The Corpse in the Cellar (21 page)

Then I left the seafront and checked out the few guesthouses higher up the hill, behind the high street—but with the same result.

I also found two shops with signs indicating that they were ‘Estate Agents and Letting Agents'. I tried both of them in the hope that Mrs Proudfoot might have rented a flat, but once again with entirely negative results.

By mid-morning I was back where I'd started, staring at the pebble beach and the lifeless waves with no more information than when I'd begun. Disappointed, I decided it was time to take the train back to Market Plumpton and report my failure.

I walked into the newsagent's to buy a copy of the
Times
to read on the return journey. I paid for the newspaper and then, on a whim, said to the man behind the counter, ‘There's a young woman I'm trying to find. She may have arrived here in the last day or two.'

His face lit up at the possibility that there was a colourful story behind my words. I went through the routine of name and description with exactly the same result as before. But then he said, ‘Of course, you're asking the wrong person. It's my wife who knows everything that's going on in this town.'

He turned towards the back room and shouted, ‘Hey, Dolly—come out here a minute, love.'

A moment later his wife appeared, running her fingers through her tousled hair. He repeated my question. His wife shook her head slowly from side to side, but even as she did so she was thinking. After a moment's more thought she said, ‘I ran into old Mrs Dawson yesterday. She said she's got a new paying guest.'

‘Could it be the woman I'm looking for?' I asked eagerly.

‘Well, I don't know what her name is,' said the newsagent's wife. ‘And I don't know what she looks like. All I know is that Mrs Dawson said she was a painted tart. Some rich man's kept woman.'

I felt deflated. That didn't sound like Amelia Proudfoot at all. We'd met her. We knew that she was a heart-broken young woman whose husband had only just died. There was no way she could be a ‘kept woman' or a ‘painted tart'. But then I thought that my investigation should be thorough, so I asked for Mrs Dawson's address, thanked the couple at the newsagent's, and set out to make what I told myself would be the last investigation on my trip to Plumpton-on-Sea.

Mrs Dawson lived in an isolated house on Cliff Road, at the edge of town. At the end of the high street I climbed the hill until I came to the address the newsagent had given me. It was a two-storey terrace of grey stone.

In response to my knock, the front door was opened by a plump middle-aged woman.

At that moment I realised that I hadn't worked out what I was going to say. If my quarry was, by any chance, staying here, she was keeping out of sight, in which case a clever piece of deception might be needed to discover the truth. But I could think of none. Being entirely unprepared with an appropriate and convincing story, out of sheer desperation I stuck to the truth.

‘Mrs Dawson?' I asked.

She nodded.

‘I'm looking for a woman named Mrs Amelia Proudfoot.'

‘No one of that name here,' she replied, and began to close the door.

‘She might be using another name,' I said hastily.

‘And why would she be doing that?'

‘She's just been through a rather unhappy time. She might be trying to put it behind her.'

‘What sort of unhappy time?'

‘Her husband has just died, and the farm they lived on has been repossessed by the bank.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that. But my paying guest, and I only have the one, is not a married woman. So she can't be the person you're looking for.'

‘The lady I'm looking for would be in her twenties, dark haired, quite good looking.'

Mrs Dawson's brow clouded with suspicion. ‘And who might you be anyway? Are you a debt collector?'

‘Nothing of that sort. I just wanted to ask her a few questions.'

‘Well, my paying guest has given me strict instructions that she's not to be disturbed. She keeps to her room, she does—and she sees no one except her gentleman friend.'

‘Her gentleman friend?'

Mrs Dawson looked uncomfortable and shuffled her feet. ‘A widow woman in my position can't afford to be too choosy. I need the rent so I take whoever comes.'

With those words she began to shut the door.

‘But does she match the description?' I asked hurried.

‘That she does—but then so do hundreds of others. Now if you don't mind, I have a kitchen floor to mop.' And with that the door was closed firmly in my face.

My train journey back to Market Plumpton was uneventful. I read my newspaper and tried not to feel too depressed by my total failure to uncover the missing woman in Plumpton-on-Sea. She might be Mrs Dawson's paying guest—in which case, who was her ‘gentleman caller'? Or she might be staying with a friend and that's why I was unable to discover her whereabouts. Or Mr Ravenswood might have been right when he suggested she had returned to her ‘relatives up north'.

In the end I threw my newspaper to one side and stared glumly at the sunny landscape sliding past the windows of the railway carriage. It does a chap no good at all to be staring at bright sunshine and cheerful fields filled with contented cows when his mind is full of fog—and damp, dark fog at that.

Back in Market Plumpton I walked back to our pub with my hands in my pockets and my head down, like a student who's just got a bad exam result. As I reached the front door of
The Boar's Head
, a large figure came charging out and almost knocked me over.

I grabbed the doorpost to steady myself while Edmund Ravenswood swayed unsteadily and complained, ‘Watch where you're going!' His voice was a full volume bellow, as if he was calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee.

Then he recognised me and seemed to pull himself together. ‘Oh, it's you. Young Morris. Sorry about that—in rather a hurry.' With those words he charged up the street continuing his bull-in-a-china-shop impersonation.

I stepped inside the dim coolness of the pub and said to Frank Jones behind the bar, ‘Did you see that?'

The publican looked up from the glass he was wiping with a tea towel and replied with a grin, ‘He's not a happy man is our bank manager.'

I asked what the problem was and the publican replied, ‘It seems there's been some sort of falling out between Mr Ravenswood and his wife. He came here asking if we'd seen her—or if she was staying here.'

