Lawrence Block - The Burglar in the Library

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.