20. The Last Revelation

Christie’s Detective Agency Two part 20 THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY

Jenny’s eyes swept round the group gathered near the counter in the library.

“Go on,” urged D.I. Cyril Hodbur.

Jenny smiled at him.

“Yes, D.I.,” she said, and she pointed towards the table where the old disabled Lofty Foster was sitting and straining to hear what was being said.

“That gentleman there,” she said in a voice loud enough for him to have a chance of hearing every word she said, “is the brother of the bride who excitedly prepared for her own wedding fifty-odd years ago. The rings were bought. The church was booked. The honeymoon had been chosen. All that went wrong was the fact that her groom to be found someone else at the nineteenth hour, and that inconsiderate piece of bad manners on his part set a ball rolling that is still trundling along today. It’s why we’re here, for goodness sake, a fifty-odd year ago piece of romantic stupidity.

“Lauren was the bride and Lauren was the elderly lady who was murdered a few days ago. The big question is who committed that dreadful crime? Who took this young lady’s reading companion away from her?”

She paused and indicated young Rosie, the library cleaner who was scowling at Gorgeous Will, who had released his grip on her.

“Before we find out who wielded the knife, let’s look at the repercussions of all those years ago. Lauren was left at the church: her groom simply did not turn up and did not do her the courtesy of explaining why. I’m too young to have known him, but I’m prepared to guess that he was a crass and thoughtless idiot.”

“If you can’t have known him, how can you say that?” demanded Mr Leslie. “It’s downright bad manners to condemn a person all these years later when you can’t possibly have known the problems he might have encountered in his life!”

Jenny looked at him, offered him a tiny humourless smile, and nodded her head. “You’re quite right, Mr Leslie,” she said, “and who better than the man’s own brother should be defending his cruel behaviour towards a young woman who was, to say the least, beautiful? Who else could so stand up for the wretched coward who ruined a sweet young woman’s special day, the day she planned to remember for the rest of her life, the day when confetti was going to be showered on her, the day when she had entered the grown uo world and become Mrs Pritchard rather than Miss Foster…”

“It’s just that…” spluttered the librarian, “the groom was murdered! He was battered to death on the farm where he worked! By a loathsome piece of work!”

“And no doubt his slightly younger brother watched?” asked Horace, taking over the story that his boss had started telling. “No doubt the younger brother watched as the blood trickled from the dying corpse of his brother? And no doubt he knew exactly who had murdered the stupid young man?”

“There we go again!” snapped Mr Leslie, “bad-mouthing a dead man who can’t defend himself! It’s not a Christian thing to do at all!”

“Neither is murder,” continued Jenny. “And the killer was caught, he handed himself in because his anger was against the wretch who had ruined his own sister’s life. Wasn’t it, Lofty?”

The elderly man seated where Lauren had died struggled to stand up.

“I paid for it!” he said, “I was charged with the murder of the Pritchard lout, and I’m not ashamed. Year after year I was behind bars, not caring whether I lived or died.”

“And I doubt that there’s anyone here who, in his heart of hearts, wouldn’t sympathise and even think he’d do the same,” Jenny said sympathetically. “But what of the dead lad’s slightly younger brother? Maybe he had lurked in a barn or behind a hedge, but he knew who had taken the life from his thoughtless brother. But the law took the killer away and delt with him. The law saw to his punishment, and as that brother grew up he had his own life to live. He was already in his teens, and very soon he chose an academic career. He went to what was called back then a red-brick University and studied book-craft. Didn’t you, Mr Leslie?”

“You what?” gaped the librarian.

“Yes. You changed your name, but out of respect to your parents who had given you a personal forename you used that as a surname and selected the rather fanciful Dorian as your first name. Dorian Leslie. You thought it had a ring to it.

“Meanwhile, your parents were forced to sell the farm that had been in the family for generations. Nothing was going right for them, and when they finally did dispose of it at a cut price because there was blood in the soil, or at least that’s what you thought, you needed more than a student’s grant to live on. And you bumped into a sleazy photographer who fancied himself as an all-round light shining on the fringes of show-business. He had a movie camera, not a good one, but it sufficed for the kind of film he wanted to make, and he had a young girl willing to take her clothes off … for a consideration.”

The librarian was looking even more uncomfortable as she said that. She noticed and smiled grimly at him while Horace took over from her.

“He had a dodgy route to distributing the videos that he made, copying them so there were enough copies to provide him with a bit of an income and to pay others to strip off,” said Horace, “and he employed a broke and hungry student to do just that. A few rather pointless and certainly unpleasant films were made and distributed before he gave up the game because there simply wasn’t enough money in it. International pornographers were producing much more daring and better quality videos, and he with his one poor movie camera couldn’t compete. But fortunately for the student he had beguiled into taking his clothes off, he gained his degree and was rewarded with a job at Brumpton public library, climbing up to the top job there in almost record time.”

“How dared you!” snapped Mr Leslie. “Taking my name in vain like this! You can’t prove a word of it!”

Jenny grinned at him. “We have one of the tapes,” she said, “some were issued and a few must have been sold despite their lack-lustre contents. But sales were thinly spread over the country and you were pretty sure that nobody would associate the lurid boxer shorts and the tantalizing young girl with their town library. For the girl in the film was also made redundant from the porn industry when the photographer gave his camera away, and she sought her so-called co-star and his new respectability. She begged him for help, probably threatening to let it be known that he had a previous career if he didn’t cooperate.

“By the time that Lofty over there was released from prison having served a life sentence for the murder of the Pritchard boy Leslie Pritchard was Dorian Leslie, librarian, still consumed with anger at the world, he enticed poor broken old Lofty towards the farm that was no longer in his own family, set light to a barn or two himself and pointed to the police that Lofty had been there. Lofty was in no state to argue, and he was returned to Brumpton jail for a second spell. But it wasn’t he who was the arsonist, was it, Mr Leslie?”

The librarian merely sulked.

“Then a creature calling himself Gorgeous Will put in an appearance. And he was the sleazy son of a sleazier father and he knew who the librarian was because he had copies of the films his father had failed to sell. You see, the girl in the videos had a distinctive birth mark where the sun rarely shines, but he had seen it. She always wore very revealing clothing when socialising and he had seen her out and about, flashing too much of her thighs, and compared what he had seen with one of the tapes. Then, knowing that me and my Number two often have coffee at a charity shop’s cafe, he donated one of the tapes knowing that if I saw it there was a good chance that I’d recognise the people on the front of the case and get ideas.”

Horace took over the story. “Meanwhile,” he said, “the librarian was terrified that his past would come back to haunt him. It wasn’t the name Pritchard and his brother’s murder that worried him, but his time under the spotlight with a camera lens pointing at his genitals. He couldn’t bear the idea of that getting about, even though he pretended to himself that he never took his boxer shorts off. But I’ve seen part of the video, and I can assure you that he did. Several times. And from the expression on his face he revelled in it.

“So the one person who knew the truth had to be silenced, and that was his female co-star, Damsel. And he knew what to do. As a farmer’s son he knew all about rat poison and which types are best when it comes stopping hearts from beating. So he made a special coffee for damsel, and she drank it.”

“And that is the story to date,” concluded Jenny, “and it all started because your brother, Mr Librarian, no matter what you say, must have been a scumbag!”

“Good work,” hissed Cyril to Jenny, “I was getting there too. But well done. I’ll enter your name as a special adviser so that you get paid.”

“Special adviser at what?” asked Jenny, guessing what might be coming.

“Pornography, of course,” he smirked.

She sighed. “Of course,” she said.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 15.10.21

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