“He amused himself with her, and fooled her into believing that the two of them would go off together, probably just for the length of time that her engagement with
“Gatty on the roof of the Bungalow, you mean?” I asked, with my usual keenness.
“Yes. What impression did you receive of Cora’s state of mind?”
“Well, when I got there,” I said, weighing the thing, “she seemed to me frightfully jumpy.”
“Yes. And she certainly did not believe the noises had been made by boys on the roof, did she?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose she did.”
“Why do you think she was so scared, Noel?”
“Well, William was scared too,” I remonstrated.
“Yes, of course. Fear is much more catching than any other disease that I know,” said Mrs. Bradley. “But will you admit that Cora may have believed it was her lover on the roof, and that Burt would discover him when he returned with Yorke from the station?”
“What, Gatty?” I said, amazed. “By Jove, that would account for Mrs. Gatty being so weird in her ways, wouldn’t it? You know, the unfaithful husband stunt, and so on. And yet you can’t somehow visualize little Gatty in the role of Don Juan, can you? Besides, you agreed that the lover came from the Manor House, and Gatty—”
Mrs. Bradley sighed, although I couldn’t at the moment detect any reason for it.
“I am not talking about Gatty,” she said, in a pained tone.
“But it was certainly Gatty on the roof,” I riposted lightly. “You can’t deny that.”
“I have no wish to deny it,” said Mrs. Bradley wearily, I thought. The woman was getting old, of course.
“It was Gatty on the roof. That has been proved. The point I am trying to make is that Cora fancied it might be, not Gatty, but this lover of hers. Got it, dear child?”
“Oh, yes, yes. Of course,” I said, grasping the thing in a flash, of course, immediately it was put to me in an intelligent manner. “Then he couldn’t have been very heavy, could he, and yet I should have thought—”
Mrs. Bradley weighed the point.
“We might test that,” she said thoughtfully. “Besides, I would be glad of an excuse to go up to the Bungalow. I want to see how Edwy David has taken the news. He must have heard by now. Go back to the vicarage and get William Coutts, and I will go to the Moat House and collect Mr. Gatty.”
I, too, was intensely curious to note how Burt had taken the news of Cora’s murder, but, as our rather curious quartette ascended the steep, rough track that led past the stone quarries to Burt’s bungalow, I experienced decided qualms about asking him to take part in Mrs. Bradley’s little test. Her idea was to get Burt, Gatty, and myself to climb on the roof, and, at a given signal from her, to take it in turns to crawl about above the dining-room. William Coutts was to be in the dining-room and record in a notebook all the differences he could detect in the amount of noise, scraping or anything else that went on above his head. He was to number the climbers 1, 2, and 3, without knowing the order in which we were to perform our antics up above, and was to put a cross beside the number whose sounds were most similar to the sounds made by Gatty on the night in question.
William was fearfully bucked. Burt was morose. He informed us all that he had not been a scrap surprised at the news. He had been perfectly certain that Cora was deceiving him because she had become a model of wifely virtue during the past summer. My words, of course, not his. His would belong more properly in Restoration comedy than to a simple chronicle of our Saltmarsh happenings. He betrayed no sign of grief, beyond a certain preoccupation and a good deal of irritability, and consented readily, if profanely, to crawl about his roof at Mrs. Bradley’s bidding and to allow Gatty and me to do so. He addressed Gatty quite civilly and offered us drinks all round. Mrs. Bradley accepted them for us, but stipulated that the trial was to take place first.
It was a beautiful day. The weather had steadily improved since the murders, I don’t know why, of course, and I sprawled in the broad sunshine with my seat in a kind of broad guttering between two slopes of roof, my back against the sunny side and my long legs up the shady side. The slope was gradual, the sun was hot, and I tilted my hat over my face and waited for the signal. Burt was number one on the list, Gatty was the second player, I was last. After about five minutes, the signal came. I cautiously lowered my legs, heaved my body first to a squatting and then to a kneeling position, and wormed my way across to the slope above the dining-room. Gatty had confessed to the wearing of tennis shoes on his nocturnal ramble, and so the three of us were similarly shod. As I crawled along, I could see into Burt’s back garden. There on the step was the coloured man, Foster Washington Yorke. He had a woodman’s axe in his hands again, and he was splitting a billet of wood. There was something kingly about the bloke, and I should have liked to watch him at his work. As it was, however, silence was essential to our plan. I tried to attract his attention, but at that moment Mrs. Bradley came round the corner of the Bungalow and invited him to desist.
I crawled about a bit, and tried to be as cat-like as possible, but got my hands and trousers pretty filthy, and lost my footing once, and slithered quite a long way down the tiles, my foot coming to rest in the guttering. Then I descended, and we charged in to check William’s notebook.
There was not enough difference for him to be able to tick any one of us as being more like Gatty than the others. Burt weighed thirteen stone nine, Gatty a mere ten one, and I went about eleven twelve.
“She couldn’t know it was
“As long as you’re satisfied,” said Mrs. Bradley. She thanked Burt, and signed to me to take the other two away. I didn’t like the idea of that. If Burt had murdered Cora, as I was beginning to feel sure he had, it certainly was not the game to leave a frail little old woman alone with him while they discussed the thing. So, urging the others on, I waited, out of earshot, it is true, but prepared for Burt if he started anything. He didn’t start anything, of course, and, after about ten minutes’ conversation with him, Mrs. Bradley came away. He waved to us with grim
