The Bodies in the Library

by Marty Wingate

  Mrs. Woolgar had raised an eyebrow at my idea, as I expected. But she would think differently when I roused the interest of the board of trustees. All five of them, not just my friend Adele Babbage. I was not required to get the board’s permission, but as the salons would be the first big project I’d taken on, I wanted to show them just how forward-thinking and thorough I could be. I knew Adele would love the idea—she had my back as far as the Society was concerned. It was the remaining four I needed to win over—three of Lady Fowling’s dear friends, now in their eighties, plus the daughter of another. I had the impression Mrs. Woolgar had the ear of at least one of them.

  It had taken the board—working with Lady Fowling’s solicitor—the entire three years after her death to get the Society up and running and to hire the first curator. During that time, Middlebank—busy during her ladyship’s life with researchers, rare-book enthusiasts, and lovers of mysteries who came to admire the first editions—fell off the radar, so to speak, leaving the first curator wondering just what she was supposed to be doing. That sense of ennui, coupled with Lady Fowling’s nephew mounting an assault on the estate and the Society in an attempt to break the will, was too much for her, and after four months of constant hounding, she’d had enough and retired to Torquay.

  The event threw the board into crisis. This was not what they’d signed on for—they had expected an easy time of it, holding quarterly meetings in the library with the sherry decanter close to hand. The other board members, that is—not Adele. She didn’t care for sherry, and besides, she believed Lady Fowling would want the Society to do and be more.

  Their fear that the nephew might take advantage of the Society’s instability coincided with a particularly low point in my year, when no matter how I did my sums, I could not seem to cover my expenses. Adele had looked at my nadir as the stars aligning and had talked me into applying for the post of curator, skating over my lack of knowledge about the mystery genre. “You’ve a university degree in literature,” she reminded me. “Books are books.” The other board members did not see a problem either, and at their next quarterly meeting, they welcomed me with raised glasses.

  * * *

  * * *

  Not yet halfway through the evening, and all was quiet from the library upstairs. I’d been twirling the end of my ponytail and staring at the blank document on my computer screen for nearly an hour before I gave up and reached for my phone. My call went unanswered just as I expected, and so I left my usual message.

  “Dinah, sweetie—it’s Mum,” I said, chipper in the face of dead silence. “Just ringing to see how you are—I transferred the money on Monday, so it should’ve landed in your account. Ring me when you can, sweetie. Cheers, bye!”

  Where would a twenty-two-year-old woman be on a Wednesday evening? My darling daughter—in her second year at Sheffield studying the history of everyday life—was probably at the library. No, wait—maybe she’d found herself a part-time job. A pub, perhaps, or a café? There’s something to hope for.

  I noticed Mariella come down the stairs and pass by my office. I got to work, and had written a heading and a one-sentence précis of my proposal by the time she returned, mug in one hand, plate of biscuits in the other.

  “Cuppa?”

  “Thanks, I’d love one.”

  “I brought my own tea along this evening,” she said. “I didn’t touch the other.”

  Good thing. Two weeks before, when Mariella had made tea in the kitchenette, she’d used Mrs. Woolgar’s Fortnum & Mason Assam Superb. Another black mark.

  “It was good of you to remember.”

  Mariella hovered just inside my office, tugging on the stretched-out sleeves of her sweater and glancing round the room at my mahogany desk, the Palladian-style mantel, and the Queen Anne wingback chair near the door where Bunter now slept amid the warm glow thrown by the lamps.

  “This house is gorgeous. All the dark wood and such—like out of some old film.” She sighed. “We aren’t too noisy for you?”

  I took that to mean there had been a fair few arguments already this evening, but at least they had been behind closed doors. “No, I haven’t heard a thing—that’s what you get from good, solid, Georgian construction, you know. Along with Lady Fowling’s refurbishments before she died. So, how’s it going? Everyone come with something fresh?”

  “Oh yes, we’ve made great progress,” Mariella said, glancing behind her and up the stairs. “Apart from Amanda, of course.”

