C S Lewis and the Body in the Basement (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 1) (23 page)

The first witness to be called was our old friend Constable William Dixon, who gave an account of the finding of the body. I rather expected one of us to be called to verify his narrative, but it seemed that this time our testimony was not going to be required.

Inspector Gideon Crispin of Scotland Yard was called next to give evidence of the recovery of the body from the river, and the state of the body when found. He also gave evidence concerning the discovery of a suitcase filled with stones in, as he put it, ‘close proximity to the deceased’. This caused a rumble of low murmurs amongst the crowd, although it can hardly have been news to them, given the efficient gossip mechanism of small towns.

Harvey Brewer rapped the table sharply with this pen and the murmurs settled into silence. Inspector Crispin completed his evidence and was excused.

The next witness called was the police surgeon, Dr Stanley Haydock. He gave the cause of death as drowning, explaining the quantity of water found in the lungs, but went on to describe the signs of a blow to the back of the head.

‘Would the blow have been sufficient to render the victim unconscious?’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘So if the victim entered the water in an unconscious state . . . ’

‘ . . . that would certainly be sufficient to explain the drowning.’

The doctor was excused and the coroner called loudly for Mrs Amelia Proudfoot. His voice echoed around the hall and died away in silence. Inspector Crispin rose to his feet to explain that Mrs Proudfoot appeared to no longer be in the district and that police had been unable to find her. I felt like raising my hand to say, ‘We also went looking for her, and we couldn’t find her either.’ But I was not foolish enough to actually do it.

Crispin remained on his feet to ask the coroner to adjourn the inquest while ‘police pursue several lines of inquiry’.

Mr Brewer rapped the table sharply and announced that the inquest was adjourned
sine die
. Then he gathered up his papers and left. The crowd exploded in speculative conversation as they slowly rose and made their way out of the hall. We trailed along behind them. Like dolphins plunging through the wake of a large ship, we were carried along by the human waves of the town’s population.

We left the church hall and entered the town square in silence. Jack appeared to be buried deep in thought. I was wondering what it was he was wondering about when I felt a sharp jab in the ribs from Warnie.

‘I say, old chap,’ he said, ‘take a look at that.’

Following his pointing finger, I saw Edmund Ravenswood on the far side of the square, dragging his clearly unwilling wife in the direction of the bank.

He had a firm grip on her arm and, being a small woman, she was finding it impossible to resist.

‘Ugly scene,’ muttered Warnie. ‘I don’t like the look of that.’

‘I quite agree with you, sir,’ said Constable Dixon who had, by this time, caught up with us. ‘But my instructions are never to interfere with a domestic unless specifically summoned to do so.’

Edmund Ravenswood fumbled with his keys, got the bank door open, dragged his wife inside and slammed the door closed behind them.

‘What was going on there?’ I asked.

‘He was taking her back home,’ replied the policeman.

‘Back home from where?’

Constable Dixon repeated the information Merrivale had given us the day before—namely, that they, meaning the police, had been keeping an eye on ‘everyone involved in this case’ and so they were aware that Mrs Ravenswood had fled from the marital home and from her unhappy marriage.

‘Fled?’ I asked. ‘Where to?’

‘The constable keeping an eye on her said she went to Mrs Brompton’s boarding house.’

‘And now she’s been dragged back home again,’ said Jack. ‘So how did that happen?’

‘I have no idea, gentlemen,’ said the beefy constable at our side. ‘No idea at all.’

‘Well, let’s find out,’ said Jack decisively as if he had suddenly been seized by an idea. ‘Where is this Mrs Brompton’s boarding house?’

Dixon pointed to the far side of the square. ‘Just up Holland Lane,’ he said. ‘The first corner on the right.’

‘That’s where we’re going then,’ said Jack. ‘Are you coming with us, constable?’

The question brought a doubtful expression to Dixon’s face. ‘I think I should go back to the station and report in.’

So he left us, and we headed off in the opposite direction—across the square and down the narrow thoroughfare signposted as Holland Lane. We found the boarding house without difficulty, entered the small hallway and rang the bell.

A few moments later a tall, broad-shouldered, stern-faced woman appeared.

In response to Jack’s question she identified herself as the Mrs Brompton who ran the boarding house. When Jack said we’d come because we were concerned for Mrs Edith Ravenswood, she responded warmly, ‘I’m glad someone is. I’m afraid I did the wrong thing by that poor woman.’

‘In what way?’ Jack asked.

‘She came here, with a suitcase, late yesterday. She told me the sad story of her unhappy marriage breaking down and asked to stay here for the time being. Well, of course I said yes at once. This morning she broke the news to me that she hadn’t actually got any money at the moment—any money at all. She said she was expecting an inheritance, but for the time being could I be patient and wait for payment? Well, that bothered me. I run a business here. I can’t afford to keep non-paying guests. So I decided to telephone her husband. I thought he’d have the decency to pay her bills until her inheritance came through.’

‘But it didn’t work out that way?’

‘The man’s a brute. He came charging into this house demanding to know where his wife’s room was. I found him very threatening so I had to tell him which room she was in. Then there was a lot of shouting upstairs. Then he was dragging her downstairs and out the front door. He shouted as he left that I should pack her suitcase and send it across to the bank. I’ve done the wrong thing, haven’t I?’

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 body in the basement’. 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 basement—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 basement 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.