CHAPTER VII
edwy david burt—his maggot
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The police arrested Bob Candy, of course. It seems that in these murder cases the police are always looking out for two things; motive and opportunity. Well, it appeared that poor Bob headed the list of possible suspects very easily on both counts. In fact, I mean, if one didn’t know Bob Candy, it looked a clear thing. Nobody denied that he had walked out with the girl; everybody denied that it was his baby. If it had been, he would have married Meg Tosstick, according to the local custom, and there would have been an end of the matter, except for the nine or ten children that the two of them would produce, and the two or three out of those nine or ten that would eventually live to become adult, and, in their turn, to procreate others. Bob denied paternity of the baby, and everybody, even the police, believed him, because the police took the view that jealousy was the motive for the murder. As for opportunity, well, the two of them were living under the same roof and it would have been the simplest thing in the world for Candy to have sneaked into Meg’s room at night and strangled her as she lay in bed. As far as the method of doing the girl to death was concerned, there was no doubt at all but that she had been strangled with the man’s knitted silk tie which was still round her neck when her dead body was discovered by Mrs. Lowry next morning. The tie was proved to have been given to Bob on his birthday by the dead girl, who had knitted it, as her weeping old devil of a father bore witness, “with her own hands for him.” In reply to this, Bob was understood to state that the tie was his, but that, thoroughly upset by the birth of the baby, he had cast it aside and had sworn never to wear it any more. Pressed, he said that he could not remember exactly where he had put it. He thought he had thrown it away, and then again, he might have thrust it into a drawer, carelessly, but, on the other hand, he had a vague recollection of having used it as a lead for a lurcher he had had to bring to the public-house from the railway station the Saturday before Bank Holiday. He admitted, sadly, that it was a wonderfully strong tie. It was, of course.
Sir William undertook to pay for the man’s defence, and he took some trouble to broadcast his belief in Candy’s innocence. Curiously enough, our own Constable Brown also refused to credit Candy with the murder. It was the inspector from Wyemouth who ordered the arrest after the adjourned inquest. Poor old Brown was quite upset about it.
“It’s like this, Mr. Wells,” he said to me. “These town chaps is all right in their way, but it isn’t like knowing a chap. Now, I’ve knowed Bob Candy since he were seven or eight years of age, and I know he never done this ’ere murder. I tells the inspector so. ‘Proof,’ he says, ‘proof!’ I scratches my head, at that, Mr. Wells, because, things being how they are, it looks black again him. No doubt of that. So they arrests him. Well, I look at it this way. Somebody done it, didn’t un? And that somebody weren’t Bob. So what we got to do is to find out who that somebody were before this ’ere old trial of Bob’s come along, and make an end of poor young chap.”
Right on the meat, of course. But there was the beastly motive. After all, who on earth, except Bob Candy, had any motive for killing the girl? I put this to old Brown. He took off his helmet and wiped the inside of it with his handkerchief.
“Don’t you think, Mr. Wells,” he said, “that the father of the baby might have done it?”
“Yes, perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, the baby was born about a fortnight before the murder, and the cat was well and truly out of the bag, so to speak. I mean, in the classic cases, the murder is to prevent the birth of the child, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” said old Brown. “Anyway,” he added, stoutly, “I’m going to keep my ears and eyes open, Mr. Wells. There’s been some very funny things happening, and poor old Bob can’t be held responsible for all of them. He hasn’t got the head on him, for one thing, and he hasn’t got no accomplices, for another. What about the parson being put in that there old pound?”
Well, of course, as soon as you got on to the subject of poor Bob’s brains, where were you? It was another point against him that there was that unfortunate affair of the escaped lunatic in the middle of his family tree. I mean, it seems as though this game of strangling young females is a proper lunatic’s trick, and Bob Candy’s ancestry told against him somewhat heavily.
I was returning from visiting rounds in the parish one afternoon during the second week in August when I encountered Mrs. Bradley.
She was walking along with her eyes fixed on the ground and did not see me until I said, “Good afternoon.”
“Ah, here you are,” she said. Quite brisk and businesslike. I gazed round for assistance but there was none available. “I want you,” she said, fixing me with the most frightfully basilisk eye, “to introduce me into the bosoms of certain families in this village. Dear little Edwy David Burt for example. Are you really friendly with him?”
Well, I was at the time, of course. Burt had upheld the cocoanut shy nobly during my enforced absences on August Bank Holiday, and I had indicated as much to him. A stout fellow, Burt.
“What about him?” I said cautiously.
“I’m on the track of the person who murdered that girl,” said Mrs. Bradley, “and I want to clear a few things out of the way.”
“Including Burt?” I asked, with an attempt at facetiousness.
“Including funny little Burt,” said Mrs. Bradley, gravely. She grasped my sleeve. “You and Constable Brown and I are going to bring a murderer to justice,” she said, with the most frightful leer.
“You mean—” I burbled.
“I want your help,” she said. “I require your invaluable assistance, child. Who so respectable as the earnest young curate? Who so universally adored as the handsome, untidy, almost illiterate young man who has not had occasion yet to quarrel with his bishop?”
She yelled with laughter, let go of my sleeve and dug me in the ribs.
“Do you believe Bob Candy did it?” she said.
“No,” I replied truthfully, “I am sure he did not.” I moved out of the reach of her claw-like hand.
“Then up with the bonnets of bonny Dundee,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking my arm. “To Burt’s bungalow—boot, saddle, to horse and away!”
Burt was out, of course. This did nothing to deter my frightfully energetic companion.
“Never mind,” she said, “let us go and see Mr. and Mrs. Gatty. There are one or two questions that I am simply bursting to put to that delicious pair!”
Mr. and Mrs. Gatty were at home. He was snipping off the dead roses and she was mowing the lawn. Both stopped working when they saw us and came to greet us.
“We’ve come about the murder,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I suppose you two dear people will sign a petition for poor Bob Candy?”
“But he hasn’t been convicted yet,” objected little Gatty.
“We want to be prepared,” said Mrs. Bradley solemnly. “Do come indoors and sign. It won’t take a minute. Come along, Mr. Wells. You will have to witness his signature. Mrs. Coutts is getting up the petition, of course,” she explained to old Gatty, who had put down his scissors and gardening gloves on the wheelbarrow and was meekly accompanying us into the house. He gazed with distaste at the entrance hall of his gloomy residence.
“I do wish I could persuade Eliza to move,” he said. “I do hate and fear this beastly house, but she’s quite attached to it.”
I must confess that this remark by Gatty nearly flabbergasted me. It was generally understood in the village that Mrs. Gatty was in a terribly nervous state owing to the influence of the ex-lunatic asylum upon her system. Now, to hear Gatty seriously asserting that he was the nervous one and that his wife was the one who was determined to stay on at the house, was rather a jolt. I was about to enter into an argument with him about it when Mrs. Bradley forestalled me by saying: