Market Basing is the local base of the inquiry into the murder at Chimneys, linking Inspector Badgworthy’s police station with the nearby inn where an unexplained stranger has arrived. Though the town is introduced through the ordinary rhythms of provincial policing, its roads and lodging houses become part of the evidence that places a suspect near the crime.

Local Setting and Police

The investigation opens at 8:30 in the morning in the Market Basing police station, where Inspector Badgworthy is at work with Constable Johnson. Badgworthy is presented as a tall, portly officer whose heavy tread and laboured breathing accompany his ceremonious approach to professional strain; Johnson, newly joined to the force, is described as having the downy, unfledged look of a human chicken. Their station is the starting point for the local response to the killing at Chimneys.

Badgworthy and Johnson set out with a young doctor for Chimneys. On the way they pass the Jolly Cricketers, where the doctor notices a good-looking man standing in the doorway. The stranger appears to have arrived the previous night, and Johnson confirms that he did not come by train. Badgworthy infers that he must have travelled by car and instructs Johnson to make inquiries at the inn on his return. The man’s marked sunburn leads the inspector to speculate that he has come from abroad, a guess that frames him as an outsider before his movements have been checked.

The Town in the Murder Inquiry

Market Basing’s police investigate the stranger through a combination of local observation and physical traces. Superintendent Battle later reports that a car stopped outside the park at 11:40 on the night of the murder, while at midnight a young man arrived at the Jolly Cricketers by car and engaged a room. His boots, left outside for cleaning, were very wet and muddy, as if he had walked through the park’s long grass. The boots were compared with the footprints leading toward and away from the window at the murder scene, tying the inn and the grounds into a single line of inquiry.

The evidence gives the town’s ordinary places investigative weight: the inn records a late arrival, the road provides a possible approach to the park, and muddy footwear offers a material link to the scene. The stranger’s presence initially attracts the doctor’s casual curiosity and Badgworthy’s speculative attention; under Battle’s investigation, timing and traces turn that curiosity into a testable account of movement.

A Provincial Base Amid Wider Crimes

The town also serves as a contrast to the scale of the events passing through it. Anthony Cade reflects that within twenty-four hours he has become entangled in two crimes: he has disposed of a body after the first and arrived at the scene of the second as it was being committed. At Chimneys, he decides to tell the truth with one small alteration and one grave omission. That selective account makes the local investigation more than a search for a stranger: the police must weigh testimony against physical evidence and against facts the speaker has chosen to withhold.

As the inquiry develops, Market Basing remains a point of contact between the investigation and the people moving through the surrounding countryside. Battle asks Anthony why he has chosen to disclose what he knows, and Anthony explains that he had withheld information for Virginia Revel’s sake until the letters associated with her were proved irrelevant. In a later exchange, the French detective M. Lemoine says he has requested the fingerprints and Bertillon measurements of King Victor, known as Captain O’Neill, to compare them with Anthony. The investigative thread that began with local questions about an unfamiliar man thus belongs to a wider web of identities and crimes, while Market Basing provides its provincial point of departure.