The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Eighteen

“Jonathan Rathburn,” Nigel Eglantine said, and put the tips of his long fingers together. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him at all. He rang up early in the week to ask if he could come up for a short stay. You both arrived yesterday, didn’t you? Mr. Rathburn preceded you by a day. It was Wednesday when he turned up, early in the afternoon.”

“How did he get here?”

“I don’t know that he said. If he drove, his car would be parked on the other side of the bridge. But we can’t get there to look for it, and we wouldn’t know it if we saw it, would we?”

“We wouldn’t even see it,” I said, “under all that snow.”

It was snowing again, though not as heavily as before. Carolyn and I were in the Great Library, along with Nigel and Colonel Blount-Buller. That room was pretty much as we’d left it, down to the copy of The Big Sleep still perched on the topmost shelf. There was, however, one significant change. Jonathan Rathburn was no longer crumpled at the foot of the library steps. The steps remained, and his blood still discolored the carpet, but Rathburn was gone.

He hadn’t risen from the dead, nor had he been mysteriously spirited away. The decision to move the body had been a collective one, taken up with not much argument in the aftermath of a satisfying if initially unnerving lunch of lamb stew and salad and seven-grain bread, all washed down with Newcastle brown ale or California zinfandel or Deer Park spring water, as one preferred. Someone, I’m not sure who, made the point that we now had two rooms off-limits and out of bounds because there were bodies in them. While it was no more than a nuisance to be unable to go into the library, we would be hard-pressed to make do without the kitchen.

Furthermore, it was noted, our initial decision to give up the library to the late Mr. Rathburn had been founded on the belief that the police would be appearing shortly. With the phone disabled and the bridge down, and with more snow falling, there was no way to guess when the police would actually show up. In the meantime, neither corpse was improving with age.

“Rathburn’s gone off,” the colonel reported, “and the cook can’t be far behind. It’s unfortunate about young Orris, but there’s no denying he’s a good deal more conveniently placed than the other two.”

Now, halfway through the afternoon, Rathburn and Cook were conveniently situated as well-outside, though not at the bottom of the gully. They reposed side by side in lawn chairs immediately to the rear of Cuttleford House, each covered with a bedsheet that was being covered in its turn by a fresh fall of snow.

We’d taken crime-scene photographs before we moved the bodies, making use of a Polaroid camera the Savages had brought. Greg had snapped half a dozen shots of each of them from a variety of angles. He had more film in his room, he assured us, but thought he ought to save some. For the next victim, I suppose.

Someone proposed outlining the bodies before moving them, either with chalk or strips of tape, but both were in short supply. Nor could anyone quite say what point there was in outlining the corpses. We’d all seen them do it on TV and figured you were supposed to.

Once the library was clear, we opened a window to air it out, then assembled there and divided into groups of three. It was the colonel’s suggestion that he make up a trio with Carolyn and me, and that the three of us initiate an investigation, interviewing each of the others in turn and holding our interviews in the library, at the very scene of the first murder. “I do have a lifetime of military experience,” he said, “and sat on my share of courts-martial over the years. And Rhodenbarr here has had investigative experience.”

What sort, someone wondered. Millicent, bless her heart, piped up again that I was a burglar. “Maybe the police investigated him,” she said. “And he assisted them in their inquiries.”

“Cut the crap,” Carolyn told her. “If you want to know what Bernie is, he’s what you could call an amateur sleuth. With a house like this, I’m surprised you haven’t got an amateur sleuth on staff year-round.” Someone wanted to know just what an amateur sleuth was, and what they did. “Sometimes they’re busybodies,” Carolyn explained. “But other times they’re ordinary people like Bernie, just minding their own business, and getting mixed up in murder investigations through no fault of their own. That’s what keeps happening to Bernie. He can’t go away for a quiet weekend in the country without stumbling over dead bodies.”

“And then he solves the crime?”

“I’ve had some good luck in the past,” I admitted.

“Is it a hobby?” someone wanted to know. I felt like saying that staying out of jail was a hobby, and solving other people’s crimes had occasionally served as a means toward that end. But I just lowered my head and tried to look modest.

And now our investigation was under way. We’d begun with Nigel, and had learned that he didn’t know much about Rathburn, except that Nigel had thought he’d said over the phone that he was calling from New York, but that he’d written “ Boston, Mass. ” in the guest register. “Of course he could have called from New York even if he lived in Boston,” Nigel added.

