The Queer Feet

The Vernon Hotel is the most exclusive house in the Cape, and it is silent. Not quiet - silent. Its proprietor, Mr. Lever, has spent a fortune packing every spring and gear in the building in felt and lead and beds of sand, so that the machinery of the place moves like a swimmer under ice. A guest may stay a week and never hear a tick. The only sound left in the Vernon is the human foot.

Tonight is the annual dinner of the Twelve True Fishermen, and the club has laid out its treasures: twelve silver fish knives and forks, each loaded at the hilt with a pearl the size of a boy's marble. Twelve gentlemen sit down to dine. Fifteen waiters stand against the wall, as is the custom, and then vanish into the silence.

Upstairs, in a small private room, a shabby priest from the Hex River Valley is writing out a message for a dying waiter. And through the wall, in the corridor, he hears footsteps.

They are the same pair of boots. They are unmistakably the same pair of boots. And they are doing something no pair of boots should do - first a light quick patter, like a man walking on tiptoe for a wager; then a slow, careless, creaking stamp, like a heavy gentleman strolling with a cigar; then the patter again; then the stamp. Over and over, in the same passage, for twenty minutes.

Father Brown does not know what the sound means. He only knows that everything else in the hotel keeps perfect time, and this does not.

By the end of the fish course, the silver is gone. By the end of the evening, a thief is at the cloakroom counter, the watch is at the door, and a small round priest is explaining the plainest and most brilliant crime of the age - which turns, in the end, on nothing more complicated than a black coat.

The Queer Feet is a Father Brown clockpunk mystery of the Cape.