The Thin Woman (38 page)

Brigadier Lester-Smith took advantage of the emotional break in my voice to interject hastily, “It must take him a month of Sundays to dry his hair. And speaking of time marching on, Mrs. Haskell, I do think we should be making our way upstairs to the Reading Room. The other members of the League expect me to have the coffee on the perk, and the minutes from the last meeting,” he patted his briefcase, “laid out on the table, ready for review.” Crossing the mosaic tile in two measured steps, the brigadier opened the door into the library proper.

The arrangement inside was unapologetically old-fashioned. No little turnstiles by which to enter and exit and send one into a tail spin. No revolving magazine racks. No magnifying mirrors installed for the purpose of assisting in the apprehension of book nabbers. No computers pretending to mind their own business even as they secreted away information on the reading habits of each and every library card holder.

The brigadier and I might have been standing on the threshold of a household library, the kind guaranteed to lend just the right touch of snob appeal to a gentleman’s country retreat. There were no other patrons about because it was after closing hour. And by some quirk of shadow and light the free-standing bookcases turned the room—partitioned by archways—into
a maze that would appear to have been set up for the expressed amusement of his lordship’s children. Two or three worn leather chairs were drawn conversationally around an oak table positioned in front of the leaded windows overlooking Spittle Lane. A pair of hunting prints echoed the muted tones of the Jacobean patterned curtains. A hammered brass screen stood guard in front of the stone fireplace. The marble bust of Shakespeare sat on a pedestal above the archway leading into the nonfiction area, which in turn opened onto the children’s section.

Perhaps, on second thought, the fact that the books were not uniformly bound in gold tooled leather did hint that this was not a private collection. There was also the reception desk—the size of Amelia Earhart’s practice runway—to clinch one’s suspicions that we were in a lending institution.

Miss Bunch, our stalwart librarian, lived at that desk. Rumour had it that she had been born there—fully grown, already stout, red-faced and with her hair cropped to an uncompromising bob. I had it on good authority (from Mrs. Malloy) that Miss Bunch did not possess a first name. Doubtless her parents had instantly realized the impropriety of attempting to become too familiar with their offspring.

My knees has a tendency to knock on those occasions when I approached Miss Bunch at her desk—my arms loaded with books whose overdue status would momentarily be calculated down to a percentage of a second. Being an accomplished coward I had on occasion brought along a doctor’s certificate to excuse my disregard for timely returns, but
this evening I did not feel the full force of Miss Bunch’s bull’s-eye stare as I tiptoed forward with my eight volumes of riveting romance novels. My engrossing conversation with Brigadier Lester-Smith had blinded me to the obvious.

For tonight our librarian was conspicuous by her absence.

“Surprising!” The brigadier glanced from me to the door marked Private and shook his head. No need for him to expound. The concept of Miss Bunch abandoning her post in order to indulge in a cup of tea and a cream bun or—heaven forbid, go to the loo, was not open to discussion. Miss Bunch would have handed in her date stamp sooner than exhibit such human frailty. That she might be stacking books in the far reaches of nonfiction was equally unlikely. A time for every job was Miss Bunch’s sacred maxim. Books were always returned to their allotted shelves between the hours of 10 A.M. and noon.

“I expect she went upstairs to turn on the lights for us in the Reading Room,” I said, while scanning the room uneasily out the corner of my eye. Surely it was the patter of rain on the windows and the ghoulish gurgle of the wind that made the library look suddenly forlorn?

“You cannot be serious, Mrs. Haskell.” Brigadier Lester-Smith looked suitably grave. “Turning on the lights, along with plugging in the percolator, has always been my job. I do not imagine that for all her industriousness Miss Bunch would overstep that particular line.”

It was my opinion that Miss Bunch would do precisely as she chose in her own library, but I kept
mum as I planted my books on the eerily deserted desk. For the moment I was freed from the obligation of confessing that I had left an indelible coffee cup ring on page 342 of
Speak Her Name Softly
, by the prolific Zinnia Parish. So with my mind determinedly focused on the evening’s meeting, I stood behind the brigadier as he opened the door that gave access to the staircase.

“After you, Mrs. Haskell.”

My gasp made us both jump.

