Saltmarsh Murders

CHAPTER VI

a student of dickens

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At about five-thirty next morning I was awakened by William Coutts. His shining face, wet with perspiration and beaming with unholy joy and fierce excitement, loomed over me as I opened my eyes.

“I say, Noel! Oh, do wake up, you fool! Listen! I say! Noel! Noel!”

He thumped me vigorously and blew into my right ear, which was uppermost. My first thought was that I was back at school, so I sat up in bed with the idea of getting some rotter’s head in chancery and jolly well giving him beans. Then the identity of my assailant dawned on me, and so I merely rubbed my eyes and prepared to curse him.

“Get up!” commanded young William, before I could produce the book of words germane to the situation. “I’ve found him!”

“What!” I said, wide awake, of course. “Where?”

“In the pound,” said William, “and I can’t get him out. He’s chained up.”

Without stopping to reflect upon the peculiar nature of the tidings, I put on my shirt and trousers, thrust my feet into my boots, tied the laces, of course, and in about twenty seconds I was tearing after William down the stairs.

We had an ancient pound in the village. It was upon the village green. It was practically a historical monument, of course. Never used. Anyway, the vicar was in it. A huge stake had been driven into the ground, and the vicar, gagged with a leather driving glove and an army puttee—(can you have it in the singular? I suppose you can! It was only one, anyway, of course)—was tethered to it by a collar and chain. His arms were bound, and he looked the wildest, filthiest, angriest, most disreputable person in creation. The collar was padlocked on him, but I managed to detach the end of the chain from the stake and to remove the gag.

“Don’t attempt to talk, sir,” I said. “Good thing William found you so early in the morning.”

He’d been pretty well knocked about. His mouth was pretty badly bruised and the knuckles of both hands were cut almost to the bone.

“Yes,” he said, looking at his hands with what the books call gloomy satisfaction, “if my assailants were local people, it won’t be hard to pick ’em out. I think—I ra-ther think!—I’ve left my mark on them.”

This was after he’d had a rest and some bread and milk. I shot a stiffish dose of brandy into the pig-food before he started on it. Mrs. Coutts remonstrated, but, for once in our lives, we ignored the woman. I’m all for temperance, of course, but if ever a man needed— needed, mind you!—a drop of the amber adder, it was poor old Coutts. He was pretty far gone, take him one way and another. I think it was only his frightful annoyance that kept him up at all. His tale was a curious one, and when we had heard it, I said immediately:

“Mrs. Bradley is the person to get to the bottom of all this.”

Briefly, the yarn was as follows:

After having had the row with Sir William Kingston-Fox over the final of the choirboys’ hundred yards, old Coutts, in accordance with custom, returned to the vicarage, got himself a glass of lemonade and some bread and cheese and a handful of raisins, and settled down, with the wireless, to have a pleasant evening. However, what with the row he had had with Sir William getting thoroughly on his nerves, and the beastly wireless clicking a foreign station that would butt in and ruin the concert he was listening to, he got thoroughly fed, and decided to go out for a walk as far from the fête as he could.

