The Saltmarsh Murders

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Ah, very likely. Wells,” he said, suddenly turning to me, “this is serious, you know. As a magistrate, I say that it is very serious indeed! The vicar of Salt-marsh to be assaulted in his own parish! Upon my word, it’s really monstrous! He marked the men, you say?”

  “One of them, Sir William,” I replied, trying to keep my face straight. Hang it all, he would have been the first person to assault the vicar in his own parish, had not the vicar assaulted him first! Daphne said:

  “Yes; his poor hands!”

  “Ah,” said Sir William. “Then all we have to do is to find the fellow the vicar marked so severely, and get from him the name of his accomplice, and get the couple of them a spell of hard labour, the damned scoundrels!”

  He looked round after tenderly feeling his eye. Margaret said:

  “They are probably not local people, Daddy.”

  Mrs. Bradley said:

  “In the pound, you say?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Curious,” said the little old woman. “It was only on Sunday that Mrs. Gatty was calling him a bull. The bull strayed on to someone else’s land and was put in the pound.”

  She fixed her black eyes on me.

  “Do you read the Pickwick Papers, young man?”

  “I have read them, yes,” I replied. As a matter of fact I’m fond of the book.

  “Aha!” said Mrs. Bradley. “A little of Dickens and a little of Gatty, and what a curious situation arises!”

  She chortled in a way that made one’s blood run cold, and then helped herself to kidneys and bacon from the sideboard. Did I say we had arrived at breakfast time?

  “Oh, how do you mean, Mrs. Bradley?” I asked. She wagged her fork at me and grinned fiendishly.

  “What happened when Captain Boldwig found Mr. Pickwick asleep in the barrow?” she asked. I racked my brain.

  “After the shooting?” I said.

  “Yes, and after the lunch:

  Complete with cold punch,” said Mrs. Bradley, positively hooting with mirth at her own absurd rhyme.

  “Why, the captain ordered his servant to wheel Mr. Pickwick to the pound,” said I, “He was trespassing on his land, or something, wasn’t he? But then, Mr. Coutts wasn’t trespassing. He was——”

  “Obviously he was where he wasn’t wanted,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “By Jove!” I said, struck by an idea. “I’ll get one or two men to help me, and we’ll go along there tonight, and see what happens. Surely five or six of us should be a match for a couple of roughnecks, shouldn’t we?”

  “Don’t go, Noel,” said Daphne.

  “Let him go,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Nothing on earth will happen, child.”

  “How do you know?” said the squire. “I myself will come with you, Wells, and, by the powers, I’ll bring along half a dozen of my own men, fellows I can thoroughly trust. Meet you outside Burt’s bungalow at nine o’clock to-night.”

  In its way it was quite a bit of excitement, of course, and I found myself swanking along the village street as though I were the chief of the Chicago police planning to clean up the city. But, as things turned out, when we did go to patrol the sea-shore, we were not only on the track of the men who had attacked the vicar but, as we thought, on the track of the man who killed Meg Tosstick. As though there were not mystery enough surrounding that poor girl, the next thing we heard was that she had been strangled at some time between nine o’clock and ten-thirty on the night of the Bank Holiday, and that there was no sign anywhere of the baby. People must actually have been dancing, or I myself may even have been concluding the fortune-telling, while that poor girl was being done to death. It was the most shocking and dreadful news I think any of us had ever had. Brown, the village constable, panting and exhausted, came to the vicarage soon after Daphne and I had returned from Sir William’s house, and told us what had happened. Then the vicar had to tell his story, for he bore too many marks of the fray to be able to hush the thing up. Old Brown shook his head.

  “Mark my words, Mr. Coutts, sir,” he stated solemnly, “it’s the same gang. I wonder what their game is?”

  “How was she killed?” asked Mrs. Coutts.

  “With a gent’s ‘and-knitted silk tie, ma’am,” replied Brown. “It had been put round her neck, tied in a bow in front, like as if someone had been having a little friendly joke with her, and then a wooden clothes peg had been used to make what the First Aid books calls a tourniquet. Oh, she’s not a nice sight, ma’am. She isn’t really, poor young gal. Got a nasty lump on ’er ’ead, too, but strangling was the cause of death, the doctor says.”

