The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton (beach read book txt) 📕

“What place?” asked his companion.

“The place where the poor fellow was killed,” said Fisher, sadly.

“What do you mean?” demanded March.

“He was smashed up on the rocks a mile and a half from here.”

“No, he wasn’t,” replied Fisher. “He didn’t fall on the rocks at all. Didn’t you notice that he only fell on the slope of soft grass underneath? But I saw that he had a bullet in him already.”

Then after a pause he added:

“He was alive at the inn, but he was dead long before he came to the rocks. So he was shot as he drove his car down this strip of straight road, and I should think somewhere about here. After that, of course, the car went straight on with nobody to stop or turn it. It’s really a very cunning dodge in its way; for the body would be found far away, and most people would say, as you do, that it was an accident to a motorist. The murderer must have been a clever brute.”

“But wouldn’t the shot be heard at the inn or somewhere?” asked March.

“It would be heard. But it would not be noticed. That,” continued the investigator, “is where he was clever again. Shooting was going on all over the place all day; very likely he timed his shot so as to drown it in a number of others. Certainly he was a first-class criminal. And he was something else as well.”

“What do you mean?” asked his companion, with a creepy premonition of something coming, he knew not why.

“He was a first-class shot,” said Fisher. He had turned his back abruptly and was walking down a narrow, grassy lane, little more than a cart track, which lay opposite the inn and marked the end of the great estate and the beginning of the open moors. March plodded after him with the same idle perseverance, and found him staring through a gap in giant weeds and thorns at the flat face of a painted paling. From behind the paling rose the great gray columns of a row of poplars, which filled the heavens above them with dark-green shadow and shook faintly in a wind which had sunk slowly into a breeze. The afternoon was already deepening into evening, and the titanic shadows of the poplars lengthened over a third of the landscape.

“Are you a first-class criminal?” asked Fisher, in a friendly tone. “I’m afraid I’m not. But I think I can manage to be a sort of fourth-rate burglar.”

And before his companion could reply he had managed to swing himself up and over the fence; March followed without much bodily effort, but with considerable mental disturbance. The poplars grew so close against the fence that they had some difficulty in slipping past them, and beyond the poplars they could see only a high hedge of laurel, green and lustrous in the level sun. Something in this limitation by a series of living walls made him feel as if he were really entering a shattered house instead of an open field. It was as if he came in by a disused door or window and found the way blocked by furniture. When they had circumvented the laurel hedge, they came out on a sort of terrace of turf, which fell by one green step to an oblong lawn like a bowling green. Beyond this was the only building in sight, a low conservatory, which seemed far away from anywhere, like a glass cottage standing in its own fields in fairyland. Fisher knew that lonely look of the outlying parts of a great house well enough. He realized that it is more of a satire on aristocracy than if it were choked with weeds and littered with ruins. For it is not neglected and yet it is deserted; at any rate, it is disused. It is regularly swept and garnished for a master who never comes.

Looking over the lawn, however, he saw one object which he had not apparently expected. It was a sort of tripod supporting a large disk like the round top of a table tipped sideways, and it was not until they had dropped on to the lawn and walked across to look at it that March realized that it was a target. It was worn and weatherstained; the gay colors of its concentric rings were faded; possibly it had been set up in those far-off Victorian days when there was a fashion of archery. March had one of his vague visions of ladies in cloudy crinolines and gentlemen in outlandish hats and whiskers revisiting that lost garden like ghosts.

Fisher, who was peering more closely at the target, startled him by an exclamation.

“Hullo!” he said. “Somebody has been peppering this thing with shot, after all, and quite lately, too. Why, I believe old Jink’s been trying to improve his bad shooting here.”

“Yes, and it looks as if it still wanted improving,” answered March, laughing. “Not one of these shots is anywhere near the bull’s-eye; they seem just scattered about in the wildest way.”

“In the wildest way,” repeated Fisher, still peering intently at the target. He seemed merely to assent, but March fancied his eye was shining under its sleepy lid and that he straightened his stooping figure with a strange effort.

“Excuse me a moment,” he said, feeling in his pockets. “I think I’ve got some of my chemicals; and after that we’ll go up to the house.” And he stooped again over the target, putting something with his finger over each of the shot-holes, so far as March could see merely a dull-gray smear. Then they went through the gathering twilight up the long green avenues to the great house.

Here again, however, the eccentric investigator did not enter by the front door. He walked round the house until he found a window open, and, leaping into it, introduced his friend to what appeared to be the gun-room. Rows of the regular instruments for bringing down birds stood against the walls; but across a table in the window lay one or two weapons of a heavier and more formidable pattern.