He had been tinkering with the radio set for some time, trying to cut out the interference, and had taken a bit of time to get his meal and eat it, and so forth, so that it must have been, he thinks, round about nine o’clock when he left the vicarage, but it might have been later. With the idea of getting clear away from the fête, the raucous music of the roundabouts and all that, he walked up towards the stone quarries and down to the beach by Saltmarsh Cove. He walked fast, and was pretty tired when he reached the cove, so he sat on a bit of rock and gazed at the sea and decided it was a good chance for a swim. Bit of a Spartan, old Coutts, of course. It was getting dark by that time. (You can’t reach the cove in less than an hour and a half from the vicarage, even going all out.) He stripped off his flannels— he had been playing cricket during the day, of course, against Much Hartley—and pushed them just into the entrance to the Cove, as the tide was almost out. He had his swim—a lazy one, he admits—and was rubbing himself as dry as he could on a handkerchief—ever tried it?—when he was surprised to see a lantern swung rhythmically three times out at sea, apparently from the rail of a ship. He was interested, because there was no reason that he could think of for a ship to anchor out there. She must be taking a risk, he thought, to do so. She must be lying off an uninhabited island called Skall Rock, but the channel between the island and some totally submerged rocks was known to very few people indeed, and those strictly local men. No big ships could make the passage, and even small ones ran considerable risk in attempting it. Besides, there was no point in attempting it, as the way into Wyemouth Harbour was clearly charted, and was marked, where necessary, by buoys. He screwed up his eyes and thought he could just make her out. Suddenly, as he was thinking all this out, a beam from the ship’s searchlight fell clear upon him, and was immediately withdrawn. At the same time a lantern was swung three times again, this time from higher up—from the bridge—he thinks it must have been from the bridge—it looked high off the water anyway. It was all a bit queer, but he was getting chilly, so he ran about a bit to finish drying, put on his clothes and was about to reach for his straw hat when somebody behind him, who must have come up like a cat, gave him a terrific shove in the back, and down he went. Before he knew what was happening, some great bloke fell on him. He put up a good show, he said, and, if his knuckles were anything to go by, I should say he did! However, another fellow came up and they got him gagged at last, blindfolded him, tied him up and carted him along, by devious ways, to the pound. Weird! They must have spotted our torches and dodged us—Brown, Mrs. Bradley, the two students and myself,—while we were searching for him. Or he must have been in the pound by then. Everybody else was still at the fête, or else in bed. They didn’t meet a soul, anyway, Coutts thinks. Well, I mean, they couldn’t have done! What a neck, though! Both his captors had blackened faces, he thought. An old poachers’ trick, that, to avoid being recognised. And neither spoke a word. They communicated with one another in series of grunts. Well, I mean, it’s jolly difficult to recognise a chap by his grunt, as witness those frightful parlour games we all have played at times. One is called “Mum” and the other, I believe is known to the trade as “Squeak, Piggy, Squeak.” Anyway, they grunted their intentions to one another, and one drove the stake into the middle of the pound and they both chained him up as I’ve already described. They left him gagged, but took the bandage off his eyes. We tried to get him to make a guess at the fellows’ identity, but he couldn’t hazard a single one. It was very dark, of course. He hadn’t seen them clearly at all. We had to look out, he said, for two big fellows, one of whom had a face that looked as though it had been hit by the front of an express train.

“I know I didn’t mark one of ’em, the bigger one,” he said, “because he kept out of my reach. But the other must look like the outside page of a kids’ comic paper. So if they’re local men—”

He seemed not so keen on the idea of lugging Mrs. Bradley into it, but I put the point so forcefully that he agreed. Daphne and I went off to Sir William’s house, and I, for one, had a certain interest in seeing Sir William himself. He was biggish. True, I couldn’t quite imagine him blacking his face in order to escape recognition; neither could I see him calling in assistance, in the form of another black-faced desperado, to settle a private quarrel. Still, they had had a fearful row, he and the vicar, so really the whole thing was a bit of a coincidence. The Squire had the very devil of a temper, and the vicar’s peculiar code would probably forbid him to name the squire as his assailant even if he had recognised him…

I was in the midst of decanting these theories to Daphne when we arrived at the lodge gates of Sir William’s park and, entering, began to cross the park to the house.

Talk about the morning after the night before, or the abomination of desolation! The park was in a simply fearful state. The turf was torn, worn, wheel-rutted and strewn with bits of paper, banana and orange peel, broken bottles, confetti, a hat, three odd gloves at least —(I speak of what we could see as we walked along!)—empty chocolate boxes, bits of cocoanut; the father and mother of a horrible, disgraceful mess. I’m a member of an anti-litter society, and so I know what the many-headed can do when it chooses, but, upon my word, I’ve never seen anything to equal the state of Sir William Kingston-Fox’s park on that August morning. It had not rained a bit during the night, which probably made matters a bit better than they might have been. And yet, I don’t know! It was awful!

Sir William’s face was as usual. Not marked at all, I mean, except for the rather puffy eye he had received from the vicar at the sports. He heard our story, as did Mrs. Bradley, Bransome Burns, the financier, Margaret Kingston-Fox, and Storey, who was waiting at table. He coughed—Storey, I mean—as an indication that he had something to say.

