Skeleton Island (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Well, one thing,” said Laura, cheerfully, “the fact that you were wearing a life-jacket rules out the suggestion that you were attempting suicide, and that’s a big point in your favour. Another thing is that we’re as certain as can be that Colin is no more guilty than you are of causing Ferrars’ death.”

  “Thank you,” said Howard. “Your visit, and what you tell me, have done me more good than all the medicine I’ve been given. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “He does get his language off the peg, doesn’t he?” said Laura to Dame Beatrice, when they were on their way back to the airport. “Rather a hero, though, on the whole, don’t you think?”

  “Neither he nor his son will be out of the wood, though,” said Dame Beatrice, employing the worn-out metaphor with an evil leer, “until it is discovered who did kill Mr. Ferrars. The interesting point, of course, is that the body, which, in addition to some injuries—possibly minor ones—which I thought might have been inflicted before death, had been killed by a heavy fall, yet the body was found lying on grass on the top of the cliff.”

  “Somebody winched the body up from those flat rocks which run out from the base of the cliffs thereabouts and left it on the cliff-top,” said Laura.

  “Yes, but who?—and why?” said Dame Beatrice. “The murderer had only to leave the body on the flat rocks for the tide to take it away and for the Race to do the rest. I think I must speak to the fishermen who use those winches, or cranes, or whatever they choose to call them.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Beginnings of a Synthesis

  “…we heard voices already drawing near us…along the shore.”

  On Laura’s return to the school she was met by Colin, who informed her that Fiona had left the lighthouse.

  “The police have taken our home address. That’s where she’ll stay until we go to Jersey,” he said. “I expect they’ll tail her, of course, but they don’t really suspect her of anything. It’s the old man who’s in for it, I’m afraid, and he’s the last person on earth to have done such a thing. I’m perfectly certain it’s that convict. I mean, it stands to reason.”

  “Dame Beatrice is going to do a lot more sorting out there, and she has more cards up her sleeve, so she tells me. Be of good cheer,” advised Laura. “What’s going to happen to you next term?”

  “I’ve no idea. I’d like to go to Kent with the school. The building will be near enough ready by the end of April, it seems. Mr. Eastleigh has asked me to stay on, but, of course, if my old man’s in the jug, I can’t, and I shouldn’t think the school would want me, anyway. What would you do in my case?”

  “Keep my chin up and act as though everything was going to be all right.”

  “Excellent advice,” said Dame Beatrice, when she heard of it. “Mr. Howard has given up his tenancy of the lighthouse and, as there is no clause in the lease against sub-letting, I have arranged that a large board, indicating that the place is to be let, fully furnished and with all modern conveniences, is to go up today.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “Time will show, child. Possibly a mackerel will attract a couple of sprats. One never knows.”

  Laura worked it out.

  “Fine!” she said. “Count on me. Meanwhile, what’s the procedure?”

  “I have to await a report from the inspector. Armed with what I was able to tell him about Mr. Howard’s part in the affair, he is going to confront the prisoner who escaped, and find out to what extent he is prepared to amend his story of what happened between his escape and his recapture.”

  “How will that help us?”

  “It will not help us to identify the murderer, of course, but it may help to confirm Mr. Howard’s story.”

  “That won’t help Mr. Howard himself, though, will it?”

  “I fear not, but anything which tends to clarify matters may prove of general help, and nobody, I venture to think, can do Mr. Howard more harm than he has already done to himself. Apart from the (to me) all-important theory that he is incapable of committing murder, the idiocy of his proceedings would be enough to persuade me of his innocence.”

  “You mean that he himself has seen, as he told us, that the only sensible course, once he’d spotted the body, would have been to heave it over the cliff and let the rocks and the Race do the rest?”

  “Or simply to have left it where he found it and do nothing about it at all. Masterly inactivity is the keynote of successful living. Queen Elizabeth knew that.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “As I have already indicated, we shall contact the fishermen who must have winched the body from the rocky ledge up to the cliff-top and left it there.”

