“That question was answered by the discovery of her body in Meg Tosstick’s grave. It was mere chance that that melodramatic action of changing the bodies did not count as another of the murderer’s, mistakes. Suppose that the body of Meg Tosstick had been found before we came to the conclusion that the name of the buried girl did not correspond with the name on the tombstone! The police would then have exhumed the body and discovered that it was not Meg’s but Miss McCanley’s, and that it also had met death by strangling. I have made various tests, and I discover that flotsam thrown into the water opposite Saltmarsh Cove and thereabouts is washed up two or three days later on to the spit of land known as Dead Man’s Reach, some two miles down the coast westwards; that is, to the right of that rough plan. By the most extraordinary coincidence, the tides, the wind and the awful weather must have combined to take the body out to sea. It has not yet been found; or, if found, it has not yet been identified. The murderer may have worked this out. He is a clever person. But I think he was taking a big risk. His argument probably ran something like this:
“ ‘Cora McCanley has disappeared from Saltmarsh. Some interfering busybody has put the police on her track. So if I throw her body into the sea and it gets washed up and identified, where am I? On the other hand, if Meg Tosstick’s body gets washed up, the chances are that as no description of Meg has been circulated, the body won’t be identified, particularly as it will have been in the sea for a day or two.’
“So he risked it, and it came off; and, but for the most fortuitous set of circumstances”—(thus Mrs. Bradley on her own marvellous bits of reasoning and deduction!)—“it would have continued to come off, at any rate for several months. By that time, any possible connection of the murderer with the crime would have vanished.
“Now, those fortuitous circumstances were as follows:
“You remember, perhaps, that I stated the murderer’s first mistake had been to cause Robert Candy, for whom, please, I feel quite as much sympathy as you do, to kill his sweetheart eleven days after her baby was born. Now, that kind of crime for that kind of reason is almost unheard-of. There was no earthly reason, so far as one could see, why Bob Candy, having familiarised his mind with the fact that his sweetheart had betrayed him, and having shown neither scorn nor resentment when he heard that the child was born, should suddenly, without apparent warning, seize an opportunity to strangle the girl he had loved. It was so unreasonable an action that one felt an amazing amount of curiosity about it. One weighed the known facts, wondering all the time whether the police had not arrested the wrong man. But the more one looked at the facts, the more apparent it became that Bob was probably the technically-guilty person.”
This time there was an interruption. From the second row—I know where it was, because it came from immediately behind me—Mrs. Gatty’s unmistakable voice said menacingly:
“That will do, Croc. That will do. The pig shall lie down with the young she-bear; she was no longer Lady Clare; and all the beasts of the field shall be blind for the space of two moons. I, Moto-Kari, the wise owl, have spoken it. Go away, you boys!”
She was prodded into silence by old Gatty, I suppose. Anyway, she shut up, after that, and Mrs. Bradley was able to continue her remarks. In five minutes, or less, the audience was as much absorbed in what she was saying as though there had been no interruption. Mrs. Gatty went to sleep, I believe. I could hear her deep, rather noisy breathing, behind me, and once old Gatty grunted as though her head on his shoulder was becoming too heavy to be blithely and carelessly supported.
“It was obvious from the first,” Mrs. Bradley continued, “that poor Meg Tosstick was being terrorised, presumably by the father of her child. Now, the biggest mistake that the murderer of Cora McCanley (and the responsible murderer of Meg) made, was this. He changed his habit of mind. When a man or woman changes a mental habit, one of two things has happened. Either there is an ulterior motive for that change, or else that person’s spiritual outlook has completely altered. The change to which I am referring was a change from meanness to generosity—perhaps the most unusual change which ever takes place in the nature of man. It is, indeed, such an unusual change that we psychologists always regard it with what I consider to be a very legitimate and comprehensible amount of doubt and suspicion when it is brought to our notice.
“Now, I brought to the investigation of these Saltmarsh crimes an open and unprejudiced mind. I did not know any of you, when I first came to stay here, with the exception of Sir William Kingston-Fox and his daughter. The fact that I knew nothing about you was more of a disadvantage than an advantage, because it meant that almost all the information about you which it was possible for me to acquire had to be acquired from other people, many of whom showed considerable prejudice and bias in what they told me. A good deal of the most valuable information now in my possession was given to me without the donors being aware of the importance of their remarks. It might be of interest to some of you to be given a few examples of the kind of thing I mean. Let us take, for instance, the matter of that secret passage which connected the Cove with the Mornington Arms. You may, or may not know, that the end of the passage which terminates in the cellars of the Mornington Arms is now blocked up. Mr. Lowry informs us that it was blocked up when he succeeded his father at the Mornington Arms, and that he remembers, very vaguely, its being blocked up when he was a tiny boy. Now when I tell you that I know for a fact that Cora McCanley was murdered in her own home, and that Mr. Burt, for a joke, once spent several months tunnelling a transverse to that tunnel so that he could reach the Cove underground from his bungalow if he wished to do so, you will see that it was of importance to Mr. Lowry to prove that the exit at his end was blocked. But did Mr. Lowry prove it? No. The supposition that that exit was, and had, for years and years been blocked up, came out quite casually when I was talking with one of Sir William Kingston-Fox’s servants some time ago, and this supposition was proved to be a fact only quite recently, after police investigations.
“To take another instance:—there was the affair of Mr. Burt and the vicar. You remember that the vicar was attacked by two men with blackened faces whom he supposed were poachers. It was entirely fortuitously that it came to my notice that Mr. Burt kept a negro manservant, and so I traced Mr. Burt’s little joke to its perpetrator. So far as the murder of Meg Tosstick was concerned, that incident was of primary importance, because it then suggested to me that Robert Candy was goaded into murdering Margaret Tosstick by hearing that she had been seduced by Burt’s negro servant and had borne a half-breed baby.”
There was a sudden violent interruption. Foster Washington Yorke stood up, I should say, and his chair fell back on to the person behind, who shrieked.
“Dat’s a lie! Dat’s a lie!” shouted the negro, apparently, by the sound, trying to fight his way to the front of the hall. Several people tried to collar him, of course. At least, judging from the row that was going on, they did. Suddenly in the midst of the tumult the door nearest to me opened, and some biggish person slid out without a sound. I felt a terrible draught from the open door, but I could not identify the slinking figure. Mrs. Bradley had a megaphone with her, I should think, because the village hall was suddenly filled with her voice, amplified and booming. It said, in a tone of absolute confidence and authority:
“Keep your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Quiet, please.”