Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Sometimes I feel like cursing the fête,” he said. “She’s right, Wells, you know, according to general opinion. No doubt of that. The villagers do behave disgustingly, according to most people’s notions. But I cannot get excited about it. Never could.”

  It was a funny thing about Mrs. Coutts. After all, she was married, although she had no children of her own, but the fact was—only the old man wouldn’t seem to see it—she couldn’t stand the thought of the village people having any of that sort of bucolic fun which consists in squirting water down one another’s necks at fairs, or the lads lying on the grass with the girls, or coming home down the lanes at evening with their arms round them. It was nothing to do with right and wrong. She simply had the kink that all sexual intercourse was most fearfully unpleasant and wicked. The village was pretty decent, really. Boys and girls used to keep company until there was a child on the way, then they used to come to us to put up the banns. They were a steady, contented lot, on the whole, and their policy, although some people would condemn it, was based on sound common sense. The lads could be saving money all the time they were keeping company, and, if anything did happen and the man was a little slow to do the proper thing, old Coutts and I would urge him, quietly or forcibly, to get to it and marry. Of course, it was queer that Meg Tosstick wouldn’t tell the name of her child’s father, but I couldn’t see what business it was of Mrs. Coutts. Meg came from tainted stock, unfortunately. The Moat House, where the Gattys live now, was once a private lunatic asylum, and the story goes that one of the inmates escaped one night and forced several of the women and murdered three men. Meg was in the direct line of descent from the escaped madman and a woman called Sarah Parsett. One of the barmen, and, incidentally, the chucker-out at the inn, a chap named Candy, Bob Candy, was another lineal descendant of the lunatic, and a further curious fact was that he and Meg were supposed by all the village to have been sweethearts. But if it was Candy’s baby, one would think he would have admitted it and married her. I did put it to him, as a matter of fact, and he hunched his shoulders and spat into the gutter and scowled, and I gathered that he was not the father and was pretty well peeved about the whole affair. I let it go at that, of course. No sense in coming the heavy parson. Never does any good.

  The talk at tea was again in connection with the August Bank Holiday fête. Sir William lends his park for it and gives two-thirds of the gross takings to the Church Fund. A fair turns up from somewhere, and pays five pounds in cash and loans us a marquee in return for the privilege of collecting the villagers’ money on roundabouts, swing-boats, houp-la, darts, and a rifle-shooting game. We don’t allow them to import a cocoanut-shy now, because, at my suggestion, old Lowry, the innkeeper, gets us the cocoanuts by the hundred from a pal of his at Covent Garden, and William, Daphne and I carpentered the stands the year before last, and we use the tennis club’s netting to mark the pitch and protect the bystanders. William and I run the shy at five hundred and fifty per cent. profit on the great day, in the intervals of batting and fielding in the cricket match against Much Hartley which is another Bank Holiday feature. During our compulsory absences, old Lowry looks after it, which is very decent of him, because every year he applies for a licence to sell beer on the ground, and every year the magistrates, directed by Sir William, who is under instructions from Coutts, who is bowing to the inevitable in the guise of Mrs. Coutts, refuse to grant him the licence. He never seems to get shirty about it. Marvellously good-humoured bloke.

  At tea on the following Wednesday, Mrs. Coutts said she couldn’t see how on earth she was going to seat fifteen of the nobs on nine deck chairs, and directed Daphne to go and see whether Mrs. Gatty had any to lend. Daphne grabbed my hand under the table and squeezed it quickly three times, which is our S.O.S. signal. I knew she was afraid of going to the Moat House alone, and Mrs. Gatty, who is a fat, placid-looking lady with gold-rimmed glasses, has decidedly bats in the belfry. Hoots at one, and compares one with the beasts of the field. Most peculiar, and, of course, instructive, if one is of a philosophical turn of mind. She thinks I’m a goat. Literally, I mean. She once got me by the ankle in a running bowline and tethered me to the leg of an occasional table. Of course, I know her now, and when I go to see her, which I do fairly often, because she’s a lonely sort of woman—her husband is a traveller in motors—I sit in one chair and stick my feet up on another. That does her, of course, because she thinks it cruel to tether animals by the neck. One comfort about people with a mania is that they are so beautifully consistent. Once you’ve grasped their point of view there’s nothing more to worry about unless they’re homicidal, when to grasp the main theme is hardly good enough, unless, again, one happens to be a philosopher!

