The Liar in the Library

by Simon Brett

  ‘“Even if he were English”?’ Jude echoed.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean that there is prejudice in this country against the Polish?’

  ‘Of course. If you work in a pub, you hear a lot of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were quite settled here.’

  ‘I am, yes. And I have good friends, and I know many people who do not care what country I come from. But in the pub, you know, there are many Polish jokes.’

  ‘Jokes about the Poles being stupid?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Zosia dismissed the subject. ‘It doesn’t worry me now. Maybe it would worry me, if I thought I was stupid.’

  ‘You are far from stupid.’

  ‘I know this. So for me it is sometimes an irritation, but not a problem. For Uncle Pawel, whose English is not so good, the problem is bigger.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  The girl grimaced. ‘Since he has been in England, he has lived with me. He sleeps on a sofa bed in my sitting room.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound ideal.’

  ‘No, it is not, Jude, but it is how it has to be, at the moment. He is family. He is my mother’s brother.’ The way she spoke suggested that she had never questioned the obligation such a relationship placed on her.

  ‘Of course. So, is that what the problem is: finding somewhere else for him to live?’

  Zosia sighed. ‘That is part of the problem. Only a small part.’ She took a deep breath, preparing herself for the next section of her narrative. ‘The fact is, Jude, that Uncle Pawel has always had a problem with alcohol. In Poland too, yes, the vodka. But when he was working, it was fine. Yes, he drank a lot, but the physical work kept him fit. He never turned up late, he never failed to do his work. It was not a problem for his boss, it was a problem for his family.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘Was married,’ Zosia replied glumly. ‘Finally, his wife could not put up with the drinking, so she left. Now they are divorced. He had become violent, you see, which is not in his nature. Uncle Pawel is a gentle, simple man, until he gets the vodka inside him. Then he changes, you know, like Jekyll and Hyde.’

  Jude was impressed by the girl’s command of British literature, as she went on, ‘I have tried to stop him drinking, but it is no good. He does not want to stop. At first he thought that, because he has a niece who works in a pub, that will be a source of free drinks for him. I pretty soon stopped him thinking on those lines. Now he is banned from the pub. But there are plenty of other places you can get alcohol.’

  ‘Legally?’

  That prompted another grimace. ‘I worry about that. With Uncle Pawel, the dependency is so strong, he is quite capable of stealing from an off-licence, or stealing money to buy alcohol. And so, to stop him from doing this, I give him money, though I know exactly what he will spend it on.’

  ‘I see your problem.’

  ‘And the terrible thing is, Uncle Pawel is bad for the Polish community here on the South Coast. We are mostly hard-working people, and we have managed to put up with the prejudice and live alongside the locals in a friendly way. Then someone like Uncle Pawel comes along, and all the lines about “bone-idle immigrants, taking advantage of our welfare system” – well, they become true. And Uncle Pawel is not alone. There are a few – very few, I am glad to say – like him. And they gravitate together. He finds other Polish layabouts to drink with. They hang about in the shelters on the seafront, drinking together. People see them, hear they are speaking a foreign language. It is not good for the image of the Poles.

  ‘And then some of the men Uncle Pawel drinks with are into drugs, too. It is easy to get drugs round here – Littlehampton, Bognor; you don’t even have to go to Brighton.’

  ‘And does your uncle use drugs?’

  ‘I do not know for sure, but I think it is likely,’ came the bleak response.

  ‘Hm. Zosia, you spoke of “taking advantage of our welfare system”. Does that mean you’ve consulted health professionals, alcohol recovery programmes, about your uncle’s problems?’ If not, Jude could certainly help. She had a comprehensive list of such services at her fingertips. It was surprising how many of her clients, even in nice, middle-class Fethering, had dependency issues.

  Zosia blushed. ‘No, it is … I do not want to ask for outside help. Uncle Pawel is family. My mother would not like me to make his shame public.’

  Jude was beginning to realize the extent of the girl’s troubles. It was more than someone of her age should have to cope with. Then suddenly she had another thought, a memory of her walk earlier that week to Fethering Library.

  ‘Zosia, you said your uncle and his drinking mates often got together in seafront shelters?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember whether he was out drinking last Tuesday evening?’

  The girl’s brow wrinkled. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It was the evening that ended up with the writer’s body being found in the library car park … well, no, it was actually the following morning that the body was found, but—’

  ‘I know what you are talking about. It’s been the main topic of conversation in the pub all week.’

  ‘I bet it has. Anyway, as I was walking along the front last Tuesday, on my way to the library, about half-past six I suppose it would have been, I heard some people carousing in one of the shelters on—’

  ‘No, that would not have been Uncle Pawel,’ said Zosia firmly. ‘Tuesday is my day off at the pub. So that Tuesday evening I cook for him. Good Polish food. Kopytka he likes very much, like my mother cooks, like their mother cooked for them when they were children. That night he does not drink. And he is the Uncle Pawel I have always known and loved.’

  ‘And then on Wednesday he’s back to his drinking ways.’

  ‘Usually, yes.’

  ‘But not this week?’

