Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  “What about him?” I said. “The victim of an illicit passion, that’s all.”

  “The victim of an inferiority complex,” returned Mrs. Bradley. I chewed the thought.

  “Hm!” I said. These psychologists frighten me. I don’t talk their argot, of course, and that puts one at a disadvantage.

  “Besides,” said Mrs. Bradley, warming to it, “most murderers are insane at the time of committing the murder. Take Patrick Mahon.”

  “Oh, but that was frightfully nasty,” I said.

  “You are confusing the two acts of the unfortunate man when you say so,” responded Mrs. Bradley.

  “But he dismembered the body!” I protested. I mean, hang it all!

  “Yes, that’s what I am saying,” she said. I blinked.

  “If a man laid an entirely false trail for the police, misled them, hoodwinked them, drew red herrings across the track and dived and doubled in order to escape them, you wouldn’t say that he was any more of a villain than if he took no steps to secure himself from arrest, would you?” she asked. I thought it over, and replied, cautiously, in the negative.

  “Well, a man who dismembers a body and hides the head is only trying to secure himself against arrest,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You should try to think clearly, child.”

  “But murderers who are found to be insane are lodged in Broadmoor,” I said, adroitly side-stepping once more.

  “Ah, Broadmoor,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a waste of public money! A painless death would be far the better method. There’s a great deal of rubbish talked about death, young man. Mind you, there must be none of that dreadful period of waiting for the execution morning that obtains under our present inhuman and disgraceful system. I do not say abolish the death penalty, but, instead of a penalty, let it be a release. We must always have the moral courage to release from life those who are not fitted to bear life’s burdens. Social morality, consisting, as it so largely does, in refraining from action, is to some minds an unachievable ideal, and to others simply nonsense.”

  “Ah, but the duty of the church—” I interrupted. Then I stopped short, because, of course, the church is not primarily concerned with morals. At least, it ought not to be, for morals are not even the A.B.C. of religion. I doubt whether, at most, they are more than the pothooks and hangers of our spiritual life.

  “Priests are but men,” I said, lamely, of course.

  “Not always,” retorted the Bradley, with her frightful cackle. My trouble is that I never know when the woman is serious, but I found myself thinking of Mrs. Coutts with her murky mind. Beside her, this queer little reptilian was like a rainbow or an iridescent shell of pearl. Mind you, you couldn’t exactly guarantee what you would find underneath the shell, but I felt that while it would be possible to imagine the Archangel Gabriel blowing his trumpet in Mrs. Bradley’s ear, it would be impossible for Mrs. Coutts even to recognise the Archangel and the sound of his trumpet on the last great day. There was something about the Bradley. I should be the last person to deny it. One felt, in the words of the rather Nonconformist hymn, that she was on the Lord’s side. Curious.

  She clapped me on the shoulder. It was quite a welcome change, of course, to being poked in the ribs.

  “And now, to the question of the hour,” she said. “Talking about murderers, let us include our own.” She paused a moment, and then added, “Oh, by the way, do you know which train is best from Wyemouth Harbour if one wishes to arrive in London in time for dinner and a theatre?”

  “Oh, yes. The 3.30 is easily the best,” I said. “For one thing, it doesn’t stop anywhere until it gets into Waterloo, and for another, it has a restaurant car.”

  “Ah, thank you, my dear,” she said. “The 3.30.”

  She wrote it down.

  “And now, dear child,” she said, “this murder of the girl Tosstick. A queer affair, you know.” And, arguing, I suppose, from the general to the particular, she began to talk about Bob Candy, which was what I had been trying to urge her to do.

  “I want you to go and see Bob,” she said. “And I want you to ask him some questions about what happened on August Bank Holiday.”

  “But his lawyers,” I began, “are surely the people—”

  “Yes, yes,” said the little old woman. She began to stroke the sleeve of her orange and black dinner frock as she talked. “But I want you to go. He always liked you, didn’t he?”

  “Oh, averagely,” I said.

