The Mudflats of the Dead (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  “She fully deserved the ticking-off I gave her.”

  “She took Mr. Kirby with her on this jaunt?”

  “She took good care to lose him as soon as they got to Stack Ferry, I expect. I bet she only took him with her so that I shouldn’t blow my top about the car. She was mistaken. I did blow my top. Of course, if Adrian had known she had snitched the car without permission, he would never have gone with her. I’m certain of that. Adrian is a very decent chap, one of the best. He can be a bit tedious at times—you know—tiresomely informative and all that, but—”

  “We wander from the point, Mr. Palgrave.”

  “Which is, I take it, that I can’t prove I did not drown Camilla before I went back that night and changed my clothes. One person I can definitely swear was in the cottage at the same time as I was, because I actually saw him asleep in the parlour, and that’s Lowson.”

  “Ah, yes. You left Miss St. John in the sea—”

  “Yes, and swimming about like a little fish.”

  “I was not suggesting anything else. You returned to the cottage. How did you say you got in?”

  “I had a key, but when I had changed and shaved and gone out again, I remember that I did not close the door behind me for fear of waking Lowson.”

  “So you did not wake him when you entered the cottage?”

  “Apparently not. Surprising, in a way, because I had to hunt around for my suitcase. They’d moved it from where I’d left it. I think I told you that. I had to find it before I could change my clothes, of course.”

  “How long did all this take you?”

  “Half an hour or so. Yes, quite that.”

  “And Miss St. John did not return?”

  “Not while I was there.”

  “And Mrs. Lowson?”

  “Oh, I see! Now that I remember, she wasn’t there. I expect she was out enjoying the moonlight. She used to say it made her fey. Highland blood, you know.”

  “Miss St. John’s suitcase was found half buried in a sand-dune, and I cannot believe that she herself took it there and hid it.”

  “That does seem a bit odd, unless she had hidden it there earlier, before we bathed. She would have had plenty of time while we were all at the pub that evening.”

  “Not a new suggestion, but why should she do such a thing?”

  “Well, if she’d decided to flit when she knew the Lowsons were going to stay, and she had no place to leave a suitcase, I suppose she might have carried it down to the dunes, although it doesn’t seem very likely unless she was expecting somebody to pick her up in a dinghy, but, even so, hardly at night.”

  “I wonder whether Miss St. John had a similar reason to your own for vacating the cottage?”

  “How do you mean, Dame Beatrice?”

  “That she had known the Lowsons—or one of them—before, and did not welcome them as house-mates.”

  “I think she was simply planning to go on a toot with some bloke. Ever so much more likely, in my opinion, and I knew her, whereas you did not.”

  “How right you are!”

  “But the suitcase remains a mystery.”

  “The person who buried it (and so inadequately!) remains a mystery.”

  “Is it just because of the suitcase that you talk about a murderer?”

  “Oh, dear me, no! Do you think Miss St. John would have bathed in deep water on an outgoing tide?”

  “No, I don’t. What’s more, on that particular evening the tide was pretty high, as I said, but it wasn’t nearly on the turn when I left her. It could have had as much as an hour to run before there was slack water and then the ebb. Even Camilla wouldn’t have stayed in as long as that.”

  “The murderer can hardly have been a local person. He or she thought, no doubt, that the ebb would carry the body right out to sea, not knowing that, at Saltacres, what the sea removes it returns, sooner or later, to very much the same place. Did the Lowsons swim?”

  “Oh, not that day, I’m sure. I don’t know about any other day, but they’d only come down that same afternoon. I found them there when I got back after dining in Stack Ferry.”

  “And you saw nobody on the marshes or the shore that night except your companion, Miss St. John?”

  “I thought I had answered that. I saw nobody until I was back in my car and was ready to drive off. Then I thought I saw somebody wearing white, but the thing was quite a long way off.”

  “All the same, by moonlight it is still possible to recognise a figure, if not a face.”

