1. A Knife in the Night

Christie’s Detective Agency Two Part 1 THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY

Lauren Foster loved her books, and anything on paper between two covers entered the category of her books. It didn’t matter whether they were fact or fiction, informative or fanciful, she loved them all.

She was what most people called a young seventy-four year old. She’d kept her looks from youth, only allowing a minimum number of lines to criss-cross her face. Her hair, which had been a dark ebony in colour, was now a natural snowy blonde and hung over her shoulders like winter sun. And as for clothes, well, she may have been elderly but didn’t like to advertise the fact by dowdiness. She liked bright colours.

Her two handicaps involved her senses. Her eyes had, she believed, been worn out because of all the reading she’d been obliged to do on account of her fascination with the written or printed or even etched word, and on top of that her ears had, she also believed, been rendered inefficient due to lack of use. Her world was a quiet one. She even enjoyed a silent one when available, with her nose in a book.

It was the books that provided her sounds: the voices of lovers (she did like romances, even saucy ones), she calls of the wild (Africa was a favourite haunt for her imagination), and the rugged shouts on a rugby pitch (it wasn’t the game but those who played it that appealed to her.)

Sadly, Lauren had never been married. She’d been on the cusp of it once, with Ian, a farmer’s son, but at the last moment he’d left her waiting at the church because in the twenty four hours before he was due to arrive at the church suited and rosy cheeked and eager for her flesh he’d met another girl, Bonny Fancee, had actually courted her, even proposed to her and run off with her into the wild world of the seventies, and forgotten all about poor Lauren until Lauren’s brother, Lofty, had sought him out and taught him a lesson he couldn’t forget because he became very swiftly devoid of life.

The punishment lashed out by Lofty had been extreme and he was locked away for life because he’d inflicted it, sentenced by a severe and angry judge with a swollen nose.

On the particular day when the fascinating events that I will recount had their beginning, Lauren went to the public library, it not being Sunday when the library was closed. It was, in fact, a Saturday which may or may not have had been in any way significant to the unfolding of events.

She had a corner she rather liked. It wasn’t the nature of the books that appealed to her, but a picture on the wall, one that had escaped somehow from the small gallery that was next door to the library itself and where few townspeople ventured. This one picture showed the fierce determination on the face of a sportsman clutching an oval ball and charging across an open field with it. She had never forgotten that her beloved Ian had played the game and raced across a field in exactly the same way as the figure in the painting did. It might, indeed, have been Ian but for the fact that he was obviously alive and Ian wasn’t.

Maybe, in her heart, she wanted Ian to return to her, forgetting that brother Lofty had seen to him good and proper and to the extent that the bewigged judge had sentenced him to life behind bars. Life, of course, had been a lot less than life. He had lingered in jail for little more than a decade before being allowed out on licence.

But the picture in the library still ate into Lauren’s heart. If this had been her one true love he might have seen to her virginity like he had promised “when we are wed”. Unsuspected by either of them of course, it had already been seen to, of course, though she wasn’t sure how or when, just that it had happened when she was young enough not to be bothered, and no over-eager lads had been involved. She believed it was the way she cycled to school up Python Hill, but who could tell?

On the day in question she closed her eyes briefly while she tried to absorb a passage in Chaucer. She’d tried to read The Canterbury Tales many times over the years and had never got far in any one of them, but now well into her seventies was convinced she really ought to absorb at least one tale while her fading eyes still almost worked. A magnifying glass helped, of course, as did closing her eyes in order to think.

The bell went.

It was a simple hand bell and it was on the counter near the door, and she was as far away from that counter as geography allowed. It was the bell that told anyone still lingering in the place that the doors were about to be locked for the night. She was near the picture of the white-shorted rugby player and a fair distance away from that bell, and her hearing was far from perfect even when she was wide awake. But sitting so far from the main door was helpful in the winter when a cold draft might have run up her legs every time it opened, but it was summer and of no help at all.

Her seat was at a table. There were other seats round that table, four in all, but nobody liked to disturb the elderly lady and her endless consumption of words.

The librarian called himself Dorian Leslie, though rumour had it that his real name was something else altogether. Anyway, he made his usual tour of the library, peeping into the odd corners created by rows of shelving, and, as had happened many time before, he saw her.

“Closing time!” he barked, and returned to his desk in order to tidy away a few tickets that needed tidying away.

Meanwhile, Lauren’s shut-eye developed into something rather deeper. It became an actual slumber.

Dorian Leslie, his desk being tidy, quietly pulled his coat on and switched the light off. The day had come to its ending, and he liked that very much. There would be a pint waiting for him at the local. The library was plunged into darkness. Silence prevailed, a silence that if all the people in the town who might appreciate it was listed, Lauren’s name must have been near the top.

And she was still sitting in her chair, at her table, facing the darkened image of a rugby player in full manly pursuit of his game.

She was still gently snoring when a shadow crept up to her in the darkness, a shadow that shouldn’t have been there at all. And she snorted only slightly as that shadow leaned over her and forced a really sharp blade into her back where whoever it was suspected her heart might be.

And got it right.

© Peter Rogerson 25.09.21

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