The Corpse in the Cellar (12 page)

Constable Dixon's directions had been clear and helpful, and within half an hour I was back at the edge of the town. I found that the towpath led me directly to the footpath over the road bridge. I followed this to the high street, and in turn followed the high street until it opened into the town square, where we had set out that morning.

Around the corner, where the high street joined the square, I found the blue sign that identified the police station. I sprinted up the steps, and just inside the dark brick walls was a counter that separated the public from the policemen.

Behind this, seated at a desk, was the same Sergeant Donaldson we had seen at work the day before as Inspector Hyde's silent assistant. This Donaldson was a solid, stodgy man who appeared to have been assembled out of some sort of suet. And when he moved, which he did rather ponderously, it appeared that the suet had not entirely set.

‘Ah, it's you!' he said, leaning forward on his desk. ‘The detectives from Scotland Yard have been looking for you. Where are the other two?'

‘Still with the body,' I replied.

‘I'll go and tell Inspector Hyde you're here,' he said turning towards a back office. ‘The Scotland Yard men are with him now—' He came to a sudden halt as my words sank in. He turned back towards me, trembling like a jelly in a high wind. His eyes were staring, like windows with the shutters suddenly thrown open. ‘Still with the what?' he asked.

‘The body.'

‘Which body? Whose body?'

‘Nicholas Proudfoot. We found him dead in that stream to the north of the town—if you know the one I mean.'

‘Yes, yes, it's a tributary of the Plum River. He has to cross it when he comes into town from his farm. You found him in the water, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Just wait there. Stand there. Don't move.' And he rushed off in an urgent wobble into the back office. Less than a minute later he was back, followed by three men. One of them was Inspector Hyde who had questioned us the day before; the other two I didn't recognise.

‘You're Morris, aren't you?' said Hyde, striding up to the counter in his busy, bustling manner, looking every inch (and he didn't have many inches) the small man with the Napoleon complex.

‘Tom Morris, yes.'

‘And you say you've found Nicholas Proudfoot's body?'

‘Well,
we
have—myself, my friends, Jack and Warren Lewis, and Constable Dixon.'

‘Dixon was with you?

I nodded and said, ‘He's still there—keeping an eye on the body, along with my friends.'

Hyde turned to talk to the other two, then he decided he first should introduce them to me—or, more likely, me to them. The taller of the two was identified as Inspector Crispin and the shorter, stockier individual as Sergeant Merrivale.

‘Is the police car in the yard?' Hyde asked Sergeant Donaldson.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘We'll take that. It'll only seat four, so you can follow on your bicycle, Donaldson. In fact, if you take the towpath and we take the road you should get there almost as quickly as we do. But before you do, telephone Dr Haydock. I want him to come out and inspect the body before we move it.'

The police car did seat four—but only just. It was a small, black Ford Popular. Hyde and Crispin sat in the front seat while I squeezed into the back alongside the somewhat bulky form of Sergeant Merrivale. It was like sitting beside a bag of large, lumpy potatoes—potatoes that remained entirely silent throughout the journey, and seemed to concentrate entirely on spreading out and occupying as much of the back seat as possible.

For the last part of the journey we needed to hang on to whatever we could as the small car bumped and bounced over the unsealed cart track that led from the road to the river.

After ten minutes of this we arrived at the old stone bridge that crossed the stream. Seeing the car appear out of a cloud of dust, Constable Dixon rushed towards us with the look of a man delighted to hand over his responsibility to somebody more senior. Dixon led the others to where the body lay on the embankment and stood back.

The tall man, Inspector Crispin, was immaculately dressed and quietly observant. He spoke little, but when he did it was with authority. He looked and sounded more like a school master than my idea of a Scotland Yard detective. At any moment I half expected him to turn to one of the uniformed men and say, ‘You there, the boy at the back of the room—are you paying attention?'

The other policeman from London, Sergeant Merrivale, was very respectful to the taller man, like an army sergeant in the presence of his colonel.

These two, Crispin and Merrivale, crouched over the body, emptying the pockets and examining the wounds. Then Sergeant Merrivale went back to the police car and returned with photographic equipment. He took pictures of the corpse and the surrounding area from every angle, then returned the equipment to the boot of the car.

While this was going on, a breathless and red-faced Sergeant Donaldson arrived, cycling up the towpath and oozing exhaustion from every pore. In a puffed voice, gasping for air, he reported to Inspector Hyde, who turned to Crispin and said, ‘Anything my men can do, sir?'

‘Search the area,' said the Scotland Yard man. ‘Both banks and in the water as well. You men should look for anything that strikes you as being out of place. And for bloodstains or signs of violence anywhere in this general vicinity.'

Donaldson and Dixon set off to carry out this assignment. Jack, Warnie and I had been standing well back, watching proceedings, but now Jack stepped forward and said, ‘You might like to take a look at the top of the stonework in the middle of that bridge.'

Inspector Crispin said nothing but asked a question by raising his eyebrows.

‘There are fresh scratch marks—could be the scene of a fight, a struggle or some act of violence.'

‘Show me,' said Crispin. With Jack in the lead we all trooped back to the old stone bridge. In the centre of the arch we stopped where Jack indicated a number of broad scratch marks across one of the large stones. They appeared to be newly made. The dark green moss that covered the stones had been scraped off, revealing the honey-coloured sandstone underneath.

‘Fresh all right,' Crispin agreed, and set Merrivale the task of retrieving his equipment and photographing these marks.

Jack, I noticed, had lost interest in the scratch marks and was staring intently at the thick branches of the willow tree that hung over the bridge. I was about to ask what was so interesting about the tree when I was stopped by a shout that came almost from our feet. We all hurried to the side of the bridge and looked down.

Constable Dixon had waded into the water almost up to his waist and was struggling to stay upright in the fast-flowing current.

‘There's something here, sir,' he was shouting, ‘but it's hard to reach.'

‘Help him, Donaldson,' shouted Inspector Hyde impatiently. ‘He's wet—you might as well get wet too. Wade in and help him.'

Sergeant Donaldson took off his jacket, dropped it on the bank and waded into the cold rushing stream. It took them the next ten minutes, with the aid of a broken tree branch, to fetch out the object Constable Dixon had found. When they finally struggled with it up the bank, it turned out to be an old brown leather suitcase.

Inspector Crispin joined the dripping wet local policemen and said, ‘Open it. Show me what's inside.'

I felt sorry for our old friend Constable Dixon, whose cold fingers had to fumble with the catches for some time before he got them open. When he did so he flung back the lid to reveal—a suitcase full of large stones.

Dixon straightened up and shook himself like a wet dog—a very disappointed wet dog that had just returned to its favourite hiding place in the garden to discover all its buried bones were missing.

We all stepped back from the fine spray of water coming off the shaking policeman as Inspector Hyde exclaimed, ‘Rocks! Who in his right mind would throw a good leather suitcase full of rocks into the water? It makes no sense. And Dixon—stop that at once! You're making the rest of us as wet as you are!'

‘Sorry, sir,' mumbled Dixon, suddenly feeling as unloved as the same wet dog at a family picnic.

Crispin smiled slowly as he said, ‘Rocks—nothing but rocks. And that makes it interesting, doesn't it?' Then he leaned forward to examine a small piece of frayed rope attached to the handle of the suitcase.

Clearly Inspector Hyde could find nothing even remotely interesting in a soaking wet suitcase full of rocks, but he made no objection when Crispin ordered the find to be put in the boot of the police car. The two sergeants, Donaldson and Merrivale, between them carried the heavy bag to the car and put it in the boot beside the photographic equipment case.

At this point a loud, rattling petrol engine announced the arrival of the police surgeon, Dr Haydock, in an Austin Seven. He was a cheerful, hearty man who kept addressing the corpse as if it were still alive.

‘Let's see where you've been hurt, shall we?' he said to the dead man as he rolled the body over. ‘Dear me, you're not in good shape, are you? What have you been up to, Nick Proudfoot? How did you manage to do this?'

He fingered the wounds on the front and back of Nicholas Proudfoot's head just as gently as he would have done with a patient in his surgery.

‘Those blows,' said Inspector Crispin, crouching down beside the doctor, ‘are they pre-mortem or post-mortem?'

‘Hard to tell until I get him on the slab and do a proper examination. The water has washed away most of the blood that would otherwise have indicated which wounds bled freely and which didn't.'

‘Could
any
of them have been delivered before death?'

‘The one on the back of the head, possibly. But don't hold me to that. I'll do the post-mortem as soon as possible.'

‘Any idea whether he died from the blows or from drowning?' asked the Scotland Yard man.

Dr Haydock shook his head sadly, as if dealing with a recalcitrant patient who was not listening to his instructions.

‘After the post-mortem, inspector,' he said, ‘and not before. I need to open him up to see if there's water in the lungs or not. But I can tell you one thing immediately: Nicholas Proudfoot was my patient and I happen to know that he couldn't swim. So as soon as he went into this cold, fast-flowing water, with no one here to rescue him, he was a dead man.'

This drew a grunt from Crispin, who rose to his feet scratching his chin thoughtfully.

‘Now inspector, my dear chap,' said Warnie, bustling forward, ‘surely you don't need us around any longer? Morris and my brother and I are supposed to be on a walking holiday. Inspector Hyde took our statements: surely we can be on our way? What do you say, eh?'

‘I'm sorry, Major Lewis,' replied Crispin, ‘but not just yet. In fact, I'm calling a meeting at the bank this afternoon to ask all of the principal witnesses to go over their evidence with me at the scene of the crime. Let's say two o'clock, shall we?'

Warnie's round expressionless face hid his disappointment as he muttered, ‘Ah well, if you say so . . . two o'clock then.'

Then there arose the question of how we were all to get back to town. Inspector Hyde banned Dixon and Donaldson, both still soaking wet, from riding in the police car and told them they had to walk—or, in Donaldson's case, ride his bicycle—back into Market Plumpton. Jack, Warnie and I clearly wouldn't fit in the car with the three policemen so we announced that we too would walk back to town.

We set off down the towpath beside the stream, leaving Dixon and Donaldson waiting for a vehicle to come to pick up the body, and Inspector Hyde making plans to go and break the news to young Mrs Proudfoot at the farm on the drive back to town.

The late morning sunshine was warm and the breeze gentle. The weather seemed to be saying, ‘You've had enough grim news for one day, I'll try to cheer you up.'

But the weather was failing to work its magic on Warnie. ‘Nice day for walking,' he grumbled. ‘Should be walking. Should be off on our holiday. Shouldn't be stuck here to answer the same fool questions over and over again.'

‘Think of it as an adventure,' said Jack, slapping his brother on his back. ‘You must admit the murder of young Mr Grimm is most mysterious and intriguing, and I would have thought, for a passionate reader of detective novels such as yourself, dashed interesting.'

‘Well, yes, I suppose so,' grunted Warnie, a slightly surprised expression on his face. ‘Hadn't thought of it quite like that. I do love a good mystery.'

We were walking in single file, as we had to do down that narrow towpath, with Warnie in the lead, followed by Jack with me bringing up the rear.

I had had quite enough of violent death in the last two days, and I wanted to throw the switch to some other topic entirely. So I picked up on Warnie's words and said, ‘I also love a good mystery, Jack—and I find it quite mysterious that an intelligent man such as yourself keeps insisting that only Christianity can see the truth about life in this world.'