The Corpse in the Cellar (5 page)

Standing there in that dimly lit cellar, with a dead body at our feet and deep, gloomy shadows stretching away into blackness, the terrors of childhood seemed to come back with a rush. The darkness gathered itself into the monstrous shapes of nightmares and advanced towards us menacingly.

In broad sunlight the tale of murder and butchery this cellar had witnessed was a harmless folktale. But now, in the darkness, in the presence of death, the imagination played tricks, and shadows seemed to hide the pulsating menace of ghostly revenge. Quite suddenly Boris had ceased to be a funny name in an old tale, and had become, in my imagination, powerful phantom hands reaching out of the grave.

I shivered and tried to shake off the tricks my mind was playing on me.

Then I looked again at Constable Dixon, whose mouth was opening and closing as he gasped for air—like a man drowning in the deep end of the swimming pool hoping that someone would notice before he had to embarrass himself by crying out for help.

‘I suggest, old chap,' said Warnie in a fatherly manner, ‘that you make a quick search of this cellar before your superiors turn up and ask you where the weapon is.'

‘Search?' asked the constable. ‘Ah, yes. A search. Thank you, sir. Very good idea, sir.'

He unhitched an electric torch from his belt and turned on its powerful beam. He swept this around the small room. We saw a plain concrete floor, brick walls, the closed and locked vault door, a couple of broken office chairs—and nothing else. There was no knife, and there appeared to be nowhere a knife could be hidden.

‘Well . . . ' began the policeman cautiously, ‘this is very strange. I don't understand . . . ' Then he reached a decision. ‘We all have to go back upstairs,' he said firmly. ‘You gentlemen first, and I'll follow right behind you. Then I'm locking that door at the top of the stairs and calling Inspector Hyde. He'll know what to do.'

Back in the office Constable Dixon made his phone call. When he got to the part explaining that Franklin Grimm was dead, the office girl, sitting at the next desk, howled and burst into tears. When Dixon hung up the phone, he rather awkwardly tried to comfort the sobbing girl, reaching out a tentative hand to pat her shoulder and muttering, ‘There, there.'

‘Can I get you a glass of water . . . or something,' mumbled Warnie, feeling as uncomfortable as the rest of us in the face of the girl's distress.

She sniffed, dabbed at her eyes and nose with a pathetically small piece of lace handkerchief, and then whispered, ‘No . . . no, thank you. I'll be all right in a moment.'

Within three minutes of the phone call Inspector Hyde was striding through the front door of the bank. He was a bustling, efficient, restless little man. Beside him was a taller, solidly built, stocky man, later introduced to us as Sergeant Donaldson.

‘Where's the body, Dixon?' the inspector demanded, without a glance at us.

Constable Dixon unlocked the cellar door and led his senior officers down the stairs. We heard them moving about and speaking quietly, and when they returned ten minutes later the inspector was saying, ‘Well, where is the weapon, Dixon? Answer me that?'

The constable had the good sense to remain silent. The inspector waved a hand at us, asking Dixon, ‘Are these the witnesses you mentioned?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Gentlemen, I must ask you to wait here a little longer while we take additional statements. And I'd ask you not to leave Market Plumpton without my permission.' Jack, Warnie and I glanced at each other. Our prospects of a walking holiday were sinking fast.

‘Now, young lady,' said the inspector, turning his attention to the tear-stained office girl. ‘The bank is closed for the remainder of the day. You are to lock the front door.'

She blinked the tears from her eyes and said, ‘But it's not closing time yet . . . '

‘Nonsense!' snapped the inspector. ‘There's been a serious crime committed here, and I am in command of the crime scene. You will lock up immediately.'

‘Yes, sir,' she responded mildly, taking a large bunch of keys from a desk drawer and walking to the front door. A moment later it closed with a soft thud, shutting out the street sounds, and shutting us in with the bristling inspector. In response to a commanding gesture from his superior, Constable Dixon walked over and stood with his back to the closed front door. Clearly we were not going to be allowed to leave for a little while yet.

