Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  “At what time, exactly, would you say you got to your own room?” I asked. Candy considered the question.

  “Not before a quarter to eleven and not after eleven o’clock,” he said. “But, of course, it’s that there quarter of an hour I were down the cellar they’ve got against me.”

  I spoke a few reassuring words to him, but I knew that that quarter of an hour was the snag. At last I took my leave, for my time was up.

  “So you see,” I said to Daphne, as we sat at tea, “the poor girl must have been murdered before Candy went up to bed that night. The medical evidence at the inquest put the time of death between nine o’clock and ten-thirty.”

  “Just the time,” said Daphne, “when Candy would be kept busy, and could not interfere.”

  “Just the time,” I said bitterly, “when the damn fool decided to go down the cellar and bring up some more beer for the jug and bottle department, presided over by Mrs. Lowry.”

  “Well, I suppose she asked him to go down the cellar!” retorted Daphne.

  “How could she? She wasn’t in the house at all,” I replied. “Bob told me that both the Lowrys were out, and that he doesn’t know when they came home. Mrs. Lowry simply left word that some time during the evening the job was to be done.”

  “Hm. It looks beastly suspicious to me,” said Daphne.

  “My dear girl, do be reasonable,” I said.

  “Well, Noel, it’s rather funny that just at the time when they’re out of the house and no suspicion can attach to either of them, poor Meg gets murdered, isn’t it? Not to mention the fact that it was also the very first time Mrs. Lowry had left her to herself!”

  “But, Daphne,” I said—laughing, I must confess, at her simplicity —“naturally the murderer would prefer to attack somebody in the Lowrys’ house while they were not there. It’s only common sense to suppose that the murderer has some gumption, isn’t it?”

  “Anyway, I hate those Lowrys,” said Daphne. “I’m sure there was something fishy when they took Meg to live with them in the first place.”

  “But your uncle, I understood, paid for her board and lodging,” I said weakly.

  “Oh, did he?” said Daphne. Nor could I persuade her to add anything to the rather moot point suggested by the question.

  “Well, anyway, while Bob’s story is fresh in my mind,” I said, “I think I’ll dot it down in shorthand, so that I can tell it to Mrs. Bradley in his own words, as nearly as I can remember them.”

  I have rather a remarkable verbal memory, and I am a fairly accomplished shorthand writer. I can do my hundred and forty, of course. So, armed with Bob’s depositions, we returned to Saltmarsh, and I went immediately to the Manor House to see Mrs. Bradley.

  “The first person to interview,” said she, after I had read Bob’s yarn to her, “is the girl who was taking Mrs. Lowry’s place in the jug and bottle department that evening. By the way, isn’t it rather unusual to have the host’s wife serving in that particular department?”

  “It’s to cater for motorists,” I said. “It’s more like an off-licence department, really, only they stick to the old name so as to be able to keep it open on Sundays.”

  “Ah, yes, that would be so, I dare say,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  She cackled, as startlingly as usual, and we sallied forth to the Mornington Arms.

  “You don’t know which maid was serving in the off-licence—I mean jug-and-bottle department on August Monday evening,” she said, as we walked along the road, “and so we had better have speech with Barman Charlie Peachey, I think. What kind of a man is Charlie?”

  “Oh, all right, I suppose,” I said cautiously. “He doesn’t come to church. He’s a Roman Catholic.”

  “Oh, well, he’s the less likely to be a murderer,” said Mrs. Bradley. I was still pondering this queer axiom when we arrived in front of the public house. The Mornington Arms is no longer the small, whitewashed, flat-fronted village inn that it used to be. It is set back from the road in its own tea-gardens, and was rebuilt, about three years before the murder, in the form of an Elizabethan half-timbered house. It can garage twelve cars and has ten bedrooms. The Lowrys were making a very good thing out of it, I believe. They catered solely for summer tourists and visitors, of course. During the winter months they did nothing beyond supplying the village with beer.

  “You go in,” said Mrs. Bradley to me, “and have something to drink, and get Charlie to tell you the girl’s name. I’ll wait in the Post Office.”

