Saltmarsh Murders

CHAPTER VIII

bob candy’s bank holiday

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I was not as much surprised as I might have been. Burt was exactly the opposite of my conception of a distributor of indecent literature, it is true; on the other hand, his language was of that revolting type which revels in causing embarrassment to those that hear it. I frowned judicially and stared in dignified displeasure at the carpet. I did not really know what to say, of course. Luckily, Mrs. Bradley was at no loss for words. She continued, after giving me sufficient time to digest the tidings.

“Of course, he won’t be able to carry on the good work.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed. “I say! I bet Lowry was in on the game, whether it was books or beer! He’s a proper old miser, you know, and not one to let good money slip past him—well, bad money, I mean, of course!”

I laughed at my own joke, but Mrs. Bradley did not seem frightfully amused. I take it, from my fairly close observation of the sex, that women have not a very keen sense of humour. I played my trump card, however, and caused the old lady to sit up a bit, I fancy.

“You see,” I said, “he must have used Lowry’s secret passage sometimes to escape detection, and he could hardly do that without Lowry’s connivance, could he?”

I don’t know why it is, but the mention of a secret passage always interests people. It interested Mrs. Bradley, and she asked me a lot of questions about it. I could not tell her much more than the fact that there was such a smugglers’ passage leading from Lowry’s cellars to the Cove, that it had been blocked up, but that I did not see why it shouldn’t have been unblocked by Lowry and Burt.

“Why choose the Cove, if not for the secret passage?” I asked, triumphantly. Mrs. Bradley still looked interested.

“A baby could have seen through that lonely bungalow business,” she said, at last. “If ever the situation of a house shrieked that something illegal was going on, the situation of that one did so. Add to that an occupant, who, far from observing the most elementary precautions, goes out of his way to waylay and half-murder the local vicar, and plays a silly and cruel trick on a little jackal like Gatty, and places himself, as you say (I hadn’t, of course!) in the hands of a fox like Lowry, and something is bound to go wrong. If I hadn’t put two and two together, someone else would have done so, and then—”

“Yes, all for the best. After all I do think that the public morals—”

I began, but Mrs. Bradley cut me short.

“I never did, and I never shall, believe that vile things affect the minds of any but the vile,” she said, firmly. “Besides, evil and filth are the most incomparably dull, boring, surfeiting things in the world. See the published works of George Bernard Shaw.” She hooted. “Corruption, as he indicates, is not only nauseating to the senses, but it palls upon the imagination. Evil is the devil’s worst advocate. Refer again to the above-mentioned sources. Why, child, you, as a priest, should know that it is the little insidious vices, treachery, malice, envy, jealousy and greed, covetousness, slandering, sentimentality and self-deception that enslave mankind, not filthy postcards and erotic literature, Mrs. Grundy, my dear.”

She spoilt it all, of course, by howling like a hyena and poking me in the ribs until I was forced to remove myself out of reach of her terrible yellow talons.

“ ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ you mean?” I suggested, by way of finishing the conversation. But she only shrieked louder than ever. A most extraordinary woman. Sincere, in her way, of course.

“Then I suppose that even murder—” I began, when the air was still again. I had not the slightest idea of how I was going to finish the sentence. My object was to change the subject of conversation. I never like people to know that they have worsted me in an argument. I feel that I owe it to the cloth to keep my end up and the Anglican flag flying.

“Oh, murder!” said Mrs. Bradley, fastening on to the word with grim relish. She wagged her head at me. “Murder is a queer crime, young man. If it is a crime.”

“Of course it’s a crime,” I said. “It’s a sin, too,” I added, buttoning the black jacket and composing the countenance into ecclesiastical lines.

“Rubbish, child,” retorted the Bradley, with spirit. “Murder is a general heading for a whole list of actions, most of which ought to be judged merely as misdemeanours. The second division ought to be the special preserve of murderers.”

“It would be, wouldn’t it?” I said. She waved aside the shaft of wit.

“Look at Crippen,” she said. As I have always looked upon the little thug as one of the hottest exhibits in the Chamber of Horrors, this suggestion fell flat so far as I was concerned.

“What about him?” I said. “The victim of an illicit passion, that’s all.”

“The victim of an inferiority complex,” returned Mrs. Bradley. I chewed the thought.

