The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  It was so unexpected that Garth laughed; he couldn’t help himself, while Marion looked haughty.

  “Really, now! Have I said anything so very amusing?”

  “Not at all, except that it’s a new conversational approach to a doctor. Trade is quite brisk, I suppose. It’s gratifying to hear of your concern.”

  “I’m not in the least concerned, thank you. I was merely trying to show an intelligent interest in your work. However, if you don’t want me to—!” And Marion lifted one shoulder, and her tone changed. “By the way, David.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid our motor-car has broken down again. It’s Vince’s fault, of course. Just because he’s an older man he doesn’t have to be so stupid. But old men often are.”

  “Old?” exclaimed Garth, who was again thinking of Betty. “Vince isn’t old, you know. He’s the same age as I am.”

  “Oh, well, you know what I mean! Anyway, in your case it’s becoming. It makes you look so very wise, with those suave airs and that hatchet-face of yours.”

  “I can’t help my face, Marion. I only wish to heaven I could.”

  “David, I do so wish you wouldn’t keep trying to put me in the wrong. Our car has broken down and I loathe public cabs: that’s all there is to it. Could you please possibly take us home to Hyde Park Gardens? Oh, and you might care for some refreshment afterwards?”

  “With pleasure. Marion, is anything troubling you?”

  “Troubling me?” Up went her voice. “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  Garth employed no chauffeur-engineer. He drove them himself in the big five-seater 20-horsepower Panhard, painted bright green with brass trimmings. Since all the servants had gone to bed, Vince acted as barman and opened a bottle of champagne as they stood round the table in the dining-room.

  The dining-room, its walls panelled in black wood to simulate an obviously mock-baronial hall with heraldic shields, was lighted by electric wall-candles in pink shades. Summer ferns banked the fireplace. Vincent Bostwick, tall and thin in evening-clothes with a very high collar, had just lifted his glass to propose a toast when Marion spoke.

  “David,” she said, “why don’t you get married?”

  Vince set down the glass. Not for the first time Garth wondered why he had never told them about Betty, and now be was wondering if they had heard anything. Evidently they hadn’t, to judge by Vince’s laugh.

  “Sooner or later, old boy,” he said lazily, “every woman gets round to that remark. But you’re wasting your time with David, my dear. He’s one of nature’s bachelors. In any case, I might remind you, he’s got his work.”

  “Yes,” cried Marion, “and that’s half the trouble. That poor fellow there,” her commiserating gesture indicated that Garth might be all of twelve years old, “is so devoted to work that it’s positively morbid. He never goes out; we had almost to drag him to the theatre. And he doesn’t seem to be interested in anything else except murder.”

  “Murder?” repeated the astonished Vince.

  “Oh, well, you know what I meant I mean those stories with the detectives in them, the ones David is always reading. Sherlock Holmes, and L. T. Meade, and Robert Eustace, and those silly books by somebody who writes under the name of ‘Phantom.’”

  “Your mind, my dear,” said Vince, “is like a railway yard with trains shunting past in every direction. I know what you mean, yes. But if that’s being interested in murder as a practical proposition, then I’m interested in it too.”

  “Yes, darling. I’ve often fancied you were. Please don’t evade the point.” Marion swung round. “And forgive my ignorance, David, but just what is this famous work of yours that you’re so busy with? What is neurology?”

  “In general, Marion, it’s the treatment of nervous illnesses. Some of them, admittedly, are organic—”

  Marion looked impatient

  “That’s not much good to me, I’m afraid. ‘Organic?’”

  “It means they derive from some physical cause: epilepsy, to take one example. For years we’ve been more or less governed by the system of Dr. Weir Mitchell, who says all such illnesses are organic. If there’s no physical disturbance, then there’s nothing wrong with the patient that a good rest won’t cure.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. There’s a professor of neurology at the University of Vienna who has been preaching a very different approach. His theories have roused the bitterest kind of opposition; and in some respects, if you want my opinion, he makes it too simple. But sooner or later he may change the attitude of the whole profession.”

