The Saltmarsh Murders (22 page)

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, neither 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 …!

M
rs. 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 McCanley, 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 have 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 be 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.”

“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.