  After tea, then, Daphne and I set off for the Moat House. It lies a little way out of the village, but is on the main road. It is one of those eerie, shrubbery-haunted houses, with high brick walls and big gates. We walked up the drive and rang the front-door bell, and were received by Mrs. Gatty in person, as she kept only two servants, a parlourmaid and a cook, and it was the parlourmaid’s evening out. The cook never answered the door, of course, upon principle. She said it wasn’t her place. This was unanswerable. Mrs. Gatty used to liken her to a duck, but the cook was from Aylesbury, so she took it for a compliment, which was just as well, as I can’t really believe that it was meant for one.

  She asked us in, conducted us to her boudoir—it used to be the padded cell when the house was a private asylum—and asked us to sit down. Then she shut the door and tip-toed to her chair, sat down, leaned forward, and said in an excited whisper:

  “It’s done! The deed is done!”

  “Oh, splendid,” I said, quite at sea, of course.

  Daphne goggled a bit and looked nervously at me. I rose to it.

  “Er—could you lend us a couple of deck-chairs for the fête, you know, on August Bank Holiday?” I said, and she replied most amicably.

  “I’ll lend you three, if you won’t tell anybody. It’s Jackson, you know. You won’t tell, will you? Mr. Burt told me. I think it’s simply beautiful. Don’t tell!”

  We said we wouldn’t, and I said I’d send the Scouts up with their troop-cart to collect the chairs. She was as good as her word, of course, and we netted three splendid chairs. That was the night Daphne kissed me, so it was rather a jolly evening, take it altogether, except for Bill’s adventures, although they ended quite happily, too, and acquired for us two new and almost invaluable helpers for the fête.

  Old Coutts went out, apparently, while Daphne and I were at the Moat House, and he had not returned when we got back. I went into the study and did a bit of arithmetic in connection with the cocoanuts and refreshments, and Daphne sorted the prize list. Mrs. Coutts was champing about in the kitchen bossing the cook and the supper, William came in but went out again soon, and everything was jolly fine. At ten p.m. the telephone bell rang, and, when I answered, a frightfully hectic voice at the other end of the wire desired old Coutts’ immediate presence at the Bungalow, Saltmarsh Stone Quarries. Coutts being unavailable, I slid along, of course, shoving a Prayer Book into my pocket. I concluded, from the agitation indicated by the voice—a woman’s, by the way—that one of the queer household up at the stone quarries had tumbled down one of the holes—rottenly badly fenced, those quarries. Fences were broken down by some toughs one year, and have never been repaired, of course, except on the east side, where nobody ever goes! A chap called Burt lived at the Bungalow—big, hefty bloke. More about him later.

  It took me a good forty minutes to do the mile and a half from the vicarage to the Bungalow. It was uphill nearly all the way, and the foulest, rockiest, ruttiest sheep-track of a road imaginable, once one had left the main road. The track mounted a shoulder of the coastal range of hills in the sides of which the quarries were cut, and the slope on the opposite side descended through bracken and gorse and heather to the sea. The cliffs were low and sandy, and there was nothing much to see or to do when one reached the shore
except to bathe or to sit on the stretch of sand or to explore Saltmarsh Cove, a smallish, uninteresting little cave. Why on earth anybody in their senses had ever built the Bungalow in its lonely, exposed position was one of the things which I thought I should never understand. I did understand it in the end, of course.

  There was a light in the hall, and a light in one of the rooms when I arrived. Just as I was about to knock on the door I heard a scraping sound on the roof, but thought it must be the Bungalow cat. Then I banged at the door and was almost shot on to my face by having the knocker suddenly wrenched from my grasp by some muscular blighter tugging the door open with such force that I tumbled over the step and cascaded down the polished linoleum of the passage. Before I could apologise for hurtling in upon the household, the door was slammed behind me, and a voice, male, said, “It’s young Wells.” A second voice, William Coutts’, exclaimed, “It’s Noel!” And a third voice, female, the same which had squealed over the wire at me some forty-two minutes earlier, exclaimed, “Thank goodness, someone’s come for you, ducky!”

