Saltmarsh Murders

“I have not heard you prove anything which persuades me that he murdered Meg Tosstick,” I said.

“You will at least allow that he could have murdered her,” she said. “Why, child, he had the virus in his blood!”

“Well, Lowry knew of that fact, and yet risked employing him as barman and as chucker-out,” I said.

“Yes, so he did,” admitted Mrs. Bradley. I forbore to press the point, except to add:

“The moral is obvious to me.”

“Oh, yes, so it is to me,” said Mrs. Bradley hastily. Anxious apparently, to change the subject, she remarked:

“About Burt’s smuggling, Sir William. You are here in your private capacity, and not as a Justice of the Peace? That is understood?”

“Well, not exactly. Perhaps I’d better go,” Sir William said. Huffy, of course, at being called a murderer. Margaret followed him out, but Bransome Burns stayed with us.

“What made you think of liquor?” enquired Mrs. Bradley of me. She seemed amused.

“Obvious,” I said.

“Yes,” she retorted swiftly. “Obvious that it couldn’t have been liquor. If it had been, do you not think that every soul in this village, man, woman and child, would have been aware of the fact, and would have got his pickings out of it? But nobody knew. Nobody was interested. And why? Because Burt smuggled books, not liquor. Banned books, dear child. Nasty, pornographic literature, dirt and offal, dear child, and did not even make a fortune out of them, so his conduct really was inexcusable!”

She hooted with outrageous laughter. Bransome Burns said nervously,

“How beastly. What’s happened to his wife, by the way? I used to talk to her down at the post office sometimes, but I haven’t seen her since the murder.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Mrs. Bradley answered, before I had a chance to do so. “She is absent from the Bungalow.”

“Oh, really?” said Burns. “Nice-looking girl. Pity she married that rotten fellow.”

So we talked about the Burts until I took my leave.

CHAPTER VIII

bob candy’s bank holiday

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I was not as much surprised as I might have been. Burt was exactly the opposite of my conception of a distributor of indecent literature, it is true; on the other hand, his language was of that revolting type which revels in causing embarrassment to those that hear it. I frowned judicially and stared in dignified displeasure at the carpet. I did not really know what to say, of course. Luckily, Mrs. Bradley was at no loss for words. She continued, after giving me sufficient time to digest the tidings.

“Of course, he won’t be able to carry on the good work.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed. “I say! I bet Lowry was in on the game, whether it was books or beer! He’s a proper old miser, you know, and not one to let good money slip past him—well, bad money, I mean, of course!”

I laughed at my own joke, but Mrs. Bradley did not seem frightfully amused. I take it, from my fairly close observation of the sex, that women have not a very keen sense of humour. I played my trump card, however, and caused the old lady to sit up a bit, I fancy.

“You see,” I said, “he must have used Lowry’s secret passage sometimes to escape detection, and he could hardly do that without Lowry’s connivance, could he?”

I don’t know why it is, but the mention of a secret passage always interests people. It interested Mrs. Bradley, and she asked me a lot of questions about it. I could not tell her much more than the fact that there was such a smugglers’ passage leading from Lowry’s cellars to the Cove, that it had been blocked up, but that I did not see why it shouldn’t have been unblocked by Lowry and Burt.

“Why choose the Cove, if not for the secret passage?” I asked, triumphantly. Mrs. Bradley still looked interested.

“A baby could have seen through that lonely bungalow business,” she said, at last. “If ever the situation of a house shrieked that something illegal was going on, the situation of that one did so. Add to that an occupant, who, far from observing the most elementary precautions, goes out of his way to waylay and half-murder the local vicar, and plays a silly and cruel trick on a little jackal like Gatty, and places himself, as you say (I hadn’t, of course!) in the hands of a fox like Lowry, and something is bound to go wrong. If I hadn’t put two and two together, someone else would have done so, and then—”

“Yes, all for the best. After all I do think that the public morals—”

I began, but Mrs. Bradley cut me short.

“I never did, and I never shall, believe that vile things affect the minds of any but the vile,” she said, firmly. “Besides, evil and filth are the most incomparably dull, boring, surfeiting things in the world. See the published works of George Bernard Shaw.” She hooted. “Corruption, as he indicates, is not only nauseating to the senses, but it palls upon the imagination. Evil is the devil’s worst advocate. Refer again to the above-mentioned sources. Why, child, you, as a priest, should know that it is the little insidious vices, treachery, malice, envy, jealousy and greed, covetousness, slandering, sentimentality and self-deception that enslave mankind, not filthy postcards and erotic literature, Mrs. Grundy, my dear.”

She spoilt it all, of course, by howling like a hyena and poking me in the ribs until I was forced to remove myself out of reach of her terrible yellow talons.