Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  “The lectures are on Wednesdays,” I replied. She beamed.

  “Wednesday week, then, dear child.”

  “And the—er—the subject?” I stuttered, hoping, of course, for the best.

  “Ah, the subject,” said Mrs. Bradley, looking a bit dashed. “Of course. Yes. The subject.” She brightened. “How do you think they would like to hear me on ‘Ego and Libido’?”

  I choked a bit, swallowing it, and passed a humid forefinger round the inside of the dog-collar.

  “Ah, well, perhaps not. It’s really rather elementary,” she said. “What about ‘Pride and Prejudice in their Relationship to Racial Health’?”

  “Well, er—” I said desperately.

  “Well, look here,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We’ll leave it until to-morrow. I’ll get up something, never fear.”

  “They aren’t awfully easily interested, you know,” I said, feebly. “I mean, we generally have lantern slides, and even then they hoot and raise catcalls sometimes, and I have known them to chuck things at the screen.”

  “Ah, I couldn’t have that,” said Mrs. Bradley. She paused. “Does the vicar turn up?” she asked. (Well, he doesn’t, of course.)

  “He will for your lecture, I have no doubt,” I said, hoping, again, for the best.

  “And Mrs. Coutts?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “I’ll rake her in,” I said, hurriedly.

  “And I myself will get Edwy David Burt to come along, and I think we ought to have Sir William and Mr. Bransome Burns—”

  “He’s staying rather a long time at the Manor House, isn’t he?” I asked; rather rudely, of course, for it was none of my business how long Sir William kept his guests. Mrs. Bradley laughed like a hyena.

  “So am I staying rather a long time, dear child,” she pointed out. She poked me in the ribs.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, sheering off a pace or two. I blushed. Rather a brick, of course. But, really, I had become so much accustomed to her presence in and about the village that I had forgotten that she was, in that sense, Sir William’s guest.

  “Never mind, dear child,” she said gaily. “We meet at Philippi.”

  I broke the news of the lecture to the members of the vicarage household at tea that evening. Their reactions were characteristic, of course. Old Coutts grinned ruefully.

  “I suppose I must turn up and help keep order,” he said.

  “We’d better start with a tea, or else we shan’t get anybody, and that would be frightfully awkward for the poor old dear,” said Daphne, who, of course, is full of the milk of human kindness and drips it about rather after the manner of a punctured cocoanut—that is to say, where it is neither expected nor desired.

  “Don’t you worry,” said William sturdily. “They’ll come, if it’s only to throw eggs. She’s been talking to some of ’em about the way they bring up their bally offspring.”

  “William!” said Mrs. Coutts, sharply.

  “Well, anyway, she has!” said William defiantly. “What’s she going to talk about, Noel?”

  “Well, that’s just the point,” I said, weakly. Mrs. Coutts sat up very straight and parked the tea-pot, with which she had been about to fill my cup, on its parent china stand.

  “You understand,” she said, with frightful venom, “I hold you responsible.”

  I didn’t get this at first.

  “Eh?” I said, with my winning smile.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Coutts, “if That Woman speaks upon an Indelicate Topic, I shall hold you personally responsible. So mind!” She picked up the tea-pot and cascaded the brew into my cup.

  “Hello,” said William, opening his eyes wide, “has she been talking to you, too, Aunt, about bringing up kids?”

  “Go out of the room, William!” thundered old Coutts. William, hastily snatching a chunk of bread and butter, went.

  “Really,” I said, “I think—don’t you think—I mean, you’re a bit premature, Mrs. Coutts. After all, why should she talk about anything peculiar? Besides, I am sure that Mrs. Bradley would never dream of lecturing upon any topic which is—well, not lecturable upon.”

  I tried the winning smile again, but it came unstuck half-way. I don’t know why. I mean, I’m not afraid of Mrs. Coutts. Daphne came to my rescue.

  “You can always rise and protest, Aunt,” she said austerely, “if you don’t approve of the lecture.”