  I was conducted into the lighted room, and, at intervals during the next hour, some of which was spent at the Bungalow, and some on conducting William back to the vicarage, I heard a somewhat weird story from the boy. William, although in some ways the most placid kid I know, does somehow contrive to get himself mixed up in any excitement that is going on. Even when his prep. school caught fire, William was the only kid out of the whole ninety-odd who had to jump out of an upstair window on to the sheet held out below. Old Coutts had to take him away soon after that, because he was always getting into trouble for scrapping with kids who tried to rub his nose in the dirt for him. Old Coutts admires a scrapper, and wrote a strongish letter to the headmaster for punishing William, and then removed the kid and sent him to Yeominster.

  Considering that William had only achieved the distinction of leaping into space because he was in process of regaining admission to the building by night after having been out in the orchard sneaking the head beak’s apples, I thought, personally, that old Coutts’ letter was a bit thick. Still, it was no business of mine, of course.

  CHAPTER II

  maggots at the moat house and bats at the bungalow

  « ^ »

  William Coutts’ adventures began when the Scouts took their troop cart up to the Moat House on that same Wednesday evening to collect Mrs. Gatty’s three deck chairs for the fête. Mrs. Gatty is fond of boys, and she invited the Scouts into the dining-room and fed them with cake and home-made ginger-beer and home-made treacle toffee. Then, while the rest of them returned with the chairs, William, as Patrol Leader, politely offered to stay and wash up all the plates and glasses. Mrs. Gatty was rather bucked with the offer, because, of course, the maid was out and the cook was in the middle of dinner. It was about seven o’clock or perhaps half-past seven, and still daylight, although the weather, for the end of July, was fearfully unseasonable. In fact, I can’t remember a wetter or more depressing summer. Our one hope was that the Bank Holiday Monday would be fine.

  William returned to the vicarage in a state of great excitement. This was unusual, for, as I say he was one of those biggish, hefty, good-humoured, practical-minded kids who are always on good terms with everyone and never get seriously ragged even at school, except in the incident last recounted, so to speak. That was an exception. His nature was placid, and he was inclined to accept things as they came without annoyance, question or perturbation. Thus, when he burst in on Daphne and me with the air of one who has discovered the Gunpowder Plot, I was somewhat astonished. But I couldn’t take him seriously. He told me that Mr. Gatty had been murdered. Daphne was scared, so I rose to it.

  “Sez you!” I observed, ruthlessly.

  “No,” said William. “I had it from Mrs. Gatty herself while we were washing up. She says the deed is done, and that she wanted to tell you and Daphne, only you didn’t seem interested in anything but deck-chairs.”

  I frowned and lent the theme a little concentrated thought. Those were the words she had used to Daphne and myself in connection with her husband, but one takes it for granted that with anyone of Mrs. Gatty’s singular mentality a few odd remarks are in character and need not be regarded with the same amount of close attention that they would excite if they were uttered by some more normal person. On the other hand, those particular words, “The deed is done,” do sound a trifle sinister, even when uttered by somebody short-circuited in the brain line. I questioned William closely, but could not shake his evidence. He was going to Constable Brown, our village keeper of the peace, he said, to place matters before him. I was struck quite suddenly with a better idea. Anything, of course, to get rid of William, so that we could be on our own, but not, I thought, the Robert, who is unquestionably wooden-headed, although a jolly good chap.

  “Listen, William,” I said. “There’s an old lady called Mrs. Something Bradley, or Mrs. Bradley Something—I forget which—staying with Sir William Kingston-Fox at the Manor House. She’s one of those psychology whales. Take her along to see Mrs. Gatty to-morrow morning. She’ll turn her inside and out, and find what the trouble is. Believe me, it won’t be a case for the police.”

  I persuaded him to abandon the idea of going to Brown with the story, but he insisted on getting Mrs. Bradley right away. I was in favour of the scheme, for it would relieve us of his company, so I decided to incite him, so to speak.

  “They’ll be having dinner,” I objected.

  “Shouldn’t think so,” said William, who hates to be thwarted. “You see, Noel, Sir William starts it at six-thirty, anyway, and it’s now just after eight. Come with me, Noel, there’s a good chap.”

