The Saltmarsh Murders (27 page)

“Keep your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Quiet, please.”

She got quiet. Then her voice—her ordinary voice this time—said steadily:

“Ladies and gentlemen, someone has just left the hall. There is a cordon of police waiting for him outside. Please remain exactly where you are. Any person or persons making any attempt either to create a disturbance or to leave the hall until I receive a prearranged signal from the police, is liable to arrest as an accessory either before or after the fact of the crime. Please keep your seats.”

“Tell us who done it!” shouted the voice of someone bolder than the rest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I warn you solemnly that any demonstration in this hall to-night under the circumstances—the peculiar circumstances—will be regarded by the police as a breach of the peace.”

“Oh, blast the police!” shouted Burt, hysterically. “Turn the lights up, somebody, and let me get at him!” He swore, loudly and terribly.

“Turn up the lights!” shouted several voices.

The lights were switched on by old Coutts. I felt him get up and squeeze past me. As soon as I had got
over the first blindness, after the intense darkness of the hall, I turned round to see who had left the hall in that furtive manner. While I was still blinking at the empty chair in the row behind me, Mrs. Bradley said:

“Listen, ladies and gentlemen.”

We all listened. There was the sound of a car on the road outside. About five farm labourers were holding Burt on to his chair.

“They've got him,” she continued, gravely.

“Who?” asked several voices.

“The police,” said Mrs. Bradley, wilfully misunderstanding the question, I suppose.

I had been wondering how on earth we were going to get the hall cleared in an orderly way, but suddenly the doors were in the possession of the police, and those excellent chaps took matters into their own hands, and we were freed from all trouble and anxiety. At last nobody but Mrs. Bradley, the Gattys, old Coutts, Sir William, Bransome Burns, Margaret Kingston-Fox and I were left in the hall.

“Of course, that man took advantage of the disturbance caused by Foster Washington Yorke. I thought perhaps he would,” Mrs. Bradley said. “I didn't want him to go too soon. It was interesting to see the point at which he cracked, though. Did you notice?”

“You were saying something about that blocked-up passage, weren't you?” I said. Suddenly Mrs. Gatty began to giggle wildly.

“The bathroom! The bathroom!” she shouted.

P
recisely,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The bathroom. That was the last link, and a very important one. I wanted to be certain about it before I handed some of the rest of my conclusions to the police.”

“Excuse me,” said Sir William, “but what about an adjournment? They'll be wanting to lock up this hall for the night, won't they, Coutts?”

“Quite,” said old Coutts. “Will you all come along to the vicarage? It isn't far out of your way. I daresay my wife would be glad to hear the full story. Besides, I confess that I haven't yet fathomed the identity of the murderer. Stupid, I know. …”

“Oh, if you want me to tell it as a story——” said Mrs. Bradley, with her famous cackle. We all assured her that we did. I too, had not discovered who it was who had dived out of the hall and into the arms of the police.

Daphne and I managed to loiter behind the others as we walked along the main road home. Unfortunately, it is a very short distance from the village hall to the vicarage.

When we were seated in the vicarage dining-room, which, fortunately, was large enough to house the entire gathering, including William Coutts, who took cover behind the settee and gazed imploringly at me
when he caught my eye, Mrs. Bradley told us the whole story as she had built it up brick by brick and argument by argument.

“As I explained in the village hall just now,” she said, “I couldn't believe that an impulse to kill Meg Tosstick would have come naturally to Candy. For a long time I could imagine no argument which would have been strong enough to goad him to the deed. At last, with Noel's and Mr. Coutts' help, I established that the feeling in the village against mixed marriages was very strong—therefore, I wondered whether that fact explained Bob Candy's action, if indeed he was the murderer. An interesting feature, too, was the fact that nobody ever saw Meg's baby except its mother and Mrs. Lowry. So my next problem was to find out why such secrecy had been maintained. At first I confess, I was inclined to think that somebody in the position of, say, lord of the Manor—she grinned at Sir William—“or shepherd of the village souls “—she leered at old Coutts—” had been bribing Mrs. Lowry to keep a secret for him. I could not help suspecting that the newly-born baby very strongly resembled somebody who did not want his identity, to be known. New-born babies often bear a far more striking resemblance to one or other of their progenitors than do infants of five or six months old. That is a recognised fact.

