Bagshaw turned abruptly to the man called Flood. “Is there anybody in this place,” he said, “who can testify to your identity?”
“Not many, even in this country,” growled Flood. “I’ve only just come from Ireland; the only man I know round here is the priest at St. Dominic’s Church—Father Brown.”
“Neither of you must leave this place,” said Bagshaw, and then added to the servant: “But you can go into the house and ring up St. Dominic’s Presbytery and ask Father Brown if he would mind coming round here at once. No tricks, mind.”
While the energetic detective was securing the potential fugitives, his companion, at his direction, had hastened on to the actual scene of the tragedy. It was a strange enough scene; and, indeed, if the tragedy had not been tragic it would have been highly fantastic. The dead man (for the briefest examination proved him to be dead) lay with his head in the pond, where the glow of the artificial illumination encircled the head with something of the appearance of an unholy halo. The face was gaunt and rather sinister, the brow bald and the scanty curls dark grey, like iron rings, and, despite the damage done by the bullet wound in the temple, Underhill had no difficulty in recognizing the features he had seen in the many portraits of Sir Humphrey Gwynne. The dead man was in evening-dress and his long, black legs, so thin as to be almost spidery, were sprawling at different angles up the steep bank from which he had fallen. As by some weird whim of diabolical arabesque, blood was eddying out, very slowly, into the luminous water in snaky rings, like the transparent crimson of sunset clouds.
Underhill did not know how long he stood staring down at this macabre figure, when he looked up and saw a group of four figures standing above him on the bank. He was prepared for Bagshaw and his Irish captive, and he had no difficulty in guessing the status of the servant in the red waistcoat. But the fourth figure had a sort of grotesque solemnity that seemed strangely congruous to that incongruity. It was a stumpy figure with a round face and a hat like a black halo. He realized that it was, in fact, a priest; but there was something about it that reminded him of some quaint old black woodcut at the end of a Dance of Death.
Then he heard Bagshaw saying to the priest:
“I’m glad you can identify this man; but you must realize that he’s to some extent under suspicion. Of course, he may be innocent; but he did enter the garden in an irregular fashion.”
“Well, I think he’s innocent myself,” said the little priest in a colourless voice. “But, of course, I may be wrong.”
“Why do you think he is innocent?”
“Because he entered the garden in an irregular fashion,” answered the cleric. “You see, I entered it in a regular fashion myself. But I seem to be almost the only person who did. All the best people seem to get over garden walls nowadays.”
“What do you mean by a regular fashion?” asked the detective.
“Well,” said Father Brown, looking at him with limpid gravity, “I came in by the front door. I often come into houses that way.”
“Excuse me,” said Bagshaw, “but does it matter very much how you came in, unless you propose to confess to the murder?”
“Yes, I think it does,” said the priest mildly. “The truth is, that when I came in at the front door I saw something I don’t think any of the rest of you have seen. It seems to me it might have something to do with it.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw a sort of general smash-up,” said Father Brown in his mild voice. “A big looking-glass broken, and a small palm tree knocked over and the pot smashed all over the floor. Somehow, it looked to me as if something had happened.”
“You are right,” said Bagshaw after a pause. “If you saw that, it certainly looks as if it had something to do with it.”
“And if it had anything to do with it,” said the priest very gently, “it looks as if there was one person who had nothing to do with it; and that is Mr. Michael Flood, who entered the garden over the wall in an irregular fashion, and then tried to leave it in the same irregular fashion. It is his irregularity that makes me believe in his innocence.”
“Let us go into the house,” said Bagshaw abruptly.
As they passed in at the side-door, the servant leading the way, Bagshaw fell back a pace or two and spoke to his friend.
“Something odd about that servant,” he said. “Says his name is Green, though he doesn’t look it; but there seems no doubt he’s really Gwynne’s servant, apparently the only regular servant he had. But the queer thing is, that he flatly denied that his master was in the garden at all, dead or alive. Said the old judge had gone out to a grand legal dinner and couldn’t be home for hours, and gave that as his excuse for slipping out.”
“Did he,” asked Underhill, “give any excuse for his curious way of slipping in?”
“No, none that I can make sense of,” answered the detective. “I can’t make him out. He seems to be scared of something.”
Entering by the side-door, they found themselves at the inner end of the entrance hall, which ran along the side of the house and ended with the front door, surmounted by a dreary fanlight of the old-fashioned pattern. A faint grey light was beginning to outline its radiation upon the darkness, like some dismal and discoloured sunrise; but what light there was in the hall came from