“Hullo I these are Burke’s big-game rifles,” said Fisher. “I never knew he kept them here.” He lifted one of them, examined it briefly, and put it down again, frowning heavily. Almost as he did so a strange young man came hurriedly into the room. He was dark and sturdy, with a bumpy forehead and a bulldog jaw, and he spoke with a curt apology.

“I left Major Burke’s guns here,” he said, “and he wants them packed up. He’s going away to-night.”

And he carried off the two rifles without casting a glance at the stranger; through the open window they could see his short, dark figure walking away across the glimmering garden. Fisher got out of the window again and stood looking after him.

“That’s Halkett, whom I told you about,” he said. “I knew he was a sort of secretary and had to do with Burke’s papers; but I never knew he. had anything to do with his guns. But he’s just the sort of silent, sensible little devil who might be very good at anything; the sort of man you know for years before you find he’s a chess champion.”

He had begun to walk in the direction of the disappearing secretary, and they soon came within sight of the rest of the house-party talking and laughing on the lawn. They could see the tall figure and loose mane of the lion-hunter dominating the little group.

“By the way,” observed Fisher, “when we were talking about Burke and Halkett, I said that a man couldn’t very well write with a gun. Well, I’m not so sure now. Did you ever hear of an artist so clever that he could draw with a gun? There’s a wonderful chap loose about here.”

Sir Howard hailed Fisher and his friend the journalist with almost boisterous amiability. The latter was presented to Major Burke and Mr. Halkett and also (by way of a parenthesis) to his host, Mr. Jenkins, a commonplace little man in loud tweeds, whom everybody else seemed to treat with a sort of affection, as if he were a baby.

The irrepressible Chancellor of the Exchequer was still talking about the birds he had brought down, the birds that Burke and Halkett had brought down, and the birds that Jenkins, their host, had failed to bring down. It seemed to be a sort of sociable monomania.

“You and your big game,” he ejaculated, aggressively, to Burke. “Why, anybody could shoot big game. You want to be a shot to shoot small game.”

“Quite so,” interposed Horne Fisher. “Now if only a hippopotamus could fly up in the air out of that bush, or you preserved flying elephants on the estate, why, then—”

“Why even Jink might hit that sort of bird,” cried Sir Howard, hilariously slapping his host on the back. “Even he might hit a haystack or a hippopotamus.”

“Look here, you fellows,” said Fisher. “I want you to come along with me for a minute and shoot at something else. Not a hippopotamus. Another kind of queer animal I’ve found on the estate. It’s an animal with three legs and one eye, and it’s all the colors of the rainbow.”

“What the deuce are you talking about?” asked Burke.

“You come along and see,” replied Fisher, cheerfully.

Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are always seeking for somethingnew. They gravely rearmed themselves fromthe gun-room and trooped along at the tail of their guide, Sir Howard only pausing, in a sort of ecstasy, to point out the celebrated gilt summerhouse on which the gilt weathercock still stood crooked. It was dusk turning to dark by the time they reached the remote green by the poplars and accepted the new and aimless game of shooting at the old mark.

The last light seemed to fade from the lawn, and the poplars against the sunset were like great plumes upon a purple hearse, when the futile procession finally curved round, and came out in front of the target. Sir Howard again slapped his host on the shoulder, shoving him playfully forward to take the first shot. The shoulder and arm he touched seemed unnaturally stiff and angular. Mr. Jenkins was holding his gun in an attitude more awkward than any that his satiric friends had seen or expected.

At the same instant a horrible scream seemed to come from nowhere. It was so unnatural and so unsuited to the scene that it might have been made by some inhuman thing flying on wings above them or eavesdropping in the dark woods beyond. But Fisher knew that it had started and stopped on the pale lips of Jefferson Jenkins, of Montreal, and no one at that moment catching sight of Jefferson Jenkins’s face would have complained that it was commonplace. The next moment a torrent of guttural but good-humored oaths came from Major Burke as he and the two other men saw what was in front of them. The target stood up in the dim grass like a dark goblin grinning at them, and it was literally grinning. It had two eyes like stars, and in similar livid points of light were picked out the two upturned and open nostrils and the two ends of the wide and tight mouth. A few white dots above each eye indicated the hoary eyebrows; and one of them ran upward almost erect. It was a brilliant caricature done in bright botted lines and March knew of whom. It shone in the shadowy grass, smeared with sea fire as if one of the submarine monsters had crawled into the twilight garden; but it had the head of a dead man.

“It’s only luminous paint,” said Burke.