The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  “Abbot, have you forgotten why you came to Fairfield in the first place?”

  “No; but—”

  “Not so very long ago, in this room, you were much exercised about Mrs. Blanche Montague. “What does that woman know? What did she say to Glynis Stukeley, if it was Glynis Stukeley, that made Stukeley herself go berserk?” Garth gnawed at his under-lip. “Well, if I read matters aright, Marion knows too. She knows as well as anyone. And, fortunately, she’s here.”

  “Here?”

  “Marion Bostwick is at the Stag and Glove, where I mean to take Betty tonight. Whether I relish the prospect or not, I must speak to Marion like a Dutch uncle. In case Twigg should be preparing more unpleasant surprises, it can’t be delayed much longer.”

  Abbot expelled his breath.

  “Suit yourself, my dear fellow. At the same time…”

  “Yes?”

  “Everybody in London, it seems to me, has read one book by ‘Phantom’ called Instruments of Darkness. And another called By Whose Hand? Take care another side of your hobby doesn’t become real too! I told you, didn’t I, that Glynis Stukeley (only we thought it was her sister) is said to have joined a Satanist group in Paris? Yes?”

  Every breath of wind had died. Lace curtains and yellow-shaded lamp hung as motionless as the books on the shelves.

  “Abbot, you’re not serious?”

  “Think not?”

  “Even allowing your own hobby to be the occult, surely you don’t expect to meet ghosts? Or believe that woman was done to death by supernatural means?”

  “I spare you,” Abbot said impassively, “a hackneyed quotation that begins, ‘There are more things—’ I merely refer you,” and he pointed at the shelves, “to a book of much higher quality than your own. Its scene is a place named Baskerville Hall. And my quotation is, ‘The devil’s agents may be flesh and blood, may they not?’”

  There were quick footsteps outside the door. Betty Calder, wearing a brown tweed skirt and jacket as severe as her usual costumes, and a hat which seemed to be decorated with a white ribbon, threw open the door and spoke before she had seen Abbot.

  “Darling, I’ve packed a bag. And I’ve been turning out the lamps. It’s all dark except for this room. Oh! I beg your pardon!”

  She shied back. Belatedly Abbot removed his own hat and gave her a bow of immense gallantry.

  “No, dear lady. No! I most heartily beg yours.”

  “The police aren’t back here, are they? Not again? Not tonight? Forgive me, but I don’t think I could bear…”

  “Pray be easy, madam. This call is entirely unofficial. As I was telling Dr. Garth, I arrived with the carriage from the railway-station at Ravensport. And I shall be spending the night myself at the Palace Hotel in Fairfield. You’ll allow me, I hope, to drive you both to the Stag and Glove?”

  “That is most kind of you, Mr. Abbot. But I’m not sure…”

  “It’s very kind indeed, Abbot,” Garth said quickly. “We shall be happy to accept.”

  Betty, he could see, was nearing the end of her strength. The brown eyes had gone to him, for confirmation or denial as they usually did, when Abbot asked the question. Though clearly she was relieved when he spoke, several things caught them up at once and carried them again towards a point of panic.

  “Yes, to be sure,” Betty murmured. “The back door is locked. There’s only this.”

  Buttoning her glove, Betty turned to the left of the door. From a hook beside the door, all but invisible against tan-and-white wallpaper and a white ceiling, a cord ran up past the jamb and across the ceiling on staples to a pulley in the middle. You could lower or raise the lamp to light it or to blow it out. Garth was about to assist her when Abbot’s voice struck in and held him where he stood.

  “Garth, do you mean to help me in this?”

  “In what?”

  “With the particular witness in question?” Abbot seemed reluctant to mention Marion Bostwick’s name. “The lady we were speaking about. If she has been concealing information, and you’re already aware of it, why don’t you tell me now?”

  “Believe me, there are reasons why I can’t And they are professional reasons, though you won’t credit that either.”

  “Who doubts you, confound it? I never have! You may remember, I stopped Twigg—”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, it seems to me I should be there when you question her. Then there’s the matter of young Fielding.”

