The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  “Oh, ah? Because you gentlemen always stick together?”

  “No.” And up went Abbot’s eyeglass. “The first reason is that he has thrown just enough doubt on your case to make the difference. The second reason, and to me perhaps the better one, is that I believe Dr. Garth.”

  “And I’m to forget all about it, am I? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, it is not. If I could persuade you and Dr. Garth to shake hands and forget your differences, you might make the best detective team on earth. We’re not dealing with a fool, my good Twigg, even if he does get his notions out of books. You are to—”

  Abbot stopped abruptly. The other was not even listening.

  “Book!” whispered Inspector Twigg. “Now why didn’t I think of that before? Books!”

  And the whole atmosphere changed for the second time.

  Garth felt his heart give a sickening sort of bound; this was the most dangerous ground of all. “Not again!” he was praying to himself. “Not quite so soon. Not again!”

  Twigg’s big face smoothed itself out to urbanity. He looked round the room, along the row of shelves. Whatever he saw, it appeared to be in one of the shelves just to the left of the fireplace. He lumbered over towards the shelves, stretching out his hand.

  “Do you honour me with your attention, Inspector?”

  “Sir?”

  “In future, Inspector, you will not be quite so quick off the mark. You will leave these people free of your threats until—”

  “Ho!” said Twigg. He turned round. “They’ll never be free of me, either of ’em, until that innocent little prostitute gets what she deserves. But you’re right, Mr. Abbot, not to let me fall in a trap like the doctor wanted. I’ve just remembered something else. By jing! I’ve just remembered something else.”

  10

  “THEY’VE GONE NOW.” BETTY said. “They’ve all gone. But what did he remember?”

  In the road outside the cottage, under high incurious stars, the wind blew with a coolness grateful to Garth’s aching eyes and muscles. He was emotionally as exhausted as though physically he had finished one stage of a dangerous rock-climb.

  But it was only one stage, not the summit

  “Betty,” he said, “you can’t stay here alone tonight. It’s almost unheard of for the Stag and Glove to take in a single woman as a guest, but we’ll see if we can get them to put you up. Go and pack a bag, will you?”

  “I was only asking—”

  “Betty, for God’s sake go and pack a bag!”

  “You hate me, don’t you? I can’t blame you. If you also realized…”

  “Betty, I know you didn’t kill her. I think I know who did, and I’m beginning to believe I know how it was done. If the question is whether I hate you, the answer is no. The answer is that I love you far too much. For the rest, let’s leave that until I am a little more my so-called reasonable self. Will you go and pack a bag, please?”

  Betty nodded.

  Her eyes seemed enormous in the dim light. Except that she had changed her flat-heeled cycling shoes when she and Garth and Abbot had gone to dinner much earlier at the Stag and Glove, she still wore the dark skirt and grey blouse of that afternoon. Suddenly she turned and ran up the path to the house.

  Garth’s watch told him it was now twenty minutes past eleven. If a house containing only paraffin lamps can be said to blaze with light, the cottage did so at this moment. All bogies were held at bay. No witch or goblin crept across the sands to strangle without a trace. Glynis Stukeley’s body had been removed.

  But Twigg, ever-present and ever-watchful…

  Shutting away the image, Garth himself went up the path to the house.

  Not even several years as the wife of Jamaica’s Captain-General had freed Betty from the notion that you had a “best” room for occasions which were mainly uncomfortable ones, and seldom used otherwise. If anything, her experiences added to this belief.

  To the left of the central hall, at the front, lay a dining-room in the best artwork style of 1907. To the right, matching the sitting-room at the rear, was a drawing-room congealed to rural effect with plants in those glazed pots called jardinières.

  Somebody hissed at Garth as he passed the drawing-room. Vincent Bostwick, in frock coat and striped trousers, a silk hat cradled in his left arm and a silver-headed walking-stick in his right hand, stood under a lamp hanging from the ceiling. Its light emphasized the middle parting of Vince’s hair and threw into relief a weather-beaten face now somewhat hollow of eye.

