The Bodies in the Library

by Marty Wingate

  She shrugged.

  “You told the police, didn’t you—about this impending breakup?”

  “It didn’t seem relevant. And, if I had told the police, they might put me in the frame for Trist’s murder, and I didn’t do it, and so thought it best not to distract them from the enquiry.”

  In the frame. I continued to place Charles Henry Dill in the frame for Trist’s murder, and so I tended to agree with Harry. Still, every bit of information should be handed over to the police. I blushed, remembering my omission—suspicions about Lulu and her connection to Pauline.

  “Harry, the police do need to know everything.”

  “Yes, yes—” Harry squirmed and then heaved a sigh. “All right, I’ll tell them. If they’ll let me into the station again.”

  Now I only needed to persuade myself to come clean, too.

  “Where did you leave Trist?” I asked. “Where did you go?”

  “I had a great deal to think about, and Trist said he wanted to catch the others up and tell them, so he turned back. And I took a walk up through Bathwick Fields. You can see the lights of the city. I go there often—it’s a good way to clear my head. Although I’m not sure the police believe me. Would I believe me? Would Miss Marple?”

  “Is that safe—walking there late at night?”

  “There are always dog walkers about both late and early—and also, I carry an air horn with me. Anyone tries anything, and I could burst his eardrums. Do you want to hear?”

  “No thanks—you sound prepared, so good on you. After you left Trist”—there was no harm in asking, was there?—“did you see anyone else? Did you see a large man wearing a brown plaid suit?”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “The thing is,” Harry said, “Trist didn’t think we could make it on our own. Wouldn’t he be surprised?”

  I don’t know what we’re going to do without him—that’s what Amanda had said to me. More than once.

  “But you have Amanda at the reins now. To guide you.”

  “It feels more like a choke hold. Do you know she e-mailed instructions to us for this week? Instructions! I’d never seen this side of her, but we’re following along. I suppose it shows you we need someone to take charge—even Peter does. Amanda says someone’s got to keep us writing and it might as well be her.”

  “Did Trist get to the others that night—to tell them about leaving the group?”

  “I haven’t asked,” Harry said, her face reddening. “I didn’t want to let on I knew in case he hadn’t. Amanda thinks I’ve got loose lips. But I’ve not been grassing anyone up.”

  “By ‘grassing up,’ do you mean turning over information to the police that might be useful in their enquiry into Trist’s murder?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “And you told them about your relationship with Trist yourself.”

  “I did. But Amanda thinks I’m the one who let on about the set-to Trist and Peter had. And that I told them about Mariella.”

  “What about Mariella?”

  “It was nothing really. Only that she’s given her Poirot special powers. Trist called that a superficial plot device, and she told him she hoped he would meet his end at the hands of one of Miss Marple’s zombies.”

  For a moment, we watched a woman outside fishing round in the buckets, pulling out stems to make her own arrangement. Harry swirled the dregs of her coffee and drank it down.

  “Even though I’m back at work,” she said, “the enquiry is always on my mind. And I’ve been wondering—I know you said the books in the library weren’t the valuable ones, but was there anything else someone might’ve wanted?”

  Had someone been searching the library for valuables? Now that she’d brought it up, it had occurred to me that if the murderer could get in once—when he carried Trist up to the library—he could’ve been in at other times, too. On Wednesday evenings, after the writers left, I would give the library a cursory inspection and think all was well, but the next morning, Mrs. Woolgar would spot chairs out of place and books taken off shelves. Had I not been paying close enough attention, or had someone come back into Middlebank later—wandering the house, having his way with the library, standing at the doors of our flats? I shuddered.

  What if Trist had found out about this and had gone to confront him, and only then had the would-be thief turned into a murderer?

  “Harry, remember you asked me if it was all right to take the books off the shelves, and I said it was fine? I have noticed that someone has handled them. Who was it?”

  The door opened, and in came the woman with her arms full of flowers. Harry hopped off her stool.

  “Oh . . . er . . . that was just a general question,” she replied, and with that, having reminded herself of Amanda’s comment about loose lips, Harry snapped hers shut.

  * * *

  * * *

  The woman at the coffee shop next door let me nip into their toilet, and I gave her a wave of thanks as I left. Stepping out onto the pavement, I saw two women approach—the older one in a wheelchair and the younger one pushing. I held the door open for them.

  “Here you are.”

  The older woman patted my arm as they passed. “Bless,” she said.

  The younger one gave me a smile. “Thanks.”

  “You’ve very welcome,” I replied. “Enjoy your coffees.”

  That could be my mum and me—and it reminded me of my mother’s admonishment about keeping an open mind on the enquiry. Dill shouldn’t be the only bird in my cage of suspects. Right, well, I would make straight for Detective Sergeant Hopgood and show him that I had an open mind and was able to pick up on clues and put them together and come to conclusions and not just be stuck in a rut. Also, I could find out if they’d arrested Charles Henry yet.

