The Body in the Library

Posing as a door-to-door collector of charity for the local vicarage, Miss Marple goes to Basil Blake’s cottage in St. Mary Mead and pushes her way past the platinum-blonde woman who answers the door. Cheerily assertive, she bullies a half-crown donation out of the young woman, who identifies herself as Dinah Lee. Apologizing for the “impertinence” of her advice, Marple urges her strongly to stop using her “maiden name” in the village while living with her husband, Basil Blake. Though it has “amused” them to shock the neighbors by pretending to live “in sin,” Marple warns Dinah that she and Basil may soon need all the goodwill they can get. Shocked, Dinah asks if she discovered their married status from Somerset House, where marriages are registered. Marple explains that she knew it from their public arguments, which are clearly those of a married couple; unmarried couples, she says, “dare not quarrel” (181). Gravely, she tells Dinah that her husband is on the verge of being arrested for the murder of Ruby Keene.

Minutes later, Basil arrives with a fresh supply of booze. Seeing Miss Marple, and hearing of his imminent arrest, he quickly loses the spring in his step and looks despondent. He protests that he only saw Ruby a couple of times at the Majestic and knows almost nothing about her. Marple asks him what happened to his hearthrug, which is missing, and Basil says he threw it in the trash. Chiding him for this mistake, Marple guesses that the rug had “spangles” on it from Ruby’s dress, and Basil confesses that he couldn’t get them off. Sullenly, Basil tells his tale: Returning early from a party on the night in question, he came home to find a dead girl lying on his hearthrug, apparently strangled. Afraid of Dinah coming home and finding him with the freshly murdered corpse, he rashly decided to move it elsewhere. Under the influence of alcohol and his resentment of Colonel Bantry, he decided to leave the body in Bantry’s home, Gossington Hall. Nodding, Marple repeats the analogy she drew earlier to little Tommy Bond, who put a frog in his teacher’s clock as a joke.

Basil Blake tells Dinah not to worry, that his innocence will come out in the end. At just that moment, Inspector Slack arrives to take him into custody. Having independently found evidence against Basil, notably the discarded hearthrug covered with Ruby’s spangles, Slack gapes in wonder at Miss Marple, inferring that she beat him to the solution yet again. His own theory is that Basil, mad with “blood lust,” murdered both Ruby Keene and Pamela Reeves in one busy night. Apparently, Basil’s alibi has been contradicted by a parking attendant, who reports that he left the party that night at 11 o’clock rather than midnight. After Basil leaves in handcuffs, Marple reassures Dinah that she knows Basil is innocent, though it may be hard to prove. However, a remark Dinah made has given her an idea.

At Gossington Hall, Dolly Bantry returns from Danemouth to find her husband noticeably “shrunken” and morose. The gossip over Ruby’s death has already taken a toll: The Colonel’s appointment to the county council chair has, on some pretext, been rescinded, along with several dinner invitations. Angrily, Dolly sits down and distractedly cuts the fingers off of one of her gloves. Discussing where to sit that evening, the Colonel meekly suggests the drawing room, but Dolly insists on the library. A “sparkle” comes into her husband’s eye, and he wholeheartedly agrees.

Unable to reach Miss Marple by phone, Dolly is greatly relieved to hear the butler announce her arrival. In a rush, she bemoans to her friend how the neighbors have begun to “cold-shoulder” them, but Marple tells her not to worry. Announcing that Basil Blake has just been arrested for Ruby’s murder, she adds quickly that he didn’t do it. He did put the body in their library, she says, but only after someone else murdered the girl in his parlor. As the Colonel objects that any honest, stalwart fellow in his situation would have called the police, Marple informs him that Basil Blake, as a teenage volunteer for the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) during the war, rescued four children from a burning building. Gravely injured by his heroics, he spent the next year in traction at a hospital, after which he became interested in film design. The Colonel, impressed by this, and especially by Basil’s modesty in never talking about it, admits that he was wrong to jump to conclusions about the young man. And the fact that Basil was drunk when he pulled his “prank” elicits from the Colonel “an Englishman’s sympathy for alcoholic excess” (192). Moreover, Marple tells them that she’s fairly certain who did murder Ruby and put her body in the Blakes’ cottage. To make sure, however, she needs their help. The answer, she says, lies in Somerset House.

Sir Henry Clithering tells Miss Marple that he feels uneasy with a plan that she has proposed. Marple admits her scheme is “unorthodox,” but explains that she needs to be sure. As for Superintendent Harper, it might be dangerous to tell him too much: A hint to watch certain persons should suffice, she says.

Alone with Harper, Sir Henry passes on the private information that Conway Jefferson plans to meet with his solicitor the next day to make up a new will. Mark Gaskell and Adelaide Jefferson, he says, will be informed that very evening. Inferring much from those two facts, Harper guesses that there are serious questions about the guilt of Basil Blake. As if to confirm, Sir Henry passes him a slip of folded paper; reading it, Harper whistles in amazement. “Women,” says Sir Henry, “are eternally interested in marriages” (195). Next, Sir Henry visits his friend Conway Jefferson, who says he has told his two in-laws of his decision to honor Ruby’s memory by leaving his £50,000 to a hostel for young girls who work as professional dancers. Both of them, he says, “swallowed it.” He adds that he regrets having made a “fool” of himself over Ruby, around whom he built up a fantasy world. She may, he says, have had his daughter Rosamund’s “coloring,” but certainly not her heart or mind.