  “Really, David? Who’s the man at Vienna?”

  “His name is Freud. Dr. Sigmund Freud.”

  “And what does he say?”

  Somewhere upstairs a clock chimed the hour. It was very late; Garth ought to have dropped the subject But he didn’t; he went on to tell them.

  “Here, now, half a minute!” Vince began in a tone of protest.

  But Marion did not seem either shocked or angry, as people usually were or pretended to be. On the contrary, she suddenly laughed. Cradling her arms, all restlessness, she stalked away from the table and then swept back again in a whirl of white skirts and lace.

  “What fun! Really, now, the things they do think of! What you’re actually saying, David, is that everybody in the world is leading a kind of double life.”

  “I hadn’t thought about the matter in quite that way. To a certain limited extent, though, I suppose it’s true.”

  “Now look here!” Vince again interrupted.

  “Darling, please do be quiet. It’s fascinating. David dear, answer me just one question. Suppose it happened to be me? Suppose somebody came to your office, and told you things about me, and said I was abnormal and unnatural and ought to be locked up in a madhouse to keep me from committing a murder? What would you say then?”

  It was as though someone had flung a stone through the window.

  “Good God, Marion,” said Vince, “why do you keep harping on murder? And what’s all this rot about madhouses? You’re not serious, I take it?”

  Again Marion laughed, this time mocking them.

  “No, stupid, of course I’m not serious. You and David pretend to be such men of the world, reading those ridiculous stories, that I couldn’t help teasing you a little.” She swept out her arm. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’m rather tired. Let’s forget it, shall we?”

  That was the night of Saturday, June 8. On the following Monday afternoon, while David Garth sat in his Harley Street consulting-room during an interval between patients, the speaking-tube whistled at him from the inside wall.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said the voice of young Michael Fielding, the medical student who ‘devilled’ for him, “but there’s a gentleman out in the hall here. He says he’s got to see you, and he says it’s very urgent.”

  “I can’t see him now, Michael. You ought to know that. My engagement-book—”

  “I know it, sir! But he doesn’t want to see you now. He wants to make an appointment for nine o’clock on Friday evening. And he’d like to know if he can see you here, in the consulting-room, rather than your going to his house.”

  “Michael, what’s the matter with you?”

  The young man cleared his throat. He was a brilliant student, with much charm despite his too-eager bony countenance and too-eager ways. He almost gulped in reply.

  “I know, sir, you don’t usually make arrangements like that. But this might be a bit different, I thought. His card says, ‘Colonel John Selby. Royal Bengal Artillery, retired.’”

  Garth stood motionless by the speaking tube.

  He could hear no traffic-noises from outside. Rain splashed the rooftops on a dusky, oppressive afternoon; rain made a hollow drumming sound in the courtyard behind the house; rain streaked and clouded the window-panes as thoughts streaked and clouded the brain.

  “That’s Mrs.
Bostwick’s former guardian, isn’t it, sir? Anyway, the card’s got an address at Hampstead. Anyway, I thought I’d heard the name. Anyway…Doctor! Are you still there?”

  “Yes. I’m still here.”

  “I hope I haven’t done anything wrong, sir? I’m very sorry if I have.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong, Michael, and I beg your pardon,” Garth told him seriously. “Make the appointment. Tell Colonel Selby I shall be happy to see him here at nine o’clock on Friday.”

  And, now that dusk was deepening to night on the arranged Friday, and a taxicab carried him clanking through those prim, professional squares which lie mummified in red brick between Oxford Street and the southern side of Regent’s Park, he faced the realization of another fact.

  It was not that he didn’t want Vince and Marion to meet Betty Calder. He had been thinking of this problem the wrong way round. In his heart, Garth realized, he never wanted Betty to meet Marion Bostwick.