  I refused, of course. No, but honestly, I didn’t think the thing could be very serious. So he tooled off by himself.

  He was ushered into the presence of Margaret Kingston-Fox in the Manor drawing-room, and Margaret, who is Sir William’s daughter, and rather a Juno to look at, introduced him to one of the most frightful-looking old ladies—(according to William, of course)—that he’d ever seen. She was smallish, thin and shrivelled, and she had a yellow face with sharp black eyes, like a witch, and yellow, claw-like hands. She cackled harshly when William was introduced and chucked him under the chin, and then squealed like a macaw that’s having its tail pulled. She looked rather like a macaw, too, because her evening dress was of bright blue velvet and she was wearing over it a little coatee (Daphne’s word, of course, not mine)—of sulphur and orange. William’s first conclusion was that if Mrs. Gatty were bats, this woman was positive vampires in the belfry. She had the evil eye, according to William. Her voice, when she spoke, though, was wonderful. Even William, who has no ear for music although, for the look of the thing, being the vicar’s nephew, he has to sing in the church choir when he is on holiday from school—even William could tell that. She and Margaret listened to his story quite gravely, and Mrs. Bradley offered to accompany him to the Moat House and see what was to be seen. Margaret was inclined to favour the idea that Mr. Gatty had been murdered, but, pressed for a reason, could only say that he was a horrid little man and that such awful things happened nowadays. So all three of them went to the Gatty residence. Sir William and the men were finishing the port, of course, and did not accompany them. Didn’t know they were going, in fact, I suppose.

  Mrs. Gatty herself opened the door to them, and Margaret opened the conversation by asking whether Mr. Gatty had indeed met with foul play. Mrs. Gatty did not answer that, but kept looking nervously at Mrs. Bradley and muttering,

  “Serpent, or is it crocodile? Serpent, or is it crocodile?” Just the sort of remark, in fact, that gave visitors such a bad impression. Luckily, however, Mrs. Bradley, who had been staying at Sir William’s house for more than a week, and so, of course, must have heard of poor Mrs. Gatty and her peculiarity, was not put out by the quaint old girl’s rather remarkable greeting, and replied courteously,

  “Crocodile, I think. I am generally considered to be definitely
saurian in type. Yorkshire people often are, you know. It is interesting, I think, to note how the types vary from county to county, and even from village to village.”

  This launched Mrs. Gatty on her favourite topic, it seems, and Mrs. Bradley had some difficulty in switching the conversation back to Jackson Gatty.

  “Ah, Jackson,” said Mrs. Gatty. “Yes, Jackson, of course. Well, it’s all over, bar the discovery of the body.”

  “And where is the body?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “If you only knew this village as I know it,” said Mrs. Gatty, to William’s great disappointment, for, of course, he wanted to hear details of the murder, “you would sit here and laugh and laugh and laugh, just as I do. Oh, it’s too funny for words! Of course, the vicar’s wife is the funniest of the whole lot.”

  “Look here, Mrs. Gatty,” said William, but no one took any notice of him.

  “I call her Mrs. Camel,” went on Mrs. Gatty, “because she squeals and bites on the slightest provocation, and then kneels to pray. And then there’s that creature at the Bungalow. A Kept Woman, my dear Mrs. Crocodile! What do you think of that?”

  “Shocking, interesting and anachronistic,” replied Mrs. Bradley. At least, that is what I think William meant to say; and Mrs. Gatty, I suppose, spent quite a couple of minutes digesting this summary of the world’s Babylonian heritage, for William says that she sat quite still for ages, while he finished dotting down the conversation in his Scout’s notebook. At last she nodded in a solemn manner.

  “Somebody at the Manor House could say more than that if he chose. And then take this girl Tosstick,” she continued. “That whole business is incredible to me, simply incredible from first to last. First, she is not the kind of girl to have an illegitimate child at all; secondly, she ought to publish the father’s name, as all the village girls do, so that we can all make sure she is treated rightly by the young fellow; thirdly, I suppose the child is deformed as no one is allowed to see it; and, lastly, there is the singular conduct of the people at the inn.”