  I turned the corner and marched up Manvers, the police station in sight and my resolve firm. I slid my hand along the top of the metal railing as I walked the concrete ramp, and reached the doors just as Charles Henry Dill burst out, nearly knocking me over. We stopped—the shock that went through me reflected on his face. But for only a second. Then his eyes narrowed, and he stuck a finger at my face. I couldn’t help noticing the nail was filed and buffed, cuticle trimmed. Tosser—spending his inheritance on manicures?

  “Do you think I don’t know you’re behind this?” he hissed. Every bit of his smarmy charm had been torn away, and what was left was not pretty. “Required to prove my whereabouts the past fortnight like a common criminal? You’re lucky I don’t press charges for harassment.”

  We had dropped into the middle of a battle that, up to that moment, had been fought only in my head.

  “Harassment?” I snapped. “Pull the other one, why don’t you. If anyone’s doing the harassing, it’s you. With your petty scheming, you are threatening the memory of Lady Fowling and her legacy. And you do it for your own gain.”

  “You did not know my aunt, Ms. Burke, and I’ll thank you not to imagine her thoughts and feelings.”

  “I don’t have to imagine—those closest to her know full well her views and her deepest desires.”

  He took a step closer and I wanted more than the world to shrink away, but I steeled myself and didn’t move. “The police came to visit me.” He spoke in a low, menacing voice. “At my hotel. They called me out to the lobby of the Royal Crescent in front of other guests. You can’t tell me you and Woolley didn’t have something to do with that.”

  “Did they clap you in irons and drag you out the door? Did they chain you to a pillar? Or did they have a quiet word to clear a few things up. The police are an entity unto themselves, Mr. Dill—neither I nor Mrs. Woolgar can order them around Bath and force them to talk with people even if those people may have information vital to an ongoing enquiry. And by the way, does Maureen Frost know you have another friend in town?”
r />   His face went puce, and his eyes bugged out like a cartoon character. I would’ve laughed, except it frightened me.

  “How does my personal life concern you?” he choked out.

  “What concerns me is your motive, your desire, to destroy your aunt’s lifelong work, the thing she loved above all else.”

  “There, you’ve said it—what she ‘loved above all else.’ Books—made-up stories about detectives. Not real people—not her own family.”

  “You ungrateful—” Before I knew it, I was advancing on him. His face went from purple to white as he stumbled backward, bumping into the railing. “Perhaps if you hadn’t always come at her with your hand out, you’d’ve discovered what a lovely woman she was. You just keep this up, Mr. Dill—we know what you’re really about. We know what you’ve done. And truth will out.”

  “What, Shakespeare?” He laughed as he straightened his jacket. “Shouldn’t you be quoting Jane Marple—or are you that unfamiliar with her?”

  The door to the station opened, and both of us jumped. DC Kenny Pye put his head out.

  “Is everything all right here?” he asked, eyeing us.

  “Yes, thank you for asking, Detective Constable Pye,” I said. “As it happens, I’ve come to have a word with you and Sergeant Hopgood.” I breezed past Dill into the station.

  * * *

  * * *

  Kenny Pye went in search of Hopgood as I waited near the front desk. The dark look on the sergeant’s face when he appeared made me unsure of my welcome.

  “I will take up as little of your time as possible,” I said. “But it’s occurred to me that the person who murdered Trist may have gained entry to Middlebank before that night—may have spent time in the library and even searched the house, for all I know. I mean, if he got in once, why couldn’t he have—”

  Constable Pye interrupted. “Sarge.”

  Hopgood looked from his DC to me, his eyebrows a solid horizontal line. He didn’t speak, but it was as if I could see the gears turning in his mind. At last, he nodded. “Come through, Ms. Burke.”

  The officers dropped me off in Interview #1 and excused themselves. I tried to get comfortable in the hard chair—next time, I’d bring a pillow to sit on and my own cup of tea. I was alone long enough to let my thoughts wander away from the murder enquiry and down other roads. I knew why Wyn hadn’t phoned back—I had seen him so absorbed in work that he heard or saw nothing else. He and his crew were holed up in a Brussels hotel room talking software programming and working up manufacturing quotes to build an army of Myrtles. I had wanted to end our relationship in person, but if I had to break it off over the phone, I would.

  When Sergeant Hopgood swept into the room with DC Pye in his wake, my thoughts scattered in the wind.

  “Now, about these earlier break-ins,” Hopgood began.

  “What earlier break-ins?” I asked, my eyes on the two thick files Kenny Pye had laid on the table. “Oh, wait, yes, I see. I can’t say for certain, but looking back, it’s possible things had been moved round the library, and it may have happened when no one was about.”

  “‘May have’?” Hopgood repeated.

  “Or not.” The more I thought about it, the less sure I became. “On Wednesday evenings, after the writers group left, I almost always looked into the library before going up to my flat—to check that they’d left it tidy, you know. It would look fine to me at the time. And yet the next morning, Mrs. Woolgar always seemed to find a chair out of place or a book left unshelved.”

  Perhaps ignoring a chair out of place or a book down off the shelf had been my way of protesting Mrs. Woolgar’s rigid view of how the Society and Middlebank should be run. I regretted that now.

  “And so now you believe someone had been in the library before the night of the murder?” Pye asked.

  “I can’t be sure, but what else could it be?”

