Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  Motive and opportunity were the prosecution’s main lines of attack, and they scored pretty heavily, I should say. There was also a nasty bit when the prosecuting counsel, leaning forward, asked Bob what the row was about between himself and the Lowrys on the Sunday night before the Bank Holiday and the murder. Mrs. Bradley and I had both hoped that Ferdinand would not put Bob in the box, but I suppose it looks bad if the prisoner does not make his statement, and Sir Ferdinand was out for a dyed-in-the-wool, no-stain-on-the-character-of-my-unfortunate-and-much-maligned client decision. So he risked it. Bob, glowering (which was a pity with so many women on the jury), replied that the quarrel was a private matter. The prosecuting counsel, with a nasty smile, pressed the point. Bob suddenly met his eye squarely and replied:

  “I were complaining about the food.”

  “You were complaining about the food, were you?” asked the counsel. The jury wrote this down.

  “I were,” repeated Bob, stolidly. His grim expression lightened. “Hadn’t been so bad for years.”

  “I understood that you asked permission to visit the girl Tosstick in her bedroom, and that you became angry when the permission was refused,” said the prosecution counsel, silkily.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Bob. “It’s the food I remember best.”

  “Pore feller,” said a woman, rather audibly. Thus encouraged, I suppose, Bob stuck to the food and nothing would budge him. Sir Ferdinand began to look happier. His junior read the note that he scribbled and grinned meaningly at the jury.

  The matter of the baby was gone into next. It was a pity, I think, from the point of view of the prosecution, that they had been compelled to accept the theory that Bob had murdered the baby, because they could not get very far with it. The Lowrys had explained that, by the wish of the girl-mother, nobody had set eyes on the baby except herself and Mrs. Lowry. Mrs. Lowry explained that not even her husband had seen the baby. No, the child was not deformed… Luckily for Bob, the jury, one and all, were looking at Mrs. Lowry as she gave her evidence, and not at him. If ever a poor wretch on trial for his life looked thoroughly guilty, it was Bob Candy. He glowered, and seemed to be swearing to himself. He looked evil enough to have murdered a dozen babies.

  Sir Ferdinand rose to make hay. He wanted to know what had become of the body of the baby. He wanted to know how and when it had been proved that the baby had been murdered at all, apart from whether the prosecution could prove that the accused man had murdered it. Might it not have been claimed by its natural father? Had any attempt been made by the prosecution to discover whether it was living with its natural father? Had any attempt been made—here there was what is known as a sensation in court—had any attempt been made to prove that the baby had ever been born at all?

  A doctor who had been present at the post-mortem was able to assure Sir Ferdinand that the deceased girl had certainly been delivered of a child. Pressed by Sir Ferdinand, he admitted that it was beyond him to declare whether the baby had been born alive or dead.

  The judge, in his summing-up, rather stressed the baby. He was noted for his leniency to murderers of the working class type, I believe. The point that, while the body of the mother had been found lying in the bed where she had been done to death, whereas no trace of the baby could be found, was in favour of the prisoner. He was accused of murdering mother and child. Of course, the jury must use their judgment and decide whether the prisoner was guilty of both murders or only of one, or of neither of the murders. If they believed that the baby had not been murdered, but was either born dead or had been taken by the father or by some other interested person, they could say so. They must weigh up the motive imputed to the prisoner and see whether, in their opinion, it was sufficiently strong to cause him to take the life of the girl he had intended to marry. They must weigh up the opportunity and remember that all-important time-limit they had heard learned counsel discussing so ably. They were to ask themselves whether any other person might have had a stronger motive or a more favourable opportunity for committing the murders for which the prisoner at the bar had been charged. (Well, of course, they had heard nothing about old Coutts, or Mrs. Coutts, so that wasn’t too simple for them! But still, really and truly, it seemed to me that the judge said everything except actually to put the words “Not Guilty” into their mouths.)

  Mrs. Bradley was seated beside me in the court on that last exciting Saturday morning. As soon as the jury had retired, I turned to her and said that I supposed it was all over, bar actually conducting old Bob in triumph back to Saltmarsh. She shook her head.

  “I should not care to predict the result,” she said. “There are five women on the jury, and women are notoriously hard on sexual crimes. For Bob’s sake I wish the jury had been all men. He would certainly have been acquitted. Women are still an unknown quantity on a jury. Of course, the seven men may bully them into giving in. It is surprising the way in which women will allow themselves to be bullied out of their rights by the opposite sex.”

  I could not help thinking that if the opposite sex had any notions of bullying Mrs. Bradley they were in for a thin time, but I did not say so. We waited for nearly two hours and then the jury returned.

  Guilty of both murders.

  So the black cap was needed after all, and I was able to see how the judge looked in it. A little older, and a little more sad, I thought. I was absolutely stunned, of course. It had never occurred to me for one single instant that we should not be taking Bob back with us to Saltmarsh. The poor fellow cried when the judge put on the black cap. He was led away, still weeping, and rubbing away the tears with the sleeve of his jacket. It was horrible.

