Saltmarsh Murders

CHAPTER IX

the village speaks its mind

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“That last remark Mabel made is important, don’t you think?” asked Mrs. Bradley, as we walked on together. I considered it.

“Why, especially?” I asked, feeling fogged, of course.

“Bob had got over his resentment long before the murder,” said Mrs. Bradley. “It rather knocks the motive on the head, doesn’t it?”

“One moment,” I said. “This Mabel Thingummy herself. Could she have done it, do you think?”

Mrs. Bradley pursed her thin lips into a kind of little beak, and then shook her head.

“You need strong hands, and a lot of nerve, and even then it must be a very unpleasant way of killing anybody,” she said. “You are arguing from the point of view that Mabel is in love with Bob and might have wished Meg Tosstick out of the way. I don’t think there is much in it. Mabel doesn’t strike me as the jealous, vindictive possessive type of lover. Besides, if she were fond of Bob and had committed the murder herself, she would confess in order to save him, wouldn’t she? Still, we could keep her in mind. It’s a point, certainly, that Bob was not the only person who had a motive for putting the girl out of the way.”

“Thank you,” I said, quite bucked, of course, that she had not turned the idea down flat. “Pray sum up will you? Shall I take down?”

“It would be nice of you,” said Mrs. Bradley. We had been walking towards the Manor House, and as she spoke, we entered its gates. In a few moments we were in the library.

“First,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I believe if Candy could give the story of that Bank Holiday afternoon to the Court as he gave it to you, any jury in the land would acquit him. It was very affecting, and very possibly true. Secondly, it is obvious that if he could provide himself with an alibi for that quarter of an hour in the beer cellar, the case against him would fall flat. Personally, I think the police acted very hastily and ill-advisedly in arresting the young man so soon, even on the strength of that quarter of an hour. It was exceedingly unlucky for Candy that the knife and boot boy should not have been there to perform his usual duties, wasn’t it?”

“The trouble is,” I said, “that everybody was at the fête, of course. And, because of that fact, everybody in the village will have much the same alibi. Even if their friends can’t vouch for them—”

“Everybody in the village will not have the same alibi,” said Mrs. Bradley, interrupting me. “Incidentally, you noted the fact that Candy didn’t get sight of the baby, I suppose?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Poor little thing. It must be deformed, mustn’t it? Or do you think he did see it, and was lying for some reason?”

“There are so many kinds of deformity,” said Mrs. Bradley, seriously. I waited to hear what more she had to say, but apparently her remarks for the day were concluded. She did not even bother to answer my last question, but, just as I was about to take myself off, she looked me in the eye and said:

“You really do still believe in Candy’s innocence, I suppose?”

“I’d pledge my soul!” I exclaimed.

“Rash Faustus,” retorted the little old woman, and her evil cackling pursued me down the drive. As I walked back through the twilight from the Manor House to the vicarage, I found myself still wondering what had become of the baby. Nobody seemed interested in the fact that apparently it had disappeared since the murder. I called at Constable Brown’s cottage and put the point.

“It’s funny you should ask that,” he said. “See here, Mr. Wells, what do you make of this, like?”

He produced from a drawer a visiting card. It had Gatty’s name on the one side and on the other, in roughly printed capitals, the words:

“Where is Meg Tosstick’s baby?”

“Who did this?” I asked.

“Ah,” said the constable, scratching his chin with the edge of the small rectangle of pasteboard, “there, sir, you do me; proper you do me. I don’t know. It weren’t given to me, of course. May be you’re thinking it was. Oh, no, sir. Mrs. Coutts brought me this here, about two o’clock this afternoon. ‘Here, Brown,’ she says, holding it like it would have a nip of her hand if she didn’t look to it, ‘what’s all this?’

“ ‘All this, mum,’ I says, like I might say it to you now. ‘All this, mum,’ I says, sort of silly like. ‘Why, I don’t know,’ I says. ‘What is it, mum, if I may ask.’

“ ‘I’ve brought it to you to find out,’ she snaps. Well, beg your pardon, Mr. Wells, but she do snap. Snaps like my brindled whippet bitch used to. You remember her, I daresay. Master William wanted one of her last litter, but his aunt put the cash in a missionary box. Well, I looks it over and I can’t make nought out on it except what it says. ‘I’ll look into it, mam,’ I says. ‘Wants investigating carefully, this do.’

“Course, I haven’t done nothing about it, Mr. Wells, because, to tell you the truth, I don’t know where I are. One thing is quite certain, how I look at it. It isn’t a Gatty job.”

“A Gatty job?” I said.