“If you please, Sir William—”

“Well?”

“It sounds as though the smugglers had begun their games again.”

“Oh, rubbish! Rubbish! This is not America, Storey.”

“No, Sir William. It just occurred to me, that’s all. Saltmarsh Cove was a regular smugglers’ hole in my great-grandfather’s time, sir, and there’s an underground passage to the inn, sir, or so I’ve heard tell, although I believe it is blocked up now.”

“Ah, very likely. Wells,” he said, suddenly turning to me, “this is serious, you know. As a magistrate, I say that it is very serious indeed! The vicar of Saltmarsh to be assaulted in his own parish! Upon my word, it’s really monstrous! He marked the men, you say?”

“One of them, Sir William,” I replied, trying to keep my face straight. Hang it all, he would have been the first person to assault the vicar in his own parish, had not the vicar assaulted him first! Daphne said:

“Yes; his poor hands!”

“Ah,” said Sir William. “Then all we have to do is to find the fellow the vicar marked so severely, and get from him the name of his accomplice, and get the couple of them a spell of hard labour, the damned scoundrels!”

He looked round after tenderly feeling his eye. Margaret said:

“They are probably not local people, Daddy.”

Mrs. Bradley said:

“In the pound, you say?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Curious,” said the little old woman. “It was only on Sunday that Mrs. Gatty was calling him a bull. The bull strayed on to someone else’s land and was put in the pound.”

She fixed her black eyes on me.

“Do you read the Pickwick Papers, young man?”

“I have read them, yes,” I replied. As a matter of fact I’m fond of the book.

“Aha!” said Mrs. Bradley. “A little of Dickens and a little of Gatty, and what a curious situation arises!”

She chortled in a way that made one’s blood run cold, and then helped herself to kidneys and bacon from the sideboard. Did I say we had arrived at breakfast time?

“Oh, how do you mean, Mrs. Bradley?” I asked. She wagged her fork at me and grinned fiendishly.

“What happened when Captain Boldwig found Mr. Pickwick asleep in the barrow?” she asked. I racked my brain.

“After the shooting?” I said.

“Yes, and after the lunch:

Complete with cold punch,” said Mrs. Bradley, positively hooting with mirth at her own absurd rhyme.

“Why, the captain ordered his servant to wheel Mr. Pickwick to the pound,” said I, “He was trespassing on his land, or something, wasn’t he? But then, Mr. Coutts wasn’t trespassing. He was—”

“Obviously he was where he wasn’t wanted,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“By Jove!” I said, struck by an idea. “I’ll get one or two men to help me, and we’ll go along there tonight, and see what happens. Surely five or six of us should be a match for a couple of roughnecks, shouldn’t we?”

“Don’t go, Noel,” said Daphne.

“Let him go,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Nothing on earth will happen, child.”

“How do you know?” said the squire. “I myself will come with you, Wells, and, by the powers, I’ll bring along half a dozen of my own men, fellows I can thoroughly trust. Meet you outside Burt’s bungalow at nine o’clock to-night.”

In its way it was quite a bit of excitement, of course, and I found myself swanking along the village street as though I were the chief of the Chicago police planning to clean up the city. But, as things turned out, when we did go to patrol the sea-shore, we were not only on the track of the men who had attacked the vicar but, as we thought, on the track of the man who killed Meg Tosstick. As though there were not mystery enough surrounding that poor girl, the next thing we heard was that she had been strangled at some time between nine o’clock and ten-thirty on the night of the Bank Holiday, and that there was no sign anywhere of the baby. People must actually have been dancing, or I myself may even have been concluding the fortune-telling, while that poor girl was being done to death. It was the most shocking and dreadful news I think any of us had ever had. Brown, the village constable, panting and exhausted, came to the vicarage soon after Daphne and I had returned from Sir William’s house, and told us what had happened. Then the vicar had to tell his story, for he bore too many marks of the fray to be able to hush the thing up. Old Brown shook his head.

“Mark my words, Mr. Coutts, sir,” he stated solemnly, “it’s the same gang. I wonder what their game is?”

“How was she killed?” asked Mrs. Coutts.

