The first peculiar thing about Arthur Vane’s funeral was that almost everyone had come.
The second was that nobody seemed to know the deceased.
Father Brown discovered this while standing beneath the porch of St. Michael’s, watching an astonishing procession of umbrellas advance through the rain.
St. Michael’s belonged to one of those English villages that had escaped modernity chiefly because modernity had never found the turning. Its church was Norman, its inn Georgian, and its telephone box remained bright red despite several official attempts to remove it.
Arthur Vane had lived outside the village for twenty-seven years.
Father Brown had never met him.
He had expected perhaps six mourners.
There were already eighty.
Inspector Mallory came up the path, shaking rain from his hat.
“You’re popular today.”
“I don’t think they’ve come to see me,” said Father Brown.
“Vane had no family, did he?”
“Apparently not.”
Mallory glanced at the crowd.
“Then who are all these people?”
“I was hoping you knew.”
A large motorcar stopped at the gate. A prosperous-looking man climbed out and hurried toward the church.
An elderly woman saw him and gasped.
“Arthur!”
The man stopped.
“I beg your pardon?”
For several seconds the woman stared at him.
Then her face fell.
“I’m terribly sorry. From behind you looked exactly like him.”
The businessman gave her a sympathetic smile.
“You knew Mr. Vane?”
“Oh yes.”
“So did I.”
Her smile returned.
“Then you must know what I mean. He never liked anyone making a fuss.”
The businessman hesitated.
“That certainly sounds like him.”
“What a shame about his leg.”
“His leg?”
“The limp.”
The businessman stared at her.
“Arthur Vane didn’t limp.”
“Oh, but he did. Quite badly.”
“I saw him run half the length of Paddington Station.”
They looked at one another.
Father Brown watched them both.
Then the bell began to toll.
The funeral was remarkable chiefly for the number of Arthur Vanes who attended it.
Mrs. Edith Palmer, a widow from Reading, remembered a thin man in his sixties with a grey moustache and a pronounced limp.
“He saved us,” she told Father Brown after the service. “My husband had died. The landlord was putting me out. Mr. Vane paid six months’ rent.”
“You met him?”
“Several times.”
She opened her handbag and produced an old photograph.
A tall, grey-haired man stood beside a garden gate.
“That’s him.”
Across the churchyard, Thomas Pike had a different Arthur Vane.
Pike was broad, bald and built like a retired prizefighter, which was not very far from the truth.
“He found me work when I came out.”
“Out of where?” asked Mallory.
“Prison.”
Mallory looked interested.
Pike looked amused.
“You policemen always do.”
“And Mr. Vane helped you?”
“Gave me a railway ticket, twenty pounds and a name to ask for in Birmingham.”
“What did he look like?”
“Vane? Short fellow. Round face. Spectacles.”
Father Brown glanced toward Mrs. Palmer.
“No moustache?”
“Couldn’t grow one to save his life.”
“And did he limp?”
Pike laughed.
“He boxed with me once.”
Mallory frowned.
“Arthur Vane boxed?”
“Only one round. Terrible guard.”
A young woman waiting nearby interrupted.
“He didn’t wear spectacles.”
They turned.
She was perhaps thirty-five and held an envelope carefully between gloved fingers.
“I’m Clara Bell. Mr. Vane helped me a very long time ago.”
“You knew him too?” said Mallory.
“I owe him my life.”
She said it without melodrama.
Father Brown looked at her.
“What did he do?”
Clara considered this.
“He listened.”
It was the first description of Arthur Vane that did not contradict any of the others.
They went into the vestry because the rain had become heavier.
There they found Edwin March.
March was Vane’s solicitor and executor: a narrow, immaculate man whose black suit seemed tailored specifically for funerals.
“This is dreadful,” he said. “Absolutely dreadful.”
“The death?” asked Father Brown.
“The confusion.”
March gestured toward the church.
“I had no idea Arthur knew so many people.”
“You invited them,” said Mallory.
“As executor. I found names among his papers.”
“All of them?”
“Most.”
Mallory opened his notebook.
“You knew Vane well?”
“For thirty years.”
“At last,” said Father Brown.
March blinked.
“At last what?”
“Someone who knew him.”
March gave a tired smile.
“Arthur was intensely private.”
“What did he look like?”
The solicitor appeared surprised by the question.
“Look like?”
“Yes.”
“Well—ordinary. Medium height. Grey hair toward the end. Clean-shaven.”
“No limp?”
“Certainly not.”
“Spectacles?”
“For reading.”
“Did he smoke?”
“Never.”
Mrs. Palmer, who had entered behind them, looked astonished.
“He smoked a pipe every evening.”
March smiled patiently.
“My dear lady, whoever you knew, I assure you it was not Arthur.”
She stiffened.
“I knew Arthur Vane.”
