It could be taken for granted till now that the English racketeer has been less well acquainted with violence than his American counterpart. He and his friends exchange endless cruelties, they cheat one another and squeeze one another in blackmail and railroad one another into prison, but they rarely draw a gun. A beating-up is the furthest most of them ever go, and that is not common nor drastic. But Mr. Setty had all that summer been showing signs of acute apprehension. Nothing would induce him to get into any automobile but his own, which is an unusual form of shyness in an automobile dealer, and he went less and less to his own garage; and, indeed, Cambridge Terrace mews at certain hours might feel uncommonly like a mousetrap to a nervous man. His garage lay across the dead end of the mews, and, going in or out of it, he could be covered by a single enemy. He would not go into a strange garage, or go upstairs into an office or warehouse. His clients had to seek him where he stood in the open street or in a public house. All the same, on October 4, he disappeared. He told his family that he was going to look at an automobile in Watford and drove off in his Citroën, which later was found abandoned near his garage.
His family were quick to take alarm. Very soon they offered a thousand pounds reward to anybody who could find him for them. Remoter relatives, including a sister named Mrs. Sadie Spectreman, converged on the apartment house, the other tenants of which were startled by their new knowledge of their neighbour. A Miss Constance Palfreyman told the reporters that no, a day had never been actually fixed for the wedding, but they had hoped it would be soon. While this group mourned and wondered, the police remained quite calm. Three days after Mr. Setty’s disappearance his sister and her husband reported a bizarre circumstance: they went out for the afternoon, after turning the key in two mortice locks in the front door, and came back to find it swinging wide open. Coldly the police issued a notice to the effect that they had found no indication that the apartment had been entered. There was as cold a tone about all their announcements. Indeed, they inspired an announcement which was bound to leave any reader suspecting that they thought that Mr. Setty had come to no harm and had left home for his own purposes.
Then, suddenly, part of Mr. Setty appeared. Off the Essex coast, some distance north of the Thames estuary, there is a marsh, a curious springy cushion of mud and grasses, patterned with a net of rivulets, and frequented by a great many duck and widgeon. On October 22, Mr. Sidney Tiffen, a farm worker who was taking a week’s holiday but not leaving home for it, went out in his punt to get some game. He saw something grey being lifted off the hummocks by the tide and thought it was a drogue, the target, not unlike the windsock of an airfield, which a training plane trails behind it in fighting exercises. As he had earned five shillings often enough by picking up these drogues and taking them back to the RAF station not far away, he paddled over to it. When he got there he found that it was not a target but a grey bundle tied up in a thick piece of felt, like the carpet of an automobile. It was so carefully secured with such stout rope that he deduced the packers must have thought it valuable, and wondered if this was flotsam from a wreck. As it was too heavy and unwieldy to take in his punt, he cut it open and found himself looking on a body, swaddled in a cream silk shirt and pale blue silk shorts, from which the head and legs had been hacked away. He drove a stake into the mud and tied the torso to it, then paddled ashore and went two miles over the marshes to fetch the local policeman. Eventually the body was carried ashore and its fingerprints were taken. The murderer who hopes to commit the perfect crime should exchange references with his victim. Mr. Setty’s enemy had not known that he had ever been convicted, so he had not cut off his hands. Thus Scotland Yard was able to identify his body in a few hours. Seven days later a man of twenty-nine named Brian Donald Hume, owner of a radio shop in a London suburb and managing director of a small factory producing gadgets for domestic and workshop use, was arrested and charged with the murder of Mr. Setty. In court he was accused of having dropped the body on the marshes from an airplane.