“Of course, when everybody was refused admission to the mother's bedroom, one of two things was likely. Either the girl herself felt the shame of her position very keenly—if she did, it was a false shame, I should like to add—” here Mrs. Coutts began to get white round the nostrils. Mrs. Bradley looked her blandly in the
eye, nodded in a birdlike manner as though to indicate that she had given Mrs. Coutts one to get on with—which she had, of course—and continued—” or else it was feared that she would give away the name of the father.

“We know now that both these reasons may have been true; but the most important reason for keeping people away from the mother and child was that the day after it was born the baby must have disappeared. Do you remember, Noel, that I asked you several times whether you considered Bob Candy capable of murder?” she broke off, turning to me.

I nodded.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “I thought you meant he had murdered Meg Tosstick.”

“I did not necessarily mean he had murdered Meg Tosstick. I meant that in any case, murder or no murder, he had distinctly homicidal tendencies, a very bad heredity, and that the man who had wronged both Bob and Meg may have known of these, and feared death at Bob's hands. It was absolutely essential to the father's safety, perhaps, that Meg should die be fore she had a chance of betraying him to Candy. He may have hoped that she would die in childbirth. She did not. And she produced a child so startlingly like its father in appearance——”

“Poor little thing,” interpolated Daphne.

“—that, even if he denied Meg's assertions, he knew no one would believe him when once they had seen the baby. So first he may have planned to do away with the evidence of his paternity. By some means he got rid of the newly-born infant, we will suppose, and
for a day or two perhaps he felt safe. Then he realised that Mrs. Lowry could not keep Meg Tosstick hidden away from the world for ever, and that directly the girl's confinement was absolutely concluded people would want to know what had happened to the baby; and the girl would tell them. He dared not say that the mother had smothered it or overlaid it or killed it in the madness of puerperal fever, because then the child's body would have to be seen by a doctor, and then the very secret which he wanted kept would immediately come to light. …

“Oh, another rather curious, but very significant point! You remember that I began telling the villagers about information I lighted on more by luck than judgment? Well, here is an example. As the woman at the inn was always called Mrs. Lowry I took it for granted at first that Mr. and Mrs. Lowry were man and wife. Then it struck me that there was a most extraordinary physical resemblance between them, and I came to the conclusion that ‘Mrs.' was probably a courtesy title, and that they were really brother and sister. I have worked on that assumption during the later stages of the investigation, and it has explained several points insuperably difficult to correlate with the rest of the facts. Do you follow what I mean?”

“Of course they are brother and sister,” said Mrs. Coutts, frostily. “I could have told you that weeks ago if you had come to me.”

“Fortunately Mrs. Bradley could do without your assistance, Aunt, you see,” said Daphne, who simply cannot resist having a jab at the woman if it is humanly possible.

There ensued a good slab of domestic back-chat, of course. When we were all quiet again, and while Daphne was still putting out her tongue at me, because, for once, I was on Mrs. Coutts' side and Daphne knew it, Mrs. Bradley resumed her remarks.

“Matters came to their first head, I imagine, when Mr. and Mrs. Coutts here sent away the pregnant girl; and to their second head, if I may express myself clumsily,” she said, “with the trouble at the inn on the Sunday immediately preceding the August Bank Holiday. Bob Candy, you remember, had to be forcibly prevented from breaking into Meg Tosstick's bedroom because he was determined to find out whether she was being ill-treated by the Lowrys.”

“They locked him in the woodshed until he cooled off, didn't they?” I asked.

“Oh, the night he came round to say that he wouldn't play in the cricket match against Much Hartley?” said old Coutts. “I remember. Yes, yes, quite.” His manner was a nice mixture of gentlemanly detachment and professional sympathy.

“Yes. Having worked him up to the required state of baffled fury,” continued Mrs. Bradley, “one or other of the Lowrys—the woman, I expect—told him the lie about the negro parentage of Meg's baby—the lie that so much upset poor Yorke in the village hall just now.”

“Yes, he
was
upset, wasn't he?” said Sir William.

