Saltmarsh Murders

“But you can’t exhume the whole churchyard!” I exclaimed, probably ungrammatically.

“Of course not, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley, patiently this time. “Meg Tosstick’s grave will be sufficient, I expect.”

Well, it was, of course. On the night, or rather, in the very early morning, after the villagers had searched for Mrs. Bradley’s wallet— and found it, of course—trust the old lady to do a job thoroughly—a party of us, including old Coutts and myself, Ferdinand Lestrange, a representative of the Home Office, and a fairly stout squad of police, including the police doctor, watched the exhumation of Meg Tosstick’s body. Only it wasn’t Meg Tosstick’s body. It was Cora McCanley’s.

CHAPTER XII

permutations and combinations

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“Oh,” I said, a great light beginning to dawn, of course, “so when you said, all those days ago, that you were on the track of the person who murdered that poor girl, you meant Cora, not Meg?”

“I did,” replied Mrs. Bradley. She spoke complacently, as well she might, for if she had not thought of looking for Cora McCanley in the new grave where Meg Tosstick had been buried, I don’t suppose anybody else would have done so, and the disappearance of Cora would have been another of those unsolved mysteries that the Sunday papers seem so keen about.

“I suppose the murderer hid Cora’s body until Meg was buried, and then changed the corpses, trusting that the new grave would tell no tales of having been reopened,” I said, getting my mind to work on the problem.

“I think the murderer minimised every possible risk,” said Mrs. Bradley, obliquely.

“But where is Meg’s body?” I asked.

“In the sea, I expect,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But we can shelve that point. Let the police get on with it. I have provided them with the body they asked me for, and now it is up to them to find the one which has disappeared. Bob Candy is our immediate object of consideration. Ferdinand is confident. He is more confident than I am, as a matter of fact. I shall be very glad when the trial is over, because then we can get Bob to talk, and that will assist us very considerably in solving several points whose solution at present eludes me.”

“To talk?” I said.

“To talk,” repeated Mrs. Bradley, firmly. “Once he has been acquitted he will be in a position to tell us the truth.”

“But he has told us the truth,” I said.

“Not the whole truth,” said Mrs. Bradley. “One could not expect it. I had some hopes at the beginning that he would tell it to you, but those hopes were doomed to disappointment.”

I was still hotly on Bob’s side, of course. I had been several times to visit the poor lad, and I could not believe that he had committed murder.

“He swore to me on the Bible that he had never thought of murder,” I said, excitedly. Mrs. Bradley waved her skinny yellow claw at me.

“Then I think it was very, very cruel of you to allow the poor child to perjure himself,” she said. “We shall have him attempting to commit suicide before the trial if you go overburdening his already heavily burdened and not very powerful mind. A nice thing for my poor Ferdinand to attempt—the defence of a would-be suicide who has been charged with murder! You are a selfish and mutton-headed little boy, Noel Wells!” She then softened towards me, of course. No woman can remain angry for long with a younger man. I have often noticed that.

“Do use your brains sometimes, dear child,” she said, very kindly. “I know it hurts, but persevere.”

There could be no reasonable doubt of my perseverance, in that and other directions. I was even making headway with old Coutts about speeding up my marriage with Daphne. But I could not share Mrs. Bradley’s cock- eyed point of view about Bob. If she could not make up her mind whether he was guilty or innocent she had no right to interfere with the course of justice. I was sticking up for Candy because, in my heart of hearts, I believed him innocent.

Mrs. Bradley said, after a pause:

“Don’t you see that the murder of Meg led on directly, and, in a sense, inevitably to the murder of Cora? Don’t you see that there was never any reason strong enough for Bob to kill Meg of his own accord? Either he is innocent or else he had to be induced by someone else to commit the murder.”

“Oh, I see that well enough,” I said eagerly. “He didn’t commit the murder, therefore he was not induced to do so. You know that I still believe him innocent of the murder, don’t you?”

“First,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking no notice of my remarks, “whoever murdered Cora had planned the murder very carefully, and wanted to distract attention from it. That is quite certain, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You mean those bogus letters and things?”

“It was not a bogus letter,” Mrs. Bradley reminded me, “if you are referring to the missive received by Burt. It was a genuine letter, written by Cora for a special purpose, and it fulfilled that purpose, but not quite as Cora had intended that it should. It was written with the idea of indicating to Burt that she was in a different locality from the one where her body actually was at the time of posting the letter. Only, you see, her body was dead, not alive, when the letter was posted. That bit of the story was the one which Cora did not foresee. I don’t imagine her lover foresaw it, either.”

“But why did her lover kill her?” I asked. We seemed tacitly agreed to refer to Sir William by this pseudonym.

“The question is not ‘Why did he kill her?’, but ‘Did he kill her?’ isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

The woman was tiresome, of course. She grimaced at me, and wagged her yellow forefinger, and continued: