The Bodies in the Library

by Marty Wingate

  My heart’s desire? Were those the choices in life, either marriage or occasional couplings? Surely there was something between. The anger drained away, leaving me empty and tired and in great need of talking with Val.

  “No, Wyn, it isn’t my heart’s desire.”

  I heard the kettle, its whistle gaining force and rising in pitch. The library door opened and Harry called down, “Do you need help with the tea, Hayley?”

  “No, thanks—I’ll be right there.” I nodded up the stairs and said to Wyn, “The writers are here, and I’ve got to get back to it. You all right? Can I get you something? Cup of tea?”

  Wyn’s head bobbed somewhere between a nod and a shake. “No, I . . .”

  His phone rang. I motioned for him to answer and walked back to the kitchenette. I’d leave him to it, and when I came through with the tea, we’d have a properly sweet—but brief—goodbye. I would wish him best of luck with Myrtle and his entire business, and he would leave with no hard feelings.

  I poured up the pot and put milk, sugar, and mugs on the tray alongside a packet of shortbread fingers. I returned to the entry to see Wyn walking out the door while on his phone.

  “No, Tommy,” he was saying, “drone delivery won’t work in the City, the population’s too dense. We can’t deal with airspace problems now, we’ve got to stick to what we know—the pavement. Although, saying that, we must sort out Myrtle’s ability to detect foot traffic, or we’ll be buggered. What if she crashes into some rich American from California—we’d never get overseas investments. I’m on my way now, let’s have another look at the details before we go any further.”

  He didn’t even turn, but reached round behind and pulled the door closed.

  I continued up to the library, where Mariella began reading as soon as the tea was distributed. She was followed by Amanda, her piece sounding innocuous, and familiar. The glances darting round the room told me she’d gone back to rewriting those ten pages.

  Through the rest of the evening, Val wouldn’t meet my eye. What did he think had happened downstairs? Didn’t he trust me? I spent the remainder of the time annoyed and hurt and scared, and wanting it all to be over as quickly as possible.

  * * *

  * * *

  Peter took the tea tray downstairs and then left with Mariella. Amanda looked set to rush out but paused long enough to leave my phone on the hall stand and say, “Sorry, Hayley, I didn’t recognize her.” She leaned closer and added quietly, “I handed your phone to Mariella, too. Hope that was all right.”

  “She’d already seen the photos, but thanks.” Amanda scooted out the door before I could wish her good evening.

  That left Val and me alone in the entry. He stood at the bottom of the stairs while I kept near the door—a vast ocean of misunderstanding between us.

  “I had only stepped out onto the landing to ask if you needed help,” he said. “I didn’t mean to overhear you and Wyn.”

  “It’s all right—I’m glad you heard.”

  He shifted, looked down at his shoes, and put his hands in his jacket pockets. “I don’t want to get between the two of you.”

  “That would be impossible to do, because Wyn and I are no longer together.”

  “I saw him propose—he must care for you. And if I have, in any way—”

  I crossed my arms and stuck out my chin. “You should’ve stayed on the landing to hear the rest. The part where I told him no, I would not marry him, and he was so entirely heartbroken that when he got a call from his business partner, he walked out, wittering on about Myrtle’s navigation system and trying to land an American investor. It was quite touching.”

  “Look, Hayley, maybe we should—” Val took one step toward me with his hand out, and Harry appeared from the kitchenette.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, lifting her shoulders and scrunching up her face. “I always seem to be interrupting, don’t I? I stayed to tidy up the kitchen. The thing is, Hayley, could I have a quick word? And then I swear I’m gone.”

  “No need to hurry,” Val said. “I’m just off. Good evening.”

  “Thank you for attending our group, Mr. Moffatt,” Harry called after him. “Your comments were quite helpful.” Val acknowledged her with a wave. Harry and I watched him walk down the pavement, the light from the streetlamps turning his green jacket gray.