“Or he could have lied over the phone,” Carolyn said, “and remembered it wrong when it was time to sign in. For all we know he’s from Ames, Iowa.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest from Iowa,” Nigel said. “That’s not the same as Omaha, is it?”

The colonel asked him where he’d been at the time of the first murder, and Nigel said he didn’t know when the murder took place, but he rather thought he must have been asleep at the time. “In our own private quarters,” he said, “which isn’t one of the named rooms, I’m afraid. Cissy and I have a suite on the other side of the kitchen.”

“On the ground floor?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know when you retired for the night?”

He frowned. “It’s difficult to be precise,” he said. “Last night you’ll recall we had a sort of informal trial of the Glen Drumnadrochit.” I said I remembered it well. “I remember it well enough,” he said, “but I find that when I drink a good deal over a period of several hours, the tail end of the evening tends to be the slightest bit difficult to recall. The details blur, as it were.”

“No need to apologize,” the colonel said. “It could happen to a bishop.”

“It seems to me I had a walk round the downstairs,” Nigel said, “to see the house was settled in for the night. Cissy was already in bed when I returned to our room, and I joined her and, well, I must have dropped off right away. Next thing I knew it was morning.”

He’d been awake and dressed when Molly Cobbett discovered the body, he said, but hadn’t yet left the bedroom quarters. “We’ve our own en-suite bathroom,” he explained. “I say, I hope you won’t need to mention that to the others? All of the guests have to share, and they might resent it.”

“It’s your house, Nigel,” the colonel said. “You’re in it twelve months a year. I don’t imagine anyone would begrudge you a bog of your own. Was Cissy there when you awoke?”

“She woke up before me. But she was in our quarters, yes.”

“And neither of you left your quarters during the night?” I asked.

“Well, we wouldn’t have had occasion to, would we? Having the bath en suite and all.”

Cissy was next. She’d had hardly any contact with Rathburn beyond taking the imprint of his credit card when he checked in. She was quick to assure us, though, that he had seemed like a very nice man. All of the guests were nice people, she added, which was what made things so impossibly difficult.

“I know you’re all quite certain it couldn’t be a tramp,” she said wistfully, “and I do understand, believe me. But it would be ever so much nicer if it were. You can see that, can’t you?”

We agreed that we could.

“Because all of us here at Cuttleford House, guests and staff alike, are unassailably nice, don’t you see? And this is just not the sort of thing nice people do.”

I thought about this, while Carolyn and the colonel asked various logistical questions in an attempt to determine who was where when various acts occurred. I found myself contemplating various murderers over the years, trying to determine if any of them had been what you could legitimately call “nice.” Murder itself was not nice, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed to me that it was occasionally committed by nice people, or at least by people who appeared unequivocally nice on the surface.

Such was the case in my own experience, and such was most definitely the case in what I’d read, especially when English country houses came into the picture. A good part of the appeal of books set in English country houses, it seemed to me, lay in the fact that one wasn’t forced to read about the sort of person with whom one wouldn’t care to associate in real life. All of the characters were just as nice as you could hope, and yet you always seemed to wind up with dead bodies all over the place.

“Mrs. Eglantine,” I said. “Or should I call you Cecilia?”

“Or Cissy,” she said. “Everyone calls me that.”

“Cissy,” I said, “I’m sure you’re an observant woman. You’d have to be, running an establishment like Cuttleford House.”

“One has to keep one’s eyes open,” she agreed.

“So I’m sure you’ve noticed some unusual behavior.”

“Unusual behavior?”

“Perhaps some of the guests are not quite what they seem.”

“Not quite…”

“Or a little more than appears on the surface.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said.

“Some of the others have noticed things,” I said. “Inconsistencies, odd behavior.”

“They have?”

“And reported them to us.”

“Oh, dear,” she said, frowning. “But you’ve only just spoken with Nigel, haven’t you?”

“There were some other informal discussions earlier. With some of the others.”

“I see.”

“And I can’t violate a confidence, but-”

“No, of course not.”

“But if everyone adds a little piece to the puzzle, soon the whole picture may emerge.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” she said. “And there is something.”

“I thought there might be.”