‘That sounds like more than a falling out,' I commented. ‘It sounds rather more like she's left him.'

Jones grinned salaciously but said nothing. Then I asked him where the Lewis brothers were, and following his directions found them seated in cane chairs in the sunshine on the lawn behind the pub. Both were reading books. Jack had a pocket edition of Spenser while Warnie was turning the pages of
It Walks by Night
.

‘Ah, the traveller returns,' grunted Warnie.

‘Was my absence noticed?' I asked. ‘Was I missed?'

‘I'm afraid so,' said Jack. ‘In fact, the good Inspector Crispin was rather miffed to discover you'd slipped the net. He calmed down a little when I promised that you'd return shortly. He left here only ten minutes ago, muttering darkly about the calamities that might fall upon your head.'

‘Should I go and see him at the police station?' I asked nervously. I didn't fancy the idea of upsetting policemen—especially senior policemen from Scotland Yard.

‘We all have to, old chap,' said Warnie, putting down his book and levering his bulk out of the low-slung cane chair. ‘We three are under instructions to present ourselves at the police station the moment you return.'

‘And we shall,' said Jack, ‘but first I'd like to hear your report, Tom.'

So I narrated my adventures, providing a complete and unabridged edition. I have the ability to recall and report conversations verbatim, and this is what I did. When I finished, I apologised for my total and abject failure.

‘Not at all, old chap,' said Jack heartily, ‘not at all. In fact, I think you did very well—and I believe you discovered enough for me to slide another probable piece into place in the jigsaw puzzle. Now, off to confront our unhappy inspector.'

‘And have you heard the news?' I said as Jack rose from his chair. I told them about Mrs Ravenswood apparently leaving her husband. In response Jack shook his head sadly and Warnie muttered something about Ravenswood being ‘a pompous, unpleasant man'.

Before we left the pub I went upstairs to shed my now unnecessary coat. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and decided that I looked like a corpse that had just been fished out of a river—or, more alarmingly, like someone whose face belonged on a ‘Most Wanted' poster on the walls of a Chicago police station. Not wanting to create a bad impression at my interview with the inspector, I had a quick wash and brushed my hair. Checking the results in the mirror, I decided I still looked like a corpse—but a neater, more cheerful corpse.

As we left the pub I felt like a Christian in ancient Rome about to shake hands with one of the lions.

At the Market Plumpton police station, the sergeant on the desk kept us waiting in the lobby for almost twenty minutes. Then our old friend Constable Dixon emerged from somewhere deep within the bowels of the station and said, ‘Detective Inspector Crispin will see you now—if you'll just follow me, gentlemen.'

He lifted the flap on the front desk and we filed through. Dixon led us to a small room towards the back of the building with the words ‘Interview Room' painted on the door. It was bare and had a single high window. It was furnished with a plain deal table and half a dozen straight-backed chairs. Dixon left us there and closed the door.

‘Now I really feel like a suspect,' grumbled Warnie. ‘No doubt we're about to be interrogated. We'll be given what the American detective novels I read call a “grilling”. They also refer to this process as the “third degree”—which I've never understood. They never seem to give anyone the “first degree” or the “second degree”. Puzzling.'

Jack and I took our seats and waited patiently, but Warnie paced around the small space muttering, ‘This is not an interview room, it's an interrogation chamber!'

Warnie continued grumbling in this gloomy fashion until the door opened to admit Detective Inspector Crispin and his faithful assistant, Sergeant Merrivale.

At the inspector's insistence Warnie took a seat beside Jack and me on one side of the table while Crispin and Merrivale sat on the other.

‘By rights,' said Crispin in a quiet but grim voice, ‘I should interview each of you three separately—but time is pressing and we need to get on, so we'll do it this way. And we'll begin with you, young Morris. What did you mean by fleeing the district when I explicitly told you not to leave without informing us?'

‘I didn't flee,' I protested. ‘I paid a brief visit to Plumpton-on-Sea, that's all. I was only gone one night—less than twenty-four hours in all. And I came back. That hardly qualifies as “fleeing”.'

‘I take it you didn't go to paddle in the waves, so why did you go?'

On our walk to the police station we'd agreed that we'd be completely frank with the inspector, so I told him about my attempts to locate Amelia Proudfoot.

‘Mr Ravenswood,' responded Crispin, ‘who dealt with the foreclosure, told us that she's returned to her relatives up north. I've asked the Yorkshire constabulary to try to locate her.'

‘They won't,' said Jack confidently.

‘Explain,' snapped the Scotland Yard man.

‘She's down on the coast.'

‘But your friend here looked and failed to find her!'

Inspector Crispin leaned back in his chair and stared at Jack for the better part of a minute, trying to make him out. I could almost hear the thoughts running through his head: is this just an Oxford don playing clever games? Or does he really know something? Or does he have a theory of the crime that would make sense of all the puzzles?

In the absence of a question Jack said, ‘Mr Ravenswood seemed most unhappy when he visited
The Boar's Head
this morning.'

‘Mr Ravenswood's marital difficulties have no bearing on this investigation,' Crispin responded.

‘She's left her husband then?' I asked.

Sergeant Merrivale broke his silence to say, ‘We knew before he did.' He said this with a rather smarmy smile on his face, so I asked him how he knew.

‘Well, sir,' he replied, with the smile still firmly in place, ‘we do keep an eye on the key witnesses in a case like this, and our man saw her leave their flat above the bank before dawn this morning. She was carrying a suitcase. He followed her to a boarding house on the other side of town. It seems that now she's in line to inherit the money that was coming to her late brother, so she's decided she no longer needs to put up with that unpleasant man.'