  Garth, by this time past any sort of surprise, looked at him from the doorway.

  “Vince, how did you get here?”

  “I walked here,” retorted Vince, choosing to take him literally. “It’s only a short distance to Fairfield, and less than that to the Stag and Glove. The fact is, old boy, Marion and I are putting up at the Stag and Glove.”

  “Since when?”

  “Don’t ask questions! Tell you later. The fact is—”

  “Then we’re all here? We’re all at Fairfield.”

  “Well, yes,” admitted Vince, jabbing out with the ferrule of his tick at a stand holding a jardinière. “You might call it a gathering of the legions or whatever is the heraldic term for a muster of vultures.” He jabbed again. “I’ve been dodging bluebottles; and they’re not easy to dodge. Have they all gone?”

  “The police? I hope so. Do you know what’s happened?”

  “Yes. I met Hal in the road after Cullingford Abbot slung him out of here.”

  “It’s a relief to hear somebody met him in the road. Have you seen Betty?”

  “Not exactly face to face, but that’s what I wanted to ask you about. I couldn’t help overhearing you two. David, do you think you’d better take your—do you think you’d better take Lady Calder to the Stag and Glove? Wouldn’t she be more comfortable at the Palace Hotel? Or the Imperial?”

  “No. Marion can chaperone her. That is, if Marion still doesn’t ‘disown’ me.”

  “If you meant what I think you mean,” retorted Vince, looking him in the eyes, “that was a misunderstanding. You haven’t got it straight!”

  “Everybody,” Garth said despairingly, “Goes on telling me that. Perhaps they’re right. Vince, will you do me a favour? Go back to the Stag and Glove; tell Fred Easterbrook (that’s the proprietor; the fat man with the barman’s curl) I shall bring Lady Calder there in about half an hour. Meanwhile…”

  “Yes, old boy?”

  “A police-officer named Twigg has just had a dazzling inspiration about what he thinks I’ve been doing. I’ve got to discover what he thinks or he may have me in a corner again.”

  “It’s not all gas and gaiters, is it?” Vince asked suddenly.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Losing your head and your heart and everything else.” Then Vince checked himself, the veins swelling at his temples. “Right,” he added, expressionless again. “I’ll tell Mr. What’s-his-name. See you tomorrow morning.”

  And he clapped on his hat, stalking past Garth towards the front door.

  Twigg! Good old Twigg!

  Garth returned to the back sitting-room, where padded chairs and sofa covered in rose-patterned cretonne had become as disordered as people’s emotions. Past the window he could see that they had blown out the hurricane-lantern inside the pavilion. There remained only a dark sea now kindled by a late-rising moon.

  From the doorway he looked round at the bookshelves and at the paintings of Mr. Maxfield Parrish’s chaste female nudes. Betty’s liking for these paintings represented less a taste for the sensuous than the liking, as with so many other women, for exotic dream-scenes out of a fairy-tale. Though the new Viennese science regarded with suspicion even a fondness for fairy-tales, it regarded too damned many things with suspicion.

  Whereupon, beyond a clutter of silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece, he found himself staring at a framed photograph on the wall. It was the “bathing-party” picture of 1897, left behi
nd by previous tenants. It showed two rowboats of holiday-makers so posed and poised for the camera that they looked stuffed.

  “Betty,” he remembered having asked her not long ago, “why do you keep that idiotic scene? You don’t know any of the people, do you? It has no sentimental value?”

  “No, of course not!” Betty had answered. “I honestly don’t know why I keep it, except that it’s rather funny. I’ll take it down, if you’d rather I did.”

  But he was glad now she hadn’t taken it down.

  That afternoon, as he stood over a dead woman, there had come into his mind a terrifying half-notion of what might have happened at the pavilion. It was only a glimpse. It was only a wild guess. But it leaped at him like a strangler, making him smash a cup.

  That same half-notion, inspired by a faded photograph and the memory of a canvas screen set out at right-angles between two doors that were side by side, screamed again with a silent voice in Betty’s sitting-room at past eleven o’clock.

