Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

“I see. Then you think she walked along the sands from Wyemouth Harbour Pier-head Station—or, of course, she could have walked along the cliffs if the tide were full—we can check the state of the tide, of course—and risked running full tilt into Burt?”

  “I think she felt pretty secure,” said Mrs. Bradley, “so far as Burt was concerned. Have you heard of the smugglers’ passage from the Mornington Arms to Saltmarsh Cove?”

  “I’ve heard of it, yes. Why?”

  “I happen to know,” said Mrs. Bradley, “that Burt, who is rather an extraordinary young man, spent a good deal of his spare time in digging a transverse to that old tunnel from his bungalow.”

  She gave me time to get this down, and then asked me for a sheet of paper and a pencil. She sketched quickly and badly, but comprehensibly, a plan of the chief houses in Saltmarsh and dotted in the old tunnel and Burt’s new bit.

  “Like that, wasn’t it, Noel?” she asked, handing it to me. I assented and the Chief Constable studied it.

  “You see,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I think Cora walked as far as the Cove—(knowing that the chances were at least a thousand to one against her meeting anybody she knew)—dived into the Cove, followed the passage—(whose entrance at the Cove end is so cleverly concealed that I spent two hours there with a powerful electric torch before I located it)—reached the transverse to the Bungalow, went along the transverse, and was actually under or in the Bungalow when she was murdered.”

  “But—but they always slept together!” I yelped, as soon as I had dashed the theory on to paper. Both the polite conversationalists stared at me as though I had gone mad.

  “They what?” said the Chief Constable, concentrating upon the somewhat salient point I had indicated to them.

  “Always slept together. They’ve both told me so at different times. You know, shared a bed,” I said.

  “This is important, isn’t it?” asked the Chief Constable.

  “Well, it is important in view of the fact that Burt and Cora had a serious quarrel on the morning of the day she was murdered,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But it is not particularly important in this instance, because Burt was one of the night watchers at the Cove, wasn’t he, Noel?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I had forgotten that,” I said, feeling a fool.

  The Chief Constable produced papers and a notebook. He donned horn-rimmed glasses and, looking rather like Mr. Pickwick, perused the literature he had dug out of his dispatch case. “Burt seems to confess to the quarrel,” he said at last. “Yes,” he went on, “he certainly seems to confess to the quarrel. It was very bitter, apparently, and was with reference to the stinginess of Burt in withholding the greater portion of his income from McCanley. He gives as his reason for behaving thus that she was extravagant.”

  Mrs. Bradley nodded.

  “Cora was angry about having so little money,” she ventured. I could see, of course, that she did not intend to give Burt away about the smuggled books, if she could help it; and, after all, if the man had seen the error of his ways, it was surely right to guard him from punishment.

  “Very angry, it seems,” said the Chief Constable. “She made Burt very angry, too. In the end he chased her with the intention, as he very frankly admits, of wreaking vengeance upon her person, whereat Cora rushed to the edge of the stone quarries and threatened to throw herself over if he did not instantly and finally give up the intention of beating her.”

  “Quite a melodramatic scene, in fact,” said Mrs. Bradley. I could not help feeling rather relieved that William Coutts had missed this bit.

  “Exactly,” said the Chief Constable. “So melodramatic that I don’t suppose for one instant that anything of the sort happened at all. I’ll get the inspector along to question Burt about this underground passage business. I had never thought of Cora McCanley having been murdered in the Bungalow itself. Of course, during what one may call the suspicious hours of that Tuesday, Burt seems to have a pretty complete alibi.”

  “Well, as the doctor who examined Cora’s exhumed body refuses to commit himself as to the time that death took place, we don’t know whether Burt’s alibi was complete, do we?” asked Mrs. Bradley, quietly.

  “If you will be kind enough to excuse me,” said the Chief Constable, slowly digesting this point—“I will just step into the hall and telephone the Wyemouth Harbour inspector and his people. They will be glad to get on to Burt again. They have been very suspicious of him all along, I know.”

