The Saltmarsh Murders Read online

  GLADYS MITCHELL

  The Saltmarsh

  Murders

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Gladys Mitchell

  Chapter I: Mrs. Coutts’ Maggot

  Chapter II: Maggots at The Moat House And Bats at The Bungalow

  Chapter III: Sir William’S Large Maggot and Daphne’S Small One

  Chapter IV: Maggots In The Church Porch and Public House Maggots

  Chapter V: The Village FÊTe

  Chapter VI: A Student Of dickens

  Chapter VII: Edwy David Burt—His Maggot

  Chapter VIII: Bob Candy’S Bank Holiday

  Chapter IX: The Village Speaks Its Mind

  Chapter X: Sundry Alibis, and a Regular Facer

  Chapter XI: Reappearance of Cora

  Chapter XII: Permutations and Combinations

  Chapter XIII: Bats In The Jury Box

  Chapter XIV: Twentieth-Century Usage of a Smugglers’ Hole

  Chapter XV: Black Man’S Maggot

  Chapter XVI: Mrs. Gatty Falls from Grace, and Mrs. Bradley Leads us up The Garden

  Chapter XVII: Mrs Bradley Sticks Her Pig

  Chapter XVIII: The Last Straw

  Appendix

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409076704

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2009

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  Copyright © the Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1932

  Gladys Mitchell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 1932 by Victor Gollancz

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099526193

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  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

  THE SALTMARSH MURDERS

  Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or ‘The Great Gladys’ as Philip Larkin described her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

  Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

  ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  Speedy Death

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

  The Longer Bodies

  Death at the Opera

  The Devil at Saxon Wall

  Dead Men’s Morris

  Come Away, Death

  St Peter’s Finger

  Printer’s Error

  Brazen Tongue

  Hangman’s Curfew

  When Last I Died

  Laurels Are Poison

  The Worsted Viper

  Sunset Over Soho

  My Father Sleeps

  The Rising of the Moon

  Here Comes a Chopper

  Death and the Maiden

  The Dancing Druids

  Tom Brown’s Body

  Groaning Spinney

  The Devil’s Elbow

  The Echoing Strangers

  Merlin’s Furlong

  Faintley Speaking

  Watson’s Choice

  Twelve Horses and the

  Hangman’s Noose

  The Twenty-third Man

  Spotted Hemlock

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

  Say It With Flowers

  The Nodding Canaries

  My Bones Will Keep

  Adders on the Heath

  Death of the Delft Blue

  Pageant of Murder

  The Croaking Raven

  Skeleton Island

  Three Quick and Five Dead

  Dance to Your Daddy

  Gory Dew

  Lament for Leto

  A Hearse on May-Day

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie

  Winking at the Brim

  A Javelin for Jonah

  Convent on Styx

  Late, Late in the Evening

  Noonday and Night

  Fault in the Structure

  Wraiths and Changelings

  Mingled with Venom

  The Mudflats of the Dead

  Nest of Vipers

  Uncoffin’d Clay

  The Whispering Knights

  Lovers, Make Moan

  The Death-Cap Dancers

  The Death of a Burrowing Mole

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy

  Cold, Lone and Still

  The Greenstone Griffins

  The Crozier Pharaohs

  No Winding-Sheet

  CHAPTER I

  MRS. COUTTS’ MAGGOT

  There are all sorts of disadvantages in telling a story in the first person, especially a tale of murder. But I was so mixed up in the business from first to last, and saw so much of it from all conceivable angles and from nearly everybody’s point of view, that I can’t very well stand outside the story and recount it in a detached manner.

  I had taken an arts degree at Oxford, and was intending to read for the Bar when a bachelor uncle died and left me thirty thousand pounds on condition that I went into the Church. Well, my mother and sisters were living on about two hundred and fifty a year at the time, and I owed my father’s friend, Sir William Kingston-Fox, for my University fees, so I took the will at its word and did three years slum curating in the South-East district, Rotherhithe way. After that, Sir William recommended me to the Reverend Bedivere Coutts, Vicar of Saltmarsh, and I became the curate there.

  I didn’t like Mr. or Mrs. Coutts, but I liked Daphne and William. Daphne was eighteen when I first knew her, and William was fourteen. I fell in love with Daphne later, of course. Well, not so much later, really
. Daphne and William were surnamed Coutts, and were old Coutts’ niece and nephew.

