The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  “Confound it Marion—!”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “Let’s say I’m fond of her, yes. But forget that; don’t run your own head into a noose. If the police learn of this affair, will they swallow any such childish story as yours?”

  “Whereas, if they don’t learn of it, I daresay your own high and mighty sense of professional ethics will compel you to tell them?”

  “Damn my sense of professional ethics,” Garth horrified himself by saying. “You and Vince have been closer to me than any person I ever knew except Betty. I’ll protect you if it becomes necessary. I think you knew that when you brought me here to try me with your version of what happened. But leave Betty out of it. It’s bad enough to hear her called a cheat and a whore. You’ll not outrage common sense by saying she can be in two places at once or melt through solid walls.”

  Marion jumped up from the chair.

  “Every word I told you,” said Marion, articulating slowly through stiff jaws, “was the strict, sober, literal truth. And I hope to die if it’s not. Make him believe me,” she cried to the ceiling, and kicked her heels backwards like a child in a tantrum. “Dear God in heaven, make him believe me!”

  A new voice, interrupting with a flurried “Hoy!” of protest, caught them in mid-flight as though a bucket of cold water had been flung over both.

  Vince Bostwick, for once in his life rather pale, strode into the drawing-room over the bright-coloured Indian mats. He was smoking a cigarette, which, as he saw Marion’s cold eye, he hastily crushed out in a brass bowl on a side table. Otherwise Vince appeared anything but mild.

  “My dear old boy,” he said, looking Garth up and down, “I never heard you carry on like that. I didn’t know you could.”

  “Didn’t you?” Marion cried, lifting her upper lip. “Didn’t you really, now?”

  “No. And a word in your ear, my pet. Did you persuade old Dr. Fortescue not to tell the police about your Aunt Blanche? Did you even ask him not to?”

  “My poor Vince, it wasn’t necessary. I hinted. He’ll do what I ask.”

  “If you think so, my dear, you’d better look out of the front window.”

  Marion did not move.

  “Uniforms,” added Vince. “From what I remember of this district, one of ’em is the inspector from the police-station on Rosslyn Hill. Any comment, David?”

  “A question, anyway,” replied Garth, also turning to Marion. “You said you didn’t tell Dr. Fortescue ‘anything’ about this business. What does that mean?”

  “Well, I had to say something, hadn’t I? I couldn’t simply ignore it, could I? I said Aunt Blanche had been attacked by a woman who got away by the basement door, just as she really did. But I said she was probably a sneak-thief, and I didn’t get a good enough look at her to be sure of her afterwards.”

  A sharp rapping at the front door, deferential but authoritative, echoed with hollow summons through the foyer.

  “Then you better think of what you’ll tell these chaps,” said Vince.

  Vince went out to answer the door, squaring his shoulders before he touched the knob. Garth followed him.

  Outside at attention stood a bulky figure with a military air and a large grey moustache, wearing the flat uniform-cap of an inspector. The helmet of a constable rose behind him. Vince was always at his best with minor officials, who worshipped him.

  “Oh, hullo,” he said with welcoming lightness. “Er—Inspector Rogers, isn’t it?”

  “Sir!” said the Inspector, stiffening and saluting. “Colonel Selby at home, sir?”

  “Colonel Selby is at the Oriental Club this evening, I’m afraid.”

  “Just between ourselves, sir, it wasn’t the Colonel I wanted to see. You’re Mr. Bostwick, aren’t you? The Colonel’s son-in-law?”

  “Not exactly son-in-law, but that’s near enough. Yes?”

  Inspector Rogers’s face grew even greater and more uncomfortable. He saluted again.

  “Bad business, this, sir, about the poor lady who was hurt. Still! We’ve got a witness, sir, who believes she may be able to help if she can have ten minutes’ conversation with Mrs. Bostwick.”

  “Witness?”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll look out towards the gate, you’ll see her sitting in the Panhard motor-car. Her name is Lady Calder.”

  5

  “LADY CALDER,” VINCE REPEATED.

  He looked round at Garth.

  “Yes, old boy,” Vince’s far-from-languid glance added, as plainly as though he had spoken, “I was listening to your last conversation with Marion.”