  Of course.

  “Have you read all those books in the library?”

  I opened my bottom desk drawer and bent over it to hide my blush lest she cotton on to the fact that I had yet to crack a cover of those first editions and collectible volumes of the Golden Age of Mystery authors.

  “The ones her ladyship wrote, I mean,” Mariella added, innocently giving me a way out.

  “I haven’t as yet, but I intend to.”

  Lady Fowling, as it happened, was a mystery writer, too, each of her many titles gloriously produced in tooled leather binding with gold lettering. She had known the publisher. Twelve books starred her own detective, but the rest had, as protagonist, one of the famous detectives from her favorite authors. Yes—fan fiction. It was as I had told Mrs. Woolgar when I booked the writers group in—if Lady Fowling had been alive today, she’d’ve joined them in the library on Wednesdays.

  * * *

  * * *

  By ten o’clock, I had made considerable progress on my proposal, but when Bunter raised his head and yawned, so did I. Perhaps another cup of tea. I stood and stretched, and my phone rang. One glance told me it wasn’t Dinah returning her mum’s call.

  “Hello, you,” I answered.

  “Why aren’t you here in London with me? Why?”

  “And why isn’t Bath the perfect place for your business, not London?” I responded, sitting again. We both sighed.

  My boyfriend, Wyn Rundle, was a brilliant inventor and businessman whose fully funded start-up—Eat Here, Eat Now—promised to deliver meals by robot to any address in Greater London, whether that was an office on the twenty-seventh floor of the Shard or a semidetatched in Ealing. Initially, of course, they would concentrate on lunchtime in the one-mile City proper, but as Wyn and his best mate, Tommy, pointed out, the financial district alone would be a gold mine.

  We’d met two years earlier here in Bath when Wyn had attended a business expo—one of those happy coincidences when we had both reached for the same flat white order at the Costa Coffee on Southgate. We’d laughed and got to chatting and . . . well, fueled by caffeine, things moved along fairly quickly after that, and by the time he’d returned to London two days later, we were smitten.

  And yet we remained living separately. Was it our age—both of us midforties—that kept us from making that last leap and moving cities? We’d grown rather tired of the topic—apart from our requisite greeting on the phone—and had decided to enjoy our long-distance relationship to its fullest, supplementing widely spaced weekends together with phone calls and texts.

  “We need a new navigation system for Myrtle,” he said glumly. “She can’t tell left from right. I’d just as soon throw the bloody thing off Tower Bridge at the moment.”

  Myrtle, the robot. Why did these things always have women’s names?

  I heard voices on the stairs. The writers must’ve reconciled their differences for the evening, because as they trooped down quietly, Peter asked, “Pub?” and the others murmured assents.

  “Hang on a tick,” I whispered to Wyn. “The group’s leaving—I should probably have a quick word and then we can talk.” I jumped up and hurried out to the entry.

  “Sorry,” Wyn replied in a rush. “Here’s Tommy. We’ve got to get to work. Love you.” And he was gone.

  “Trist?” I called as the group filed out the door.

  Already on the pavement, he replied,
“See ya, Hayley.”

  “Library’s all in order,” Harry promised.

  “Night, Hayley,” came from the others.

  “But I—”

  I withdrew my objection when Mrs. Woolgar appeared—I got the idea she carried out surveillance from across the road and returned only when she saw the writers leaving.

  “Turned a bit chilly,” I commented to her as she marched past me.

  “It’ll do that in October. And tonight’s damage?” she asked, shrugging off her coat and hanging it on a peg.

  “I’m sure they took care—I’ll check on my way up.”

  “Good night, then,” she replied, and made straight for the stairs that led down to her flat.

  I locked the door and set the alarm. I heard Mrs. Woolgar’s door close, and I stood in the entry, listening to the silent house. The cat emerged from my office, stretched, and made his way into the next room to his bed behind Mrs. Woolgar’s desk.

  “Well then—good night, Bunter.”

