The Penguin Complete Father Brown [antikvár]

THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN THE BLUE CROSS Between the silver ribbon of mornin; sea, the boat touched Harwich and among whom the man we must fol ; and the green glittering ribbon of et loose a swarm of folk like Sies, ow was by no means conspicuous -nor'wished to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century. Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the great criminal at l«t from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of die Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretory connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau. It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ccased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flariibeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned the jtdge d'instruction upside down and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. It is due to liim to say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undig-