“Burt kept her short of money,” I interpolated.
“Ah,” said Burns, waking up, “silly game, blackmail. Always get the worst of it in the end.”
“Well, she did, rather, didn’t she?” I said. “Getting done in, I mean. Funny both the girls were strangled.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Bradley.
“Well, you would think the second murder would have been done a different way.”
“Oh, murderers usually repeat themselves,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“Yes, but in this case,” I said, intending to remind her that possibly we were talking of two murderers, not one; but Gatty interrupted me.
“She was blackmailing him on the Tuesday when he joined her at the Bungalow, then?”
“How could he know it was safe to join her at the Bungalow?” asked Mrs. Gatty.
“Why, Burt was at the Cove and along the beach with us on that guarding and patrolling stunt, and Yorke was at the cinema in Wyemouth,” said I.
“Yes, very well. He strangled Cora and dragged her body up that secret passage to the inn—” said old Gatty.
“But he couldn’t!” interrupted Margaret Kingston-Fox, who had been following the story with very close attention.
“Why not?” asked Mrs. Gatty, to everybody’s surprise.
“Because it was bricked up, and had spiders’ webs all over it,” said Margaret. All those present knew that, of course, by this time, because Mrs. Bradley had announced it at the lecture.
“You forget Mrs. Gatty’s health and cleanliness campaign,” said Mrs. Bradley, laughing.
“What?” I said. “Do you mean that that was a put-up job?”
“Completely,” said Mrs. Gatty, beaming. “Mrs. Bradley said she had to know whether that passage had an outlet at the inn.”
“You see, Noel,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning to me, “when that bomb was dropped about the blocked-up end to the smugglers’ passage, I thought for one wild instant that my whole theory of the crimes was wrong. It seemed to me that the passage must open into the inn. Then it occurred to me that if I had proof that the passage had a new exit, also in the inn, my case would be stronger than before. Besides, I had felt all along that the outlet in the cellar, which is now under the garages, you remember, was much too public a way for anybody to be able to use in safety. So Mrs. Gatty and I put our heads together, and it was her brilliant idea that if a man wanted to be away from the world for a longish period of time, the best thing for him to do would be to lie and soak in his bath. When Mrs. Gatty discovered that the Lowrys’ own private bathroom was on the ground floor of the inn, it was all over bar the shouting. The fact that Lowry and Mrs. Lowry were brother and sister and not man and wife was sufficient to explain everything else.”
“Well, I’m damned,” I said. Apparently Mrs. Coutts was, too, for she never said a word, and she is usually on to a little strong language like a terrier on a rat.
We sat and drank it in about the passage.
“Then they got Meg Tosstick’s body to the sea along the passage,” I said, “and the baby, too—”
“He went along the passage to kill Cora McCanley in the Bungalow,” said old Gatty, who seemed to be getting quite a sleuth-hound, “and brought her body back to the inn the same way—as I said just now.”
“So that’s that,” said Sir William.
“Not quite,” said Mrs. Bradley, “I’ve a piece of positive proof about the use of the smugglers’ passage which may interest you. You remember the substitution of Cora McCanley’s body for that of Meg Tosstick in the coffin, don’t you? Well, of course, the substitution was made at the inn. At this point Lowry showed an amount of audacity which really deserved to come off. But, acting upon his own initiative, the police inspector had got on to the undertaker who was given the job of arranging Meg Tosstick’s funeral. It took him some time, because the undertaker was not a local man. He did not come from Wyemouth Harbour, either, as most people believed, but from a place called Harmington in the next county. He got the job, he thought, because he was some sort of connection of Lowry. It was a motor-funeral, you remember, so that distance was no object, and in any case the town the undertaker came from is less than twenty miles away. The advantage of that particular town was that, for Lowry’s purpose, it was sufficiently obscure.
“Well, greatly to their credit, the police got on to this man, and persuaded him to try and recall the build and features of the girl whose body he had screwed down in the coffin. He was shown photographs of about fifteen young women, including those of Meg and Cora, and, despite the evidences of strangulation with their resultant disfigurement, he unhesitatingly picked out Cora as the girl whose coffin he had actually supplied. He gave us the measurements then. Oh, it was Cora, without a doubt, for whom Meg Tosstick’s coffin was made. They proved it to the hilt. You remember what a fine big girl she was, compared with Meg?”
CHAPTER XVIII
the last straw
« ^ »
We gasped.
“What?” said old Coutts. “
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Bradley. “If it had come off, you see, it would have been a splendid move to avoid discovery. No difficult and dangerous digging up of graves in the churchyard at night. No risk that the undertaker would recognise that the girl for whom the coffin was prepared was not the girl whose sweetheart had been arrested for murder—”