“So did I,” said Pike from the doorway.
“And he smoked cigars.”
Mallory shut his notebook.
“This is getting ridiculous.”
“No,” said Father Brown. “It is getting interesting.”
The body had been found three days earlier at Vane’s house.
His housekeeper came twice a week. She discovered him sitting in his study beside an unfinished cup of tea.
Vane had suffered from a heart complaint.
His medicine stood beside him.
The local doctor certified the death.
Nothing appeared suspicious.
Mallory explained all this with the slightly resentful air of a policeman being required to investigate a corpse that had inconsiderately died of natural causes.
Father Brown listened.
Then he asked:
“Who identified him?”
March answered immediately.
“I did.”
“You saw the body?”
There was the smallest pause.
“Of course.”
“Before or after it was taken away?”
“After.”
Father Brown looked toward the church.
“Did anyone else?”
“The housekeeper.”
“Did she know him well?”
“She worked for him.”
“That isn’t quite the same thing.”
March’s expression hardened.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re suggesting.”
“Neither do I,” said Father Brown cheerfully. “That is why I keep asking questions.”
The questions continued over luncheon at the Crown.
They produced more Arthur Vanes.
A retired schoolmaster had known a tall man with a beard.
A nurse remembered a clean-shaven man who spoke with a Scottish accent.
A former shopkeeper remembered Vane as unmistakably Welsh.
One woman insisted he was nearly seventy when she met him fifteen years ago.
Pike said he could not have been forty-five.
Every witness possessed evidence.
Letters.
Receipts.
Christmas cards.
A railway ticket.
A photograph.
A cancelled cheque.
All carried the name Arthur Vane.
Mallory spread them across a table in the private dining room.
“Aliases,” he said.
Father Brown ate his soup.
“Possibly.”
“Fraud.”
“Perhaps.”
“Blackmail?”
Father Brown buttered some bread.
“Why?”
Mallory stared at him.
“You might occasionally help.”
“I am helping. I am preventing you from becoming too attached to nouns.”
March sat at the far end of the table.
“This is exactly what I feared.”
Father Brown looked up.
“What did you fear?”
“That Arthur had been leading some sort of double life.”
“Judging by the evidence,” said Mallory, “he’d need to have been leading six.”
March did not smile.
“There are irregularities in the estate.”
That changed the room.
“What sort?” asked Mallory.
“Financial.”
“How much?”
“I don’t yet know. Arthur distributed money privately for years. There are payments everywhere. Cash withdrawals. Transfers. Cheques to people I’ve never heard of.”
He gestured toward the mourners beyond the door.
“And now this.”
Mallory leaned back.
“So Vane wasn’t the harmless recluse everyone thought.”
March lowered his voice.
“I’m afraid we may discover that nobody knew what Arthur Vane really was.”
Father Brown stopped eating.
He looked at March for a long moment.
Then he returned to his soup.
Clara Bell’s letter was written on cream paper.
Father Brown found her reading it beneath the inn’s staircase.
“From him?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I was nineteen.”
She handed it to him.
The message was brief.
Miss Bell,
Mr. Arthur Vane has asked me to tell you that the enclosed railway fare is not a loan and therefore cannot be repaid.
If you insist upon thanking somebody, thank Arthur Vane.
There was no signature beyond the typed name.
Father Brown turned the envelope over.
Embossed faintly across the flap were the words:
MARCH & MARCH
SOLICITORS
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS
“Did you meet him?” Father Brown asked.
“Once.”
“Arthur Vane?”
“I thought so.”
“What happened?”
Clara looked down.
“I was having a very bad night. A man sat beside me at a railway station and talked until the last train had gone.”
“What did he say?”
“Almost nothing important.”
Father Brown smiled.
“That can sometimes be very important indeed.”
“At the end I asked his name.”
“And?”
“He said, ‘If you must thank somebody, thank Arthur Vane.’”
Father Brown became very still.
“Those exact words?”
“Yes.”
He looked again at the letter.
Then he went looking for Mrs. Palmer.
Her letter was twenty-two years old.
Different handwriting.
Same signature.
Arthur Vane.
Pike’s was seventeen years old.
Different handwriting again.
Arthur Vane.
The retired schoolmaster’s was typed.
The nurse’s was written in green ink.
But one phrase kept returning.
If you must thank somebody...
Father Brown laid the letters beside one another.
Mallory stared at them.
“So he had secretaries.”
“No.”
“Agents?”
“Yes.”
March had entered unnoticed.
He was pale.
Father Brown looked at him.
“You know, don’t you?”
March sat down.
For the first time that day, he looked old.
“Arthur hated gratitude.”
Mallory frowned.
“What?”
“He inherited money when he was thirty-eight. Not a fortune, but enough. He began helping people.”
“Through you?”
“At first.”
“And later?”