  Well, that was the way in which we received the news. Brown had been called on to the scene by Lowry after Mrs. Lowry, going to take the poor girl her breakfast in bed—for she still was accustomed to remain in bed for the greater part of the day—made the dreadful discovery of her death. Brown had called in Doctor Fosse, and then had rung up the police station at Wyemouth Harbour, our nearest town, and they had promised to send down an inspecter. Brown was easily the most important man in the village that day, I should think, although the Lowrys ran him close in reflected glory and personal popularity. A small crowd of villagers was outside the inn every time I passed that way, and knots of boys followed Brown wherever he went.

  Of course, look at it as you please, it was a most inexplicable thing. One hears of girls being murdered when a baby is going to be born and the show, so to speak, is going to be given away thereby. There have been classic instances, followed usually by mutilation of the body, decapitation to avoid identification, and games of that sort. But the plain facts of our Saltmarsh affair were, first, that the baby had been in the world for eleven whole days before its mother was murdered; secondly, that there was no reason why anybody should have wanted the poor girl out of the way, apart from the baby business, and (see above, so to speak), if the father, whoever he was, didn’t want to acknowledge paternity, why should he? Did he think the girl would give him away? What was the mystery?

  Struck by a sudden thought, I said to Mrs. Coutts:

  “I suppose the poor girl did have a baby?”

  She said:

  “Whatever do you mean? There was no doubt at all that when she left my service she was pregnant.”

  “Ah, well, that’s that, then,” I said. “It had just struck me that, as no one seems to have seen this baby, and as it has completely disappeared since the murder, it might never have existed.”

  A bright and thoughtful opinion, I considered.

  “You need not worry,” said the woman, viciously. “That baby has been moved, with the connivance of the Lowrys, to some home approved of by its natural father. Nobody was allowed to see that baby, my dear Noel, for a very good and sufficient reason. You mark my words! That baby resembled somebody too closely for its father’s comfort. That’s the reason for all this mystery surrounding the baby.”

  She snapped out the words as though they had been said on a typewriter.

  “So you think the father killed the mother, in case she should give him away?” I suggested, going on with what seemed to me the logical sequence of the story. “That is the police theory, too, I believe.” I was wrong about that, of course.

  Mrs. Coutts suddenly swayed, and pitched forward. I had never seen anybody faint before. She went dead off. I was fearfully alarmed. It was the merest luck, or sheer instinct, or something, which prompted me to freeze on to her before she struck her head. Dicky heart, of course. She had looked very groggy since she had reported old Coutts’ absence on the night of the fête. Very groggy.

  The police from Wyemouth Harbour and an inspector and the Chief Constable of the County all came down during the course of the day, and the village positively hummed. We got a fair crop of reporters, too, all seething with enthusiasm, and hosts of amateur detectives (holiday-makers from Wyemouth Harbour, chiefly), hunting for clues—or rather, souvenirs of the murder. Frightfully ghoulish, the many-headed, of course.

  William Cout
ts went snooping, too, and apparently walked into a hornets’ nest up at the Bungalow; He had spent a hot and dirty couple of hours in and about the Cove and the quarries, and then decided to call at the Bungalow to pick up any fresh trail, he said, but I concluded that he meant to see whether he would be asked to stay to lunch. The front door was open, as usual, so he walked in, and was just going to barge into the dining-room, whence he could hear voices, when it was borne in on him that Burt and Cora were having the most frightful row. He didn’t stay, of course. He heard the words:

  “—get a damned good hiding if I hear any more of it! Yes, and that Tired Business Man! Blast his eyes!”

  “—beastly old hole, enough to make a pig homesick!”

  “—pig is what I said! And now get on! You’ll miss that train.”

  Then he came away. I imagine that Cora and Burt quarrelled a good deal. They were both hot-headed, I had decided, and as I said before, it couldn’t have been much of a life for a gay-living high-spirited young woman of Cora’s type and mentality.