“With a gent’s ’and-knitted silk tie, ma’am,” replied Brown. “It had been put round her neck, tied in a bow in front, like as if someone had been having a little friendly joke with her, and then a wooden clothes peg had been used to make what the First Aid books calls a tourniquet. Oh, she’s not a nice sight, ma’am. She isn’t really, poor young gal. Got a nasty lump on ’er ’ead, too, but strangling was the cause of death, the doctor says.”

Well, that was the way in which we received the news. Brown had been called on to the scene by Lowry after Mrs. Lowry, going to take the poor girl her breakfast in bed—for she still was accustomed to remain in bed for the greater part of the day—made the dreadful discovery of her death. Brown had called in Doctor Fosse, and then had rung up the police station at Wyemouth Harbour, our nearest town, and they had promised to send down an inspector. Brown was easily the most important man in the village that day, I should think, although the Lowrys ran him close in reflected glory and personal popularity. A small crowd of villagers was outside the inn every time I passed that way, and knots of boys followed Brown wherever he went.

Of course, look at it as you please, it was a most inexplicable thing. One hears of girls being murdered when a baby is going to be born and the show, so to speak, is going to be given away thereby. There have been classic instances, followed usually by mutilation of the body, decapitation to avoid identification, and games of that sort. But the plain facts of our Saltmarsh affair were, first, that the baby had been in the world for eleven whole days before its mother was murdered; secondly, that there was no reason why anybody should have wanted the poor girl out of the way, apart from the baby business, and (see above, so to speak), if the father, whoever he was, didn’t want to acknowledge paternity, why should he? Did he think the girl would give him away? What was the mystery?

Struck by a sudden thought, I said to Mrs. Courts:

“I suppose the poor girl did have a baby?”

She said:

“Whatever do you mean? There was no doubt at all that when she left my service she was pregnant.”

“Ah, well, that’s that, then,” I said. “It had just struck me that, as no one seems to have seen this baby, and as it has completely disappeared since the murder, it might never have existed.”

A bright and thoughtful opinion, I considered.

“You need not worry,” said the woman, viciously. “That baby has been moved, with the connivance of the Lowrys, to some home approved of by its natural father. Nobody was allowed to see that baby, my dear Noel, for a very good and sufficient reason. You mark my words! That baby resembled somebody too closely for its father’s comfort. That’s the reason for all this mystery surrounding the baby.”

She snapped out the words as though they had been said on a typewriter.

“So you think the father killed the mother, in case she should give him away?” I suggested, going on with what seemed to me the logical sequence of the story. “That is the police theory, too, I believe.” I was wrong about that, of course.

Mrs. Coutts suddenly swayed, and pitched forward. I had never seen anybody faint before. She went dead off. I was fearfully alarmed. It was the merest luck, or sheer instinct, or something, which prompted me to freeze on to her before she struck her head. Dicky heart, of course. She had looked very groggy since she had reported old Coutts’ absence on the night of the fête. Very groggy.

The police from Wyemouth Harbour and an inspector and the Chief Constable of the County all came down during the course of the day, and the village positively hummed. We got a fair crop of reporters, too, all seething with enthusiasm, and hosts of amateur detectives (holiday-makers from Wyemouth Harbour, chiefly), hunting for clues—or rather, souvenirs of the murder. Frightfully ghoulish, the many-headed, of course.

William Coutts went snooping, too, and apparently walked into a hornets’ nest up at the Bungalow. He had spent a hot and dirty couple of hours in and about the Cove and the quarries, and then decided to call at the Bungalow to pick up any fresh trail, he said, but I concluded that he meant to see whether he would be asked to stay to lunch. The front door was open, as usual, so he walked in, and was just going to barge into the dining-room, whence he could hear voices, when it was borne in on him that Burt and Cora were having the most frightful row. He didn’t stay, of course. He heard the words:

“—get a damned good hiding if I hear any more of it! Yes, and that Tired Business Man! Blast his eyes!”

“—beastly old hole, enough to make a pig homesick!”

“—pig is what I said! And now get on! You’ll miss that train.”

Then he came away. I imagine that Cora and Burt quarrelled a good deal. They were both hot-headed, I had decided, and as I said before, it couldn’t have been much of a life for a gay-living high-spirited young woman of Cora’s type and mentality.

