The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  “I hoped—”

  “What did you hope? Why did you follow Mrs. Bostwick here tonight?”

  “Because she wasn’t at her home. I thought she’d probably come here, just as she did on Friday.”

  “That’s not what I asked you. What reason did you have for coming here?”

  “I came here,” Betty answered in a clear voice, “because I am tired of being too weak-willed to stand up for myself. I came here because yesterday I was jealous, and I behaved like a beast and a bitch to the only man I ever cared for in this world. If Marion Bostwick tried to kill this so-called ‘aunt,’ she probably killed Glynis too. No matter how much you try to stop me or how much you sneer, I am going on trying to make that woman admit it.”

  Garth walked forward and opened the door, resisting an impulse to fling it open so that it would crash against the inner wall.

  “It’s not necessary to go on trying, Betty,” he told her. Then, controlling another savage impulse which could have blunted his wits and addled the wariness that must protect them both, he looked round at the man facing Betty.

  “Mr. Twigg,” he said, “I think it is time you and I had a reckoning.”

  18

  THE KITCHEN, A LARGE cavern with a glass-panelled half-underground door, remained as dingy as when he last saw it.

  Only one pale-yellow electric bulb, hanging gauntly from the ceiling over the drainboard beside the sink, brought out whatever could be seen of the expressions on faces. It barely dispelled shadows. It must have summoned blackbeetles to the corners. But at least it was better than the rush-light which previously had been burning on the big cooking-range built into the flue of the chimney.

  Betty and Twigg faced each other across a large table with a marble top and a chopping-block. Both craned round. Twigg wore his bowler hat on the back of his head, and his gold watch chain quivered as he straightened up with a good deal of dignity.

  “You think that, Doctor?” he asked in his hoarse voice. “Maybe I think so too. But what you’d like or I’d like is no odds to anybody. I’ve got a duty to do.”

  “So have I.”

  “And all’s fair in that duty. Just you be kind enough to clear out of here—”

  “No. State your case against this lady. State it here and now. If you’re right in any point you make, I’ll acknowledge it and so will she. State your case!”

  “Ho! And have you twist everything up?”

  “Is it so difficult? Can’t you protect yourself?”

  Some of the colour drained out of Twigg’s face.

  (“That was a dirty one,” Garth was thinking. “Let it be!”)

  Betty, clearly convinced these two would fly at each other’s throats (as it is quite possible they would) ran away from the table and over to the sink. She stood with her back to the drainboard, under the light, watching them.

  “By jing!” whispered Twigg, achingly tempted. “By jing! Maybe you’re the one who can’t protect yourself, eh? Now that Mr. Abbot’s not here to back you up?”

  “Maybe I can’t. Ask your questions. I’ll tell the truth.”

  “You’ll tell the truth? When this woman’s going up for murder, and you’re probably for it as accessory after the fact?”

  “Does it honestly strike you, Mr. Twigg, that the question of my own arrest weighs so very much with me?”

  “No; I’ll give you that. You’re daft! Where a doctor of your reputation’s concerned, and a woman from the Moulin Rouge—”

  “Keep your moral judgements out of this, Mr. Twigg,” Garth said in a very soft voice. “If you’re going to use the advantage, I implore you, keep your moral judgements out of this.”

  Suddenly, like duellists, they began circling round the table and the chopping-block.

  “You admit you’ve got something to hide, Doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that woman’s got a whole lot more to hide?”

  “Yes!”

  “Ah!” Twiggs colour went up. “Maybe you do halfway mean it. We’ll see. Maybe you’re not such a stuck-up—!”

  “And you’re not such a pig-headed—!”

  Both of them stopped at the same instant.

  “What beat me,” said Twigg, “what beat me from the very minute Mr. Abbot and I walked out on the sands and saw you two standing by the pavilion, was something I didn’t begin to understand until much later. Because why? Because none of that business seemed to be sensible no matter what happened.”

  It was a measure of Twigg’s absorption in the problem that he had lowered his guard; once committed, he trusted the word of the man who had fought him at every step; he might have been arguing to another officer of the Criminal Investigation Department.

