Through his mind ran words Betty had read aloud to him, less than a week ago, from a so-called fashion-hint in a magazine.
“‘A discarded heavy wool-mohair skirt,’” she had quoted, “‘can be made over into an excellent new bathing-costume.’” And she had added, “Ugh!”
He was held there momentarily by that scene of frozen violence, as no doctor should have been. But this, he told himself, was different “A discarded heavy wool-mohair skirt can be made over into an excellent new bathing-costume. A discarded heavy wool-mohair skirt can be made over into an excellent new bathing-costume. A discarded heavy wool-mohair skirt, can be—”
He went to that lifeless body, gently touching her as he moved her face up. He looked at the swollen, cyanosed face; he touched the white-sash-cord embedded in her throat and knotted hard at the back of the neck. And he stood up very quickly.
The woman was not Betty.
But this alone failed to move him so much. This alone did not make him get up so quickly, and look quickly round the dim, stuffy, evil little room. The woman’s body was almost at life temperature. A little blood on the edges of the nostrils had scarcely dried. Whoever the woman was (and he now believed he could guess well enough), she had been dead for not much more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
Fifteen or twenty minutes.
He took out his watch and opened it. Incredibly, the hands stood at no later than just six o’clock.
Garth replaced the watch. Afterwards he stood motionless, and only his eyes roved.
The open door to the veranda was just opposite the partly open door out to the little entry on the beach side. This had once been a bathing-pavilion for privacy; there were no windows. The table with the tea-things stood against the wall to the right as you faced the veranda door. Amid a clutter of china and spoons beside the spirit-lamp was a half-gallon jar in which Betty kept water to brew tea, together with a kettle, an earthenware teapot, and a tin of condensed milk.
Garth looked at the wall opposite. From one of the hooks along this wall hung a long bathing-cape of brown serge with horizontal yellow stripes. It belonged to Betty, he knew, although she very seldom wore it. He went to the cape, explored its inside pockets, and in the second one found a handkerchief with the initials G. S.
Glynis Stukeley.
Her figure much resembled Betty, yes. The face—not considering that bitten tongue and those protruding half-open eyes against discolouring, you couldn’t tell about the face. Quickly he returned to Glynis Stukeley’s body, and adjusted her face down just as he had found her.
Next he glanced along the table. He reached out to touch the teapot—and then, drawing back as though he had been burnt, his arm swept off a cup which smashed on the floor with a hellish noise and a spray of china-bits like a small bomb.
At the same moment a familiar voice outside the pavilion, calling his name and growing louder as it called, brought him alert to meet what must be met. He hurried out into the entry towards what might be called the “front” door of the pavilion, whose red-and-white canvas sunblind remained half lowered. He yanked the cords down and raised it fully.
The first thing he saw, even before he saw the face of the woman who had hurried out there, was an overturned bicycle.
It lay more than forty feet away, up the grass slope of the cycle track humped to the north of the house.
“Hal—” began Betty’s panting voice.
“What about Hal?”
“I passed him in the road. He looked—”
Betty stopped. She was wearing a different straw hat, a dark skirt, and a dove-grey silk blouse without a jacket but with a high lace collar. Life assumed reality again; life caught up its pace as it caught up these two people, and flung them along with a rapidity that would not now cease until the last word of murder was said.
“Betty, did your sister come down to see you?”
“Yes. She’s still here.”
“Where?”
“At the house, I suppose. She must have come back from bathing. Over two hours ago we had the most awful, screaming fishwife row; I called her things that would have shocked the life out of your friends. So I ran, or pedalled, rather. But your note said you’d be here at six o’clock, so I couldn’t—”
“My note? What note?”
Betty’s breathing had slowed down, though her flush remained high. She was staring at him with dilated eyes and an unnatural look as though inspiration were about to fly to the heart of truth. About to say something, she changed her mind and thrust out her left hand palm upwards.
