He jotted something down, and then asked, “Now, Ms. Burke, your relationship to this writers group.”
“I have no relationship to them—it was an arrangement. Have they been able to tell you anything?”
“Nothing useful as yet. What they most want to do is advise me.” Hopgood drummed his fingertips on his knees. “I spoke too soon yesterday—about how the body was moved. It’s been pointed out to me that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that one person—woman or man—could’ve picked the victim up and carried him in a fireman’s lift with little problem.” His eyebrows rose. “Do you know what that is?”
Did it make me a suspect if I did?
“With the person horizontal across both shoulders, is that right?”
“Mmm. The arrangement for the group to meet here—was it to continue?”
I squirmed. “I had started to reconsider the offer—I’m not sure they were a good fit for the Society. But I would hardly murder one of them to accomplish that—I only needed to tell them.”
“Did they get along?”
“They had their differences of opinion, but at the end of an evening, they usually headed off to the pub together.”
“Yes, so they tell me. We’ve got the CCTV from the pub and can see who left when and which way they went.”
“Do you know what time Trist died?”
“Between two and four in the morning. I don’t like having such a wide window. The temperature in the house is fairly stable, but if he lay outdoors for any length of time, the cold would’ve delayed the normal process the body goes through when—”
The DS held up, mid-thought, and I appreciated it, suspecting that he was nearing details I might not like to hear. But I did wish he would have caught himself just a wee bit earlier.
“So, Ms. Burke. A person such as yourself—curator of a society dedicated to first-edition mysteries and, I’m sure, a fan of Mrs. Christie and her detectives—you can’t tell me you haven’t come up with a few ideas of your own.”
Here’s the sum total of what I knew about Agatha Christie’s sleuths—Miss Marple was a little old lady and Hercule Poirot a finicky Belgian. I’d never heard of Tommy and Tuppence until the writers group arrived.
“I don’t know how you could think that.”
“Oh, come now—all those detectives in books. You must’ve picked up a few pointers.”
I shifted in my seat, unable to keep still as I sought a plausible excuse. “I’ll have you know, Sergeant, that I understand the difference between my responsibilities and yours. It is not for me to dig into people’s lives and ask a lot of unpleasant questions. I would not presume to do the job of the police. Why would I even want to?”
Hopgood held up his open hands in surrender. “All right, all right—keep your hat on. But you must see it’s a bit odd that the mystery expert in our midst is the only one not trying to horn in on my enquiry.”
“It isn’t my place,” I said, nose in the air. But as he had brought it up, I added, “Is it possible that it could be one of those accidents where Trist hit his head, but got up and came inside Middlebank and up to the library, and only then collapsed and died?”
“Aha!” Hopgood stabbed a victorious finger in the air. “I knew you would come up with something.”
“It’s only a thought,” I said weakly. And not my own—it was Adele’s.
“Sadly, no,” the sergeant said. “You saw the wound at the back of his head, and you saw the topper on the railing—like a cannonball. Mr. Cummins would have had to be fair flying backward to crack his head that hard. It wasn’t only an internal injury—his skin was broken. If he’d lived for even a few minutes, he would’ve bled profusely. No, he was shoved against that railing—and shoved with a great deal of force. Died instantly.”
I sighed. Trist dead outside on Gravel Walk, then transported upstairs to the library—along with his . . .
“Sergeant, what about Trist’s leather case? He always carried it.”
“No sign of a case, Ms. Burke. Had you ever seen its contents?”
I shook my head. “So it was robbery?”
“The other writers—when I can get them away from advising me about the enquiry—say they had only ever seen printed pages of his book inside. And he had his wallet and identification with him, along with eighty-three pounds forty pence. The murderer didn’t care one whit about that.”
“Fingerprints anywhere?”
“Not a single dab,” Hopgood said, then took note of my blank look. “That is, we found fingerprints around the library from you, Mrs. Woolgar, Ms. Lunn, and the writers. Except for the door—that had been wiped. A proper job of it, too.”
Was that an oblique reference to the person who cleaned Middlebank? I made no comment.
“Well, I’ll have that word with Mrs. Woolgar, and that’ll be me away.” The sergeant rose and I followed him out.
But Mrs. Woolgar was not in her office.
“She must be downstairs in her flat for lunch,” I said, checking the time.
“Right, I’ll catch her up later. Meanwhile, Ms. Burke, if you do think of anything, you will let us know.”
* * *
* * *
It was high time for me to have a bite of lunch, too. I went to my flat, stood at the kitchen sink, and ate cheese and crackers and grapes, considering what sort of busywork I could assign myself for the afternoon. Ah, yes—the cellar. Changing into old denims and a sweater with a hole in the sleeve, I headed for the lower ground floor, looking into Mrs. Woolgar’s office on my way, to find she had returned to her desk.
“Sergeant Hopgood wanted to have another word with you,” I said.
“Did he say why?”
“It’s about the keys, I think. He asked who would have access to the keys and the alarm code.”
“I’ve told him already.”
“Yes, well”—this was not my battle to fight—“I’ll be below continuing with the cellar.”
But my heart was not in it, and my work consisted only of shifting a few more bits of furniture, and then resting on a side chair. Chippendale—it matched the one on the library landing. I had reached the first carton and found it full of old copies of Vogue—really old—and settled down to peruse the June 1953 issue, brimming with stories and photos of the Queen’s coronation. That’s how Mrs. Woolgar found me when she appeared at the door.
“I’m staying elsewhere again tonight, Ms. Burke—I hope this won’t be a problem.”
“Thank you for telling me. I’ll be perfectly fine here this evening, and I’ll be off to Liverpool tomorrow morning as usual. I’ll see you—”
“Monday morning.” She didn’t leave, but instead looked down at the key where I’d left it in the door.
“I will be sure to lock the cellar and keep the key in a safe place,” I told her, and went back to my magazine.
But she’d broken the spell—my pretense that nothing was wrong and I always sat in cellars looking at decades-old magazines. I flipped a few more pages, but when I heard Mrs. Woolgar leave her flat and the front door upstairs close, it dawned on me that I was alone in Middlebank. I checked the time—just gone four o’clock. I needed to do a bit of shopping, and so closed up the cellar, retrieved my handbag from my flat, and was at the front door when Bunter reminded me about his dinner.
I fed him and left as he tucked into a dish of fish-in-gravy.
9
At Waitrose, I stood in front of the refrigerated shelves of ready meals with a wire basket looped over an arm, perusing the offerings as if I were looking at frocks in the window at Jack Wills. While I pondered the macaroni cheese, another shopper came up beside me, and I shifted over a few inches to make room. But I realized I was being watched, and so I took a quick peek to size up the situation.
“Hello,” he said.
It was Val Moff
att, wearing scruffy brown trousers, a sweater, and that same green jacket he’d worn the first time I’d seen him. His own shopping basket was half full. I noticed a tiny hole in the neck of his sweater, and then remembered the hole in the sleeve of my own. I put my hand over it.
“Oh, hello, Mr. Moffatt,” I said airily.
Neither of us moved as a woman reached round me in a hurry to nab a chicken tikka masala and get on with it.
Moffatt peered in my basket. “You took the last cottage pie, did you?” he asked.
“Sorry?” I looked down at my hoard. “Oh, yes, I suppose I did.”
“I’ll trade you a lemon pepper chicken for it.” He held the container out to me, his face full of hope.
I glanced into his basket. “Can’t you do better than that?”
With what appeared to be great reluctance, he pulled out a different dinner. “I do have this four-cheese ravioli I might be willing to let go.”
“Done.”
We exchanged dinners and smiles, and his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“You wouldn’t be interested in another swap?” he asked. “For example, what would you give me for this fine tub of organic strawberry yogurt?”
I wrinkled my nose. “I much prefer mango yogurt.”
“Do you, now?” he murmured. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”
Jostled from the back, I remembered where we were and said, “Well, I should get on with my shopping.” But I found myself disinclined to move.
“I don’t suppose—” He hesitated and looked at his shoes. “Did you happen to check your e-mail this afternoon?”
And with that, my spirits dropped to the floor and shattered. “Oh God, they know, don’t they? Your people at Bath College have found out what happened at Middlebank. Did they say no to the project? Did they give up just because of a—” An elbow appeared in my vision as a woman reached in for beef stroganoff. I swallowed my next words. “You know, too, don’t you—you know about the . . . incident?”
“Yes, I heard.”
“So, that’s it? We’re written off as unreliable and attracting the wrong sort and being the scene of a crime—is that it? Is it over?” My voice trembled, and an edge of hysteria crept in until I ended in little more than a warble.
“Hang on,” Moffatt said, and took my elbow, guiding me to the middle of the aisle and out of people’s way. “I don’t believe it’s the end.” He glanced at our surroundings—Waitrose on a Friday at five o’clock was a melee. “Look, do you fancy a coffee? I mean, we could go over a few issues before we decide how to approach them.”
With great effort I regulated my breathing until I could reply. “Yes, all right—how about the café?”
* * *
* * *
We went through the basket till to pay and then lugged our bags up the stairs to the Waitrose café, where we joined the queue. I stood on tiptoe to look over the shoulders of the people in front of me and saw one fruit scone left. Please let no one else take it. Once I’d had a cup of tea, I’d be better able to assess the situation, as bleak as it seemed. My first big idea for the Society shot down because of a murder—doesn’t it just figure?
At the café till, Moffatt asked for a dish of blackberry crumble and a little pitcher of custard with his coffee, and he paid for both our trays. When I protested, he said, “Doing my part in hopes that you won’t shoot the messenger.” I gave in, and we found a table by the windows that overlooked the bottom of Walcot Street and sat on plastic chairs under fluorescent lights.
Moffatt looked admiringly at our surroundings. “I could live at Waitrose,” he said, tucking into his crumble.
“You what?”
“I’m serious. I’m thinking of slipping a cot into that back corner, near the beer aisle. They’d never get rid of me.”
I giggled and he smiled. “There now, that’s better.”
“What is?”
“You were looking a bit glum back there.”
“Yes, and with good reason.” I buttered my scone and spread strawberry jam over half. “Go on, tell me what they said.”
