So what's going on in the basement? The story begins with a giddy newlywed couple (each calls the other "Darling!" as they walk about their new domicile with their arms wrapped around each others' waists) moving into their first (rental) home together. The moving men are getting ready to leave and they are gripped with anxiety about what a reasonable tip is: they aren't rich, but they don't want to be cheap, but the fact is that the movers didn't put any of the boxes into the correct room and the dining table now has a massive gouge in it that no amount of furniture polish will hide. But too happy to be fair, they give the guy in charge a whole quid (moving man isn't impressed) and, once the men are out of their way, settle into the business of dancing around, whooping and hollering, praising the amazingness of each and every room, not even noticing how lonely the barren "pocket handkerchief -sized front lawn" looks. "I'll make us tea!" chirrups the happy wife as she gets to work in the kitchen, looking for a kettle and cups. She tells her husband that, since it's getting late, he should put up some curtains. "Curtains!" he snorts, "Remember there's a cellar! Maybe the previous owner forgot something!....Maybe there's buried treasure down there!" He runs down the rickety stairs into the cellar like a child running for his presents on Christmas morning. And, while the cellar is empty, there is an intriguing depression in the bricked floor, 5' x 15" in size. "I knew it--treasure!!!" he whoops, and races to find a spade among the boxes tossed higgledy-piggledy around the place. His wife, only concerned with the fact that his toast is getting cold, doesn't care about "treasure." But there's no stopping "Darling" once he starts digging. Yep, the soil is loose--surely that's a sign of recent activity...wait a minute, what's that? Then, female Darling hears male Darling's gurgled, gagging cry, "Darling! Call the police!"
Yes, just as we all suspected from the title of the book, the husband has found a corpse in the basement. The police arrive and haul the Darlings away, escorting them to relatives where they are instructred to stay for a few weeks so the police have time to tear the house apart searching for clues. This really wasn't how they imagined their move-in day going...
Into the tumult of officers inspecting the grounds, tearing through all the boxes, ("They may be all right, but you never know."), behind wallpaper, in the attic, in the cellar, steps our hero, Chief Inspector Moresby. (This is not his first rodeo. He's solved seven other major crimes, all of which have been given catchy names like The Poisoned Chocolates Case and The Silk Stocking Murder. "Nasty bit of business, that was," he tells us.) An anti-Sherlock, Moseby is happy, friendly, and not afraid to assign tedious tasks to his junior colleagues. ("Go ask every cabbie in London if they brought a young woman between the ages 20-35 to this address any time last August.") And discovering the facts takes time: we can't even begin figuring out who the murderer is until we identify the body and get her backstory. To begin, Moseby heads over to meet the neighbors who are dying to learn what is going on in the house next door. We find out that the lady who used to live there was very old and died peacefully. She has two older children, a son who is in the navy and right at that minute on a ship on the other side of the world, and an estranged daughter who died some time ago. No one else. A few friends, mostly other older ladies in the neighborhood. Other than that, they don't know anything. Unsurprisingly, the people who know the most (including remembering a shifty looking "vacuum salesman" that came a while ago and a young woman wearing giant spectacles claiming she reupolstered furniture for suspiciously low prices) are "The Mabels"--the name the inspector gives to all maids as that's the name of the first maid he interviews. ("Find more Mabels to question!", he orders Sergaent Afford.)
After many, many weeks involving many, many interviews, they finally find out (following a lead on the strange war-time metal brace used to repair a femur break) her identity and that she was five months pregnant when she was killed. ("Well, there's our motive," concludes Moseby--and it turns out he's right.). I say "weird brace" because we are told that, as a result of steel shortages during The War, bone braces had to be made out of an inferior kind of metal--good enough, but not nice to work with and the bone joins didn't heal properly as the metal wasn't soft enough to allow the tissues to grow. This feature of the leg brace actually works in Moseby's favor as, like counting tree rings, experts can tell how long ago a bone break occured by how much bone tissue builds up and, because of the non-standard brace, they could get it down to a time frame of 4-6 months. See what you learn by reading old books? Moresby's supervisor asks why he's ruling out suicide--she wasn't married, maybe she was ashamed? "Girls aren't ashamed of being pregnant these days," opines Moresby. So now that we know who she is and why someone wanted her dead so now we need to learn who wanted her dead--and finding that out takes us to her last place of employment, Roland House, a boy's prep school in a teeny village south of London. So, off they trot...
Roland House is just wrapping up the end of term and everyone's nerves are frazzled. Five instructors have announced they intend to hand in their notices to punish instructors they are feuding with over rugby schedules and two, Mr. Duff and Miss Crimp (who suffers from sexual repression, diagnoses Moseby), are gleefully planning how to flex their newly acquired power once their enemies are gone.
Arriving at Roland House marks the beginning of the "psychological thriller" part of the book which turns into a cat and mouse game between our police inspector and a cold-hearted killer. Each time the inspector learns something (as when he does find a cabbie who remembers our Prime Suspect visiting our Victim at her apartment just a few days before she disappeared), he is more certain that Mr. Smartie (as he calls the murderer) did it--but also the more certain that he has NO material evidence that will get the case into a courtroom.
I won't give anything away other than that, as usual for this author (at least, when he is channeling his 'Iles' self as he has done here), you can't possibly know how this is going to go until you literally get to the second to the last sentence of the book. And, as usual for Iles, the book leaves one with that greasy feeling of having been exposed to a kind of nastiness that makes one want to get far, far away from humans.
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