The Cinema Murder

A free download from http://www.dertz.in

The Cinema Murder

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cinema Murder, by E. Phillips Oppenheim This
eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Cinema Murder
Author: E. Phillips Oppenheim
Release Date: December 3, 2003 [EBook #10371]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CINEMA MURDER
***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.

THE CINEMA MURDER
BY E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
1917

BOOK I
CHAPTER I
With a somewhat prolonged grinding of the brakes and an unnecessary amount of fuss in
the way of letting off steam, the afternoon train from London came to a standstill in the
station at Detton Magna. An elderly porter, putting on his coat as he came, issued, with

the dogged aid of one bound by custom to perform a hopeless mission, from the small,
redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage in front of the
shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up and down the lifeless row of closed
and streaming windows, with an expectancy dulled by daily disappointment, for the
passengers who seldom alighted. On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary
young man stepped out on to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a
third-class return ticket from London, passed through the two open doors and
commenced to climb the long ascent which led into the town.
He wore no overcoat, and for protection against the inclement weather he was able only
to turn up the collar of his well-worn blue serge coat. The damp of a ceaselessly wet day
seemed to have laid its cheerless pall upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. The
hedges, blackened with smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, were
dripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy with
repellent-looking mud--there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which he
trod. On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an
industrial neighbourhood. The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him
presented scarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hard and
unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new, red-brick cottages. In the
background were the tall chimneys of several factories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised
its smoke-blackened finger to the lowering clouds.
After his first glance around at these familiar and unlovely objects, Philip Romilly
walked with his head a little thrown back, his eyes lifted as though with intent to the
melancholy and watery skies. He was a young man well above medium height, slim,
almost inclined to be angular, yet with a good carriage notwithstanding a stoop which
seemed more the result of an habitual depression than occasioned by any physical
weakness. His features were large, his mouth querulous, a little discontented, his eyes
filled with the light of a silent and rebellious bitterness which seemed, somehow, to have
found a more or less permanent abode in his face. His clothes, although they were neat,
had seen better days. He was ungloved, and he carried under his arm a small parcel,
which appeared to contain a book, carefully done up in brown paper.
As he reached the outskirts of the village he slackened his pace. Standing a little way
back from the road, from which they were separated by an ugly, gravelled playground,
were the familiar school buildings, with the usual inscription carved in stone above the
door. He laid his hand upon the wooden gate and paused. From inside he could catch the
drone of children's voices. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty minutes past
four. For a moment he hesitated. Then he strolled on, and, turning at the gate of an
adjoining cottage, the nearest to the schools of a little unlovely row, he tried the latch,
found it yield to his touch, and stepped inside. He closed the door behind him and turned,
with a little weary sigh of content, towards a large easy-chair drawn up in front of the fire.
For a single moment he seemed about to throw himself into its depths--his long fingers,
indeed, a little blue with the cold, seemed already on their way towards the genial warmth
of the flames. Then he stopped short. He stood perfectly still in an attitude of arrested
motion, his eyes, wonderingly at first, and then with a strange, unanalysable expression,
seeming to embark upon