“Oh, various worries about being seen to condone violence and the instability of an organization that has yet to prove itself after the death of its founder. One of our more cynical faculty wondered if this wasn’t a publicity stunt on the part of the Society.”
“Publicity stunt? I’m sure the victim—Trist—would disagree. And if they’d care for a firsthand account, I’d be happy to describe how horrible it is to look down on the corpse of someone you knew.” I sloshed milk into my tea. “Publicity stunt, my—”
“He was talking through his hat,” Moffatt cut in.
“Well, there’s nothing for it but to meet this head-on. I’ll go and talk with them in person. Answer their questions, ease their worries.”
Moffatt nodded, his mouth full. When he’d swallowed, he said, “It’s just what I thought. Look, we’ve a faculty meeting on Monday afternoon, three o’clock. I’ll put us on the agenda—we’ll show them a solid front.”
“Yes, that’s good. And your friend Amanda can put in a good word for us.”
“Amanda? What does she have to do with this?”
“You said it was a friend told you about the idea of a joint venture between the college and the Society. Last Wednesday, I saw that you and Amanda knew each other, so I thought she was the friend who told you about us.”
Moffatt laughed. “Amanda’s not my friend—she’s my student.”
“But then, who is your friend?”
“Adele.”
I felt as if I’d been bopped on the head. “Adele Babbage?”
“Didn’t she mention it?”
No, Adele had been surprisingly mum with this piece of information—even after I’d told her Moffatt was the one who’d been in touch.
“Probably slipped her mind,” I offered, not believing my own excuse. A thought niggled at me, but I set it aside to be examined later. “Right, Monday afternoon. But I’ll be away all weekend and won’t have time to work up anything new. Can we sort out our approach now?”
We did, deciding who would take which talking points. By the time he’d finished his crumble and I’d taken the last bite of my scone, we had our plan—and I had another worry. Would the committee ask me a pointed question about one of those famous detectives in books that I knew nothing about? Would I at last be flushed out for the fraud I was? I shoved that problem into an empty wardrobe in my mind and slammed the door.
“So, you’re away,” Moffatt said. “It’s probably for the best.”
“I’m away every weekend. On Saturdays, I go up to see my mum in Liverpool. And this Sunday, I’ll spend all day with my boyfriend in London—that’s where he lives.” I hadn’t mentioned that to Wyn, but I knew there would be no problem.
Moffatt drained his cup. “Your mum is in Liverpool? Is that where you’re from?”
“No, Herefordshire. When my mum remarried, she moved to Liverpool with her husband. Then he moved to Scotland. They’re divorced now.”
Toying with his coffee spoon, Moffatt said, “And has your boyfriend not come down here to Bath? You know, considering what you’re going through.”
“He’s quite tied up with his work.”
Moffatt lifted his eyebrows. “Where does he work?”
“He works for himself.”
I heard my own words, and added quickly, “He’s an inventor and at a crucial stage of a new project.”
“What does he . . . invent?”
I launched into a vivid and detailed description of Eat Here, Eat Now. “And so, you see, it’s difficult for him to get away at the moment, what with the delicate nature of . . . He and his business partner are sorting out the intricacies of . . .” I floundered and grabbed for the nearest life buoy. “It’s a fully funded start-up.”
Moffatt listened politely without asking questions.
“But I’ll return Sunday evening, so there’s no problem with the Monday-afternoon meeting.”
“But in the meantime, you and Mrs. Woolgar aren’t staying in your flats, are you?”
I arched an eyebrow, half waiting for another reference to how good I had it, but nothing else followed. Perhaps I’d taken his remark about my accommodations the wrong way and he’d only been admiring his surroundings. I certainly admired them on a daily basis.
“Mrs. Woolgar is staying elsewhere tonight.”
“And you?”
“I stayed at Adele’s last night.”
“And you will tonight as well?” Moffatt asked with an insistent tone.
“No. I’m perfectly safe at Middlebank. We’ve changed the locks and the security code. I refuse to be frightened out of my own home.”
Moffatt leaned in and whispered fiercely, “Yesterday morning you found a man murdered in the library. There’s no point in trying to be brave about it.”
“I don’t need to be brave,” I retorted. “This doesn’t have anything to do with—”
“You should stay with Adele!”
“I want to sleep in my own bed!”
My voice echoed off the walls of the café as silence fell round us. I dropped my eyes to the table, wishing I could slide beneath it and hide.
“Do you think anyone heard that?” I asked quietly.
“Oh, I’d say everyone heard it.”
I cut my eyes up at him and saw the smile he tried to hide. I returned the smile and then giggled. Without warning, the giggles exploded into shrieks of laughter. I clamped a hand over my mouth, but it did no good, and only resulted in a series of snorts. Tears streamed down my face, and when I took a gasping breath, it began all over again.
Moffatt’s grin vanished, replaced by a look of concern. I knew I should stop, but I couldn’t figure out how until he put a firm hand on my arm, forming a bridge back to reality. I began to calm down, and at last, panting, I wiped my eyes and blew my nose on one of the tiny paper café napkins. It disintegrated under the strain.
The Bodies in the Library Page 9
