Saltmarsh Murders mb-4

by Gladys Mitchell

  “In what way is their conduct singular?” enquired Mrs. Bradley, politely.

  “I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Gatty. “It just strikes me as singular that they should be so charitable. You know, that Lowry even gets a commission on the cocoanuts for the village fête, and he never gives the village children more than a farthing on the bottles they bring back. They find them in the roads left by picnicking parties, and he ought to give the poor little dears a halfpenny, as I do when they bring me bottles for my home-made wine. He is certainly dead by now. Jackson, I mean, of course.”

  William noticed that Mrs. Bradley had also produced a small notebook, and was surreptitiously dotting down—in shorthand, William thinks—all that Mrs. Gatty said. I discovered afterwards that it was none of the recognised methods of writing shorthand, of course.

  “Poor Jackson,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Gatty, “if a man will be a wolf, he must be caged like a wolf. And the joke of that is, that he is caged in the sheep-fold. That’s funny, now, isn’t it?”

  “Funny and clever,” said Mrs. Bradley, noting it down.

  “Caged, you know,” said Mrs. Gatty. “So funny that he should be caged. What awful weather for the time of year!”

  “And caged in the sheep-fold! I must remember that!” said Mrs. Bradley. She gave her awful cackle, William said, and rose to go. When they all got outside the Moat House, and Mrs. Gatty had shut the door, Mrs. Bradley sent Margaret home to the Manor House and was just about to speak to William when Mrs. Gatty came flying down the drive and grasped Mrs. Bradley’s arm.

  “And do you know what I think?” she said.

  “No,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “I think Mrs. Camel believes her reverend husband is the father of Meg Tosstick’s baby,” said Mrs. Gatty.

  (William, in his narrative to me, interpolated here, “What rot, Noel, isn’t it?” I concurred verbally with this view, but inwardly I was far from sure. The woman Coutts is capable of any frightful thought, so far as I can see!)

  Mrs. Gatty, having voiced her opinion, turned and darted up the drive again, and Mrs. Bradley said to William:

  “Has the church a crypt, child?”

  “Yes,” said William. The evening was drawing in.

  “Then lead me to it,” said Mrs. Bradley. “And let us hasten, for I perceive that it is beginning to rain.”

  So William escorted her to the church. They passed through the lych-gate and skirted the south door, which is early Norman, of course, and soon reached the flight of stone steps which lead down to the crypt. A heavy iron gate breaks the flight about two-thirds of the way down.

  “Do you just want to squint through the railings, or shall we go inside?” asked William.

  “I should like to go into the crypt,” replied Mrs. Bradley.

  “All right. I’ll go home and get the key,” said William obligingly. He surveyed his companion. “I suppose you wouldn’t like to get down from the inside of the church, would you?” he asked. “We needn’t bother about the key, if you could get down the steps inside. I can put the lights on.”

  “It would suit me far better,” said Mrs. Bradley. “William, I think Mr. Jackson Gatty, either dead or alive, is in the crypt.”

  “Who said so?” asked William, thrilled.

  “Mrs. Gatty herself, but she doesn’t know she did,” replied Mrs. Bradley.

  “Golly!” said William, irreverently. He led the way into the church, up the aisle, and into the vestry. Here he stooped and pulled aside a strip of cocoanut matting. A trap-door was disclosed, of course. The vicar’s predecessor had it made, I think.

  “Now you be careful,” said William. “This trap-door is fairly new. They used to bury people in the crypt, and the tale is that some old girl jazzed it down the steps here and bagged a couple of skulls. So the chap who held the living before my uncle got it, had that iron gate put on the outside steps, and this trapdoor built over the inside ones, and, you’ll see in a minute, the trapdoor is about two feet away from the top of the steps, so that it’s tricky work getting down.”

  He looked at Mrs. Bradley again.

  “I really think you’d better remain at the top, you know,” he said, frankly. “I mean, there wouldn’t be much sense in breaking your neck, would there?”

  Mrs. Bradley chuckled softly and replied:

  “Let us lift the trapdoor. Perhaps neither of us need go down.”