  “Yes, well, you get at his alibi, young man. And, if he hasn’t an alibi, find out the truth. I don’t think he has told the police the truth, and, if my deductions are correct, that’s because the truth would be one more weapon in the hands of the prosecution. I have thought a good deal about Bob while I’ve been clearing up the little mysteries in connection with Mr. Burt, and I have come to the conclusion that Bob was with Meg Tosstick some time during the afternoon or evening of August Bank Holiday, and that, instead of having thrown the tie away, he was actually wearing it on that day. You must admit that he did not come out very strongly on the subject of that tie.”

  I admitted it, of course. Anybody could have seen that the poor fellow had been lying about the wretched knitted silk tie with which Meg Tosstick had been strangled.

  “Tell me about Bob,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Oh, well,” I said, “he was a big, sturdy fellow. You saw that for yourself, of course. He never showed any signs of abnormality except a tendency to glower and brood over fancied wrongs. His gifts as chucker-out were seldom in requisition, because the village is orderly and we seldom have men drunk. It’s easy enough to get rid of the guests at closing time, I am sure. Bob was simply a barman, really. He fell in love with the poor unfortunate girl Tosstick, and they were both saving up to get married, I know, because they tried to get the vicar to mind their money. Of course, Coutts pointed out that the Post Office would pay two and a half per cent. interest, which he was not in a position to do, and persuaded them to start a Savings Bank account. It was all in the girl’s name, because Bob said it was to be. Coutts wanted them to have separate accounts, but Bob wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Well, you’ve put several points which are in the young man’s favour,” said Mrs. Bradley. She frowned. “Not at all the sort of young man who ought to be hanged,” she said.

  “You see that Bob did not gain financially by Meg Tosstick’s death?” I said, eagerly. “Constable Brown put that to the Wyemouth inspector, but he chose to ignore it, I suppose.”

  Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “And you have also shown that Bob had no particular enemies,” she said.

  “Oh, the chucking-out business? No, I’m sure he hadn’t. He got handled a bit roughly on that Sunday evening, but he’s quite popular really.”

  “Yes. You, as his advocate, must find every possible point in the lad’s favour. A number of quite small points might be sufficient just to tip the scale towards an acquittal, if you really want him to be acquitted.”

  “You’ve no hope, then, of discovering the real murderer?” I asked. I was disappointed. The woman had managed to convey the distinct impression that she had something up her sleeve.

  “Oh, I tell you that I can very well guess who the murderer is,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But the trouble will be to get some people to believe it. You surprise me, you know. You still seem certain that Bob Candy was not capable of committing murder. And that is absurd.”

  She had put the point before; this time, without giving me a chance to say anything, she proceeded to enlarge upon it.

  “A young man must be very much attached to a young girl to trust her with all his savings,” she said. “Don’t you think that it was an extraordinary thing that everybody in the village was so astonished at the news that the girl was going to have a child? Upon your own and Mrs. Coutts’ showing, I take it that conception before marriage is not an uncommon thing in the village.”

  “It’s the custom,” I said, prepared to stick up for it of course. After all, our
people are essentially moral. You can’t call that sort of thing immorality, although Mrs. Coutts does, of course. It’s simply local colour. One has to be broadminded. Mrs. Bradley was prepared to accept the facts without criticising them, it seemed, for she merely nodded and said:

  “Assuming, as you are determined to assume, that Candy is innocent, here is a workable hypothesis to go on. Let us say that Meg Tosstick, begged by several interested persons, including the Lowrys, to disclose to them the name of her seducer, refused to comply with the request. We do not know her reason for withholding the father’s name, but apparently she did withhold it. Now—a remarkable point, this—nobody seems to have encountered the proverbial little bird. Meg’s secret is still a secret—even to me—so that I have no way of putting my convictions to the test, and they remain merely convictions for the present, and are not established facts. Now, I imagine that she kept the secret for one of two reasons. Either she was being terrorised by the baby’s father, or else she knew that her lover would commit murder if the secret came out. A girl of Meg Tosstick’s type might easily be terrorised by a stronger personality. This stronger personality, however, was not strong enough to dare Bob Candy’s vengeance if the secret leaked out. The girl, in a weakly hysterical state, poor thing, after all that she had suffered both mentally and physically, was in just the frame of mind to blurt out with tears and self-reproaches the whole pitiful, shameful story. The wretch whose lust had victimised her was terrified at the thought of the consequences to himself if she did that, and so he planned to murder her to close her mouth for good and all. Immediately the murder was accomplished, poor, innocent Candy was arrested, as the murderer foresaw that he would be. How’s that?” And she laughed heartily.

