The Secret Garden

Aristide Valentin, Captain-General of the Watch of the Hours, has built himself a house no one can leave. One door, guarded by his servant Ivan and an armoury of bells. A garden sealed on every side by a wall of dressed stone, topped with spikes, threaded with a wire that rings if anything so much as leans upon it. A ribbon of paper in the hall that stamps the name of every man who enters and cannot be unstamped. Valentin has spent his life catching criminals. He intends to sleep soundly.

He comes home late from the Castle, where the Falling Engine has just done its work upon a murderer named Louis Becker. His guests are already gathered — the English ambassador, a Scotch heiress, an Irish commandant, a doctor of the Castle school, a little priest from the Hex River Valley, and an American millionaire named Julius K. Brayne who funds every religion he can find and believes in none of them.

At dinner the millionaire argues with his host. Afterwards he walks out to smoke a cigar in the garden.

An hour later, Lord Galloway runs screaming across the lawn. There is a body in the grass, face down, in evening black. When they lift it, the head falls off.

A stranger, plainly — no one at the party knows the yellow face or the hawk nose or the black doublet without a watch-chain. But the walls are sealed, the wire never rang, and no one has come through the front door who was not stamped on the ribbon. The dead man could not have entered. The murderer could not have left.

Valentin has twelve hours before his guests go free. He has five impossible questions and no answers. And he has one guest who sits in a corner blinking at the lamps, saying nothing of consequence — until the moment when something happens, and then he says everything.

The Secret Garden is a Father Brown clockpunk mystery of the Cape.