  2

  Up the stairs, I paused for a quick glance in the library—it certainly passed my muster—and then continued to my own flat, pulling the key out of my pocket. Yes, even within the house, Mrs. Woolgar and I had our accommodations secured—it was a good way to separate life from work. I walked in, switching on a lamp as I did so, and unbuttoned my jacket. Breathing a sigh of relief, I took a moment to be grateful, as I had done at the end of almost every day since I’d moved in two months earlier.

  My flat occupied the second floor and consisted of a sitting room that segued into a small dining area next to a cozy kitchen, with bedroom and bathroom through the far door. It was the same area as the library on the floor below me, but—for someone who had moved from a place where I could knock into a wall if I spread my arms too wide—this was a palace. And it had come furnished with bits and bobs that may not have been antiques but could certainly be called vintage. Lady Fowling had probably bought them new. In addition to my flat, I had use of the attic, and that’s where I’d stacked all of my daughter’s boxes—everything from little-girl mementos to a young woman’s passions. Dinah hadn’t wanted to take any of it to Sheffield, but it’s a mother’s duty to hold on to the past.

  I contemplated a cup of tea or a glass of wine as I glanced at the stacks of paperback books gleaned from charity shops in town—my self-assigned reading, the Golden Age authors themselves. Who would it be—Agatha Christie? Josephine Tey? Dorothy L. Sayers and her sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey? Or that outlier, Daphne du Maurier?

  I yawned. Perhaps tomorrow.

  * * *

  * * *

  Misty rain made for a gray dawn, but that did not daunt me— I threw on my waterproof gear, pulled up the hood, closed the front door of Middlebank behind me, and set off for my early-morning two-mile walk. I had instituted this exercise program a week ago, when I noticed the button on my jacket becoming a bit snug, and although the button hadn’t loosened, I felt all the better for the air and the unspoken camaraderie among those strangers I passed on my way—all of us dedicated to exercise.

  I took a route that led me behind the Royal Crescent and down and through Royal Victoria Park, hooking round the Circus as if I were in orbit before breaking away onto Gravel Walk—a wide path that ran behind the entire terrace. This allowed me to avoid the steep climb up to our front door. I pulled up halfway along and huffed with satisfaction.

  Middlebank’s back gate didn’t squeak, yet still I took care—Mrs. Woolgar’s windows looked out onto the garden, and I didn’t want to give her something else to complain about at our morning briefing. I crept up the stone stairs, through the back door, and into the ground-floor kitchenette. I was headed for the entry and the two flights up to my flat when the front door opened to our cleaner. Spiky bits of her short blond hair stuck out from a bandanna embroidered with Cleaned by Pauline along the edge. Her arms were full of cleaning supplies and a vacuum, and she struggled to get her key out of the lock.

  “Morning, Pauline—here, let me help.”

  “Cheers, Hayley,” she said as I grabbed the buckets and held the door. “Alarm’s already off?”

  “It is—I’ve been out and back. Shall I leave your things here?”

  Middlebank House did have its own cleaning supplies, of course, but Pauline had declined use of what she referred to as “the world’s oldest Hoover,” saying she was afraid it would blow the electrics. She also preferred her own nontoxic products to whatever might be on someone’s shelf, and so she—and the three women who worked for her—lugged their accoutrements along to each job.

  I left her to it. She always started on the ground floor and later cleaned both my flat and Mrs. Woolgar’s. No one but me had ever cleaned any place I’d lived in the whole of my adult life, and so this had made me uncomfortable at first. But Pauline told me to think of it as a well-deserved treat—like getting a manicure. There’s something else I’d never done.