  “Do you think he’ll come back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I took my time closing the door, blinking like mad to empty my eyes of unwanted tears. I sniffed and faced Harry and smiled. “So, now, what did you want to tell me?”

  “Well, so.” Harry looked over her shoulder, although we were alone. “It’s your photos of that woman.”

  “Lulu Ingleby.”

  “Lulu. There were a great many of them—”

  “I did that by accident. But you could see her well enough in the first few.”

  “Did you show them to the others?”

  “Yes. Peter saw them earlier today, and I showed Mariella before we went up. And Amanda just before I came down to make the tea. No one recognized her.”

  “The photos covered a few seconds of time,” Harry said. “Did you look at all of them? Because—can I show you?”

  I grabbed my phone off the hall stand, opened photos, and was met with a shot of Bunter I’d taken a week ago as he lay asleep on the bottom step. I flipped forward, but there was nothing. I flipped the other way and went further back in time.

  “Where have they gone?” This was no time for a camera malfunction, but no amount of furious swiping brought up the bursts of Lulu.

  Harry tried and I tried again.

  “Maybe they were deleted,” Harry suggested.

  “No, that’s not—wait, though. Even if they were, they’d still be in ‘recently deleted’!” I zeroed in on that last-hope file and found it empty.

  “They’ve vanished—all of them.” My words echoed in my head. “What’s happened?”

  “When you gave your phone to Amanda, did she give it back?” Harry asked.

  “She brought it downstairs at the end and set it there on the hall stand. She told me she had handed it to Mariella, but Mariella had already seen them.”

  “So the photos were there when you gave Amanda the phone, and now they’re gone.”

  “Harry, are you saying Amanda deleted all those photos of Lulu Ingleby?”

  “I’m saying that at the end of the second burst of photos, I saw one that showed Amanda and Lulu talking.”

  28

  Harry peppered me with questions about Lulu Ingleby, but I replied only vaguely, and instead countered with my own queries. “Are you sure they were talking to each other? Could you tell their expressions? Friendly? Angry?”

  “It was definitely an enounter of some kind. And I wouldn’t say either of them looked happy. Why won’t you tell me who she is? Is she involved in Trist’s murder?”

  “She works for Pauline, who cleans for us. If she is involved, the police will find out—I will ring them first thing in the morning. Better still, I’ll go in to the station.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Harry said quickly, and then just as fast she moaned. “No, I can’t. We’ve a massive order for a wedding, and I won’t have a minute to myself.”

  “Just as well—the police probably won’t tell me what they know. Now, off you go. Will you be all right walking home? I mean, are you still nervous about being watched?”

  She gave me a sad smile. “I’m not nervous, no. After I said it aloud—that I felt Trist was watching me—it sort of made me feel better. But, if I believe that, does it make me daft?”

  I certainly hoped not.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mrs. Woolgar and I were like ships passing in the night—she returned and we nodded to each other as I took the stairs. Tomorrow,
at our morning briefing, we would talk.

  In my flat, I worked over and over this new evidence. Amanda knew—or at the very least had encountered—Lulu, but she had lied about it. Why? How well did they know each other? I drew up connections in my mind the way Sergeant Hopgood had drawn lines to show where the suspects had walked the night of Trist’s murder.

  Amanda lived in Grove Street.

  I had seen Lulu in Grove Street. She must live there, too.

  Amanda and Lulu knew each other. They could be flatmates.

  After that initial connection, my suppositions drifted into wild ideas. Lulu had access to houses through Cleaned by Pauline—was she part of a gang that carried out those “no sign of forced entry” break-ins? Had she gained access to Middlebank by stealing the key and code from Pauline? Had she somehow involved her flatmate? Had Trist discovered this and confronted them—or was he part of the gang? After all, he had been accused of theft five years ago. And acquitted, I reminded myself—much to Mrs. Woolgar’s dismay.