  From the top-floor windows of this house, Vince had once remarked, it was possible on a clear day to see out over one edge of the Heath as far as St. Paul’s in the distance. Even if any such view had been possible now, Garth would not have looked at it.

  An untidy front garden, with rhododendrons and a monkey-puzzle tree, stretched out to the high stone wall fronting Nag’s Corner Road. Past a door in the wall, where the iron-grilled gate stood open, he could see the light of a street-lamp glimmering on the green paint and brasswork of the motor-car.

  Garth’s first thought was: “Inspector Rogers. How does Vince remember these names? How does he remember all their names, gratifying every man-jack of them?” Afterwards he could think only of Betty.

  “Lady Calder,” repeated Vince. “Thank you, Inspector. Ask Lady Calder to come in, won’t you?”

  “Very good, sir!”

  In the foyer, which had known so much emotion, there was a similar sort of explosion. Marion Bostwick, skirts rustling, swept with imperious dignity out of the drawing-room and marched towards the rear of the foyer.

  Drawing-room and dining-room were in the right-hand wall. At the end of the foyer, facing front, was a smaller room; and this, as Garth saw when Marion turned on a light inside, was the sort known as a man’s den.

  Betty Calder walked up the path from the gate.

  She was pale under the straw hat with the blue-and-white band. It seemed that the shrinking, reticent Betty had gone past embarrassment, even past humiliation. Perhaps not quite past either; she hesitated when she saw Garth, and spots of colour appeared in her cheeks. But determination carried her on.

  Inspector Rogers, the sort of police officer whom Garth liked and trusted as much as he disliked and distrusted Inspector Twigg’s kind, made sympathetic noises beside her.

  “Now, my lady,” he was saying, “this is Mr. Bostwick here. That’s Mrs. Bostwick, back in the Colonel’s study. This gentleman—?”

  “I am acquainted with Dr. Garth,” said Betty.

  “Another doctor? Ah, I see! That’s good.”

  Betty’s waxen pallor did not change. It seemed all but inhuman. The bronze figure of Diana on the newel-post held a lamp that clearly illumined both women: Marion just inside the den, Betty facing her and slowly approaching.

  Garth, falling into step beside Betty, said, “Gently!” and touched her elbow. Betty’s whole body was trembling; her elbows were pressed against her sides, her arms back and fingers crisped like claws.

  The emotional atmosphere shot up several degrees. With a sudden angry gesture Marion moved forward and stopped just as suddenly on the threshold of the den: not in fear, you sensed, but in wonder at what she saw. Betty stopped too. Then nothing stirred in the foyer of dark oak panelling and red burlap walls above.

  Betty’s soft voice rose up.

  “Inspector,” she cleared her throat, “will you please, please do what you half promised you would? Let me be alone with Mr. and Mrs. Bostwick for ten minutes? Yes, and with Dr. Garth too! Afterwards it doesn’t matter what happens.”

  “Inspector—” Vince began quickly.

  “Be quiet,” said Garth.

  “Well, now, my lady,” fumed Inspector Rogers, “I don’t know as I ought to do that. Still! You’re a rare plucked ’un, unless I’m very much mistaken, so I’ll risk it. Ten minutes, mind! Me and the constable will wait outside.”

  �
��You won’t wait outside,” said Vince. “There’s whisky in the dining-room there. Help yourself. And the constable too.”

  “Well, sir…”

  Marion, shoulders still back in regal dignity, retreated farther into the den. Betty followed, with Garth and Vince after her.

  Three more big-game heads, a panther and a black buck and a snow-leopard, looked down from a dark wallpaper twined with flecks of dull gold. The room was redolent of cigars and of its brown-leather chairs. Framed photographs decorated the walls, mainly of shooting or of pig-sticking groups. There were no books except some bound copies of The Field on top of a glass cabinet enclosing a rifle-rack. Though the chandelier had been fitted for electricity, a green-shaded brass gas-lamp—Colonel Selby preferred old-fashioned ways—stood on his neat desk. Another tiger’s head, this time with skin attached, lay on the floor.