  They raised the little hatch and peered into the depths. Then Mrs. Bradley called, clearly but not loudly:

  “Mr. Gatty! Mr. Gatty!”

  A dark shape silhouetted itself against the light which streamed in from a grating. (My translation of William’s description. Shouldn’t think there could have been much light streaming in, of course.)

  “Up the steps Mr. Gatty. This way! This way!” cried Mrs. Bradley; and she and William lay flat on their stomachs and hauled a little, thin man into safety.

  “Good God!” said Jackson Gatty. “Good God! Thank you a thousand times. I’m very, very hungry! How anxious poor Eliza will be!”

  “And now,” said Mrs. Bradley, dusting the little man down in a motherly manner, “what have you to say for yourself, frightening us all like this?”

  Jackson Gatty coughed nervously.

  “I really am most frightfully sorry,” he said, “and I know that Eliza will never forgive me.” (He smiled, and William tells me that, upon seeing Jackson Gatty’s long canine top teeth, he nearly shouted “Wolf!”) “I allowed myself to be tempted by a wager. I think I have won it, too.”

  Mrs. Bradley began to lead the way out of the church.

  “Oh, I beg pardon,” said Jackson Gatty, flustered. “I should hardly have mentioned such a matter in the sacred edifice.”

  William says he shut the trapdoor, pulled the matting into place to cover it, and turned out the lights. Then he closed the church door— it was a foible of the vicar never to lock the church, although the vicar’s wife insisted that it attracted courting couples, a species of the human kind that never failed to inspire her with fearful loathing, of course—and followed the other two to the lych gate and out on to the road. He was just in time to overhear Jackson’s remark:

  “Yes, at the invitation of Mr. Burt, I allowed myself to be incarcerated in the crypt. But I certainly thought they would have—”

  Here William thinks that Mr. Gatty stopped talking because he heard William behind him. Mrs. Bradley did not prompt the little man to finish his sentence, and William, with a coy:

  “Well, good night,” was about to step into the night and return home when Mrs. Bradley stepped quickly up to him, and, to his amazement, put a ten-shilling note into his hand and thanked him for his assistance.

  At this point I confess that I can’t follow William’s line of thought. But, of course, boys of fourteen just don’t think along the same lines as any other human beings, and that’s all there is to it. It seemed to him, he said, that the least he could do in return for the ten bob was to go up to the Bungalow where Mr. Burt lived, and tax him with the fearful crime of incarcerating poor old Gatty in the church crypt. So, in spite of the fact that it was very dark, that a wretched drizzle was falling, that the Bungalow was nearly a mile and a half from his home and that it was situated above the Saltmarsh stone quarries, a lonely and a dangerous, and, according to the villagers, a haunted locality, he set out at Scouts’ pace for the Burt residence, as American stories say. As I said, I can’t follow the argument, but William seemed clear that he was doing the right thing.

  Foster Washington Yorke, the big negro, admitted and announced William. Yorke was Burt’s servant, the only one they kept. Burt was seated in a large easy chair and Cora was on his knees, and neither attempted to move when William was announced. They merely smiled at him, and Burt said:

  “Hullo, what can we do for you?”

  And Cora, whom William admired immediately, said:

  “Take a pew, ducky, and make yourself at home. Like a bit
of cake? Bring some cake, Dirty!”

  Foster Washington Yorke appeared with the cake, and William sat down on the nearest chair, and, as he confessed to me later, he never felt so much at a loss in his life. He had come to accuse Burt of a murderous attempt on Gatty, and yet, when he looked at this great, blond, healthy, jolly fellow, and reflected that he held records for sport, and saw that he held in his arms, as carelessly as an emperor, the most glorious creature on earth, it seemed madness as well as the most frightful side to accuse him of murdering, or wanting to murder, a poor little worm like Gatty. He said at last:

  “I expect you wonder why I’ve come?”

  “Not at all,” said Burt. “You’re the vicar’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Nephew,” said William, and there was a silence until Cora jumped up, and, opening the door, shouted to Foster Washington Yorke to bring in the supper.