“A Gatty job,” repeated the constable. He turned the card over and showed me the name and address.

“Don’t mean to tell me, Mr. Wells,” he said, “as Mr. or Mrs. Gatty sent this, when they could have come along themselves to the vicarage and said it. If they wanted it kept secret who they were, why send a visiting card? It aren’t sensible, Mr. Wells.”

I agreed. Curiously enough, Mrs. Coutts met me at the front door of the vicarage with a similar bit of pasteboard in her hand.

“What? What?” I said.

“I know it can’t be the Gattys,” said the woman, pushing the visiting card at me, “but do just run along to the Moat House and see.”

I groaned, but went, of course. The Gattys were in, and denied all knowledge of the printing on the back of the card. They handled it pretty freely, but then, so had I, and so had Mrs. Coutts and the rest of them. Fingerprints, I mean. No good for fingerprints. I clawed the card away from them and went back to the vicarage.

“Another one has come,” said Mrs. Coutts. Old Coutts had gone up to bed with neuralgia, and Daphne and William were playing quoits tennis out of sight of the front door.

The next day happened to be Sunday. On Sundays we breakfast at eight o’clock, on weekdays at eight-thirty. I have never discovered the reason for this unless it is to get the vicar out of bed soon enough for him to have a last glance over his sermon for Morning Prayer. I usually have to be wakened, therefore, on Sundays, but on this particular Sunday morning something roused me with a start. I sat up in bed, and observed a large squelchy object stuck on the outside of the bedroom window. It had all the appearance of an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. I arose and inspected it. It was an over-ripe, flattened-out tomato. Blinking, as much to clear the brain as the eyeballs, I took another goggle at the frightful fruit. Beyond it I could see the vicarage hedge, and beyond the hedge a collection of the lads of the village. They were engaged, apparently, in plastering over-ripe fruit, bad eggs, and chunks of horse and cow manure over every window of the vicar’s residence. I opened the window, rashly, as it turned out, and began to shout at them. Just at that moment the window beside mine was flung up and young William’s boyish, excited bleat announced:

“If you don’t cheese it, you ugly stiffs—”

A chunk of horse-dung took him over the eyebrow. At the same instant a last season’s egg got me in the left ear. We both shut our windows, shot out on the landing and made for the bathroom. William was seriously annoyed. He didn’t know many expletives, but those he knew he made full use of. I couldn’t very well follow suit, of course, but I listened sympathetically.

“But what’s it for?” enquired William, scrubbing his now shining face upon the towel. “What’s the giddy idea? That’s what I want to know.”

I charged out to dig up the old man, closely followed by William. Daphne came out on to the landing. She had her blue dressing gown on—rather jolly. Her hair was rumpled, of course. Small kid sort of effect. I managed a hasty but quite charmingly satisfactory salute. She rubbed it off, absentmindedly, of course, and told us gratuitously, of course, about the mob of sans culottes at the front. Mrs. Coutts, up and dressed and not a hair unbrushed, joined us, and we all goggled out of the landing window. The populace had stopped chucking the soft fruit and other bouquets, and were beginning on the chunks of soil and the stones course. The dining room windows seemed to be copping it rather badly, and a chunk of rock about the size of a large grapefruit crashed through my bedroom window and broke a picture called Nymphs at Play which used to hang over the head of my bed. I didn’t like the picture, but it served to annoy Mrs. Coutts, and she used to push in every morning, to my certain knowledge, and turn it face to the wall, before the maid came to make the bed.

The general din brought old Coutts out. He had arrived at the shirt and trouser stage and had not shaved. Nothing would satisfy him, when he had had a look at the ancient society of rock-chuckers, but to harangue them.

“Useless to do so from the open window of a bedroom,” he said, surveying the two-foot hole in my casement. “I will go into the garden and enquire into this disgraceful demonstration.”

Even Mrs. Coutts, who usually represents the Church Militant in times of stress, thought this a damn-fool idea, and I am compelled to state that I upheld her. At least, I upheld her until I caught Daphne’s eye. When I did, I said that if he went, I would go with him. He didn’t even stop to put his coat and waistcoat on, but marched out at the front door and began by booming at them. His voice, on this occasion, was the voice he keeps for weekdays when we have the schoolchildren en masse in church, and they hoof the fronts of the pews and surreptitiously play football with the hassocks, and whack each other’s shins with the edges of the hymnbooks, and cough aggressively after the first six minutes of the address until the pronouncement of the Benediction.

“Good people,” megaphoned old Coutts, “what is the meaning of this?”

