The Witch of the Low Tide

by John Dickson Carr

  “You had to move slow; it was dark and at first you weren’t sure. She could move quick. A few seconds, that’s all! A few seconds to put down that nice, beautiful burden on the floor. And hang up the robe. And nip out to the steps again.

  “She put on her shoes there. She stepped backwards out on the sand. If she had to scuff up the last two footprints she’d made, her skirt would hide it until she could get you to walk down the steps and mess up the tracks still more. Then she was ready, waiting and listening, to sing out your name and call you to the door. She was out of breath and untidy. But what of that? She could say she’d been riding a bike. She didn’t have to tell you she’d been carrying the body of the sister she strangled.”

  “Stop,” Betty screamed. “Stop this. If you want a confession—”

  “Betty, be quiet!”

  “I don’t care. I can’t bear any more.”

  “Ah!” said Twigg. His hard breathing gradually slowed down while he craned round to look at Betty. He strolled towards her. “Well, now, miss,” he added, dusting his hands together in an expression between leisureliness and contempt, “I don’t think we need a confession. I think we’ve got enough against you already. Still! You offered it. And while we’re about it, Doctor,” he flung his head round, “we’ll have one from you too.”

  “A confession of what?”

  “You guessed what she’d done, didn’t you? While you were out at the pavilion, standing over Glynis Stukeley’s body for the first time, you guessed what this woman had done?”

  “I promised to answer questions, Mr. Twigg. There was no promise to counter vague generalities. State a precise question or for God’s sake hold your peace.”

  Twigg spun round.

  He studied the other with sudden attention. Then he lumbered back to the marble-topped table.

  “You guessed she’d messed about with the evidence, didn’t you? You guessed she’d brought a dead body from the house to the pavilion?”

  “Yes. I guessed that.”

  “Oh, ah! And you told one thumping lie in your testimony, in the hope of shielding this woman here?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Oh, ah! I’ll just lay a tanner you told the same lie to her too, and you both pretended to each other, and never admitted the truth of it even between yourselves.”

  “No. We never admitted it. Even between ourselves.”

  Suddenly Twigg looked a little shamefaced, glaring first at Betty and then back at Garth.

  “Why did you have to go and do this? Either of you? It’s not so easy, is it? It’s easy to think up these fancy stories. It’s not so easy when you learn what murder’s like, and find you’ve only made a fool of yourself after all?”

  “I greatly fear,” answered Garth, “that is true too.” His tone changed. “Now another word of warning, Inspector. I have badly misjudged you. You are an honest man and you are not a bad fellow. But nothing on earth is of less importance than your personal vanity or mine. And I ask you again to carry the triumph no further.”

  “Ho! That’s a lot of brag and bounce, ain’t it? Now we know this woman’s a criminal—”

  “Who says she is a criminal?”

  “Don’t talk soft! We know she committed the murder!”

  “Who says she committed the murder?”

  Garth stood motionless, as though listening, his head partly turned towards the corridor and the open door behind him.

  “Inspector,” he went on, “you are a first-class police-officer. No mechanics of a crime will ever baffle you. What you have completely overlooked is the motive. You still don’t see the real reason why the victim was killed.”

  “I don’t, eh? She was lulled because her sister couldn’t put up with her any longer!”

  “Oh, no. It’s not quite as simple as that. And the murderer was a man.”

  “God’s truth! Are you trying to tell me it’s another man who’s been mixed up in a blackmailing relationship with Glynis Stukeley?”

  “Not exactly,” said Garth, “though that enters into it. The murderer is a man who for years has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Marion Bostwick.”

  “Marion Bostwick?” yelled Twigg.

  “Listen!” said Garth.

  There was someone else moving in the cellar.

  Garth went over at Betty’s side and put his arm tightly round her. Twigg lifted his head.

  The noise they heard might at first have sounded like the scuttle of a rat. Yet it was not a rapid movement. Slow footsteps on gritty stone approached from the direction of the cellar stairs. Those footsteps began to run only as they neared the door; and then the newcomer stopped short as he appeared in the doorway.