“Except it’s really nothing, you see.”

“Well, of course it would seem like nothing.”

“It would?”

“It always does.”

“Ah,” she said. “I see. It always seems like nothing.”

“Always.”

“Well,” she said, “it was a look.”

“A look?”

“A glance, really. One person glanced at another.”

“And who did the glancing?”

“Mr. Rathburn. Poor Mr. Rathburn.”

“And he glanced at-”

“Mrs. Savage.”

“Leona Savage.”

“Yes. Millicent’s mother.”

“And Greg’s wife,” I said. “And Mr. Rathburn glanced at her?”

“He did.”

The colonel cleared his throat. “Men do glance at women,” he said, “although with every passing year I find it a little more difficult to remember why. But they do, and Mrs. Savage is an attractive young woman, and Mr. Rathburn is a vigorous young man. Or was, that is to say. So if Mr. Rathburn glanced at Mrs. Savage the way a man glances at a woman-”

“I’m sure that’s all it was,” Cissy Eglantine said.

“No,” Carolyn said, “you’re not. Are you?”

Cissy sighed, set her shoulders. “No,” she admitted. “I’m not. It wasn’t that sort of glance at all.”

“It couldn’t have been, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it. What sort of glance was it?”

“It was just a glance,” Cissy said, “and perfectly innocent, I’m certain, but the thought that came to me-”

“Yes?”

“-was that they knew each other, and that they weren’t keen that anyone else should know this. But I’m sure there was nothing to it. I’m sure there was just something about her that reminded him of someone he’d known years ago, but only from a certain angle. And then when she turned her head the resemblance was gone. That happens all the time, doesn’t it? You think you recognize someone, but once you take a second glance you realize there’s really no resemblance at all.”

“That fellow Wolpert,” Rufus Quilp said. “He talks like a lawyer. You may have noticed.”

“Everyone talks like a lawyer,” Carolyn said. “I think Court TV’s what did it, that and the OJ trial.”

“Perhaps that’s all it is,” Quilp said with a sigh, settling his clasped hands upon his ample stomach. “He can’t actually be an attorney, can he? Because they’re all terribly busy, and Wolpert has the time to come here for a lengthy holiday.”

“He was talking about extending his stay,” I remembered.

“We’re all extending our stay now, aren’t we? Like it or not. No TV to be watched, either, Court or otherwise, so perhaps our Mr. Wolpert will lose his lawyerly aspect. If that’s where he got it.” He sniffed. “He certainly doesn’t dress like a lawyer. No Brooks Brothers suits in his closet. Tweed jackets with elbow patches, that’s more his line. Knows a lot about poisons, did you notice?”

“About mushrooms, anyway.”

“About everything. Could be a professor. Dresses like a professor, wouldn’t you say? Ought to be fiddling about with a pipe, forever taking it apart and cleaning it. Fit the image to a T.”

“You don’t like him,” Carolyn said.

“Don’t dislike him, either,” Quilp said. “No need to feel one way or the other about him, actually. Wouldn’t have said boo about him, but you did ask about little suspicions and observations.” He leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what it is. I’ve watched him eat.”

“You have?”

“I have. He picks at his food. I never trust a man who picks at his food.”

“Miss Dinmont can walk,” Millicent Savage reported.

“I think she said as much,” I said. “She was telling me that she has a first-floor room because of the wheelchair. She can manage stairs if she absolutely has to, but then somebody has to carry the wheelchair upstairs. If she can get up a flight of stairs, I suppose she can walk.”

“She was dancing,” the child said.

“Dancing?”

“In her room. She was all by herself, too, in her room with the door locked and the curtain drawn.”

“If the door was locked and the curtain drawn,” said the colonel, “then how could you possibly have seen her?”

“Maybe I was wrong and the door was open,” Millicent suggested.

“And maybe it wasn’t,” Carolyn said. “Maybe you looked through the keyhole.”

Millicent giggled. “Maybe I did.”

“I say,” the colonel said. “That’s no way to behave, young lady.”

“I know,” she said. “But I’m only ten years old. It would be a lot worse if a grown-up did it. And I never would have done it except for the music.”

“The music?”

“That she was dancing to. It was all dreamy and gooey and romantic, and I heard it coming through the door, and that’s what made me look.”

