The Saltmarsh Murders (17 page)

“You have committed sacrilege. You have also
disturbed the peace. I shall lay an information with the constable, and you will be called upon very shortly to give an account of yourselves. You may go.”

Of course, I don't like old Coutts, but one can't help admiring him. The lads looked at each other and licked their lips. Then they began to shamble off. There were fifteen of them. Some were not from our parish, but from the neighbouring village of Stadhemington.

“Interesting, of course,” said Mrs. Bradley, when she heard about it.

“Well, it shows what the villagers think,” I said.

“Yes,” said the little old woman. She grinned.

“And why do they think it?” she asked.

I shook my head and murmured something about smoke and fire, also about throwing mud and it sticking. Mrs. Bradley pursed her little beak and shook her head.

“Mrs. Coutts,” she said. “The camel bites and squeals. Anonymously, dear child.”

“You mean the Gatty visiting cards?” I said.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Those cards came
to
the vicarage
from
the vicarage. What do you say to that, young man? Is the vicar innocent? Is he mad?”

“Oh, come,” I protested. She grinned again.

“Take your choice, my dear,” she said. “Do you believe he is the father of Meg Tosstick's child? His wife believes it. That has been her trouble all along.”

“Never!” I exclaimed, hypocritically, of course. I knew quite well that Mrs. Coutts had believed it from the beginning. A most frightful woman! Most frightful!

“The point is,” continued Mrs. Bradley, “upon what, I wonder, does she base her opinion? Does she
base it upon Certain Knowledge, as a friend of mine would say? Does she deduce it from information in her possession? Does she suspect it, and is attempting to prove it by driving her husband to confide in her? Or what? Especially the last named.”

As I had not the faintest inkling of what she meant, I grunted and tried my best to look intelligent.

“If the vicar were the father, that would let Bob out,” I said, after a moment's pause.

“Why so?” enquired Mrs. Bradley.

“Well——” I recalled the show put up by old Coutts against Burt and the negro before they got him chained up in the pound—his knuckles couldn't have looked worse if he'd knocked out a tree—and the way he had shot those roughnecks out of the church on the Sunday. Squeezing a girl's neck would be a mere nothing to a man like that. I propounded this theory to Mrs. Bradley. She merely grinned.

“Well, you must admit that if he's the father, he had a good enough motive for shutting the girl's mouth,” I said doggedly.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, “but why wait until the baby had been in the world over a fortnight? It's of no use, Noel, my dear boy. If you are going to pin that murder on to the baby's father, you've got to explain why he waited so long.”

“Well, the vicar paid for Meg's keep at the inn, I understood,” said I.

“You understood? Don't you know?”

“No. I was given to understand that he did,” I replied. After all, I reflected, Daphne had not actually denied this.

“Not good enough,” said Mrs. Bradley, firmly. “Ask yourself whether it is.”

“I could ask the Lowrys, I suppose, to make quite sure,” I said, “or Coutts himself, of course.”

“I imagine that Mrs. Coutts did that at the time the child was born,” said Mrs. Bradley, drily. “I think, too, that all three persons concerned returned an evasive answer.”

“On which she based her suspicions?” I asked.

“Oh, no. I expect she had had her suspicions from the first,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “If she had not, why did she dismiss the girl from her service? A woman of Mrs. Coutts' mentality could have had an exceedingly interesting time torturing the girl with the dreadful instruments of charity and forgiveness. Cruel people don't let their victims escape them unless there is a good reason for it.”

Well, the old lady scored there, of course. Lifting the fallen (with inquisitorial accompaniment) was Mrs. Coutts' great stunt.

“Well, what do we do?” I asked. “Hang it all, it was you who suggested that Meg's seducer was also her murderer.”

Mrs. Bradley grinned fiendishly, and, picking up one of those little pieces of paper which the packers place between layers of cigarettes, she printed on it:

“If you persist in this foolish policy, your husband will be hanged.”

She placed the slip in an envelope, printed Mrs. Coutts' name and address on the outside, and stamped the envelope.

“I'm going to be anonymous, too,” she said. “Come
along. We'll go and post it. And now about these alibis.”