A smallish sheet of paper, folded several times lengthways, showed in the open palm of the grey kid glove. Garth tied the cords of the sunblind round its rusty hook, holding the blind high.
“When we first met,” she cried, “you wrote me two or three notes on a typewriter. I kept them, even if they were on a typewriter. That’s your typewriter, isn’t it?” And then, “Why are you asking all this? Have you seen Glynis? Has Hal met her?”
“Betty, I don’t want to alarm you….”
She was standing on the damp sand a little way out from the three steps that led up to the pavilion’s door, and holding herself with unnatural rigidity as she looked up at him.
“I don’t want to alarm you….”
“Then answer me something. Please, please answer me something! Will you do that?”
“If I can.”
“Has something happened,” said Betty, “that I’m afraid may have happened?”
“Yes.”
For a second he thought she was going to give way. It was almost as though the colour went out of Betty’s eyes. He descended the steps, put his arm round her waist, and held her tightly while she trembled.
Anyone who saw them standing there might have thought them alone in the world as they were alone on the beach; and, in a certain sense, this was so. Betty’s left arm, with the note thrust into the palm of the glove, had dropped to her side. For a moment he did not touch the note.
“Betty, listen to me. Your sister is dead. She is in one of those two rooms in the pavilion, the right-hand one as you face the sea. What happened to her is what almost happened to Mrs. Montague last night. Can you bear to hear this?”
“I’m all right. I hated her.”
“Yes. That’s what we must guard against. We shall be no good to each other if we don’t face facts. You understand that?”
“Oh, David, I’m sorry,” she cried out at him. “Oh, God, darling, I’m most awfully sorry!”
“For what? There’s nothing to be sorry about, my dear. You didn’t do this, I take it?”
“No! No! I wanted to, but I knew I couldn’t. What I meant was—”
“I know what you meant. It doesn’t matter.”
Betty flung her arms round him. Then, with a spasmodic effort, she straightened her shoulders. He was still speaking slowly, gently, so that she seized strength and almost caught his mood.
“This is being even more foolish,” she said after a pause, “than I usually am. Please ask me anything you like.”
“Very well. This quarrel with your sister: when did it happen? When did you last see Glynis alive?”
“It was over two hours ago,” replied Betty, with a composure that may have been feigned but was nevertheless strong and compelling. “I can’t remember the exact time,” her hand flew to her breast, “and I’m not wearing my watch. It may have been ten minutes to four. Anyway, it happened in her bedroom.”
“In ‘her’ bedroom?”
“Yes.” Betty looked back steadily. “Glynis turned up this morning bright and early from Fairfield railway-station. She brought a valise, and said she thought she would be staying for a day or two. She also laughed and said, ‘But don’t think that gives you your opportunity, ducky. No, no, no! I left a letter in London to be opened in case anything nasty happens to me.’”
Garth spoke with some violence. “This sister of yours would appear to have been a good deal of a pathological case.”
“Of a what-kind-of-case?”
“Never mind. She is not laughing now.”
“Don’t say that!”
“I beg your pardon. You were telling me?”
“Fortunately,” Betty went on in a rush. “Mrs. Hanshew wasn’t here.” A picture of that eminently respectable housekeeper rose in Garth’s mind like a picture of Mrs. Grundy. “You see, Mrs. Hanshew’s daughter has been ill over at Bunch. Yesterday evening, before Hal and I started for London in that wretched car, I gave her permission to visit her daughter and not return until Monday. In my own way, David, I’m quite as cheap and vulgar as Glynis is. I simply couldn’t endure the thought of anyone knowing Glynis was here. She’d kept her visits secret before this, and now she’d begun them openly. Then, when I got your note in the afternoon post—”
“Ah, yes. That note of mine. May I see it?”
Betty stared at him.
“But I thought you’d forgiven me,” she cried. “You—you did write this?”
“Yes, to be sure I wrote it. All the same, may I see it?”
