The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

“Deuce take it, who says she did? I thought she might need help, that’s all. I was going out to lend a hand when the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Bostwick, very upset about an attempted murder—”

  “Mr. Fielding, come with me.”

  In the little library, as in the consulting-room, four electric bulbs glowed in shades like glass flowers. Morris chairs and smoking-stands gave the room an air of shabby comfort. Round the walls, at irregular heights, ran glass-fronted bookcases with enamelled designs on their doors and more than medical works on the shelves.

  First, above Michael’s shoulder as the young man faced him, Garth saw the reflection of his own face in the glass door of a bookcase. Next, conspicuous among heavy darkish volumes, he saw another red-bound novel by the author who chose to be called “Phantom.”

  “Now, Michael, suppose we hear about this telephone conversation. I am to have dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Bostwick later tonight. Mrs. Bostwick was speaking from Hyde Park Gardens, I imagine?”

  “No, sir. From Hampstead.”

  “From Colonel Selby’s house?”

  “So I understood, anyway. She said she’d got to speak to you, and said, ‘That woman will be the death of me.’”

  “What woman?”

  “That’s the part I’m not clear about. None of it was easy. As soon as I said, ‘Mrs. Bostwick?’ or, ‘Is that you, Mrs. Bostwick?’ after she identified herself, this Scotland Yard detective was out of the waiting-room like a shot and standing beside me. He kept saying, ‘Yes, my lad? What does Mrs. Bostwick want?’ I couldn’t shush him or make him go away, so it wasn’t easy to hear.”

  “Michael, just how does Inspector Twigg come to know anything of Marion Bostwick?”

  “Sir, I don’t know! Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Yes; I propose to. But not until I have a little more information…. Wait one moment, now!”

  So pervasive was the presence of Detective-Inspector Twigg that Garth half expected to find him standing by the telephone out in the hall. He was not there, though he could be heard whistling between his teeth in the waiting-room. Garth snatched up the telephone, mouthpiece and earpiece at opposite ends of a single instrument hanging from its hook, with a metal ridge along the barrel which must be pressed down before the other person could hear you speak.

  Scotland Yard! Cullingford Abbot!

  The building called New Scotland Yard was still fairly new, as time went. Its architect had designed it to look like a donjon-keep: massive, built of red and white brick with a conical tower at each corner, and a flying bridge across the courtyard to an annexe on the south. It had been overcrowded since the Metropolitan Police moved their headquarters from Old Scotland Yard up the road. It was a constant headache of expense.

  And yet nothing had changed so much, during these past seventeen years, as the public’s attitude towards the Criminal Investigation Department.

  When they first occupied the new building, Garth well remembered, both Criminal Investigation Department and Uniformed Branch still faced uproar from their recent failure to find Jack the Ripper. This failure was not greatly the police’s fault; reforms of efficiency had already begun. But it seemed as distant as the dark ages. Such reforms were felt only when from the Indian Civil Police they imported Mr. Edward Henry, now Sir Edward Henry, as Metropolitan Commissioner.

  Detractors ceased to jeer. In 1905, with the conviction of the Muswell Hill murderers, the system of identification by fingerprints was admitted as evidence for the first time in a British court. Police and public were coming of age.

  If most of the triumph must be given to Sir Edward Henry, Cullingford Abbot could claim a great deal of credit too. They called Abbot the Commissioner’s “secretary” because no official term existed. Abbot was a colleague; at times he directed the C.I.D.

  Edward Henry was a professional civil servant, Cullingford Abbot a well-to-do dilettante with a mission. Edward Henry was brusque but reticent; Abbot, single eyeglass raised and greying moustache a-bristle, became a public figure who dined most evenings in the large blue-and-gilt room at the Café Royal. Abbot could be brusque, but he could also be understanding. His private hobby was a study of the occult and the supernatural, and yet he worshipped mechanical progress.

  “Pray remember,” he had told Garth less than a fortnight ago, “that good police-work is simply good organization plus new ideas. This game of yours: what d’ye call it? Psychanalysis?”

  “Psychanalysis is one term, yes.”