  “One moment,” said Mrs. Bradley. She hesitated, and then continued, “Of course, I cannot control your actions, but may I suggest that Burt is not your man?”

  “No?” said the Chief Constable, surprised. “But everything points to it, and if his alibi is not as good as it seems we have no check on him before seven-thirty p.m., you see.”

  “Not quite everything points to it,” said Mrs. Bradley. “To begin with, what do you think Cora McCanley’s object was in affecting to go to London to join that touring company?”

  “To free herself from Burt in order to meet her lover,” said the Chief Constable. “I thought the whole argument rested on that assumption.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Think it out, dear Sir Malcolm. Think it out, before you telephone the police.”

  “You are not suggesting to me that Cora and her lover spent the night, or that part of the night which passed before she was murdered, in Burt’s bungalow without Burt’s knowledge?” asked Sir Malcolm.

  “That would certainly be Cora McCanley’s idea of girlish fun, and a very good idea of it, too,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Oh, I’m sorry about Cora! She was bored and became naughty, just like a child, and her punishment was far too heavy for her sin!”

  “Sin?” I said, when I had dotted down the above.

  “Think it out, child, think it out,” said Mrs. Bradley waving her hand.

  “But you don’t call that kind of behaviour sinful,” I said.

  “I don’t,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But some people do.”

  They both nodded. Then Mrs. Bradley said:

  “If I were you, Sir Malcolm, I should ask the inspector to find out how tired Burt was that night, or rather, early morning, when he returned home.”

  “If he felt anything at all like I did,” I said, “he was pretty anxious to get to bed.”

  “That’s an idea!” said the Chief Constable, disregarding my contribution to the discussion. “I’ll just leave it at that, then.”

  “I should,” said Mrs. Bradley. “After all, if you really think the murderer was Burt, you still have to ask yourself what he did with the body between the time the murder was committed and the time it was put into Meg Tosstick’s coffin.”

  “Yes, that coffin business,” said the Chief Constable, scratching his jaw, “is a regular facer, isn’t it? The sheer damned impudence of it really tickles me! I can’t think how you deduced it, though.”

  “It was obvious really,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The whole thing turns on the murder of Meg Tosstick. I hope they reprieve young Candy.”

  “Ah, what do you think about young Candy?” asked the Chief Constable.

  “The result of the trial, do you mean?”

  “No. I wondered whether you yourself had come to any conclusion, quite apart from the trial and its very unfortunate result, as to his innocence or guilt.”

  “As I have said to Noel here,” replied Mrs. Bradley, “I believe either that Candy was absolutely innocent, or else that Candy was incited to the murder by someone who knew the poor lad so well that he or she, the inciter, could deduce exactly what Bob’s reactions would be to the suggestion that Meg, his sweetheart, had permitted herself to be seduced by a negro and had borne a half-caste child.”

  “What!” shouted Sir Malcolm and I, in one breath. Mrs. Bradley turned to me.

  “Don’t you remember, Noel, that you managed to find out for me what the village as a whole thought of mixed marriages? Don’t you remember Mr. Coutts’ sermon on brotherly love, and the sub
sequent discussion among the villagers, skilfully fanned and guided by yourself?”

  She turned to Sir Malcolm.

  “The whole difficulty, to my mind, of connecting the first murder with anybody at all was the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of accounting for the time when it was done.”

  “The time?” said Sir Malcolm. “Do you mean that you didn’t agree with the doctor’s evidence of the time of death?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that,” Mrs. Bradley hastened to assure him. “I never disagree with expert witnesses upon principle.”

  “Upon principle?” said Sir Malcolm, puzzled.