“Hm!” I said. These psychologists frighten me. I don’t talk their argot, of course, and that puts one at a disadvantage.

“Besides,” said Mrs. Bradley, warming to it, “most murderers are insane at the time of committing the murder. Take Patrick Mahon.”

“Oh, but that was frightfully nasty,” I said.

“You are confusing the two acts of the unfortunate man when you say so,” responded Mrs. Bradley.

“But he dismembered the body!” I protested. I mean, hang it all!

“Yes, that’s what I am saying,” she said. I blinked.

“If a man laid an entirely false trail for the police, misled them, hoodwinked them, drew red herrings across the track and dived and doubled in order to escape them, you wouldn’t say that he was any more of a villain than if he took no steps to secure himself from arrest, would you?” she asked. I thought it over, and replied, cautiously, in the negative.

“Well, a man who dismembers a body and hides the head is only trying to secure himself against arrest,” said Mrs. Bradley. “You should try to think clearly, child.”

“But murderers who are found to be insane are lodged in Broadmoor,” I said, adroitly side-stepping once more.

“Ah, Broadmoor,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a waste of public money! A painless death would be far the better method. There’s a great deal of rubbish talked about death, young man. Mind you, there must be none of that dreadful period of waiting for the execution morning that obtains under our present inhuman and disgraceful system. I do not say abolish the death penalty, but, instead of a penalty, let it be a release. We must always have the moral courage to release from life those who are not fitted to bear life’s burdens. Social morality, consisting, as it so largely does, in refraining from action, is to some minds an unachievable ideal, and to others simply nonsense.”

“Ah, but the duty of the church—” I interrupted. Then I stopped short, because, of course, the church is not primarily concerned with morals. At least, it ought not to be, for morals are not even the A.B.C. of religion. I doubt whether, at most, they are more than the pothooks and hangers of our spiritual life.

“Priests are but men,” I said, lamely, of course.

“Not always,” retorted the Bradley, with her frightful cackle. My trouble is that I never know when the woman is serious, but I found myself thinking of Mrs. Coutts with her murky mind. Beside her, this queer little reptilian was like a rainbow or an iridescent shell of pearl. Mind you, you couldn’t exactly guarantee what you would find underneath the shell, but I felt that while it would be possible to imagine the Archangel Gabriel blowing his trumpet in Mrs. Bradley’s ear, it would be impossible for Mrs. Coutts even to recognise the Archangel and the sound of his trumpet on the last great day. There was something about the Bradley. I should be the last person to deny it. One felt, in the words of the rather Nonconformist hymn, that she was on the Lord’s side. Curious.

She clapped me on the shoulder. It was quite a welcome change, of course, to being poked in the ribs.

“And now, to the question of the hour,” she said. “Talking about murderers, let us include our own.” She paused a moment, and then added, “Oh, by the way, do you know which train is best from Wyemouth Harbour if one wishes to arrive in London in time for dinner and a theatre?”

“Oh, yes. The 3.30 is easily the best,” I said. “For one thing, it doesn’t stop anywhere until it gets into Waterloo, and for another, it has a restaurant car.”

“Ah, thank you, my dear,” she said. “The 3.30.”

She wrote it down.

“And now, dear child,” she said, “this murder of the girl Tosstick. A queer affair, you know.” And, arguing, I suppose, from the general to the particular, she began to talk about Bob Candy, which was what I had been trying to urge her to do.

“I want you to go and see Bob,” she said. “And I want you to ask him some questions about what happened on August Bank Holiday.”

“But his lawyers,” I began, “are surely the people—”

“Yes, yes,” said the little old woman. She began to stroke the sleeve of her orange and black dinner frock as she talked. “But I want you to go. He always liked you, didn’t he?”

“Oh, averagely,” I said.

“Yes, well, you get at his alibi, young man. And, if he hasn’t an alibi, find out the truth. I don’t think he has told the police the truth, and, if my deductions are correct, that’s because the truth would be one more weapon in the hands of the prosecution. I have thought a good deal about Bob while I’ve been clearing up the little mysteries in connection with Mr. Burt, and I have come to the conclusion that Bob was with Meg Tosstick some time during the afternoon or evening of August Bank Holiday, and that, instead of having thrown the tie away, he was actually wearing it on that day. You must admit that he did not come out very strongly on the subject of that tie.”