  After a quick shower, I drank my tea sitting on a stool at the kitchen window, looking out across the trees, now turning autumnal gold, and the tops of buildings and into the hills. Below me, the city stirred to life. The tour buses would begin to disgorge people near the abbey, and the mannequin in Regency clothes would be set on the pavement outside the Jane Austen Centre—but here at Middlebank, we were above the fray. On one hand, this was a comfort, but on the other, I knew we couldn’t remain too far from the bustle of Bath—the Society needed to secure its place in this historic city. We needed to make a name for ourselves. First editions by mystery writers who were still popular today were not for rare-book lovers only, but for those around the globe who enjoyed a good story. I sighed—this was a pep talk I gave myself frequently.

  Pulling my jacket on, I stepped over the threshold of my flat and walked into my job.

  Where I found, one flight down, Mrs. Woolgar standing at the open library door.

  “At it again, were they?” she asked.

  The writers group? “No, I checked—they put the furniture back.”

  She gave a single, sharp nod to the far wall.

  The oak ladder—Edwardian, if I remembered correctly—had three rungs and a top cap wide enough to sit on. It usually occupied the far corner of the library, but this morning, it was behind the table, up against the shelves of books. Last night, I had missed this egregious error.

  “Is it damaged?” I asked, striding over to examine the bit of furniture. “Scuffs? Scrapes? Gouges in the wood?”

  “That’s hardly the point,” Mrs. Woolgar replied.

  “But it is the point. I’m sorry that the ladder wasn’t put in its proper place, but after all, it is a library ladder and this is a library.”

  “And does that mean they were handling the books?” The secretary remained in the doorway, squinting across the table and up to the top shelf.

  “Possibly. Is there one missing?” I asked, following her gaze.

  “Lady Fowling would never have left furniture in the middle of the room. Things have their proper place. There was a time when . . .”

  I turned away from her and rolled my eyes. It’s the same lecture she’d given me when I left the tin of shortbread on the counter in the kitchenette instead of on top of the fridge.

  I assumed an air of nonchalance. “We should be well accustomed to the public handling the books by the time the exhibition rolls round.”

  My comment produced the expected result—a look from Mrs. Woolgar that said, Over my dead body.

  It had been my first idea as curator—putting on an exhibition of those most-prized books owned by The First Edition Society. The library at Middlebank housed the majority of Lady Fowling’s vast collection, but the rarest volumes—worth a fair amount—were locked away at the bank. Mounting an exhibition would mean letting the most important part of the collection see the light of day. Mrs. Woolgar had gone apoplectic at the idea.

>   I didn’t need her approval for the venture, but I did want her support, and as it wasn’t in my remit to give the secretary a heart attack, I tabled the idea for the time being. When I came back about the arrangement for the writers group, Mrs. Woolgar most likely saw it as the lesser of two evils, and we reached détente. Still, it didn’t keep me from the occasional mention.

  Now the secretary wittered on about our responsibilities as I moved the library ladder back to the corner, where I spied a small, worn notebook—a school exercise book, the kind with the marbled cover—on the floor. In one smooth movement, I set the ladder down and picked the notebook up, keeping it behind my back when I turned round so that I wouldn’t next get a lecture about littering.

  * * *

  * * *

  By late afternoon, I had written the upcoming newsletter for the Society, finished a rough draft of my proposal for the board, and received a sniff from Mrs. Woolgar when I told her. What would she say when I brought up my plan to raise the membership fees? I’d meet that obstacle when I came to it, because I had another “first” to tackle—at long last, I would enter the cellar.

  In addition to Middlebank itself, Lady Fowling had left the contents of the house to the Society. And yet, no one could tell me quite what these “contents” were—only where they were. They resided in the locked cellar, the key to which was in a safety deposit box at the bank.

  When I stated my intention of studying her ladyship’s personal effects, members of the board had reacted as if I’d said I was turning grave robber. They murmured vague comments about how inconsequential these possessions must be—diaries and clothing and inexpensive jewelry. But Adele had encouraged me to continue my campaign, and so I had brought the subject up at several morning briefings with Mrs. Woolgar. Each time, I received a stiff reply that the solicitor had a complete list of contents and she did not see how a few personal items could be of any use to me—as if she worried that I’d ring the television program Cash in the Attic as soon as her back was turned.