  Trist would’ve chalked it up to Lady Fowling’s ghost—that had always been his flippant remark when I brought it up. Had he been covering for his own actions—or someone else’s? Because I knew for certain it had not been Lady Fowling’s ghost—she would never play cheap tricks like that.

  “You’re certain nothing was taken?” the sergeant asked.

  Pye had opened one of the files. As he ran his finger down a half-page list of numbers, I tried to read upside down. Were they dates?

  “I will check the books against our catalog,” I said, “but as I told you before, the valuable part of the collection is at the bank. I suppose some of the paintings or furniture could be worth a bit, but I feel certain I’d notice if someone had carried the mahogany hall stand out the door.” I couldn’t hold my curiosity any longer. “This isn’t about Trist, is it?”

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Burke.”

  “I’m dismissed? But, Sergeant, what about Charles Henry Dill?”

  “That was quite alert of you, picking up on the fact that Mr. Dill did arrive in Bath earlier than he initially stated.” Hopgood’s tone had eased, making me think he was relieved at this change of topic. “Two days earlier, in fact. But still, that was well after the murder, and there is no evidence that points to him.”

  My shoulders sagged.

  “Picking a favorite too early in the race can lead us astray,” the sergeant said gently. “We must keep an open mind, even when faced with unpleasant facts.”

  I must introduce Sergeant Hopgood to my mother one of these days.

  24

  I walked out of the station and stood holding on to the railing for a moment, washed out and in need of lunch. No wonder—gone four o’clock. Waitrose was in one direction, but I headed the other way, opting for the café in Marks & Spencer instead. It was a good second, and closer to my next destination. I had an egg-and-cress sandwich and tea and felt much better for it, although I had to go in search of a Boots to buy dental floss before continuing to Bath College. All day, I had longed to see Val, and yet I had been filled with apprehension. At last, longing had won.

  I took time for only one more chore. Standing on the pavement on Stall Street, I made another attempt at Wyn. Voice mail again. I know your meetings in Brussels are important, but please ring. We need to talk.

  On the day Val and I had met with the committee about the literary salons, he had stopped by his office, and so, when I walked through the glass-front entry of the college, at least I knew where to look for him.

  His door stood open, and he sat at a desk that was stacked with books in precarious columns. Any other open space had been filled with loose sheets of paper. At one corner lay an open laptop, and at another, I saw the backs of photo frames. He had his head down, reading a paperback, but I couldn’t see the title and I didn’t want to disturb. Instead, I took in the sight of him, wearing his slightly worn green corduroy jacket and a green plaid shirt with a dark wool tie that hung askew. I could straighten that for him. Only when two students passed behind me in the corridor, laughing, did he look up.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi.” He rose with a smile and walked round the desk. “Come in.”

  “I’m disturbing you—you’re preparing for class.”

  “No, I’ve nothing to prepare for this evening. It’s the ‘Unnamed Manuscript’ night—students who want to submit a few pages of a new piece can do so, anonymously. I read them out and anyone can offer a first impression.”

  “Oh, that sounds interesting.” I fiddled with the zipper on my bag and my gaze wandered round the room. I was at a loss as to how to begin.

  Val’s smile faded—my apprehension must be contagious. I needed to get this over with.

  “Look—”

  “Do you want to sit down?” He gestured to two chairs by a low table.

  “Thanks.” He closed the door before joining me. But as soon as I sat, I popped up again. He followed suit.

  “I went to Lo
ndon yesterday. To see Wyn.”

  My throat was dry and I coughed, and Val lost a bit of color in his face, and his smile vanished altogether.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I was going to tell him, explain to him, that he and I were . . . that it wasn’t really working out . . . and so . . . but there was a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “He proposed.”

  Val cocked his head, as if he hadn’t heard properly. “He proposed—marriage?”

  I nodded, my misery complete.

  “You didn’t accept, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t accept! It’s only that I didn’t have the opportunity to tell him no. Tommy walked in with some other bloke and they all breezed out the door, off to Brussels to talk with a fellow about bloody Myrtle and how to keep the bouillabaisse from going bad. I tried to stop him and tell him we needed to talk, but he paid me no mind. Off he went.” I flung my arm out, and Val had to step back or be struck.

  My outburst had drained me and I sank back into the chair, hugged my bag, and stared at the floor. “He doesn’t listen,” I muttered. “He never listens.”

  Val perched on the edge of his chair. I stole a look at him—his face gave nothing away.

  I popped up again. “I’ve left three voice mails for him today. He gets so absorbed in this Eat Here, Eat Now business he pays no attention to anything else. I would rather talk with him and explain, but if I have to break up by voice mail, so be it.” I frowned and my frown deepened—better that than let my chin quiver. “Am I being ridiculous? Insisting on stopping this with him before I . . . we . . . start something else?”

  “No, you aren’t ridiculous. You’re cautious. You’re considerate.” Val stepped close and ran his hand down my arm. Then he pulled back and stuck his hands in his pockets, as if they couldn’t be trusted.

  “I will get this sorted,” I said.

  He nodded. His hands came out of his pockets, and he stuck them under his arms. “Will you have dinner with me? Not this evening, but—”