Betty snatched the paper out of her glove, unfolded it, and handed it over. It was no time to tell her he had never seen the note before, and knew nothing about it.
The murky sky threw changing shadows across a sheet of his own professional stationery, the smaller kind of notepaper on which accounts were sent out My dear, ran the typed words. I shall be with you at six o’clock on Saturday. Yours unalterably. There was no date. As a signature it bore only a capital “D,” written in ink.
But it had not been typed on the official machine used by Michael Fielding to send out his accounts. Instead someone had written it on the personal, private typewriter he kept in his living-quarters at Harley Street for a double life of his own which now seemed so comic and so grotesque.
“Betty, did you keep the envelope of this?”
“Yes, of course I kept it.” There was almost reproach in Betty’s cry. “I can tell you now it. was postmarked London, West, at 12:30 A. M. I can show you the envelope. But what difference does that make? If you sent it…”
“My dear, I have already told you I sent it. I was thinking of something else.”
He was thinking, in fact, of certain expressions on a young face in Harley Street last night; and of a red-bound novel carefully left open in the waiting-room. But he did not say as much.
“Gently, now! Here.” And he handed back the note. “You were telling me about your sister, and what happened at the cottage this afternoon. Yes?”
Wind ruffled Betty’s hair.
“Well, I’d given Glynis the large bedroom on the ground floor at the back.” She made an uncertain gesture towards the house. “When I got that note I brooded and brooded, and finally I ran back to her room. She had found one of my bathing-costumes, and she was putting it on. I said, ‘You’re not going out on that beach; you’re not going to disgrace everything I’ve ever tried to be.’ Glynis said, ‘What’s the matter, ducky; don’t you want your young man to meet me?’ I said, ‘I don’t want anybody even to see you here; you sha’n’t do it.’ And Glynis said, ‘If you’re not very careful, ducks, I’ll wear much less than a bathing-costume. You’ve done it often enough, I’ll be bound.’ That was where the screaming started. And I just ran away.”
“Did you tell her about the note from me?”
“Oh, God, no!”
“Well, Betty, she did use the bathing-costume. Two witnesses saw her walk down the beach and into the water. The witnesses say it was you.”
“But I didn’t do any such…”
“Gently. I know you didn’t. And we may be able to establish that.” Garth shut his eyes, visualized other matters, and looked at Betty again. “You left here with your bicycle at some time before four o’clock. Where did you go? To Fairfield?”
“In the direction of Fairfield, but not into the town. I was in the country west of it. Sometimes I rode, but mainly I just walked and pushed the bike. I was so horribly upset that I even forgot your note.”
“Did you meet anyone you knew?”
“That’s always the question they ask in the stories, isn’t it?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know.” Her brown eyes, shy and nervous and intensely imaginative, wandered past him towards the pavilion. “There were so very few people; incredibly few people. Probably that was because it looked like rain, and yet the whole country-side seemed as lonely as though it were haunted.”
“‘Haunted?’” Garth repeated.
“Yes, that sounds silly; but I think you understand what I mean. It’s the same kind of feeling you can get, especially towards twilight, in one or two of those mediaeval buildings at Ravensport. Anyway, I was having tea at some country place with a sign outside that said, ‘Bed and Breakfast,’ and ‘Fresh Eggs’ underneath, when I saw the clock and remembered your note. And I raced back here so hard I feel sticky and horrible all over. Just this side of Fairfield I passed Hal Ormiston, driving your car in the opposite direction and looking very angry.”
“Did Hal see you?”
“Yes, of course. He must have done. We were only a dozen feet apart and he wasn’t going very fast, though he didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Is—is that important?”
“Several things my nephew says, for once in his life, may be of the most vital importance. Don’t shrink back Betty! I want you to understand this situation exactly as it is.”
“Yes? I’m all right! Yes?”
Garth extended a hand behind him.