  Again he put the thought away. Inspector Twigg had been given some sort of glimpse in this room too. Garth walked over to the bookshelves on the left of the fireplace. He was reaching out towards one particular shelf, just as Twigg had done, when the door to the hall opened and closed sharply.

  “Mind if I come in?” demanded the voice of Cullingford Abbot. And then, “Forgive me if I startled you. Didn’t mean to.”

  “That’s of no consequence. Come in, by all means.”

  In fact, despite a jump of the nerves, Garth could have welcomed him with joy. About Abbot there was a quality both hearty and heartening; Garth had never felt it so much as tonight. And yet, though Abbot wore his silk hat rakishly, he showed a certain embarrassment. His eyeglass hung on a cord down the white waistcoat. He seized the glass, twitched it into place with a grimace, and then bristled.

  “Look here. I’m a copper and I’m proud to be one. I can’t expect you to trust me. All I’ll say is, Twigg doesn’t know I’m here. I brought the carriage back.”

  “Twigg—” Garth began at very near fury.

  “Twigg’s an honest man. You may not credit that, but he is. It’s only, sometimes, he can be as arrogant and intolerant as you are.”

  “That’s the second time today someone has called me arrogant. Arrogant? Can you tell me why?”

  “My dear chap! Yes! I can. You can understand and tolerate and sympathize with nearly every person on this earth. When you stumble on the very rare person you can’t tolerate because you can’t in the least understand, you blow up. Like Twigg. Or like your nephew. Not that I’d give much shrift to Master Hal, mind! However…”

  Abbot, short and stocky, almost strutted as again he paced beside the fireplace.

  “This case is more fascinatin’ than ever. Look here, Lady Calder had nothing whatever to do with the murder, had she?”

  “No, she had not. If you’re finally convinced of that…”

  “Oh, I’m convinced of it.”

  “And it’s not, I hope, because of her beautiful eyes? As you yourself put it? It is not because you were impressed by her as you were so impressed by Marion Bostwick?”

  “Now why in blazes,” said Abbot, taken aback as he had taken Garth aback the moment before, “must you go on reminding me of Mrs. Bostwick?”

  “Isn’t that true? That you were very much impressed?”

  “Frankly, yes. And I flatter myself,” Abbot said with dignity, “she was not unimpressed by me.” He touched his moustache. “But that’s beside the point. It’s Lady Calder’s innocence we’re bound to establish. Agreed?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I can’t get a word out of Twigg. If you told him he was trying to behave like Sherlock Holmes (which he is), and not at all like Lestrade or Gregson (which he couldn’t), he’d rave at you and say he had no time for fancy yarns. And yet he was reaching out towards some book over here.”

  “Correct. He was reaching out towards this.”

  From the end of the second shelf down Garth took out a paper-covered novel published that same year in the Daily Mail Sixpenny Series. He handed it to Abbot.

  “The Mystery of the Yellow Room,” Abbot read aloud, “by Gaston Leroux. Is this book what I think it is?”

  “It’s a murder mystery, possible the greatest of its kind. At the beginning there is what appears to be a near-murder at a pavilion—”

  Abbot’s grey head whipped up.

  “No, no!” Garth corrected him. “The pavilion is in the grounds of a French chateau; it’s not in the least like the hut we have here. But the doors and windows are all found fastened on the inside. Later in the story, its most sensational incident, the murderer disappears before the eyes of four witnesses.”

  “H’m,” said Abbot

  “Now if you’ll glance farther along the same shelf,” and Garth pointed, “you’ll see another book. In cloth this time. Also published this year. The Thinking Machine. Author: Jacques Futrelle.”

  “Another Frenchman?”

  “No; Jacques Futrelle is an American. And it’s a book of short stories. But the best stories concern impossible or apparently supernatural happenings which are explained naturally at the end.”

  “H’m,” said Abbot.

  Bending down, quivering with alertness, he ran his eye along several shelves.

  “I like the literature myself,” he continued, “but Lady Calder seems to have a particular passion for it.”

