C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (19 page)

Shortly after eleven o’clock that night I crept out of my room, carrying my boots in my hand, and began my slow and silent departure. As I tiptoed down the darkened corridor, a narrow finger of light appeared beside me as the door to Warnie’s room was opened an inch. An eye appeared in the gap. Seeing me, Warnie pushed the door wider and put his finger to his lips to signal silence. Did he really think I was about to slap him on the back and shout, ‘Warnie, what are you doing up at this time of night?’

But Warnie was clearly enjoying his plunge into this cloak and dagger stuff, and, fuelled by his endless reading of thrillers, he was playing his role with all the relish of an old ham actor in a juicy melodrama.

Warnie stepped out into the corridor, taking the lead and beckoning me to follow. He had also removed his boots and was treading carefully down the stairs in his woollen socks. About six steps from the bottom he put his weight on one step that creaked loudly. In that silent pub it sounded like the explosion of Krakatoa. We both froze, waiting to hear if anyone had been roused. After a lengthy silence Warnie resumed his cat-like tread to the foot of the stairs. I followed, being careful to step over, and not on, the sixth step from the bottom.

Warnie then led the way behind the bar and through the door into the kitchen. Here he struck a match, and it’s a good thing he did: around us were kitchen benches stacked high with pots and pans. If we had bumped those over we would have had a crash to wake the dead, the entire pub, most of the town and all the closer farms. Then, of course, we would have had a lot of inventive explaining to do, and my overnight adventure would have been cancelled.

As it was, we negotiated our way between the benches and the piles of cookware, then down a shorter hallway. This was clearly used as storage space by the publican, with boxes piled upon boxes. We had to turn sideways and inch past these. Then we were at the solid wooden door at the back of the pub.

Warnie slowly eased back the latch and bolt and slid the door open. I squatted down on the floor to pull on my boots and lace them up. As I was doing this the flickering match burned down to Warnie’s fingers. He blew it out and lit another.

I stepped outside. Warnie shook my hand, wished me luck in a whisper, and gave me the thumbs up sign as a gesture of encouragement. Then he gently closed the door behind me. I heard him slowly ease the latch and then the lock securely into place. A second later I heard the bolt on the door slide home.

Now I had no way back.

A crescent moon came out briefly from behind a cloud and cast a pale blue light over my surroundings. I was standing in a narrow alley that ran behind the back wall of the pub. Treading as lightly as I could on the old cobblestones of Market Plumpton, I made my way to the corner of the building and peered around. I was looking down another alleyway that ran between the pub and the building next door, past the side windows of the pub. The moonlight clearly revealed the rubbish bins that lined this passage. I carefully squeezed past these potential hazards. My aim was to get to the front of the pub because that was a street I had come to know well, and I thought from there I could easily find my way to the railway station.

At the end of the second alley I cautiously peered around the corner. The street in front of the pub was a river of darkness dotted with small splashes of dim, yellow light beneath the street lamps. I looked up and down the street. It appeared to be completely deserted.

I was about to step out from behind the corner of the pub when I heard a sound from the opposite side of the street. Quickly I stepped back, quietened my breathing and tried to peer into the deep shadows opposite the front door of the pub. The sound came again—the scraping of a boot on the footpath. This was followed by the striking of a match, and a moment later I saw a young uniformed policeman lighting a cigarette. The flame of the match died and all I could see was the dull red glow of the end of the cigarette.

He didn’t move. I waited and waited, and still he didn’t move on. I decided he was not a bobby on his beat but was stationed in front of the pub to make sure we didn’t do a midnight flit. But flitting was what I had in mind. Making a midnight flit was essential to our plans. So I retreated down the alleyway, past the rubbish bins and along the first alley that followed the back wall of the pub.

I passed the now-locked back door and kept going. Once again the clouds broke long enough to give me a few moments of dim, silvery moonlight. By this I found another narrow laneway leading off to my left. On one side were the back walls of terrace houses and shops, each with its back door opening into the lane, and on the other a long, high, unbroken brick wall. I guided myself by running my fingers lightly along this wall, moving forward slowly and cautiously. I didn’t want to kick over a rubbish bin and attract attention.

The lane widened out as it led downhill. Downhill, I knew, was the general direction in which the railway station lay, so I pushed on. Eventually the lane opened into a slightly wider street. This sloped up to my left and down to my right. I turned right.

A few minutes later I stepped into a small square, and from here I could see down to the railway station itself—the platform dimly lit with a warm, buttery-yellow light. I hurried through the darkened town towards my destination. I quickly lost sight of the station behind the buildings, but I was now confident that I was heading in the right direction.

I walked down the middle of this wider street to avoid colliding with rubbish bins or stray cats. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. A congregation of dogs in nearby backyards yapped their liturgical responses. The street reminded me of some lines by Alfred Noyes I had learned as a child: ‘The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight . . . ’ And so it was, as the clouds broke into feathery traces and a crescent moon appeared, painting the street in pale light alternating with solid, black shadows—looking rather like an old woodblock print.

The street I was hurrying down ended in a yard behind the railway station. At this time of night the area was empty, except for a single truck parked next to the back wall of the station. Two men were struggling to slide large, heavy milk cans off the back of the truck onto the ground.