I admitted it, of course. Anybody could have seen that the poor fellow had been lying about the wretched knitted silk tie with which Meg Tosstick had been strangled.

“Tell me about Bob,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Oh, well,” I said, “he was a big, sturdy fellow. You saw that for yourself, of course. He never showed any signs of abnormality except a tendency to glower and brood over fancied wrongs. His gifts as chucker-out were seldom in requisition, because the village is orderly and we seldom have men drunk. It’s easy enough to get rid of the guests at closing time, I am sure. Bob was simply a barman, really. He fell in love with the poor unfortunate girl Tosstick, and they were both saving up to get married, I know, because they tried to get the vicar to mind their money. Of course, Coutts pointed out that the Post Office would pay two and a half per cent. interest, which he was not in a position to do, and persuaded them to start a Savings Bank account. It was all in the girl’s name, because Bob said it was to be. Coutts wanted them to have separate accounts, but Bob wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Well, you’ve put several points which are in the young man’s favour,” said Mrs. Bradley. She frowned. “Not at all the sort of young man who ought to be hanged,” she said.

“You see that Bob did not gain financially by Meg Tosstick’s death?” I said, eagerly. “Constable Brown put that to the Wyemouth inspector, but he chose to ignore it, I suppose.”

Mrs. Bradley nodded.

“And you have also shown that Bob had no particular enemies,” she said.

“Oh, the chucking-out business? No, I’m sure he hadn’t. He got handled a bit roughly on that Sunday evening, but he’s quite popular really.”

“Yes. You, as his advocate, must find every possible point in the lad’s favour. A number of quite small points might be sufficient just to tip the scale towards an acquittal, if you really want him to be acquitted.”

“You’ve no hope, then, of discovering the real murderer?” I asked. I was disappointed. The woman had managed to convey the distinct impression that she had something up her sleeve.

“Oh, I tell you that I can very well guess who the murderer is,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But the trouble will be to get some people to believe it. You surprise me, you know. You still seem certain that Bob Candy was not capable of committing murder. And that is absurd.”

She had put the point before; this time, without giving me a chance to say anything, she proceeded to enlarge upon it.

“A young man must be very much attached to a young girl to trust her with all his savings,” she said. “Don’t you think that it was an extraordinary thing that everybody in the village was so astonished at the news that the girl was going to have a child? Upon your own and Mrs. Coutts’ showing, I take it that conception before marriage is not an uncommon thing in the village.”

“It’s the custom,” I said, prepared to stick up for it of course. After all, our people are essentially moral. You can’t call that sort of thing immorality, although Mrs. Coutts does, of course. It’s simply local colour. One has to be broadminded. Mrs. Bradley was prepared to accept the facts without criticising them, it seemed, for she merely nodded and said:

“Assuming, as you are determined to assume, that Candy is innocent, here is a workable hypothesis to go on. Let us say that Meg Tosstick, begged by several interested persons, including the Lowrys, to disclose to them the name of her seducer, refused to comply with the request. We do not know her reason for withholding the father’s name, but apparently she did withhold it. Now—a remarkable point, this—nobody seems to have encountered the proverbial little bird. Meg’s secret is still a secret—even to me—so that I have no way of putting my convictions to the test, and they remain merely convictions for the present, and are not established facts. Now, I imagine that she kept the secret for one of two reasons. Either she was being terrorised by the baby’s father, or else she knew that her lover would commit murder if the secret came out. A girl of Meg Tosstick’s type might easily be terrorised by a stronger personality. This stronger personality, however, was not strong enough to dare Bob Candy’s vengeance if the secret leaked out. The girl, in a weakly hysterical state, poor thing, after all that she had suffered both mentally and physically, was in just the frame of mind to blurt out with tears and self-reproaches the whole pitiful, shameful story. The wretch whose lust had victimised her was terrified at the thought of the consequences to himself if she did that, and so he planned to murder her to close her mouth for good and all. Immediately the murder was accomplished, poor, innocent Candy was arrested, as the murderer foresaw that he would be. How’s that?” And she laughed heartily.

“Then we have only to find the father!” I exclaimed. “Oh, but you have a conviction, you say, that you know him. Can’t we frighten the truth out of him?”