  “Thinks I to myself, ‘That woman killed her sister, right enough. And the doctor’s shielding her. Still and all, why do they keep on telling a story that makes ’em look even guiltier than they are?’”

  Here Twigg looked the other man in the eyes.

  “We’ll allow you two were interrupted, Doctor, before you could work up a proper story. We’ll allow sand is tricky stuff to mess about with. We’ll allow Lady Calder’s flighty; easy to upset, and acts too quick. Even so! She’s not simple—”

  “Simple?”

  “Simple in the head! Like the village idiot!”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s got plenty of imagination; maybe too much. Oh, ah! She tries to imitate you and think like you think. And you’re not simple, Doctor, not by a jugful, even if you do write those stories I’ll admit now I read! Never mind how I learned you write ’em. Secretaries to a literary agent can tell things, specially when the doctor is a witness in a trial at the Old Bailey, and a secretary in the audience says, ‘Oo-er!’

  “But how did a brown-and-yellow bathing-robe get from the house out to that pavilion, when it wasn’t carried by the woman who went out for a swim at four o’clock? I got the answer next day, handed me on a plate. And the night before I’d been all wrong, letting you half-flummox me, until I saw the kind of books that were all over Lady Calder’s sitting-room and specially that book about the near-murder in the Yellow Room.”

  Garth braced himself. Twigg saw it, and pounced.

  “I asked you next day what was the point of the Yellow Room as compared to the real murder we’d got here. You tried to flummox me again, didn’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “You said it was because the murderer was the official detective investigating the case?”

  “Not the official detective, necessarily.”

  “What’s that, Doctor?”

  “I was trying to deceive you, and I admit it! What more do you want?”

  “But that wasn’t the point, was it? In this Yellow Room business, I mean, they heard screams and shots and whatnot in the middle of the night. But the murderer wasn’t there at that time. He’d attacked the lady in the afternoon, and left the bruises and the bloodstains. She hid ’em all, and pretended nothing had happened. In the night it was only a nightmare that got her. She dreamed she was being attacked again. She jumped up screaming in bed, and grabbed a revolver and fired at nothing; then she fell and cracked her head on an overturned table. There never was any murderer in the Yellow Room. Is that true?”

  “Quite true.”

  Garth glanced quickly over his shoulder towards the open door to the cellar corridor behind him.

  “Oh, ah! And there never was any murderer in that pavilion, either. Leastways, at the time we thought there was. Isn’t that true too?”

  “Quite true.”

  “At four o’clock in the afternoon,” said Twigg, “a woman in a bathing-costume walked down the beach and out into the water. Mr. Abbot and young Mr. Ormiston saw her from some distance away. Mr. Ormiston thought it was Lady Calder. Then he changed his mind oh, ah; like witnesses keep on doing!—and said it was Glynis Stukeley. But it couldn’t ’a’ been Glynis Stukeley. Lady Calder don’t like people using her bathing-costumes, and keeps ’em locked u
p so they can’t be used. The woman on that beach was Lady Calder.”

  Twigg flung his head round.

  “Fair’s fair, miss. You heard what the doctor promised! It was you in that bathing-costume and nobody else. Now wasn’t it?”

  “Answer him, Betty!”

  “But I—”

  “Answer him, Betty! Tell the truth!”

  “It was you, miss. Now wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Betty whispered.

  “Ah!” said Twigg, but with no other pounce of triumph. Red-faced, inexorable, be turned slowly back to Garth. “Admit that, Doctor, and I’ve got the two of you just where I want you.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so! ’Course she went for a dip! ’Course she pulled herself up on the porch of the pavilion afterwards! But she didn’t stay there any two hours. She never did before, they tell me. And why should she this time? She was as mad as hops and wild with her sister. She stayed there just long enough to make a small pot of tea and drink one cup of it on the porch, ten minutes maybe, and back she went to the house. The fingerprints she left on the cup and the teapot—”

  “They could have been old fingerprints, Mr. Twigg.”

  “They could have been, Doctor. Do you think they were?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Ah!” said Twigg.

