Bagshaw stood looking down at the fallen pot and the mingled fragments at his feet.
“You’re quite right,” he said to the priest, “there’s been a struggle here. And it must have been a struggle between Gwynne and his murderer.”
“It seemed to me,” said Father Brown modestly, “that something had happened here.”
“Yes, it’s pretty clear what happened,” assented the detective. “The murderer entered by the front door and found Gwynne; probably Gwynne let him in. There was a death grapple, possibly a chance shot that hit the glass, though they might have broken it with a stray kick or anything. Gwynne managed to free himself and fled into the garden, where he was pursued and shot finally by the pond. I fancy that’s the whole story of the crime itself; but, of course, I must look round the other rooms.”
The other rooms, however, revealed very little, though Bagshaw pointed significantly to the loaded automatic pistol that he found in a drawer of the library desk.
“Looks as if he was expecting this,” he said; “yet it seems queer he didn’t take it with him when he went out into the hall.”
Eventually they returned to the hall, making their way towards the front door, Father Brown letting his eye rove around in a rather absentminded fashion. The two corridors, monotonously papered in the same grey and faded pattern, seemed to emphasize the dust and dingy floridity of the few early Victorian ornaments, the green rust that devoured the bronze of the lamp, the dull gold that glimmered in the frame of the broken mirror.
“They say it’s bad luck to break a looking-glass,” he said. “This looks like the very house of ill-luck. There’s something about the very furniture—”
“That’s rather odd,” said Bagshaw sharply. “I thought the front door would be shut, but it’s left on the latch.”
There was no reply; and they passed out of the front door into the front garden, a narrower and more formal plot of flowers, having at one end a curiously clipped hedge with a hole in it, like a green cave, under the shadow of which some broken steps peeped out.
Father Brown strolled up to the hole and ducked his head under it. A few moments after he had disappeared they were astonished to hear his quiet voice in conversation above their heads, as if he were talking to somebody at the top of a tree. The detective followed, and found that the curious covered stairway led to what looked like a broken bridge, overhanging the darker and emptier spaces of the garden. It just curled round the corner of the house, bringing in sight the field of coloured lights beyond and beneath. Probably it was the relic of some abandoned architectural fancy of building a sort of terrace on arches across the lawn. Bagshaw thought it a curious cul-de-sac in which to find anybody in the small hours between night and morning; but he was not looking at the details of it just then. He was looking at the man who was found.
As the man stood with his back turned, a small man in light grey clothes, the one outstanding feature about him was a wonderful head of hair, as yellow and radiant as the head of a huge dandelion. It was literally outstanding like a halo, and something in that association made the face, when it was slowly and sulkily turned on them, rather a shock of contrast. That halo should have enclosed an oval face of the mildly angelic sort; but the face was crabbed and elderly, with a powerful jowl and a short nose that somehow suggested the broken nose of a pugilist.
“This is Mr. Orm, the celebrated poet, I understand,” said Father Brown, as calmly as if he were introducing two people in a drawing-room.
“Whoever he is,” said Bagshaw, “I must trouble him to come with me and answer a few questions.”
Mr. Osric Orm, the poet, was not a model of self-expression when it came to the answering of questions. There in that corner of the old garden, as the grey twilight before dawn began to creep over the heavy hedges and the broken bridge, and afterwards in a succession of circumstances and stages of legal inquiry that grew more and more ominous, he refused to say anything, except that he had intended to call on Sir Humphrey Gwynne, but had not done so because he could not get anyone to answer the bell. When it was pointed out that the door was practically open, he snorted. When it was hinted that the hour was somewhat late, he snarled. The little that he said was obscure, either because he really knew hardly any English, or because he knew better than to know any. His opinions seemed to be of a nihilistic and destructive sort, as was indeed the tendency of his poetry for those who could follow it; and it seemed possible that his business with the judge, and perhaps his quarrel with the judge, had been something in the anarchist line. Gwynne was known to have had