  Violence and despair entered with him. His right hand hung at his side, but it held an Eley’s revolver. He looked at each of them in turn, with eyes so wide open that a ring of white showed round the iris.

  I’m the man you want,” said Colonel Selby. “I strangled that woman at the beach-house. And nobody else is going to suffer for it.”

  Holding the revolver in both hands with trigger-guard outwards, drawing the hammer back to cock, he rammed its muzzle between his teeth and up hard against the roof of his mouth. There was no time for Twigg to interfere. Garth could not have interfered even if he had wished to do so. He had time only to seize the back of Betty’s neck and force her head downwards. She did not see what happened when Colonel Selby pulled the trigger.

  19

  DISTANT CLOCKS WERE STRIKING the hour of one in the morning when Inspector Twigg, Cullingford Abbot, and David Garth entered Garth’s consulting-room at number 31b Harley Street.

  First Garth switched on the four bulbs of the chandelier. Their light lay bleakly over the broad desk, over chairs of black padded leather, over a mantelpiece on whose ledge the bronze clock was flanked by a silver-framed photograph of Garth’s parents at one side and by a silver-framed photograph of Betty Calder at the other. The room was haunted by a vague smell of drugs or antiseptics.

  “Sit down, gentlemen,” Garth said. “This profession of mine I chose for myself. It has a thousand compensations. But tonight has not shown me one of them.”

  He himself sat down behind the desk. Abbot occupied the big chair facing it. But Twigg, too restless, paced and lifted his fist

  “‘Sexual relation,’” Twigg was saying. “‘Sexual relation!’” He flung the words away from him, as though he would stamp on them and blot them out as too shameful to exist. Yet he could not resist repeating them. “With Mrs. Bostwick? Ever since she was fourteen years old?”

  “Tut!” Abbot said acidly, though even his eyeglass appeared subdued. “Can you honestly claim you never suspected it?”

  “‘Sexual relations.’ God’s truth! It’s not right.”

  “Possibly not. But such things happen. Its refreshing to hear that you, a policeman of twenty years’ experience, have never encountered them.”

  “Encountered ’em? Oh, ah! I’ve encountered ’em often enough. I began in K Division, and that means the East End. But among the gentry—”

  Twigg stopped short. Abbot raised his eyebrows.

  “The gentry? Your hated gentry? Is Saul also among the prophets?”

  “All I meant—”

  “If you may be said to have a fault, my dear Twigg, it’s that you regard these queer animals as being either much worse or much better than they really are. Have a little charity. Try to think that the ranks of the damned may be not so much different from yourself.”

  “Look here, Doctor.” Twigg turned to Garth with a fierce and lowering embarrassment “If you’d just mind telling us? Eh?”

  “You have heard the main facts, Inspector. There is very little else to tell.”

  “The main facts, perhaps,” agreed Abbot with some malevolence. “Otherwise there is almost everything to tell. And you know it.”

  “It will be held in confidence, I hope? Colonel Selby is dead. Nobody else has read that statement I gave him. Is there any re
ason why Vince Bostwick should ever hear one word more about it?”

  “Oh, it will be held in confidence. If the police were inclined to tell all they knew, many people (including your obedient servant) would not sleep well at night. Still! In the interests of Mr. Bostwick himself, is that wise?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! I only wish I could decide!”

  “You are too young, Garth, to remember the Bravo case in ’76. Nearly all the explosion of tragedy was caused by the fact that a very handsome young woman would not give up her affair with a man more than old enough to be her father. Those were Mrs. Bostwick’s feelings too, I take it? That caused the tragedy?”

  “In part, yes. But only in part.”

  “And the other part? Let us hear it!”

  Garth leaned back in the chair. Then he leaned forward again, elbow on the desk, shielding his eyes with his hand.