  Mrs. Bradley slid her skinny arm in mine when we got outside.

  “Never mind, Noel,” she said quietly. “We shall appeal, of course, and if the poor boy doesn’t throw up the sponge and begin confessing or any rubbish of that sort, we shall get him off. The verdict was directly contrary to the summing-up, you noticed. I’m not coming back to Saltmarsh for about ten days. At the end of that time I will return armed to the teeth. Perhaps the verdict is the best thing that could have happened, as things stand. Poor Bob! That dreadful manner of his was all against him. He stood there looking such a thug!”

  “How inconsistent your sex is,” I exclaimed. “You believe him innocent now the court declares him guilty!”

  “Oh, no,” rejoined Mrs. Bradley. “I have always believed him innocent. Did you spot the witness who was lying?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I did,” she said, with a kind of fat satisfaction in her dulcet voice. “Good-bye, dear child. Don’t pine. In ten days, or maybe less, I shall be in Saltmarsh with Jove’s thunderbolts. Look after Daphne, whatever happens. Good-bye.”

  Daphne cried for nearly an hour when I returned to Saltmarsh with the sad news of Bob’s conviction. Even Mrs. Coutts seemed rather dashed. The Lowrys were mobbed at the station by villagers anxious to hear the news. Burt came down to the vicarage and we told him. He was thoughtful, and didn’t use any strong language. He said at last:

  “Do you think he could have done for Cora as well?”

  “Impossible!” we all said. After all, we ourselves had provided Bob’s alibi for the Tuesday.

  “Oh,” said Burt, “that’s all right, then. If I knew for certain who had killed Cora I would—” The rest of the sentence was quite unprintable, but even Mrs. Coutts made no adverse comment except for a grim tightening of her lips, and a clenching of her nervous hands.

  The Gattys were the next to hear the news from us.

  “Poor fellow! Poor young fellow,” was the burden of their song.

  We got all the visitors out of the house at last, and Daphne said:

  “I couldn’t say so in front of all those people, because I suppose it would be contempt of court or something, but I still think those Lowrys did it! I hate that fat, bald-headed old man!”

  “That’s no reason for thinking he murdered Meg Tosstick,” I retorted. “Besides, ne
ither of the Lowrys went near the pub at the time of Meg Tosstick’s murder, and neither of ’em left the pub on the morning, afternoon, or evening of Cora McCanley’s death. You can’t fix it on them, dearest, however much you dislike them.”

  “Well, who did do it, then?” she persisted. We went over the whole thing again; hammered out all the suspects and their alibis, just as we had done so many times before.

  “Uncle is easily the likeliest,” said Daphne dolefully. I chewed it over until far into the night. I mean, dash it all, he so absolutely was, you know! And what about Cora McCanley? If he had seduced one girl, why not another? Ah, but he had an alibi for the Tuesday. I knew that. We had been together all that day, and during the night we had patrolled the shore, of course. If only somebody could find out all Cora’s movements on the afternoon and evening of her death, I felt we might get somewhere. But at Wyemouth Harbour railway station she had simply disappeared. We could trace her to the booking office but not a step beyond. I knew that Mrs. Bradley felt sure she had returned to the Bungalow, but there was no proof of it.

  I went to the Bungalow next day and talked to Burt about it. A risky thing to do, of course, but it occurred to me that if we could only discover the murderer of Cora, it would give us just that much firmer ground of appeal for Bob. One of these psychology stunts, I mean, of course. Burt was surprisingly mild and very sympathetic.

  “Of course I don’t want the bleeding fellow to be hanged if he’s innocent,” he said. “But I tell you what it is, Wells. When I find Cora’s murderer, I’m going to get my hands round his throat first, and then I’m going to knock the neck off my last bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and then I’m doing a dive into the stone quarries before I’m arrested.”

  The remark was a bit of a revelation to me, of course, in more ways than one. To begin with, Burt was now giving us every indication that his feeling for Cora McCanley had been very much stronger than we had ever imagined. Secondly, I had always laboured under the—I think rather excusable—delusion that the term “the Widow,” used in describing champagne, was some kind of a—complimentary, of course—reference to Queen Victoria.

  But my conversation with Burt got me no further. I was not at all keen on mentioning Sir William’s name in connection with Cora, and, in any case, if Cora had indeed been murdered on the Tuesday, Sir William could not possibly have been concerned in her death.

  As I walked home, however, another horrible thought struck me. If Cora had been murdered later than the Tuesday, the squire had no more of an alibi than, say, Lowry, for instance, or myself, or old Coutts… !

  CHAPTER XIV

  twentieth-century usage of a smugglers’ hole

  « ^ »

  Mrs. Bradley was better than her word. It was exactly five days after the result of Bob’s trial had been announced in the evening papers, that she returned to Saltmarsh. That is to say, it was on the late afternoon of Thursday, October 29th, that she walked into the vicarage and informed us that, in the opinion of everyone in legal circles whose opinion she had been able to hear—and their name, it appeared, was pretty well legion, of course, as her son was in the thick of things—Bob’s appeal could not fail.