  I went in and ordered a gin and ginger, and tackled Peachey squarely. He was a thin, sandy-haired young man whom I hardly knew because of his Roman opinions.

  “Who was in charge in the jug and bottle on Bank Holiday evening?” I asked.

  “Mabel,” said Peachey. “Want to see her, Mr. Wells?”

  “She couldn’t make some excuse to slip down to the Post Office, could she?” I asked. “I could talk to her better there.”

  “Sure she can,” said Peachey. “She’s not doing anything, and madam’s making herself pleasant to a shooting party from London, and the boss is out, I know.”

  There was no-one else in the bar, so I leaned towards Peachey and asked quietly:

  “What’s been going on here, Peachey? Was there ever a baby or not?”

  He wiped a few spots of beer off the counter and then said:

  “It’s rum, ain’t it, Mr. Wells? There was a babby all right, because we all heard un cry. Ah, but what’s happened to that babby is a rare mystery.”

  “Well, look here,” I said, feeling somewhat Sherlock Holmesian, of course, and beginning to pant like a bally bloodhound when it sees land in sight, “what do you yourself think? Hang it, man,” I said, “you knew Bob. Presumably you knew something of the dead girl. What was it all about? Who did kill Meg Tosstick, eh? And where’s the baby?”

  Peachey said, doubtfully:

  “I don’t know as I ought to talk. You ain’t the police, Mr. Wells. Still, if you won’t let it go no further—”

  I promised, but said that I should like to talk things over with my friends. However, if he wanted me not to, I wouldn’t.

  “The little sharp party from the Manor?” he said. I assented.

  “Oh, all right then. Mind, I don’t know nawthen. Tis only what I thinks. You understand that?”

  “Oh, quite,” I said.

  “Well, then, I reckon it’s that there Mr. Burt. And what’s more, I reckon he had a rare facer when poor young Bob got taken up. He meant to fix it on the boss.”

  I gave the man a shilling for his trouble, as he was not of our own flock, and sauntered out as soon as I had finished my drink. Sure enough, by the time I had strolled to the Post Office and helped Mrs. Bradley choose a couple of picture postcards, along came Mabel Pusey, the barmaid, looking extremely scared. She asked for a three-halfpenny stamp, stuck it on the letter she was holding and we all walked out of the shop. We had taken no notice of Mabel, of course, while we were inside the Post Office, but as soon as she had posted her letter, we foregathered. Mabel was certainly in a pitiable state.

  “Oh, ma’am,” she said to Mrs. Bradley immediately, “I know it’s going to get poor Bobby hanged, but how was I to know? How was I to know? Mrs. Lowry said before she went as we might need some more pale ale and perhaps a dozen of stout up, and how was I to know? I’d have bitten out my tongue before I’d have told the police Bob was down there for a quarter of an hour, and after nine o’clock, too, but how was I to know they’d twist it into the time he murdered her?”

  “Listen, Mabel,” said Mrs. Bradley, kindly, in her wonderful voice. “You want to help Candy, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I do, I do!” said the girl. “Why before Meg Tosstick had him—” She stopped, but it was easy to finish the sentence. The poor girl was in love with Candy, and she felt that words of hers were sentencing him to death. Decidedly an unpleasant thought, of course. We nodded sympathetically. Mrs. Bradley said:

  “And how many bottles did he bring up
out of the cellar that night?”

  Mabel answered:

  “About three dozen. Certainly not less.”

  “Where is the cellar, Mabel?”

  “It’s under the garages now, where the old house stood before we was rebuilt. To get down the cellar we have to cross the bit of yard and go in the first lock-up, and the trap door to the cellar is in the far right-hand corner. You switch on the electric light on the wall of the lock-up over the trap door, and that lights up in the cellar and down you go. It’s where that old passage used to end.”

  “And ought it to have taken Bob Candy fifteen minutes to bring up three dozen bottles, Mabel, do you think?”

  “Well,” said Mabel, hesitating in order to consider the question, “in court I’d say it would, perjury or no perjury, I would, and of course, the knife and boots, little tyke, wasn’t there, so you can’t hardly say, what with one thing and another.”

