Read The Saltmarsh Murders Online
Authors: Gladys Mitchell
GLADYS MITCHELL
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Chapter I: Mrs. Coutts' Maggot
Chapter II: Maggots at The Moat House And Bats at The Bungalow
Chapter III: Sir William'S Large Maggot and Daphne'S Small One
Chapter IV: Maggots In The Church Porch and Public House Maggots
Chapter VI: A Student Of dickens
Chapter VII: Edwy David BurtâHis Maggot
Chapter VIII: Bob Candy'S Bank Holiday
Chapter IX: The Village Speaks Its Mind
Chapter X: Sundry Alibis, and a Regular Facer
Chapter XI: Reappearance of Cora
Chapter XII: Permutations and Combinations
Chapter XIII: Bats In The Jury Box
Chapter XIV: Twentieth-Century Usage of a Smugglers' Hole
Chapter XV: Black Man'S Maggot
Chapter XVI: Mrs. Gatty Falls from Grace, and Mrs. Bradley Leads us up The Garden
Chapter XVII: Mrs Bradley Sticks Her Pig
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409076704
Published by Vintage 2009
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Copyright © the Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1932
Gladys Mitchell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1932 by Victor Gollancz
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THE SALTMARSH MURDERS
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell â or âThe Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin described her â was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.
Her first novel,
Speedy Death
, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.
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ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL
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Speedy Death
The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop
The Longer Bodies
Death at the Opera
The Devil at Saxon Wall
Dead Men's Morris
Come Away, Death
St Peter's Finger
Printer's Error
Brazen Tongue
Hangman's Curfew
When Last I Died
Laurels Are Poison
The Worsted Viper
Sunset Over Soho
My Father Sleeps
The Rising of the Moon
Here Comes a Chopper
Death and the Maiden
The Dancing Druids
Tom Brown's Body
Groaning Spinney
The Devil's Elbow
The Echoing Strangers
Merlin's Furlong
Faintley Speaking
Watson's Choice
Twelve Horses and the
Hangman's Noose
The Twenty-third Man
Spotted Hemlock
The Man Who Grew Tomatoes
Say It With Flowers
The Nodding Canaries
My Bones Will Keep
Adders on the Heath
Death of the Delft Blue
Pageant of Murder
The Croaking Raven
Skeleton Island
Three Quick and Five Dead
Dance to Your Daddy
Gory Dew
Lament for Leto
A Hearse on May-Day
The Murder of Busy Lizzie
Winking at the Brim
A Javelin for Jonah
Convent on Styx
Late, Late in the Evening
Noonday and Night
Fault in the Structure
Wraiths and Changelings
Mingled with Venom
The Mudflats of the Dead
Nest of Vipers
Uncoffin'd Clay
The Whispering Knights
Lovers, Make Moan
The Death-Cap Dancers
The Death of a Burrowing Mole
Here Lies Gloria Mundy
Cold, Lone and Still
The Greenstone Griffins
The Crozier Pharaohs
No Winding-Sheet
T
here are all sorts of disadvantages in telling a story in the first person, especially a tale of murder. But I was so mixed up in the business from first to last, and saw so much of it from all conceivable angles and from nearly everybody's point of view, that I can't very well stand outside the story and recount it in a detached manner.
I had taken an arts degree at Oxford, and was intending to read for the Bar when a bachelor uncle died and left me thirty thousand pounds on condition that I went into the Church. Well, my mother and sisters were living on about two hundred and fifty a year at the time, and I owed my father's friend, Sir William Kingston-Fox, for my University fees, so I took the will at its word and did three years slum curating in the South-East district, Rotherhithe way. After that, Sir William recommended me to the Reverend Bedivere Coutts, Vicar of Saltmarsh, and I became the curate there.
I didn't like Mr. or Mrs. Coutts, but I liked Daphne and William. Daphne was eighteen when I first knew her, and William was fourteen. I fell in love with Daphne later, of course. Well, not so much later, really. Daphne and William were surnamed Coutts, and were old Coutts' niece and nephew.
As I look back over the whole thing, I can see that
the match laid to the train of gunpowder must have been the day upon which it became known to Mrs. Coutts that our housemaid, a quiet, softly-spoken, rather pretty country girl called Meg Tosstick, was going to have a baby. I think Meg herself had known for about three months that the thing was going to happen, and had kept a shut mouth and a demeanour of great calmness. Awfully creditable, at least, I think so, because I imagine it must be a rather hysteria-makingâ(Daphne's word, of course, not mine)âthing to be carrying a baby when one isn't married and has a boss like Mrs. Coutts.
