“Very creditable indeed,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I see Bob Candy being carried shoulder-high out of the court! Oh,” she broke off, “it’s not Bob I’m worrying about. I firmly believe that we can get him off. Ferdinand will eat the prosecution. The police arrested the lad too soon.”
“How do you mean—you are not worried about Bob?” I asked. “Do you mean that something else is worrying you?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “The second murder—the murder that nobody has mentioned, the murder without a corpse—is worrying me to death, because I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Whatever can you mean?” I gasped.
“The murder of Cora McCanley,” replied the little old woman astoundingly.
“But she isn’t murdered,” I said. “She’s on tour with a show called —called—”
“Home Birds, ” said Mrs. Bradley. “But she isn’t, you know. That’s just my trouble. But I can’t get hold of any definite information.”
“She had a telegram,” I said. “She went off suddenly. Caught the 3.30 train or something. That’s all definite enough, I should think.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley, mechanically, as though her thoughts were far away. “Who told you about the train?” she asked, waking up a bit.
“Burt,” I replied. “He told us both. Oh, no, he didn’t mention the train! Still, it’s the only possible train of the day, isn’t it? I say,” I went on, rather aghast, of course, “that row she had with Burt!” I had just remembered it.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Bradley. She did not speak mechanically this time. “That row she had with Burt, dear child, is both interesting and important. And so are all the other rows she had with Burt.”
“What other rows?” I asked.
“About money matters,” Mrs. Bradley replied.
“I thought that was just one long continuous row,” I said.
CHAPTER XI
reappearance of cora
« ^ »
Our village hall, just before the commencement of one of our annual concerts, is as good a place as I know for the exchange of confidences. I had been up to see Burt about Cora. After what Mrs. Bradley had suggested, I was resolved upon making a few guarded enquiries. He gave me beer and answered my questions with what I could only regard as suspicious readiness. I made the village concert the excuse for introducing the subject. As a matter of fact, I pretended not to know that Cora McCanley was to be absent for any length of time from the Bungalow, and represented myself as an agent from Mrs. Coutts with the request that Cora would do us a song and dance item if she returned from her tour in time. Of course, had Burt known Mrs. C. as I do, he would never have swallowed this. Anything less like Cora McCanley’s idea of a song and dance show than the average item in the average village concert in Saltmarsh can scarcely be imagined. Mrs. Coutts exercises a rigid censorship over the concert programme and would be about as agreeable to the Folies Bergère taking part as to anyone of Cora’s reputation doing so. Burt, however, was not wise to this, and he answered, quite civilly, that Cora was off to God-knows-where in some bleeding high-kicking revue, and would only return when the boss bunked with the gross takings. His expressions, of course, not mine.
“Oh,” I said, affecting to be considerably dashed. “Then you don’t think she will be back by to-morrow week?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t even the faintest idea where she is. I don’t even know the name of the people who are running the show, and, except that she is supposed to be touring the North-Eastern counties with the soul-destroying, hick and hayseed, damnation stuff, I couldn’t put a finger on Cora for the next few weeks for any money you offered me.”
I went away, a sadder, and, of course, a wiser man. Horrible suspicions nestled like adders in my mind.
“And when she does come back,” said Burt, as he saw me off the premises, “she’ll get what’s coming to her. That’s how.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. He explained. Cora was “going gay” as I believe the saying is. A man, and so on. His remarks were expressive, but not edifying. A bit of a brute, I should say. And yet, of course, if he really thought she was coming back, he couldn’t possibly have murdered her. And yet, again, if he wished to disprove any wild rumours of her death—I went straight to Mrs. Bradley and confided to her my doubts and fears. For or against Burt, so to speak. She shook her head.
She said, “Please don’t say anything to him about my suspicions of Cora McCanley’s death. I don’t want the poor boy going round with a hatchet.”
“Poor boy!” I snorted. At least it was intended for a snort. They are not easy words to snort, of course. “Do you know he used to beat her?”
“Well, I don’t suppose she minded that,” said Mrs. Bradley, noting it down. As Daphne had said practically the same thing, I couldn’t very well call the old woman a fool. Besides, she did not give me the opportunity to do so, for she continued, almost without a pause, but with her frightful grin:
“Sadist plus masochist equals happy marriage.” I blinked, and very slowly translated the idiom into reasonable English.
“Oh, cave-man stuff?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Bradley. She cackled. I am prepared to wager that, if there was any cave-man stuff in either of her marriages, it was on the distaff side, so to speak.
“Let it pass,” I said, quoting from my favourite author. “But about poor Cora McCanley. We ought to inform the police.”
“I have done so,” replied Mrs. Bradley. “I informed them while you were up at the Bungalow this afternoon.”
“What did they say?”
“They said,” replied Mrs. Bradley, “that they would make enquiries. They thought—” she emphasised the word very slightly, “that I was suffering from murder-phobia.”
“From what?” I asked, trying vainly this time to cope with the patois.
“That isn’t a scientific term,” explained Mrs. Bradley. “I mean that the police are accustomed to receive scaremongers’ tales in any district where a murder has been committed. They will go up to the Bungalow, interview Burt, get this story, check it as far as Wyemouth Harbour main line railway station, and, if it checks with Cora’s movements on the day she was murdered, they will let it go at that unless I can give them some further proof that my assertions are the truth.”
“And can’t you?”
“Plenty, speaking psychologically. None, speaking in the language of the police.”
For some time after this conversation, we were both busy over Bob, and on account of the concert, and we did not meet again until the evening of the entertainment. Mrs. Bradley had been up to London twice, I knew, to talk matters over with her son, Sir Ferdinand Lestrange, the defending counsel, and I had visited Bob Candy, of course, two or three times, and tried to cheer him up, for, as the time of the trial grew nearer, he seemed to be sinking into a morbid condition of the utmost melancholy and depression, and talked of pleading guilty and so getting the trial over more quickly.
“Oh, you can’t do that, Bob!” I exclaimed. “Think how unfair it would be to all the people who believe in you!”
He promised that he would drop the idea, but I wondered whether Mrs. Bradley were right, of course, and the poor fellow, in a mood of desperation, had done the deed of which he was accused. She had not said she believed Bob was guilty, but her manner indicated it. Commonsense asserted itself, however, in my own case. Why had Bob waited until eleven days after the birth of the baby, when he must have known for nearly six months that Meg was to be the mother of a child? My three years in London slums had taught me that in cases of this kind the jealous lover invariably tries to take his revenge before the birth of the child, and, as I saw the thing, Bob was in the position of jealous lover. And what had become of the baby? Killed, I supposed, and not by Bob. Ah, but then, I did not believe that Bob had killed Meg either.