The Corpse in the Cellar (24 page)

Dinner that night was roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. After the table had been cleared we three sat around the fire in the snug, each nursing a glass of port and each puzzling over a solution to what Warnie was now calling ‘the mystery of the corpse in the cellar'. Clearly he has read too many of those yellow-jacketed detective novels.

‘The only question that matters in the end,' Warnie was saying as his conclusion to a long summary of the case, ‘is how the blighter got in.'

‘What blighter? Got in where?' I asked, not having paid very close attention to his monologue.

‘The murderer, you chump,' replied Warnie with a grunt. Jack passed me a bowl of nuts, and as I chose a few Warnie rose and wandered over to the window of the pub. He was clearly restless tonight. He flicked open the curtains and looked out into the street.

‘Is there a uniformed watchman on duty, keeping an eye on us?' asked Jack.

Warnie looked up and down the street. ‘Not yet. Perhaps he's on a late shift.'

He came back to the fire, took a fistful of nuts and finished his port. ‘We shouldn't be sitting here,' he complained. ‘We should be up and doing. We should be conducting our own investigation the way we'd planned. In those books I read, it's never the Scotland Yard man who solves the case, it's always the amateur.'

‘Unless it's Inspector French,' chuckled Jack.

‘Ah, yes, of course,' said Warnie. ‘I'd forgotten that you read one of my Freeman Wills Crofts novels a few months ago. Yes, of course, French always solves the most baffling mysteries and gets his man. Usually involves breaking alibis: looking at train timetables and how long it takes to bicycle from point A to point B—that sort of thing. But in most of these detective novels it's the amateurs, Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion, who solve the thing while the police are still scratching their heads.'

‘Who do you want us to be, Wimsey or Campion?' Jack asked with a smile.

‘I want you to be Jack Lewis, the man with a brain the size of Scotland, who solves the case and gets us back to our walking holiday.'

‘Very well,' said Jack as he cracked an almond shell, ‘what do you have in mind?'

‘It's a fine night out there. The clouds have broken up, the moonlight is flooding the streets, let's get out and snoop around that bank building. There must be some other way into that cellar—there's no other possible explanation.'

‘Why not?' said Jack with a cheerful grin on his ruddy face.

‘Why not indeed!' I added. Now that I'd recovered from my bootless investigations in Plumpton-on-Sea, I was ready to play the bloodhound once more.

Warnie grinned widely at our enthusiastic response to his plan and led the way to the front door of the pub. The locals in the front bar parlour paid us little attention. By now they were used to us and we'd become part of the scenery. Out in the street I found the wind a little chilly. Fortunately I still had my scarf in my coat pocket, so I pulled it out and wound it warmly around my throat. Jack buttoned up his tweed jacket. Warnie never seemed to feel the cold.

With hands thrust into pockets we walked briskly down the street. The pale moonlight made the black shadows and the edges of the buildings stand out sharply and clearly. The town square was a pool of moonlight, dotted at sparse intervals with street lamps that gave out only a pale yellow glow, creating dim splashes of buttery light in the moon-blue landscape.

Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. Looking up I saw a black shape flit across the night stars—a shape that I was certain was a bat.

On the edge of the town square we stood in the shadow of a shopfront and surveyed the scene. It was silent and deserted. A few dead leaves were picked up by the night breeze and pushed over the cobblestones in limp, lazy swirls. A black cat leaped silently from the top of a brick wall and then walked across the centre of the square, tail held high, the lordly owner of all it surveyed. A moment later it vanished silently into the inky blackness of a moon shadow.

The ground floor of the bank building was plunged in darkness. On the floor above only a single light showed through drawn curtains.

‘That'll be the bedroom,' muttered Warnie, ‘where poor Mrs Ravenswood is trapped with that brute of a husband of hers.'

‘Presumably that means,' added Jack, ‘that they are too preoccupied to notice visitors snooping around their building.'

We didn't go directly across the square but walked around the edges, keeping mostly to the shadows of the buildings and avoiding the pools of dim light surrounding the street lamps. Soon we were standing in front of the bank in a shadow blacker than ink.

‘This is where we start,' said Jack in a whisper. ‘What do we look for, Warnie old chap? You're the expert on amateur detectives—point us in the right direction.'

‘We need to look for some way into the basement,' he replied in a murmur so low it was little more than a soft growl. ‘There just has to be a way in that we don't know about, or that the police haven't found.'

That seemed highly unlikely to me, but this was Warnie's expedition and I was happy to follow his lead.

‘The bank's basement used to be a coal cellar,' said Warnie, ‘years ago, when it was a residence. At least, I'm sure someone told us that—when we were told the story of that old murder from years ago. Well, if it was a coal cellar there must have been some sort of opening onto the street for the coal man to make his delivery.' With these words Warnie dug into one of the inside pockets of his coat and, after fishing around for a long time, produced a small electric torch. I never ceased to be amazed at the cornucopia of rubbish that Warnie kept in his bulging coat pockets.

When Warnie turned on the torch it gave a feeble light. Clearly the batteries were on the verge of giving up the ghost.

‘At least,' I whispered, ‘that light won't give away our presence. Now, where do you suggest we start looking?'

‘The footpath,' Warnie hissed back. ‘And in the walls. Low down, where the walls meet the ground.'

We searched in silence for the next ten minutes. Jack gently tapped at each paving stone with his walking stick, listening for one that might ring hollow. I crouched down and ran my fingers over the lower bricks of the bank wall and the adjoining paving stones, feeling for some sort of join. Warnie bent close to the ground and ran the pale beam of his torch over every surface. If Constable Dixon or one of his colleagues had come upon us at that moment, they would most probably have found our behaviour highly suspicious.

