C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (20 page)

Then faintly, beneath the rail noises and the wind, I could also hear crashing waves.

The window beside me had become misted by my breath. I wiped it clear with a gloved hand and pressed my face to the glass. As I watched there was another brief appearance of the crescent moon. This time it was reflected by an inky black sea, and it was clear that we were running down the coast with farmland on one side and waves and rocks on the other.

It was half past three in the morning when the train pulled into the platform at Plumpton-on-Sea. Once it had jolted and clanked to a complete halt, I left the comfort of the carriage for the damp, windy dimness of the platform. Light misty rain was still falling so I turned up the collar of my coat and pulled down the brim of my hat. There was only one railwayman on the platform. He was picking up bundles of newspapers and loading them onto a trolley. He stopped as I approached and collected my ticket.

I asked for directions and was told there was only one road leading from here into the town. I stepped out of the oasis of dim light that was the railway station and there it was—a steep road leading down the hillside to the harbour and the town. I wrapped my scarf more snugly around my neck, pushed my hands into my coat pockets, and, with my head lowered into the oncoming breeze, set off for the town of Plumpton-on-Sea.

On a hot summer’s day it was probably a delightful spot. But none of its attractions were obvious in the dark and damp of that night. The brisk walk, however, kept me warm. The only illumination came from the pinpricks of street lights at wide intervals.

The road leading down from the railway station became the high street of the town and led me to the seafront. It was four in the morning by the time I found myself staring at the sleeping faces of a row of buildings that looked across the high street to a stretch of grass and a pebble beach beyond. Dark, lethargic waves were rolling up the beach and breaking in limp, frothy surges on the pebbles, as if they found the effort exhausting.

It was at least an hour to sunrise, and I needed to find somewhere to wait for the town to wake up. I tried a bus shelter on the high street, but it was exposed to the wind. So I walked onto the pier that jutted out above the beach. Here I found another shelter, and a bench—presumably for sightseers who wanted to rest while enjoying the view. This was much better, for the back of this little refuge was to the driving wind and I could sit out of the misty rain. I slid to one end of the bench, rested my head against the side of the shelter and closed my eyes.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened them again it was broad daylight and I could hear the cry of the gulls circling above the beach. I woke up feeling stiff in the joints and uncomfortable—perhaps a little like the poet Shelley after a night on the tiles with Lord Byron.

I looked at my watch: it was almost half past six. There must, I thought, be somewhere open at that hour that would serve me breakfast. In my imagination I could already hear the sizzling bacon—and smell it. Half the pleasure of bacon is the wonderful, inviting aroma it gives off when it’s frying. Yes, breakfast, I told myself, must be my first priority.

I stood up and stretched my arms and legs. I pulled off my scarf and stuffed it into a coat pocket. Sleeping in my clothes, I decided, had left me feeling as ragged as a badly tied up brown paper parcel.

The wind had dropped and the clouds were breaking up, promising a warm and sunny day. Here in England, I thought to myself, we don’t have climate, only weather—ever changeable, never-quite-what-you-expect weather.

Most of the shops and guesthouses on the seafront still had their shutters up, but several were starting to open. The newsagent’s was open and its lights were on. The teashop next door was also taking its shutters down, even as I looked.

I walked across the deserted road and pushed open the front door of the teashop. This caused a small bell on the top of the door to tinkle.

‘Good morning,’ I said. The young girl behind the counter looked at me blankly. She was, clearly, not quite awake: the shutters were still closed behind her eyes.

‘Too early for breakfast?’ I asked. She looked at me blankly, as I if had spoken in Lithuanian and she was struggling to translate.

‘How about a cup of tea, love? You can manage that, can’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she murmured, recovering from the shock of having a customer so early in the morning. ‘Take a seat and I’ll bring it to your table.’

I took a window seat and stared across the road at the almost dead flat sea that was washing against the pebbles. A few minutes later the girl turned up with a cup and saucer, a small teapot and a small jug of milk.

‘Sugar’s on the table,’ she said, waving vaguely in the direction of a bowl of sugar cubes.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now, would a hot breakfast be possible, do you think?’

She nodded and pulled a tiny notebook out of the pocket of her apron.

‘Would bacon and eggs be on the menu?’

She said nothing, but scribbled in her notebook and walked away.

Ten minutes later the bacon and eggs arrived. Twenty minutes later, having wrapped myself around hot food and two cups of tea, I was feeling human again.

I walked up to the counter to pay, but held my money tightly in my right hand while I asked a question: ‘I’m looking for a Mrs Proudfoot—Mrs Amelia Proudfoot. She would have arrived in the last day or two. Probably staying at one the guesthouses or boarding houses. Young woman—in her twenties I would guess. Quite good looking. Dark hair. Have you seen her around?’

The girl’s face went as blank as a whitewashed wall. This appeared to be the expression she adopted when she was thinking intensely.

Finally she replied, ‘No, I don’t think so. Not in the last day or two.’

‘Is there anyone else here who might have seen her, or might know if she’s in town?’

The girl yelled over her shoulder to the open doorway leading to the kitchen, ‘Mrs Henson! Man here’s got a question for you.’

Mrs Henson waddled out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a tea cloth. ‘How can I help you, sir?’

I repeated what I’d said to the girl. Then Mrs Henson and the girl went into conference. ‘I don’t think there’s been anyone like that, do you, Rosie? Can’t say I’ve seen anyone like that around the place. And the name doesn’t ring a bell at all. I’ve never heard of this Amelia Proudfoot. Have you, Rosie? So there you are, sir—Rosie hasn’t heard of her neither. I suppose she might be around somewhere, but keeping herself to herself, so to speak.’

And this turned out to be the pattern for all the replies I received at every possible place in Plumpton-on-Sea. At boarding houses, guesthouses, shops, pubs, homes that took in lodgers—everywhere except the bus depot and the post office—I asked my set questions. Over the course of the morning I worked my way along the length of the seafront stopping at every building that had a sign up saying ‘room available’ or that might do business with a visitor. They all gave the same answer: the name Amelia Proudfoot meant nothing to them. As I described her to them I realised that my description was rather vague and it would have helped if I’d had a photograph. But I didn’t. And my description awoke no sign of recognition for anyone.

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.