  Garth closed the door. He was still holding the Kodak snapshot, which he returned to his notecase. And Betty still refused to meet his eye.

  “Look at me,” she said to Marion. “Look at me again!”

  “I am doing so, thanks very much.”

  “You didn’t really see me in this house tonight, did you? You saw someone who looked rather like me, and was dressed exactly like me. I can’t bear any more of her. I’ve tried, and I’ve tried very hard to be respectable too. But I can’t bear any more of her.”

  “Her?” Marion cried. “Are you calling yourself so much of an innocent?”

  “No, I am not innocent. I am almost what she is, except that I’m not a criminal. A good many times, when she was drunk, I appeared in her place on the bill. The worst of it is that in my heart I didn’t really mind doing that; I even enjoyed it, until—”

  She paused.

  “But that’s finished,” Betty said. “If she tries just one more trick, so help me God, I mean to kill her and take the consequences. I’m not the person you saw, am I?”

  “Do you know,” exclaimed Marion, whom these statements seemed to fascinate as much as they startled and mollified, “I’m beginning to think you’re not.”

  “Betty,” Garth said gently.

  “Don’t touch me,” Betty cried in her turn, and twitched her shoulder away. “You won’t even want to touch me, after tonight. You don’t understand.”

  “Betty, don’t be a fool. Marion saw one of your sisters, I imagine, if in fact she saw anybody at all.” Vince Bostwick, who had been opening a silver cigarette-case, shut it up with a click. Betty faltered, the brown eyes turning towards Garth at last.

  “How did you know that?”

  “It’s not a very complicated supposition, considering what Twigg said. Sit down there,” he indicated a brown-leather sofa at right angles to the empty fireplace, “and let’s understand the more obscure features.”

  “But—!”

  “You too, Marion. The other end of the sofa.”

  “Oh, just as you please,” sang Marion, with an elaborate kind of shrug. “I can’t understand a word of all this, but just as you please.”

  “Come off it, Marion. You’re not altogether ignorant of the blackmailing dancer from the Moulin Rouge.”

  “I have not the remotest idea…!”

  “Sit down there, both of you. We’re in a damned awkward situation, and we haven’t much time to meet it.” Garth waited. “That’s better. Betty, when Inspector Twigg turned up in Harley Street tonight and said he wanted to see me about someone leading a double life, you felt panic and you ran away. That’s understandable; no one could blame you. But what brought you first to the Hampstead police and then here? Where did you learn about Marion and Vince? I don’t recall ever having mentioned them.”

  “Those things were accidents. I had better tell you about Glynis.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  It would have been too much to expect those two women of all women to sit side by side like patient Griseldas, though Marion was the easier because she was frankly curious and did not seem at all ill-disposed towards Betty.

  But Betty was no longer so much sustained by that desperate determination. For the first time, clearly, she felt this as a social occasion. She began to reflect on what she had been saying in the hearing of strangers. Betty rose up. Hesitant, with a quick little apologetic gesture of her gloved hand, she ran over and then turned to face them with her back to the wall. She was not at all beautiful but vitally pretty, the prim Navy-blue serge and white blouse emphasizing her femininity.

  “I—”

  “You have three sisters.” Garth held her gaze. “‘Born out Hoxton way,’ Twigg said, presumably meaning born in poor circumstances, and trained as dancers.”

  “Yes! Glynis is the only one who matters. Glynis is a year older than I am. She wouldn’t even look very much like me if she hadn’t deliberately begun to dress like me ever since I married Horace Calder. That’s a part of Glynis’s sense of humour, if you want to call it that. It’s caused all the trouble. Glynis always said I was a—”

  “A what?”

  “A prude,” Betty cried out. “I always hated the life we were brought up in. I hated it. I don’t deny that. As long as seven years ago Glynis got her first engagement as a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. A year later she wrote me in England; she said she was making an enormous wonderful salary at the Moulin Rouge (of course, the money wasn’t from there); and, since I wasn’t very successful (that was true), she had a use for me if I cared to join her in Paris.

  “The ‘use’ was to act as a kind of hanger-on, and do her turn for her when she couldn’t appear. I knew all about her men, naturally. This isn’t a pretty story. But I swear I never knew nearly every affair ended in blackmail or attempted blackmail.