  “Well! We forced the judges to accept fingerprints. Well soon force ’em to admit a bullet fired from a rifled barrel can be identified just as infallibly. One day we may be using psychanalysis too.”

  And so Garth, now making a telephone call to Cullingford Abbot at Scotland Yard, hoped for much in the way of good sense. Then his hopes were swept away.

  “Mistake?” repeated Abbot’s brisk, benevolently cynical voice. “Oh, no. Inspector Twigg’s not an impostor and there’s no mistake. I’m afraid there’s no mistake, either, about the lady down at Fairfield.”

  “Betty Calder?”

  “That’s the gel.”

  “Seriously, now, can you expect me to credit all that nonsense? Or give one sound reason why it should be so?”

  “My dear Garth,” Abbot said impatiently, “I can’t help what you credit or don’t credit. It is so. As for reasons, they’re older than your psychanalysis. You’re forgetting the men concerned.”

  “What men?”

  “When a countryman of ours wants to get away from home and kick up his heels, especially a married man, he takes the boat-train straight to Paris. That’s true, isn’t it? It happens to a good many people?”

  “Yes. It happens to you too.”

  “Oh, undoubtedly.” There was a snap in Abbot’s voice. “But I’m not the man concerned in the latest affair of blackmail.”

  “Who is the man, then?”

  “Do you want me to tell you on the telephone?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a friend of yours named Bostwick. Vincent Bostwick.”

  (“Dear God!”)

  Garth glanced back over his shoulder. From his position at the telephone-table he could see straight into the little library and slantwise into the consulting-room. Michael Fielding stood facing out from the bookcases; Twigg was now at the consulting-room door. Both had congealed motionless, though Twigg continued to whistle between his teeth, as if both could hear that thin voice over the wire.

  “Garth! Confound it! Are you there?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Let me read you a little of the woman’s record,” continued Abbot “Maiden name (interesting term, eh?) Elizabeth Stukeley. Before old Calder married her, in his seventy-third year and also his dotage, she had been a dancer for three seasons at the Moulin Rouge. They’ve always liked English beauties there. Ever see her without her clothes?”

  “I have not yet,” Garth said politely, “had that pleasure.”

  “My reference,” Abbot retorted with equal suavity, “was to seeing her in a bathing-costume. I’m told you’ve done that once or twice. But take the reference as it strikes your mind. Ever notice her legs? They’re a dancer’s legs. Now, then.

  “While she was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge, three men had particular trouble with her after they’d returned to England. I can’t reveal their names, but names don’t matter. One was a stockbroker, one was M.P. from a good Conservative district, and one was head of a private banking firm. In each case your friend Betty followed him, and wrote to him or called on him. If he avoided her, she finally called on the man’s wife. We don’t know what happened in two cases; it was hushed up. However, the banker shot himself.”

  There was a silence.

  Inspector Twigg went on whistling tunelessly.

  “He shot himself during the autumn of ’02, I see,” observed Abbot. “H’m! Miss Betty escaped scot-free; the dead man’s relatives acknowledged there had been blackmail, but refused to press charges.
The following summer she married Sir Horace Calder and disappeared to Jamaica until Calder’s death two years later. Last summer, before she met you at Ostend, she was back at the Moulin Rouge.”

  Again Cullingford Abbot paused. It was easy to picture him: vigorous, insatiably alert, his monocle gripped in his left eye, bending over papers.

  “Look here, Garth. Calder is believed to have left her well off. But I wonder! That beach-cottage is a very modest place, I take it?”

  “What else should it be?”

  “True. At the same time, her home in London seems to be a not very impressive semi-detached house at Putney Hill. There’s another fact that may be of more than academic interest. Last summer, also in Paris, we think she joined a Satanist group.”

  “A what?”

  “A Satanist group. Rather lewd rites in adoration of Old Scratch. There’s always one in Paris for a few fanatics and a larger group of bored sensation-seekers.”

  “Abbot, for God’s sake! It’s not being maintained, I hope, that Betty has developed supernatural powers?”