“What alibis?” I asked, accompanying her to the front door and down the drive. “Oh, you mean Coutts and the murder!” I laughed. “He wasn't the murderer, of course,” I said, “but still he was O.K. until the row with Sir William about the Sports finals. After that, there was the attack by Burt, but we haven't any very clear idea of the time the attack took place. So that leaves him unaccounted for from the time he left the fête until the time he was attacked by Burt and Yorke.”

I glanced at her. She nodded. Her black eyes were gazing straight ahead, down the gravel drive. There was a gentle, appreciative smile on her lips. At least, I hope it was appreciative.

“According to Coutts' own story,” I continued, “he went for a walk over the stone quarries towards the sea. He thinks he left the house at about nine o'clock, or perhaps later—By Jove!” I said. Mrs. Bradley's eyes opened. She grinned again.

“Exactly,” she said. “Suppose he did not go for his walk towards the Cove until after the murder! Suppose he
knew
that at the Cove he would be attacked by Burt! Suppose Meg Tosstick did die by the vicar's hand, after all! What a score for Mrs. Coutts' maggot! And how awful for Mrs. Coutts!”

I shook my head, although I myself had voiced the theory, but a little while earlier, in the Manor Library.

“He wouldn't kill anyone,” I said. Suddenly, in spite of my own previous arguments, I felt convinced of this.

“Facts are facts,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and the fact
that emerges clearly from our consideration of the vicar's movements on the night of the murder is that he had the time and the opportunity to murder Meg Tosstick before he was set upon by Burt and the negro. Added to that, if his wife is right, and the villagers are right, and he is the father of Meg Tosstick's child, he had a bigger motive than Candy for wanting the girl out of the way. But we have discussed that before. His question all the time would be: ‘How long will the girl keep my secret? ‘Nasty, unpleasant situation for the shepherd of Saltmarsh souls!”

I was somewhat appalled, of course. Not, as I say, that I believed in the vicar's guilt. I don't believe I ever had, except intellectually, so to speak. The case, as put, however, certainly did hang together. I mean, apart from everything else, there was the point that, while, upon all the evidence, even that of the police who had arrested Candy, poor Bob had had a bare fifteen minutes in which to commit the murder and bring three dozen bottles of assorted beers out of the public house cellar, the vicar had had a possible hour to an hour and a half. I thought I wouldn't put this point to Mrs. Bradley. She wasn't safe!

“I'll see Burt,” I said, “and find out exactly at what time the vicar was attacked.”

“Splendid,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I'll come with you. You don't mind going the longer way, via the post office, do you? I really must post this letter.”

Burt was up in his loft. He came down rather obligingly, gave us drinks, and started laughing and talking about the riot in the church.

“Look here, Burt,” I said, “you know the night of
August Bank Holiday, when you tied the vicar up in the pound——”

“Oh, dash it!” said Burt, “Let bygones be bygones, can't you? After the stout work I put in on his behalf yesterday evening at the kirk—look here!”

He pulled up his trousers and showed us two badly-hacked shins. We sympathised, and I thanked him for what he had done.

“I only wanted to ask you the time when the vicar was first set upon at the Cove,” I said. “We want some sort of defence for Candy when his trial comes on.”

Burt put it at twenty-past ten or perhaps half-past. Curiously enough, he didn't seem sufficiently interested in the murder to ask how the attack on the vicar would assist Candy.

“Not earlier?” I asked, my heart beginning to thump rather horribly.

“Oh, couldn't have been earlier,” said Burt. “I left the fête as soon as it got round about six o'clock, came back here and had tea, and then went down to the Cove and helped the ‘Sans Baisers' to land the tomes. My beautifully exact translation of ‘Les Soeurs de Matabilles,' dear boy.” He patted my knee. “Eighteen and six a copy in England, Mrs. Bradley,”—he had the hardihood to wink at her—” and sold strictly sub rosa and under the ‘snow' laws, but dirt cheap at the price. Do you still read Browning? Wouldn't you like to ‘grovel hand and foot in Belial's gripe'? But anyway, it's too late, laddie. A gent's word is his bleeding bond. Besides, the lady opposite would jug me if I so much as touched the dust-jacket of the ‘Soeurs ‘now, wouldn't you, Mrs. Bradley?”

I returned to the Manor with my worst fears confirmed. The vicar could have had ample time to commit the murder at the inn and get over to the Cove by twenty minutes past ten.

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Bradley. “That is only one. Come along. Let us check Sir William's movements.”

“But he came straight back here after the quarrel with the vicar, didn't he?” I asked.

