had a glass in his hand. Foster Washington Yorke had admitted me, of course, and, as soon as I had accepted Burt’s cordial invitation to be seated, he brought me a glass of beer, too.
“Oh, yes,” said Burt, as one who was continuing a conversation which my entrance had interrupted. “We did push him into the crypt. I told his wife where he was, you know, and made sure she’d go along and let him out. The little snoop was rubbering round the cove (Burt’s words, of course, not mine), and we collected him and tied him up until we had finished our job. I forgot him after that.”
“Mr. Burt,” said Mrs. Bradley, calmly. “I think you will have to promise me that your fortune-hunting is over. No more cargo must be landed at Wyemouth Cove and brought to this house. You understand, don’t you? And—er— about your quarrels with your wife—”
She spoke gently, but her terrifying, black, witch’s eyes never left Burt’s angry face. I was horribly alarmed to see Burt’s furious expression. The odds were too frightfully unequal. Unostentatiously I bent and picked up the poker. It was a nicely balanced, fairly weighty weapon, and swung prettily between the fingers. I dangled it, getting the feel and the balance of it. Mrs. Bradley was grinning with a kind of fiendish blandness at Burt, whose neck was beginning to swell.
“You wouldn’t commit a murder, Edwy, would you?” asked the terrible little old woman.
“
“Tut! tut!” observed Mrs. Bradley. She pointed a yellow talon at him. “Naughty boy! Sit down!”
Burt sat down. He even grinned, sheepishly, of course. I replaced the poker, as unostentatiously, I trust, as I had taken it up. He glared at me.
“Damn your eyes, you poodle pup!” he said. I smiled, weakly, of course. Mrs. Bradley said:
“Why were you so rough with the vicar, Edwy?”
“He put up such a fight,” said Burt. “He knocked poor old Foster about. If Foster weren’t a black, he’d have had a face like a rainbow.”
All sorts of things began to emerge from the back of my mind, and take shape, and slip into place. The vicar had mentioned two men with blackened faces. Why on earth hadn’t it dawned upon me that one of them might have been a real negro? Mrs. Bradley had started from that point, probably, and argued the whole matter from Foster Washington Yorke to Burt. The Bungalow was much the nearest dwelling house to the cove, of course, and smuggling was much the most obvious thing to connect with the appearance of the ship which Coutts had seen, although Sir William had scouted the notion when his butler had put it forward.
“I suppose the whole thing connects up with Lowry, the landlord of the Mornington Arms,” I said to Mrs. Bradley, as the boisterous wind nearly blew us off our feet and into the village below. I believe Mrs. Bradley was going to dismiss this idea as absurd, when suddenly she prodded me in the ribs in an ecstasy of joy.
“My dearest, dearest child!” she observed, cackling like a hen with an egg. “What a sweet idea! No, just fancy! I should never have thought of connecting Landlord Lowry with the smuggling!”
I was not as surprised as she seemed to be. My experience of the sex, consisting, as it does, of a knowledge of the vagaries of such different ornaments of womankind as Mrs. Coutts, Mrs. Gatty, my mother, my sisters and Daphne, has led me to the inevitable conclusion that, outside certain well-defined and exceedingly narrow avenues of knowledge, women are singularly ill-informed. Mrs. Bradley might have deduced that Burt was a smuggler, but apparently the fact that wines and spirits were the smuggled articles had completely escaped her. I dare say she was not even aware that such imports are dutiable. I gave her a short, but I trust, informative discourse, upon the subject of import duties. We were almost running down the hill, and the wind was tearing and shouting behind us. My talk was a summary of the first of my winter lectures to the Boys’ Club, of course, a series of talks entitled, “Great Englishmen.” The first lecture was to be the life of Sir Robert Walpole. She seemed interested, I thought, and certainly thanked me warmly when we arrived at the Manor House. I was relieved when she had gone. Daphne and I talked about the Harvest Festival and other matters until supper time. After supper, to my surprise, I received a summons from Sir William to go at once to the Manor House, as Mrs. Bradley wished to see me. Had the message come from Mrs. Bradley herself, I am strongly disposed to believe that I should have ignored it, or, at any rate, sent an apology in lieu of going to see her. But a message from Sir William was a different matter. I begged the vicar not to sit up for me, took my hat and waterproof, for the night had set in wet once the great wind had dropped, and was soon on my way to the Manor House.
I could not help thinking about the murder as I walked at a good brisk pace along the main road, away from the village. There are no cottages near the Manor, except for the dwelling of Constable Brown. It heartened me to remember that this ignorant but staunch keeper of the village peace was convinced of poor Bob Candy’s innocence. It struck me, as I came abreast of his cottage, that it would be a good plan to stop there for a moment on my way to the Manor House and find out how far the Wyemouth inspector had gone in his investigations of the crime. Brown, I decided, would probably know all that there was to know, as he went everywhere with the inspector and took copious, albeit laborious, notes of all that his superior said and did. The inspector, I suppose, was flattered by this proceeding, and suffered the constable gladly, fool though he considered him, I expect. He wasn’t, of course. Not at all a fool. Brown, I mean.
I knocked at the door and it was opened by Mrs. Brown. She invited me in and showed me into the parlour, which was immediately inside the street door, of course. There I found Constable Henry Brown and his two lodgers. I had thought a good deal about those lodgers. After all, I argued, surely it was more sensible to suppose that a stranger had murdered Meg Tosstick rather than that one of our own villagers had done such a dastardly thing! I observed the young men narrowly, but could not conscientiously admit that either of them showed symptoms of abnormal depravity. Neither had they the nervous, hunted look that I associate with unconvicted murderers. Not that I had ever seen any, of course, at that time.
Brown had no real news to give me. The inspector, he said, had now finished interviewing everybody in the village who could possibly be expected to know anything at all about the murder, and it had advanced the case against Bob Candy no further. That was the most optimistic thing he could find to say, and it was not particularly cheering. Brown ventured the opinion that the prosecution would have an easy job of it at the trial.
“You see, Mr. Wells,” said the good fellow, “the police have got their case all mapped out, like. They don’t really want no more evidence to hang poor young Bob with. They’ve been getting their witnesses ready, that’s all. Who to call, and who not, as you might say, sir. The inspector don’t want to find anything now as’ll put him in a muddle, don’t you see.”
“Do you mean, Brown,” I said, rather horrified, of course, “that the police don’t want to get at the
“Oh, they want the truth all right, as you might say,” Brown replied, waving his pipe, “but, you see, sir, they
