"There!"
Miss Marple understood then just what her friend had meant when she said the dead girl wasn't real.
The library was a room very typical of its owners. It was large and shabby and untidy.
It had big, sagging armchairs, and pipes and books and estate papers laid out on the big table.
There were one or two good old family portraits on the walls, and some bad Victorian water colours, and some would-be-funny hunting scenes.
There was a big vase of flowers in the corner.
The whole room was dim and mellow and casual. It spoke of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition.
And across the old bearskin hearth rug there was sprawled something new and crude and melodramatic. The flamboyant figure of a girl. A girl with unnaturally fair hair dressed up off her face in elaborate curls and rings.
Her thin body was dressed in a backless evening dress of white spangled satin; the face was heavily made up, the powder standing out grotesquely on its blue, swollen surface, the mascara of the lashes lying thickly on the distorted cheeks, the scarlet of the lips looking like a gash.
The fingernails were enamelled a deep blood red, and so were the toenails in their cheap silver sandal shoes.
It was a cheap, tawdry, flamboyant figure, most incongruous in the solid, old-fashioned comfort of Colonel Bantry's library.
Mrs Bantry said in a low voice,
"You see what I mean? It just isn't true?"
The old lady by her side nodded her head. She looked down long and thoughtfully at the huddled figure.
She said at last in a gentle voice,
"She's very young."
"Yes, yes, I suppose she is." Mrs Bantry seemed almost surprised, like one making a discovery.
There was the sound of a car crunching on the gravel outside.
Constable Palk said with urgency,
"That'll be the inspector."
True to his ingrained belief that the gentry didn't let you down, Mrs Bantry immediately moved to the door. Miss Marple followed her.
Mrs Bantry said, "That'll be all right, Palk" Constable Palk was immensely relieved.
chapter 5
Hastily downing the last fragments of toast and marmalade with a drink of coffee Colonel Bantry hurried out into the hall and was relieved to see Colonel Melchett, the chief constable of the county, descending from a car, with Inspector Slack in attendance.
Melchett was a friend of the colonel's; Slack he had never very much taken to. An energetic man who belied his name and who accompanied his bustling manner with a good deal of disregard for the feelings of anyone he did not consider important.
"Morning, Bantry," said the chief constable. "Thought I'd better come along myself.
This seems an extraordinary business."
"It's - it's -" Colonel Bantry struggled to express himself- "it's incredible -fantastic!"
"No idea who the woman is?"
"Not in the slightest.
Never set eyes on her in my life."
"Butler knows anything?" asked Inspector Slack.
"Lorrimer is just as taken aback as I am."
"Ah," said Inspector Slack. "I wonder."
Colonel Bantry said, "There's breakfast in the dining room, Melchett, if you'd like anything."
"No, no, better get on with the job.
Haydock ought to be here any minute now... Ah, here he is."
Another car drew up and big, broad-shouldered Doctor Haydock, who was also the police surgeon, got out.
A second police car had disgorged two plain-clothes men, one with a camera.
"All set, eh?" said the chief constable. "Right. We'll go along.
In the library, Slack tells me."
Colonel Bantry groaned.
"It's incredible!
You know, when my wife insisted this morning that the housemaid had come in and said there was a body in the library, I just wouldn't believe her."
"No, no, I can quite understand that.
Hope your missus isn't too badly upset by it all."
"She's been wonderful, really wonderful.
She's got old Miss Marple up here with her from the village, you know."
"Miss Marple?" The chief constable stiffened. "Why did she send for her?"
"Oh, a woman wants another woman don't you think so?"