  “Quite, quite,” said old Coutts, rising from the table. Mrs. Coutts stacked up the tray in frightful silence, and waited rather pointedly for my cup. I got up and rang the bell. When tea was cleared, Mrs. Coutts hopped it to the Girls’ Guildry and Daphne and I collared cake out of the sideboard and went in search of William.

  At intervals during the next day I tried in vain to get from Mrs. Bradley the subject of her lecture. She would tell me nothing definite. All she would do was to hint that the lecture would certainly draw crowds if I would fix up, in place of the usual notice, a card indicating that a Mystery Lecture would be given by Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, in the Village Hall at 9.0 p.m. on the Wednesday week.

  “But we always start at seven-thirty. You see, we wash out the Women’s Prayer Meeting and Devotional on lecture nights,” I said. She waved all that aside.

  “We have dinner just before that,” she said. “Surely, dear child, you are not suggesting that I miss my dinner?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, “but isn’t nine o’clock rather the other extreme?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It must be quite dark while my lecture is going on. The hall must be dark, and it must be pitch dark outside.”

  “But we can draw the blinds and things,” I pointed out. “We always do darken the hall for lantern lectures. By the way, do you want somebody to manage the slides for you?”

  She shook her head.

  “There is only one slide,” she said. “It can be fixed at the commencement of the lecture and left until the end.”

  I began to regret that I had not put my foot down and boldly refused her offer to lecture. We usually get a sprinkling of youths from other villages at our lectures and they are apt to be a nuisance. Our best chance, I thought, was to fill the hall with as many of our own people as we could. To this end, I spent the Wednesday morning in going round the village soliciting promises of attendance at the lecture. As it happened, the notice had tickled the fancy of some of our people, and even Burt announced his intention of being present.

  “And I’ll have to bring my nigger with me,” he said. “Hanged if I can get the coon to stay in the house alone for a single instant, since he spent the night at your place. I can’t think what’s the matter with the fellow. He misses Cora, you know. That’s about the fact of it. These blighters are like dogs for that. Besides, Mrs. Gatty has been round frightening him. Is she quite mad?”

  So on the Wednesday evening at about ten minutes to nine, the front rows of the village hall were filled with a fairly complete collection of the local nobs and semi-nobs. There were Sir William and Margaret and Bransome Burns, the Gattys, our vicarage party, except William who had been sent to bed, and Mrs. Coutts who was remaining indoors to see that he stayed there, the doctor and his wife and two daughters, Burt, and quite a sprinkling of the more respectable element of the village and most of the servants from the hall, the pub and the Moat House. At the back were the people whom our weekly winter efforts were really intended to benefit—the louts, mutts and hobbledehoys of our own village and the neighbouring hamlets. In short, the hall was about three-quarters full.

  At nine o’clock precisely, Mrs. Bradley mounted the rostrum and commenced her lecture. She had asked particularly that the hall might be in complete darkness except for the light of the magic lantern, so that we could not see her, we could only hear her really beautiful voice coming across out of the void, so to speak. There was dead silence when she began. Except for occasional gasps and whistles of surprise and an exclamation from a rather hysterical servant girl, and Mrs. Gatty’s absurd interruption and som
ebody popping out quietly towards the end, there was complete silence until the great thrill. She waited until all the lights were extinguished, and her one lantern slide, a plan of Saltmarsh and the surrounding country, had been thrown on to the screen, before she began her remarks. Then she said:

  “To-night I am going to show you the mistakes made by persons who had a hand in committing the Saltmarsh murders. At the end of my lecture I think that everybody in this hall will know the author of the deaths by violence of Margaret (Meg) Tosstick, of this village, and Cora McCanley, of the Bungalow, Saltmarsh Quarries. In front of you on the screen there is a rough plan of the scene of operations. I will explain what is meant by the various markings on that plan.

  “To your extreme right, as you look at the screen, you will see a square. That represents Saltmarsh vicarage. Moving your gaze from right to left, you will perceive a cross which represents the church, and then a rectangle, which represents the residence of Sir William Kingston-Fox. I think you call it the Manor House. To the left of the plan there is another square, rather larger than the first. This is the Mornington Arms Hotel. The main road through the village of Saltmarsh is represented by a broad ribbon-like marking running below all the above-named buildings. On the other side of this road and almost opposite the church, you will see a much smaller square than either of the others. This represents the cottage of Constable Brown. Up a short and narrow side turning, a mere lane, further to

  the left and on the same side of the main road as Constable Brown’s cottage, there is a rectangle which marks the site of the Moat House, the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Gatty.

  “At the top of the plan you will see a wavering line which represents the sea coast. The small cross there marks the cave known as Saltmarsh Cove. It is an old smugglers’ hole, as most of you know, and an underground passage was constructed in about the year 1704 to connect the Cove with the Mornington Arms, which was then called the Pagg and Nancy, after a famous smuggler and his sweetheart. This passage to the Pagg and Nancy, which was made to meet the problem of getting contraband liquor to the inn in the old smuggling days, is represented by a closely-dotted line and the dotted line which leads from the Cove, past the Bungalow, where Miss McCanley lived, to the edge of Sir William Kingston-Fox’s estate, represents the footpath which leads past the stone quarries. An arrow, pointing along the coast to your right, would show direction of the current called Deadman’s Drift.

  “I shall not have very much occasion to refer to the plan during the course of my lecture, but I am going to leave it up in front of you, so that you may the more easily follow the movements of the persons about whom I have to tell you.”

  There was a slight pause. Somebody shuffled his feet; a chair creaked as somebody changed her position; somebody cleared his throat. They were nervous, not fidgety, noises. The whole atmosphere reminded me of a fearful row at school once when the head pi-jawed us before he expelled a chap. There was the same tenseness, the same feeling of wondering how much the old man knew about one’s own sins… Mrs. Bradley braced her belt about her, so to speak, and having fired off the sighting shots, as it were, got down to business.

  “I warn you,” she said, “that you will find my next remark very unpalatable. But I am going to ask you to receive it patiently and accept it as the truth. It seems to me that the whole Mystery of Saltmarsh, as the newspapers have called it, rests upon the fact that this unpalatable truth which I am going to utter was not recognised, even by the police, for an important clue—which means a key, you know—to the dreadful things which have happened here since the beginning of August. Briefly, your comrade, and my young friend, Robert Candy, may have been the agent who strangled Margaret Tosstick on the evening of August Bank Holiday, August 3rd.”

  There was an uncomfortable rustling, but nobody said a word. She continued:

  “I am calling my lecture, ‘Mistakes the Murderer Made.’ I am not referring to Robert Candy, but to the murderer of Cora McCanley and the murderer of Meg Tosstick.”

  I heard Burt whisper a terrible oath, but Mrs. Bradley’s voice was hypnotic, and, shifting his great shoulders uneasily against the back of his chair, which was next to mine, he settled down again into immobility.

  “The first mistake the murderer made,” said Mrs. Bradley, “was in arranging for Robert Candy to kill Meg Tosstick eleven days after her baby was born. His second mistake was that the baby was never seen, apparently, except by Mrs. Lowry, who had acted as midwife at the birth of the child; therefore several wild rumours, which circulated about the village very freely and were believed by certain very credulous and rather foolish people, could not be disproved, except by Mrs. Lowry, and she seems to have been sworn to secrecy.”

  I thought of Mrs. Coutts and the underlying causes of the siege of the vicarage. I thought, too, of the girl’s ruin being laid at the door of Sir William Kingston-Fox. I could feel people trying to pierce the blackness in which Mrs. Lowry sat, invisible.

  “The murderer’s third mistake,” said Mrs. Bradley, “was to kill his second victim on the day after the first murder. His fourth lay in refusing to allow Cora McCanley to go to London and do something at the London terminus silly enough or flighty enough, or daring enough to make certain that she would be noticed. As soon as it was found impossible to ascertain whether Cora McCanley had ever arrived at the London terminus to which she took a ticket on that particular Tuesday, it became a matter for consideration whether she had ever actually left Saltmarsh. Then the police discovered that she had never joined the theatrical company which was her supposed objective. Thus it became increasingly conjecturable whether she had ever left Saltmarsh. From that, the question arose, ‘Where was she, if she were still in Saltmarsh?’

  “That question was answered by the discovery of her body in Meg Tosstick’s grave. It was mere chance that that melodramatic action of changing the bodies did not count as another of the murderer’s, mistakes. Suppose that the body of Meg Tosstick had been found before we came to the conclusion that the name of the buried girl did not correspond with the name on the tombstone! The police would then have exhumed the body and discovered that it was not Meg’s but Miss McCanley’s, and that it also had met death by strangling. I have made various tests, and I discover that flotsam thrown into the water opposite Saltmarsh Cove and thereabouts is washed up two or three days later on to the spit of land known as Dead Man’s Reach, some two miles down the coast westwards; that is, to the right of that rough plan. By the most extraordinary coincidence, the tides, the wind and the awful weather must have combined to take the body out to sea. It has not yet been found; or, if found, it has not yet been identified. The murderer may have worked this out. He is a clever person. But I think he was taking a big risk. His argument probably ran something like this:

  “ ‘Cora McCanley has disappeared from Saltmarsh. Some interfering busybody has put the police on her track. So if I throw her body into the sea and it gets washed up and identified, where am I? On the other hand, if Meg Tosstick’s body gets washed up, the chances are that as no description of Meg has been circulated, the body won’t be identified, particularly as it will have been in the sea for a day or two.’

  “So he risked it, and it came off; and, but for the most fortuitous set of circumstances”—(thus Mrs. Bradley on her own marvellous bits of reasoning and deduction!)—“it would have continued to come off, at any rate for several months. By that time, any possible connection of the murderer with the crime would have vanished.

  “Now, those fortuitous circumstances were as follows:

  “You remember, perhaps, that I stated the murderer’s first mistake had been to cause Robert Candy, for whom, please, I feel quite as much sympathy as you do, to kill his sweetheart eleven days after her baby was born. Now, that kind of crime for that kind of reason is almost unheard-of. There was no earthly reason, so far as one could see, why Bob Candy, having familiarised his mind with the fact that his sweetheart had betrayed him, and having shown neither scorn nor
resentment when he heard that the child was born, should suddenly, without apparent warning, seize an opportunity to strangle the girl he had loved. It was so unreasonable an action that one felt an amazing amount of curiosity about it. One weighed the known facts, wondering all the time whether the police had not arrested the wrong man. But the more one looked at the facts, the more apparent it became that Bob was probably the technically-guilty person.”

  This time there was an interruption. From the second row—I know where it was, because it came from immediately behind me—Mrs. Gatty’s unmistakable voice said menacingly:

  “That will do, Croc. That will do. The pig shall lie down with the young she-bear; she was no longer Lady Clare; and all the beasts of the field shall be blind for the space of two moons. I, Moto-Kari, the wise owl, have spoken it. Go away, you boys!”

  She was prodded into silence by old Gatty, I suppose. Anyway, she shut up, after that, and Mrs. Bradley was able to continue her remarks. In five minutes, or less, the audience was as much absorbed in what she was saying as though there had been no interruption. Mrs. Gatty went to sleep, I believe. I could hear her deep, rather noisy breathing, behind me, and once old Gatty grunted as though her head on his shoulder was becoming too heavy to be blithely and carelessly supported.

  “It was obvious from the first,” Mrs. Bradley continued, “that poor Meg Tosstick was being terrorised, presumably by the father of her child. Now, the biggest mistake that the murderer of Cora McCanley (and the responsible murderer of Meg) made, was this. He changed his habit of mind. When a man or woman changes a mental habit, one of two things has happened. Either there is an ulterior motive for that change, or else that person’s spiritual outlook has completely altered. The change to which I am referring was a change from meanness to generosity—perhaps the most unusual change which ever takes place in the nature of man. It is, indeed, such an unusual change that we psychologists always regard it with what I consider to be a very legitimate and comprehensible amount of doubt and suspicion when it is brought to our notice.