  “Yes. I am sometimes called in the capacity of expert witness myself,” Mrs. Bradley explained. “I mean that it puzzled me to think that the murder was committed eleven days after the baby’s birth. I could not help considering that if Bob, or the baby’s father, killed Meg Tosstick when all the village knew that she had had an illegitimate child, some other reason, besides the facts of seduction and illegitimacy, must have caused that murder. For two or three weeks, faced with the twin facts, seemingly contradictory, that the murder must have been committed by Bob and yet Bob would have had much less motive then to kill Meg, eleven days after the birth of her child, than, say, six months earlier, when he received the shocking news that she was pregnant, I was forced to the conclusion that some other factor had entered into the case. I have come to the conclusion that Bob may have been incited to murder Meg by being told by someone who had an interest in causing Meg’s death, that she had been seduced by Foster Washington Yorke, Burt’s negro servant, and had borne a half-caste baby. I also deduce, partly from the disappearance of the baby, that this was a lie.”

  “From the disappearance of the baby?” said the Chief Constable.

  “Partly, yes. If you will get on the telephone now to Mrs. Lowry, and ask a few questions about the baby, I think that you will at least discover it was not a little half-breed.”

  “But, my dear Mrs. Bradley,” the Chief Constable objected, “the police have already driven the unfortunate Lowrys, both man and wife, the one to blasphemy and the other to hysterics, by their repeated questionings. I am sure we can get nothing further from the Lowrys. Still, I can try, if you like.”

  “By the way, Sir Malcolm,” I said, looking up, “I know both the Lowrys have a good alibi for the Bank Holiday murder, but what about the Tuesday?”

  He smiled paternally, and turned out his despatch case again.

  “Naturally,” he said, “the inspector and his people have been very severe with the Lowrys, as the first murder occurred in their house, although, as you say, they were not on the spot at the time, and can in no way be held responsible for what happened during their absence. But, my dear fellow, there is nothing at all to connect them in any way with the murder of Cora McCanley.”

  “What?” said I, thinking of Daphne’s dislike of the fellow. “Not with that secret passage leading direct from the Mornington Arms to the transverse passage made by Burt for his—own amusement?” I ended weakly, catching Mrs. Bradley’s eye. I had been about to give Burt away. Unintentionally, of course.

  “Well,” said Sir Malcolm, shuffling the papers until he found the one he wanted, “both the Lowrys went to the bank at Wyemouth Harbour in the morning, and had lunch at a hotel there. That’s all checked. In the afternoon Mr. Lowry had a nap in the summer house —sworn to by the gardener and gardener’s boy—and Mrs. Lowry marked some new linen, assisted by two of the maids. At four-thirty they had tea, turned on the wireless, invited the men and maids in to listen with them, and from opening time until closing time they were both kept very busy indeed. How’s that?”

  He went out to the telephone again, and returned in five minutes, during which time Mrs. Bradley sat staring into the fire. He was obviously amused when he came back.

  “I wish we’d betted on the nigger babby,” he said, seating himself again. Mrs. Bradley looked startled.

  “You don’t mean that it was a brown one?” she asked incredulously. The Chief Constable, smiling gently, kept nodding his head like a mandarin.

  “Right first pip!” he observed, with almost boyish inelegance, of course, but rather expressively. Mrs. Bradley shook her head as forcibly as he was nodding his.

  “I tell you, my dear Sir Malcolm,” she said gently but firmly, “that it is absolutely and utterly impossible that the child should have been a half-caste.”

  “Well, to convince you, I might put the point to Foster Washington Yorke,” said Sir Malcolm good-humouredly. It generally puts people in a good humour, I notice, to catch Jove nodding—Mrs. Bradley, in this case, of course. “But the gentle blackamoor would simply deny it blandly, and, that being so, and ourselves being unable to produce the child, where are we?”

  “Exactly one step further on the road than we were before,” said Mrs. Bradley, firmly.

  “But this good woman Lowry tells me, now, that the only reason they had for refusing to allow the baby to be seen was to save that poor girl Tosstick’s feelings. Apparently she turned hysterical at the very suggestion that she should receive visitors after her confinement, and so, out of pity, they kept people out, and kept the poor girl’s secret.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Bradley, “they kept people out because it paid them to do so. That baby strongly resembled somebody who wanted his identity kept secret.”

  “It certainly would not be the Lowrys, if they weren’t on the make somehow,” I said, remembering Lowry’s commission on our cocoanuts at the fête. The Chief Constable scratched his jaw.