  As I look back over the whole thing, I can see that the match laid to the train of gunpowder must have been the day upon which it became known to Mrs. Coutts that our housemaid, a quiet, softly-spoken, rather pretty country girl called Meg Tosstick, was going to have a baby. I think Meg herself had known for about three months that the thing was going to happen, and had kept a shut mouth and a demeanour of great calmness. Awfully creditable, at least, I think so, because I imagine it must be a rather hysteria-making—(Daphne’s word, of course, not mine)—thing to be carrying a baby when one isn’t married and has a boss like Mrs. Coutts.

  The net result of Mrs. Coutts’ discovery that the poor girl was with child, was as may be imagined. Out went the girl, in spite of the fact that she told Mrs. Coutts her father would thrash her and kick her into the street if she lost her place—the old devil used to turn up regularly at both the Sunday services, too!—he was our verger—and Mrs. Coutts told the vicar that public prayers would have to be said for the girl.

  If there’s one thing for which Coutts was to be admired it was for the fact that, afraid of his wife as he was, he never allowed her to dictate to him where his job was concerned. In the home she reigned supreme, but in the church she became as other women are, and had to cover her bally head. He replied, on this occasion, that it would be the time for public prayers when the girl herself asked for them, and then he turned to me and asked me whether I was going to visit the girl’s home and soothe her father, or whether he should go himself. I left it to him, of course. In the end, the innkeepers, Lowry and Mrs. Lowry, who were extraordinarily alike to look at, by the way, decided to take the girl in, and promised to see her through. I didn’t know at the time whether Coutts paid them for it, but I supposed that he did. I didn’t like the chap, but he was very decent where the parishioners were concerned. Besides, I think his wife’s attitude got his goat rather. At any rate the next we heard of Meg Tosstick was the news that she was a mother.

  Mrs. Coutts was one of the first to get hold of the tidings, of course.

  “It’s happened,” said Mrs. Coutts. She came into the study where Coutts and I were working, removed her fabric gloves, folded them and laid them on the small mahogany table which had belonged to her mother. The table was inlaid on the top surface with squares of ebony and yellow oak for chess, but no one at the Saltmarsh vicarage played chess, and so the table supported a small cheap gramophone and two cigarette tins containing gramophone needles. The blue tin with the gold lettering held the unused, and the yellow tin with the scarlet lettering held the used, needles. I was sentimental, rather, about these tins because Daphne and I used to dance to the strains of the gramophone. Mrs. Coutts took off her rather frightful dark brown hat, shoved her hair this way and that, as ladies do, and laid the hat on top of the gramophone case. She was a tall, thin woman with eyes so deep in her head, that, beyond the fact that they were dark, you couldn’t tell their colour. She had thinnish lightish eyebrows and a nose whose attempt to give an expression of benevolence and generosity to her face was countered heavily by an intolerant mouth and a rather receding chin. She seated herself in the only comfortable chair, of course, sighed and began to drum nervously on the broad leather arm. I think her rotten nerves were what got on me, really. Her hands, though, were really rather fine. Long, thin, strong-fingered hands, you know. She was rather a fine pianist.

  As usual, she started straight in to bait the great man, who, to my quiet delight, had taken no notice at all of her entrance beyond clicking his tongue in an irritated sort of way.

  “Have you nothing to say, Bedivere?” she demanded.

  “No, my dear, I don’t think I have,” her husband replied. “Would you mind not tapping like that? I can’t concentrate upon my sermon.”

  “If you are not able to improve upon last Sunday’s performance, it won’t make much difference whether you concentrate or not,” replied Mrs. Coutts, sharply. It was justified, mind you. His previous effort had been well below forty per cent.

  “Oblige me, my dear, by not referring to my preaching as a performance,” said the old man. He laid down his pen, scraped his chair back and turned to look at her. I rose to go, but he glared at me and waved me to my work. I was checking his classical references.

  “I suppose I shall get no peace until I hear the news, whatever it is,” he added, “therefore open your heart, my dear Caroline, and do please be as brief as possible. I must get my sermon ready this afternoon. You know I’ve that match to umpire to-morrow.”

  He stood up, removed his pince-nez and bestowed upon his life-partner a bleak smile. He was a blue-eyed, hard-faced man in middle life, with more of the athlete’s slouch than the scholar’s stoop about his shoulders. He was a hefty bloke, very hefty. His hands and wrists were hairy, he had the jowl of a prizefighter and his thigh muscles bulged beneath his narrow black trousers. He looked out of the window and suddenly bellowed, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” so that I leapt into the air with fright. The window rattled in its worm-eaten frame and his wife also leapt nervously from her chair.