  “But why on earth should they have done that? Left it there, without a word to a soul, I mean.”

  “We will ask them. I can guess the reason, but we must get it confirmed.”

  There were half a dozen broad, clumsy rowing-boats lying on the cliff-top, and an inspection of them, and of the gear used for launching them, showed the method employed. The derrick worked on a swivel so that the boats, when they were landed, could be placed side by side. The method of raising and lowering them involved attaching two ropes, one at each end of the centre thwart, and then using the winch which was worked from the large cogwheel which possessed a handle. Between the slight promontory (a stretch of flat, bare rock) on which the boats were kept, and the next small headland, which was partly covered by short grass, lay a tiny inlet up which the incoming tide beat viciously, and from which the outgoing tide sucked noisily. Laura stood on the verge of this and gazed down at the deep and threatening water while she waited for Dame Beatrice, who had gone to call on the cottagers.

  She had less than ten minutes to wait. From the nearest cottage, some five hundred yards away, three figures came into Laura’s view. Recognising the smallest of these as Dame Beatrice, she went to meet them. Her employer’s companions were a bearded man in a reefer jacket and a long-haired, tough-looking youth in a fisherman’s jersey. Dame Beatrice introduced them.

  “Mr. John Dory and his son Frank. They are fishermen, and can tell us all that we want to know.”

  “As to that, it isn’t unlikely,” said the long-haired boy. His father spat to leeward and grunted. “Us don’t want to be mixed up in anything.”

  “Keep ourselves to ourselves,” said his father.

  “There is no reason why you should be mixed up in anything,” said Dame Beatrice mildly.

  “That’ll come to be seen.”

  “Police matter, Dad,” said the boy. “She’m in with the inspector. I seen ’em. Better tell her what she want to know.”

  “Of course you had,” said Laura. “Come clean. It’s the only plan.”

  “First,” said Dame Beatrice, “do you go fishing every day?”

  The father and son were silent, and obviously intended to remain so.

  “Well, do you?” demanded Laura.

  “Maybe, and maybe not,” said the boy.

  “What do you know about the body which lay up here near the boats?”

  “Body?”

  “Yes, the body that disappeared later. The body that somebody winched up from the flat rock below.”

  “Don’t know nothen about it,” said the son.

  “Thought he were dead,” amended the father. “Seen him a-laying down there, like you say, spread out like, as if he’d tumbled off the top here, and us thought he’d drownd if us left him. So us lowered boat, me at wheel, Frank in boat, and dragged him aboard and winched him up, and laid him out for dead. Us needn’t have troubled ourselves, for dead he were.”

  “You did not think of going for help, in case a doctor could have done something for him?”

  The younger man made a sound between a laugh and a snort, expressive of sardonic amusement.

  “No doctor couldn’t have done nothen for him assept write out the sustificate,” he said. His father nodded and spat.

  “Dead and gone, and a pr
etty mess he were in,” he committed himself to saying. “Wasn’t no point in wasting no time on a corpus. Us had plenty to do without that.”

  “What, in that mist that came up?” asked Laura.

  “Mist had cleared. Us wouldn’t have spotted him else. ’Sides, nobody but a fool would have lowered a boat while we was all clogged and clobbered be a dirty great bank of fog like that out there,” said the boy. “’Course the mist had cleared, else us wouldn’t have spotted him, would us?”

  “So you left the body up here and went off to your fishing,” said Dame Beatrice. “Did you remember it when you came back? Did you look for it again?”

  “It were gone. Us reckoned his friends must have missed him, and come to look for him, and found him and tookened him away.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  The father spat. The son asked:

  “What do you think? Wasn’t no business of ourn. Didn’t do nothen, of course. Keep ourselves to ourselves, us do.”

