by M C Beaton
“Oh, the snoops of Carsely,” she said in a husky voice. “I was just about to make a cup of tea. Come in.”
The living-room was full of knick-knacks and plants. Beside the window, a palm tree grew out of an old toilet. One wall was covered in those tin advertising signs that antique dealers love to fake. On the other side of the window from the palm tree was a copy of the boy of Bruges, peeing into a stone basin. The three–piece suite was upholstered in slippery green silk and decorated with gold fringe.
“I’ll get the tea,” said Peggy.
John looked at the stone boy of Bruges. “I wonder how the water circulates?” he said.
“Awful thing to have in your living room,” said Agatha. “Makes me want to pee myself.”
“Do you think she is really trying to be funny with all this kitsch?” whispered John.
“No, I have a feeling she really likes it. Shhh! Here she comes.”
Peggy entered carrying a tray. The teapot was in the shape of a squat fat man. The spout was his penis. Agatha suddenly decided she did not want tea. When Peggy handed her a cup, she placed it on a side-table.
“All this murder is quite exciting,” said Peggy.
“Exciting?” Agatha looked at her in surprise. “I thought you were very fond of Tristan.”
“Oh, we all were, dear. Such a gorgeous young man.”
“When’s the funeral?” asked John. “I forgot to ask.”
“Some cousin’s having the body taken to London for cremation.”
“I would like to attend that funeral,” said Agatha. “Do you know when it’s going to be?”
“I don’t think anyone will know until the body is released by the police. Of course, you had a thing with him, didn’t you?”
“If you mean an affair,” said Agatha stiffly, “I most certainly did not.”
“But Mrs. Feathers is telling everyone she peered round the kitchen door and saw him kissing you good night.”
“It was a social peck, that’s all,” said Agatha, becoming angry. “I thought you were close to him.”
“Not close. He amused me. And women of our decaying ages, Agatha, do like to be seen around with beautiful young men.”
“I do not need beautiful young men. I am engaged to John, here.”
“Really?” Peggy surveyed John from top to bottom before turning back to Agatha. “How did you manage that?”
John said quickly, “Did you give Tristan any money?”
“Not a penny. Not that the poor lamb didn’t try. Cost him a good few dinners before he gave up on me.”
I hate you, thought Agatha.
“Where were you on the night he died?” asked John.
“Silly man. You’re not the police, so I’m not even bothering to answer you. I thought it would be funny to see how you two snoops went about your business, but I’m beginning to find the whole thing rather boring.”
Agatha stood up. Rage was making her intuitive faculties work overtime. “It’s a good act you’re putting on, Peggy, dear. But you were in love with him and somehow he suckered you and I’m going to find out how. Oh, by the way, did you know he was gay? Come along, John.”
Peggy sat staring after them as they made their exit.
“That last remark of yours hit the old bag hard,” said John when they were back in the car. “How did you guess all that casual jeering was a front?”
“Tristan, it turns out, was a complete rat and a blackmailer,” said Agatha. “But he was glorious and charming. He made me feel fascinating and desirable. That was why he was so dangerous. People who have been conned by him – and to be honest, I could have been – will pretend he had no effect on them. But I can’t imagine any woman being unaffected by Tristan.”
“Except Mrs. Bloxby,” said John. “Let’s go and see Mrs. Tremp.”
∨ The Case of the Curious Curate ∧
5
Mrs. Tremp lived in a converted barn outside the village. Agatha remembered seeing her at various village events. She was a small, mousy woman, and when the colonel was alive, the locals reported that he bullied her.
They bumped down the pot-holed drive leading to her home. As they got out of the car, Agatha slammed the door, and rooks, roosting in a nearby lightning-blasted tree, swirled up to the heavens, cawing in alarm. The harvest was in, and the large field beside the house was full of pheasant pecking among the golden stubble.
The converted barn looked large and solid. Agatha rang the bell and they waited. The rooks came swirling back to their tree and stared down at Agatha and John with beady eyes. Agatha shivered. “I don’t like rooks. Birds of ill omen.”
“You mean ravens,” said John.
The door opened and Mrs. Tremp stood there, blinking myopically up at them in the sunlight.
“It’s Mrs. Raisin and Mr. Armitage, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Agatha. “May we come in? We want to talk about Tristan Delon.”
“Oh dear. I was just making jam…and…I suppose you’d better.” She turned and walked indoors and they followed her into a huge sitting-room with long French windows. The furnishings were a comfortable mixture of old and new. The air was redolent with the smell of plum jam.
“Do sit down,” said Mrs. Tremp. “I hope you don’t mind, I keep the windows closed when I am making jam or I get plagued by wasps. What do you want to know about Mr. Delon?”
“We heard you were friendly with him,” said Agatha.
“Yes, I was, and I was most distressed to hear of his death. And now this other terrible murder. There was never anything like this before you arrived in our village, Mrs. Raisin.”
“Nothing to do with me. I don’t go around murdering people. But I’d like to know who is for Mr. Bloxby’s sake.”
“He has only himself to blame for being a suspect,” said Mrs. Tremp. “He was so jealous of Mr. Delon.”
“I suppose Tristan told you that.”
“He did let slip that he was having a difficult time with the vicar, yes.”
“Did you know that he was gay?” asked John. “And that he tried to get women to give him money?”
She raised a gnarled and veined hand up to her suddenly trembling mouth. “I don’t believe it. That’s a wicked thing to say.”
“I’m afraid it’s true,” said Agatha. “Did he try to get you to give him money?”