  Betty, her back to the drainboard, was gripping its ledges at either side.

  “And she didn’t leave any footprints when she went back to the house, did she? The tide was still too high. Any footprints would have been washed out clean. Or else they’d be so close to the top they’d have dried enough to be taken for old footprints made on any day you like. There wasn’t a print within thirty feet. And nobody’d been strangled—not yet. Nobody was thinking about murder—or maybe not. Agreed?”

  “Yes! Agreed! Get on with it!”

  “This murder, now, wasn’t done in the pavilion at all. Not on your life! Where was it done, Doctor?”

  “It was done, in my opinion, in the back bedroom assigned to Glynis Stukeley. Pieces of sash-cord were lying ready to a murderer’s hand.”

  Betty let out a cry. Garth started towards her, across the dingy kitchen trader the sickly yellow light. Then he changed his mind and backed away.

  “Oh, ah!” Twigg said relentlessly.

  Whereupon he paused, tapping his finger-tips on the marble top of the table.

  “What time was that? In exactness, what time when Lady Calder gets from the pavilion back to the house? Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes past four. To go as near as we can by the medical evidence, it’s not for a good bit more than an hour that the murder’s done.

  “But that fits in. Lady Calder’s got to go upstairs to her own room; get out of her wet bathing-costume; get into her day-clothes again. And that takes time, or it takes my wife time. Afterwards she goes down to her sister’s room. The quarrel breaks out; the real quarrel; the honest-to-God quarrel; the one that ends with a rope round the neck.

  “Lady Calder told a lot of the truth in her story. You bet she did! In the parts we could get answers to from other witnesses. Glynis Stukeley did get to Fairfield by a morning train. There was a letter for her in the afternoon post: typed address, London postmark.

  “You were getting there at six o’clock, weren’t you? That’s another reason why she wouldn’t have stayed out at that pavilion, where she admits she was. She didn’t want her sister to meet you.

  “But the row blew up. And what happened to her is what’s happened to a whole heap of murderers before they know how to stop. The lightning’s struck. It’s all over. There’s the victim dead. They’re scared to the soul. What’ll they do next? Suppose you tell us, Doctor, about the evidence of what did happen next?”

  “No,” snapped Garth. “No, I will not. You’re making too much of rather a pathetic triumph.”

  “I’m doing me duty, that’s what I’m doing, and don’t you ever forget it I’m no swine. I don’t like singing big. But I’m cornering a murderer and there it is.” Twigg broke off. “What’s got into you? Why do you keep looking back over your shoulder?”

  “As you would say, Mr. Twigg, it’s no odds. Forget me! Here, will you smoke? Will you have a cigarette?”

  They were grotesque words, as though Garth’s judgement had slipped as his hands almost slipped. He had not forgotten this time, as at Fairfield, to fill his silver cigarette-case. The case flashed out, wabbled, and all but clattered to spill on the table.

  “Smoke?” said Twigg, controlling himself. “No, Doctor. Thanks very much, but I will not.” They looked at each other strangely, as though both hesitated and wondered. “If this is some more of your games, by jing, I wouldn’t try it on! What happened when she’d done the murder?”

  “It’s your story. Why don’t you tell it?”

  “Oh, ah. That’s just what I will. Do you know why I will?”

  “Mr. Twigg—”

  “‘Because there,’ thinks I to myself, ‘just there is where the light went out in the case. Those two, the guilty woman and the doctor, weren’t acting together. They didn’t know it, but they were acting independent-like. And they didn’t mean to, but they flummoxed each other.’

  “Here she was,” said Twigg, glancing round towards Betty and back again, “standing over her victim, alone in the house. It’s nearly twenty minutes to six o’clock. You’ll be there at six. Nobody’ll believe her if she swears she didn’t do it. But you’re different. You’re high and mighty. They’ll take your word (won’t they?) if she convinces you she couldn’t ’a’ done it? She’s got to do that, or she thinks she has. For she can’t say, ‘I’ve just done a murder,’ to the man she still hopes to marry.

