The Blue Cross

Aristide Valentin, Captain-General of the Watch of the Hours, arrives at Simon's Town by packet boat on a summer morning, his mechanical arm ticking at his side and his crystal eye recording everything it sees. He has come to Cape Town to make the greatest arrest of his career. Hercule Flambeau, the most famous thief in the world, is believed to be in the Cape.

Aboard the train, Valentin studies his fellow passengers and finds nothing. Flambeau is four inches over six feet and cannot hide it. But one passenger interests him in spite of himself - a short, round, shabbily dressed priest from the Hex River Valley, carrying several brown paper parcels, one of which he keeps announcing to the entire carriage contains something made of real silver "with blue stones." The little man is so helpless, so naive, so incapable of managing his own return ticket, that Valentin pities him. He warns him not to advertise his valuables. Then he forgets him.

At the Castle, Valentin regularizes his position. Then he begins his hunt - not by going where a criminal would go, but where he would not. He reasons that with no clue at all, the best method is to follow the unreasonable. Somewhere a man must begin, and it might as well be where another man would stop.

What follows is a chase through the old streets beyond the Company's Garden. A restaurant where the salt is in the sugar basin and a clergyman threw his soup at the wall. A greengrocer's window where the nuts are labelled oranges. A public-house where a priest paid three times his bill in advance and then smashed the pane with his umbrella, explaining the money would cover it. A sweet shop near the mountain, where a brown paper parcel was left behind to be posted to the harbor.

Valentin follows every mark, certain he is hunting a madman.

He is wrong.

On the lower slopes of Table Mountain, behind a tree, in the last of the light, he and two watchmen listen as the tall priest turns to the short one and says, without changing his voice: Just hand over that sapphire cross of yours, will you? We're all alone here, and I could pull you to pieces like a straw doll.

The little priest does not flinch. He has known from the first. Every oddity on that trail - the soup, the tickets, the broken window, the overpaid bill - was his own doing. He laid the breadcrumbs knowing a great detective would read them, and knowing a great thief would assume a fool had left them.

And he was right.

The Blue Cross is a Father Brown clockpunk mystery of the Cape - a story of the greatest detective in the colony, the greatest thief in the world, and the small round priest who catches them both with an unseen hook and an invisible line.