Saltmarsh Murders

CHAPTER XVII

mrs. bradley sticks her pig

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“Precisely,” 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 before 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 prearranged, 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 cocoanuts 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.

Well, I felt just the same about this murderer business. All along I had felt that Lowry’s name was on the very tip of my tongue, and as soon as Mrs. Bradley actually pronounced it I sort of realised, as it were, that I had known it all along. Daphne was openly, blatantly and really rather vulgarly triumphant.

“I knew it! I knew it!” she shrieked. “Didn’t I say he was a horrid fat pig!”

We shut her up, of course. It wasn’t decent to talk like that. After all, the man would be hanged soon enough, and I have never agreed with those who would speak ill of the dead.

“But you don’t really mean that Lowry killed Meg Tosstick and Cora McCanley?” asked little Gatty.

“Remember the word ‘proxy,’ Mr. Gatty,” I said, feeling fearfully bucked, of course, to think that I had put my finger on the spot. “Mrs. Bradley’s point is that Lowry incited Candy to murder Meg by telling him that she had had an affair with the negro and that her illegitimate child was a half-breed.”

“Ah!” said Gatty. “Clever work, of course. But wasn’t that taking rather a lot for granted, Mrs. Bradley?”

“It was,” replied Mrs. Bradley, with her dry cackle.

“But, of course,” said I, fearfully conscious that Daphne was drinking me in, “these inn-keepers have to be pretty good psychologists. Can’t keep an inn unless you’ve got your wits about you, can you, Mrs. Bradley?”

“Surely not,” said the little old woman, making no attempt, as a lesser personality would have done, to snatch the laurel wreath from my head and bung it on her own. It was my little hour, and she let me get away with it. A bit sardonic of her, really, I suppose. The ‘sufficient rope’ idea, I expect, if the truth were known, although the word ‘rope’ in a tale of murder is a bit sinister, of course. But little Gatty wanted his money’s worth.

“Well, what about Cora McCanley, then?” he demanded, “Did he prevail upon someone to murder her too?”

“Well, to understand all the points in connection with the murder of Cora McCanley,” said Mrs. Bradley, “we have to consider, not only the peculiar psychology of the murderer, but the psychological and physiological type to which Cora McCanley belonged. Right from the very first I could not understand how she could bear to spend long months in that lonely bungalow without any amusement or mental relaxation whatever. I soon came to the conclusion that she was not without amusement, and immediately I suspected the presence, in or near Saltmarsh, of a lover. But how was it, I asked myself at first, that a jealous stag among men like Burt should be unaware of what was going on? Their last quarrel, which was partly overheard by William Coutts, assured me that Burt was not deceived.

“The smugglers’ passage explained a good deal of what otherwise would have been mysterious in Cora’s actions. That she had a lover seemed to me absolutely certain, but I could not decide how they managed to meet secretly, until I heard about the smugglers’ passage. The passage was their secret way, the Cove their meeting place. When Burt was out on his smuggling excursions, which some of you do not know about, Cora and her lover met, very comfortably, in the Bungalow itself. At the first sign of Burt’s return, the lover made his escape. He went by the underground passage if Burt came overland home, and out of the skylight if Burt returned by way of the underground passage. There he crouched on the roof until the coast was clear. Then, as soon as Cora gave the signal, he would drop from the roof to the ground—see the advantages of a bungalow over a house! —and would made his escape past the stone quarries and back to the Mornington Arms and so home. You realise the importance of the position of the Mornington Arms? It was built well away from the village and the village’s gossiping tongue.”

“Then when Cora heard Mr. Gatty on the roof that night, she must have thought Low—her lover had gone mad,” I said.

“She must have been frightfully alarmed when Burt fired his revolver,” said William.

“Go to bed, William,” said Mrs. Coutts, apparently aware for the first time of his presence in the select group. William was about to argue the point when Daphne said:

“Yes, come on, Bill. I’m coming as well. We’ll talk through the wall if you like. We’ve heard all the thrills.” So off they went. I formed the impression that Mrs. Bradley was glad to see the back of them. I rather gathered that their youthful presence cramped her style a bit.

“You don’t think that Cora and Lowry were at the Bungalow enjoying themselves together while Burt and Yorke were savaging me by the Cove, do you?” enquired old Coutts.

“Impossible, Bedivere!” snapped the woman, handing her spouse the marital back-chat, as usual.

“Why impossible?” asked old Gatty. “Quite a sensible idea.”

“If you want to know,” said Mrs. Coutts, “I saw them dancing together in Sir William’s park. I saw them distinctly.”

“You would,” I thought, remembering her habit of snooping round, and her perfectly beastly mind.

“They were very well-conducted, too,” went on Mrs. Coutts, as though she felt she was scoring off somebody. “I remember thinking that they set a very good example to everyone there, if only the village could be induced to profit by a good example,” she concluded bitterly. “Their behaviour compared very favourably with that of nearly every other person in the park.”

“I don’t doubt it for an instant,” said Mrs. Bradley, politely. “I suppose you remained in the park all the evening?”

I avoided Mrs. Bradley’s eye, which seemed to be seeking mine, in case I should begin to giggle. Not that I am an hysterical subject, of course, but I do sometimes giggle at the wrong time.

