Saltmarsh Murders

“What?” said I, thinking of Daphne’s dislike of the fellow. “Not with that secret passage leading direct from the Mornington Arms to the transverse passage made by Burt for his—own amusement?” I ended weakly, catching Mrs. Bradley’s eye. I had been about to give Burt away. Unintentionally, of course.

“Well,” said Sir Malcolm, shuffling the papers until he found the one he wanted, “both the Lowrys went to the bank at Wyemouth Harbour in the morning, and had lunch at a hotel there. That’s all checked. In the afternoon Mr. Lowry had a nap in the summer house —sworn to by the gardener and gardener’s boy—and Mrs. Lowry marked some new linen, assisted by two of the maids. At four-thirty they had tea, turned on the wireless, invited the men and maids in to listen with them, and from opening time until closing time they were both kept very busy indeed. How’s that?”

He went out to the telephone again, and returned in five minutes, during which time Mrs. Bradley sat staring into the fire. He was obviously amused when he came back.

“I wish we’d betted on the nigger babby,” he said, seating himself again. Mrs. Bradley looked startled.

“You don’t mean that it was a brown one?” she asked incredulously. The Chief Constable, smiling gently, kept nodding his head like a mandarin.

“Right first pip!” he observed, with almost boyish inelegance, of course, but rather expressively. Mrs. Bradley shook her head as forcibly as he was nodding his.

“I tell you, my dear Sir Malcolm,” she said gently but firmly, “that it is absolutely and utterly impossible that the child should have been a half-caste.”

“Well, to convince you, I might put the point to Foster Washington Yorke,” said Sir Malcolm good-humouredly. It generally puts people in a good humour, I notice, to catch Jove nodding—Mrs. Bradley, in this case, of course. “But the gentle blackamoor would simply deny it blandly, and, that being so, and ourselves being unable to produce the child, where are we?”

“Exactly one step further on the road than we were before,” said Mrs. Bradley, firmly.

“But this good woman Lowry tells me, now, that the only reason they had for refusing to allow the baby to be seen was to save that poor girl Tosstick’s feelings. Apparently she turned hysterical at the very suggestion that she should receive visitors after her confinement, and so, out of pity, they kept people out, and kept the poor girl’s secret.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Bradley, “they kept people out because it paid them to do so. That baby strongly resembled somebody who wanted his identity kept secret.”

“It certainly would not be the Lowrys, if they weren’t on the make somehow,” I said, remembering Lowry’s commission on our cocoanuts at the fete. The Chief Constable scratched his jaw.

“Of course, there’s something in it,” he admitted. “You mean the Lowrys found it was decidedly to their interest to keep the identity of that baby’s father dark”—he grinned at the feeble pun—“and have been primed with this information about the negro parentage of the child by the real father?”

I looked at Mrs. Bradley. She pursed her little beaky lips at me, so, of course, I kept my mouth shut. There was a long silence. Sir Malcolm broke it.

“I wonder when the baby disappeared,” he said.

“The day that it was born,” said Mrs. Bradley, in a small voice.

She and I sat on, discussing the thing, after the Chief Constable had gone. He had taken a longhand copy of my shorthand verbatim report with him.

“Well, Noel, my child?” she said.

“Hang it all,” I said, “it’s more of a mess than ever, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied. She sat very upright in her chair and sighed deeply.

“Truth, truth! Where art thou, lovely many-sided, single hearted one!” she observed, apparently to a tall vase on the revolving bookcase. “I know all about it, every single thing, and I don’t want to prove it. Noel,” she said, switching her gaze on to me as I still sat at the table and played with my pencil, “if or when you commit a murder, mind you do absolutely nothing when the deed is over. Go on with your ordinary life, present a bland, ingenuous countenance to the world, alter none of your habits, let there be no inconsistencies, and, above all, my dear boy, don’t be clever.”

I goggled, of course.

“Sez you!” I observed, not inappositely, I flatter myself.

“I mean it,” she said. “The murderer—I am not talking about Candy, who must be reprieved, whether his hand actually committed the crime or not, but about the real murderer of both Meg Tosstick and Cora McCanley—the murderer must have had an accomplice. These two choice spirits have followed just about one-half of my prescription, but they tripped up on the other half.”

“Please expound,” I said.

Mrs. Bradley smiled. She reminded me of a sand lizard basking in the sun. She replied, good-naturedly:

“The murderer did very nearly nothing, and the accomplice was clever, too. He went on with his ordinary life, showing no fear. He altered only one of his habits, but that one alteration was so very inconsistent with what I could gather of his ordinary behaviour, that it caused me almost immediate suspicion. Oh, and they were both a bit too clever, you know. They must have realised that I am getting old and tired, Noel, my dear.”

She hooted, as usual, just as I was going to offer manly sympathy, so I cut short my condolences. Then I said:

“I wonder how long it would have been before Cora’s death was discovered, if it had not been for you?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Of course, time was important to the murderer, once Cora’s body was buried in Meg’s coffin. The longer the lapse of time, the less chance there would be of identification, you see.”

“Funny that the bodies of Meg Tosstick and the child have not been found,” I said.