The Saltmarsh Murders

by Gladys Mitchell

  “To talk?” I said.

  “To talk,” repeated Mrs. Bradley, firmly. “Once he has been acquitted he will be in a position to tell us the truth.”

  “But he has told us the truth,” I said.

  “Not the whole truth,” said Mrs. Bradley. “One could not expect it. I had some hopes at the beginning that he would tell it to you, but those hopes were doomed to disappointment.”

  I was still hotly on Bob’s side, of course. I had been several times to visit the poor lad, and I could not believe that he had committed murder.

  “He swore to me on the Bible that he had never thought of murder,” I said, excitedly. Mrs. Bradley waved her skinny yellow claw at me.

  “Then I think it was very, very cruel of you to allow the poor child to perjure himself,” she said. “We shall have him attempting to commit suicide before the trial if you go overburdening his already heavily burdened and not very powerful mind. A nice thing for my poor Ferdinand to attempt—the defence of a would-be suicide who has been charged with murder! You are a selfish and mutton-headed little boy, Noel Wells!” She then softened towards me, of course. No woman can remain angry for long with a younger man. I have often noticed that.

  “Do use your brains sometimes, dear child,” she said, very kindly. “I know it hurts, but persevere.”

  There could be no reasonable doubt of my perseverance, in that and other directions. I was even making headway with old Coutts about speeding up my marriage with Daphne. But I could not share Mrs. Bradley’s cock-eyed point of view about Bob. If she could not make up her mind whether he was guilty or innocent she had no right to interfere with the course of justice. I was sticking up for Candy because, in my heart of hearts, I believed him innocent.

  Mrs. Bradley said, after a pause:

  “Don’t you see that the murder of Meg led on directly, and, in a sense, inevitably to the murder of Cora? Don’t you see that there was never any reason strong enough for Bob to kill Meg of his own accord? Either he is innocent or else he had to be induced by someone else to commit the murder.”

  “Oh, I see that well enough,” I said eagerly. “He didn’t commit the murder, therefore he was not induced to do so. You know that I still believe him innocent of the murder, don’t you?”

  “First,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking no notice of my remarks, “whoever murdered Cora had planned the murder very carefully, and wanted to distract attention from it. That is quite certain, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You mean those bogus letters and things?”

  “It was not a bogus letter,” Mrs. Bradley reminded me, “if you are referring to the missive received by Burt. It was a genuine letter, written by Cora for a special purpose, and it fulfilled that purpose, but not quite as Cora had intended that it should. It was written with the idea of indicating to Burt that she was in a different locality from the one where her body actually was at the time of posting the letter. Only, you see, her body was dead, not alive, when the letter was posted. That bit of the story was the one which Cora did not foresee. I don’t imagine her lover foresaw it, either.”

  “But why did her lover kill her?” I asked. We seemed tacitly agreed to refer to Sir William by this pseudonym.

  “The question is not ‘Why did he kill her? ‘, but ‘Did he kill her? ‘isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  The woman was tiresome, of course. She grimaced at me, and wagged her yellow forefinger, and continued:

  “He amused himself with her, and fooled her into believing that the two of them would go off together, probably just for the length of time that her engagement with Home Birds might be expected to last. Cora was fond of Burt, in a way, you see, and would not want to leave him for good and all. But we have no positive indications that it was her lover who killed Cora McCanley. Cora belonged to a definite type of uneducated female. Such girls have no outside interests and they have no faculties within themselves for creating amusement or interest of any kind. They are usually very prodigal of their charms, within limits, and are curiously insensitive to a man’s failings provided he has good-humour and a certain amount of money. Hoodwinking the preoccupied Burt was probably Cora’s sole means of entertaining herself in this somewhat one-horse village. To take an instance of what I mean. You remember the night that William Coutts was left with Cora while Burt and Yorke went down to the village for some books, don’t you?”

  “Gatty on the roof of the Bungalow, you mean?” I asked, with my usual keenness.

