The young daughter thought she had shot the "woman" intruder. But the intruder was at the nightclub and at the cemetery after the murder.
So what actually had happened to the transvestite in the bedroom after he killed the MISSING MAN? He fell to the floor. Was he merely stunned? And, if so, then he got off free,too?
I'm puzzled. Would appreciate an explanation. Thanks.
There was no intruder. The daughter shot her father (Ned), who was a cross-dresser. That was the reason he "disappeared" for all those years; his father forced him to stay away for his mother's sake. The mother died, and Ned's "widow" was going to marry Ned's brother. That was when Ned came back; he couldn't allow his wife to be an unwitting bigamist.
The nightclub was what people might call a drag bar, although "drag" is a subset of cross-dressing that usually includes performance art. This bar was a safe place for men who liked to dress as women, which at the time was a criminal activity. Ned was coming back from there when his daughter mistook him for a woman who was trying to break up her parents marriage, and shot "her".
The gunshot was actually heard by others in the house, who got the daughter back to bed, and got Ned out of women's clothing, and also cleaned the makeup off him (but the lipstick stained, which was what Father Brown saw, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, the person at the nightclub and cemetery was not Ned, but another patron. He came to the cemetery to pay his respects to a dead friend - an act of great courage (as it was a crime).
I hope that cleared it up, but was also not so detailed that your eyes rolled back in your head.
(To anyone who might be offended because I used out-of-favor terms, or minimized things, or just plain got cultural concepts wrong, I do apologize. Please put any errors down to ignorance, and not ill-will.)
Acter
Well put. The person in the bar and cemetary was 'jackie'. Thats what she said father brown could call her when they visited the club. I had a lot of questions. If the dead man came back wearing a military uniform and how he could when he had supposedly deserted the army. That was a big mystery for me. I know that in America you can't wear your uniform unless its a Veterans parade etc once out of service. But, if he deserted he shouldn't have been able to wear it period. Also, there was mention he was on a secret mission. Lastly, he would have had to desert if he even did, toward the end of the war as his cross in the cemetary listed it being 1953 and if he was gone eight years, he would have been gone since 1945 which was the end of world war II after Hitlers death for all purposes I believe in April of 1945. My own father back home in November of 1945.
share