Very soon the experienced newspaper reader began to suspect that Mr. Tiffen was, in some way, an exceptional person. The legal restrictions on crime-reporting in Great Britain are far beyond American conception. They are admirable, and it should be our pride to obey them, for they go far towards preventing trial by prejudiced juries. If a gentleman were arrested carrying a lady’s severed head in his arms and wearing her large intestine as a garland round his neck and crying aloud that he and he alone had been responsible for her reduction from a whole to parts, it would still be an offence for any newspaper to suggest that he might have had any connection with her demise until he had been convicted of this offence by a jury and sentenced by a judge. Therefore the veins swell up and pulse on the foreheads of reporters and sub-editors, and somehow their passion seeps into the newsprint and devises occult means by which the truth becomes known. The experienced newspaper reader can run his eye over the columns of newspapers which are paralysed by fear of committing contempt of court (and this fear has justification—only the other day the editor of an English tabloid was sentenced to three months in jail for stating, quite truly, that a man had confessed to a murder for which he was afterwards hanged, and served every day of it), and can learn with absolute certainty, from something too subtle even to be termed a turn of phrase, which person involved in a case is suspected by the police of complicity and which is thought innocent. It was at once apparent that Mr. Tiffen was regarded by the police as guiltless of any part in Mr. Setty’s murder, although his story was precisely that which would have been told by an accessory after the fact who had been paid to take Mr. Setty’s body out to sink on the flooded marshes, had found it more difficult to do than he had anticipated, and had in panic resolved to try to clear himself of suspicion. There was also discernible to the eye of any newspaper writer the sort of block round Mr. Tiffen’s name which comes when a reporter would like to write more fully about a person or an event but is stopped by some consideration, most probably lack of space, but sometimes a matter of emotion.
A friend had a legitimate reason for visiting Mr. Tiffen, so one evening, after a fifty-mile drive from London, we came to a little town on the east coast just north of the Thames estuary and got out in the high street. In a tower a big clock, pale orange like a harvest moon, bright above the low mist, told us that it was too late to look for Mr. Tiffen at his home some miles away. We found a hotel and dinner, and then went out to find a public house where Mr. Tiffen might go, for it was Saturday night and not impossible that he might have come in from his village for a glass of beer and a game of darts.
We found the public house which was Mr. Tiffen’s favourite port of call, but he was not there. A man can be judged by his public house, and we left thinking well of Mr. Tiffen. We had settled down to watch a game of darts, and only gradually realized that we had strayed into a private room, reserved by custom for the use of some friends who met there every Saturday night. But the people saw that we did not know and made us welcome; and they were pleasant too to a girl who belonged to that wistful company who love playing games and are duffers at them all. Each time she lifted her hand to throw a dart her eyes shone like a begging dog’s; and each time it fell somewhere out of the scoring areas, often right off the board into the wall behind. They were just right for her, not so sorry for her that they rubbed in how bad she was, but sorry enough to dispel any suspicion that they were knocked speechless by her ineptitude. By such signs a gentlemanly society reveals itself, and it looked as if Mr. Tiffen might be a gentleman. We went back to our beds, and the next morning showed us the river like grey glass, with a hundred or so little boats lying in the harbour basin. On the opposite bank the sea walls which kept the estuary from doing harm were darker grey, the trees rising above them were black and flat like so many aces of clubs, and some barns were red. Yachtsmen and yachtswomen came down and breakfasted, glossy with content because they were presently to get into their boats and sail off into the shining water, as if taking refuge in
a mirror. We drove away through the little town, at the very moment when the lie-abed leisure of Sunday morning changes to the churchgoing bustle, into a countryside that was the simplest arrangement of soil conceivable. It was featureless as the flats of Holland and Belgium it was facing across the North Sea. Some force had patted this piece of it into rising ground, but not very hard; the plateau was quite low. It was cut up by hedges into green pastures and fields of fat black earth. There were a few trees, some farms and cottages, no great houses. It could be seen that a ragged and muddy coastline had kept the railways out of this corner of England, and the sea winds and heavy soil had limited the size of the settlements. Here society had been kept simple; and what simplicity can do if left to itself was shown to us when we halted at a cottage to ask the way, and a woman, young but quite toothless, with several tubby children at her tubby skirts, stared at us without answering, without ill will, without good will, neutral as dough. I wondered whether the reporters’ pencils had halted on Mr. Tiffen’s name because he belonged to this recessive phase of the bucolic, and it had struck them as painful that the worst of town life, in this murdered body, should in its finding have come in contact with the worst of country life.