Mrs. Bradley cackled.

“I think you would find that he was more afraid of the gallows than of your threats, child,” she said. “Besides, we can’t do very much without proof, and in any case, what I have just told you is not necessarily the truth, remember. It is merely a working hypothesis which covers all the facts that we know. Now when you’ve visited poor Bob, and have found out exactly what he did and where he went on August Bank Holiday, let me know. Persuade him that to tell the whole truth is his best plan. By the way, I have briefed Ferdinand Lestrange for the defence.”

“What, Sir Ferdinand?” I gasped, thinking, of course, of the fees.

“Yes. My son by my first husband,” said this remarkable woman. “A clever boy. Nearly as clever as his mother, and quite as unscrupulous as his father, who cornered wheat on Wall Street and then slipped up and all the wheat fell on him!”

She screamed with Satanic mirth and poked me in the ribs until I fled the room. Her laughter pursued me to the front door, where I grabbed my hat from the footman and bolted down the drive. I managed to get a short talk with Daphne as soon as I arrived at the vicarage. The other inmates of the vicarage were in bed. She had been to bed, also, but, upon hearing my latch-key in the door, she had sneaked downstairs to the dining room. She sat on my knee while I told her all that I had heard—well, most of it, of course. She squeezed my arm.

“I bet she means Lowry, horrid, fat old pig!” declared my beloved. “He looks just that sort of man.”

“I plump for Burt,” I said. “A noted atheist and a nasty-minded fellow if ever there was one. Burt would make nothing of twisting girls’ necks. He used to beat Cora, you know. I don’t wonder they had a dust-up.”

“He doesn’t gave you the shudders, anyway, as Lowry does,” said Daphne, “and girls like Cora don’t mind being whacked. They like their husbands to be rough with them.”

Personally, I have always considered this Ethel M. Dell stuff to be a myth, but Daphne did not give me time to argue. She lowered her voice, and looked hastily over her shoulder. Then she said in my ear —it tickled me a bit, of course:—

“You know the Adj. thinks it was either Uncle or Sir William, don’t you? The baby business, I mean. She thinks Meg and the Lowrys wouldn’t show it because of the resemblance.”

“Your aunt is mad,” I said, softly but with considerable heartiness. “I say, Daphne, come over to Clyton with me when I go to see Candy. You could wait in the public library for me, couldn’t you? We could have tea together in a little teashop I know of, and anyway there would be the journey both ways. It takes about an hour and three quarters because the connections are so frightfully bad, so we’d get at least four hours together, one way and another.”

We fixed it up and then went up to our separate beds. I was longing for my marriage. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

Three days later I got permission to visit Candy and we set off. I left Daphne in the magazine and periodicals department of the public library and went to the prison by tram. The prison lay about a mile and a half outside the town. Candy seemed quite pleased to see me, but shut up like a clam as soon as I began trying to talk business. He looked a bit pale, but quite well, I thought, and talked hopefully about the trial.

“They’ll have to let me off,” he kept saying, twisting his hands together, “because I never done it, see? They can’t hang me if I never done it! That aren’t the law, Mr. Wells, that aren’t.”

“But look here, Candy, old fellow,” I said, desperately anxious not to put the wind up the poor chap, of course, but just as keen not to let Mrs. Bradley down, “they may think you did do it. And, look here, Candy, there are some very rich and clever people interested in you, and they’re going to get you off, but they can’t do it unless you tell everything you know.”

He sat there as dumb as the Mona Lisa, and looking about as soft, and the way he kept twisting his fingers got on my nerves. He wouldn’t say a word, so, at last, knowing that time was passing, I determined to try a bold shot. I leaned forward and said in my sternest rebuke-of-the-old-Adam tone, which, in a priest, of course, amounts to about the same thing as an army officer’s parade voice:

“Why don’t you confess that you spent the evening with the murdered girl?”

He jumped so suddenly that I jumped too.

“You—!” he said. “It weren’t the evening, damn you, it were only the afternoon!”

“Everybody knows about it, Bob,” I said, gently, hoping that the lie would be forgiven me. “So why don’t you make a clean breast of it? It was in the evening that you saw Meg Tosstick.” Sheer bluff of course, and I was ashamed of it.

