Saltmarsh Murders

rung up the police station at Wyemouth Harbour, our nearest town, and they had promised to send down an inspector. 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. Courts:

“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 fete. 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 Coutts 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.