  “No. Hardly. But you were asking for reasons. If she needs money, it explains why she’s gone back to the Moulin Rouge for a little blackmail. If she’s joined a Satanist group, it explains why she enjoys appearing in the near-nude. Lots of women, even respectable ones, would take pleasure in that if only they dared. Don’t let it upset you, my dear fellow.”

  “It’s not upsetting me,” said Garth.

  “Really? I thought—”

  “Never mind. A minute ago you claimed Vince Bostwick was—was somehow involved with Betty. Is there any actual evidence of that?”

  “Mr. Bostwick, they tell me, was in Paris last summer.”

  “So were thousands of tourists. I said evidence. Did he ever meet her? Did she ‘follow him’ to London, as you say she followed the others? Did she ever write to him or try to see him?”

  “No,” Abbot answered almost with admiration, “there’s no evidence whatever.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m afraid there doesn’t need to be. She’s got no change out of Bostwick, that’s apparent.” Then Abbot’s tone changed. “But the old, old game is being played in the old, old way. Confound it, Garth! Three times in the past fortnight she’s called on Mrs. Bostwick at Hyde Park Gardens.”

  “How do you know she has?”

  “Because Inspector Twigg has made it his business to keep an eye on her.”

  “Twigg again, eh?”

  “If I were you, my dear fellow, I shouldn’t underrate him. He’s not always easy to get on with, but he’s a capable officer. He never lets go. If you put his back up you’ll make a bad enemy.”

  “Well, well, well!” observed Inspector Twigg, himself intervening at this point. “Well, well, well!”

  It was impossible to tell whether Twigg had even gained an impression of Abbot’s words on the telephone. Rising on his toes in the doorway of the consulting-room, he lowered himself with satisfaction. The light behind him shone on a bald skull plastered with a few strands of brownish hair. Then briskly, he strode towards Garth.

  “Abbot,” Garth said to the telephone, “I will say good-bye now.”

  “Stop! Wait! You haven’t told me—”

  “I will say good-bye now,” Garth repeated. He rang off.

  “That’s just as well, Doctor,” Twigg said heartily. “So we’ll just hear,” and he jerked his thumb towards Michael Fielding in the little library, “we’ll just hear what the young gentleman has to say. About Mrs. Bostwick’s message on the telephone.”

  “Mr. Fielding,” and Garth raised his voice, “you will tell this man nothing. Is that clear? You will tell this man nothing.”

  He spoke through stiff jaws. He could feel if not see that his own face was white. Twigg stopped short.

  “I want no more trouble here, Doctor.”

  “Nor do I. Mrs. Bostwick is my patient,” it was the first lie he had told, “and any communication from her is privileged. You have no further business in this house, Mr. Twigg. Both of us will be happy to excuse you.”

  “Now I warn you, sir—!”

  “Yes?” Garth waited. “That’s the second time you have used those words and the dozenth time you have implied them. You warn me of what?”

  “Of landing in bad trouble. Mrs. Bostwick’s at Hampstead. I’ve only to go out there—”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Twigg, I am warning you. Let me repeat that Mrs. Bostwick is my patient. If you attempt to see her without my permission, either tonight or at any time, you are the one who will land in trouble and very well you know it There’s the door: now get out.”

  “I won’t be told…!”

  Both of them had powerful voices, the Inspector’s hoarse and Garth’s clear-edged. Echoes slipped round the white arch of the hall and bounded back in clamour. For perhaps ten seconds Twigg looked at him in noisy breathing. Then Twigg nodded. Returning to the consulting-room to fetch his hat, he marched out over the black-and-white tiles: carefully, as though on tiptoe. At the front door he hesitated, half turning again. He did not speak, but his glance at Garth was more ominous than any word.

  The door closed after him.

  Wryness, a release of taut nerves, went up through Garth’s throat. That wryness ended almost in a smile.

  “All right, Michael. What did Mrs. Bostwick say?”

  “Look here, sir, was that wise? Chucking him out, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. I am beginning not to care. No, that’s untrue; I do care! As you were saying, about Mrs. Bostwick?”

  Michael strode out of the little library.