  “So what becomes of the inspector’s kineaesthetic theory?” demanded Laura of Dame Beatrice. “He and his fountain pens and typewriters! Has the inspector been to see you?” she demanded, turning again to the fishermen.

  “Ah, on and off. Us didn’t tell him about the body, though,” replied the son.

  “Why not?”

  “Might have got ourself in trouble. Best not to have no dealings with the police. Too nosey by half, they be.”

  “Somebody did attack Ferrars and push him over the cliff, then,” said Laura, as she and Dame Beatrice were walking back to the car. “What they said confirms that much, anyhow. It doesn’t get us any further forward. It teams up with Howard’s story, that’s all. How did you persuade two such reluctant heroes to come out to the cliff-top with you?”

  “I allowed them to suppose that I was Mr. Ferrars’ grandmother—although perhaps to have represented myself as his great-grandmother might have carried the laws of probability a stage further.” She cackled harshly.

  “All I can say is that you didn’t seem to receive from them the ready sympathy which one would have expected to be forthcoming for an aged and interested relative. What happens next, do you suppose?”

  “We go to the police station in the hope that the inspector has returned from his visit to the prison and will have something interesting to tell us. After that, at the right state of the tide (if I have read the tide-tables correctly), there should be a yellow half-moon, large and low, which should suit our purpose and, I have little doubt, the purposes of others, unknown to us except by inference, and, so far, nameless.”

  Knowing that, when her employer talked in this facetious vein, sensible questions were useless, Laura observed that she had always wanted to meet a faceless fiend, and wondered how Manoel had felt when the mist had rolled in upon the island.

  The police station had the appearance of a fortress. It was guarded by an immense gatehouse, beyond which was a broad gravel path and then the station proper, built round a hollow square. Most of the building, the inspector explained, was no longer in use, for the place had originally housed the island garrison, and was far too large for its present purpose.

  He received them in a comfortable office next door to the charge room and gave them chairs.

  “Your story first, if you please, Dame Beatrice,” he said, “and then we’ll see how mine fits on to it.”

  Dame Beatrice described her interview with the fishermen, and added that it tallied with the story told by Howard Spalding.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “either that someone took advantage of the thick sea-mist to push Mr. Ferrars over the edge of the cliff, or that, during a struggle—for, according to the medical evidence, a struggle there must have been—Ferrars got too near the edge without realising it, and took a fatal step backwards.”

  “In the latter case—in fact, in either case—wouldn’t he have yelled out? Nobody has reported such a cry. Still, come to think of it, those fishermen’s houses—old coastguard cottages they are—are stone-built with walls so thick they’d muffle any sound of that sort, except, perhaps, a woman’s high-pitched scream—and even that might be mistaken for a sea-gull in these parts. Then, again, the sea makes such a thundering noise coming up against those rocks and into the fissures between them, that, again, most likely, a shout wouldn’t be heard.”

  “And Howard Spalding, of course, would have been at the top of the lighthouse in the lamp room,” put in Laura. “If he’d been out on the gallery he might have heard something, but not behind that storm-proof glass.”

  “Oh, well, if we haven’t gained much, we haven’t lost anything,” said the inspector. “Now for the chap Marsh. I saw him in the governor’s office, and he was shaking in his shoes, I can tell you. If he did it, it was done in a fit of panic, I should say. I started off by taking him over the story he told us before. I warned him that I had fresh evidence, and that his only chance was to tell me the truth. Of course, he swore he had, so then I began to read his statement over to him, with plenty of pauses where I thought he’d probably lied or left out a bit.

  “My chief concern, of course, was to check his statement about the clothes. He’d already told us two different stories about how he got hold of them, so I thought there might be a third version. What I got out of him this time was very interesting, and again ties up remarkably well with what you got from Mr. Spalding in the Jersey hospital.