“His moral sense outraged, do you think?” asked Gatty.

“His sense of justice, I expect,” said Coutts. “After
all, it
was
a lie. He was
not
the baby's father.” He coughed.

“Simpler than all those explanations is the real one,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yorke is a sensitive, nervous man, and has a horror of being lynched. All negroes who have lived in countries where the colour line is drawn, have what the language of my profession might call a ‘mob-law' complex, you know. But about Candy: almost immediately the Lowrys had told Bob that lie about the parentage of the child, giving him sufficient time to brood over what he had heard and work himself up into the requisite state of nervous ferocity, but not giving him a sufficient interval in which to cool off and think better of it, Lowry, devilishly pretending to be sorry for the poor youth, offered him a whole day's holiday. Now I contend that the Lowrys knew quite well that Bob would make some attempt to get into communication with Meg and see the baby some time during that day's holiday while everyone else at the inn was absent at the August Bank Holiday fête. That part of the business, and the consequent suspicion which rested on Bob, was dastardly.

“Of course, Bob never saw the baby. The prosecuting counsel at the poor youth's trial actually said that he would not be a bit surprised if it was in attempting to coerce Meg into showing him the baby so that he could know the worst, that Bob went too far and strangled the girl. ‘He thought,' said Counsel ‘that she was determined to keep from him all evidence of her shame.'

“The matter of the time-limit at Bob's disposal, that quarter of an hour in which it was thought that he must have committed the crime, was attacked so thoroughly
by the defence at Bob's trial that it need not be thrashed out now. Even the girl Mabel, who is almost insanely pro-Bob, allowed to Wells and myself that he would have had time to get those bottles up and also commit the murder. The theory of the prosecution, that Bob had previously got the bottles ready in order to leave himself time to commit the murder—(or, as he probably planned, poor boy!—time to slip up and ‘have it out with Meg ‘)—also deserved consideration. If they believed that the murder was pre-arranged, they were right to assume that Bob would want to allow himself plenty of time.

“You remember what I said in the village hall just now about the improbability of a mean man becoming generous?” she went on. We assented, of course. “Well, I heard about Lowry's meanness from two distinct and unconnected sources. I heard, quite independently, that Lowry was mean to the village children when they brought him empty bottles, and that he obtained a commission on getting the cocoa-nuts for the shy at the village fête. Mrs. Gatty and Noel Wells respectively, were my informants.” She grinned at us impartially.

“Another example of casually acquired but important information, of course,” I said.

“Very important indeed,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Yes, well, I could not reconcile with that information the very definite fact that Lowry had given shelter to a girl who had lost her situation and her character, and had even been turned out of doors by her own father.” She paused and smiled. “I
did
hear that Saltmarsh was the fortunate possessor of a very charitable vicar,” she
said, wickedly, “but all attempts to substantiate the rumour that he was paying for Meg Tosstick's keep at the Mornington Arms absolutely failed.”

“So I should hope!” exclaimed Mrs. Coutts, sharply. Mrs. Bradley laughed, and Mrs. Gatty said spitefully:

“The rumour was almost strong enough to break all the glass in the vicarage windows, anyhow, my dear Mrs. Camel!”

Mrs. Coutts' thin lips closed tightly together. She looked down her nose in a way that we inmates of the vicarage had learned to behold with dread. Needless to say, it cut no ice at all with either Mrs. Gatty or Mrs. Bradley, and the latter continued:

“Do you remember, Noel, asking me once whether Lowry could have committed murder by proxy?”

“What?” said several of us together.

“Oh, come,” said Mrs. Bradley with her terrifying cackle.

“But
Lowry
!” we all said. There was a fairly lengthy silence while we digested it. Of course, it was pretty obvious as soon as she said it. There's a game one plays at parties which makes me feel much the same. You all sit round with pencils and paper and an expression of anguished concentration while some silly blighter plays well-known airs on the piano. You have to write down the titles of as many of the airs as you can, and there is a frightful prize for the best result and the worst player, who is invariably me, has to pay some ghastly forfeit. Well, when they read out the titles, you know, I find I really knew them all the time, but just couldn't seem to put a name to them.