The net result of Mrs. Coutts' discovery that the poor girl was with child, was as may be imagined. Out went the girl, in spite of the fact that she told Mrs. Coutts her father would thrash her and kick her into the street if she lost her placeâthe old devil used to turn up regularly at both the Sunday services, too!âhe was our vergerâand Mrs. Coutts told the vicar that public prayers would have to be said for the girl.
If there's one thing for which Coutts was to be admired it was for the fact that, afraid of his wife as he was, he never allowed her to dictate to him where his job was concerned. In the home she reigned supreme, but in the church she became as other women are, and had to cover her bally head. He replied, on this occasion, that it would be the time for public prayers when the girl herself asked for them, and then he turned to me and asked me whether I was going to visit the girl's home and soothe her father, or whether he should go himself. I left it to him, of course. In the end, the innkeepers, Lowry and Mrs. Lowry, who were extraordinarily
alike to look at, by the way, decided to take the girl in, and promised to see her through. I didn't know at the time whether Coutts paid them for it, but I supposed that he did. I didn't like the chap, but he was very decent where the parishioners were concerned. Besides, I think his wife's attitude got his goat rather. At any rate the next we heard of Meg Tosstick was the news that she was a mother.
Mrs. Coutts was one of the first to get hold of the tidings, of course.
“It's happened,” said Mrs. Coutts. She came into the study where Coutts and I were working, removed her fabric gloves, folded them and laid them on the small mahogany table which had belonged to her mother. The table was inlaid on the top surface with squares of ebony and yellow oak for chess, but no one at the Saltmarsh vicarage played chess, and so the table supported a small cheap gramophone and two cigarette tins containing gramophone needles. The blue tin with the gold lettering held the unused, and the yellow tin with the scarlet lettering held the used, needles. I was sentimental, rather, about these tins because Daphne and I used to dance to the strains of the gramophone. Mrs. Coutts took off her rather frightful dark brown hat, shoved her hair this way and that, as ladies do, and laid the hat on top of the gramophone case. She was a tall, thin woman with eyes so deep in her head, that, beyond the fact that they were dark, you couldn't tell their colour. She had thinnish lightish eyebrows and a nose whose attempt to give an expression of benevolence and generosity to her face was countered heavily by an intolerant mouth and a rather receding
chin. She seated herself in the only comfortable chair, of course, sighed and began to drum nervously on the broad leather arm. I think her rotten nerves were what got on me, really. Her hands, though, were really rather fine. Long, thin, strong-fingered hands, you know. She was rather a fine pianist.
As usual, she started straight in to bait the great man, who, to my quiet delight, had taken no notice at all of her entrance beyond clicking his tongue in an irritated sort of way.
“Have you nothing to say, Bedivere?” she demanded.
“No, my dear, I don't think I have,” her husband replied. “Would you mind not tapping like that? I can't concentrate upon my sermon.”
“If you are not able to improve upon last Sunday's performance, it won't make much difference whether you concentrate or not,” replied Mrs. Coutts, sharply. It was justified, mind you. His previous effort had been well below forty per cent.
“Oblige me, my dear, by not referring to my preaching as a performance,” said the old man. He laid down his pen, scraped his chair back and turned to look at her. I rose to go, but he glared at me and waved me to my work. I was checking his classical references.
“I suppose I shall get no peace until I hear the news, whatever it is,” he added, “therefore open your heart, my dear Caroline, and do please be as brief as possible. I
must
get my sermon ready this afternoon. You know I've that match to umpire to-morrow.”
He stood up, removed his pince-nez and bestowed
upon his life-partner a bleak smile. He was a
blue
-eyed, hard-faced man in middle life, with more of the athlete's slouch than the scholar's stoop about his shoulders. He was a hefty bloke, very hefty. His hands and wrists were hairy, he had the jowl of a prizefighter and his thigh muscles bulged beneath his narrow black trousers. He looked out of the window and suddenly bellowed, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” so that I leapt into the air with fright. The window rattled in its worm-eaten frame and his wife also leapt nervously from her chair.