Sir Henry makes a sweep of the downstairs and learns that Mark Gaskell has just left for London in his car. Hugo McLean is doing a crossword in the lounge, and Josie and Raymond are wearily dancing with a couple of ungainly guests in the ballroom. Hours later, at three o’clock in the morning, a shadowy figure creeps into Conway Jefferson’s room from the window and approaches his bed. With hardly a sound, a “finger and thumb were ready to pick up a fold of skin; in the other hand the hypodermic was ready” (197). Suddenly, a second figure darts from the shadows, seizing both of the intruder’s hands in an iron-hard grip. Light floods the room, and Conway, fully awake, looks into the face of Ruby Keene’s murderer.

Sir Henry, Colonel Melchett, and Superintendent Harper all beseech Marple to explain her “methods” in cracking the case. Marple begins by saying that most people, including policemen, are “far too trusting for this wicked world. They believe what is told them. I never do” (198). What hampered the police in this case, she says, was their tendency to take things for granted—to jump to conclusions that went far beyond the bare facts. The pivotal facts about the body in the library, she says, were that the girl’s teeth stuck out and that she bit her nails, but these were largely ignored. Much of the confusion in the case came from the body’s appearance in the Bantrys’ library, which made the “wrong pattern,” as well as stalling the murderer’s plan, which was to frame Basil Blake. Blake must have seemed the perfect scapegoat, since he had a wild lifestyle and was known to frequent the Majestic Hotel: The police would just assume Ruby had been extorting him, and that her murder was a spontaneous crime of passion. But as a result of the body being moved, the investigation focused very quickly on the Jefferson family, which must have been very annoying to the killer.

Marple says that the money connected with Ruby’s death—£50,000—stood out as the most likely motive. The two who would benefit from it (Mark and Adelaide) seemed harmless; but one can never tell with people, when that kind of money is involved. Adelaide, after all, wanted her freedom, and had a child to look out for. Mark, of course, had gambling debts. But for certain reasons, Marple says, she believed a woman was behind the murders. Then, when the car containing the charred body was found, the answer snapped into place. But Marple still had an insoluble problem: The person she knew to be involved in the murder seemed to have no motive for doing it. But then Dinah Lee gave her the idea about Somerset House and its marriage records. If either Mark or Adelaide was (secretly) married, or was planning to be, then their significant other would also have Conway’s money for a motive; Raymond Starr or Hugo McLean, for instance. But Miss Marple knew who the culprit had to be.

The corpse’s bitten nails, quite different in appearance from trimmed nails, gave the game away. If Ruby’s nails were trimmed, as seems certain from the pairings found in her hotel room, then the body in the library couldn’t be hers. Which means that Josie Turner lied when she identified the body as her cousin’s, and there could only be one reason for this. Josie, in fact, was astonished to learn that the body had moved to the Bantrys’ library from Basil Blake’s cottage, where she had had it placed. Her other attempts to cast suspicion on Basil included mentioning him to Raymond (as “the film man”) and slipping a photo of him into Ruby’s pocket book. No one questioned Josie’s statements, because she had no (known) motive to lie or deceive. But at Somerset House, Miss Marple discovered that Josie and Mark Gaskell had been secretly married for over a year. This gave her one of the strongest (and oldest) motives in the world: money.

To secure their alibis for Ruby’s murder, Josie and Mark needed a decoy corpse to leave in Basil’s cottage. Accordingly, an innocent Girl Guide was lured to the hotel by Mark, who played the part of a Hollywood producer, while Josie pretended to be a makeup artist. As Josie used hair bleach, makeup, and nail polish to turn Pamela Reeves into Ruby’s double, the girl was given a drugged soda, so Mark could smuggle her comatose body to St. Mary Mead after nightfall. In Basil’s cottage, he strangled her, then drove at full speed back to the Majestic so he could be seen playing bridge between 10:30 pm and midnight. In other words, it was Pamela’s body that was found in the Bantrys’ library, and Ruby’s that was burned in the car.

Ruby, after finishing her dance at 10:30 pm, was drugged as well, probably in her after-dinner coffee. Shortly afterward, Josie murdered her in her room, after dressing her as Pamela. When Ruby didn’t turn up for her midnight dance, Josie lied to everyone that she wasn’t in her room. Finally, in the early hours, Josie carried Ruby’s body out the side exit and loaded it into George Bartlett’s car. At the abandoned quarry, she set the car ablaze with tanks of petrol, knowing that Ruby’s charred body would be identified as Pamela’s. All of this was just to give Mark and herself alibis for the police surgeon’s estimated window for “Ruby’s” death.

Josie, Marple says, thought of (almost) everything: Since Pamela’s nails were bitten down, she publicly snagged and broke one of Ruby’s nails on her shawl, to create an excuse to cut them. However, bitten nails are obvious to a knowledgeable eye; moreover, Mark confirmed Marple’s suspicions by saying that Ruby’s teeth went “down her throat” (108), which didn’t match the body in the library, whose teeth stuck out. So, knowing who the culprits were, Marple set a trap for them by having Conway announce an imminent change to his will, which would force them to act that very night. Mark drove off to London to secure an alibi for himself, while Josie crept into Conway’s room with a syringe of digitalin. Josie had even planned to knock a stone ball off the balcony afterward, to make it look as if the shock of the noise had triggered Conway’s heart attack. The mastermind behind the entire plan, Marple says, was Josie, the smarter and more willful of the two. Ironically, it was she who had summoned Ruby to the hotel in the first place, ruining her own prospects. No wonder it was so difficult for her to conceal her anger at her cousin, even after the poor girl’s death.

As Marple finishes her explanation, Adelaide enters the room with Hugo McLean and announces her engagement to him. Congratulating them, Conway Jefferson says that he’s changing his will to settle £10,000 on Adelaide when he dies; all the rest will go to her son, Peter, to whom he has taken a great fondness. When Raymond Starr hears of the engagement, he smiles bravely, and wishes Adelaide happiness. Afterward, he privately bemoans his ill luck, after all “the trouble [he] took to mug up that bit about the Devonshire Starrs” (207).