  “I was mistaken in what I thought. The person I thought it might have been was no longer wearing white that evening. All I saw was marsh mist.”

  Dame Beatrice did not press the point.

  CHAPTER 13

  INTERIM

  “Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home: Is this a holiday?”

  William Shakespeare

  When Dame Beatrice returned to her home it was to find her secretary there. She greeted Laura warmly, but added: “I did not expect you back so soon.”

  “Oh, Gavin was called upon at short notice to attend an Interpol conference in West Germany. It seemed pointless to stay on without him, so here I am, filled with the London ozone of lead poisoning and petrol fumes, and with a heart for any fate, as the Master of English Prose so often said. You didn’t tell me much about it in your letters, but I gather you’ve been busy on a case of murder.”

  “That it is a case of murder has not been proved. There is every likelihood that it never will be proved.” She gave Laura a brief but sufficient account of her activities concerning the death of Camilla Hoveton St. John.

  “So this Palgrave mentioned blackmail, did he?” said Laura. “He’s a schoolmaster, you say—Caesar’s wife, in other words. Wonder whether the girl had anything to go on?”

  “Before I left him we discussed the matter. He did not believe the girl would have carried out her threat and he assured me that there was nothing in her insinuations and that she withdrew them on the plea that she had been joking. Apparently he threatened her that his union would sue her for defamation of character.”

  “Yes, well, it’s not the sort of joke a man who teaches in a mixed comprehensive, where the kids stay on until they’re seventeen or eighteen, would find very funny. I think, on the face of it, that he’s your murderer.”

  “He may be the chief, but he is not the only suspect. The girl seems to have involved herself with other men while she was living in the cottage. So far as Mr. Palgrave is concerned, I gave him every chance to tell me some easy lies, but he did not avail himself of the opportunity.”

  “Oh, yes? Clever enough to see the snares you were laying, perhaps.”

  “Yes, but it must have been a temptation to take an obvious way out. He must know that he is the chief suspect, so I gave him the opportunity of saying that he was not the only member of the cottage party who was out of the house that night. He did not take advantage of this. He agreed that Mrs. Lowson was out walking, but he was compelled to admit this as others, of course, can testify to it. Besides, on the face of it, she appears to be the last person to have needed to lay violent hands upon Miss St. John, since she had met her for the first time that day.”

  “What about the husband?”

  “Cupar Lowson? He is well out of it, it seems. He was in bed, presumably asleep, at the time when Palgrave left the cottage to drive to Stack Ferry that night. Palgrave saw him.”

  “Palgrave said Lowson was in bed?”

  “Palgrave said so. My suggestion that both the Lowsons and both the Kirbys may have been out he ignored. As Mrs. Kirby told me that Miss St. John had attempted to seduce Adrian Kirby, I thought that Mr. Palgrave might have risen to my bait, but he did not.”

  “So exit Palgrave and all’s well?”

  “By no means. I mention the matter for what it is worth. The difficulty is that if none of the cottage party was involved, that brings us to the need to consider an incalculable number of outsiders. The place was
teeming with yachtsmen and other summer visitors and the girl was avid for male society. Further to that, but for the mysterious business of the suitcase, as I explained to you, there is little reason to think that the verdict at the inquest was mistaken.”

  “That the girl swam on an outgoing tide and was drowned because she couldn’t get back to shore? As a swimmer myself, I still can’t swallow that. Mind you, if she was the kind of little tramp you indicate, and some man was there, egging her on, well, she might have been daft enough to do it, I suppose.”

  “I think the possibilities have all been considered and I am inclined to reject that one.”

  “There is just one thing,” said Laura. “When Palgrave admitted that Lowson was in bed and asleep that night, was that both when he entered the cottage and when he left it?”

  “He seems to have assumed that it was both. Palgrave was in the cottage for about half an hour. He groped around for his suitcase, went upstairs to change his clothes, went into the kitchen to shave and straight out to his car when he had done this.”

  “Why should he go upstairs to change?”