But all minor excitements paled before the great blaze of terror and thrills that followed the discovery of the murder.

William, I know, slept with his heaviest catapult under his pillow, and I shrewdly suspect that Mrs. Coutts used to put the kitchen poker on the chair beside her bed. I took care to accompany Daphne even into the garden to pick gooseberries and garden peas. At night I made a point of tapping upon her bedroom door and enquiring whether she was all right. She always was, of course.

On the Tuesday afternoon and evening the men of the village, headed by the squire and the vicar, who had sunk their private differences in this terrible affair of the murder, and supported strongly by William Coutts and the local Boy Scouts, determined to track down the beast who had killed the poor girl. I dug out Burt, who, with his brains and physique certainly would have been a match for any murderer. He agreed willingly to help us, the more so as he was feeling a bit at a loose end, for Cora McCanley had received an offer by telegram that same morning to appear in a piece called Home Birds which was touring the provinces, and he supposed he would not see her again until after Christmas. Not that he seemed to care much. The row, I suppose.

Our first task was to patrol the shore by the Cove, but, although we kept it up from seven in the evening until nearly one in the morning, nothing happened at all. Personally, I could not believe that there had been no connection between the attack on the vicar and the murder of the girl. We were harbouring Thugs in the village. When we arrived home, Mrs. Coutts, William and Daphne were all in bed. The vicar went into his wife’s room, and the next moment I heard him calling me.

“Get some sal volatile from Daphne,” he said. It was rather nice to see Daphne asleep, but I was compelled to wake her for the stuff.

It appeared that Mrs. Coutts had been out to look for us when it got dark, had missed her way and nearly fallen down one of the unfenced quarries. She was rather bad.

And, blow me, if, on the Wednesday, another beastly mysterious affair didn’t occur which put the most fearful wind up Daphne and myself.

As Mrs. Coutts was so very groggy, and complained of her heart and a bad headache and shock to the system, Daphne had to go down to the church and play the organ for the Women’s Weekly Prayer Meeting and Devotional.

This was Mrs. Coutts’ job really, so Daphne, who was rather taken on the hop, thought she had better go along at about half-past six that evening and practise the hymns. Although I say it that love her, Daphne is not at her best on the organ unless she’s had considerable practice first. So we arranged to put in an hour from six-thirty to seven-thirty when the meeting was billed to begin.

I say “we,” because, since the attack on William and myself outside the Bungalow, Daphne had been exceedingly nervous, and so I had fallen into the habit of “standing by.” We kept this pretty little fact to ourselves, because Mrs. Coutts would not have approved.

So I accompanied Daphne to the church and worked the beastly bellows for her. She was in the middle of “Lead, Kindly Light,” and doing well, when I heard the music stop.

“Gee up!” I said loudly and encouragingly. There was no answer, so I slid round, to see what was what.

“Oh, Noel!” said Daphne. She threw her arms round me, clutching me tightly.

“Somebody put their hands on my neck! Somebody put their hands on my neck!” she said.

It was about five past seven then, and the verger came and lit up, and the earliest arrivals began to trickle in. I thought, to be quite honest, that Daphne was suffering from nerves. Nobody had come into the church unless they had come in from the vestry, and that was always kept locked. We ourselves had come in by the. west door so as not to bother old Coutts for the keys.

“I shrieked your name as soon as I felt the hands on me,” said Daphne, when the meeting was over and we were on our way home. Old Coutts had stayed behind to talk to some of the congregation, of course. Although the incident had given me quite a jolt, I would not discuss the subject with Daphne. I was certain really she had been imagining things. But I promised to stand by more closely than ever, and advised her to lock her door at night as an antidote to nerves. We were all suffering from nerves, more or less, that week, I think.

I told Mrs. Bradley about it, of course. She looked more grave than I expected.

“Don’t let her go about alone, Noel,” she said. “After all, no arrest has been made yet for the murder of Meg Tosstick. It may take place to-day. But keep close to little Daphne. They may not arrest the right person, you know!”

She gave her ghoulish chuckle and patted me on the shoulder.