Saltmarsh Murders

was a hefty bloke, very hefty. His hands and wrists were hairy, he had the jowl of a prize-fighter and his thigh muscles bulged beneath his narrow black trousers. He looked out of the window and suddenly bellowed, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” so that I leapt into the air with fright. The window rattled in its worm-eaten frame and his wife also leapt nervously from her chair.

“It’s all right, my dear. It’s only William at those hens again. The boy’s a perfect curse. I shall be glad when the holidays are over, except that I must have him to play for the village against Much Hartley on August Monday. We’re a man short, now that Sir William has had Johnstone run in for poaching. Sir William, I really believe, would let a man off for shooting his mother but not for poaching his game. A nuisance. Johnstone could be relied on in the slips and would have made a useful change bowler.”

“Never mind about cricket,” said Mrs. Coutts. “The thing that worries me about the Bank Holiday is this wretched fete at the Hall.”

“The sports, you mean?” The vicar, having barged her off the subject of his last sermon, became more genial.

“I do not mean the sports, Bedivere, although I am aware that you take interest in nothing else that goes on in the village,” she said. The old man let out a groan and decidedly weakened.

“But does anything else go on in the village?” he asked. “I mean, of course, apart from the daily round?”

“If you’ve no conception of what goes on in the village, Bedivere,” said the lady, finding a spot and proceeding to bowl slow twisters, “it isn’t my fault. I’ve attempted to bring it to your notice time and again. And I must say, even at the risk of becoming tedious, that the kind of behaviour which obtained last year at the village fete has got to stop. The village will get itself a name like Sodom and Gomorrah if things are allowed to go on unchecked. It is your clear duty to announce from the pulpit next Sunday, and to repeat the announcement on the following Sunday, that you will publicly proclaim the names of all those who transgress the laws of decency and proper behaviour in Sir William Kingston-Fox’s park on August Bank Holiday.”

“But, my dear girl,” said the batting side, pulling itself together, “apart from the fact that the whole thing would most certainly be regarded by the bishop as a rather cheap stunt to fill the church, how on earth am I to know how the village behaves itself in the Hall grounds on August Monday? You know as well as I do that my activities are confined to assisting to put up the tea tent for the ladies and to running off the sports finals for the children. And I can only manage the sports if our side is batting and my own innings is at an end. In the evening, as you very well know, I come back here, shut all the windows, and turn on the wireless. People don’t want a clergyman about when they’re enjoying themselves dancing and skylarking.”

Mrs. Coutts’ lip curled.

“For all you care, Bedivere, the whole village may go to perdition in its own way, mayn’t it?” she said bitterly. “Meg Tosstick and all! Oh, and I was refused admittance to her, if you please! Really, the state of the village —”

“Look here, Caroline—” the vicar sat down and leaned forward with his great hairy hands dangling between his knees—“let’s face the facts. I know the sort of thing that goes on. I know it as well as you do. And I say it doesn’t matter. Does it harm anybody? You know the custom here as well as I do, and it has plenty to recommend it. I’ve performed the marriage ceremony in such cases dozens of times, and I’ll challenge you, or any other moralist, to prove that there is anything fundamentally wicked in the custom. If of course, the youth doesn’t marry the girl, that’s another matter, but, hang it all, my dear, the village is so small and everybody’s affairs are so well known that the poor chap can’t escape. As for that poor unfortunate girl at the village inn, I suppose she is too ill to see anybody, even you! And now, if that’s all—”

“But it isn’t all.” She clasped and unclasped her hands. “It isn’t all,” she repeated. There was silence except for a fly buzzing on the window pane. Bedivere Coutts, who had then been married nineteen years, waited patiently.

“I’ve been to visit her, as I said. The baby was born at two o’clock this morning,” said Mrs. Coutts at last. Her hands were trembling. Her thin face was pinched into resentment. “Bedivere, not only was I refused admittance to her bedroom, but, according to Mrs. Lowry, who was barely civil to me, Tosstick persists in withholding the name of the father, and she won’t allow anybody to see the baby. Nothing will shake her. Of course, everybody suspects the worst. It’s perfectly dreadful! And that Mrs. Lowry encourages the girl!”

“And what is the worst?” enquired the vicar, suddenly switching his chair round and taking up his pen. Mrs. Coutts passed her tongue over her lips.

“The squire,” she said, dropping her voice. I think they must have forgotten me, of course.

“Kingston-Fox?” said Coutts. “Oh, rubbish, Caroline!”

He shook a drop of ink from his pen on to his blotting paper.

“Well, at any rate,” began Mrs. Coutts, flushing, so that her thin face looked like a withered crab-apple.

The vicar pushed back his chair and turned round again. I was longing to go, but I hardly liked to make a disturbance.

“And not only rubbish, but wicked rubbish, Caroline, do you hear? Please do not repeat it. Sir William is our friend and my patron. Whoever started such a beastly lie ought to get hard labour for slander. It’s damnable!” He shouted the words at her. His face was red and his eyes were slightly bloodshot as though he had been drinking too much. He breathed hard like a man who has been running, and his great hairy hands gripped the thin wooden arms of his chair. Then he suddenly subsided, and his voice grew quieter.

“I know that even the best of women enjoy a spice of scandal,” he said, “but keep Kingston-Fox out of it, Caroline, please!”

Mrs. Coutts rose and picked up her hat and gloves. Without a word she walked out of the room.

The old man shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.

“Sometimes I feel like cursing the fete,” he said. “She’s right, Wells, you know, according to general opinion. No doubt of that. The villagers do behave disgustingly, according to most people’s notions. But I cannot get excited about it. Never could.”

It was a funny thing about Mrs. Coutts. After all, she was married, although she had no children of her own, but the fact was—only the old man wouldn’t seem to see it—she couldn’t stand the thought of the village people having any of that sort of bucolic fun which consists in squirting water down one another’s necks at fairs, or the lads lying on the grass with the girls, or coming home down the lanes at evening with their arms round them. It was nothing to do with right and wrong. She simply had the kink that all sexual intercourse was most fearfully unpleasant and