The Seahaven-Waterloo express roars through a lonely country station. The Station Master is horrified when he sees a body thrown out of the one of the carriages, which is carried along by the slipstream and comes to a halt with a thud against the waiting room wall. The Yard, lead by Supt Duggan (Russell Napier), are called in and the body is promptly identified as that of one Edward Matrion (Patrick Waddington). He was a research engineer engaged in top secret government work involving an advanced guided missile for Consolidated Aircraft. A search of his train carriage at Waterloo station sees his empty briefcase found hidden under a seat, but it is empty prompting concern that he may have been carrying sensitive documents that could have fallen into the wrong hands. The safe in Matrion's offices confirm that top secret blueprints for a guided missile are indeed missing. The police discover that he had drawn £800 from his bank account on the day he went to the seaside town of Seahaven. Supt Duggan and Sgt Blunt (Julian Strange) go to the genteel seaside resort and a taxi driver remembers driving Matrion to a hotel, which the two officers visit. They learn that he had hired a car from a local garage, which is thoroughly examined by forensics. They find the murdered man's fingerprints and another set belonging to as yet an unknown person. Traces of chalk on the tyres suggest that he and his unidentified passenger drove to the cliff tops where the body of a woman is subsequently discovered. She is identified as his secretary, Elizabeth Welton, after her handbag is discovered close by containing her passport and a one way ticket to France. Her fingerprints confirm that she was the passenger in Matrion's car. Meanwhile, the missing blueprints turn up at Matrion's offices and it appears that Matrion had mailed them to himself at Seahaven on the morning he made that fatal train journey. A witness comes forward and identifies a foreign student called Josef Ahmed (Michael Mellinger) as having been on the train at around the time of the murder. Ahmed is quickly traced to a lodging house in Pimlico - the same one, incidentally, as where Elizabeth Welton lived. Did the two of them know each other and did they conspire to blackmail and murder her boss? Did Ahmed then turn on her when she got cold feet, kill her and keep the money for himself? And what about the blueprints?
All in all, this is a fun if standard entry in the Scotland Yard series. Like others it is pretty grisly in content in places and, for its era, it must have seemed daring. It's opening scene in which a corpse is dumped from a speeding train at a rural station is well staged and succeeds in having a horrific impact upon the audience. There is practically no humour at all in this deadly serious little whodunit in which "Give us the murder, man!" is very much the objective. There are some delightful period locations to look at such as Waterloo station and, although that busy terminus has changed quite a bit since then, you can still recognise the place. There is an old railway billboard visible on the concourse advertising rail fares to Bournemouth for fifteen shillings - those were the days! The b/w lighting of Bert Mason (a fine cinematographer who lit several of Anglo Amalgamated's Edgar Wallace mysteries) and Martin Curtis heightens the feeling for the mysteriousness and for place and period. The acting is more than competent all round and the assured direction is again by Montgomery Tully.
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