I’ve got to get back to the Deaf School,” said Father Brown. “I’m sorry

I can’t stop for the inquiry.”