“As a matter of fact, this last point, though it is the last link, is not the main business. There were much more curious things in the case than that. One of them is rather a curiosity of evidence. Let me begin by saying something that may surprise you. Darnaway did not die at seven o’clock that evening. He had been already dead for a whole day.”
“Surprise is rather a mild word,” said Payne grimly, “since you and I both saw him walking about afterwards.”
“No, we did not,” replied Father Brown quietly. “I think we both saw him, or thought we saw him, fussing about with the focusing of his camera. Wasn’t his head under that black cloak when you passed through the room? It was when I did. And that’s why I felt there was something queer about the room and the figure. It wasn’t that the leg was crooked, but rather that it wasn’t crooked. It was dressed in the same sort of dark clothes; but if you see what you believe to be one man standing in the way that another man stands, you will think he’s in a strange and strained attitude.”
“Do you really mean,” cried Payne with something like a shudder, “that it was some unknown man?”
“It was the murderer,” said Father Brown. “He had already killed Darnaway at daybreak and hid the corpse and himself in the dark room—an excellent hiding-place, because nobody normally goes into it or can see much if he does. But he let it fall out on the floor at seven o’clock, of course, that the whole thing might be explained by the curse.”
“But I don’t understand,” observed Payne. “Why didn’t he kill him at seven o’clock then, instead of loading himself with a corpse for fourteen hours?”
“Let me ask you another question,” said the priest. “Why was there no photograph taken? Because the murderer made sure of killing him when he first got up, and before he could take it. It was essential to the murderer to prevent that photograph reaching the expert on the Darnaway antiquities.”
There was a sudden silence for a moment, and then the priest went on in a lower tone:
“Don’t you see how simple it is? Why, you yourself saw one side of the possibility; but it’s simpler even than you thought. You said a man might be faked to resemble an old picture. Surely it’s simpler that a picture should be faked to resemble a man. In plain words, it’s true in a rather special way that there was no Doom of the Darnaways. There was no old picture; there was no old rhyme; there was no legend of a man who caused his wife’s death. But there was a very wicked and a very clever man who was willing to cause another man’s death in order to rob him of his promised wife.”
The priest suddenly gave Payne a sad smile, as if in reassurance. “For the moment I believe you thought I meant you,” he said, “but you were not the only person who haunted that house for sentimental reasons. You know the man, or rather you think you do. But there were depths in the man called Martin Wood, artist and antiquary, which none of his mere artistic acquaintances were likely to guess. Remember that he was called in to criticize and catalogue the pictures; in an aristocratic dustbin of that sort that practically means simply to tell the Darnaways what art treasures they had got. They would not be surprised at things turning up they had never noticed before. It had to be done well, and it was; perhaps he was right when he said that if it wasn’t Holbein it was somebody of the same genius.”
“I feel rather stunned,” said Payne, “and there are twenty things I don’t see yet. How did he know what Darnaway looked like? How did he actually kill him? The doctors seem rather puzzled at present.”
“I saw a photograph the lady had which the Australian sent on before him,” said the priest, “and there are several ways in which he could have learned things when the new heir was once recognized. We may not know these details; but they are not difficulties. You remember he used to help in the dark room; it seems to me an ideal place, say, to prick a man with a poisoned pin, with the poisons all handy. No; I say these were not difficulties. The difficulty that stumped me was how Wood could be in two places at once. How could he take the corpse from the darkroom and prop it against the camera so that it would fall in a few seconds, without coming downstairs, when he was in the library looking out a book? And I was such a fool that I never looked at the books in the library; and it was only in this photograph, by very undeserved good luck, that I saw the simple fact of a book about Pope Joan.”
“You’ve kept your best riddle for the end,” said Payne grimly. “What on earth can Pope Joan have to do with it?”
“Don’t forget the book about the Something of Iceland,” advised the priest, “or the religion of somebody called Frederick. It only remains to ask what sort of man was the late Lord Darnaway.”
“Oh, does it?” observed Payne heavily.
“He was a cultivated, humorous sort of eccentric, I believe,” went on Father Brown. “Being cultivated, he knew there was no such person as Pope Joan. Being humorous, he was very likely to have thought of the title of The Snakes of Iceland or something else that didn’t exist. I venture to reconstruct the third title
