The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  His tone hardly changed at all. He remained aloof but fatherly, chin drawn in and large grey moustache towering above her. But Betty stopped short in the middle of the foyer. Catching sight of Garth at the doorway of the drawing-room, she flushed and turned away so that she faced Inspector Rogers.

  “Yes?” Betty asked.

  “There wouldn’t be any special reason, my lady, why you’re going back to this country cottage tonight?”

  “But I—I live at the cottage during the summer! I’ve been there since the middle of May.”

  “You wouldn’t be meeting this sister of yours, maybe?”

  “No, certainly not,” Betty cried in obvious astonishment. “Glynis is in London; I just gave you that Kensington address.”

  “What I mean to say: you wouldn’t apprehend no danger from this sister, would you? Or maybe try to do something foolish in return?”

  Garth suddenly took a step out towards them. Inspector Rogers’s eyes held him back. Though Rogers addressed Betty, his words were plainly meant for the other man.

  “Now, now, my lady, I’ve promised you we needn’t trouble Dr. Garth or his motor-car to drive you to Charing Cross. The constable’s gone to fetch a cab; he’ll be back in a brace of shakes. What I mean to say—”

  “Then say it, please.”

  “There’s been threats, you tell me. From your sister. To take away your money or your property or what not. She talks about the cottage and about a ‘pavilion.’ Meaning no intrusion, my lady, but what is this pavilion? Something like Brighton Pavilion, maybe?”

  “Good heavens, no! You might call it a permanent and elaborate kind of bathing-machine, a hut as big as a small cottage in itself, with two rooms for keeping the sexes apart.”

  “Beg pardon, my lady?”

  And Betty began to laugh, as Marion had laughed earlier in the evening.

  “For keeping the sexes apart, all very modestly.” The laughter, not without a touch of hysteria, throbbed and rang until Betty swallowed hard. “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Rogers. It’s not at all comical. The people who built the cottage also had supports driven into the sand and built the pavilion ten or a dozen years ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nobody uses the pavilion nowadays for changing in. If I have visitors, they change in the cottage. But we do use the pavilion for bathing from, and for watching the sea from the little veranda, and sometimes for making tea; and we run up a flag if it’s occupied.”

  “Do you have many visitors, my lady?”

  “No. Didn’t I tell you I’m an outcast? Only Dr. Garth and—and Mr. Hal Ormiston.” Betty broke off. “Why? Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not. I hope you’ll take a well-meant tip, though. Just you keep your head, my lady, when you go for a bathe.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Pontifical footsteps marched up the path outside, the front door opened.

  “Cab’s here, Inspector,” reported the constable.

  Every word, every inflection remained vivid in David Garth’s memory. The scene was still with him as he strode along the seafront parade at Fairfield late on that following afternoon, with a damp wind flapping at his hat under a dark overcast sky.

  He had so concentrated on memories that he almost walked into the steps of the Royal Albert Aquarium, whose dressed stone and ornamental ironwork closed off the southern end of the parade. The sea lay on his right. To return to a path parallel with it, he must go left past the aquarium into Balaclava Road, then right again into Sebastopol Avenue, until all macadamized surfaces out of Fairfield ended in an unpaved road along the bank of the coast.

  Thus, in a hollow some five miles long between these Kentish cliffs, the flattish beach curved between Bunch on the north and Ravensport on the extreme south. The latter town, once a small powerful seaport, had fallen on sleep since the Middle Ages; it retained only a few picturesque survivals and two of the best pubs in England.

  On the outskirts of Fairfield, Garth passed the inn of the Stag and Glove. His rooms there were still booked; but he had left his car in London and come down by train; he did not pause at the inn. Ten minutes’ quick walking, now, would bring him to Betty’s cottage in open country.

  And then—?

  “There is one question,” he decided, “so obvious that everybody last night forgot to ask it. At the same time, in a matter of blackmail, it may become the most important question of all.”