  “Yes. What impression did you receive of Cora’s state of mind?”

  “Well, when I got there,” I said, weighing the thing, “she seemed to me frightfully jumpy.”

  “Yes. And she certainly did not believe the noises had been made by boys on the roof, did she?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose she did.”

  “Why do you think she was so scared, Noel?”

  “Well, William was scared too,” I remonstrated.

  “Yes, of course. Fear is much more catching than any other disease that I know,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But will you admit that Cora may have believed it was her lover on the roof, and that Burt would discover him when he returned with Yorke from the station?”

  “What, Gatty?” I said, amazed. “By Jove, that would account for Mrs. Gatty being so weird in her ways, wouldn’t it? You know, the unfaithful husband stunt, and so on. And yet you can’t somehow visualise little Gatty in the role of Don Juan, can you? Besides, you agreed that the lover came from the Manor House, and Gatty——”

  Mrs. Bradley sighed, although I couldn’t at the moment detect any reason for it.

  “I am not talking about Gatty,” she said, in a pained tone.

  “But it was certainly Gatty on the roof,” I riposted lightly. “You can’t deny that.”

  “I have no wish to deny it,” said Mrs. Bradley wearily, I thought. The woman was getting old, of course.

  “It was Gatty on the roof. That has been proved. The point I am trying to make is that Cora fancied it might be, not Gatty, but this lover of hers. Got it, dear child?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. Of course,” I said, grasping the thing in a flash, of course, immediately it was put to me in an intelligent manner. “Then he couldn’t have been very heavy, could he, and yet I should have thought——”

  Mrs. Bradley weighed the point.

  “We might test that,” she said thoughtfully. “Besides, I would be glad of an excuse to go up to the Bungalow. I want to see how Edwy David has taken the news. He must have heard by now. Go back to the vicarage and get William Coutts, and I will go to the Moat House and collect Mr. Gatty.”

  I, too, was intensely curious to note how Burt had taken the news of Cora’s murder, but, as our rather curious quartette ascended the steep, rough track that led past the stone quarries to Burt’s bungalow, I experienced decided qualms about asking him to take part in Mrs. Bradley’s little test. Her idea was to get Burt, Gatty, and myself to climb on the roof, and, at a given signal from her, to take it in turns to crawl about above the dining-room. William Coutts was to be in the dining-room and record in a notebook all the differences he could detect in the amount of noise, scraping or anything else that went on above his head. He was to number the climbers 1, 2, and 3, without knowing the order in which we were to perform our antics up above, and was to put a cross beside the number whose sounds were most similar to the sounds made by Gatty on the night in question.

  William was fearfully bucked. Burt was morose. He informed us all that he had not been a scrap surprised at the news. He had been perfectly certain that Cora was deceiving him because she had become a model of wifely virtue during the past summer. My words, of course, not his. His would belong more properly in Restoration comedy than to a simple chronicle of our Saltmarsh happenings. He betrayed no sign of grief, beyond a certain preoccupation and a good deal of irritability, and consented readily, if profanely, to crawl about his roof at Mrs. Bradley’s bidding and to allow Gatty and me to do so. He addressed Gatty qui
te civilly and offered us drinks all round. Mrs. Bradley accepted them for us, but stipulated that the trial was to take place first.

  It was a beautiful day. The weather had steadily improved since the murders, I don’t know why, of course, and I sprawled in the broad sunshine with my seat in a kind of broad guttering between two slopes of roof, my back against the sunny side and my long legs up the shady side. The slope was gradual, the sun was hot, and I tilted my hat over my face and waited for the signal. Burt was number one on the list, Gatty was the second player, I was last. After about five minutes, the signal came. I cautiously lowered my legs, heaved my body first to a squatting and then to a kneeling position, and wormed my way across to the slope above the dining-room. Gatty had confessed to the wearing of tennis shoes on his nocturnal ramble, and so the three of us were similarly shod. As I crawled along, I could see into Burt’s back garden. There on the step was the coloured man, Foster Washington Yorke. He had a woodman’s axe in his hands again, and he was splitting a billet of wood. There was something kingly about the bloke, and I should have liked to watch him at his work. As it was, however, silence was essential to our plan. I tried to attract his attention, but at that moment Mrs. Bradley came round the corner of the Bungalow and invited him to desist.