  “Michael? You may take my word for it, Abbot, Michael had no knowingly or consciously guilty part in any of this!”

  “Ah? Then you think he may have had some part to play in it?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell.” Garth’s head had begun to ache again. “Tomorrow, if you like, I’ll send Michael a telegram and ask him to come down here. No; tomorrow’s Sunday; I can’t send a telegram.”

  “You can, I believe, if you go to the Central Post Office in Ravensport. What do you say?”

  That was the point at which Betty almost cried out.

  She was lowering the lamp. Garth, like a man trying to look in two directions at once, had seen her gaze move towards the chair in which lay the paper-bound copy of The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Instantly Betty’s gaze flicked away from that chair, and upwards.

  The white lamp-cord snaked across the ceiling. He saw realization dawn in Betty’s eyes at the same instant it entered his own mind. There was a cord like that in nearly every room here. Although this one had been just over his head all evening, it had never once occurred to him that a short length of such sash-cord had been embedded in the dead throat of Glynis Stukeley.

  “Allow me,” he said. And he was at Betty’s side.

  There was no danger that the lamp would run through its pulley and smash in flames on the floor; a knot beside one staple prevented that. But he had seen Betty’s arm tremble, and her colour recede.

  “Abbot, is the carriage outside?”

  “Naturally!” the other said with some impatience.

  “Then have the consideration to escort Lady Calder, won’t you? I must blow out this lamp. We can’t stumble about in the dark.”

  “As you please. But have you been listening to a word I’m saying? Is it necessary to question the lady tonight? Can’t it wait?”

  “Yes, I suppose it can wait. Vince and Marion will have gone to bed anyway. And I’m tired; I can’t remember being so tired since the Pretoria campaign in the South African War.”

  Garth would have said almost anything to silence Abbot. Desperately he wanted to have a word in private with Betty. But this, under the circumstances, became impossible.

  The lamp was extinguished, the cottage left behind. The clop and jingle of the landau bore them through a moon-washed world to the Stag and Glove. There was small difficulty about accommodation, even in June. Garth already occupied bedroom and private sitting-room in the north wing of a half-timbered house whose black beams and white plaster had seen the end of the fifteenth century. Vince and Marion seemed to have retired to a similar set of chambers in the south wing. Though Betty’s room at the rear might be less spacious, it was a good deal more comfortable.

  But Cullingford Abbot wouldn’t leave them.

  Betty, now so cool and composed that she seemed a different woman, chatted interminably. When at length Abbot told his driver to go on to the Palace Hotel, Mr. Fred Easterbrook bounced in like a spirit of respectability to hover near them.

  “I am of Fairfield, look,” the proprietor’s eye seemed to be saying. “No members of the lower orders can get yelling drunk in my bar. If a single lady and a single gentleman want rooms unexpectedly: why, no harm done and I’m sure it’s all right. Still—!”

  And so, in the raftered inn-parlour with the brass warming-pans round the walls, his eye remained eloquent.

  “Ain’t there anything else I can get you, sir?”

  “Nothing else, thanks.”

  “Here’s your bedroom candle, ready and lighted.
Wouldn’t you like a hot Scotch and water, sir? Mr. Bostwick had one.”

  “No refreshment now, I thank you. That will be all.”

  “It’s not a bit of trouble, you know, sir. Past midnight; my wife and the girl are both asleep; but I’m always awake. Wouldn’t you like a hot Scotch and water?”

  “Mr. Easterbrook—”

  “Then here’s Lady Calder’s bedroom light, sir. By your leave, my lady, and gentleman’s too, I’ll escort you to your room. This way, my lady.”

  There was no getting round the iron laws of respectability, even in the matter of saying good-night. Garth bowed. He watched them go up the stairs to the landing, and back along a passage towards the rear.

  Then he himself marched up the ancient staircase, its oak treads hollowed. He turned left into the north wing, along the solid if uneven floor of a corridor with a bottle-glass window at its far end. He opened the door of his sitting-room—and stepped into the dark.