  “Then we have only to find the father!” I exclaimed. “Oh, but you have a conviction, you say, that you know him. Can’t we frighten the truth out of him?”

  Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “I think you would find that he was more afraid of the gallows than of your threats, child,” she said. “Besides, we can’t do very much without proof, and in any case, what I have just told you is not necessarily the truth, remember. It is merely a working hypothesis which covers all the facts that we know. Now when you’ve visited poor Bob, and have found out exactly what he did and where he went on August Bank Holiday, let me know. Persuade him that to tell the whole truth is his best plan. By the way, I have briefed Ferdinand Lestrange for the defence.”

  “What, Sir Ferdinand?” I gasped, thinking, of course, of the fees.

  “Yes. My son by my first husband,” said this remarkable woman. “A clever boy. Nearly as clever as his mother, and quite as unscrupulous as his father, who cornered wheat on Wall Street and then slipped up and all the wheat fell on him!”

  She screamed with Satanic mirth and poked me in the ribs until I fled the room. Her laughter pursued me to the front door, where I grabbed my hat from the footman and bolted down the drive. I managed to get a short talk with Daphne as soon as I arrived at the vicarage. The other inmates of the vicarage were in bed. She had been to bed, also, but, upon hearing my latch-key in the door, she had sneaked downstairs to the dining room. She sat on my knee while I told her all that I had heard—well, most of it, of course. She squeezed my arm.

  “I bet she means Lowry, horrid, fat old pig!” declared my beloved. “He looks just that sort of man.”

  “I plump for Burt,” I said. “A noted atheist and a nasty-minded fellow if ever there was one. Burt would make nothing of twisting girls’ necks. He used to beat Cora, you know. I don’t wonder they had a dust-up.”

  “He doesn’t gave you the shudders, anyway, as Lowry does,” said Daphne, “and girls like Cora don’t mind being whacked. They like their husbands to be rough with them.”

  Personally, I have always considered this Ethel M. Dell stuff to be a myth, but Daphne did not give me time to argue. She lowered her voice, and looked hastily over her shoulder. Then she said in my ear —it tickled me a bit, of course:—

  “You know the Adj. thinks it was either Uncle or Sir William, don’t you? The baby business, I mean. She thinks Meg and the Lowrys wouldn’t show it because of the resemblance.”

  “Your aunt is mad,” I said, softly but with considerable heartiness. “I say, Daphne, come over to Clyton with me when I go to see Candy. You could wait in the public library for me, couldn’t you? We could have tea together in a little teashop I know of, and anyway there would be the journey both ways. It takes about an hour and three quarters because the connections are so frightfully bad, so we’d get at least four hours together, one way and another.”

  We fixed it up and then went up to our separate beds. I was longing for my marriage. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

  Three days later I got permission to visit Candy and we set off. I left Daphne in the magazine and periodicals department of the public library and went to the prison by tram. The prison lay about a mile and a half outside the town. Candy seemed quite pleased to see me, but shut up like a clam as soon as I began trying to talk business. He looked a bit pale, but quite well, I thought, and talked hopefully about the trial.

  “They’ll have to let me off,” he kept saying, twisting his hands together, “because I never done it, see? They can’t hang me if I never done it! That aren’t the law, Mr. Wells, that aren’t.”

  “But look here, Candy, old fellow,” I said, desperately anxious not to put the wind up the poor chap, of course, but just as keen not to let Mrs. Bradley down, “they may think you did do it. And, look here, Candy, there are some very rich and clever people interested in you, and they’re going to get you off, but they can’t do it unless you tell everything you know.”

  He sat there as dumb as the Mona Lisa, and looking about as soft, and the way he kept twisting his fingers got on my nerves. He wouldn’t say a word, so, at last, knowing that time was passing, I determined to try a bold shot. I leaned forward and said in my sternest rebuke-of-the-old-Adam tone, which, in a priest, of course, amounts to about the same thing as an army officer’s parade voice:

  “Why don’t you confess that you spent the evening with the murdered girl?”

