I had been wondering how on earth we were going to get the hall cleared in an orderly way, but suddenly the doors were in the possession of the police, and those excellent chaps took matters into their own hands, and we were freed from all trouble and anxiety. At last nobody but Mrs. Bradley, the Gattys, old Coutts, Sir William, Bransome Burns, Margaret Kingston-Fox and I were left in the hall.
“Of course, that man took advantage of the disturbance caused by Foster Washington Yorke. I thought perhaps he would,” Mrs. Bradley said. “I didn’t want him to go too soon. It was interesting to see the point at which he cracked, though. Did you notice?”
“You were saying something about that blocked-up passage, weren’t you?” I said. Suddenly Mrs. Gatty began to giggle wildly.
“The bathroom! The bathroom!” she shouted.
CHAPTER XVII
mrs. bradley sticks her pig
« ^ »
“Precisely,” said Mrs. Bradley. “The bathroom. That was the last link, and a very important one. I wanted to be certain about it before I handed some of the rest of my conclusions to the police.”
“Excuse me,” said Sir William, “but what about an adjournment? They’ll be wanting to lock up this hall for the night, won’t they, Coutts?”
“Quite,” said old Coutts. “Will you all come along to the vicarage? It isn’t far out of your way. I daresay my wife would be glad to hear the full story. Besides, I confess that I haven’t yet fathomed the identity of the murderer. Stupid, I know…”
“Oh, if you want me to tell it as a story—” said Mrs. Bradley, with her famous cackle. We all assured her that we did. I too, had not discovered who it was who had dived out of the hall and into the arms of the police.
Daphne and I managed to loiter behind the others as we walked along the main road home. Unfortunately, it is a very short distance from the village hall to the vicarage.
When we were seated in the vicarage dining-room, which, fortunately, was large enough to house the entire gathering, including William Coutts, who took cover behind the settee and gazed imploringly at me when he caught my eye, Mrs. Bradley told us the whole story as she had built it up brick by brick and argument by argument.
“As I explained in the village hall just now,” she said, “I couldn’t believe that an impulse to kill Meg Tosstick would have come naturally to Candy. For a long time I could imagine no argument which would have been strong enough to goad him to the deed. At last, with Noel’s and Mr. Coutts’ help, I established that the feeling in the village against mixed marriages was very strong—therefore, I wondered whether that fact explained Bob Candy’s action, if indeed he was the murderer. An interesting feature, too, was the fact that nobody ever saw Meg’s baby except its mother and Mrs. Lowry. So my next problem was to find out why such secrecy had been maintained. At first I confess, I was inclined to think that somebody in the position of, say, lord of the Manor”—she grinned at Sir William—“or shepherd of the village souls”—she leered at old Coutts—“had been bribing Mrs. Lowry to keep a secret for him. I could not help suspecting that the newly-born baby very strongly resembled somebody who did not want his identity to be known. New-born babies often bear a far more striking resemblance to one or other of their progenitors than do infants of five or six months old. That is a recognised fact.
“Of course, when everybody was refused admission to the mother’s bedroom, one of two things was likely. Either the girl herself felt the shame of her position very keenly—if she did, it was a false shame, I should like to add—” here Mrs. Coutts began to get white round the nostrils. Mrs. Bradley looked her blandly in the eye, nodded in a birdlike manner as though to indicate that she had given Mrs. Coutts one to get on with—which she had, of course—and continued—“or else it was feared that she would give away the name of the father.
“We know now that both these reasons may have been true; but the most important reason for keeping people away from the mother and child was that the day after it was born the baby must have disappeared. Do you remember, Noel, that I asked you several times whether you considered Bob Candy capable of murder?” she broke off, turning to me.
I nodded.
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “I thought you meant he had murdered Meg Tosstick.”
“I did not necessarily mean he had murdered Meg Tosstick. I meant that in any case, murder or no murder, he had distinctly homicidal tendencies, a very bad heredity, and that the man who had wronged both Bob and Meg may have known of these, and feared death at Bob’s hands. It was absolutely essential to the father’s safety, perhaps, that Meg should die before she had a chance of betraying him to Candy. He may have hoped that she would die in childbirth. She did not. And she produced a child so startlingly like its father in appearance—”
“Poor little thing,” interpolated Daphne.
“—that, even if he denied Meg’s assertions, he knew no one would believe him when once they had seen the baby. So first he may have planned to do away with the evidence of his paternity. By some means he got rid of the newly-born infant, we will suppose, and for a day or two perhaps he felt safe. Then he realised that Mrs. Lowry could not keep Meg Tosstick hidden away from the world for ever, and that directly the girl’s confinement was absolutely concluded people would want to know what had happened to the baby; and the girl would tell them. He dared not say that the mother had smothered it or overlaid it or killed it in the madness of puerperal fever, because then the child’s body would have to be seen by a doctor, and then the very secret which he wanted kept would immediately come to light…
“Oh, another rather curious, but very significant point! You remember that I began telling the villagers about information I lighted on more by luck than judgment? Well, here is an example. As the woman at the inn was always called Mrs. Lowry I took it for granted at first that Mr. and Mrs. Lowry were man and wife. Then it struck me that there was a most extraordinary physical resemblance between them, and I came to the conclusion that ‘Mrs.’ was probably a courtesy title, and that they were really brother and sister. I have worked on that assumption during the later stages of the investigation, and it has explained several points insuperably difficult to correlate with the rest of the facts. Do you follow what I mean?”
“Of course they are brother and sister,” said Mrs. Coutts, frostily. “I could have told you that weeks ago if you had come to me.”