“I didn’t do it, I tell you! I didn’t do it!” he said.

“I know you didn’t, you fool!” I said, trying a little savaging. “But what chance do you give anybody, if you won’t tell the truth?”

He licked his lips. A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched and twitched.

“Here you are, then,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t have no heart to go to the fête, and I knew we wouldn’t be busy at the Arms until the evening, so I get Mr. Lowry to give me the morning and afternoon off, and I promise to be back by six. Well, we open at half-past six, see, and they chaps at the fête be getting thirsty by then. I get away to Little Hartley, because I told the vicar I didn’t want to play in that there old cricket match against Much Hartley, and I wander about the woods and the common, and have a bit of dinner I brought along, and in the afternoon I sneak back to Saltmarsh to see Meg, and have a few things out with her. I have no chance before to talk to the poor maid because Mrs. Lowry was always for keeping me away. Afeared I’d do her a cruel turn, I do suppose,” added Bob, his face darkening.

“Did she say that?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No. Her would always say maid was too bad, or too tired, or was asleep, or was suckling, or some excuse, to keep me from her.”

“Then you didn’t see Meg to speak to from the time the child was born until August Bank Holiday?” I asked.

“That’s in the way of it,” he answered. “Anyway, I knowed the master and missus and all the gals and men ’ud be at the fête in the afternoon, so, with them thinking I was away to a day’s holiday on my own, I could see it were my chance to get speech with Meg. I wasn’t going to frit the poor maid; only ask she, pleasant-like, who was her fancy chap, and did she prefer him to I, and suchlike. But not rancorious, Mr. Wells…” He looked at me pleadingly, but I said nothing at all, so at last he continued:

“Well, Meg looked proper frit when I walked in. Her was white and looked weary. Couldn’t see nothing of babby. Her had it too close and all covered up not to have its looks give nawthen away, I reckon.

“ ‘Why, Bob,’ her says in a whisper, ‘How be?’

“ ‘I be fine,’ I says, ‘How be you?’

“ ‘I be all right,’ her says, ‘Oh, Bob, have ee come to upbraid me? Don’t ee upbraid me, Bob, nor yet miscall me, my dear,’ her says, ‘for I can’t abide no hard words, I be that weak. And don’t ee ask Babby’s surname, neither,’ her says. So we set and talk, and at last her says:

“ ‘I do know I lost ee for good and all, Bob,’ her says, ‘but do ee lay thy face down on pillow beside me, and give me a bit of comfort, my dear.’

“So I lays down my head on pillow, ah, and body, too, on top of quilt, and puts arm over she, having took off collar and tie for comfort first.”

“The—the knitted silk tie?” I gasped. He nodded, and then smiled sardonically, and said,

“Ah. Funny bit, that there, weren’t it? Well, like silly chap, happen I fall asleep, what with the quiet and the warmth and such, and first thing I know, Meg shaking I and telling I to get up and go away. Sure enough, when I look at clock, five past six her say, so I hop up in a hurry, part my hair with Meg’s comb, put on collar and can’t see tie. Meg say she’ll find un and hide un, but I must go. Poor maid seem so set on it, and so frit to think somebody might see me there, that I pack up and go. I get another tie from my own bedroom, put on my barman’s overall, and step down into the bar. Mr. and Mrs. Lowry wasn’t back from fête, but the gals and Charlie Peachey, the other barman with me, soon come in, and we open as usual. But master and missus never come in until goodness knows when that night, for Charlie and I close the house at half-past ten, and he go back to the fête for the dancing, and the gals with him, and I go upstairs. I tap at Meg’s door, but get no answer, so I twist the handle, but the door was locked, so I go along to my bed.”

“At what time, exactly, would you say you got to your own room?” I asked. Candy considered the question.

“Not before a quarter to eleven and not after eleven o’clock,” he said. “But, of course, it’s that there quarter of an hour I were down the cellar they’ve got against me.”

I spoke a few reassuring words to him, but I knew that that quarter of an hour was the snag. At last I took my leave, for my time was up.

“So you see,” I said to Daphne, as we sat at tea, “the poor girl must have been murdered before Candy went up to bed that night. The medical evidence at the inquest put the time of death between nine o’clock and ten-thirty.”