  Two years ago,” he said, “a close friend of my own age married a girl of eighteen. She had been brought home from India at fourteen by a guardian who was then (at a guess) in his middle fifties. About this girl there was some disturbing quality not easy to identify. Nor could the household, Colonel Selby and Mrs. Montague and their ward Marion, be called altogether a usual one. Mrs. Montague, though she permitted a telephone in the house, refused to have their names included in the directory. The wedding was a hasty, ill-arranged affair; neither Colonel Selby nor Mrs. Montague attended the ceremony at Hampstead Town Hall.

  “Something had gone wrong there. It concerned Marion; nor was I prompted entirely by what Vince would call my Viennese inclinations to suspect a matter of a sexual nature. As I told Vince long afterwards, any experienced G.P. could have seen that.

  Though Vince deeply loved his wife, it became plain they were not happy and that she was restless to a dangerous point. The only clue appeared to be her constant, monotonous harping on the matter of how much she liked ‘young’ men, which was not true. On so many unnecessary occasions did she drag in references to how ‘old’ people were, à propos love or marriage, that it was revealing. I wondered—”

  “You wondered if the lady protested too much?” inquired Abbot. “A point made by a somewhat older psychoanalyst than any in Vienna?”

  “Yes. Others noticed it too; it need not be laboured. Marion, Vince, and I attended the opening night of The Merry Widow. Afterwards, again in that same restless state, she began questioning me about my work. She asked me what I should do if someone came to me and told me she was ‘abnormal and unnatural and apt to be locked up in a madhouse’ to keep her from committing a murder.

  “At the beginning of the following week Colonel Selby telephoned Michael Fielding and asked for a professional appointment so that he could see me here, away from his house and the members of his household. On Friday night he asked me much the same question.”

  “And he was talking about her?” asked Abbot.

  “Oh, no,” retorted Garth. “He thought he was talking about himself.”

  “He ‘thought’ he was talking about himself?”

  “Yes.”

  Garth leaned back in the chair.

  “Even now, when Colonel Selby is dead, I should not reveal any word ever spoken in this consulting-room if it were not necessary to explain a crime to the police. But that was a revealing interview.

  “The man was shaken, badly frightened, at the end of his nervous resources. He said that he wanted to state a hypothetical case, and changed this to saying he was talking about someone he knew.

  “Every doctor knows (and sometimes dreads) that opening. When a patient approaches some very embarrassing subject, and begins by insisting it is a hypothetical case or someone else’s case, almost invariably he is talking about himself. On many occasions it will take time and delicacy to get the truth.

  “Colonel Selby was talking about himself—and his relations with Marion Bostwick. The man was horrified. Because he could not keep away from a woman so very much younger than himself, because it had happened time after time when he had sworn it shouldn’t happen again, he thought he must be tainted and insane. He was over-conscientious, over-dogged, thoroughly scrupulous….”

  Garth sat up straight.

  “Don’t scoff,” Garth added sharply, as the familiar look of benevolent cynicism crossed Abbot’s face. “I mean just what I say. If he had not been all of that, he would never afterwards have admitted he killed Glynis Stukeley and then shot himself.”

  There was a pause.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Abbot. “You are quite right, of course. I am not myself fond of bad taste, though I am always displaying it. Go on.”

  “Colonel Selby was not to know it had happened to many other men besides himself. Up to then he had lived in the relatively (I say relatively) uncomplicated world shown to us by Mr. Kipling. Above all he was never to guess that the driving, motivating force in the sexual affair was the girl herself, Marion, who brought about all the trouble and will get off scot-free.”

  Again there was a pause.

  “Colonel Selby wanted to tell me of this affair on Friday night. He was nerving himself to tell me, especially since he and Marion were both being threatened by a blackmailer. But the interview was interrupted. It was interrupted by two things, occurring one after the other, though at the time I could understand only the second—and more obvious—interruption.