  “It seems that he did see the light in a downstairs room in the living-quarters of the lighthouse, and he did go up to the door, hoping to steal food and perhaps clothes. He was lying doggo in the shadow of the tower when he heard Mrs. Spalding call out to her husband. He realised that she was frightened and that there only seemed to be two people in the place, so he stayed in hiding and tried, in his bone-headed way, to make plans. The next thing he knew was that, after a short time—about ten minutes, he reckons—a man came out carrying a pretty big bundle. When the man reached the door in that high, white-washed wall which surrounds the bungalow, Marsh saw, by the gas lamp over the entrance, that the bundle was a bundle of clothes. The braces were dangling, he said, so he knew they were a man’s things.

  “Well, the man set out at a pretty fast clip, as though he knew the ground pretty well, and where he was going, but he was easy to follow because he kept switching on an electric torch and shining it on the ground. Marsh decided to go along with him and, once they were away from the lighthouse, jump on his back, put in a spot of rough work, and make off with the clothes. He admits all this.

  “The only trouble was that he couldn’t make up his mind in a hurry—he’s a dim-witted chap, at the best, and all the various times he’s been inside haven’t sharpened up his initiative—so on they both went. Marsh got wind up, because he realised, from a row of lights, that they were approaching some houses. However, the chap (Spalding, of course) by-passed these, and the way got rougher and rougher, and Marsh dared not get too close in case the chap should hear him and drop the clothes and swing on him. Marsh is an undersized little rat, and more than a bit of a coward, and he had no idea what was the age of the man he was following, only that he was inches taller than himself.

  “Well, at last this man stopped, flashed his torch round in a semi-circle, and then chucked the bundle away. Then he shone the torch again, downwards as before. Marsh chanced it, crawled nearer, and discovered that the man was on the edge of a quarry, but before Marsh could get to him he had turned and begun to trot, flashing his torch as he went. Marsh would have given anything, I should say, for the use of that torch, but he realised that he had only to stay where he was for the rest of the night, and then, as soon as it was light, he would be able to replace some, if not all, of his prison garb.

  “He was not worried, except by the cold. He guessed that the first thing the police and the warders would do would be to cordon off the island from the mainland, but he thought that, with a change of clothes, he would sooner or later get by.”

  “And he got the cha
nge of clothes,” said Laura. “Still, there’s one bit in this thrice-told tale which intrigues me. According to this last version, he did not go into the lighthouse tower, but stayed in shadow at the foot of it. How, then, did he know that there were six steps leading up to the bottom room, and how did he know that the room was locked?”

  “We asked him about that, of course. Obviously he saw the steps when Spalding came down from the top. Spalding had a torch. The bit about his dropping it and Marsh picking it up is poppycock. He admits that now.”

  “I don’t think it was poppycock,” said Laura. “I can’t see him risking the climb down into that quarry in the dark. I think he did pick up Howard’s torch. Howard is certain to have had a spare one. He’s that kind of man. I don’t think Marsh spent the night in the quarry, either. It would have been much too cold. I think he waited until Howard had gone, then used the purloined torch to light himself down into the quarry. I don’t believe, either, that, with a suit of clothes dropped to him, so to speak, from heaven, he would have wasted any time before he got himself changed into them.”

  “You may be right enough there, Mrs. Gavin. It doesn’t make any difference. We don’t think that he could have committed the murder. I don’t believe we ever thought so, and, of course, Spalding and the fishermen have let him out now, quite conclusively. Mr. Ferrars was dead, and still clothed, when Spalding carried the body into the lighthouse. You also think, then, that Marsh, in Mr. Ferrars’ clothes, got food at one of those cottages, as he said he did? Again, what’s the odds? So long as we know he’s in the clear regarding Mr. Ferrars’ death, and so long as we’ve got him safely locked up again, well, san fairy ann, as they used to say, so far as Marsh is concerned.”

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” said Laura, “and I do like to get things clear. Why did he go to the trouble of putting on all Ferrars’ clothes except the shirt and pullover? We know about the socks and the tie.”