  “Of course, there’s something in it,” he admitted. “You mean the Lowrys found it was decidedly to their interest to keep the identity of that baby’s father dark”—he grinned at the feeble pun—“and have been primed with this information about the negro parentage of the child by the real father?”

  I looked at Mrs. Bradley. She pursed her little beaky lips at me, so, of course, I kept my mouth shut. There was a long silence. Sir Malcolm broke it.

  “I wonder when the baby disappeared,” he said.

  “The day that it was born,” said Mrs. Bradley, in a small voice.

  She and I sat on, discussing the thing, after the Chief Constable had gone. He had taken a longhand copy of my shorthand verbatim report with him.

  “Well, Noel, my child?” she said.

  “Hang it all,” I said, “it’s more of a mess than ever, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied. She sat very upright in her chair and sighed deeply.

  “Truth, truth! Where art thou, lovely many-sided, single hearted one!” she observed, apparently to a tall vase on the revolving bookcase. “I know all about it, every single thing, and I don’t want to prove it. Noel,” she said, switching her gaze on to me as I still sat at the table and played with my pencil, “if or when you commit a murder, mind you do absolutely nothing when the deed is over. Go on with your ordinary life, present a bland, ingenuous countenance to the world, alter none of your habits, let there be no inconsistencies, and, above all, my dear boy, don’t be clever.”

  I goggled, of course.

  “Sez you!” I observed, not inappositely, I flatter myself.

  “I mean it,” she said. “The murderer—I am not talking about Candy, who must be reprieved, whether his hand actually committed the crime or not, but about the real murderer of both Meg Tosstick and Cora McCanley—the murderer must have had an accomplice. These two choice spirits have followed just about one-half of my prescription, but they tripped up on the other half.”

  “Please expound,” I said.

  Mrs. Bradley smiled. She reminded me of a sand lizard basking in the sun. She replied, good-naturedly:

  “The murderer did very nearly nothing, and the accomplice was clever, too. He went on with his ordinary life, showing no fear. He altered only one of his habits, but that one alteration was so very inconsistent with what I could gather of his ordinary behaviour, that it caused me almost immediate suspicion. O
h, and they were both a bit too clever, you know. They must have realised that I am getting old and tired, Noel, my dear.”

  She hooted, as usual, just as I was going to offer manly sympathy, so I cut short my condolences. Then I said:

  “I wonder how long it would have been before Cora’s death was discovered, if it had not been for you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Of course, time was important to the murderer, once Cora’s body was buried in Meg’s coffin. The longer the lapse of time, the less chance there would be of identification, you see.”

  “Funny that the bodies of Meg Tosstick and the child have not been found,” I said.

  “Oh, Meg’s body must have been washed up somewhere by now,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I believe the police have been called upon to identify nearly a dozen drowned bodies, strangled and not, but, of course, identification is almost impossible and not really very important now.”

  “Look here, Mrs. Bradley,” I said, after a pause, “what about Burt?”

  “What about him?” she repeated, puzzled.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know you have told me he didn’t murder Cora, but how can you be sure? I mean—” I went on, without giving her a chance to butt in with some of her leg-pulling stunts that make me forget what it is I have set out to say—“you have told the Chief Constable that you believe Cora was murdered actually in the Bungalow itself. You have shown, very reasonably, I admit, that she could have returned to the Bungalow by way of the shore, or the cliffs, and the smugglers’ passage without being seen. But you have not shown how her lover could have come to her there and murdered her; whereas, if she did return, as you have said, what could be more natural than that Burt should have killed her that night when he returned from that patrolling of the sea-shore?”

  “Lots of things,” said Mrs. Bradley, drily. “First, I cannot believe that Burt would kill a woman.”

  “He could beat one, anyway,” I said.

  “Oh, my dear boy!” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing. “Besides, I don’t think the beatings Cora McCanley received from Burt can have upset or hurt her very much, or she would have left him. She always had plenty of opportunity to do so if she chose. Her charms were decidedly of the marketable type. No, it was lack of money that Cora always complained about, nothing else.”