The Cinema Murder

With a somewhat prolonged grinding of the brakes and an unnecessary amount of fuss inthe way of letting off steam, the afternoon train from London came to a standstill in thestation at Detton Magna. An elderly porter, putting on his coat as he came, issued, with thedogged aid of one bound by custom to perform a hopeless mission, from the small, redbricklamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage in front of the shed whichenclosed the booking office, looked up and down the lifeless row of closed and streamingwindows, with an expectancy dulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers whoseldom alighted. On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary young man steppedout on to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a third-class return ticketfrom London, passed through the two open doors and commenced to climb the long ascentwhich led into the town.He wore no overcoat, and for protection against the inclement weather he was able only toturn up the collar of his well-worn blue serge coat. The damp of a ceaselessly wet dayseemed to have laid its cheerless pall upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. Thehedges, blackened with smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, weredripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy withrepellent-looking mud-there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which hetrod. On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of anindustrial neighbourhood. The town-village which stretched up the hillside before himpresented scarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hard andunadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new, red-brick cottages. In thebackground were the tall chimneys of several factories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised itssmoke-blackened finger to the lowering clouds.