  “A verdict in the teeth of the summing up is usually reversed on appeal, I believe,” said old Coutts, who, of course, knows nothing at all about it—a fact which his wife was very quick in bringing to his notice. I do dislike that woman. When she is in the right I dislike her rather more than when she is in the wrong.

  Mrs. Bradley had received a cordial invitation from Sir William to continue in residence at the Manor House until the mysteries of Saltmarsh were thoroughly cleared up. He had been much entertained by Mrs. Bradley’s brilliant deductions as to the whereabouts of Cora McCanley’s body, and his theory, often and loudly expressed, was that Bob was innocent, and that the murderer of Cora had also murdered Meg and the baby.

  Next morning, at about eleven o’clock, I was not too pleased to receive a summons from Sir William to visit the Manor, “with all my shorthand at my finger-tips.”

  Daphne and I were inspecting the store of apples in the loft, when the message came. It is a useful work, that of inspecting the storage of apples, and I was annoyed at being called away to other matters.

  To my astonishment, the Chief Constable of the County was with Sir William and Mrs. Bradley, and Sir William’s first move, after bunging my name and station at the great man, was to clear out and leave the three of us in possession of the library. I was given a nice notebook, a set of beautifully sharpened pencils, and a comfortable, workmanlike seat at the big table. The other two sat in armchairs on either side of the fire.

  “Now, Mr. Wells,” said the Chief Constable, beaming. He looked like an inspector of schools, or like the gently smiling crocodile of the classic. They are awfully alike, you know, both in appearance and character.

  I hitched my chair forward rather nervously, and grinned.

  “At your service, sir,” I replied, suitably I hope.

  “You have been sent for to act as Mrs. Bradley’s secretary. You are under pledge of secrecy on account of everything that is said in this room from now onwards, until you are released from that pledge,” he said. (I have been released from it by now, of course, or I should not be discussing these matters.)

  I bowed, feeling rather like a League of Nations Conference on the White Slave Traffic, of course.

  “Please take down everything that is said, in your beautiful shorthand, Noel, my dear, and later, when you have read it over to me, transcribe it into your nice legible longhand,” said Mrs. Bradley kindly. “Are you ready?”

  Well, they talked, of course, and I took down. That’s about all it amounted to.

  “You think, then,” the Chief Constable began, “that the unfortunate lad will be acquitted?”

  “If the police could possibly discover the murderer of Cora Mc-Canley, I think it would be certain,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “The bodies of Meg Tosstick and the baby have not been found yet, I take it?”

  “No. The police have followed up every possible clue. I don’t think they have left a single stone unturned,” the Chief Constable replied, “but, so far—nothing!”

  Mrs. Bradley grimaced, I suppose, at this. I didn’t look up from my notebook, so, of course, I can’t be certain, and there was a longish pause. At last she said:

  “The criminal is rather a remarkable person. Let me outline to you what I think he has done. I am assuming, by the way, that we are dealing with one criminal who committed both crimes; not with two murderers.”

  “You say ‘he,’ as though it could not be a woman’s crime,” said the Chief Constable.

  “My mind is open on the point,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t be a woman’s crime. Of course, Cora McCanley was a big girl and Meg Tosstick a little one, but both appear to have been stunned before they were strangled.”

  “Oh, so Cora was strangled too,” I thought to myself, as I waited for the next remark to take down.

  “Yes. Surprise is a great factor, of course, in a strangling crime,” said the Chief Constable. “And there are such things as drugs, of course, or the victim being attacked during sleep. She had quite a lump on the back of her head, as you say. She may certainly have been stunned first.”

  “During sleep,” said Mrs. Bradley, thoughtfully. There was a long pause. Then she went on, “You mean that she was sleeping beside her murderer, and that he attacked and killed her?”

  It occurred to me that Mrs. Bradley was determined to shield Sir William.

  “Well,” said the Chief Constable, slowly, “if she had a lover, you see, and was expecting to go off with him—I wonder where she was killed! That’s what the inspector and his people have been trying to get at. But the trail stops dead at Wyemouth Harbour Station.”

  “The Pier-head Station?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “Oh, no. The main line Central Station,” replied the Chief Constable. “She took a ticket for London, as we should h
ave expected her to do if her story of going to join the touring company were true. The next thing we know for certain is that she did not join the company. We can’t prove whether she actually went to London or not. It’s as though, when Cora McCanley stepped past the barrier to board the London train, she stepped into thin air.”

  “Have you considered the possibility of her having crossed the line by the footbridge and boarded a train which was returning to the Pier-head Station?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “But what could she do at the Pier-head Station?” demanded the Chief Constable. “She could do nothing but swim, unless she chartered a boat.”

  “Surely she could have returned to the Bungalow by way of the seashore, if she wished?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “She could. Your argument, then, is that she returned almost immediately to Saltmarsh?”

  “That is what I think. You see, you have to take the girl’s temperament into account. Hoodwinking her partner would bê the chief appeal to her. She was bored, you see. To have a lover under Burt’s very nose would tickle her sense of the humorous more than actually going off with someone.”