‘Now, gentlemen,' said the inspector. ‘I apologise for neglecting you so far. The name is Hyde. I am the inspector of police for this district. What can you tell me about this suspicious death?'

‘In all probability, nothing more than your constable has already told you,' said Jack.

Sergeant Donaldson pulled out a notebook and pencil, and during the conversation that followed took copious notes. He began by taking down our names, addresses and occupations. There was a look of slight surprise on his face when he discovered that Jack was a Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, that Warnie held a commission in the British Army, and that I was about to start work for Sir William Dyer at Plumwood Hall.

‘Did any one of you go back down to the cellar?' asked Hyde.

We all looked at him and shook our heads.

‘Jack was withdrawing money from his passbook account, and we stood beside him,' Warnie explained.

‘In fact,' I added, ‘the late Mr Grimm insisted that we three all stand on the customers' side of the counter, so none of us was even close to the door leading to the cellar steps.'

‘So who could have gone through that door and down those steps?' asked the inspector quietly, putting the question more to himself than to us. Then he turned around to face the office girl.

‘Miss,' he barked. She went pale and dabbed at her eyes with an already soaked handkerchief. ‘You're Ruth Jarvis, aren't you? Todd Jarvis's daughter?'

‘Yes, sir,' she replied in a voice little above a whisper.

‘How long have you worked here?'

‘Two years, sir.'

‘Now, you were here in this office. Did you follow Mr Grimm down those steps into the cellar?'

Her only response was to break into a fresh round of howling.

‘She couldn't have, inspector,' said Jack. ‘We were facing the office and if she'd moved we would have noticed. She didn't leave her desk. In fact, I'm sure she didn't stop typing.'

‘That's right,' sobbed Ruth Jarvis. ‘I didn't stop typing. Not the whole time I didn't stop. You can see the work in my machine.'

Inspector Hyde actually walked through the counter flap and stood at her desk looking at the sheet of paper in the typewriter and the pile of completed sheets beside it. Then he spun around and faced us again.

‘Well, if it wasn't Miss Jarvis, then who was it?' he demanded.

There was no answer to that question, so we didn't try to provide one. I saw the suspicious gleam in his eye and wondered if he thought he was looking at some secret society of Gentlemen Murderers. At least, that's what his narrowing gaze said to me. What did he imagine we were? The Oxford League of Assassins: mysterious murders committed to order on short notice—reasonable rates. Is that what he imagined? His suspicion of us couldn't have been clearer if he'd worn it as a broad phylactery on his forehead.

‘Perhaps there's another way into the cellar,' mumbled Warnie after a long silence. ‘Only thing I can think of.'

‘And we thought of it too, Major Lewis. Some seventy or eighty years ago, when this was a private residence, there was a coal hole from the street into the cellar. But that was sealed up years ago. No, this door is the only way down and the only way out.'

‘Well, no one went down,' I said, ‘and certainly no one came out.'

‘Does it make any sense to you, Donaldson?' the inspector snapped at his sergeant.

‘There's some funny business going on here,' said the sergeant, ‘but I don't know what it is.' As he spoke his forehead crinkled, like a junior clerk struggling with a tricky clue in a
Times
crossword.

‘Have you made a more thorough search for the weapon?' Jack asked.

‘Yes, yes, yes,' groaned the inspector. ‘First thing we did. It's not a big cellar, and it's almost bare. Donaldson, Dixon and I went over it very carefully. The weapon that young Grimm stabbed himself with—if, that is, he did stab himself—has definitely disappeared.'

As he said the words ‘stab himself' Ruth Jarvis howled again. Clearly this was going to drag on for some time, so I walked over to one of the straight-backed wooden chairs and sat down, stretching my legs out in front of me.

‘Come along, inspector—this is getting us nowhere,' said Jack. ‘The facts are the facts, and we can sit around talking about them until doomsday and they won't change.'