“I don’t believe you,” Carolyn said. “I bet you look in keyholes all the time.”

“Not all the time.” The imp giggled. “You’d be surprised what you can see that way.”

“And what did you see this time?”

“Miss Dinmont dancing, and she was very graceful, too. She had her arms held out as if she was dancing with a partner, but she was all by herself. Unless she was dancing with a ghost. But I’m sure she wasn’t.”

I’d have let that pass, but Carolyn thought to ask her what made her so certain.

“Because it wouldn’t have been decent.”

“To dance with a ghost?”

“Not like that.”

“Not like what?”

“Naked,” Millicent said. “Miss Dinmont didn’t have any clothes on.”

Rufus Quilp was apt to drop off to sleep at any moment. It might be Pickwickian syndrome and it might be apnea. And it might be feigned-sometimes he appeared to be sleeping, but something he said later would indicate that he’d overheard what was being said during his little nap.

Miss Hardesty had been seen in urgent conversation with the cook. Greg Savage, who mentioned seeing the two of them, had assumed the conversation had something to do with Miss Dinmont’s dietary requirements, which one somehow knew would be complicated. Now, though, it seemed to him that Miss Hardesty had appeared a bit agitated, and the cook faintly disgruntled.

Jonathan Rathburn, whom I had observed writing at the desk in the library, had been spotted doing the same thing in other parts of the house as well. There was some disagreement as to what he’d been writing. I’d sort of assumed he’d been writing letters, as that’s one of the things people are forever doing in English country houses, but someone reported him as having written on a pad, and another thought he had been making entries in a diary. Neither letters nor a diary had been found on his body, or elsewhere in the library, which might mean that the murderer had carried them off, or that he hadn’t had them with him when he was murdered.

No one admitted to having met Rathburn prior to his arrival at Cuttleford House. Hardly anyone could recall exchanging a word with him. Several people described him as preoccupied, and Leona Savage, who’d also seen him scribbling away, had thought he might be a writer. “Struggling to make headway on a book or story,” she said. “He had that air about him, as if he’d come to the country to free himself creatively.”

“And she never laid eyes on him before,” the colonel said after she’d left the room, “and yet Cissy Eglantine saw Rathburn give her a significant glance.”

“Cissy could be mistaken,” Carolyn said, “or Rathburn could have recognized Leona even if Leona didn’t recognize him. Or he could have thought he knew her even if he didn’t.”

“Or she could be lying,” I said.

“Or she could be lying. Anybody could be lying about anything, couldn’t they? You know those party games where one person’s the murderer, and when you interrogate all the players, everybody except the murderer has to tell the truth? Well, that’s what this is like, except it isn’t.” The colonel looked puzzled, and I suppose I did, too. “Because any of them could be lying and it wouldn’t prove anything,” she explained. “Not necessarily. Suppose Jonathan and Leona had a brief fling twenty years ago when they were both counselors at Camp Yahrzeit. That would be reason enough for him to give her a significant glance, and it might also be reason enough for her to insist she’d never met him before, no matter who killed him.”

We tossed that back and forth, and wound up agreeing with her. Anybody could lie, not just the murderer. It didn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it was.

It left me wondering at the point of our efforts. I’d deliberately turned things around during our session with Cissy, switching from a clinical look at alibis and schedules to a more gossipy, anecdotal approach. After she’d left the room I had explained why.

“You described me as an amateur sleuth,” I told Carolyn, “and that’s what all three of us are, amateurs. We all have a little experience that might prove useful, but we’re not cops. A professional approach won’t work for us. But an amateur approach, where people wind up telling us the kind of observations and inferences they wouldn’t dream of sharing with a policeman, well, that might be fruitful.”

And I suppose it had been, in a way. We’d since learned from Quilp that Gordon Wolpert was a picky eater and not to be trusted, and in due course we learned from Wolpert that Earlene Cobbett, the freckled chambermaid so distraught over Orris’s fatal fall, had been noisily ill several mornings in succession. “Now that doesn’t mean the girl is in the family way,” he said, “or that Orris put her there, and even if she is and he did, that doesn’t begin to implicate either of them or anyone else in the events you’re attempting to investigate.” But we’d said we wanted to know what he had observed, and he’d heard her retching three mornings in a row, so he was reporting it.