  But all minor excitements paled before the great blaze of terror and thrills that followed the discovery of the murder.

  William, I know, slept with his heaviest catapult under his pillow, and I shrewdly suspect that Mrs. Coutts used to put the kitchen poker on the chair beside her bed. I took care to accompany Daphne even into the garden to pick gooseberries and garden peas. At night I made a point of tapping upon her bedroom door and enquiring whether she was all right. She always was, of course.

  On the Tuesday afternoon and evening the men of the village, headed by the squire and the vicar, who had sunk their private differences in this terrible affair of the murder, and supported strongly by William Coutts and the local Boy Scouts, determined to track down the beast who had killed the poor girl. I dug out Burt, who, with his brains and physique certainly would have been a match for any murderer. He agreed willingly to help us, the more so as he was feeling a bit at a loose end, for Cora McCanley had received an offer by telegram that same morning to appear in a piece called Home Birds which was touring the provinces, and he supposed he would not see her again until after Christmas. Not that he seemed to care much. The row, I suppose.

  Our first task was to patrol the shore by the Cove, but, although we kept it up from seven in the evening until nearly one in the morning, nothing happened at all. Personally, I could not believe that there had been no connection between the attack on the vicar and the murder of the girl. We were harbouring Thugs in the village. When we arrived home, Mrs. Coutts, William and Daphne were all in bed. The vicar went into his wife’s room, and the next moment I heard him calling me.

  “Get some sal volatile from Daphne,” he said. It was rather nice to see Daphne asleep, but I was compelled to wake her for the stuff.

  It appeared that Mrs. Coutts had been out to look for us when it got dark, had missed her way and nearly fallen down one of the unfenced quarries. She was rather bad.

  And, blow me, if, on the Wednesday, another beastly mysterious affair didn’t occur which put the most fearful wind up Daphne and myself.

  As Mrs. Coutts was so very groggy, and complained of her heart and a bad headache and shock to the system, Daphne had to go down to the church and play the organ for the Women’s Weekly Prayer Meeting and Devotional.

  This was Mrs. Coutts’ job really, so Daphne, who was rather taken on the hop, thought she had better go along at about half-past six that evening and practise the hymns. Although I say it that love her, Daphne is not at her best on the organ unless she’s had considerable practice first. So we arranged to put in an hour from six-thirty to seven-thirty when the meeting was billed to begin.

  I say “we,” because, since the attack on William and myself outside the Bungalow, Daphne had been exceedingly nervous, and so I had fallen into the habit of “standing by.” We kept this pretty little fact to ourselves, because Mrs. Coutts would not have approved.

  So I accompanied Daphne to the church and worked the beastly bellows for her. She was in the middle of “Lead, Kindly Light,” and doing well, when I heard the music stop.

  “Gee up!” I said loudly and encouragingly. There was no answer, so I slid round, to see what was what.

  “Oh, Noel!” said Daphne. She threw her arms round me, clutching me tightly.

  “Somebody put their hands on my neck! Somebody put their hands on my neck!” she said.

  It was about five past seven then, and the verger came and lit up, and the earliest arrivals began to trickle in. I thought, to be quite honest, that Daphne was suffering from nerves. Nobody had come into the church unless they had come in from the vestry, and that was always kept locked. We ourselves had come in by the west door so as not to bother old Coutts for the keys.

  “I shrieked your name as soon as I felt the hands on me,” said Daphne, when the meeting was over and we were on our way home. Old Coutts had stayed behind to talk to some of the congregation, of course. Although the incident had given me quite a jolt, I would not discuss the subject with Daphne. I was certain really she had been imagining things. But I promised to stand by more closely than ever, and advised her to lock her door at night as an antidote to nerves. We were all suffering from nerves, more or less, that week, I think.

  I told Mrs. Bradley about it, of course. She looked more grave than I expected.

  “Don’t let her go about alone, Noel,” she said. “After all, no arrest has been made yet for the murder of Meg Tosstick. It may take place to-day. But keep close to little Daphne. They may not arrest the right person, you know!”