“Just the time,” said Daphne, “when Candy would be kept busy, and could not interfere.”

“Just the time,” I said bitterly, “when the damn fool decided to go down the cellar and bring up some more beer for the jug and bottle department, presided over by Mrs. Lowry.”

“Well, I suppose she asked him to go down the cellar!” retorted Daphne.

“How could she? She wasn’t in the house at all,” I replied. “Bob told me that both the Lowrys were out, and that he doesn’t know when they came home. Mrs. Lowry simply left word that some time during the evening the job was to be done.”

“Hm. It looks beastly suspicious to me,” said Daphne.

“My dear girl, do be reasonable,” I said.

“Well, Noel, it’s rather funny that just at the time when they’re out of the house and no suspicion can attach to either of them, poor Meg gets murdered, isn’t it? Not to mention the fact that it was also the very first time Mrs. Lowry had left her to herself!”

“But, Daphne,” I said—laughing, I must confess, at her simplicity —“naturally the murderer would prefer to attack somebody in the Lowrys’ house while they were not there. It’s only common sense to suppose that the murderer has some gumption, isn’t it?”

“Anyway, I hate those Lowrys,” said Daphne. “I’m sure there was something fishy when they took Meg to live with them in the first place.”

“But your uncle, I understood, paid for her board and lodging,” I said weakly.

“Oh, did he?” said Daphne. Nor could I persuade her to add anything to the rather moot point suggested by the question.

“Well, anyway, while Bob’s story is fresh in my mind,” I said, “I think I’ll dot it down in shorthand, so that I can tell it to Mrs. Bradley in his own words, as nearly as I can remember them.”

I have rather a remarkable verbal memory, and I am a fairly accomplished shorthand writer. I can do my hundred and forty, of course. So, armed with Bob’s depositions, we returned to Saltmarsh, and I went immediately to the Manor House to see Mrs. Bradley.

“The first person to interview,” said she, after I had read Bob’s yarn to her, “is the girl who was taking Mrs. Lowry’s place in the jug and bottle department that evening. By the way, isn’t it rather unusual to have the host’s wife serving in that particular department?”

“It’s to cater for motorists,” I said. “It’s more like an off-licence department, really, only they stick to the old name so as to be able to keep it open on Sundays.”

“Ah, yes, that would be so, I dare say,” said Mrs. Bradley.

She cackled, as startlingly as usual, and we sallied forth to the Mornington Arms.

“You don’t know which maid was serving in the off-licence—I mean jug-and-bottle department on August Monday evening,” she said, as we walked along the road, “and so we had better have speech with Barman Charlie Peachey, I think. What kind of a man is Charlie?”

“Oh, all right, I suppose,” I said cautiously. “He doesn’t come to church. He’s a Roman Catholic.”

“Oh, well, he’s the less likely to be a murderer,” said Mrs. Bradley. I was still pondering this queer axiom when we arrived in front of the public house. The Mornington Arms is no longer the small, whitewashed, flat-fronted village inn that it used to be. It is set back from the road in its own tea-gardens, and was rebuilt, about three years before the murder, in the form of an Elizabethan half-timbered house. It can garage twelve cars and has ten bedrooms. The Lowrys were making a very good thing out of it, I believe. They catered solely for summer tourists and visitors, of course. During the winter months they did nothing beyond supplying the village with beer.

“You go in,” said Mrs. Bradley to me, “and have something to drink, and get Charlie to tell you the girl’s name. I’ll wait in the Post Office.”

I went in and ordered a gin and ginger, and tackled Peachey squarely. He was a thin, sandy-haired young man whom I hardly knew because of his Roman opinions.

“Who was in charge in the jug and bottle on Bank Holiday evening?” I asked.

“Mabel,” said Peachey. “Want to see her, Mr. Wells?”

“She couldn’t make some excuse to slip down to the Post Office, could she?” I asked. “I could talk to her better there.”

“Sure she can,” said Peachey. “She’s not doing anything, and madam’s making herself pleasant to a shooting party from London, and the boss is out, I know.”

There was no-one else in the bar, so I leaned towards Peachey and asked quietly:

“What’s been going on here, Peachey? Was there ever a baby or not?”