The inspector didn't like this and he responded by saying that we would be required as witnesses and were not to leave the town at least for the next few days. Then he looked at his watch and asked, ‘How long has Ravenswood been locked in that strongroom now?'

‘No more than half an hour,' I said. ‘The teller told us there was plenty of air in the vault and the man with the combination should be here early this afternoon.'

‘In fact, we should check that vault door. Donaldson, you come with me. Dixon you stay here and keep an eye on . . . these people.'

As they disappeared back into the cellar, Warnie muttered, ‘I say, Jack. Does this mean that we're suspects or something?'

‘It's not “something”, it's definitely “suspects”. After all, this is a small town and we're the outsiders,' Jack replied.

‘I think it's quite offensive,' puffed Warnie. ‘You're an Oxford don, I'm an officer in the British Army. It's outrageous that we should be treated as suspects.'

A few minutes later the inspector and his sergeant reappeared.

‘Well?' asked Jack. ‘What did you find?'

‘That vault door is locked up as strong as a prison.' With these words Inspector Hyde ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘Well, I'm beaten,' he muttered. ‘This is too much for me. I'm going to phone the Chief Constable and get permission to call in Scotland Yard.'

The question then arose of what was to be done with us. The inspector decided that we should find ourselves some accommodation for the night and make ourselves available tomorrow for the man from Scotland Yard.

‘Where were you planning to stay?' he asked.

‘Not here,' said Jack firmly. ‘Not in Market Plumpton.'

‘Well, you're staying here now,' insisted the inspector, looking like a small, pugnacious rat trying to herd a crowd of larger and more important rats into a corner. ‘In the light of what's happened, gentlemen, you'll have to revise your plans. Dixon, escort these men to
The Boar's Head
.'

‘Yes, sir,' said the constable, unlocking and opening the front door of the bank and standing back to allow us through.

Behind us we could hear the inspector making his phone call to the Chief Constable. ‘Colonel Weatherly? It's Inspector Hyde, sir . . . ah, we have a problem . . . '

But we heard no more, for Constable Dixon was saying, ‘If you'll just follow me, gentlemen, I'll show you the way to
The Boar's Head
. You'll like it there, nicest little pub in town.'

We had stepped back out into the blazing sunshine of a warm midday and found ourselves blinking in the light. The nightmare behind us started to fade. In fact, as we walked into the sunshine I was finding it moment by moment more impossible to believe that there really was a dead body in the bank cellar—a body for which there was no possible, logical explanation. The warm sun made it all seem like a wild story from a cheap novel—the sort of detective novel Warnie loved to read. If Warnie had told me that exactly the same thing had happened in something called
The Secret Nine
or
The Purple Hand Strikes Again
, I would not have been the least bit surprised.

The constable led the way out of the town square, on the opposite side to the church, and around several corners until we reached the pub.

‘There it is, gentlemen,' he said with the pride of a gardener showing off his prize pumpkin at a county fair. ‘Frank Jones is the publican. Good chap. And his wife Annie is the best cook for miles around. I often have a bite to eat here myself.'

He then plunged through the open door of the bar parlour and introduced us to the man wiping glasses behind the bar. Dixon stood close beside us and watched carefully as each of us signed the register. Then Frank Jones summoned his wife to show us up to our rooms. Halfway up the stairs I stopped and looked back. The constable and the publican had their heads together in a whispered conversation.

Annie Jones showed us to three rather small, but neat and cheerful, rooms. I tossed my rucksack onto my bed then joined Jack in his room. Warnie did the same, dropping into the only armchair in the room with the words, ‘This is a bit of a turn up for the books, eh? Here we are in the middle of a murder, what? Almost like being in the middle of a book actually. Sort of thing that Agatha Christie woman writes about. Rather like her books myself.' Then he chuckled and said, ‘She always baffles me . . . always turns out to be the person I didn't expect. Jolly clever, eh?'