  “She wants you to go out there just as soon as you possibly can. She begs it, sir. She’s in earnest.”

  “So I gathered. What seems to be the trouble?”

  “While Mrs. Bostwick was alone in the house with her aunt, some woman got in and tried to kill Mrs. Montague. Tried to strangle her. Very nearly did.”

  “If they want a doctor—”

  “They don’t. Not in that particular way. Mrs. Bostwick called their own doctor at Hampstead. But she does rather desperately want to consult you about a private matter. This woman that got into the house, and then somehow disappeared through the cellar—”

  “Who was the woman?”

  “Mrs. Bostwick didn’t say,” Michael answered after a pause. His tongue crept out to moisten his lips. “Considering what’s been half hinted and half looked out of the corners of eyes here tonight, I should hate like the devil to guess.”

  Garth made no comment

  Brushing past the young man, whose Adam’s apple rose and fell above a tall collar, he went into the consulting-room. He went to the mantelpiece, on whose ledge the silver-framed photograph of Betty Calder stood to the left of the clock against a background of ferns and flowers painted on a looking-glass.

  There was another photograph of Betty, a smaller Kodak snapshot, inside the notecase in his inside breast pocket. He touched the pocket. Neither photograph could show the colour of the hair and eyes as a vivid brown, or the colour of the half-parted lips as pink. But the face in the silver frame seemed alive, with a strength and passion of innocence, and looked back at him.

  “Sir,” Michael burst out, “what is going on?”

  Again Garth touched his coat over the inside breast pocket. He drew the watch out of the pocket of his white waistcoat, pressed the stem to open its case, calculated times, then shut up the watch and replaced it.

  “Sir, I just asked…!”

  “Yes,” Garth said. “I heard you.” He turned round. “Would you mind trying for another cab, please? Whatever may be going on, I mean to prove it is not what they think.”

  4

  MARION BOSTWICK SAUNTERED BACK and forth in the drawing-room.

  She was stately and unhurried. She seemed to be pondering. The hem of her bell-shaped skirt brushed the carpet as she moved.

  David Garth, descending the stairs, could look down sideways past the bannisters towards t
he lighted door of the drawing-room. He stopped for a minute or two, deciding what he ought to say. Then he went on.

  Of this house on the heights, itself so tall and narrow as to seem topheavy, he had an impression slightly different from that of his first visit. You still felt uneasiness, a disquiet of atmosphere, a wish to glance back over your shoulder without knowing why. Yet the house seemed a little less dark and cavernous than he remembered. In the drawing-room stood golden-oak chairs, gaunt without upholstery, a high gloss on their carving. The polished golden-oak table had drawers with bright brass loop-handles. There was a mounted tiger’s head on the wall above the mantelpiece.

  Again Marion passed the door, pressing a lace handkerchief to her upper lip. She wore a semi-formal gown, tight across hips and bust, of some satiny blue material rather darker than the colour of her pale-blue eyes. She started when she heard his footsteps, peering round above the handkerchief.

  “Yes, David?”

  “They were smallish hands,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The hands that strangled Mrs. Montague. Smallish, but very strong. They caught her from behind; the marks of the fingernails show in her neck. She is lucky to be alive.”

  “Oh!” Marion’s eyes widened. “Oh. Yes, I know. Poor Aunt Blanche! How did you find her?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “I mean, what was her condition when you examined her?”

  “I only looked at her superficially. I didn’t examine her. She is not my patient.”

  “You men and your stupid ethics!” Then Marion checked her impatient gesture. “You know, David, I rather wish you hadn’t come.”

  “You sent for me.”

  “So I did, dear. But even I,” said Marion, lifting one shoulder and turning out her wrist, “even I can have the vapours like any other person. Fortunately it’s not so serious after all.”

  “It’s quite serious enough, Marion. You’d better tell me what happened.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “As I understand it, I was to have dinner with you and Vince at Hyde Park Gardens. What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, that? Yes, I do owe you an explanation. Though I’m the one who was put upon and I don’t like it and I won’t have it! David, Aunt Blanche sent for me.”