“He did,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Then that must be that,” I said, surprised that she had brought his name forward.

“Yes, that must be that,” Mrs. Bradley agreed. I gazed at her rather hard, but could make nothing whatever of her amused smirk. After a moment she said:

“Very well. Let us try Edwy David Burt. Mark this, child. If the vicar had no alibi, neither had Burt.”

“Nor Yorke,” I interpolated, cheering up. “We ought to get hold of Yorke. He's simple and will tell us about Burt, I should think, because he won't see what we're getting at.”

“An excellent idea,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

“What, now?” I asked.

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Bradley. So off we trailed again, up the hill and past the quarries and in at the front gate of the Bungalow. Instead of snooping round the back and taking cover behind the water-butt as preliminaries to our seeing Foster Washington Yorke without Burt seeing us again, Mrs. Bradley led the way to the front door and rang the bell. Burt himself opened the door. His hair was rumpled and his eye was wild,
and he had a fountain pen in his hand. He stumped down the passage and flung the door open and scowled at us. He looked positively murderous. Not at all the genial host of an hour earlier.

“Go to hell! I'm busy!” he said, and banged the door in our faces.

“That being that,” said Mrs. Bradley, with her unnerving yelp of laughter, “we will now concentrate upon our objective.”

She led the way to the back regions, and we
found
the negro chopping wood.

“Did you know Burt wouldn't want to see us?” I asked the old lady.

“Of course. He always writes at this time of the day,” she answered. “Surely this is a much nicer way
of
interviewing our friend with the axe than if we had darted from currant bush to currant bush to avoid being seen by the master of the house?”

She hooted, and dug me in the ribs. Yorke grinned. He seemed pleased to see us, and, guided, of course, by Mrs. Bradley's questions, he gave us a very clear account of the manner in which he and Burt had spent August Bank Holiday. Mrs. Bradley skilfully steered him past the uninformative hours of nine a.m. to nine p.m. but after that his story was interesting—at least, I thought so. It dove-tailed so beautifully with Burt's that I was fascinated. Burt
had
left the fête at about six o'clock, it seemed, and had returned to the Bungalow for tea. After tea, he and Yorke had taken advantage of the fact that all the village would be at the fête, to receive the copies of the scrofulous book from the ship which, later, was seen by the vicar. The volumes,
which were German-printed copies, in English, of Burt's translation of a French book, were landed in packing cases marked “Hefferton Carlisle School, Bootle: Social History.” The ship's boats brought the packing cases to land. Apparently the job was always done openly, boldly, and at dusk. Burt trusted that if one of the packing cases were opened by a customs official or by order of the county police, the fact that it contained copies of a book which had not even been officially banned in England would be sufficiently uninteresting to prevent any further notice being taken. The Customs, said Burt, had no soul for literature.

“Hm!” said Mrs. Bradley to me later on. “If I had to classify Edwy David, I should place his name under the heading of Criminal Optimist. I suppose it never occurred to him that anyone might
open
the book!”

The phrase “Criminal Optimist,” stuck in my mind. Burt was big enough, ruthless enough, lawless enough, amoral enough to commit even such a beastly crime as the strangling of that poor girl. … I allowed my mind to dwell on the idea. I was rather attracted by it. The only flaw seemed to be that Burt had not once been separated from Yorke during that hour and a half during which the murder had taken place. They provided each other with a perfectly watertight alibi. Suddenly I switched my mind on to Yorke the negro. The more I thought of Yorke the more likely it appeared to me that he was the murderer, and that Burt was covering him. Burt would, of course. After all, strangling a girl like Meg Tosstick was so un-English a crime that it was much more probable that Yorke rather than Burt had committed it. I thought of Yorke's pink-palmed
sooty-backed hands with their beautiful, long, thin, fingers. I remembered the way they were curled round the handle of the axe, and I could imagine them curled round a girl's thin throat. She had had a throat like a child. I could remember the swallowing motion she had made with it when Mrs. Coutts dismissed her. Very pathetic and trying, of course. But what a perfect nuisance that their stories coincided so completely! To me it had all the appearance of being a put-up job. And still one had to take one's choice. Yorke or Burt? Burt or Yorke? Either? Neither? Both? Stymied, I thought, disgustedly. I was distressed, too, since everything still pointed to Coutts.