The Corpse in the Cellar (29 page)

‘Warnie found me the weapon—and when he did that it confirmed everything I'd been thinking up until that point. Once I held that weapon in my hand, I saw that there was only one way that murder could have been committed and, in consequence, only one person who could have committed it.'

‘What weapon?' I asked.

‘The oily screwdriver Warnie found in the rubbish bin at the back of the bank.'

‘That was the murder weapon?' I mumbled. ‘I still don't understand who or how.'

‘Well, we know
who
now that Ravenswood has been charged with that murder,' said Warnie. ‘But it still beats me. In fact, it's more like a story by that John Dickson Carr chappie. You know the sort of thing: locked room, no way in, no way out, impossible crime.'

‘You're quite right,' Jack agreed. ‘It does look like that. It fact, it looks rather like a magic trick. And that's because there is a trick to it. What all magicians do is distract our attention. Circumstances conspired to do that in this case. We were looking at the wrong thing and thinking the wrong way.'

‘Ravenswood,' I protested, ‘was behind a locked vault door—a heavy steel door with a double combination lock and two big locking levers—when the murder was committed. An expert had to come from the bank head office to get that vault door open.'

‘Exactly!' said Jack triumphantly. ‘That's the illusion.'

‘It's not an illusion,' I complained. ‘That vault door was really locked. Franklin Grimm himself checked and doubled checked it. When the head office man arrived he checked it. It was securely locked, with the locking mechanism firmly in place, and the combination was needed to open it. We couldn't get it open without the combination—which none of us had.'

‘Exactly!' Jack repeated. ‘That's the circumstance that created the illusion. Tell me, young Morris: what are vault doors, or safe doors, designed to do?'

‘To keep things safe,' I suggested warily, suspecting I was walking into a trap. ‘To stop thieves breaking in and taking the valuables in the vault.'

‘In other words, vaults doors are designed to be impossible to break into—not break out of. The door was sealed to us because we were on the outside. But Ravenswood was on the inside, and that's a different proposition altogether. Those combination locks are complicated mechanisms. They must need to be oiled from time to time. They must need to be serviced and checked from time to time. For such purposes there must be a service panel on the
back
of the locking mechanism. And Ravenswood was on the inside looking at the back of the door.'

‘Ah, I'm starting to see,' I gasped.

‘I'm not,' grumbled Warnie. ‘It's still as thick as a pea-soup fog to me.'

‘Recall what we were told Ravenswood was doing in the bank. Do you remember?' Jack asked.

‘I'm afraid not,' murmured Warnie.

‘We were told,' Jack continued, ‘that Ravenswood was inside the vault carrying out the regular maintenance. We saw for ourselves that there was an electric light inside the vault, and a box of tools. He was there to oil and check the mechanism that worked the combination lock. When he was locked in, all he needed to do was switch on the light in the vault, open up the service panel on the back of the locking mechanism and operate the combination lock from the inside. Remember he was the one man in the Market Plumpton bank who knew the combination.

‘The door was impossible to unlock for us on the outside, but for Ravenswood on the inside it was simplicity itself. And that's what he did: he operated that locking mechanism, swung the door open, stepped out into the bank cellar and murdered Franklin Grimm. Then to give himself an alibi he stepped back inside the vault, pulled the door closed, operated the mechanism, again from inside, and waited for the man to come from head office with the combination to “let him out”. We were fooled as if by a magician's trick: we were looking at a solid steel vault door that was impossible to break into. But Ravenswood was on the inside “breaking out”, as it were—a different story entirely.'

‘Well, blow me down,' puffed Warnie. ‘How very ingenious. Do you think he planned it like that?'

‘No, but I think he seized an opportunity that presented itself to him.'

‘Why?' I asked. ‘I still don't understand why Ravenswood would want to murder Franklin Grimm. Did it have something to do with money?'

‘No. It had something to do with darkness.'

I took another sip of my brandy and soda and waited for Jack to continue. Having left a moment for his mysterious words to hang in the air, he went on.