  Garth sensed that presence waiting for him before he had even entered. He closed the door behind him. Holding up the candle in its metal dish, he went over to a chair between the sitting-room windows. Marion Bostwick, wearing slippers and a heavily frilled nightgown, sat bolt upright and looked at him.

  11

  IF MARION HAD NOT laughed…

  Garth felt no relish for what he must say to her. Case-histories are one thing. In no stranger should any bodily or psychic illness move the physician’s emotions lest it trouble his judgement. He must not deal with what too closely touches his own life.

  But it was a startling laugh, callous and with a touch of brutality. Marion sat bolt upright, hair elaborately dressed and gleaming. The whole room reeked of her personality and of the perfume she wore.

  She was in a chair with a ladder back, against a white plaster wall between two latticed windows. The small candle-flame was reflected in her eyes. Stretching up both arms behind her head, elbows out, and seizing the supports of the chair at either side, Marion leaned back with a feline grace and crossed her knees.

  “What’s the matter, David? Why don’t you tell me not to speak so loudly? Why don’t you tell me to whisper? Why don’t you tell me there are people all about, just dying to make a scandal?”

  “That would be true, wouldn’t it?”

  It was as though Marion’s impatience at such a notion ached so deeply that it could be expressed only by a curse or a prayer.

  “You needn’t worry. Nobody can hear us; these walls are too thick. Nobody saw me slip in here. Or are you thinking about Vince?”

  “I wonder, Marion, if you can guess what I am really thinking.”

  “Vince is asleep. I poured chloral in his whisky.” At once nagging and coaxing, at once storming at him and yet wheedling in unconvincing tenderness, Marion had lowered her voice. But she still seemed to be crying out that all things were unfair. “Don’t be stupid, David. I want to be nice to you. I’m trying to be nice to you. But you don’t make it easy, do you? There are times when I could kill some of the men I know!”

  “Whereas in actual fact,” Garth said, “you only tried to kill one woman.”

  Marion dropped her arms and sat up straight.

  In one corner of the room a deep-voiced grandfather clock seemed to rustle rather than tick. Garth went back to the door. There was a new bolt, but the latch was of wood. He stood looking down at it.

  Even the Stag and Glove, he supposed, was not really old as time went in this island. They had built it more than a century after England’s life began to depend on the wool that must be sent in ships and the ships that must be guarded against pirates; and Fulke de Raven, first Deputy Warden of the Cinque Ports, kept watch from his tower above the Narrow Seas.

  But these reflections could become dangerous. If you stood motionless in the stream of time, listening to crying voices out of the past, you might presently believe that your feelings or your neighbour’s were of puny significance because they had been experienced so often before and would be experienced again when you had gone. Whereas they did matter; they were the only reality; there was no shame in feeling the hurt.

  Garth bolted the door, locking himself in with Marion.

  Near the middle of the room there was a large round table with another ladder-backed chair beside it. He put the candle on the table and sat down opposite her. Though the light now touched her face only dimly, be did not need to see it. Marion’s distended nostrils and protruding eyes were in grotesque contrast to the seductiveness of her perfume.

  “Vince, I imagine,” he said, “has told you what happened late this afternoon?”

  “The murder? Dear, dear! How very awkward for you!”

  “Yes, it’s awkward. Glynis Stukeley was strangled to death in—” here he hesitated—“in a pavilion on the beach at the back of Betty’s cottage. All the evidence indicates she must have been strangled either by Betty herself or by me.”

  “And that’s unfortunate too.”

  “By God, it is! But for whom? I doubt that even Inspector Twigg, a police-officer who hates my guts, really believes I was the one who killed her. It’s Betty he’s after. And Betty is innocent.”

  “What makes you think she’s innocent?”

  “Because I know Betty. What good should I be at my work, what earthly good at all, unless I had some knowledge of the human mind? Or, if you prefer, of the human soul?”

  Moonlight silvered the latticed windows. The tall clock, as leisurely and unhurried as time itself, threw out its beats against silence.