  She gave her ghoulish chuckle and patted me on the shoulder.

  CHAPTER VII

  EDWY DAVID BURT—HIS MAGGOT

  The police arrested Bob Candy, of course. It seems that in these murder cases the police are always looking out for two things; motive and opportunity. Well, it appeared that poor Bob headed the list of possible suspects very easily on both counts. In fact, I mean, if one didn’t know Bob Candy, it looked a clear thing. Nobody denied that he had walked out with the girl; everybody denied that it was his baby. If it had been, he would have married Meg Tosstick, according to the local custom, and there would have been an end of the matter, except for the nine or ten children that the two of them would produce, and the two or three out of those nine or ten that would eventually live to become adult, and, in their turn, to procreate others. Bob denied paternity of the baby, and everybody, even the police, believed him, because the police took the view that jealousy was the motive for the murder. As for opportunity, well, the two of them were living under the same roof and it would have been the simplest thing in the world for Candy to have sneaked into Meg’s room at night and strangled her as she lay in bed. As far as the method of doing the girl to death was concerned, there was no doubt at all but that she had been strangled with the man’s knitted silk tie which was still round her neck when her dead body was discovered by Mrs. Lowry next morning. The tie was proved to have been given to Bob on his birthday by the dead girl, who had knitted it, as her weeping old devil of a father bore witness, “with her own hands for him.” In reply to this, Bob was understood to state that the tie was his, but that, thoroughly upset by the birth of the baby, he had cast it aside and had sworn never to wear it any more. Pressed, he said that he could not remember exactly where he had put it. He thought he had thrown it away, and then again, he might have thrust it into a drawer, carelessly, but, on the other hand, he had a vague recollection of having used it as a lead for a lurcher he had had to bring to the public-house from the railway station the Saturday before Bank Holiday. He admitted, sadly, that it was a wonderfully strong tie. It was, of course.

  Sir William undertook to pay for the man’s defence, and he took some trouble to broadcast his belief in Candy’s innocence. Curiously enough, our own Constable Brown also refused to credit Candy with the murder. It was the inspector from Wyemouth who ordered the arrest after the adjourned inquest. Poor old Brown was quite upset about it.

 
; “It’s like this, Mr. Wells,” he said to me. “These town chaps is all right in their way, but it isn’t like knowing a chap. Now, I’ve knowed Bob Candy since he were seven or eight years of age, and I know he never done this ‘ere murder. I tells the inspector so. ‘Proof,’ he says, ‘proof! ‘I scratches my head, at that, Mr. Wells, because, things being how they are, it looks black again him. No doubt of that. So they arrests him. Well, I look at it this way. Somebody done it, didn’t un? And that somebody weren’t Bob. So what we got to do is to find out who that somebody were before this ‘ere old trial of Bob’s come along, and make an end of poor young chap.”

  Right on the meat, of course. But there was the beastly motive. After all, who on earth, except Bob Candy, had any motive for killing the girl? I put this to old Brown. He took off his helmet and wiped the inside of it with his handkerchief.

  “Don’t you think, Mr. Wells,” he said, “that the father of the baby might have done it?”

  “Yes, perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, the baby was born about a fortnight before the murder, and the cat was well and truly out of the bag, so to speak. I mean, in the classic cases, the murder is to prevent the birth of the child, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” said old Brown. “Anyway,” he added, stoutly, “I’m going to keep my ears and eyes open, Mr. Wells. There’s been some very funny things happening, and poor old Bob can’t be held responsible for all of them. He hasn’t got the head on him, for one thing, and he hasn’t got no accomplices, for another. What about the parson being put in that there old pound?”

  Well, of course, as soon as you got on to the subject of poor Bob’s brains, where were you? It was another point against him that there was that unfortunate affair of the escaped lunatic in the middle of his family tree. I mean, it seems as though this game of strangling young females is a proper lunatic’s trick, and Bob Candy’s ancestry told against him somewhat heavily.