  I pulled the online news site up on my phone—the “rag” that ran the brief about Trist’s murder and where I’d seen the item about the break-ins. There might be more clues there than I’d first noticed.

  More than a clue—there was an update. Another break-in had occurred only that afternoon—a quiet street, empty during daylight hours after everyone had left for work. But someone had noticed unusual activity and the police were notified. Sergeant Hopgood and Constable Pye had been on a callout this afternoon—and now a woman had been detained and was helping them with their enquiries.

  “Detained”? “Helping”? Anyone could read between those lines—they’d got her, a suspect in the robberies.

  But who was it? Lulu? Amanda? Pauline? No, wait—not Amanda, because she attended the writers group this evening. Did I have this completely wrong?

  I could ask myself questions until my head burst, but none would be answered until tomorrow, so I took a bath, sinking up to my chin in hot water. Only when the bath cooled did I get out, dry off, and go to bed—where my mind continued to spin, caroming from one potential disaster to another. I could or could not still have a job as curator at The First Edition Society when Charles Henry got finished with us. The police might or might not be closing in on Trist’s killer. I might or might not have a dinner date for Friday.

  I needed to fill my mind with happy, peaceful images or I would never get one second’s sleep, and so I inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. I thought of Val. I thought of the seaside. I thought of Dinah’s baby eyes following the china figurine as it twirled. I thought of Val again. At last, I fell asleep, and awoke rested and ready for my day at seventeen minutes past two in the morning.

  For the next half hour, I stared at the ceiling, and then decided there was nothing else for it—I arose, made tea, and went back to reading Lady Fowling’s notebooks.

  Strange thoughts come to one’s mind in the middle of the night. As I ran my hand over a marbled cover, I again had the sense I’d seen one of these exercise books before. Mrs. Woolgar thought they’d all been packed away, but a stray must’ve been left behind.

  Where had I seen it? Closing my eyes, I cleared my mind and waited for the answer. Nothing came—nothing except the notion of putting my slippers on and having a nose round my office.

  The light from my flat illuminated my way down the first set of stairs, where I held up outside the library and studied Lady Fowling’s portrait in the soft glow.

  “If you know something, you should just tell me, don’t you think?” I asked.

  Think for yourself, she responded. You’re good at that. You’ve had to be.

  How should I react to this—be pleased with her confidence in me or worried for my sanity talking to a painting? And also, shouldn’t I look in the library? But without making a conscious decision, I continued to my office, switched on all the lamps, and blinked in the brightness.

  “Why here?”

  There was only one way to find out—a search. I sat down, moved my laptop to the floor, and began with two stacks of unread mystery magazines, holding each one by its binding and giving it a shake. Finding nothing hiding between the pages, I set to cleaning out the drawers.

  That’s when Bunter appeared at my door.

  “Sorry to disturb you, cat, but I’m glad of the company.”

  He stretched—first, extending his front legs until they were almost flat on the floor and his bottom in the air, then reversing. Only when he’d finished did he saunter round the desk, sit down, and stare at the bottom drawer.

  “I’m afraid I ate the last of the custard creams you saw in there,” I told him, opening it as proof. But he might not have believed me—he stood on his hind legs, reached a paw in, and began an excavation, his claws catching on papers deep down. He shook them loose and continued, as if determined to reach to the bottom.

  “Bunter, what is it? Not a spider, I hope, because if it is, I’ll leave you to it and go make the tea.”

  He had sunk his foreleg up to his shoulder. It caught and he struggled to release it, tugging and making noises in his throat until at last his paw broke free and his prize went sailing through the air. A catnip mouse.

  “When did you put that in there?” I asked, but Bunter paid no heed, and instead crept forward on his belly, stalking his prey, which had landed near the fireplace.

  “Why ever have I saved all this?” I asked, pulling out a mountain of papers. I set the pile on my lap, and half of them slipped to the floor, and when I leaned over to retrieve them, I spied it at the bottom of the drawer.

