The Corpse in the Cellar (20 page)

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.

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.