I skirted around the edge of this goods yard, keeping away from the lights and sticking to the pools of inky black shadow, until I reached the back wall of the station building. At this point I had no choice but to step out into the light. A steady nerve was what was needed here, I decided, so I squared my shoulders and with a confident swagger walked the length of the building to the ticket office.

I looked in through the small window to see a young man putting a kettle on a gas ring. I took some coins out of my pocket and tapped them on the counter to attract his attention.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘didn’t see you there.’

As he walked across to the counter I said, ‘A return ticket to Plumpton-on-Sea please.’

He turned to a rack of tickets beside him, selected the right one and said, ‘One and sixpence please, sir.’

I counted out the money and exchanged it for the ticket. The young man explained that the train was departing from platform one in ten minutes. I breathed a heavy sigh—I had only just got there in time.

‘Looks like rain,’ said the ticket seller in a bored voice.

‘I hope not,’ I replied, pocketing the ticket and hurrying through an archway towards the platform. At the corner of the building I paused and glanced up and down. At the far end of the platform, facing away from me, with his hands clasped behind his back, was a uniformed policeman. Clearly, Inspector Crispin was determined that none of his suspects would slip away and none of his witnesses would go wandering.

I drew back into the shadows of the archway. The next time I cautiously glanced out, the policeman was slowly turning around, and I quickly withdrew my head behind the edge of the brickwork.

‘So what do I do now?’ I asked myself. I walked slowly back through the archway to the yard behind the station. The two men had finished unloading their milk cans from the back of the truck. One of them climbed into the driver’s seat and drove off with a roaring rattle that seemed to echo around the silent town. The noise slowly died away in the distance. The other man looked gloomily at the milk cans, then began dragging them, one at a time, around the end of the station building onto platform one.

Boldness, I thought—this calls for boldness. I strolled up to the chap struggling with the heavy cans and said, ‘Like a hand?’

At first he was surprised. Then he looked at my clothes. I was wearing my old hiking gear, not a suit, and I think that convinced him I was making a genuine offer.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he said. ‘Just grab that handle on the other side.’

I’d won a blue for rugby at Oxford so I could match this labourer muscle for muscle. Between the two of us we soon had the dozen or so large milk cans half-dragged, half-slid around the corner of the building, across platform one, and in through the open door of the goods van at the back of the train.

The police constable glanced up once then turned away, taking no interest in what two labourers were doing.

When the last of the milk cans was on board the workman I’d assisted touched his cap and said, ‘Thanks, guv.’

I just nodded, and seeing the policeman was at the far end of the platform and looking in the opposite direction, I hurried down the length of the train and clambered aboard a second-class carriage.

This turned out to be empty except for one other passenger: a middle-aged man dressed as a farmer with a cage balanced on his knees. Inside the cage was a fat white hen. The man himself had his head tilted backwards and was sound asleep, snoring loudly. The hen, whose eyes had also been closed, was the only one of the two to take any interest in my arrival. She half opened one eye, gave me a cold stare for disturbing her sleep, then closed her eyelid again. The farmer didn’t stir.

I took a seat in the farthest corner, away from the platform, and turned to look out of the window into the darkness beyond so that I wasn’t showing my face to the carriage or the platform. A few minutes later there was a loud hiss of steam followed by the clanking of carriage couplings taking strain. Then came the slow, powerful chugging sound of large locomotive cylinders starting to work. With a jerk the train started moving, accompanied by that glorious locomotive smell of steam, coal smoke and hot oil.

Soon there was a rhythmic rattle of rails underneath us, a steady chuffing from the locomotive ahead, and we were on our way to Plumpton-on-Sea.

We rattled noisily over the iron bridge across the Plum River and chugged steadily over the dark countryside. In the early hours of the morning we stopped in the village of Plumwood where the only other passenger in my carriage got off, taking his hen with him. The hen once again opened one eye but took no serious interest in the proceedings (clearly a seasoned traveller to whom one railway station was much the same as any other). Further down the platform I could hear some of the milk cans being unloaded.

Then we were off again. Now I was the only occupant of the carriage, so I stretched out my legs and rested my feet on the seat facing me. Not, I grant you, the behaviour of a gentleman, but perhaps understandable in a gentleman who would much rather have been tucked up in a nice warm bed.

We passed through a tunnel where both the sound of the locomotive and the smell of coal smoke became more noticeable. Back out in the open air, spots of rain began to splash against the windows of the carriage. Steadily the rain got heavier, and within ten minutes it was a torrential downpour that drummed on the roof of the carriage and thundered like a waterfall down the windows.

Half an hour later the rain eased off again to occasional drops, but it was replaced by wind. Mixing with the sound of the clacking rails and the chuffing engine I could hear the wind howling softly, like a distant banshee or a rather gloomy ghost complaining about its lot in the afterlife: ‘My colleagues get to haunt castles and here I am stuck with haunting a railway line. There’s no justice!’ As my eyelids closed and these thoughts drifted through my tired brain, I cursed my overactive imagination—and told myself to think logically, like the detective I was trying to be.