A dozen voices answered him in a kind of chant:

“Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby? Us ask the landlord! He don’t know! Us ask his missus! Her don’t know! Where be Meg Tosstick’s babby?”

After that, it sounded like the new setting we had to the Te Deum last September, or a dog fight at the Battersea Kennels, and the air was filled with stones. Suddenly there was a sharp report, and somebody on the outskirts of the crowd yelled:

“Duck your heads, lads! They’m shooting at us!”

Sure enough, young William’s airgun spoke the second time, and there was a decidedly anguished yelp from the ranks of the besiegers. The vicar swung round.

“William!” he yelled. “Stop that! Do you hear!”

“All right!” screamed William. “But I’ve got another slug ready for whoever bungs the first brick. You howling cads!” he continued, addressing the villagers. “If my aunt and sister weren’t holding the seat of my bags, I’d come down and make you sit up!”

The vicar took advantage of the diversion created by his nephew to announce that he would receive a deputation after Morning Prayer if they had a grievance. They were so used, I suppose, to cheesing their conversation when the old lad spoke, that they listened fairly quietly while he laid down the law about damage to property and unprovoked assault, and, at the end of his decidedly spirited address— delivered on an empty stomach, too, of course—they melted away without much backchat, and the vicar and I returned to the fortress and assessed the damage.

“I shall pay for the window out of the Bible Class Social Fund Box,” said old Coutts, sucking his finger which he had advanced too near the jagged edge of what was left of the pane.

“And in the meantime, Noel will have to sleep with William,” interpolated the woman.

“Not on your life!” I hastily, but, of course, ill-advisedly remarked. Mrs. Coutts spent breakfast time in recriminatory remarks directed chiefly at me. The village, I gathered, thought I had sneaked the baby. I let her run on. Really, it’s the only way.

I must confess that I felt a bit like the first missionaries must have felt as we walked into church behind the choir that Sunday morning, but the service was allowed to run its usual course, and although the tougher element of the village sat at the back and chewed gum, there was no disorder and no interruption. After the Benediction had been pronounced, the vicar stood on the steps of the chancel, cleared his throat, looked all round the church, and said:

“I am ready to meet in the vestry any person or persons with a grievance against me or against any of my household.”

He was not belligerent, but he sounded dangerous. However, two youths and an older man were at the vestry door when we were ready to go back to the vicarage for lunch. The older chap, a respectable bloke, but an atheist and a postman, was the spokesman. He took off his cap when old Coutts invited him into the vestry, and spoke quite respectfully, but there was no mincing of words. He said bluntly:

“I wasn’t at your house throwing they stones. I don’t hold with misdirected violence nor ’timidation. But us wants to know what you and your good lady done with that poor girl’s babby, Mr. Coutts. Us knows you be the father, but where be little un?”

Old Coutts went most frightfully red.

“My good man,” he said, in a kind of choking gargle, “you are being profoundly, utterly and ludicrously slanderous. Your remarks are actionable. Be careful what you say.”

He paused and scowled at the postman fiercely, snorting somewhat.

The man stuck to his point.

“Beg pardon, Mr. Coutts,” he said, “but that poor girl was living under your roof when it happened, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” said the vicar, grimly.

“Unless it were Mr. Wells,” said the frightful fellow, suddenly turning on me.

“I deny it,” I said feebly.

“I’ll let the lads know, then,” said the postman, “but I doubt whether they’ll be satisfied with plain denials. It’s facts we’re after, Mr. Coutts.”

“Then you can go to hell to get them,” said old Coutts, irascibly, forgetting, of course, where we were.

So the bird slouched off, taking the two youths with him.

“I’m going to get Burt and his negro and Sir William to put out anybody who causes a disturbance at Evensong,” said the old boy, grimly. He’d been a missionary at some period in a probably purple past, and seemed well on to the psychology of the thing, for a disturbance at Evensong there certainly was. In fact, a bally riot would perhaps convey a more correct and enlightening impression.

Whether the second lesson was an unfortunate choice, or whether the time for the hurling of the first hymnbook had been pre-arranged, we shall never know;—any more, I suppose, than we shall know the same thing about the stool chucked by the old Scotswoman at Archbishop Laud’s backer in the year sixteen-thirty or forty something. Anyway, it came whizzing along, and only just missed me. I was reading the lesson, of course. I didn’t know what to do, but the vicar’s voice behind me said:

“Carry on, Wells,” and I was aware that he was standing beside me at the lectern. Suddenly the air was full of hymnbooks, and amid the frightful din—I stopped reading, of course—I had to—I could hear Mrs. Gatty’s voice declaiming:

“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”

Most inapposite, of course.