  He could be glad, now, Betty was safely down in Kent. At the end of this evening, whatever he learned, he would take the last train back to Fairfield; he would pick up his motor-car at the inn of the Stag and Glove, where he was spending the week-end; he would drive out to her cottage for a brief, decorous good-night before returning to the inn, after which he could meet her again on Saturday and Sunday. She need know no more of Marion than Marion knew of her.

  He didn’t want Betty to be contaminated.

  Then immediately: “You damned hypocrite,” he said to himself. And he all but laughed aloud.

  Contaminated?

  This would never do. In another moment he would be thinking of evil and depravity and other such terms beloved by moralists. You must forget all that; you must approach your own affairs as impersonally, scientifically, as you approach anybody else’s. Besides, except for a few cloudy impressions, and one message from Colonel Selby which might not even concern Marion Bostwick, he had no real reason to suppose there was anything wrong.

  The cab turned into Harley Street towards his door. Abruptly, seeing what else was ahead, Garth sat up straight.

  “Stop here!” he called to the driver. “Here, just ahead! That will do.”

  He paid off the cab and heard it thump away. Six men rented consulting-rooms in the house where his office was, and shared the big waiting-room on the ground floor; two of them, Garth and an elderly surgeon who was also a bachelor, lived there as well. Outside at the kerb stood his own motor-car.

  At first he thought he must be mistaken; that car should have been at Fairfield many miles away. But it was the green Panhard: empty, splashed with the dust of a long journey, and so hot that he could hear the grease sizzling underneath.

  Fishing a key-ring out of his pocket, Garth hurried up the steps. He unlocked the front door and stood staring at the woman who faced him from the middle of the foyer.

  “This is quite a surprise, Betty,” he said.

  2

  “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG, IS there?” asked Betty Calder. “We drove.”

  “‘We’? ”

  “Hal and I.”

  Hal Ormiston, his nephew. Hal Ormiston, that languid and very superior young man, who made no secret of contempt for a slowcoach uncle. Hal Ormiston, who laughed and got his own way.

  “Or, to be exact, Hal did the driving. He wouldn’t let me, though I wanted to. We did fifty-two miles without a single breakdown, and must have got here almost as soon as your train. Hal was at the cottage, you see—” Betty broke off. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No, I don’t mind. But I didn’t know my esteemed nephew was visiting you.”

  “Good heavens, he wasn’t visiting me! He went down to the Stag and Glove to visit you.”

  (“He wanted to borrow money, no doubt? And helped himself to the car, of course, when he found I wasn’t there?”)

  Though Garth did not say these words aloud, he did not need to speak them. He had an angrily uncomfortable notion that Betty could read his mind about other matters too.

  They stood in a hall of white-painted woodwork, with a black-and-white tiled floor. Potted palms made a kind of jungle, but there were no other furnishings except a hatstand and a telephone table beside the stairs. Though the gasolier had been fitted for electricity, only one bulb was burning in yellow-pale filaments through clear glass. The hall seemed even higher and duskier; noise went up in echoes when Garth closed the front door.

  Betty started a little.

  She wore a tailored jacket and skirt, and a stiff-bosomed blouse with a watch pinned to it. Without being at all a beauty, she was one of those eager-gentle, modest, well-rounded girls who radiate innocence. Intensely luminous brown eyes looked up at him in an expression between uncertainty and the hurt of a woman misunderstood. Betty remained as cool and cologne-scented as though she had not driven fifty-odd miles through summer heat; her dust-coat and motoring veil, her hat and mica mask, lay piled with a handbag on the table.

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t think what you’re thinking.”

  “Have I said anything?”

  “No. You never say anything. Often I wish you would! You mustn’t blame poor Hal. He did take the car, yes; it was because I asked him to.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, all right,” Betty cried. Her footsteps rang on the tessellated floor as she ran to the table. “It’s this,” she continued, taking a black leather case from under the dust-coat. “It’s your brief-case. You forgot it and left it at the cottage this afternoon. I was afraid you might need it for your appointment, so I thought I’d bring it to you.”