Misunderstanding my reaction, the brigadier’s cheeks turned a peachy pink that complimented his fading ginger hair nicely as he hastily made his apologies. “You’ll have to forgive me, Mrs. Haskell; being an old-fashioned chap I forget once in a while that what used to pass for common courtesy is now perceived as an insult to womankind.”

“Forget the fallout from women’s lib!” With a trembling finger I pointed towards the N–O fiction section of the book stacks. “Brigadier, surely you see … there on the floor … way down at the end of that aisle …” The wind chose that moment to emit a death rattle that vibrated the walls, along with the window panes. “We have a body in the library.”

A blatant case of hyperbole! What we had was a leg. No, make that a foot. But was it unreasonable to assume that a body was in some way involved—out of sight, around the corner of the stack?

“A shadow, Mrs. Haskell, nothing more.”

“I tell you …”

“If you’ll excuse my saying so, Mrs. Haskell, you’ve been reading too many thrillers.” This said, with gentlemanly restraint, Brigadier Lester-Smith
did me the honour of setting down his briefcase on the desk.

“It’s such a cliché, isn’t it?” I followed him with lagging steps and galloping heart as, clearly bent on humouring me, he headed into the wooden maze. The foot I was sure I’d seen would prove to be nothing more ominous than a book left carelessly on the floor by a library patron. The brigadier’s steps quickened even as I decided I had made a complete imbecile of myself. Doubtless before he could pick up said volume and return it to its rightful place on the shelf, Miss Bunch would appear from Non-Fiction to announce that the guilty patron would be forthwith stripped of his or her library card and sentenced to two weeks community service in card catalogue.

There was in fact a book—its pages flung wide in careless abandon on the floor. And a few inches away was an object that unmistakably constituted a foot encased in a serviceable brogue. The wind drew a shuddering breath as the brigadier spoke our librarian’s name in startled greeting.

“Miss Bunch, are you feeling out of sorts?” He had tracked around the end of the aisle and now dropped to his immaculate knees, beside the librarian who lay sprawled face up on the floor in her bottle green skirt and matching jersey. She was, as always, a stout, florid-faced woman, with a combative gleam in her glassy stare. “Brace yourself, Mrs. Haskell,” the brigadier said and I obediently swayed against the stacks. “Miss Bunch has crossed the finishing line.” He spoke as a man who, though having routinely faced the grim implacability of death, in his army textbooks, was opposed to using a certain four-letter word in the presence of the opposite sex.

“Dead? Perhaps she will come out of it.” A crisis invariably brings out the idiot in me. “It’s not as if her throat has been cut from ear to ear, or her head caved in with a blunt instrument.”

“Possibly a heart attack, Mrs. Haskell.”

“Surely not!” I warded off the suggestion with the hand I wasn’t using to wipe my eyes. “I’m convinced Miss Bunch would never give way like that, not on the job. She had an irreproachable work ethic. And an unerring sense of what is appropriate. I will never forget the drumming she gave me when she discovered I had jotted down a phone number on the fly leaf of
A Midsummer Night’s Scream
. In pencil, mind you! And,” I blithered, “it wasn’t as though it were the number of a male escort service.”

Clearly Miss Bunch’s bulging eyes were beginning to get to me, for nothing short of extreme stress would have caused me to let slip the words ‘male escort’. We all have out little secrets. Mine was that I had acquired Ben Haskell for a husband after renting him for a family reunion weekend from Eligibility Escorts. Overweight, underloved, I had been seized by a wild impulse to indulge in something more daring than a new frock with which to impress my assorted relatives, especially my diabolically beautiful cousin Vanessa. Eligibility was owned and managed by Mrs. Swabucher, an elderly lady given to powder pink hats and a fondness for Belgian chocolates. Believe me, there was nothing sleazy about her operation. No bullet holes in her office door, no naughty magazines on the desk or disgruntled clients being fed into the shredder. How could I go wrong when the man who turned up at my door to escort me to
Merlin’s Court was the breathtakingly handsome Bentley T. Haskell?

When we were first married I wouldn’t have lost more than a few hours sleep had word leaked out about Eligibility Escorts. Love would have weathered the gossip. But now there were the twins to be considered. How awful it would be if my children failed to get into the nursery school of their choice because Ben and I lacked credibility as parents. And, not to take myself too seriously, I did have to consider my civic responsibilities, along with my recent decision to return to work, on a part-time basis, as an interior designer.