He wiped a few spots of beer off the counter and then said:

“It’s rum, ain’t it, Mr. Wells? There was a babby all right, because we all heard un cry. Ah, but what’s happened to that babby is a rare mystery.”

“Well, look here,” I said, feeling somewhat Sherlock Holmesian, of course, and beginning to pant like a bally bloodhound when it sees land in sight, “what do you yourself think? Hang it, man,” I said, “you knew Bob. Presumably you knew something of the dead girl. What was it all about? Who did kill Meg Tosstick, eh? And where’s the baby?”

Peachey said, doubtfully:

“I don’t know as I ought to talk. You ain’t the police, Mr. Wells. Still, if you won’t let it go no further—”

I promised, but said that I should like to talk things over with my friends. However, if he wanted me not to, I wouldn’t.

“The little sharp party from the Manor?” he said. I assented.

“Oh, all right then. Mind, I don’t know nawthen. Tis only what I thinks. You understand that?”

“Oh, quite,” I said.

“Well, then, I reckon it’s that there Mr. Burt. And what’s more, I reckon he had a rare facer when poor young Bob got taken up. He meant to fix it on the boss.”

I gave the man a shilling for his trouble, as he was not of our own flock, and sauntered out as soon as I had finished my drink. Sure enough, by the time I had strolled to the Post Office and helped Mrs. Bradley choose a couple of picture postcards, along came Mabel Pusey, the barmaid, looking extremely scared. She asked for a three-halfpenny stamp, stuck it on the letter she was holding and we all walked out of the shop. We had taken no notice of Mabel, of course, while we were inside the Post Office, but as soon as she had posted her letter, we foregathered. Mabel was certainly in a pitiable state.

“Oh, ma’am,” she said to Mrs. Bradley immediately, “I know it’s going to get poor Bobby hanged, but how was I to know? How was I to know? Mrs. Lowry said before she went as we might need some more pale ale and perhaps a dozen of stout up, and how was I to know? I’d have bitten out my tongue before I’d have told the police Bob was down there for a quarter of an hour, and after nine o’clock, too, but how was I to know they’d twist it into the time he murdered her?”

“Listen, Mabel,” said Mrs. Bradley, kindly, in her wonderful voice. “You want to help Candy, don’t you?”

“Oh, I do, I do!” said the girl. “Why before Meg Tosstick had him—” She stopped, but it was easy to finish the sentence. The poor girl was in love with Candy, and she felt that words of hers were sentencing him to death. Decidedly an unpleasant thought, of course. We nodded sympathetically. Mrs. Bradley said:

“And how many bottles did he bring up out of the cellar that night?”

Mabel answered:

“About three dozen. Certainly not less.”

“Where is the cellar, Mabel?”

“It’s under the garages now, where the old house stood before we was rebuilt. To get down the cellar we have to cross the bit of yard and go in the first lock-up, and the trap door to the cellar is in the far right-hand corner. You switch on the electric light on the wall of the lock-up over the trap door, and that lights up in the cellar and down you go. It’s where that old passage used to end.”

“And ought it to have taken Bob Candy fifteen minutes to bring up three dozen bottles, Mabel, do you think?”

“Well,” said Mabel, hesitating in order to consider the question, “in court I’d say it would, perjury or no perjury, I would, and of course, the knife and boots, little tyke, wasn’t there, so you can’t hardly say, what with one thing and another.”

“What difference would the knife and boots boy make, Mabel?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

“The knife and boots had ought to be there at the top of the steps to take the bottles from Bob and deposit ’em in a little soap-box on wheels Bob made, and wheel ’em into the jug and bottle,” replied Mabel, “but the knife and boots was at the fête. Said the missus had given him the whole day, and he wasn’t coming home till morning. And he never, neither, the little runt.” She spoke with honest indignation. “He didn’t half get a flea in his ear, neither. They was just locking up for the night when he come tearing in. It was nearly one o’clock then. ‘Boys will be boys,’ says the master, but madam, I thought she’d have fetched him a clout side the head.”

“What did Bob do when he first heard that Meg was going to have a baby?” asked Mrs. Bradley. Mabel shrugged.

“He cursed a bit and got drunk, but got over it after a bit, you know,” she said. She sighed. “Chaps aren’t like us maids, ma’am. Oh, Bob got over it all right, I’d say, and shall do if asked in court.”