  “It’s all right, my dear. It’s only William at those hens again. The boy’s a perfect curse. I shall be glad when the holidays are over, except that I must have him to play for the village against Much Hartley on August Monday. We’re a man short, now that Sir William has had Johnstone run in for poaching. Sir William, I really believe, would let a man off for shooting his mother but not for poaching his game. A nuisance. Johnstone could be relied on in the slips and would have made a useful change bowler.”

  “Never mind about cricket,” said Mrs. Coutts. “The thing that worries me about the Bank Holiday is this wretched fête at the Hall.”

  “The sports, you mean?” The vicar, having barged her off the subject of his last sermon, became more genial.

  “I do not mean the sports, Bedivere, although I am aware that you take interest in nothing else that goes on in the village,” she said. The old man let out a groan and decidedly weakened.

  “But does anything else go on in the village?” he asked. “I mean, of course, apart from the daily round?”

  “If you’ve no conception of what goes on in the village, Bedivere,” said the lady, finding a spot and proceeding to bowl slow twisters, “it isn’t my fault. I’ve attempted to bring it to your notice time and again. And I must say, even at the risk of becoming tedious, that the kind of behaviour which obtained last year at the village fête has got to stop. The village will get itself a name like Sodom and Gomorrah if things are allowed to go on unchecked. It is your clear duty to announce from the pulpit next Sunday, and to repeat the announcement on the following Sunday, that you will publicly proclaim the names of all those who transgress the laws of decency and proper behaviour in Sir William Kingston-Fox’s park on August Bank Holiday.”

  “But, my dear girl,” said the batting side, pulling itself together, “apart from the fact that the whole thing would most certainly be regarded by the bishop as a rather cheap stunt to fill the church, how on earth am I to know how the village behaves itself in the Hall grounds on August Monday? You know as well as I do that my activities are confined to assisting to put up the tea tent for the ladies and to running off the sports finals for the children. And I can only manage the sports if our side is batting and my own innings is at an end. In the evening, as you very well know, I come back here, shut all the windows, and turn on the wireless. People don’t want a clergyman about when they’re enjoying themselves dancing and skylarking.”

  Mrs. Coutts’ lip curled.

  “For all you care, Bedivere, the whole village may go to perdition in its own way, mayn’t it?” she said bitterly. “Meg Tosstick and all! Oh, and I was refused admittance to her, if you please! Really, the state of the village——”

  “Look here, Caroline—” the vicar sat down and leaned forward with his great hairy hands dangling between his knees—“let’s face the facts. I know the sort
of thing that goes on. I know it as well as you do. And I say it doesn’t matter. Does it harm anybody? You know the custom here as well as I do, and it has plenty to recommend it. I’ve performed the marriage ceremony in such cases dozens of times, and I’ll challenge you, or any other moralist, to prove that there is anything fundamentally wicked in the custom. If of course, the youth doesn’t marry the girl, that’s another matter, but, hang it all, my dear, the village is so small and everybody’s affairs are so well known that the poor chap can’t escape. As for that poor unfortunate girl at the village inn, I suppose she is too ill to see anybody, even you! And now, if that’s all——”

  “But it isn’t all.” She clasped and unclasped her hands. “It isn’t all,” she repeated. There was silence except for a fly buzzing on the window pane. Bedivere Coutts, who had then been married nineteen years, waited patiently.

  “I’ve been to visit her, as I said. The baby was born at two o’clock this morning,” said Mrs. Coutts at last. Her hands were trembling. Her thin face was pinched into resentment. “Bedivere, not only was I refused admittance to her bedroom, but, according to Mrs. Lowry, who was barely civil to me, Tosstick persists in withholding the name of the father, and she won’t allow anybody to see the baby. Nothing will shake her. Of course, everybody suspects the worst. It’s perfectly dreadful! And that Mrs. Lowry encourages the girl!”

  “And what is the worst?” enquired the vicar, suddenly switching his chair round and taking up his pen. Mrs. Coutts passed her tongue over her lips.

  “The squire,” she said, dropping her voice. I think they must have forgotten me, of course.

  “Kingston-Fox?” said Coutts. “Oh, rubbish, Caroline!”

  He shook a drop of ink from his pen on to his blotting paper.

  “Well, at any rate,” began Mrs. Coutts, flushing, so that her thin face looked like a withered crab-apple.

  The vicar pushed back his chair and turned round again. I was longing to go, but I hardly liked to make a disturbance.