‘When Ravenswood let himself out of that vault, I believe that was all he thought he was doing—getting out of the vault. Then he saw a heavily built young man sitting in the shadows in the cellar. Remember how dimly lit that cellar was? In the darkness he didn't recognise Franklin Grimm. He took that shadowy figure to be the young man he
really
wanted to kill. He seized the moment. He seized the opportunity. Using the oily screwdriver in his hand as a blade, he stepped up quickly and quietly from behind the young man and thrust that narrow blade into his victim's neck. Death, as we know, was almost instantaneous. It was when he saw the victim lying on the cellar floor, in the dim light, that he realised he'd killed the wrong man.'

Jack paused to sip his brandy and then continued, ‘I'll give him this much: he kept his head and acted swiftly, and cleverly, and decisively. He knew that he had no motive for killing Grimm so he was unlikely to be a suspect on those grounds. And he could make his appearance of innocence complete by stepping back inside the vault, pulling the door closed, operating the mechanism from within and waiting to be “released”. It left us with what looked like an impossible murder—and Ravenswood with what looked like a steel-strong alibi.'

‘So who was he trying to kill then?' asked Warnie.

‘The man he did kill just a short time later: Nicholas Proudfoot.'

‘With the weighted suitcase swung on a length of rope?' I said.

‘Exactly,' Jack agreed. ‘But all this talking is making me very dry.'

‘I'll get another round of drinks,' said Warnie. ‘What'll it be?'

‘I'll have a pint this time,' said Jack. I asked for the same. Warnie departed and returned a moment later with three pints of bitter. Settled back into our chairs, Jack resumed, ‘It was vital to Ravenswood's future that young Proudfoot died.'

Warnie looked at me and I looked at him. ‘Now we're both baffled,' I said.

‘It all revolved around the mortgage on the Proudfoot farm. That and the character of Edmund Ravenswood are what set this crime in motion,' said Jack.

He paused to sip from his pint and wipe the froth from his upper lip. ‘Think about the sequence of events as they were told to us. The first step was Nicholas Proudfoot defaulting on his mortgage payments. Next came the confrontation we've heard about. Proudfoot, and his beautiful young wife Amelia, call to see the bank manager—who refuses to allow them any leeway and warns of impending foreclosure. A short time after that, Ruth Jarvis told us, Ravenswood went out to the farm. Following that visit she saw in the books that payments had been resumed.'

‘We know all this,' mumbled Warnie. ‘What I can't see is how it connects to the murder.'

‘Just be patient, old chap,' Jack cautioned. ‘All will become clear. What I don't know, but the police are currently investigating with the aid of an auditor, is whether those mortgage payments really resumed, or whether Ravenswood only wrote them up is if they had. If it's the second, as I suspect, he was in serious trouble with the law as well as the bank when Nicholas Proudfoot discovered what was going on.'

‘What
was
going on?' I asked. ‘I'm with Warnie—I still can't see a motive.'

‘Besides the mortgage,' Jack continued calmly, ‘the other ingredient in this crime was the character of Edmund Ravenswood. He was known as a hard, mean-spirited bank manager, and as a man who made his wife desperately unhappy. When I considered the course of events, I asked myself this: what if the day Ravenswood visited the Proudfoot farm it was not to see Nicholas but to see his beautiful young wife—and to see her alone without her husband being present? What if, at that meeting, he offered to take care of the mortgage if she would make payment “in kind”—if she would give him her favours in return for his making the mortgage problems go away? We now know from Amelia Proudfoot's tearful testimony to the police that this is exactly what happened.'

‘The filthy swine,' growled Warnie.

‘Indeed,' Jack agreed. ‘Ravenswood turns out to be a thoroughly odious man. And once that situation had come into being, all that followed makes sense. Somehow Nicholas Proudfoot became aware of what was happening between his wife and the bank manager. Perhaps he arrived one day in time to see Ravenswood's car driving away. Perhaps his distressed wife broke down and confessed. You can well imagine his anger. In fact, we saw that anger on the morning he burst into the bank and confronted Ravenswood. He also showed astonishing self-control, determined as he was to keep himself out of a police cell and see Ravenswood behind bars. But his self-control broke down at the end of that confrontation and he pushed Ravenswood into the vault and locked the door behind him.'

