(Winner of the Short Story Competition) by Catherine Dent.
Research Takes Time.
Shortly after her marriage, Rose discovered her local library, the only place Malcolm’s temper couldn’t reach her. It became a quiet, neutral refuge where she could unwind and lose herself in other worlds without spending her meagre housekeeping allowance on bus fares. Even now, at sixty-three, she still paused at the entrance to breathe in the scent of polish and old paper, as though stepping onto sacred ground.
Home had never smelled like that. Home smelled of cigarette smoke, stale beer, and Malcolm’s temper.
The librarians watched Rose age quietly over the decades. They remembered her arriving with two small children in tow, each clutching books almost too big for their arms. Every Tuesday and Thursday she brought them into the calm safety of the library, conjuring a magical world where they disappeared into stories about dragons, detectives, and distant planets. Her son became a television writer. Her daughter illustrated children’s books. Both escaped their tense home early, carrying hope and creativity into the world. Rose stayed behind.
She was mild and forgettable, the sort of woman people described as “lovely” in the vague way you describe someone you’ve never really seen. Nobody noticed the way she flinched at sudden noises. Nobody questioned why she never borrowed books.
Malcolm hated books. “Filling your head with rubbish again?” he’d sneer whenever he caught her reading at home. Once, he threw a novel into the fire because the heroine divorced her husband. Another time he swiped Rose so hard with a hardback it split her eyebrow.
After that, she stopped taking books home. Instead, she read only in the library.
At first, her choices were innocent enough: crime novels, cosy mysteries, stories where cruel men met satisfying ends. Then came the true-crime section: toxicology texts, botanical encyclopaedias, medical journals. Rose became especially fond of gardening books.
The librarians noticed her growing interest in plants and thought it charming.
“Starting a garden?” Mrs Finch asked one afternoon.
“In a manner of speaking,” Rose replied.
Years passed. Malcolm grew older but never gentler. Retirement gave him more hours to drink, sneer and rage. Research takes time and Rose had learned to be patient.
She learned which poisons mimicked natural illness, which symptoms doctors dismissed in elderly men with poor diets and bad hearts, which substances accumulated slowly enough to avoid suspicion.
The perfect murder, she discovered, belonged not to the cleverest killer but the most ordinary one. Rose was extraordinarily ordinary.
On a damp October morning, she closed her final book and slid it back onto the shelf between British Wildflowers and Natural Medicine. She sighed, knowing her relationship with the library had come to an end.
Outside, Rose walked steadily over to the town hall.
“I’m here to register a death,” she said.
The clerk nodded sympathetically. “Your husband?”
From the town hall window she allowed herself a small smile at her silent co-conspirator across the square – the library – certain it would keep their secret.
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