“Mrs. Haskell?” Brigadier Lester-Smith brought me back to the matter—or rather the corpse—at hand. “Are you feeling faint, my dear?”

“I’m steady as a rock,” I lied. “Why don’t you go and ring for an ambulance while I wait here with Miss Bunch? I know it’s silly but I don’t like abandoning her to the unholy glee of Hector Rigglesworth. Listen,” I held up a hand, “do you hear him laughing?”

“The wind,” Brigadier Lester-Smith replied without undue conviction. “We mustn’t let our imaginations run riot. It is true that at upon
occasion
I have sensed a presence while on these premises, but …” He paused as I took a step backwards, sending the book lying on the floor skidding across the table.

“You were saying?” I picked up the volume without looking at the title and absently dusted it off on my raincoat sleeve.

“Only, Mrs. Haskell, that whilst I might suspect Mr. Rigglesworth of such malicious pranks as unplugging
the percolator or helping himself to a couple of ginger nuts while my back was turned, I cannot believe a gentleman of the old school, whether living or dead, would find poor Miss Bunch’s … present predicament a laughing matter.”

“The man was
soured
on women.” I lowered my voice and looked around uneasily. “Look at this book, brigadier. Can you deny the possibility that Mr. Rigglesworth lured Miss Bunch into the stacks by means of an ominous rustling and then caused this book to fly off the shelf and hit her a fatal wallop on the head?”

“Murder, Mrs. Haskell, is a serious accusation against a man who is not available to defend himself.” Brigadier Lester-Smith tightened his raincoat belt in a grim attempt at holding his emotions in check. “I am sure Miss Bunch is the victim of a stroke or a heart attack, and the fact that tonight is the hundredth anniversary of Henry Rigglesworth’s demise is no more than an unhappy coincidence.”

This revelation brought a gasp to my lips. I was about to babble away about the circumstantial evidence when I felt the floor vibrate under my feet and, whether from a momentary dizziness or not, saw a section of books quiver as if revving themselves up to let fly. “You’re absolutely right, brigadier,” I made haste to say, “life is filled with coincidence. And people die all the time without ghostly assistance. Poor Mr. Rigglesworth, he did not have things easy in life and should not be maligned in death.” Avoiding Miss Bunch’s icy glare, I took comfort in having avoided the avalanche. Then I felt it—another reverberation. But before I could leap into the brigadier’s arms, I
realized that the library door had swung open and closed.

Footsteps heralded the arrival of our fellow members of the Library League. Mrs. Dovedale’s pleasant musical voice was heard in conversation with the vicar’s husband.

“How kind of you to bring one of your lovely sponge cakes. And not from a packet, if I know you, Mr. Spike.”

“That’s all well and good, Mrs. Dovedale,” came Mr. Poucher’s dour response. “But I for one come to these meetings to feed my mind, not my belly.”

“Oh, go on, you old grouchy-pouch!” That was the irrepressible Bunty Wiseman. “You’ll be wolfing down your slice of cake and licking the cream off your fingers along with the rest of us.”

My mouth watered; a purely nervous reaction.

“I’d better go and give them the bad news.” Brigadier Lester-Smith soldiered his way towards the assembled voices.

Alas for Miss Bunch, I thought sadly. She was an institution and the library would never be the same without her. But did she leave anyone to mourn her? The rain wept steadily against the windows, but no loud burst of sobs arose in response to the brigadier’s announcement.

Sir Robert Pomeroy did say “Bloody bad show!” But he spoiled the effect by adding. “I suppose this means the meeting’s off for this evening. What! What! A bit of a shame really, seeing I was hoping to present my suggestions for improving the parking situation.”

“He doesn’t mean to be callous,” I whispered to
Miss Bunch, in futile hope of softening her up. There could be no doubt they were in shock, every one of them, including timid Sylvia Babcock who presumably had taken time out from her honeymoon rather than risk censor for seconding less motions than any other League member, past or present. Any moment now the penny would drop with a monumental clang. Someone surely would voice the possibility of Hector Rigglesworth taking a ghostly hand in Miss Bunch’s demise. The significance of the date would be bandied about. And the fact that the book I had found lying on the floor within inches of the body was titled
The Dream Lover
would forever ensure her place in local lore.