  “In the autumn of 1902 Glynis returned to England for a short time. A banker named Mr. Dalrymple put a bullet through his head, and Glynis lost her nerve and said her name was Elizabeth Stukeley when the police questioned her. Though you may not believe me, I never learned this either until much, much later.

  “Glynis can be awfully likeable when she wants to be. She only began to change towards me in the following year. Sir Horace Calder, the Governor of Jamaica (that’s the office they call Captain-General) saw me in Paris and asked me to marry him. I couldn’t believe he was serious, but he was. Well, I accepted him. He was almost seventy-three years old, and I accepted him. I told you this wasn’t a pretty story. Glynis laughed and laughed, but she nearly went out of her mind.”

  Betty did not speak hysterically or even loudly, but only with that odd expression of stolidity she could sometimes wear.

  “I accepted him,” she said. “Would you have accepted him, Mrs. Bostwick?”

  Whereupon Marion laughed. It was a ringing laugh that made Garth’s nerves crawl.

  “Well, Mrs.—but it’s Lady Calder, isn’t it?” Marion answered, before he could intervene, “I really don’t know. I might have done, but I doubt it. That’s rather old, you know. And I prefer them to be young. Oh, most certainly young!”

  Vince Bostwick took a cigarette out of the silver case, broke the cigarette in two pieces, and flung them on the floor.

  “Steady!” Garth said. “Betty, the time is running out. You were saying?”

  “I think the suicide had frightened Glynis a little. While I was in Jamaica, she went to live at Trouville—”

  “Trouville?”

  “In Normandy.”

  “I know where it is, Betty. Yes?”

  “Glynis stayed there until a year ago. My—my husband was dead. The management at the Moulin Rouge had changed; the people are always changing too. She went back; she said her name was Lady Calder now, and she wanted work again. The French love titles, but that wouldn’t have helped her if she hadn’t been a really good provocative dancer (do you understand, David?) of the sort they wanted. And I was in Paris last summer, and yet I still learned nothing at all until…”

  “Until when?”

  “Until less than a fortnight ago. Glynis turned up at the
cottage and told me everything.”

  Betty turned fully to face him.

  “They had given her the sack for drinking. She wanted money, and I gave her money. I would have given her the earth. I could have proved I had never been a blackmailer or a—or the other thing, though Glynis laughed and swore I couldn’t. But what would have been the good of that? I had danced at that place. A fortnight ago I thought I would have died rather than let you learn of it. That’s all there is.”

  “No, Betty, it’s not all there is. Vince and Marion here, where did you learn they even existed?”

  “Do you think I’m not interested in anything that concerns you? I can’t help being interested! They’re your closest friends. Hal Ormiston said so.”

  “My nephew again, eh? He told you?”

  “Yes. He said he was quite well acquainted with Mrs. Bostwick.”

  The four bulbs in the chandelier shed a light as bright and bleak as that in Garth’s consulting-room. Betty stood shivering against the wall. Marion sat bolt upright on the leather sofa.

  “Since he is David’s nephew,” Marion proclaimed, “it may scarcely be accounted surprising that Vince and I should be acquainted with him.”

  “Scarcely,” Garth said without looking at her. “When you left Harley Street in the motor-car tonight, Betty, where did you go first?”

  “To number 38b Hyde Park Gardens. Hal said that was their address.”

  “Why did you go to the Bostwicks?”

  “Dr. Garth, please do stop! I—I had my reasons.”

  “They are what I am trying to establish. Betty, the good Glynis was blackmailing you. Has she been blackmailing anyone else?”

  “I…don’t…know.”

  “Marion,” continued Garth, who himself was now the one with an air of pleading, “considering what common sense can’t help telling us, do you still say that before this evening you never set eyes on the Glynis Stukeley who sometimes calls herself Elizabeth Stukeley?”

  “I most certainly do say so!”

  “Did you ever meet her, Vince?”

  “No, old boy,” Vince answered coolly. “Any reason for asking that?”

  “Only that the Scotland Yard people think you did.”