The Bodies in the Library Read online

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Martha Wingate

  Excerpt by Marty Wingate copyright © 2019 by Martha Wingate

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wingate, Marty, author.

  Title: The bodies in the library / Marty Wingate.

  Description: New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2019. | Series: A first edition library mystery; 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019009818 | ISBN 9781984804105 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984804129 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION /Mystery & Detective / Traditional British. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I66225 B63 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009818

  First Edition: October 2019

  Cover art by Josee Bisaillin

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Leighton

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to my agent, Christina Hogrebe, of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, for her support and sharp insight, and to editor Michelle Vega at Berkley, whose enthusiasm makes all the difference. Thanks to my writing group—Kara Pomeroy, Louise Creighton, and Joan Shott—for their spot-on feedback. I’m grateful to fellow author and Anglophile Alice K. Boatwright for teatime talks about books, publishing, and scones.

  About Bath. If you’ve never been, you should visit—and when you do, you may realize I took a bit of literary license. I moved Gravel Walk to suit my own purposes, placing it behind the terrace in which Middlebank House resides. And where is that terrace? Let’s just say it’s in the vicinity of Lansdown Road. Also, there really is a small pub in Northumberland Place—but I have changed its name to the Minerva, just to remind us of the city’s Roman past. I’ve left the Jane Austen Centre right where it should be on Gay Street—a must-see and great fun for any Regency fan.

  Dear readers, I hope you enjoy The Bodies in the Library and your introduction to Hayley Burke and the First Edition Library—Lady Fowling’s wonderful collection from the Golden Age of Mystery writers. I chose to highlight Agatha Christie for this first book—Miss Marple, how could I not?—but there are many wonderful women authors from that time to celebrate. I look forward to Hayley’s next adventure—I hope you will, too.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Excerpt from Marty Wingate’s next First Edition Library Mystery

  About the Author

  1

  I’ll be leaving now, Ms. Burke.”

  I leapt up from the desk at this announcement—knocking my phone on the floor in the process—and hurried out of my office.

  “Yes, Mrs. Woolgar,” I said, tugging on my jacket. “Have a lovely evening.”

  The secretary stood in the flagstone entry and reached for her coat off the hall stand. The open front door framed a twilight sky behind her, as a cool October breeze swirled round our ankles. Bunter, a tortoiseshell cat, sauntered down the staircase, his tail straight as a soldier apart from the question-mark curl at its tip. He settled on the bottom step.

  “You will have a word with them, won’t you?”

  “I certainly will,” I replied. “But”—I added with as much authority as I could muster under her steely gaze—“as I’ve explained, I don’t feel we can ask them to move along just yet. And, I believe this connection to the local writing community will be a boon—helping us to build a base of support that will ensure the Society’s future.”

  Mrs. Woolgar took a lace-edged hankie from her sleeve and polished the brass plate mounted at the door that read The First Edition Society.

  “And the furniture?”

  “I haven’t forgotten the furniture,” I assured her. “I’m terribly sorry they left the chairs in such disarray last week.” And the week before. “It’s only that Trist had shifted things round to act out a scene he’d written with the zombies.”

  Mrs. Woolgar’s eyes were veiled as she snapped her handbag closed and brushed an imaginary speck off the lapel of her dress. “Yes, well, it’s only that we have a great responsibility to maintain a certain caliber and excellent quality here at Middlebank House. Not only because this was Lady Fowling’s own residence and she was held in high esteem here in Bath and greatly mourned three years ago when she died, but also because it sets the standard for her grand endeavor, the Society, which she began herself with . . .”

  I stopped listening but kept the polite smile plastered on my face as Mrs. Woolgar continued to tell me my job. I was new to my position as curator at The First Edition Society, an organization founded and funded by the late Lady Georgiana Fowling. She had turned Middlebank House, her home, into the repository for her lifetime passion—acquiring first editions of the women authors from the Golden Age of Mystery. Her library comprised a vast collection not only from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and the others—many of the books personally autographed—but also works from suspense author Daphne du Maurier, added to the list for the sole reason that she was one of Lady Fowling’s favorites.

  It may have appeared that I’d made quite an extraordinary leap from my former post—assistant to the assistant curator at the Jane Austen Centre—to my current position of sole curator at the Society, especially as my university degree was in nineteenth-century literature. Never having read a detective story in my life, I knew I needed to prove my worth—if not to the board, then to myself and Glynis Woolgar, a dear fri
end and personal assistant to Lady Fowling for donkey’s years, and who now held the post of Society secretary in perpetuum.