“All the evening,” said Mrs. Coutts, unwillingly. She seemed to resent Mrs. Bradley’s questioning, although she had been all over her at one time, of course.

“All the evening until you went home and found that Mr. Coutts was missing from home,” I reminded her. Old Coutts glowered. He hated to be reminded of that evening. I suppose he did get pretty badly knocked about by Burt and Yorke.

“But about the murder of Cora McCanley,” said little Gatty. “I take it that Cora and Lowry left the park together at about the same time as Mrs. Coutts went back to the vicarage, and—”

“Oh, no!” I burst out. “Mrs. Bradley has already shown that Cora was murdered on the Tuesday.”

“Ah,” said little Gatty, showing his wolf’s fangs. “Then I will try again. Lowry, the inn-keeper, was Cora McCanley’s lover, wasn’t he?”

The Coutts and Mrs. Gatty assented. Mrs. Bradley smiled like the crocodile that welcomes little fishes in, and Sir William scowled at the carpet. Only Bransome Burns, the financier, made no sign at all. He hadn’t, all along, of course.

“Well, Cora McCanley was blackmailing him for some reason—”

“Burt kept her short of money,” I interpolated.

“Ah,” said Burns, waking up, “silly game, blackmail. Always get the worst of it in the end.”

“Well, she did, rather, didn’t she?” I said. “Getting done in, I mean. Funny both the girls were strangled.”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

“Well, you would think the second murder would have been done a different way.”

“Oh, murderers usually repeat themselves,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Yes, but in this case,” I said, intending to remind her that possibly we were talking of two murderers, not one; but Gatty interrupted me.

“She was blackmailing him on the Tuesday when he joined her at the Bungalow, then?”

“How could he know it was safe to join her at the Bungalow?” asked Mrs. Gatty.

“Why, Burt was at the Cove and along the beach with us on that guarding and patrolling stunt, and Yorke was at the cinema in Wyemouth,” said I.

“Yes, very well. He strangled Cora and dragged her body up that secret passage to the inn—” said old Gatty.

“But he couldn’t!” interrupted Margaret Kingston-Fox, who had been following the story with very close attention.

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Gatty, to everybody’s surprise.

“Because it was bricked up, and had spiders’ webs all over it,” said Margaret. All those present knew that, of course, by this time, because Mrs. Bradley had announced it at the lecture.

“You forget Mrs. Gatty’s health and cleanliness campaign,” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing.

“What?” I said. “Do you mean that that was a put-up job?”

“Completely,” said Mrs. Gatty, beaming. “Mrs. Bradley said she had to know whether that passage had an outlet at the inn.”

“You see, Noel,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning to me, “when that bomb was dropped about the blocked-up end to the smugglers’ passage, I thought for one wild instant that my whole theory of the crimes was wrong. It seemed to me that the passage must open into the inn. Then it occurred to me that if I had proof that the passage had a new exit, also in the inn, my case would be stronger than before. Besides, I had felt all along that the outlet in the cellar, which is now under the garages, you remember, was much too public a way for anybody to be able to use in safety. So Mrs. Gatty and I put our heads together, and it was her brilliant idea that if a man wanted to be away from the world for a longish period of time, the best thing for him to do would be to lie and soak in his bath. When Mrs. Gatty discovered that the Lowrys’ own private bathroom was on the ground floor of the inn, it was all over bar the shouting. The fact that Lowry and Mrs. Lowry were brother and sister and not man and wife was sufficient to explain everything else.”

“Well, I’m damned,” I said. Apparently Mrs. Coutts was, too, for she never said a word, and she is usually on to a little strong language like a terrier on a rat.

We sat and drank it in about the passage.

“Then they got Meg Tosstick’s body to the sea along the passage,” I said, “and the baby, too—”

“He went along the passage to kill Cora McCanley in the Bungalow,” said old Gatty, who seemed to be getting quite a sleuth-hound, “and brought her body back to the inn the same way—as I said just now.”

“So that’s that,” said Sir William.

“Not quite,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I’ve a piece of positive proof about the use of the smugglers’ passage which may interest you. You remember the substitution of Cora McCanley’s body for that of Meg Tosstick in the coffin, don’t you? Well, of course, the substitution was made at the inn. At this point Lowry showed an amount of audacity which really deserved to come off. But, acting upon his own initiative, the police inspector had got on to the undertaker who was given the job of arranging Meg Tosstick’s funeral. It took him some time, because the undertaker was not a local man. He did not come from Wyemouth Harbour, either, as most people believed, but from a place called Harmington in the next county. He got the job, he thought, because he was some sort of connection of Lowry. It was a motor-funeral, you remember, so that distance was no object, and in any case the town the undertaker came from is less than twenty miles away. The advantage of that particular town was that, for Lowry’s purpose, it was sufficiently obscure.

“Well, greatly to their credit, the police got on to this man, and persuaded him to try and recall the build and features of the girl whose body he had screwed down in the coffin. He was shown photographs of about fifteen young women, including those of Meg and Cora, and, despite the evidences of strangulation with their resultant disfigurement, he unhesitatingly picked out Cora as the girl whose coffin he had actually supplied. He gave us the measurements then. Oh, it was Cora, without a doubt, for whom Meg Tosstick’s coffin was made. They proved it to the hilt. You remember what a fine big girl she was, compared with Meg?”