  “Twigg is one person, Marion. Cullingford Abbot is quite another. He is no more shrewd or imaginative than Twigg, but he has more experience with the kind of people Twigg hates. His very first impulse was to question Mrs. Montague; he’ll do it soon; and he may get the truth out of her. Also, after a talk I had with him tonight, he is certain to question you too.”

  “You told him,” Marion whispered. “Whatever filthy things you may have been thinking—how could you? Because—because of this Viennese doctor who says, doesn’t he, doesn’t he, that the deepest wish in our lives goes back to some kind of sexual feeling?”

  “Whatever he says, at least I believe yours does. To a certain kind of sexual feeling, anyway.”

  “You rotter,” Marion whispered. Then she sprang to her feet, fighting for breath. “Oh, Christ love us and help us, could there ever be such a rotter as the man I thought was my friend and Vince’s friend?”

  “Sit down, Marion,” Garth said coldly. “You’re frightened, that’s all. I told him nothing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I told him nothing. I promised to protect you, and I have kept that promise. But there are other people to be considered now.”

  “You fool! You utter imbecile! Do you dream for one minute I killed that awful creature at your fancy-woman’s place this afternoon?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Then what—?”

  “I don’t say you killed her, though you may have done. Nothing is certain. I was referring to another incident; connected with the murder, possibly even bringing about the murder, but a separate act that has only served to confuse the trail. I meant the attempt to strangle Mrs. Montague on Friday night. Tell me, Marion. You were the woman she really called a whore, now weren’t you?”

  Tick-tick went the tall clock, a rustle of movement through eternity.

  “That part of your story sounded real. When she hastily summoned you at night with the servants all sent away, and an elderly woman went on shouting ‘whore’ in a darkened house, that rang true. Why should it have upset Glynis Stukeley so much? Why should it have upset her in the least? What else, after all, had she ever pretended to be? But it upset you, Marion, whenever you let yourself remember.”

  Marion Bostwick, a lithe shape in a heavily frilled white nightgown, flung herself across towards the door. The old floorboards creaked and cracked; the candle-flame trembled. But she did not run far; perhaps she had not intended to run far. She returned, treading
very lightly and quickly, to face him again.

  Garth had not moved. He sat with his elbow on the table, right hand shielding his eyes even from dim candlelight.

  “I’m sorry, Marion.”

  “What are you accusing me of? What?”

  “Do you truly want me to tell you? Everything?”

  “Yes!”

  “Poor old Vince had never met Glynis Stukeley. But you had. He was not her victim; you were. All our reasoning must begin there. I hope you see to what other conclusion it presently leads.”

  “Well, I don’t!”

  “Never mind, then. We won’t pursue that. Let us return to actual events at Hampstead early last night.”

  He dropped his hand and looked up.

  “When Mrs. Montague lost her head and cried out specific accusations, you lost your head too. I know you had not meant to kill her. But you almost went too far. And then you were obliged to explain it.

  “Glynis Stukeley was not even in the house. I think you saw her somewhere that evening, so that you could describe her clothes, though there I am only guessing, and about other matters, unfortunately, I am not guessing.

  “You are not a deeply imaginative girl, Marion. But you have a quick, rather brutal kind of cunning. Always provided your courage holds up, you can seize an advantage and sweep through with it. If you accused Glynis herself of being the attacker, could she outface you? Would anyone believe her blackmail-charges then? Surely Mrs. Montague too, from her very horror of scandal, would back you up and support your story once you had given her time to think it over?

  “You thought she would. You said she would. It ran through every word you spoke to me at Hampstead last night. Glynis’s own sister believed you. You remembered to unlock the cellar door from inside; if you had not forgotten the two bolts, and had drawn them back as well, I might have believed it myself. And if that were all anyone could hold against you…”

  “All?” Marion interrupted. “All? You call me that word, or as good as call me that word, and still you say it’s not all?”

  “No, Marion. You know it’s not all.”

  Her quick, shallow breathing had an almost terrifying effect in the dim room. It went on in little gasps, steadily, like the slower beat of the clock.