“Your sister was strangled to death in that pavilion,” he said. “She was murdered there, in my opinion, about twenty minutes to six o’clock. There’s always a lot of conflict in the medical evidence about a disputed time of death; we needn’t insist on that, or try to fix the time by such rules. But there is evidence to show that somebody, somebody who isn’t in the pavilion now, must have been there within the past twenty-odd minutes.”
“Somebody?”
“I mean the murderer. In the room where she died the earthenware teapot is about a third full, and that tea is still scalding hot”
“Darling, I don’t understand you. I swear to God I don’t! Couldn’t—couldn’t Glynis have made tea for herself?”
“Oh, yes. It doesn’t matter who made the tea or who drank it or who didn’t drink it. But at any time that woman could possibly have been killed, at any time within any medical limits, the tide was almost as far out as it is at this minute. Now look round you. Look back up the beach. Look out towards the sea. Look down under the piles of the pavilion.”
The inshore breeze, further ruffling Betty’s hair, smoothed at her skirt as well. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, looking round her, and then just as quickly back again.
“There are your footprints,” Garth continued, “coming out here from the grass slope where you left the bicycle. There are my footprints,” he moved his arm to point, “coming out here from the back of the cottage. There’s not another mark anywhere. You see that?”
“David, I—”
“You see that, my dear?”
“Yes!”
“The murderer had to leave the pavilion after he killed Glynis. He’s not there now. And in some fashion, explain it how you like, he or she or some damnable witch of the low-tide managed to leave here without a single footprint in all that wet sand.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment or two.
One sound they heard, carried by the breeze, was little more than a ripple or whisper from far away in the hollow of the sea. But the tide had turned; its lap at the edges would presently become the soft, shaky thunder of the tide rolling in.
The other noise struck at them from the opposite side. It was the clop and jingle of an open carriage: a dilapidated carriage, such as you usually found at railways-stations in seaside towns, but driven at a brisk pace along the road from the direction of Ravensport.
“No, Betty!” Garth was looking past the driver of the carriage at its t
wo passengers. “Don’t move. I know both those men. We shall have to face this out.”
They had not long to wait, once the carriage had disappeared on the other side of the house. The two men in question appeared almost immediately, having walked through that broad central hall, at the open glass doors which faced the pavilion.
They were looking quickly round them. But they did not comment, even to each other, until they had marched straight out across the sands. A single eyeglass glinted, even though there, was no sun to make it glint.
“My dear fellow,” said the not unsympathetic voice of Cullingford Abbot, “we have heard, rightly or wrongly, that something most unpleasant has happened here. I only hope, for your own sake, that what we’ve heard is not true.”
The other man was entirely non-committal.
“Well, well!” said Detective-Inspector George Alfred Twigg, shaking his head and avoiding Garth’s eye. “Who’d ha’ thought it, now? Well, well, well!”
8
ALONG THIS PART OF the coast, with varying voices and in different irregular rhythms, clocks had finished striking nine.
At Betty Calder’s house the noise could be heard softly, not at all discordant, as dusk deepened into night. Softly too, and in silken undulation, moved the surf at high-tide.
But the atmosphere in Betty’s sitting-room, where Cullingford Abbot looked at David Garth, did not quite accord with this.
At the back of the stone house there were two long and low-ceilinged rooms, one at either side of the central hall; each with three windows overlooking the water that stirred whisperingly below scrub grass and beach. The room at the left had been intended as a bedroom for the late Glynis Stukeley. The room at the right was the sitting-room—cluttered, lace-curtained, its padded chairs draped in cretonne—where Betty had spent too much time dreaming over books.
A paraffin lamp in a yellow silk shade hung from the ceiling. If you glanced out of the open windows, here in this sitting-room, you could see a hurricane-lantern burning inside the pavilion. But Garth sat on the window-seat, his back to the sea, and faced Cullingford Abbot, whose back was to the fireplace.
The Witch of the Low Tide Page 9