Before long we found his village. We passed a prim edifice with “The Peculiar People” painted across its stucco forehead, towards which some lean and straight-backed men and women were walking with an air of conscious and narrow and splendid pride. That strange faith which has no creed and no church organization but believes simply in miracle, in the perpetual recreation of the universe by prayer, is about a hundred and ten years old. Each death which has occurred during that period is a defeat for it, since all sickness should be prayed into health by the faithful, but these people walked away from us with the bearing of victors. People were streaming towards the church too. We stopped a boy of twelve or so, who must have been a choirboy, for he was carrying a surplice, and asked him the way to Mr. Tiffen’s house. He smiled at us; the little frown between his eyebrows registered not ill nature but his sense of a conflict between duties. He had to hurry if he was to be in time for church; but one had to be polite to strangers. So he paused to give us full directions, detailed enough to bring us to the housing estate where Mr. Tiffen lived. A few houses built of yellow wood stood among others built of alternate slabs of concrete and breese on land which had obviously been a field till about five minutes before.
The door was opened by a young woman. She was at the opposite end of the scale of rural society from the family made of dough. Completely articulate, she explained that she was Mr. Tiffen’s married daughter, and kept house for him, and was sorry, Dad had gone to see Gran, he always did on Sundays. We asked where Gran lived, suggesting that we might follow him, and, though she was careful not to discourage us, lest she should be implying that Dad would not find our company agreeable, her gaze softened with pity. She did not think we could follow him. Gran lived four miles away in the old coast-guard’s cottage. Well, that was all right, we had an automobile and four miles was nothing. Yes, but the cottage was on the sea wall. Two miles was as far as we could go by road, after that the way was across the drained marshes, muddy and hard to find. Oh, but we went anywhere. And how long ago had Mr. Tiffen started? Half an hour? Was he driving as far as the road went, or did he ride a bicycle? Oh no, he walked. We reflected on the remarkable filial piety of Mr. Tiffen, who walked eight miles every Sunday to see Gran, and hurried off, saying that we would catch him up.
But we never did. He was not on the road, and he was not in sight when we left the car among the hayricks in a farmyard on the edge of the marshes. We could see Gran’s house in the distance, a small coal-black square under the sharp pie-crust edge of the sea wall which bounded the landscape, and there seemed to be no living thing between us and it. This was, of course, an illusion. The air was alive with the cries of countless marsh birds. All here was lively. To town dwellers winter is a season of death, but here it was a brisk cleansing process. The earth was being tilted so that the heat which had collected during the summer drained away, freshness was flowing in. Growth had not stopped. Through the black fatness of some fields the winter wheat and oats were sending up green blades bright as paint, the ploughed fields lay cut up into dark shining bricks as obviously nourishing as butter. On that nutrient material we slid and skipped and fell as we worked our way across the flatlands to the sea wall by the sides of the deep irrigation ditches. We kept at it hard, pausing only once when we came on a dead fox, which looked less pathetic than would seem possible for a dead animal, because it was still a trim and barbered wise guy. We crossed an irrigation ditch, jumping from one slope of dark butter to another, and got to the sea wall, and clambered up through the long wet grasses that clothed it.