  ‘I do not know. That is why I am so worried, so upset. Uncle Pawel has disappeared.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Carole, who hadn’t expected any contact to be made till Monday at the earliest, was surprised to get a call back from Nessa Perks on the Sunday morning. The Professor was in her office at the University of Clincham. ‘Research is an ongoing project,’ said the American. ‘It doesn’t stop just because of a weekend. The weekdays get so cluttered up with teaching, often the weekends are the only time I can concentrate.’

  Carole explained that she would like to talk about the events of the Tuesday evening, ‘because I gather you were present then at Fethering Library.’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Nessa confirmed.

  ‘Have the police talked to you about anything you might have seen?’

  ‘No, they haven’t.’ The Professor was clearly piqued by this official shortcoming. ‘You would have thought they would have done, knowing that I am an internationally recognized expert on crime.’

  Carole didn’t raise the question of how the police might have been expected to know that. Instead she said, ‘I thought your expertise was in fictional rather than real-life crime.’

  ‘You’d be surprised how frequently the two correlate,’ Nessa Perks replied. ‘They are, not to put too fine a point on it, inseparable. In fact, that is the basis of the research I am currently doing for a new book.’

  ‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Carole, though something in the Professor’s manner suggested to her that it wouldn’t be. ‘Anyway, I was wondering if we could meet to talk about Burton St Clair’s death?

  Professor Vanessa Perks was very keen on the idea. Miffed by the apparent lack of interest from the official enquiry, she was more than ready to share her theories with anyone who’d listen.

  The agreed time was four o’clock, by which time the day was colder than ever. The lethargic gatekeeper at the university’s main entrance had been alerted to Carole’s arrival and directed her towards the English and Creative Writing Department. Then he returned to his electric fire and Fast and Furious DVD. Dr
awing close, as instructed, she rang the Professor’s mobile to announce her arrival, and was admitted through a door protected from intruders by a keypad code.

  The willowy Nessa Perks said little until she was actually in her office, and when they got there, Carole could see why. The Professor wanted to impress all visitors with the magnificent contents of her shelves. For there, in serried ranks, stood a huge array of old books. All crime novels. The hardbacks looked to date from the Twenties and Thirties, and Carole recognized the green and white livery of the Penguin paperbacks.

  She was obviously expected to say something on the lines of ‘You’ve got quite a collection there’, so that was exactly what she said.

  ‘Yes, fairly comprehensive. Probably as good a collection as there is in this country, outside of specialist libraries.’

  ‘And are they all yours?’

  ‘Well, technically the university purchased them, but I curated the collection.’

  Carole had noticed that in contemporary life more and more people seemed to be ‘curating’ all kinds of things, but she supposed curating a collection of books was closer to the original meaning of the word than some other of its many current usages. She also got the firm impression that if the University of Clincham ever wanted to claim back the books they had bought for Professor Vanessa Perks, they might encounter a problem. When she looked at her shelves it was with a proprietorial air.

  Though Carole didn’t realize it, the Professor represented a relatively new trend in academia, whereby genre fiction was given serious intellectual scrutiny. Thirty years before, the idea of university students studying crime or science fiction would have been laughable, but they had both become serious academic disciplines. Like many, the trend had started in America, but quickly been embraced by British universities. (There were even course notes available, which summarized the plots of Agatha Christie novels for students who found the effort of reading them too challenging.) And people like Professor Vanessa Perks were riding the crest of this new wave.

  The academic was dressed that morning in an over-frilly cream blouse, a thin black skirt that came down to mid-thigh and Victorian buttoned boots. Her make-up was so immaculate that it looked almost as if there were a transparent shell over her face. The china in which she served tea from a silver pot was crinkled around the edges. Carole got the impression that the Professor was one of those Americans who was a little too fervently in favour of all things British. The tea, inevitably, was Earl Grey.

  Before Carole had a chance to issue any prompt, Nessa Perks was straight into her lecture. ‘As I mentioned on the telephone, many people too readily dismiss any possible correlation between Golden Age mystery fiction and the real-life world of contemporary crime. But my extensive researches into the subject have revealed that many of the tropes occurrent in the whodunits of the time can act as relevant comparators.

  ‘And that is certainly true in the case of Burton St Clair’s death. When broken down into their essential components, in such crimes certain patterns obtain. This kind of murder is almost always domestic, and it always starts with the husband having an affair. Then there are three possible scenarios that can happen. For ease of memorizing them, I refer to the scenarios as “HKW”, “WKM” and “WAMKH”.’

  Carole didn’t think it was appropriate to say that she had already had this routine spelled out by Ted Crisp. But she admired how efficiently the Professor’s didactic approach had imprinted all the details on the landlord’s memory.

  When that part of the narrative had concluded, Nessa Perks paused long enough for Carole to ask, ‘Had you ever met Burton St Clair before last Tuesday?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the “FA” question. Predictable enough.’

  ‘“FA question”?’ Carole echoed.

  ‘“Former Acquaintance”. Much asked in Golden Age mysteries – and no less in contemporary police enquiries. If two apparently unrelated people turn out to have a shared history, well, that information is obviously of great benefit to any enquiry.’