  A worn exercise notebook, the sort with the marbled cover. As I reached for it, the memory came back to me. I’d found it in the library on a Thursday, the day after the writers group had met. I hadn’t seen anything out of place the night before, but upon inspection the next morning, Mrs. Woolgar’s eagle eyes had spotted the library stepladder moved, and when I walked to the other side of the table, I’d spied the notebook on the floor and had snatched it up so she wouldn’t have even more to complain about.

  I had assumed one of the writers had left it, and so without a second look, I’d taken it downstairs and dropped it in my desk drawer, intending to ask them the following week. But it had become buried under draft proposals for literary salons and so forgotten. At that point, I had had no hint of Lady Fowling’s cartonful of notebooks, and so it had never occurred to me it might be hers. But now, on closer inspection, I could see her name in spidery script in the corner—I hadn’t noticed it before because a thick line had been drawn through it with a darker pen.

  I opened the notebook and cried out, sending Bunter racing from my office.

  “Who did this?” I hissed.

  Not only the cover, but also the contents of the exercise book had been defaced. A heavier hand with a darker pen had scrawled comments in the margins, crossed out words in lists, and written over household notes as if the sheet had been clean. On one page, Lady Fowling’s scrolly hand explained her love of St. Mary Mead and why Miss Marple’s soft spirit and sharp mind represented a modern woman of the time. Across the top had been scratched: DON’T GO OUT AT NIGHT.

  Who? Who shouldn’t go out at night? Was this a reference to Trist’s writing about Miss Marple and zombies? Or was it a warning?

  In another entry, her ladyship had divided a page into two columns titled Tommy and Tuppence versus Nick and Nora. I knew next to nothing about Agatha Christie’s married sleuths, but I’d seen the old films with William Powell and Myrna Loy. Lady Fowling had taken a lighthearted approach to the battle—she gave points to Nick and Nora for their witty banter and Nora for “those gorgeous evening gowns.”

  But I had trouble reading the light spidery script because across the page had been scrawled: SHOW SOME RESPECT.

  In contrast to Lady Fowling’s delicate cursive, the heavy hand and crude lettering radiated anger. An ink
y pen, it had left smudges, bleeding through, and making an imprint on the opposite page. My skin turned cold and clammy and I shivered in my thin nightshirt. Who would care if Tommy and Tuppence lost the vote to another sleuthing couple? I could think of only one person.

  I switched off the lamps and took the notebook upstairs. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  * * *

  Did I sleep? It didn’t seem so, but I must’ve, because when my eyes popped open, sun streamed through the sitting room windows. I dressed in a hurry, downed a few gulps of tea, and walked round with a half slice of toast hanging out of my mouth as I dressed. Before I closed the door of my flat, I checked my bag—yes, I had everything I needed.

  On my way downstairs, a text arrived from Pauline.

  Must cancel this morning. Sorry. Pub.

  Was she really at the pub or was she at the police station, “helping with their enquiries”?

  Tugging on the hem of my jacket, I stepped inside Mrs. Woolgar’s office. “Hello, good morning. No Pauline today, I’m afraid—she’s helping her brother out at the pub.”

  Mrs. Woolgar stood behind her desk, reaching for a ledger on the shelf in the corner. She wore a long-sleeved, pumpkin-colored dress with a well-cut bodice and a wide scalloped collar that sported a brooch as big as the palm of my hand—topaz-colored rhinestones in a Celtic knot design. She pulled it off well.

  “And how was your evening?” she asked.

  Personally, dismal, and—as far as it concerned the enquiry—rather unnerving. “All right, yes, fine. I need to step out for a bit—can we put off our briefing?”

  I had carefully thought this through—there was no need to share my fears until I’d learned what I could from the police. Then I would tell her all.

  The secretary scrutinized me. I responded with a cheerful smile. “If that’s all right with you,” I added.

  “Yes, of course. Mr. Rennie is coming round later.”