The tide was out. So far as the eye could see there stretched the matted bents of the mudflats: a soft monotony blended of grey and green and blue and purple. It had a quilted look, for the thousands of rivulets which cast a network over it followed the same course day in, day out, and had worn down the mud into channels between the hummocks some feet deep. To the small creatures which lived here this must have been a most fantastic landscape. At the bottom of these deep channels the tiny streams, only a few inches wide, had their established, deeply graven waterfalls, their rapids which tested to the utmost the gallantry of straws, and lakes with bays and beaches; and on the islands grass roots found purchase on the mud by gripping it and one another so that they grew into cushions of jungle, one plant rising on another like minute vegetable pagodas. The scene was incised and overstuffed with profligate ingenuity; and it was odd to think of all this elaboration being wiped out twice in every twenty-four hours, the rivulets losing their identities in the rough inundation of the tide, the springing grasses, so obstinate in their intention of making dry land out of mud, becoming the bottom of the sea. There was the same spendthrift and impermanent fabrication going on at ground level as there was over our heads, where great clouds, momentarily like castles, temples, mountains, and giant birds, were blown by the cleansing winter wind to the edges of the sky, here not clipped away by hills or streets and astonishingly far apart. There could not have been a more generous scene, nor one which was less suited to receive the remains of Mr. Setty, who from infancy had been so deeply involved in calculation, and so unhappily, who had tried keeping figures outside his head and got sent to prison for it, and had kept them inside his head and got killed for it.
Gran’s cottage lay about a quarter of a mile away on the landward side of the sea wall, not small, containing at least eight rooms, but nonetheless a deplorable habitation. It was built of brick covered with tarred weatherboard, which was falling away in splinters, and the windows of one half of it were broken. The only approach to it was by a couple of planks laid across an irrigation ditch. It seemed unlikely that Mr. Tiffen would allow Gran to live there, or that she would consent to do so, unless they were sunk so deeply in poverty that they had forgotten how to make demands. The young woman who had received us at Mr. Tiffen’s home was perhaps a sport from a rough stock; or, just as probably, we had mistaken for gentleness what was really the inanition of anæmia. We fumbled at a door, but of course it led only into a woodshed, for it was on the seaward side, and here the front door would have to face landwards, or on many days it would be impossible to open and shut it against the gales. As it was, so strong a gust blew on us as we knocked at the right door that we were pulled inside, and thus were suddenly confronted with the character of the Tiffen family, and gaped. It did not matter. They were expert in all forms of courtesy, and knew how to receive guests, and how to give them time to recover themselves if they had lost their self-possession.
They were sitting in a room which was surprisingly warm. The house was much better than we had thought; it kept out the weather, this room had a pleasing and individual shape, the fire was drawing well in the grate. There were four of them, sitting round a table, drinking cups of tea and eating mince pies, and they were obviously
an elect race. If they were not eminent it was because generation after generation had chosen not to be, having the sense to know that they would have more fun and do as good a job by remaining obscure. Gran, who was eighty-four, had been a beauty. She was still pleasing to the eye, with abundant white hair and a very white skin, and a plumpness which seemed an accumulation of satisfactions. Her daughter sat beside her, red-cheeked and blunt-featured like a Brueghel peasant, but aristocratic and artistic by reason of her unusual powers of perception. Beside the fire, next to me, sat her husband, and it could be seen that she had taken to herself a man who might have been outside the tribe but was one of the same kind. He had a good head and body, he bore himself with dignity, he made sensible remarks in beautiful English. It was to be noted that on the walls there hung two religious prints, one of them a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and numerous photographs of weddings, in which both brides and bridegrooms looked thoroughly pleasant human beings. Obviously the Tiffens, whom I realized had been looking after my interests in many ways which I had never suspected, had been carrying on successful experiments in eugenics on quite a large scale. There remained Mr. Tiffen, who was sitting over in the window, instantly affording a complete answer to the problem of why the reporters’ pencils had checked for a moment when they came to write of him. He was a small man, with dark hair which was tousled because he constantly ran his hands through it in wonder. It could be seen that he was not a rich man, because his spectacles were the cheapest kind that are made; but he needed nothing, he could get everything he wanted out of what he had, save certain things which the nature of things denied him. But he was thinking of that denial in a way which made it something other than a frustration.
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