  “Not to disturb the sleeping man.”

  “I don’t believe he would have bothered about that. Do you know what I think? I think that when Palgrave nipped in and groped around for his suitcase, he assumed that both the Lowsons were asleep in bed. It was only when he was leaving that he discovered that Lowson was on his own in the room.”

  “You may be right. I wonder why Mr. Lowson did not accompany his wife on her moonlight walk? One would have thought that in a strange environment he would have been anxious to be with her.”

  “They may have had a bit of a toss-up and she was walking it off while he preferred to fume and sulk in bed.”

  “What an imaginative mind you have!”

  “Another possibility is that Lowson murdered the girl and sneaked back while Palgrave was upstairs or in the kitchen. Anyway, there could be a simple explanation for the girl’s suitcase being found on the dunes.”

  “In what way?”

  “You said that Palgrave took the others to the pub that night. They probably didn’t bother to lock up before they went. People don’t, in the country. Couldn’t a thief have oiled in, pinched the girl’s suitcase, and hidden it among the sand-dunes until he could sell it and her clothes?”

  “There are objections to that theory. It assumes that the intruder knew that the cottage was empty. If so, there was nothing to prevent a thief from looking around to find something worth stealing. Surely the holiday clothes of Dr. Lowson and his wife, not to mention those of Mr. Palgrave, would have been better worth taking than Miss St. John’s admittedly small and dingy little outfit?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t think he had much time. As I see it, he would have popped in and out as quickly as he could.”

  “Then why go upstairs when there were three suitcases to hand just inside the front door? Even if Mr. Palgrave is lying, and his own suitcase was already in the boot of his car, there were still the Lowsons’ things ready for the picking up. Even if he did risk going upstairs, why choose Miss St. John’s—”

  “Tatty little outfit in preference to the Lowsons’ kit? Very well, then. Pass, theory that there could have been a thief, although to my mind it is still a possibility which ought to be taken into account if no other evidence is forthcoming. But, surely, so far as you’ve gone, doesn’t everything point to Palgrave? There’s no doubt he bathed with the girl that night, he came back to the cottage knowing she wouldn’t be there, and his rather feeble story seems to have been that he ‘left her in the sea.’ Well, she had not only made a perfect nuisance of herself to him, but had actually threatened (jokingly or not) to blackmail him. Add to this the fact that, instead of sleeping in his car as he had said he had intended doing, he admits that he drove around in the small hours until he found a café where he could get breakfast. Then he went to the hotel at Stack Ferry and took up his reservation earlier than he had intended. Sounds very fishy to me.”

  “And may well be so, I agree, although, of course, hotels do take customers mid-week.”

  “Then, since you are convinced there was murder done, why do you think I’m wrong?”

  “I would not say—in fact, I have not said—that you are wrong. Moreover, you have made a most valuable suggestion, although it had already occurred to me.”

  Time passed. The holiday season ended. The yachtsmen laid up their boats, the holiday cottages were vacated, the hotels paid off their auxiliary staff, the beaches were almost deserted and melancholy settled over the salt-marshes. The creeks and channels on the east side of Stack Ferry were left to the densely packed colonies of crustacean-eating knots and the winter visitors, including wild geese, mallard, teal, wild duck, widgeon and the predatory wild-fowler who was licensed to shoot them. Dame Beatrice, after exploring such avenues as remained open in the case of Camilla, decided to settle down to an autumn routine and the business of getting Christmas out of the way and hoping, with Mr. Micawber, that something would turn up.

  Laura said no more about the death and might have been excused for thinking that Dame Beatrice had lost all interest in the case. She knew her employer too well, however, to suppose anything of the kind.

  Palgrave returned to his classroom and its puerilities and when the school closed for a week at the half-term holiday at the end of October, he booked himself in again at The Stadholder with the proviso that he be allotted a better room than his previous little attic and one with facilities for his writing. This, he felt, was going extremely well. As soon as the chores of marking exercise books and preparing for the following day’s lessons were done with, he had accustomed himself to a discipline of writing until one in the morning. His weekends, except for a Sunday round of golf with a colleague, were similarly devoted to his novel and his pile of typescript was becoming encouragingly high.