  I crawled about a bit, and tried to be as cat-like as possible, but got my hands and trousers pretty filthy, and lost my footing once, and slithered quite a long way down the tiles, my foot coming to rest in the guttering. Then I descended, and we charged in to check William’s notebook.

  There was not enough difference for him to be able to tick any one of us as being more like Gatty than the others. Burt weighed thirteen stone nine, Gatty a mere ten one, and I went about eleven twelve.

  “She couldn’t know it was not her lover trying to find out whether the coast was clear,” I said.

  “As long as you’re satisfied,” said Mrs. Bradley. She thanked Burt, and signed to me to take the other two away. I didn’t like the idea of that. If Burt had murdered Cora, as I was beginning to feel sure he had, it certainly was not the game to leave a frail little old woman alone with him while they discussed the thing. So, urging the others on, I waited, out of earshot, it is true, but prepared for Burt if he started anything. He didn’t start anything, of course, and, after about ten minutes’ conversation with him, Mrs. Bradley came away. He waved to us with grim geniality from his gate as we started to descend the hill.

  “Any proof? “I asked.

  “Proof? “said Mrs. Bradley.

  “That Burt killed Cora,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Did you expect any? He didn’t kill her, you know,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Well, he’s fearfully callous about it,” I said.

  “Yes. I should be more suspicious, perhaps, if he were more obviously upset,” said Mrs. Bradley, drily. “Wouldn’t you?”

  It was a new idea to me. I turned it over in my mind as we descended the hill.

  “Did you see the negro servant chopping wood?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “Yes,” I said. “A fine-looking fellow, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She said no more until we arrived at the gates of the Manor House. “What is the feeling about coloured people in Saltmarsh, I wonder?” she said. “Don’t go asking questions about it round the village. I don’t want the poor man ill-treated on the assumption that he is the murderer. I must try and find out——” she paused. “You couldn’t get Mr. Coutts to preach a sermon about it, I suppose, could you?” she said. “Then I should have something to work on, and people wouldn’t connect my remarks with the murders.”

  Old Coutts, who is always grateful for tips, gladly embodied the point of his Sunday evening remarks. I agree with Mrs. Coutts. You really can’t call his Sunday evening efforts preaching a sermon. I went into the Mornington Arms on the Monday evening, and the bar hummed with discussion. The general conclusion seemed to be that negroes were all right and one could treat them as brother Christians, but——The stumbling block seemed to be the colour bar in marriage. Nobody was in favour of marrying a negro woman, and the idea that their daughters might marry negro husbands caused more foaming at the mouth than the beer which most of the protagonists were imbibing pretty freely. True to my unspoken promise, I asked no questions, but merely carried on the vicar’s arguments as the discussion came my way.

  “Well?” said Mrs. Bradley. I told her the general feeling.

  “And now what about Cora?” I asked.

  “Ah, that’s up a different street,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She was thoughtful for a moment, and then she said suddenly:

  “Meg’s funeral was on the Friday, wasn’t it?”

  “On the Friday. Yes,” I replied.

  “I said he minimised the risk of discovery,” said Mrs. Bradley, as though talking to herself, “but he took a fearful chance between the Tuesday and the Thursday, didn’t he?”

  “Did he?” I asked. She cackled.

  “Spill the news,” I said. She cackled again.

  “I’m wondering how to do it,” she said. “I am not a vindictive woman,” she went on, “and I don’t believe in hanging. Sometimes I wish I did. Sometimes I would give anything to be able to see no more than one single point of view. And sometimes I wish I believed in hell, Noel, my dear.”