  “Two witnesses saw her go out on the beach at four o’clock, All right! Why not prove it was her sister? Why not prove Glynis went to the pavilion, and was strangled there, and never came back? No matter what they suspect, they can’t prove anything if they can’t think how the trick was worked. You taught her that, Doctor. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you taught her that. If she’s got the nerve to go through an unholy-awful fifty or sixty seconds at the right time, she may fool everybody.

  “And she very nearly did.

  “There’s several parts to a scheme that can be put together in a very short time. She can strip the clothes off her sister, chuck the clothes into a cupboard, and dress a dead body in her own wet bathing-costume and rubber bathing-cap. She can dust the sand off the rubber soles of her bathing-shoes and put those on the body too.

  “What else do we know about this innocent-faced girl (ho!) who’s standing over there now? In Harley Street, on Friday night it was, I overheard you telling Mr. Michael Fielding. She’s a member of the Royal Life-Saving Society. Time after time she’s done exercises to carry a ‘drowned’ body, slung round the shoulders in what they call a fireman’s lift, from the water to the beach and the grass verge round the house. So she can take a dead body in the other direction.

  “Any trouble there? None that is trouble.

  “A wool bathing-costume stays damp a long time. She won’t want to get herself touched with damp and give the show away, specially since she’s got on a silk blouse. But she can wrap the body in something, can’t she? And there’s nothing better than her own serge bathing-robe, with one of Glynis Stukeley’s handkerchiefs stuck in the pocket to make the flummery look better.

  “Now what’ll happen, as sure as guns, is a visitor who knows her habits gets to the house at six o’clock and thinks she’s not there because she won’t answer a hail?

  “I’ll tell you: he’ll think she’s at the pavilion. Where else could she be, when she goes for a bathe every day the weather’s fine? That’s what young Mr. Ormiston thought, when he turned up first. He wouldn’t go on out there; no, not him! But you’d go like a shot, Doctor. That’s just what you did.

  “If she could get you to go on out ahead of her while she’s still scared-stiff-determined in the house with a dead body, she could do the
trick. That pavilion might have been hand-made for it.

  “It wouldn’t ’a’ worked if Mr. Ormiston had stayed there. But he didn’t. He nipped away in a blind rage. There’s just one other thing she had to do. What was it Doctor?”

  Nobody answered. Twigg’s voice echoed through the cellar rooms as though through a cavern.

  “What was it I’m asking you? She couldn’t admit she’d been at the house all afternoon. That’d dish her for sure. She’d be the murderer more than ever. What other bit of flummery would cover her tracks and make her story sound solid-sure?”

  “If you mean the bicycle…”

  “Yes, Doctor, I mean the bicycle. Where was it kept?”

  “In a shed built against the side of the house.”

  “Where? Opening on the grass, wasn’t it? Near a cycle-track? And not twenty feet from the room where her sister’d been killed? Yes or no?”

  “Yes!”

  “She wheeled out the bike and dropped it on the grass. She went back to the room for a dead body. She must have looked near crazy, just like she’s looking now, but they’ll all do that if the hangman’s after ’em. She picked up that dead body, and she walked out across the sand from the place where she dropped the bike.

  “She followed you, Doctor. There are two rooms in that pavilion. You couldn’t go into both of ’em at once. Whichever one you chose, she’d choose the other one. The sand was too firm and hard-packed to show the weight of one woman carrying what she did carry. You didn’t make much noise inside, you tell me. She didn’t make any noise at all. God’s truth! When I thought of why she didn’t, I could have killed you myself for letting you near hocus me with a lot of talk about her not being inside because there weren’t any traces of sandy footprints. When she got as far as the steps what did she do?”

  “There is no need—”

  “You bet there’s not! But I’ll tell you. She kicked off her shoes.”

  “What I meant—”

  “Just inside,” said Twigg, “I’ll tell you what else there is. There’s a big canvas screen, built out at right angles between the doors of the two rooms. In the old days bathers of opposite sexes couldn’t even see each other go into their dressing-rooms. If you looked back or round from either room, you couldn’t have seen her go in or out the door of the other room.