  Mrs. Woolgar was on one side or the other of sixty—closer than that I could not guess. It was because of her clothes. She dressed as if it were 1935—that great age of mystery writing. The narrow frocks with wide lapels and cinched waists suited her pencil-like physique. Perhaps some women might’ve added a whimsical flare at the hemline, but not Mrs. Woolgar. Lady Fowling—ninety-four when she died—had dressed in the same era, if the portrait on the stairs was anything to go by.

  “This is a chance for growth,” I said when the secretary had finally run out of steam. “And if we do not grow, we stagnate.”

  “The Society is not in need of funds,” Mrs. Woolgar stated, and not for the first time.

  Lady Fowling’s vast fortune notwithstanding, I knew that money was finite. It could be used up or taken away, and then where would we be? I wasn’t thinking only of my own financial history—what about her ladyship’s lout of a nephew? I’d heard the whole story. He’d received a bequest—a shocking amount of money that I could’ve lived on for the rest of my life—yet he continued to look for ways to challenge his aunt’s will. Apparently, he wanted the house, too—The First Edition Society be damned.

  “That may be true,” I replied, “but we mustn’t forget Lady Fowling’s admonition that we are ‘dedicated to the enjoyment, education, and furtherance of both readers and writers of mysteries, by connecting the public to our collection.’”

  “I doubt she meant your lot,” Mrs. Woolgar muttered as she left.

  My lot. It had been my idea to invite the fan-fiction writers group to hold its sessions at Middlebank. I had offered it free of charge, believing this was a first step in making the Society not a diminishing, albeit elite, group of elderly book lovers who were scattered across the globe, but a viable and growing concern.

  Each writer in the group had chosen to create his or her own homage to Agatha Christie—the doyenne of the detective novel. Their ages were mixed, ensuring the word got out that the Society appealed not only to university researchers and rare-book collectors, but also to a lively assortment of arty types from twentysomethings to pensioners. Apart from the fact I knew nothing about Christie’s writings, how could this be a bad idea?

  I checked the time, went to the small kitchenette behind the stairs, and made myself a sandwich. Middlebank, as was the case with terraced houses, stretched upward instead of outward, with four floors and a basement. The ground floor—street level—held our separate offices, Mrs. Woolgar’s and mine, plus the kitchenette and a loo. Up one flight of stairs lay the library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves, a large table, fireplace, and cozy nooks, as well as a powder room. My flat was up one more flight—accommodations had been included in the job, and I was ever so grateful—and at the top, an attic.

  The basement was never referred to as such—instead, it was called the lower ground floor, and that’s where Mrs. Woolgar lived. Middlebank sat midway along a well-kept Georgian terrace made of golden Bath stone. The terrace had been built on a slope and the land fell away at the back, which meant her flat had plenty of light and access to the back garden. It was lovely—the brief glimpse I’d had.

  My flat had windows that took in a sweeping expanse of the town and into the Somerset countryside, as well as having a bird’s-eye view of both the back garden and the street in front. I had moved here from a dreary, cramped flat out on the Wells Road, and I counted myself more than lucky, although I needed a reminder of this each morning when Mrs. Woolgar and I held our briefing.

  On Wednesday evenings, I remained on the ground floor and in my office while the writers group met upstairs in the library. Furniture moving wasn’t the only black mark they’d received during their short tenure. Mrs. Woolgar had posted herself in a far corner of the library on the first evening the group met—she wanted to make sure no one touched any of the books. The group’s discussion had become so heated it had spilled out onto the first-floor landing, where they’d knocked a Chippendale walnut chair against the frame of Lady Fowling’s portrait. I heard shouts of “Poirot always had superpowers. I’m just bringing them to the forefront!” and “Vice in St. Mary Mead? I don’t think so!” After that scene, Mrs. Woolgar began taking herself off the premises.

  My second thoughts on inviting the group to meet at Middlebank had turned into third and fourth thoughts, and after only a few weeks, I was considering how I might turf them out and save face. I had yet to come up with a solution.

  Bunter, who had accompanied me to the kitchen to receive his own repast, finished his meal before I’d finished mine, and so spent the remainder of the time watching me with golden eyes. Every minute or so, he would shift slightly and rewrap his tail round his toes just to let me know he was still there. I saved out a tiny bit of cheese and offered it to him on a fingertip. He sniffed politely before taking it in one lick and spending the next ten minutes washing up. When the front-door buzzer sounded, he scampered off.