  The clock at St. Jude’s Church, above a grim terrace of villas behind him in Fairfield, rang the quarter-hour to six. But he had no opportunity to ask Betty that important question. When slightly less than ten minutes brought him to a turn in the road and he could see Betty’s house, other matters drove it from his mind.

  To call the place a cottage, admittedly, was the usual misnomer of long habit. A substantial stone house, rather long and low-built, with a red tile roof, stretched beside the road behind a low wall and a rather high evergreen hedge. The beach, which you could see from either north or south of the grounds but not from in front of the house, lay behind it under a slope of scrub grass. To the right of the grounds a cycle-track—Betty was a willing if not very efficient cyclist—made a faint trail from the road down across scrub grass towards the beach.

  And in front of the cottage, haunting Garth, stood his own motor-car.

  He stopped and looked at it.

  The car was pointed towards Fairfield. Its engine, running at half-throttle, made a thump and clank against death-quiet air. Though some manufacturers had begun to design cars with windscreens and a suggested form of canopy against dust, the Panhard had neither. Dust lay thick even over the leather cushions of the tonneau, in which somebody had thrown down a linen coat, a pair of gauntlets, and a cap with sinister-looking mica eyepieces.

  “Hello, Nunkie,” said a self-assured voice. “Good afternoon, Nunkie. Though it’s not a very good afternoon, is it?”

  The engine kept throbbing.

  Mr. Henry Ormiston, a slight and fair-complexioned young man with nose held rather high as though to balance a chin held forward, strolled down the unpaved path from Betty’s cottage to the wooden gate between the evergreens. He wore a straw boater on the back of his head, and peg-top white flannel trousers; his hands were thrust into the pockets of a red-and-white striped jacket.

  “You seemed to be pondering, Nunkie. Were you?”

  “Frankly, I still am. I am wondering whether the English language contains a more objectionable word than ‘nunkie,’ either used as a diminutive for ‘uncle’ or in fact used in any other way.”

  “I’m afraid there are a lot of things you think are objectionable, Nunkie.”

  “Then you are spared a self-evident illustration. What are you doing here?”

  “My dear Nunkie,” Hal said gently, “it’s no good trying to act superior or coming the high and mighty doctor at my expense. It never impresses me and it won’t help you, so don’t try it on. Besides, you know, that’s pretty poor repartee.”

  “‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.”

  “So you did.” Hal, completely unruffled, smiled and waited. “When I called at Harley Street, quite early this morning, your housekeeper said you’d already gone out in something of a dither. She didn’t know where you’d gone, or told me she didn’t. But she said you planned to be here about this time.”

  “That, I suppose, was why you took the car again?”

  “Naturally. By the way, I had to buy petrol; and there are two more tins in the tonneau now. Shall we say a modest tenner?”

  “Are you sure ten pounds will be enough?”

  “No, but I can make do with it for the moment Your sarcasm’s not lost on me, Nunkie. It’s subtle, of course, but it’s not lost on me.”

  No sign of life stirred in the stone house. Garth’s nerves had begun to crawl with apprehension and with his desire to see Betty. He would give any sum to get Hal away from here, at once, with no delaying action being fought; quite clearly, Hal knew this; and it wa
s a mistake to reach towards the pocket that held his notecase.

  “Now I wonder,” Hal said instantly, eyes narrowing, “why you’ve become so generous all of a sudden. I’m always wondering things like that, and I also wonder if your dear, dead sister’s son can persuade you to part with a larger donation. Incidentally, did you ever meet a fine upstanding officer named George Alfred Twigg?”

  “Did he turn up in Harley Street too, by any chance?”

  “He might have. I don’t know what you’ve done to him, Nunkie, but I don’t think he likes you at all. I’m not sure he likes Betty, either.”

  “Where is Betty?”

  “Yes, I imagined you’d be wanting to know that. I imagined—”

  Hal Ormiston then did a curious thing. Standing inside the gate, he removed his straw boater and held it horizontally above flat fair hair. At first it was as though he were shedding a benediction on himself, and next as though some further advantage to himself had occurred to him, and next as though he grew uncertain. Hal’s imperturbability, Garth knew, came mainly from inexperience. There might be some flaw in the superciliousness of that raised nose and outthrust jaw.