  “What difference would the knife and boots boy make, Mabel?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “The knife and boots had ought to be there at the top of the steps to take the bottles from Bob and deposit ’em in a little soap-box on wheels Bob made, and wheel ’em into the jug and bottle,” replied Mabel, “but the knife and boots was at the fête. Said the missus had given him the whole day, and he wasn’t coming home till morning. And he never, neither, the little runt.” She spoke with honest indignation. “He didn’t half get a flea in his ear, neither. They was just locking up for the night when he come tearing in. It was nearly one o’clock then. ‘Boys will be boys,’ says the master, but madam, I thought she’d have fetched him a clout side the head.”

  “What did Bob do when he first heard that Meg was going to have a baby?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Mabel shrugged.

  “He cursed a bit and got drunk, but got over it after a bit, you know,” she said. She sighed. “Chaps aren’t like us maids, ma’am. Oh, Bob got over it all right, I’d say, and shall do if asked in court.”

  CHAPTER IX

  the village speaks its mind

  « ^ »

  “That last remark Mabel made is important, don’t you think?” asked Mrs. Bradley, as we walked on together. I considered it.

  “Why, especially?” I asked, feeling fogged, of course.

  “Bob had got over his resentment long before the murder,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It rather knocks the motive on the head, doesn’t it?”

  “One moment,” I said. “This Mabel Thingummy herself. Could she have done it, do you think?”

  Mrs. Bradley pursed her thin lips into a kind of little beak, and then shook her head.

  “You need strong hands, and a lot of nerve, and even then it must be a very unpleasant way of killing anybody,” she said. “You are arguing from the point of view that Mabel is in love with Bob and might have wished Meg Tosstick out of the way. I don’t think there is much in it. Mabel doesn’t strike me as the jealous, vindictive possessive type of lover. Besides, if she were fond of Bob and had committed the murder herself, she would confess in order to save him, wouldn’t she? Still, we could keep her in mind. It’s a point, certainly, that Bob was not the only person who had a motive for putting the girl out of the way.”

  “Thank you,” I said, quite bucked, of course, that she had not turned the idea down flat. “Pray sum up will you? Shall I take down?”

  “It would be nice of you,” said Mrs. Bradley. We had been walking towards the Manor House, and as she spoke, we entered its gates. In a few moments we were in the library.

  “First,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I believe if Candy could give the story of that Bank Holiday afternoon to the Court as he gave it to you, any jury in the land would acquit him. It was very affecting, and very possibly true. Secondly, it is obvious that if he could provide himself with an alibi for that quarter of an hour in the beer cellar, the case against him would fall flat. Personally, I think the police acted very hastily and ill-advisedly in arresting the young man so soon, even on the strength of that quarter of an hour. It was exceedingly unlucky for Candy that the knife and boot boy should not have been there to perform his usual duties, wasn’t it?”

  “The trouble is,” I said, “that everybody was at the fête, of course. And, because of that fact, everybody in the village will have much the same alibi. Even if their friends can’t vouch for them—”

  “Everybody in the village will not have the same alibi,” said Mrs. Bradley, interrupting me. “Incidentally, you noted the fact that Candy didn’t get sight of the baby, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Poor little thing. It must be deformed, mustn’t it? Or do you think he did see it, and was lying for some reason?”

  “There are so many kinds of deformity,” said Mrs. Bradley, seriously. I waited to hear what more she had to say, but apparently her remarks for the day were concluded. She did not even bother to answer my last question, but, just as I was about to take myself off, she looked me in the eye and said:

  “You really do still believe in Candy’s innocence, I suppose?”

  “I’d pledge my soul!” I exclaimed.

  “Rash Faustus,” retorted the little old woman, and her evil cackling pursued me down the drive. As I walked back through the twilight from the Manor House to the vicarage, I found myself still wondering what had become of the baby. Nobody seemed interested in the fact that apparently it had disappeared since the murder. I called at Constable Brown’s cottage and put the point.

  “It’s funny you should ask that,” he said. “See here, Mr. Wells, what do you make of this, like?”