  “The telephone rang out in the hall. We could hear Michael’s voice talking to Marion at the other end of the line, using her name, while she cried out about some then-unnamed calamity or catastrophe. Colonel Selby sprang up in a worse state of nerves. He said he could not go on with this; he broke off abruptly, and took a hasty departure. The mention of Marion’s name had influenced him, of course, as I thought. But another incident, which I failed to interpret then, had just influenced him far more.

  “Abbot, he was sitting in the same leather chair you are occupying now. Just as the telephone rang, he looked away from me. He looked over towards the fireplace. Before any mention had been made of Marion Bostwick’s name on the telephone, a change went over him; while he was looking round, his fingers tightened with some violence on the arms of the chair. Abbot, look round now. Look at the fireplace and especially the ledge of the mantelpiece above. What do you see?”

  Abbot craned round. Twigg, who had been pacing, stopped in the middle of the consulting-room and also followed the direction of Garth’s gesture.

  “So!” Abbot whistled, turning back. “A silver-framed photograph of Betty Calder. Or would it seem to be—?”

  “Exactly. To a man who was being blackmailed, wouldn’t it seem to be a photograph of Glynis Stukeley?”

  “Oh, ah!” said Twigg, rubbing his forehead. “Oh, ah!”

  “I don’t say it made Colonel Selby suspicious of me as a part of any plot against him. But he must have decided I had some very odd friends or relatives. Certainly he would change his mind in haste about giving me his confidence.

  “At the time, however, I had never heard of Glynis Stukeley; I knew nothing of plots or blackmail; his behaviour, though observed, was forgotten and went uninterpreted until twenty-four hours later.

  “The same applies to a similar fact which Colonel Selby mentioned to me almost as soon as he marched into this room. Out in the waiting-room somebody had left a copy of a novel, unfortunately a novel I myself had written, called By Whose Hand? It had been left open at the frontispiece, and Colonel Selby was glancing at the book before he saw me. The theme of that novel, as you both know, is the influence exercised by a young woman—apparently of supernatural attractiveness and other powers—over a man very much older than herself.”

  “So he thought you were getting at him? Or somebody was getting at him?”

  “Oh, no!” said Garth. “Not then. Not until afterwards.”

  “What’s that, Doctor?” demanded Twigg.

  “If he had thought any such thing at the time, he would have bolted before he even saw me. Nor would he have been so quick to me
ntion the book at the beginning. You see, Colonel Selby was no reader. If you look at his study, his den, the place where a man’s most instinctive tastes are revealed, you will find nothing in the way of books except bound copies of The Field. He had not read the book. He could have gained very little idea of its contents by glancing at it while he waited. He knew only that it was strange, queer (as everything was beginning to seem to a bedevilled man), and that it upset him.

  “On the other hand, it very much occurred to me as confirmation of my own theories. Colonel Selby’s secret was his passion for Marion Bostwick and hers for him. Someone knew this (who?) and had left the book there (why?) so that he should find it; and the person who left it there must be someone attached to my own household. On these puzzling notes he left my consulting-room in a panic.

  “Up to the time he left I had heard nothing of a blackmailer or blackmailing tactics. Immediately afterwards I began hearing of little else. You, Inspector, drove in to the attack by saying the blackmailer was Betty Calder. You, Abbot, confirmed this over the telephone. You added that Betty must have been having an affair with Vince Bostwick. Then came news of the strangling assault on Mrs. Montague.”

  Garth paused.

  Briefly, while Twigg stiffened and Abbot grimaced at the edge of the desk, old antagonisms flared and burned.

  “Considering all we now know, Inspector,” Garth asked, “will you acknowledge the person who nearly killed Mrs. Montague was Marion Bostwick herself?”

  “Oh, ah! I’m bound to. Will you acknowledge something too, Doctor? When you take a dislike to somebody, I tell you straight, you’re an uncommon hard man to get on with. God’s truth! You didn’t say ‘Inspector’ then. You had a way of saying, ‘Mr. Twigg,’ with a sting in the tail, like, that fair drove me wild whenever I heard it. Will you admit that too?”