  She ended all with a screech that the Bottomless Pit could scarcely hope to equal. A most extraordinary woman.

  CHAPTER XIII

  BATS IN THE JURY BOX

  The trial of Robert Candy for the murder of Margaret Tosstick began on October 20th, which happened to be a Tuesday, and ended at mid-day on the following Saturday. I obtained leave from old Coutts to stay in the town until the trial was ended, and promised to write every day and let him know how things were going. It was eleven weeks and a day since the murder of Meg Tosstick, and exactly eleven weeks since the murder of Cora McCanley. As we had expected, Bob was accused of murdering both mother and child, and he pleaded not guilty on both counts. The inquest on the exhumed body of Cora McCanley, which had been held on the day following the exhumation, had resulted in a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown, although a small but rowdy school of thought, not in our own village of Saltmarsh, but in Much and Little Hartley and the purlieus of Lower Bossingbury, were of the strong opinion that poor Bob was the culprit here as well, and had all three murders to his account. Even Mrs. Gatty, now happily restored to normal and the proud president of the new Saltmarsh and District Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society, told me that once you began thinking over Bob’s ancestry, you didn’t know where you were. There was a lot of truth in it, of course, but fortunately Bob had an alibi for that Tuesday, which even the police now considered must have been the day of Cora McCanley’s death. He had been employed all day at the vicarage getting the garden into some sort of order, for the bishop was expected, I remember, and Mrs. Coutts had a feeling that he would accept an invitation to stay for two or three days. I presume that news of the murder choked him off, for he never came at all. Anyway, that was Bob’s alibi, and it lasted until opening time at the Mornington Arms on that Tuesday evening. After six-thirty the whole of the Mornington Arms’ staff were prepared to swear to Bob, especially as he even shared a bedroom with the other barman, Peachey, who lay awake that night with a poisoned finger, poor fellow.

  I had often attended Petty Sessions, of course, but never a big trial. I was horribly nervous. What if they should find Bob guilty? It would be perfectly beastly to think of his hanging—perfectly beastly. I studied Sir Ferdinand Lestrange. I am a fair lip-reader. I could see him quoting Horace to his junior. You know the bit, I expect. His junior replied with a bit of—well, Terence, I think. Burt would have appreciated it, anyhow.

  The jury were a leery-looking lot, and included five women. Just as well, I thought. Women are so much more practical than men. I felt certain that these good ladies would be able to devise a better fate for poor Bob than standing him over a beastly trap door with a noose round h
is neck.

  I wasn’t listening much. I was trying to think what the judge would look like in a black cap. … But he wasn’t going to put on the black cap in this case. … I began to take in what the counsel for the prosecution was saying. He was a big, florid man, and he had a curiously soft and yet perfectly audible voice, and his words dripped, like honey and venom mixed, into the minds of his hearers. I began to think Bob must have done it. Still, I comforted myself with the thought that when Sir Ferdinand got up, I should be equally certain that Bob had not. I was not deceived, of course. Sir Ferdinand was wonderful. Of course, the whole thing struck me as being a kind of cricket match between counsel, with the judge as keeper of the score and the jury as umpires. And a frightfully confusing business the umpiring was, I should think. I did not take down the thing in shorthand, but it seemed to me that the great stunt was to confuse the witnesses and get them to contradict themselves. Old Lowry, fat as ever, quite as chinful and even more hairless, was the chief witness for the defence. His evidence, elicited by Sir Ferdinand, was to the effect that no living man would have had time to get up those three dozen bottles of beer, transport them to the jug and bottle department and go upstairs and strangle Meg Tosstick within the time limit sworn to by three independent witnesses (who were produced in due course), Charles Peachey, Mabel Pusey and the saloon barmaid, Susan Gait. A plan of the Mornington Arms, showing the route from the cellar under the garage to the doorway of the jug and bottle department with the distances clearly marked in feet and inches, was passed to the jury. Then the prosecution dealt with Lowry, and tried to force him to declare the minimum of time ever taken