‘Hang on,' I said. ‘Didn't one of the police officers tell us that they'd investigated the old coal chute?'

‘Just keep looking,' growled Warnie like a bear whose cave was being disturbed. ‘I keep telling you—in all those detective novels the police always miss the obvious. It's up to us to find the way into the bank cellar the killer used.' So the search continued.

We eventually decided that the front of the bank was entirely innocent of surreptitious entry points. On one side the bank was attached to the building next to it, but on the other there was a narrow alleyway. We made our way slowly down this passage, continuing our stone-by-stone, surface-by-surface search. Again to no avail.

And that brought us to the back of the bank, which was on a narrow lane. Here, after only a few minutes, our search turned up some results.

Jack's tapping with his walking stick produced a metallic ring rather than the usual concrete thud. Warnie and I hurried to his side.

‘It's a metal plate or trap door,' I whispered, ‘set into the footpath hard against the back wall of the bank.'

‘That's the old coal chute for sure,' hissed Warnie. ‘Let me have a closer look.'

But his closer look proved to be deeply disappointing. The door to the old coal chute was bolted closed. Furthermore, the bolts all had layers of rust on them. There was no movement in them at all, and it was clear they had not been unfastened for many years.

‘But there must be another way into the bank cellar,' Warnie insisted in a whisper, ‘there must be.'

‘You may be right,' said Jack quietly, ‘but this is not it.'

I stood up to get the cramps out of my thigh muscles and decided I was just about ready to return to the light and the warmth of our pub. In straightening up I bumped against some kind of large metal can, which rocked and rattled and sent a clattering noise echoing down the street and back again. In the hushed night it sounded like a chimneypot crashing through the roof of a glass house.

We all froze where we were, waiting for a light to go on or a window or shutter to open. There was a long silence during which absolutely nothing happened. Eventually we began to breathe a little easier.

‘Perhaps they think it's a cat jumping around the rubbish bins,' I whispered hopefully.

‘What is it you bumped into?' asked Warnie.

‘Actually, it
is
a rubbish bin,' I replied, ‘and keep your voice down. They won't think it's a cat if they can hear a conversation.'

‘Sorry,' said Warnie, dropping his voice back to a whisper. ‘Is it the bank's bin?'

‘I think it must be,' I hissed. ‘There are two bins here, both next to the back door of the bank, so they must both belong to the bank.'

‘That's gives me an idea,' said Warnie, a gleeful note in his hushed voice. My heart sank as he continued, ‘In an American detective story I read recently, by that Erle Stanley Gardner chappie, he was saying that good detectives always search through rubbish bins. There can be important clues in rubbish bins. Or trash cans as they call them in America.'

‘All right then, Warnie,' said Jack good-naturedly, ‘ease the lids off quietly and shine your torch inside.'

I did the easing and Warnie did the shining. The first bin was full of kitchen scraps, and the second was filled with paper—the contents, it seemed to me, of the bank's waste paper baskets.

‘Anything of interest?' I asked.

Warnie ignored the kitchen scraps and rummaged around in the bin full of paper.

‘Can't see anything,' he grumbled. ‘Mind you, banks never throw out important papers. They either burn them or store them for years and years. Hello—what's this then?'

From under several layers of paper Warnie fished out an oily rag. It didn't look very exciting to me. He unwrapped the rag to reveal an oil-covered screwdriver. He studied it closely by the dim light of his torch.

‘Perfectly good screwdriver,' he said. ‘Nothing wrong with it. Just needs cleaning up a bit, that's all. Hate seeing things wasted like that.' He wrapped the screwdriver back into its oily rag and thrust it deep into one of his capacious coat pockets.

‘Now,' I insisted, ‘let's get back to a nice warm room at the pub.'

Later that night we were gathered again around the blazing fire in the snug at
The Boar's Head
.

As Warnie walked in from the bar carrying a tray containing a brandy and soda for each of us, he said, ‘Bit of a blow that, eh? I was just wasting your time. Sorry about that—I thought we might find something that had been overlooked.'

‘My dear chap,' Jack exclaimed, ‘that was well worthwhile. Viewing the scene and exploring the possibilities is always worthwhile.'

‘Oh, really?' grunted Warnie, looking quite chuffed. ‘Well, that's all right then.' He sipped his brandy and soda and then said, ‘And I know what you two are about to do: start that argument of yours all over again. So if you don't mind I think I'll join those jolly chaps in the front bar parlour. Might have a game of darts while I'm at it. I'll leave you two to argue about the meaning of life in peace.'

‘It's a discussion, not an argument,' I started to say, but by then Warnie's back was disappearing through the doorway.

‘Well now, young Morris—where were we up to?' asked Jack with relish, clearly savouring the prospect of another battle of wits.

‘Actually, since our last discussion I've come to the conclusion that this debate can't possibly ever get us anywhere.'

Disappointment showed on the face of the happy warrior as he asked me why.

‘What I've realised, more clearly and firmly than ever before,' I replied, ‘is that I'm just not religious. I don't have a religious bone in my body.'

At these words he brightened up again and with a broad smile said, ‘Is that all? Because I'd have to say that on the whole that's a good thing.'

‘Now you've got me confused. I thought you were trying to persuade me to be religious.'

‘Well, of course, that all depends on what you mean by the word “religion”,' said Jack with a sly grin, and I knew I was in for one of his famous word games.

‘Go on,' I said like a chess player tentatively moving his knight into a possibly exposed position.

‘In one sense of the word everyone is religious—even the most chest-beating atheist.'