But what good did it do us to know it? What profit was there in having learned that Miss Dinmont danced in the nude, or that Millicent Savage peeped at keyholes? What difference did it make if Miss Hardesty had had words with the cook, or that Dakin Littlefield had been spotted casting speculative glances at Molly Cobbett?

It was Mrs. Colibri who’d reported Littlefield’s evident interest in the downstairs maid. Lettice in turn had Molly sized up as a saucy tart ready to throw herself at anything in pants. (The most interesting thing about her observation was Carolyn’s reaction to it; she looked down at herself to make sure she wasn’t wearing a skirt.) “My own husband hasn’t noticed the little tramp,” Lettice added, “but we’re on our honeymoon, and that makes a difference. I’m sure the rest of the men have noticed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have given her a tumble.”

If Dakin had entertained thoughts of luring the downstairs maid upstairs, he was keeping them to himself. According to him, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the staff, or to the other guests either. Nor was he much interested in our inquiry, or in staying any longer than he had to at Cuttleford House.

“In the morning,” he said, “we’re out of here.” He tossed his head, a gesture that someone must have told him showed off his wavy hair. “I understand if you walk downstream a ways there’s a place where you can get across the creek without breaking your neck in the process. Then it’s just a matter of finding your way out to the main road. It’s too late to try it now, but as soon as the sun’s up that’s what Lettice and I are going to do.”

“But there’s been murder done,” the colonel told him. “I thought it was agreed that we would all remain here until the police arrive.”

“Maybe that’s what you thought,” Dakin said, “but so what? I didn’t agree to anything, and the rest of you haven’t got any authority over me. Once we get out of here we’ll call the cops and they’ll be out here like a shot, and isn’t that what you people want?”

“Yes, but-”

“I don’t know why the hell I ever came here in the first place,” he went on. “It was Lettice’s idea, and don’t ask me where she got it from. This place is supposed to be so exclusive and special, and all I see is a run-down pile of bricks run by a dizzy dame with a drunk for a husband. Every place you go nowadays you got satellite TV with fifty or a hundred channels, and this dump can’t even put together an old black-and-white portable set with a rabbit-ear antenna. Who in his right mind would come to a place like this?”

“Mrs. Eglantine is perfectly stable,” the colonel said, “and Nigel is hardly an alcoholic simply because he’s developed a palate for malt whisky. And there are special pleasures to be found in the absence of television. As for what sort of person would willingly come here, I may say that I myself am pleased to spend six months a year here.”

“I rest my case,” Dakin said. “This investigation of yours is a lot of crap, and so’s the idea of everybody tripling up in kinky little trios. I’m with my wife, and the two of us’ll be sticking together, and everybody else can just stay the hell away from us. And in the morning we’re gone, and I’ll tell you, I’ll be glad to get out of this nuthouse.”

I could see his point.

“It’s hopeless,” I announced. “I’ve got a notebook full of scribbles, and I’m no closer to naming the murderer than I was when we started. When the police crack this case, they’ll do it by breaking down alibis and asking hard questions and analyzing physical evidence. We can’t do any of that. We’ve got no authority, and when people tell us things anyway we don’t know what to make of it. All we can hope to do is keep everyone else alive until the cops get here, and I don’t know when that will be, and neither does anybody else. Jesus, is it snowing again?”

“I think it’s just blowing around,” Carolyn said.

“Well, I don’t. I think it’s fresh snow, and I think it’s falling, and maybe it’ll go on like that all night. I don’t know what to do.”

“Keep a stiff upper lip,” Blount-Buller advised.

“I’ll certainly try,” I said, “but…”

There was a knock on the door. I went over and opened it, and Raffles came in. He usually scratches, and he’s not very good at that, and I was trying to figure out how he’d managed to knock when I realized that Molly Cobbett was standing there, waiting to be acknowledged before she said anything.

“Yes, Molly,” I said.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, “and yours, ma’am, and yours as well, sir-”

“What is it, Molly?”

“It’s dinner, sir. Not wanting to disturb you, but it’s served, and they’re all in the dining room. Except for those as are in the bar, having a drink before dinner.”

“A drink before dinner,” I said.

“Yes, sir. It sharpens the appetite, Mr. Eglantine says.”

“Well, then,” I said. “We’d all better have one, don’t you think? Everybody knows you can’t trust a picky eater.”