  He jumped so suddenly that I jumped too.

  “You—!” he said. “It weren’t the evening, damn you, it were only the afternoon!”

  “Everybody knows about it, Bob,” I said, gently, hoping that the lie would be forgiven me. “So why don’t you make a clean breast of it? It was in the evening that you saw Meg Tosstick.” Sheer bluff of course, and I was ashamed of it.

  “I didn’t do it, I tell you! I didn’t do it!” he said.

  “I know you didn’t, you fool!” I said, trying a little savaging. “But what chance do you give anybody, if you won’t tell the truth?”

  He licked his lips. A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched and twitched.

  “Here you are, then,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t have no heart to go to the fête, and I knew we wouldn’t be busy at the Arms until the evening, so I get Mr. Lowry to give me the morning and afternoon off, and I promise to be back by six. Well, we open at half-past six, see, and they chaps at the fête be getting thirsty by then. I get away to Little Hartley, because I told the vicar I didn’t want to play in that there old cricket match against Much Hartley, and I wander about the woods and the common, and have a bit of dinner I brought along, and in the afternoon I sneak back to Saltmarsh to see Meg, and have a few things out with her. I have no chance before to talk to the poor maid because Mrs. Lowry was always for keeping me away. Afeared I’d do her a cruel turn, I do suppose,” added Bob, his face darkening.

  “Did she say that?” I asked. He shook his head.

  “No. Her would always say maid was too bad, or too tired, or was asleep, or was suckling, or some excuse, to keep me from her.”

  “Then you didn’t see Meg to speak to from the time the child was born until August Bank Holiday?” I asked.

  “That’s in the way of it,” he answered. “Anyway, I know
ed the master and missus and all the gals and men ’ud be at the fête in the afternoon, so, with them thinking I was away to a day’s holiday on my own, I could see it were my chance to get speech with Meg. I wasn’t going to frit the poor maid; only ask she, pleasant-like, who was her fancy chap, and did she prefer him to I, and suchlike. But not rancorious, Mr. Wells…” He looked at me pleadingly, but I said nothing at all, so at last he continued:

  “Well, Meg looked proper frit when I walked in. Her was white and looked weary. Couldn’t see nothing of babby. Her had it too close and all covered up not to have its looks give nawthen away, I reckon.

  “ ‘Why, Bob,’ her says in a whisper, ‘How be?’

  “ ‘I be fine,’ I says, ‘How be you?’

  “ ‘I be all right,’ her says, ‘Oh, Bob, have ee come to upbraid me? Don’t ee upbraid me, Bob, nor yet miscall me, my dear,’ her says, ‘for I can’t abide no hard words, I be that weak. And don’t ee ask Babby’s surname, neither,’ her says. So we set and talk, and at last her says:

  “ ‘I do know I lost ee for good and all, Bob,’ her says, ‘but do ee lay thy face down on pillow beside me, and give me a bit of comfort, my dear.’

  “So I lays down my head on pillow, ah, and body, too, on top of quilt, and puts arm over she, having took off collar and tie for comfort first.”

  “The—the knitted silk tie?” I gasped. He nodded, and then smiled sardonically, and said,

  “Ah. Funny bit, that there, weren’t it? Well, like silly chap, happen I fall asleep, what with the quiet and the warmth and such, and first thing I know, Meg shaking I and telling I to get up and go away. Sure enough, when I look at clock, five past six her say, so I hop up in a hurry, part my hair with Meg’s comb, put on collar and can’t see tie. Meg say she’ll find un and hide un, but I must go. Poor maid seem so set on it, and so frit to think somebody might see me there, that I pack up and go. I get another tie from my own bedroom, put on my barman’s overall, and step down into the bar. Mr. and Mrs. Lowry wasn’t back from fête, but the gals and Charlie Peachey, the other barman with me, soon come in, and we open as usual. But master and missus never come in until goodness knows when that night, for Charlie and I close the house at half-past ten, and he go back to the fête for the dancing, and the gals with him, and I go upstairs. I tap at Meg’s door, but get no answer, so I twist the handle, but the door was locked, so I go along to my bed.”