  There was nothing in the brief-case except some typewritten sheets which—here Garth shut up his mind. However, that made no difference. There are times when fatuous man stands appalled at the trouble a woman will take for him.

  “You came all this distance just to bring…?”

  “Oh, my dear, does that matter?”

  “Yes. It matters to me. Betty, the extent of my apologies—!”

  “There’s no credit in doing what I want to do. And I don’t mind your being jealous; I love it, really; but only when I’m expecting it and know how to laugh at it.”

  “Well, you deserve an explanation. My esteemed nephew, that young swine—”

  “Please! If you don’t like Hal—”

  “No, I don’t like him. He has all the assurance of youth at making middle-age feel uncomfortable. I don’t like him, so I go on lending him money. Hal, I was about to say, was only the excuse for that disgraceful outburst a minute ago. The real cause is the man who’ll be here at nine o’clock; Betty, I wish you were miles away. Where is Hal, incidentally? How did you get into the house?”

  “Hal went on to the Criterion Bar. A rather nice young man let me in when I knocked; he said he was your assistant.”

  “Michael? But there’s no reason for him to have come!”

  It was as though someone had been listening.

  On the right of the hall, at the front, was the big waiting-room with its door closed. Towards the rear of the same wall, beyond the staircase, was Garth’s consulting-room. At the back was a room the doctors in this house called the little library, its door ajar. Instantly Michael Fielding, with his usual air of brashness weakened by timidity, opened that last door. All four buttons of his mustard-coloured jacket were fastened as though girded up.

  “Maybe that’s true, sir,” he announced, “but it’s just as well I did come. The patient’s here already.”

  “Already? Am I late?”

  “No, sir; Colonel Selby was miles too early. He’s in the waiting-room. I hope you won’t keep him there long, Doctor. If you want my opinion, he’s a badly frightened man.”

  The words rang in echoes. Garth glanced towards the closed door at the front.

  “Mr. Fielding,” he said formally, “I believe you have met Lady Calder? Yes.” Picking up Betty’s possessions from the table, coat and hat and ve
il and mica mask and handbag, he thrust them at Michael. “Take these, if you will. Lady Calder, I think, will prefer to wait in the little library. Then show Colonel Selby into the consulting-room.”

  “You don’t need this, do you?” asked Betty, holding out the brief-case. “It wasn’t important after all.”

  “It’s very important, Lady Calder; I thank you.” Garth took the brief-case, put it down on the telephone-table, and forgot it. “The little library, Mr. Fielding!”

  His tone added, “Don’t argue.” A few minutes later, when he waited in courteous gravity behind his desk, the situation became worse than he had feared.

  Into the consulting-room marched a thickset elderly man, iron grey and balding, with a straight back and a voice that seemed to hide behind his teeth.

  “We met once before, Doctor,” he said, stiffly extending his hand. “Hampstead. Two years ago. Good of you to see me.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Ah, but it was! I mean,” and Colonel Selby made a repressed gesture, “coming here in the middle of the night. Like a damned thief or something. But I hadn’t got much choice. The fact is—”

  “Sit down, won’t you?”

  “Thanks. The fact is—”

  Colonel Selby breathed hard. His frock coat with the silk facings, his white waistcoat and broad black cravat set off by a pearl stickpin, all exuded a defiant correctness like the standard of his behaviour. But clenched fists did not help him.

  Above the desk was a chandelier holding four electric bulbs in shades like glass flowers. As Colonel Selby lowered himself into a chair of black padded leather facing Garth, the light caught a corner of his eyelid; he shied, and there was a bright glitter of sweat on his forehead.

  “Look here.” He tried again. “I had to come to you. Had to, you being a friend of young Bostwick. In one way that makes it easier. In another way it’s worse. Look here: what we say is confidential?”

  “Of course. I hope I needn’t assure you of that.”

  “It’ll go no further, so help you God?”

  “It’ll go no further, so help me God.”

  “Doctor, what do they do to mad people?”