The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cinema Murder, by E. Phillips Oppenheim
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Title: The Cinema Murder
Author: E. Phillips Oppenheim
Release Date: December 3, 2003 [EBook #10371]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CINEMA MURDER ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
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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 inte
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