  “Oh, I’ll—I’ll go,” said William, hastily finishing his cake. The goddess laughed and pushed him back on to his chair, and kissed his cheek.

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” she said. “A nice boy like you can surely eat a bit of grub if it’s put in front of you, can’t you?”

  William says it was the most frightful moment of his existence, but he managed to blurt out:

  “I—we got Mr. Gatty out of the crypt, so you mustn’t think we don’t know you did it!”

  “Again,” said Burt, leaning forward.

  “You betted him, you know,” said William desperately, “that he wouldn’t let you lock him in the crypt. Well, I mean, it seemed awful to leave him down there like that. I mean, it might have been murder, or something, mightn’t it?”

  Burt laughed, and said he had not thought of it in that light.

  Here Foster Washington Yorke entered and began to lay the table. A cold fowl and choice salads appeared, and a great bowl of stewed fruit and another great bowl of cream, and various cakes, biscuits, cheeses, cold tongue and meat paste.

  So the evening became a merry one, until, at the end of supper, Burt swore, and said he would have to go into the village for a heavy parcel of books which would be waiting at the station. Cora suggested that he should take the coloured man to carry the books, and she suggested that William should stay and keep her company. They would not be gone long, for the station was less than three-quarters of a mile away, and William could while away the time by telling her the tale of Mr. Gatty and the crypt, she said.

  There was little that William could add to what she already knew, but, when the supper things had been cleared away and left for Foster to wash up when he returned, she and William drew easy chairs to the fire, and William obligingly recounted the story of the rescue of Jackson Gatty.

  “Oh, and you know Mrs. Gatty’s funny trick of making out that everybody is like some animal or other?” said William. “Well, she makes out old Gatty is a wolf. Funny, because he’s a fearfully weak blighter. Why, his first words when we got him out were to hope his absence hadn’t caused any inconvenience, or something. He was thinking all about Mrs. Gatty, not himself. If Mrs. Gatty is really as dotty as they say, why isn’t she in an asylum? Oh, and talking of asylums, did you read in the paper about those two inmates scrapping? One’s done the other in, and a keeper got frightfully chewed up. Blood and brains and things all over the place!” That sort of thing is William’s idea of social small-talk, of course.

  Cora shivered and said:

  “I think we’ll draw the curtains and light up, ducky. It isn’t very dark yet, but it’s somehow creepy in this half-light. I like this bungalow and the peace and quiet and all that, but it is lonely, isn’t it? All the moor and the quarries, and only that one little cart track leading up to it from the village! I get real scared sometimes. I’m glad I don’t have to stop here in the winter. I believe I’d go off my head with the nerves!”

  “But not with Mr. Burt here?” said William.

  “David couldn’t do much against a ghost, could he, ducky? That’s what I think. Did you know one of those horrible murders was done at the bottom of our back garden? Well, it was. You know, when that loony got loose from the Moat House! Of course, it was years ago now, and the bungalow wasn’t built then nor anything, but somebody’s marked the spot with one of them—those—great boulders and I often sit here of an evening while David does his work, and make meself a set of undies or something, and wonder whether that poor old corpse ever walks. My word! I wouldn’t be Mrs. Gatty and live in that Moat House for anything you could offer me. I wouldn’t! No wonder she’s gone funny! Gawd—!”

  She broke off with a gulp of deadly terror.

  “Listen, ducky!” she whispered. “Whatever can it be?”

  Something was stealthily moving across the roof above their heads. There was a scraping noise, and then something heavy slipped and scrabbled on the slates. Cora clutched William’s bare knee.

  William is a plucky boy. He picked up the poker, pushed her hand from his knee, stood up and advanced to the door.

  “Oh, ducky, don’t!” cried Cora. She ran to him, and clung to his arm. “Ducky, don’t leave me! Don’t open the door!” She moaned in terror, as the sounds began again. They were sounds clearly indicative of the fact that somebody was climbing the bungalow roof and slipping as he climbed.

  “Let go,” said William, who was probably very pale. “It’s only somebody fooling about. One of the village kids, I daresay. I’ll scare him.”