‘Which is where we came in,' said Warnie.

‘And I think I understand now,' I said. ‘When Ravenswood released himself from the vault, in the way that you explained, he thought he saw Nicholas Proudfoot sitting in the dim light and seized the opportunity to kill him.'

‘Precisely—to keep himself out of prison and to keep his career with the bank.'

‘Which is why, as soon as possible after this incident, he had to ambush young Proudfoot and kill him by knocking him into the river.'

‘Right again.'

‘But what happened to Amelia after that?' asked Warnie.

‘Somehow Ravenswood persuaded her that the farm would have to be sold to redeem the mortgage immediately, leaving her homeless and penniless. Then he offered to set her up as his “kept woman” nearby on the coast. Terrified, and unable to think clearly, she agreed.'

‘She's told the police all this?' I asked.

‘She has,' said Jack.

‘And she was the woman boarder I failed to see on my visit to Plumpton-on-Sea?'

‘I'm afraid she was. But her very insistence, through her land lady, on privacy that amounted to secrecy made me certain it was her.'

‘Horrible business,' growled Warnie. ‘Indecent business.'

‘Tragic,' Jack agreed, ‘but the consequence of corrupt human nature unrestrained by Christian civilisation.'

Then Warnie grinned hugely and said, ‘At least all the puzzles have been solved. I knew you'd beat the Scotland Yard boys at their own game. I had every confidence in you, Jack.' Warnie turned to me and with a wink said, ‘Brain the size of the Albert Hall—you know that, don't you? Now, Jack: I take it we are free to resume our walking holiday?'

‘First thing tomorrow morning. We've had enough excitement for one day, and we all need a good night's sleep before we go back on the road.'

I'd been thinking about Warnie's words and said, ‘I am impressed. That puzzle looked complicated and impossible to solve, and yet you wrestled with it, Jack, until you found the solution.'

‘It's worth wrestling with the big questions of life, young Morris,' said Jack with a cheerful grin. ‘And to keep on wrestling until you come to the solution.'

 

 

 

This adventure in which C. S. Lewis helps to investigate a grisly murder is entirely fictitious. However, Lewis, his brother Warnie and various friends often went on walking holidays of the kind described. A few of those real-life friends are mentioned in the text: J. R. R. Tolkien (‘Tollers'), Hugo Dyson and Owen Barfield.

The story is set in 1933, just after the publication of Lewis's first book,
The Pilgrim's Regress
. This was slap bang in the middle of what is often called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, when great writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, Erle Stanley Gardner and Margery Allingham were plying their trade. Several famous fictional detectives created by these writers are mentioned in the text: Hercule Poirot (Christie), Lord Peter Wimsey (Sayers), Inspector Joseph French (Crofts) and Albert Campion (Allingham). Also mentioned is the American writer John Dickson Carr, whose 1930 book
It Walks by Night
was his first featuring a kind of problem for which he became famous: the locked-room mystery.

There are a handful of other period references in the book:

•   Ben Travers (1886–1980) was an English playwright best known for a series of popular farces staged in London in the 1920s and '30s.

•   An Aga cooker was a popular brand of stove heated by wood or coal.

•   ‘Constance Kent and the Road Hill House murder' refers to a notorious 1860s case in Wiltshire, UK, in which a three-year-old boy, Francis Kent, was murdered by his sixteen-year-old half-sister, Constance.

•   
The Golden Bough
by Scottish anthropologist James Frazer was a twelve-volume history of human beliefs from primitive magic to modern science. It was highly influential in the early twentieth century.

•   The ‘interplanetary books' of early British science fiction writer H. G. Wells included
The War of the Worlds
and
The First Men in the Moon
.