  “Don’t jump to the wrong conclusions! Those shelves are full of stories about mysteries, and blood and everything of the sort, because I gave them to her. You might even say I forced them on her.”

  “Well, my dear fellow, she doesn’t seem to have disliked them. Look! There are four or five novels, the ones bound in red, by that chap ‘Phantom.’ They look as though they’d been read half to death. And, after all, why the devil shouldn’t the lady like ’em? I’ve read some of ‘Phantom’s’ stuff myself. It’s as wild as wind, but it’s first-class.”

  Garth straightened up. All the high gods seemed to be laughing at him.

  “Thanks very much,” he said in his stately way. “I am ‘Phantom.’ I wrote those red-bound books. That’s the secret of my double life, the one I thought you or Twigg had discovered when Twigg approached me last night at Charing Cross Station.” He paused. “Now go ahead, I beg, and laugh your head off.”

  And he braced himself as Abbot also straightened up.

  There was, in fact, more than a frosty twinkle behind Abbot’s eyeglass, and a beginning of mirth that might explode over the whole face. But Abbot, clearly, had not missed the pouring bitterness of his companion’s tone.

  “Dammit, man, it’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “No?”

  “No, certainly not! Why didn’t you use your own name?”

  “I hardly thought the British Medical Association would approve. And I still doubt they will approve if they should happen to learn.”

  “Tut! Aren’t there other doctors…?”

  “There are. But they gave up medicine when they turned entirely to literary work. They can invest their books with dignity. Above all, they don’t profess to cure some people of nervous illnesses while scaring others under the name of ‘Phantom.’”

  “H’m. Yes. I see.” Abbot champed his jaws. “Who knows about this?”

  “Nobody, I had hoped. I’ve worked through a discreet literary agent. Last night, though, I could have sworn Twigg knew or guessed.”

  “Why?”

  Garth gestured round the room.

  “By accident, early yesterday evening, I left a brief-case in this house when I took the train to London. The brief-case was locked; it contained nothing except some typewritten pages of a new story about a murder at the top of an inaccessible tower.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, the brief-case happens to be impressive-looking. Betty though it must be full of clinical notes, and followed me to town with it. There it caught Twigg’s eye; he was at his most siniste
r when I refused to open it. And I still wonder if he knows.”

  “Does Lady Calder know?”

  “No; fortunately not.”

  “H’m. Those books look as dog-eared as though—”

  “No, I tell you! One of our deepest urges is to boast in front of the woman we’re in love with. I have managed to avoid boasting; possibly,” Garth added with restraint, “possibly because there’s so very little to boast of.”

  “Dammit, man! If your conscience bothers you as much as all that, why do you go on writing the stuff? I take it you don’t need…?”

  “No, I don’t need the money. I do it for the same reason you are up to your eyes in police-work when you don’t need the job either; because I enjoy it. I can only hope readers enjoy it one-tenth as much as I do.”

  “You enjoy scaring ’em, you mean?”

  “Great Scott, no! That’s only the excuse for the story; we don’t really meet ghosts in Piccadilly Circus. It’s the exercise of one’s ingenuity, the setting of the trap and the double-trap, the game you play chapter after chapter against a quick-witted reader.”

  “Precisely, in short,” Abbot inquired with great politeness, “what’s been happening to you here tonight?”

  “Let’s try to forget that, shall we? It is not so very entertaining when fictional situations turn out to be real. I ought to have stopped this at the beginning, when I heard Marion Bostwick’s story about a vanishing woman and a haunted door. It’s true I didn’t see then what I see so clearly now. But I ought to have seen it.”

  “Will you have the goodness to tell me,” said Abbot, suddenly lifting The Mystery of the Yellow Room and shaking it in the air, “why we forever go round in a circle to a charming girl like Mrs. Bostwick?”

  “Because, in one sense at least, Marion is at the centre of the case. She’s at the centre of everything.”

  Abbot threw the paper-bound book into a chair. Garth, disregarding him for a moment, walked to the nearest window and stared out at the pavilion and the strengthening moon. Then he turned back.