  “You’re not to go!” said Cora. “You’re not to leave me!”

  She clung to him frantically. William could feel her heart beating heavily against his shoulder, for she was a tall woman. They listened intently, but could hear nothing more. Gradually the tension relaxed. William released himself, and they stood listening, but with recovered nerves.

  “I expect,” said William at last, in a whisper, “it was a biggish tomcat. They’re fearfully heavy, some tom-cats. As heavy as dogs. And the kind of noise reminded me rather of a cat, too.”

  “Did it, ducky?” whispered Cora, trying her hardest to believe him. “How I wish David and the blackie would come back, though, all the same.”

  “So do I, rather,” said William, glancing at the clock. “I really ought to be going home.”

  “Oh, but you can’t!” said Cora, wildly. She clung to his arm with both her big, plump hands. “I’d die of fright, if you was to leave me now! I’ll tell you what! Let’s telephone your uncle. You’re on the ’phone, I suppose, aren’t you?”

  “We’re on the ’phone, yes,” said William, giving her the number.

  She picked up the receiver and had just concluded that rather breathless message, received, as a matter of fact, by me, when the peculiar scrabbling noises began again. This time, even the pugnacious William did not want to go and investigate. Cora was white with terror. After about two minutes, the noises ceased again.

  “Whatever it is, it’s still up there,” said William. “What ought we to do?”

  “Stay here,” said Cora, her teeth chattering.

  “You don’t think,” said William, “that the others are in danger?”

  Cora groaned aloud.

  “Ducky, they might be. He might get them as they come in. Oh, my Lawks, whatever shall I do! I’m so terrified of that there Gatty, revengeful little toad!”

  She picked up the poker.

  “I’ll have that,” said William. “You won’t hit hard enough. You have the shovel, and whack them round the chops with it. I can’t be hanged if I kill anybody, that’s another thing. You can.”

  They advanced to the hall door. The light was burning in the hall. Bending double, William tiptoed to the front door. Cora followed. At this moment they heard the quavering voice of Foster Washington Yorke singing a negro spiritual to guard and cheer him and his master on their lonely road home.

  “Keep clear of the door, Cora,” said William, in whom the fear born of inaction had given place to the thrill of battle. “I’ll open it and let them in quick.”

  He waited
until he judged the negro and Burt were almost at the door, then he flung the door open and shouted, “Quick! Quick!”

  Washington was badly startled, but he responded immediately, and he and his load of books came hurtling into the house like rain, while William slammed the door.

  “Fo’ de Lawd’s sake, Mis’ Cora!” gasped the negro, rolling his eyes rapidly. “What’s de mattah?”

  “There’s something on the roof,” said William. “There it is again!” They clutched one another wildly. At the same instant a loud knock at the door heralded Burt. They besought him to enter quickly, and William told him the news. Cora, William supposed, was too scared to explain anything.

  “Something on the roof?” said Burt. “Oh, rot!”

  Nevertheless, somewhat shaken by their obvious fears, he walked to his desk, took out a revolver and walked to the door. He had a powerful electric torch in his left hand. Cora shrieked and rushing forward, clung to his arm. Burt shook her off.

  “Stay where you are,” he said. William and the negro had to hold Cora back, while Burt went outside the house. He returned in a moment or two.

  “Nothing there,” he said curtly.

  “Well, there was, ” said Cora, weakly, sitting down.

  “Yes,” said Burt, slowly and thoughtfully, and William noticed that he did not replace the gun in his desk, but left it lying on the blotting pad, “there has been something up there. You’d better have a couple of aspirins, Cora. There’s nothing to worry about now.” He looked at her and smiled grimly. (William’s words, not mine.)

  “I’d better go home,” said William.

  “Not alone,” said Cora. “You’ll have to take him, Dave.”

  “And leave you?” said William.

  “Nothing doing,” said Burt. “I couldn’t do that. The kid will have to stay here. Nothing else for it.”

  He smiled nastily again, William said. He supposed Burt was angry with Cora for getting scared.

  “His uncle might come,” said Cora. “I telephoned.”