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