  A young woman stood clutching a laptop to her chest and wriggling with excitement. “Hiya, Hayley,” she greeted me. Her pale blond hair—frizzy and chin length—fought with enthusiasm against the hair band that held it.

  “Hello, Harry, ready for your session?” I asked.

  She nodded frantically. “I’ve had a breakthrough in my plot—Miss Marple gave up a baby for adoption, and the baby’s grown into a woman and has come to St. Mary Mead to track down the mother who deserted her.”

  “Goodness.”

  “You must be joking, Harry,” said a voice behind the door as I started to close it.

  “Sorry, Peter.” I pulled the door open, and Peter—gray hair slicked back—slouched in, a worn canvas satchel thrown over his rounded shoulders. He was followed by Mariella, in her late thirties with pixie-cut black hair, creamy complexion, and dark circles under her eyes. They both wrote books with Hercule Poirot as protagonist, with the outstanding difference that Mariella imbued her character with superpowers.

  “Who’s going to believe an old thing like Miss Marple ever had a baby?” Mariella asked. She dropped her bag on the flagstone, and it landed like a sack of rocks. A sippy cup and a packet of rusks spilled out. Mariella, who looked perpetually exhausted, had a ten-month-old she left at home with her husband on Wednesdays.

  “That’s the point,” Harry said. “It’s the juxtaposition of the past and the present that leads to the murder.”

  “It’ll be a hard sell,” Peter commented as he breezed past me.

  The three continued to bicker as they headed up the stairs while I stepped out onto the pavement. The streetlights had flared, and I spotted the last two writers hurrying along—Trist, leader of the group, and Amanda, who was dedicated but indecisive and continued to rewrite the first ten pages of her story, which starred Tommy and Tuppence, Christie’s married sleuths.

  “They aren’t lightweights,” Amanda complained, flipping a long, thick, blond braid over her shoulder and unbuttoning a coat that looked three sizes too big for her.

  “She was having a lark when she penned those stories,” Trist replied. “They aren’t truly serious works of detective fiction.”

  Trist, who wrote like the wind, was not one to talk about serious fiction. But he turned a deaf ear when anyone told him that the Agatha Christie people would never let his book—Miss Marple and Zombies—see the light of day. Not that the others could ever hope for official sanction of their books either.

  “You think you’re better than the rest of us,” Amanda said, “just because you’re fast, but you’ll see—it’s one of us who’ll be published long before you. No one cares about zombies anymore, Miss Marple or no. Oh, thanks, Hayley,” she added as I held the door for her. She hitched her worn canvas satchel higher on her shoulder and walked in.

  “Trist—” I stopped him before he stepped inside. I needed to have a
word, and I liked having the extra inch or two that the doorstep provided. It wasn’t that I was short, but, although thin, he was well over six feet. He sported sparse hair in need of a trim and a scar that cut through his right eyebrow, giving him a perpetual look of scorn. “You will remember to put the furniture back, won’t you? Mrs. Woolgar said that—”

  “We put the place to rights before we left last week,” Trist argued, taking a handkerchief from the outside pocket of his leather case and wiping his brow. “And anyway, I don’t know what she’s complaining about, she doesn’t own the place.”

  “Both Mrs. Woolgar and I are responsible for what goes on inside Middlebank House,” I reminded him. I was on the verge of slamming the door in the face of his insolence, but how would I get the rest of them out? “And when you were invited to hold the group here, you took on part of that responsibility. If that is more than you’re willing to assume, we’ll have to discuss—”

  “Maybe it’s her ladyship feeling restless,” he cut in with a sly grin. “She’s starting to rearrange the furniture.”

  I put a finger in his face. “Don’t you start that again about a ghost. Lady Fowling has not returned to haunt Middlebank.”

  Trist grunted.

  “Are you coming up this evening, Hayley?” Amanda asked.

  I had monitored the group the second week they met at Middlebank—just to assuage Mrs. Woolgar’s worry—but I had no wish to hear those first ten pages again. “No, thanks. I’ve a project proposal to catch up on. I’m sure you all work better without an extra pair of ears.”

  Had I given Trist enough of a warning? Perhaps not—I would catch him on his way out. Momentarily defeated, I retreated to my office and a proposal I was writing to the board. The Society would offer a series of literary salons—intimate evening lectures on the local culture, entertainment, and writing of the 1930s. We’d serve wine and have a fire blazing. We would charge, of course—and members would receive a deep discount when they bought a ticket to the full series.