being held on the capital charge, while this arch-egg, hairless, gross, bestial and poisonous, got away with two murders, those of the poor deluded girl and her innocent new-born child!
I remember grinding my teeth. I suppose I lay down and slept after that. In the morning, as I ate my breakfast, and allowed the usual early-morning, eight forty-five-edition of Coutts v. Coutts to go in at one ear and out at the other, I made up my mind to go myself to Lowry and confront him with the truth. One thing only prevented my carrying out this resolve. One person, rather. Mrs. Bradley. I was afraid of the old lady. I admit it, frankly. The idea of doing anything in the case without her full approbation and consent became repugnant to me. After breakfast, on pretence (a subterfuge which I had been obliged to shelter behind some half-dozen times before to cloak my frequent visits to the Manor House) of visiting the sick, who were, of course, much better off without me, I went to lay my new suspicions before Mrs. Bradley. She immediately damped my ardour.
“I’m sorry for your sake, dear child,” she said, “but I took the liberty immediately I heard that the murder had been committed, of checking Lowry’s alibi by making discreet but very searching enquiries round the village, and it seems that not one minute of the day was he alone, or even in the sole company of Mrs. Lowry. I learn that he collected a large party of friends and treated them to all the fun of the fair. Part of the time he was seen minding the cocoanut shy, or watching your fortune-telling tent, Noel, my dear child, wittily inviting all and sundry to enter. He danced with sixteen maids and matrons, including Cora McCanley, and it was nearly twelve o’clock when he returned to the Mornington Arms. His alibi is hole-proof, fool-proof, and destruction-proof. And, of course,” said Mrs. Bradley, at the end of this unusually energetic outburst, “there is no reason to suspect that so perfect an alibi conceals more than it reveals, dear child. I believe the landlord of the Mornington Arms is a very popular man. He certainly is a very good-humoured one.”
I grinned. “Yes, I can’t see that we can do much with Lowry, after all,” I said. “He couldn’t have committed the murder by proxy, could he?”
I smiled weakly at my own joke, and then suddenly stiffened. The word proxy always leads me to think about Queen Mary Tudor, and from Queen Mary Tudor it is an easy transition to Mrs. Coutts.
“What about Mrs. Coutts?” I said, excitedly. “Motive enough there, and heaps of opportunity! Look here! After dusk she began her usual snooping about the park in search of courting couples, so you can jolly well bet that nobody spotted her or can swear definitely to her having been at any particular place at any particular moment. She can take cover like a Red Indian! What was to prevent her slinking off to the inn, murdering the poor girl while the barmen and Mabel Thingummy were busy serving in the pub, and going home to the vicarage and raising that hue and cry! Why, hang it all!” I exclaimed, getting all hectic, “That hue and cry might only have been a blind! She may have waited and waited for the evening of the fete to afford her the opportunity for the murder! How’s that?”
“Very creditable indeed,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I see Bob Candy being carried shoulder-high out of the court! Oh,” she broke off, “it’s not Bob I’m worrying about. I firmly believe that we can get him off. Ferdinand will eat the prosecution. The police arrested the lad too soon.”
“How do you mean—you are not worried about Bob?” I asked. “Do you mean that something else is worrying you?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “The second murder—the murder that nobody has mentioned, the murder without a corpse—is worrying me to death, because I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Whatever can you mean?” I gasped.
“The murder of Cora McCanley,” replied the little old woman astoundingly.
“But she isn’t murdered,” I said. “She’s on tour with a show called —called—”
“
“She had a telegram,” I said. “She went off suddenly. Caught the 3.30 train or something. That’s all definite enough, I should think.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, mechanically, as though her thoughts were far away. “Who told you about the train?” she asked, waking up a bit.
“Burt,” I replied. “He told us both. Oh, no, he didn’t mention the train! Still, it’s the only possible train of the day, isn’t it? I say,” I went on, rather aghast, of course, “that row she had with Burt!” I had just remembered it.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley. She did not speak mechanically this time. “That row she had with Burt, dear child, is both interesting and important. And so are all the other rows she had with Burt.”
“What other rows?” I asked.
“About money matters,” Mrs. Bradley replied.
“I thought that was just one long continuous row,” I said.
CHAPTER XI
reappearance of cora
« ^ »
Our village hall, just before the commencement of one of our annual concerts, is as good a place as I know for the exchange of confidences. I had been up to see Burt about Cora. After what Mrs. Bradley had suggested, I was resolved upon making a few guarded enquiries. He gave me beer and answered my questions with what I could only regard as suspicious readiness. I made the village concert the excuse for introducing the subject. As a matter of fact, I pretended not to know that Cora McCanley was to be absent for any length of time from the Bungalow, and represented myself as an agent from Mrs. Coutts with the request that Cora would do us a song and dance item if she returned from her tour in time. Of course, had Burt known Mrs. C. as I do, he would never have swallowed this. Anything less like Cora McCanley’s idea of a song and dance show than the average item in the average village concert in Saltmarsh can scarcely be imagined. Mrs. Coutts exercises a rigid censorship over the concert programme and would be about as agreeable to the Folies Bergere taking part as to anyone of Cora’s reputation doing so. Burt, however, was not wise to this, and he answered, quite civilly, that Cora was off to God-knows-where in some bleeding high-kicking revue, and would only return when the boss bunked with the gross takings. His expressions, of course, not mine.
“Oh,” I said, affecting to be considerably dashed. “Then you don’t think she will be back by to-morrow