  But the effect, against a lonely landscape, was sufficiently weird.

  “I’m quite fond of that little charmer,” he declared. “She’s got money, too. I should take her away from you, Nunkie, if she didn’t have much the same attitude as another woman who—”

  Garth would wait no longer. He threw open the gate and started up the path towards the cottage. But Hal, replacing the hat, was ahead of him. Together they reached a big front door, with the brass figure of a goblin as door-knocker, standing open on a very broad, low-ceilinged hall which stretched through the house to broad glass doors at the rear.

  Through those doors showed pallid daylight.

  “It’s no good shouting,” said Hal “I’ve already tried that. She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  Hal hesitated, in a hall that smelled of old wood and stone. He went to the glass doors; he opened them towards beach and sea.

  “She went for a bathe,” Hal answered, “and she hasn’t come back. I hope nothing’s happened to her.”

  7

  “THE TIDE IS OUT now,” Garth said. “Are you telling me Betty went to swim with the tide completely out?”

  Hal looked almost human, except that one corner of his mouth lifted.

  “Don’t try your tricks, my respected ancient. She went out there two hours ago, and the tide had been ebbing for less than an hour. It won’t be full high-tide again until about nine o’clock tonight.”

  Garth spoke more loudly.

  “Well, that’s all right” he said. “Betty usually goes for a swim about that time: four o’clock, just before tea. She often has tea at the pavilion afterwards.”

  “I know that Nunkie. Now why are you telling me? But she doesn’t usually take as long as this, does she?”

  “I’m only telling you—!”

  They both glanced out to sea, where damp smoky-looking clouds curled along the horizon.

  Just outside the glass doors, a stretch of dirt and hummocky scrub grass extended some three or four yards before sloping gently to the beach. And they could see the beach spread out in front of them like a map of the world. Its sand above high-water mark was white, its sand below high-water mark was damp and hard-packed, a dingy grey; farther out well beyond the pavilion, it became only a floor of mud.

  The sea lay there as a living presence, breathing back salt air and an iodine tang across mud-flats. But you thought less of the sea than of sea-monsters. The pavilion, on its blackish wooden piles, stood more than thirty feet below high-watermark on a beach sloping so gently that it hardly seemed to slope at all. Beyond the pavilion the grey surface stretched perhaps forty or fifty feet more. There was no footprint anywhere in the sand.

  This latter fact at the moment did not impress Garth or strike him as important. Anyone who walked into the water two hours ago would have had all footprints washed out by the ebbing tide. And yet Garth found his collar strangling him and the salt air difficult to breathe.

  “Hal, how do you know Betty went out there?”

  “I saw her go.”

  “You saw her from here?”

  “It’ll be better for you, my respected ancient, if you don’t keep putting words into my mouth. No! I was driving your car along the road up there,” Hal made a gesture behind him and towards the left, “in the direction of Ravensport. I saw her walk down the beach and wade out towards the pavilion. She was wearing her usual bathing-costume, and one of those big puffy hard-rubber caps.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “All that distance away?” Hal’s lip lifted again. “It’s not likely, is it? I gave her a hail, and she raised her arm to wave back. And it won’t be wise to tell me I’m lying, either. There’s another witness who saw her. There’s a witness I just happened to be driving to Ravensport.”

  “Oh? Who was the witness?”

  “That friend of yours from Scotland Yard. Cullingford Abbot”

  Garth spun round. “Now what was Abbot doing here? Why were you driving him to Ravensport?”

  “Ah! That’s the question, don’t you think? As for what he was doing here, I’m sorry to tell you that’s none of your business. And, anyway, I don’t know. He’s a close-mouthed swine, like all these police people.” Hal’s face darkened. “I dropped him in Ravensport; I spent an agreeable couple of hours at a pub called the Red Warden; I came back here in the hope of finding you, not two minutes before you turned up. Have you got all that?”

  Garth turned back towards the sea.