  The Professor was silent, as though the question had been fully answered, so Carole ventured to ask, ‘So, had you?’

  ‘Had I what?’

  ‘Had you ever met Burton St Clair before last Tuesday?’

  ‘No. No, I had not.’

  ‘And of the three possible scenarios you outlined—’

  ‘The only three possible scenarios,’ Nessa Perks insisted.

  ‘Very well. Which one do you think applies in this case?’

  ‘This is very definitely “MKH”,’ she pronounced.

  ‘“Mistress Kills Husband”?’

  ‘Indubitably.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Carole, you take my word for it. That conclusion is the result of an entire career of research.’

  ‘Right. So maybe you could spell out the details for me?’

  ‘Of course. The most important factor in my deduction here is the comparative newness of Burton St Clair’s marriage. He had been married to Persephone for less than six months. Now, from my exhaustive reading of Golden Age mysteries, I have extrapolated a set of statistics about the length of time that will elapse before a marriage becomes toxic. As a general rule, husbands and wives do not murder each other until well into their cohabitation. Except in the cases of contested wills or marriages undertaken for the sole purpose of inheritance, staples both of the “Sensation” novel of the late Victorian period, there is very little evidence of homicidal activity during the first six months after the wedding.’

  ‘The honeymoon period?’ Carole suggested.

  ‘If you like,’ said the Professor, in a manner that suggested only a non-academic would use such a frivolous expression. ‘Intermarital resentment is something which tends to build up over a period of years rather than months.’

  Thinking back to her own failed marriage to David, Carole could not but agree. ‘Have you ever been married?’ she asked suddenly. Nessa Perks seemed such a remote and shrink-wrapped personality; it was hard to imagine her having any normal bodily functions, let alone relationships – and certainly not sex.

  ‘I did contract an incautious union during my sophomore year,’ came the reply, ‘which four years later, after college, developed into a marriage. It did not last.’ And with that the subject was closed.

  ‘If you could spell out a little more of your “MKH” theory?’ asked Carole humbly.

  ‘Of course. As I said, homicidal activity is very rare in the first six months of cohabitation, for which reason I would exclude Persephone St Clair from my primary list of suspects.’

  ‘But Burton St Clair’s current mistress would be in the frame?’

  Professor Vanessa Perks shook her head firmly. ‘No, it wouldn’t be a current mistress.’ Carole wondered what it must be like to go through life with such unshakable certainty that one was always right. ‘No, for a man of Burton St Clair’s age, a new marriage would be a completely new start. A tabula rasa.’ Assuming, incorrectly, that Carole did not understand the Latin expression, she provided a gloss. ‘A blank slate.’

  ‘Yes, I do know—’

  ‘So, embarking on a new marriage, Burton St Clair would have ended all other romantic entanglements.’

  Not if he has the character Jude has described to me, thought Carole.

  ‘As a suspect, we are looking therefore for a former mistress.’

  ‘And her motivation?’

  ‘In Golden Age mystery fiction, there are only five reasons to commit murder.’ As she must have done in many lectures and seminars, she enumerated them on her fingers. ‘Cover-Up, Revenge, Insanity, Money and Sex. Which fit rather neatly into the mnemonic: “CRIMS”—’

  ‘Erm,’ Carole interrupted, ‘aren’t there a few other possible motivations for murder? Surely there are also—?’

  ‘No, there are just the five,’ said the Professor in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘Believe me, I have done a lot of research on the subject. Now, in this case, looking acro
ss the CRIMS spectrum, I would say we’re definitely looking at “S”. Sex. Burton St Clair had a complicated emotional route to finding his perfect partner in the form of Persephone. He had a lot of relationships …’

  ‘He also had a former marriage.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, Carole.’ This was made to sound like a reprimand. ‘I have obviously done a lot of research on him. And it seems that he was responsible for various infidelities during the period of his first marriage. So I would say definitely what we are looking at here is “RIADBSC” scenario.’

  ‘“RIADBSC”?’ came the feeble echo from Carole.

  ‘“Revenge is a dish best served cold”,’ Nessa translated fluently. ‘A very popular scenario with Golden Age mystery writers. An offence is allowed to rankle for a very long time, and finally, when the offendee can take no more pain and humiliation, his or her restraint snaps and the result is inevitably homicide.’ Professor Vanessa Perks sat back and took a sip of Earl Grey, confident that she had produced an unanswerable thesis.

  ‘Very well,’ said Carole. ‘Sorry if I’m being stupid, but could you tell me how that applies in the current case?’

  ‘You’re not being stupid,’ said the Professor magnanimously, ‘it’s just that very few people’s brains work at the rate that mine does. This was something which came apparent in high school, and since then it’s just something I’ve had to live with.’

  Carole was tempted to say, ‘Bad luck,’ but thought that might be seen as just another example of her lack of gravitas.

  ‘In this case,’ Nessa Perks condescended, ‘the person we have to look for in our search for the murderer is the woman whose affair with Burton St Clair broke up his first marriage. That woman got a considerable charge out of seeing off his original wife Megan. It was very good for her self-esteem and she reckoned that, following the break-up, Burton St Clair was her property. She has continued to believe that ever since.’