“Other people. A doctor. A clergyman. A retired army officer. Anyone he trusted.”
Mallory looked at the letters.
“They called themselves Arthur Vane?”
“Not exactly.”
Father Brown smiled.
“They allowed other people to call them Arthur Vane.”
March nodded.
“If Arthur heard about someone in trouble, he arranged the help. Sometimes one of us delivered it. Sometimes somebody talked to them. Sometimes somebody found them employment.”
Mrs. Palmer’s photograph lay on the table.
Father Brown touched it.
“This isn’t Arthur Vane.”
“No.”
“Who is it?”
“Dr. Samuel Haines. Dead twelve years.”
Pike’s short, bespectacled benefactor had been another intermediary.
So had Clara’s stranger at the railway station.
Mallory stared around the room.
“Then none of these people knew Vane.”
Father Brown shook his head.
“Oh, I think they knew him extremely well.”
“They couldn’t recognize him.”
“Faces are rather overrated.”
The mystery might have ended there.
It did not.
Father Brown was examining another letter.
It had supposedly been sent by Arthur Vane six months earlier to a struggling family in Bristol.
The envelope bore the same embossed mark.
MARCH & MARCH.
Father Brown carried it to the window.
“When did your father die, Mr. March?”
The solicitor stared at him.
“Twelve years ago.”
“And the firm changed its name?”
“Yes.”
“To Edwin March & Company?”
“Yes.”
“Immediately?”
“Within weeks.”
Father Brown held up the envelope.
“Then this is a remarkably patient piece of stationery.”
Mallory took it.
March said nothing.
“This letter is dated March,” said Father Brown. “Six months ago. Yet the envelope belongs to a firm that ceased to exist twelve years ago.”
“Arthur kept old stationery.”
“Perhaps.”
“He was eccentric.”
“Certainly.”
Father Brown turned the envelope over.
“But Arthur didn’t write this letter.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because Arthur had already stopped giving money by then.”
March’s face changed.
Mallory looked from one man to the other.
“How do you know that?”
Father Brown reached into his pocket.
He produced a small notebook.
“Dr. Latham told me.”
Vane’s physician had spoken to Father Brown after the funeral.
Six months earlier, Vane’s heart condition had worsened.
He had closed his charitable fund and begun putting his affairs in order.
Yet money had continued to move through the accounts.
Letters had continued to appear.
Arthur Vane had continued performing acts of generosity.
Even though Arthur Vane had stopped.
Mallory slowly turned toward March.
“How much?”
March said nothing.
“How much money is missing?”
“Not missing.”
“How much?”
“Forty-seven thousand pounds.”
The rain beat against the window.
Mallory closed the door.
March’s explanation came apart slowly.
He had administered Vane’s charitable accounts for decades.
Small amounts disappeared first.
Then larger ones.
Vane rarely examined the books.
Why would he?
The money was supposed to disappear.
That was its purpose.
But illness had made Vane cautious.
He asked questions.
He requested statements.
He found discrepancies.
And eventually he told March that they would discuss the accounts on Monday morning.
Arthur Vane died Sunday night.
“Medicine,” said Father Brown.
March looked at him.
“His heart medicine.”
Mallory stood.
“Careful, Father.”
“Mr. March was careful.”
Father Brown’s voice was almost sad.
“He didn’t need a dramatic poison. He needed only to alter something a sick man’s heart already depended upon.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“No,” said Father Brown.
Mallory smiled without humor.
“But a laboratory can.”
March looked toward the door.
Pike was standing on the other side of it.
The former prisoner folded his arms.
“I wouldn’t,” he said.
March remained seated.
Later, after the police car had gone, Mallory returned to St. Michael’s.
Father Brown was sitting in the last pew.
The coffin remained before the altar.
The inspector sat beside him.
“Odd sort of life.”
“Yes.”
“Half the people at his funeral never even saw him.”
Father Brown looked toward the coffin.
“Oh, I think they saw rather a lot of him.”
“They couldn’t even tell us what he looked like.”
“No,” said Father Brown. “Only what he was like.”
Outside, the rain had stopped.
Voices drifted through the open church door.
The mourners had not gone home.
Mrs. Palmer was speaking with Clara Bell.
The prosperous businessman had cornered Pike.
Father Brown and Mallory went outside.
“What are they doing?” Mallory asked.
Father Brown listened.
The businessman owned a small engineering company.
Pike’s nephew needed work.
Mrs. Palmer had an empty room.
Clara knew a young woman who desperately needed somewhere to live.
The retired schoolmaster was organizing something involving a scholarship.
Nobody had planned any of it.
They had simply begun talking.
Mallory shook his head.
“Extraordinary.”
Father Brown watched them for a while.
Then the little priest put on his hat.
“It appears,” he said, “that Mr. Vane has missed his own funeral.”