The Body in the Library

Colonel Bantry came out on the steps, and looked a little surprised.

‘Miss Marple?—er—very pleased to see you.’

‘Your wife telephoned to me,’ explained Miss Marple.

‘Capital, capital. She ought to have someone with her. She’ll crack up otherwise. She’s putting a good face on things at the moment, but you know what it is—’

At this moment Mrs Bantry appeared, and exclaimed:

‘Do go back into the dining-room and eat your breakfast, Arthur. Your bacon will get cold.’

‘I thought it might be the Inspector arriving,’ explained Colonel Bantry.

‘He’ll be here soon enough,’ said Mrs Bantry. ‘That’s why it’s important to get your breakfast first. You need it.’

‘So do you. Much better come and eat something. Dolly—’

‘I’ll come in a minute,’ said Mrs Bantry. ‘Go on, Arthur.’

Colonel Bantry was shooed back into the dining-room like a recalcitrant hen.

‘Now!’ said Mrs Bantry with an intonation of triumph. ‘Come on.’

She led the way rapidly along the long corridor to the east of the house. Outside the library door Constable Palk stood on guard. He intercepted Mrs Bantry with a show of authority.

‘I’m afraid nobody is allowed in, madam. Inspector’s orders.’

‘Nonsense, Palk,’ said Mrs Bantry. ‘You know Miss Marple perfectly well.’

Constable Palk admitted to knowing Miss Marple.

‘It’s very important that she should see the body,’ said Mrs Bantry. ‘Don’t be stupid, Palk. After all, it’s my library, isn’t it?’

Constable Palk gave way. His habit of giving in to the gentry was lifelong. The Inspector, he reflected, need never know about it.

‘Nothing must be touched or handled in any way,’ he warned the ladies.

‘Of course not,’ said Mrs Bantry impatiently. ‘We know that. You can come in and watch, if you like.’

Constable Palk availed himself of this permission. It had been his intention, anyway.

Mrs Bantry bore her friend triumphantly across the library to the big old-fashioned fireplace. She said, with a dramatic sense of climax: ‘There!’

Miss Marple understood then just what her friend had meant when she said the dead girl wasn’t real. The library was a room very typical of its owners. It was large and shabby and untidy. It had big sagging arm-chairs, and pipes and books and estate papers laid out on the big table. There were one or two good old family portraits on the walls, and some bad Victorian water-colours, and some would-be-funny hunting scenes. There was a big vase of Michaelmas daisies in the corner. The whole room was dim and mellow and casual. It spoke of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition.

And across the old bearskin hearthrug there was sprawled something new and crude and melodramatic.

The flamboyant figure of a girl. A girl with unnaturally fair hair dressed up off her face in elaborate curls and rings. Her thin body was dressed in a backless evening-dress of white spangled satin. The face was heavily made-up, the powder standing out grotesquely on its blue swollen surface, the mascara of the lashes lying thickly on the distorted cheeks, the scarlet of the lips looking like a gash. The finger-nails were enamelled in a deep blood-red and so were the toenails in their cheap silver sandal shoes. It was a cheap, tawdry, flamboyant figure—most incongruous in the solid old-fashioned comfort of Colonel Bantry’s library.

Mrs Bantry said in a low voice:

‘You see what I mean? It just isn’t true!’

The old lady by her side nodded her head. She looked down long and thoughtfully at the huddled figure.

She said at last in a gentle voice:

‘She’s very young.’

‘Yes—yes—I suppose she is.’ Mrs Bantry seemed almost surprised—like one making a discovery.

Miss Marple bent down. She did not touch the girl. She looked at the fingers that clutched frantically at the front of the girl’s dress, as though she had clawed it in her last frantic struggle for breath.

There was the sound of a car scrunching on the gravel outside. Constable Palk said with urgency:

‘That’ll be the Inspector …’

True to his ingrained belief that the gentry didn’t let you down, Mrs Bantry immediately moved to the door. Miss Marple followed her. Mrs Bantry said:

‘That’ll be all right, Palk.’

Constable Palk was immensely relieved.

Hastily downing the last fragments of toast and marmalade with a drink of coffee, Colonel Bantry hurried out into the hall and was relieved to see Colonel Melchett, the Chief Constable of the county, descending from a car with Inspector Slack in attendance. Melchett was a friend of the Colonel’s. Slack he had never much taken to—an energetic man who belied his name and who accompanied his bustling manner with a good deal of disregard for the feelings of anyone he did not consider important.

‘Morning, Bantry,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Thought I’d better come along myself. This seems an extraordinary business.’

‘It’s—it’s—’ Colonel Bantry struggled to express himself. ‘It’s incredible—fantastic!’

‘No idea who the woman is?’

‘Not the slightest. Never set eyes on her in my life.’

‘Butler know anything?’ asked Inspector Slack.

‘Lorrimer is just as taken aback as I am.’

‘Ah,’ said Inspector Slack. ‘I wonder.’

Colonel Bantry said:

‘There’s breakfast in the dining-room, Melchett, if you’d like anything?’

‘No, no—better get on with the job. Haydock ought to be here any minute now—ah, here he is.’

Another car drew up and big, broad-shouldered Doctor Haydock, who was also the police surgeon, got out. A second police car had disgorged two plain-clothes men, one with a camera.

‘All set—eh?’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Right. We’ll go along. In the library, Slack tells me.’