I was in the midst of decanting these theories to Daphne when we arrived at the lodge gates of Sir William’s park and, entering, began to cross the park to the house.
Talk about the morning after the night before, or the abomination of desolation! The park was in a simply fearful state. The turf was torn, worn, wheel-rutted and strewn with bits of paper, banana and orange peel, broken bottles, confetti, a hat, three odd gloves at least —(I speak of what we could see as we walked along!)—empty chocolate boxes, bits of cocoanut; the father and mother of a horrible, disgraceful mess. I’m a member of an anti-litter society, and so I know what the many-headed can do when it chooses, but, upon my word, I’ve never seen anything to equal the state of Sir William Kingston-Fox’s park on that August morning. It had not rained a bit during the night, which probably made matters a bit better than they might have been. And yet, I don’t know! It was awful!
Sir William’s face was as usual. Not marked at all, I mean, except for the rather puffy eye he had received from the vicar at the sports. He heard our story, as did Mrs. Bradley, Bransome Burns, the financier, Margaret Kingston-Fox, and Storey, who was waiting at table. He coughed—Storey, I mean—as an indication that he had something to say.
“If you please, Sir William—”
“Well?”
“It sounds as though the smugglers had begun their games again.”
“Oh, rubbish! Rubbish! This is not America, Storey.”
“No, Sir William. It just occurred to me, that’s all. Saltmarsh Cove was a regular smugglers’ hole in my great-grandfather’s time, sir, and there’s an underground passage to the inn, sir, or so I’ve heard tell, although I believe it is blocked up now.”
“Ah, very likely. Wells,” he said, suddenly turning to me, “this is serious, you know. As a magistrate, I say that it is very serious indeed! The vicar of Saltmarsh to be assaulted in his own parish! Upon my word, it’s really monstrous! He marked the men, you say?”
“One of them, Sir William,” I replied, trying to keep my face straight. Hang it all, he would have been the first person to assault the vicar in his own parish, had not the vicar assaulted him first! Daphne said:
“Yes; his poor hands!”
“Ah,” said Sir William. “Then all we have to do is to find the fellow the vicar marked so severely, and get from him the name of his accomplice, and get the couple of them a spell of hard labour, the damned scoundrels!”
He looked round after tenderly feeling his eye. Margaret said:
“They are probably not local people, Daddy.”
Mrs. Bradley said:
“In the pound, you say?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Curious,” said the little old woman. “It was only on Sunday that Mrs. Gatty was calling him a bull. The bull strayed on to someone else’s land and was put in the pound.”
She fixed her black eyes on me.
“Do you read the Pickwick Papers, young man?”
“I have read them, yes,” I replied. As a matter of fact I’m fond of the book.
“Aha!” said Mrs. Bradley. “A little of Dickens and a little of Gatty, and what a curious situation arises!”
She chortled in a way that made one’s blood run cold, and then helped herself to kidneys and bacon from the sideboard. Did I say we had arrived at breakfast time?
“Oh, how do you mean, Mrs. Bradley?” I asked. She wagged her fork at me and grinned fiendishly.
“What happened when Captain Boldwig found Mr. Pickwick asleep in the barrow?” she asked. I racked my brain.
“After the shooting?” I said.
“Yes, and after the lunch:
Complete with cold punch,” said Mrs. Bradley, positively hooting with mirth at her own absurd rhyme.
“Why, the captain ordered his servant to wheel Mr. Pickwick to the pound,” said I, “He was trespassing on his land, or something, wasn’t he? But then, Mr. Coutts wasn’t trespassing. He was—”
“Obviously he was where he wasn’t wanted,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“By Jove!” I said, struck by an idea. “I’ll get one or two men to help me, and we’ll go along there tonight, and see what happens. Surely five or six of us should be a match for a couple of roughnecks, shouldn’t we?”
“Don’t go, Noel,” said Daphne.
“Let him go,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Nothing on earth will happen, child.”
“How do you know?” said the squire. “I myself will come with you, Wells, and, by the powers, I’ll bring along half a dozen of my own men, fellows I can thoroughly trust. Meet you outside Burt’s bungalow at nine o’clock to-night.”
In its way it was quite a bit of excitement, of course, and I found myself swanking along the village street as though I were the chief of the Chicago police planning to clean up the city. But, as things turned out, when we did go to patrol the sea-shore, we were not only on the track of the men who had attacked the vicar but, as we thought, on the track of the man who killed Meg Tosstick. As though there were not mystery enough surrounding that poor girl, the next thing we heard was that she had been strangled at some time between nine o’clock and ten-thirty on the night of the Bank Holiday, and that there was no sign anywhere of the baby. People must actually have been dancing, or I myself may even have been concluding the fortune-telling, while that poor girl was being done to death. It was the most shocking and dreadful news I think any of us had ever had. Brown, the village constable, panting and exhausted, came to the vicarage soon after Daphne and I had returned from Sir William’s house, and told us what had happened. Then the vicar had to tell his story, for he bore too many marks of the fray to be able to hush the thing up. Old Brown shook his head.
“Mark my words, Mr. Coutts, sir,” he stated solemnly, “it’s the same gang. I wonder what their game is?”
“How was she killed?” asked Mrs. Coutts.
“With a gent’s ’and-knitted silk tie, ma’am,” replied Brown. “It had been put round her neck, tied in a bow in front, like as if someone had been having a little friendly joke with her, and then a wooden clothes peg had been used to make what the First Aid books calls a tourniquet. Oh, she’s not a nice sight, ma’am. She isn’t really, poor young gal. Got a nasty lump on ’er ’ead, too, but strangling was the cause of death, the doctor says.”
Well, that was the way in which we received the news. Brown had been called on to the scene by Lowry after Mrs. Lowry, going to take the poor girl her breakfast in bed—for she still was accustomed to remain in bed for the greater part of the day—made the dreadful discovery of her death. Brown had called in Doctor Fosse, and then had rung up the police station at Wyemouth Harbour, our nearest town, and they had promised to send down an inspector. Brown was easily the most important man in the village that day, I should think, although the Lowrys ran him close in reflected glory and personal popularity. A small crowd of villagers was outside the inn every time I passed that way, and knots of boys followed Brown wherever he went.
Of course, look at it as you please, it was a most inexplicable thing. One hears of girls being murdered when a baby is going to be born and the show, so to speak, is going to be given away thereby. There have been classic instances, followed usually by mutilation of the body, decapitation to avoid identification, and games of that sort. But the plain facts of our Saltmarsh affair were, first, that the baby had been in the world for eleven whole days before its mother was murdered; secondly, that there was no reason why anybody should have wanted the poor girl out of the way, apart from the baby business, and (see above, so to speak), if the father, whoever he was, didn’t want to acknowledge paternity, why should he? Did he think the girl would give him away? What was the mystery?