  At Stack Ferry he took daily exercise by walking towards Saltacres and, rather to his own surprise, one morning he felt impelled to drive into the little town where the house agent lived and book the cottage of which he had such traumatic memories, proposing to spend the three weeks of his Christmas holiday there, although where the impulse came from which prompted him to do this, he did not know. All the descriptions of the scenery that he needed were already down on paper, he thought.

  He told himself that he was merely trying to avoid having to spend Christmas in London, but he found this reason strangely unconvincing. Miranda sent him, at the beginning of December, an invitation for Boxing Day, and he was glad that he had a legitimate reason for refusing it. He wrote that he would be away for the whole of the Christmas holiday, but something prevented him from telling her where he was going. School broke up on the eighteenth of December. He loaded the boot of the car with the provision he had made for Christmas fare as well as with the more day-to-day tins of meat, fish, biscuits and vegetables he would need, and on the Saturday he set out blithely on his hundred-mile journey.

  There were no problems. He lunched early at a pub outside Cambridge and reached Saltacres well before dusk, early though the sun set at that time of year.

  He had schooled himself to believe that there might be some haunted quality about the cottage when he had it all to himself, but this was disproved as soon as, with the key for which he had called at the house agent’s on his way up, he let himself in. Except that the place seemed smaller, darker, dingier and damper than he remembered it, all seemed familiar and reassuring.

  Having dumped his luggage and unloaded his provisions, he parked his car in the accustomed place a little further up the street, returned to the cottage, lit the gas fire in the parlour and then made an investigation upstairs in order to decide upon his sleeping-quarters. He had never been inside the larger bedroom, but as soon as he looked at it he favoured it.

  He went into what had been Camilla’s room, but it evoked no painful memories. Downstairs the studio couch, well-worn but offering no suggestion that it could also do duty as a
bed—and Morag’s bed, at that!—and his little work-table still in the window, were reminders of the previous holiday, but he experienced no traumatic reaction. He unpacked his typescript and placed it on the parlour table, put his portable typewriter beside it, drew the curtains and lit the gas-mantle. Then he got himself a meal and afterwards finished the evening at the warm and friendly pub.

  “This is the life,” he said to himself, and had thoughts of throwing up his job at the end of the summer term, buying the cottage, if the agent would sell, and living on his savings plus a little assistance, perhaps, from an indulgent government while he blossomed out into full, professional authorship.

  In the morning, after breakfast, he went out for the walk he had decided to take daily for exercise, but, after a couple of miles, the biting wind made walking so unpleasant that he was glad to return to the cottage for the rest of the day. During the night the wind dropped and the snow fell. He woke to a shining, white-blanketed, silent world. Gone were the wild wastes of the marshes as he had seen them. The apparently illimitable wilderness was still there, but the alchemy of the snow had changed it into something so rich and strange that he was awed by it and, at the same time, he was filled with the liveliest anticipation and delight.

  He stepped out of the cottage feeling like the first man on the moon, and tramped over the crisp, virgin purity of the snow with the pleasure of a child who recognises the magic of his own footprints.

  “I never thought of snow for chapter ten,” he said aloud. He returned to the cottage and settled down to record this new phenomenon of an enchanted, utterly unexpected world. “Just what I needed, and I never thought of it!” he repeated joyously.

  He continued to take his morning exercise, but his walks grew shorter every day. No more snow fell, but what was there remained. He worked on his book from nine until half past twelve each morning, then got himself some lunch and after he had washed up his plates, cutlery and the glass he had used, he went for a short drive more for the sake of the car than because he wanted a change of scene and occupation. After that, it was back to his work again to check over the morning’s output and to make any corrections, alterations, and embellishments which seemed necessary. He did not think he had ever been so happy.