  He produced from a drawer a visiting card. It had Gatty’s name on the one side and on the other, in roughly printed capitals, the words:

  “Where is Meg Tosstick’s baby?”

  “Who did this?” I asked.

  “Ah,” said the constable, scratching his chin with the edge of the small rectangle of pasteboard, “there, sir, you do me; proper you do me. I don’t know. It weren’t given to me, of course. May be you’re thinking it was. Oh, no, sir. Mrs. Coutts brought me this here, about two o’clock this afternoon. ‘Here, Brown,’ she says, holding it like it would have a nip of her hand if she didn’t look to it, ‘what’s all this?’

  “ ‘All this, mum,’ I says, like I might say it to you now. ‘All this, mum,’ I says, sort of silly like. ‘Why, I don’t know,’ I says. ‘What is it, mum, if I may ask.’

  “ ‘I’ve brought it to you to find out,’ she snaps. Well, beg your pardon, Mr. Wells, but she do snap. Snaps like my brindled whippet bitch used to. You remember her, I daresay. Master William wanted one of her last litter, but his aunt put the cash in a missionary box. Well, I looks it over and I can’t make nought out on it except what it says. ‘I’ll look into it, mam,’ I says. ‘Wants investigating carefully, this do.’

  “Course, I haven’t done nothing about it, Mr. Wells, because, to tell you the truth, I don’t know where I are. One thing is quite certain, how I look at it. It isn’t a Gatty job.”

  “A Gatty job?” I said.

  “A Gatty job,” repeated the constable. He turned the card over and showed me the name and address.

  “Don’t mean to tell me, Mr. Wells,” he said, “as Mr. or Mrs. Gatty sent this, when they could have come along themselves to the vicarage and said it. If they wanted it kept secret who they were, why send a visiting card? It aren’t sensible, Mr. Wells.”

  I agreed. Curiously enough, Mrs. Coutts met me at the front door of the vicarage with a similar bit of pasteboard in her hand.

  “What? What?” I said.

  “I know it can’t be the Gattys,” said the woman, pushing the visiting card at me, “but do just run along to the Moat House and see.”

  I groaned, but went, of course. The Gattys were in, and denied all knowledge of the printing on the back of the card. They handled it pretty freely, but then, so had I, and so had Mrs. Coutts and the rest of them. Fingerprints, I mean. No good for fingerprints. I clawed the card away from them and went back to the vicarage.

/>   “Another one has come,” said Mrs. Coutts. Old Coutts had gone up to bed with neuralgia, and Daphne and William were playing quoits tennis out of sight of the front door.

  The next day happened to be Sunday. On Sundays we breakfast at eight o’clock, on weekdays at eight-thirty. I have never discovered the reason for this unless it is to get the vicar out of bed soon enough for him to have a last glance over his sermon for Morning Prayer. I usually have to be wakened, therefore, on Sundays, but on this particular Sunday morning something roused me with a start. I sat up in bed, and observed a large squelchy object stuck on the outside of the bedroom window. It had all the appearance of an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. I arose and inspected it. It was an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. Blinking, as much to clear the brain as the eyeballs, I took another goggle at the frightful fruit. Beyond it I could see the vicarage hedge, and beyond the hedge a collection of the lads of the village. They were engaged, apparently, in plastering over-ripe fruit, bad eggs, and chunks of horse and cow manure over every window of the vicar’s residence. I opened the window, rashly, as it turned out, and began to shout at them. Just at that moment the window beside mine was flung up and young William’s boyish, excited bleat announced:

  “If you don’t cheese it, you ugly stiffs—”

  A chunk of horse-dung took him over the eyebrow. At the same instant a last season’s egg got me in the left ear. We both shut our windows, shot out on the landing and made for the bathroom. William was seriously annoyed. He didn’t know many expletives, but those he knew he made full use of. I couldn’t very well follow suit, of course, but I listened sympathetically.

  “But what’s it for?” enquired William, scrubbing his now shining face upon the towel. “What’s the giddy idea? That’s what I want to know.”