  “Betty!” he shouted.

  There was no reply.

  “Betty!”

  Again his voice rang out over that lonely beach; and again there was silence except for the clanking, thudding engine of the motor-car at the front gate.

  “When you returned here from Ravensport, and found Betty wasn’t in the house, why didn’t you go out to the pavilion?”

  “And get my shoes mucked up with sand and mud? Come, now, my venerable ancient! Do you see any green in my eye? It’s no business of mine if—

  “Stop there just one second, Nunkie,” Hal added in swift coolness, as Garth started out over the grass. “Before I can let you fly to your beloved, I must remind you of something else. You won’t mind if I take the car, I’m sure. But there’s a little matter of ten pounds to be settled between us.”

  They looked at each other. Taking the notecase out of his pocket, Garth extracted two five-pound notes, folded them into a small wad, and flicked them into the grass at the young man’s feet. It was as though his own shout rang back at him from the sands. Hal’s voice went high and thin.

  “You’re an arrogant bastard, Dr. David Garth. Maybe, before we’re all many hours older, you’ll wish you hadn’t done that.”

  Garth paid no attention; he was running.

  He left shallow, sharp footprints as he ran. Behind him the throbbing of the car-engine sputtered, giving a spurt of noise and then a metallic jump. Glancing over his shoulder, he was in time to see the green car chug up and round the rise of the road north towards Fairfield. Garth slipped on the greasy surface, but kept himself from falling.

  Three wooden steps led up to the pavilion’s floor-level, and to a doorway covered by a vertical red-and-white-striped canvas sunblind, new a year ago, which could be raised or lowered by strings just inside. It was half lowered now, and he did not trouble to try raising it farther. Instead he dodged underneath and stood up again.

  Another wall, parallel with the landwards outer wall of the pavilion, made a cramped and darkish little entry. In this wall facing him were two identical little wooden doors, both partway open as usual, that led to the two rooms of the pavilion. Projecting out from the wall between these doors hung an ancient canvas curtain, like a screen.

  “Betty!” Garth called again.

  But the stamp of silence had returned. />
  He ran into the left-hand room, pushing open a door that scraped the floorboards. The little room was empty. From each room another door, its upper panel opaque glass, led out to the little veranda towards the sea.

  A faint gleam of daylight showed him a chair or two in this room, a tiny looking-glass on the wall, half a dozen hooks for clothes. Garth stood breathing a miasmatic stuffiness, that smell of rotting wood salt-crusted, of sand and sea-air and heat imprisoned throughout a day, which stifles our lungs on any pier.

  The last tenants of the cottage once used this pavilion for “bathing parties.” A large framed photograph, taken about 1897 and left behind on the wall of Betty’s sitting-room, still showed two small rowboats—one containing three overdressed ladies, the other containing three overdressed gentlemen—drawn up on the beach at high-tide. After the photographer had uncapped his lens they would have impelled themselves out over shallow water, using oars as punt-poles, so as to reach the pavilion without getting wet

  These people were gone now. They were ghosts. Garth counted slowly to ten. Then he opened the half-glazed door and went out on the little veranda.

  This was empty too. But a high-backed wooden rocking-chair stood a little way along to his right, not far from the other door to the second room. On the floor of the veranda beside that chair stood a cup and saucer containing the dregs of tea which did not date back to 1897.

  “Betty!”

  A breeze stirred heavily across mud-flats. Long-damp wood seemed to absorb sound as it had absorbed water. Garth could not even hear his own footsteps when he went to that other door. And then, as though at the end of an eternity, he found her.

  It was a few seconds before he could go inside the room. His knees felt shaky, and he held to the knob of the door he had just flung open.

  She lay face down on the floor in that other room. The pallid daylight fell faintly on her dark-brown bathing-costume, and on her bare thighs and legs, and on the canvas shoes she always wore to swim. Her head in the bathing-cap was towards a table against one wall, a table on which stood a tea-caddy, and cups and saucers, and an unlighted spirit-lamp. He could not see her face, which was just as well. She had been strangled.