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“Had the flowers got long stalks?” asked Father Brown.

Flambeau stared at him. “What an odd person you are!” he said. “That’s exactly what old Grimm said. He said the ugliest part of it, he thought–uglier than the blood and bullet–was that the flowers were quite short, plucked close under the head.”

“Of course,” said the priest, “when a grown up girl is really picking flowers, she picks them with plenty of stalk. If she just pulled their heads off, as a child does, it looks as if–” And he hesitated.

“Well?” inquired the other.

“Well, it looks rather as if she had snatched them nervously, to make an excuse for being there after–well, after she was there.”

“I know what you’re driving at,” said Flambeau rather gloomily. “But that and every other suspicion breaks down on the one point–the want of a weapon. He could have been killed, as you say, with lots of other things–even with his own military sash; but we have to explain not how he was killed, but how he was shot. And the fact is we can’t. They had the girl most ruthlessly searched; for, to tell the truth, she was a little suspect, though the niece and ward of the wicked old Chamberlain, Paul Arnhold. But she was very romantic, and was suspected of sympathy with the old revolutionary enthusiasm in her family. All the same, however romantic you are, you can’t imagine a big bullet into a man’s jaw or brain without using a gun or pistol. And there was no pistol, though there were two pistol shots. I leave it to you, my friend.”

“How do you know there were two shots?” asked the little priest.

“There was only one in his head,” said his companion, “but there was another bullet-hole in the sash.”

Father Brown’s smooth brow became suddenly constricted. “Was the other bullet found?” he demanded.

Flambeau started a little. “I don’t think I remember,” he said.

“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” cried Brown, frowning more and more, with a quite unusual concentration of curiosity. “Don’t think me rude. Let me think this out for a moment.”

“All right,” said Flambeau, laughing, and finished his beer. A slight breeze stirred the budding trees and blew up into the sky cloudlets of white and pink that seemed to make the sky bluer and the whole coloured scene more quaint. They might have been cherubs flying home to the casements of a sort of celestial nursery. The oldest tower of the castle, the Dragon Tower, stood up as grotesque as the ale-mug, but as homely. Only beyond the tower glimmered the wood in which the man had lain dead.

“What became of this Hedwig eventually?” asked the priest at last.

“She is married to General Schwartz,” said Flambeau. “No doubt you’ve heard of his career, which was rather romantic. He had distinguished himself even, before his exploits at Sadowa and Gravelotte; in fact, he rose from the ranks, which is very unusual even in the smallest of the German…”

Father Brown sat up suddenly.

“Rose from the ranks!” he cried, and made a mouth as if to whistle. “Well, well, what a queer story! What a queer way of killing a man; but I suppose it was the only one possible. But to think of hate so patient–“

“What do you mean?” demanded the other. “In what way did they kill the man?”

“They killed him with the sash,” said Brown carefully; and then, as Flambeau protested: “Yes, yes, I know about the bullet. Perhaps I ought to say he died of having a sash. I know it doesn’t sound like having a disease.”

“I suppose,” said Flambeau, “that you’ve got some notion in your head, but it won’t easily get the bullet out of his. As I explained before, he might easily have been strangled. But he was shot. By whom? By what?”

“He was shot by his own orders,” said the priest.

“You mean he committed suicide?”

“I didn’t say by his own wish,” replied Father Brown. “I said by his own orders.”