“He did tell me he had this project to start a club for the youth of the village. He said he would need help. I did offer to support him. In fact, I had a cheque ready for him. But he was killed, so he could not collect it. But I am sure he really did want to start this club. You must be mistaken. He was a real Christian.”
“Mrs. Tremp,” said Agatha firmly, “you are very lucky that he never collected that cheque. He would have pocketed the money. How much was the cheque for?”
“Five thousand pounds.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“I can afford it. My dear George left me very comfortably off. He did not like me spending money. I made all our jam and cakes and bread. He insisted on it. And he would go over my housekeeping books every week, and goodness me, he would get so angry if he thought I had spent a penny too much. We lived in that poky little cottage on the Ancombe road for years. So full of junk I could hardly move! He never threw anything away. I craved space and light. The cottage was so dark. When he died, I rented a skip and threw everything out and then I bought this place.”
She gave a little smile. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“How did your husband die?” asked John.
“In a fit of temper. I was always saying, do watch your blood pressure. I’m afraid it was the cigarettes that did it.”
“He smoked too much?” Agatha thought guiltily of the packet of cigarettes in her handbag.
“No. What happened was I suddenly craved cigarettes. He wouldn’t let me smoke. There was a new cut-price grocery shop in Evesham. I realized if I shopped there instead of the village shop, I could enter the village-shop price
s in the housekeeping book, but save enough for a packet of cigarettes. He had said he was going for a round of golf. I had just lit one up when he came crashing in. He had forgotten something. He started to rant and rave about my smoking and then he made some strange gargling sounds and dropped dead.”
She gave another little smile. “I sat down and watched him for quite a while before I phoned the ambulance. He was quiet for the first time.”
“To get back to Tristan,” said Agatha, “how did he first get in touch with you?”
“He called on me. He said he was doing the rounds for the vicar. He was so charming. He loved this house. He said he could live here forever. He said Alf Bloxby was a bully. I said I knew all about bullying and told him about my life with George.”
“Alf Bloxby is not a bully,” said Agatha firmly. “You have known him a long time. Can you see Mrs. Bloxby putting up with a bully?”
“Mr. Delon said she was very long-suffering. I think you have been listening to malicious gossip, Mrs. Raisin. Even if he were gay, where’s the shame in that?”
“None whatsoever, except it was a fact he kept from the women he was tricking out of their money.”
A mulish looked firmed Mrs. Tremp’s normally weak features. “I think you had both better go. I am not going to listen to any more slander and lies.”
She rose and went and held open the front door. “And don’t come round here again.”
“I think she deliberately smoked that cigarette to make her husband have an apoplexy,” said Agatha waspishly. “Terrifying woman.”
“There’s one thing that came out of it,” said John.
“What?”
“She said she had a cheque ready for him. If he was prepared to take cheques rather than cash, then our Tristan planned to get as much as he could and then disappear.”
“Maybe. But if he’d taken village people’s money and disappeared, he would need to leave the church, and it was his position as a churchman that made it easier for him to get money out of people.”
“But if he had received some sort of threat on his life, he might have planned to leave the country.”
“Humph,” said Agatha, annoyed that she had not thought of any of that. “We’ve not got much. What do we do now?”
“It’s early yet. We could go back up to London to try whatever church it was in Kensington that Tristan used to work at.”
“Bill didn’t say what church it was.”
“We could ask around.”
“It might be in west Kensington. Might take us all day.”
“I’m willing to bet it’s somewhere around south Ken,” said John. “Our Tristan would want somewhere fashionable.”
“What if the police call round again?”
“Well, maybe we’ll leave it until tomorrow. Let’s find out how Mrs. Bloxby is getting along.”
Mrs. Bloxby led them through to the vicarage garden. “Alf is lying down,” she said. “This has all been a nightmare.”
They sat down in the garden. “And no word of anyone seeing a stranger in the village?” asked Agatha.
“Nothing at all. It’s television, you see. So many people appear to have been indoors, glued to their sets. I often wonder what it was Miss Jellop wanted to talk to me about. Was it something important, or just one of her usual complaints?” Mrs. Bloxby sighed. “Well, I’ll never know now.”
“What about the press?” asked Agatha. “Some of them must have still been around. People might remember someone with a camera and think, oh it’s just another one of them and not bother saying anything to the police. By the way, Tristan started off at a church in Kensington. Any idea which one?”
“It might be in the letter that Mr. Lancing wrote to Alf to introduce Tristan. Wait here and I’ll look.”
When Mrs. Bloxby went inside, John said, “We’ve been neglecting our local pub. That must be a hotbed of gossip at the moment. We’d better try there after we’ve finished with Mrs. Bloxby and get some lunch at the same time.”
Mrs. Bloxby came back holding a letter. She held it out to John, much to Agatha’s irritation. Agatha pushed her chair up next to John and they both read it at the same time. It described Tristan’s need to move to the country for his mental health. It then said in the last paragraph that he had previously worked at St. David’s in south Kensington before moving to New Cross.
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” said John. “It’s probably someone from Tristan’s past.”
“I think poor Miss Jellop was very much from Tristan’s present,” pointed out Mrs. Bloxby.
“But she might have found out something,” John persisted.
“Has that sister arrived?” asked Agatha. “Miss Jellop’s sister? The one from Stoke-on-Trent?”
“I haven’t heard anything,” said Mrs. Bloxby. “If I do, I’ll let you know.”
“We’re going to the pub for lunch,” said Agatha. “Care to join us?”
“No, Alf will be up and about soon.”
John and Agatha left her and drove the short distance to the pub. “We’re getting lazy,” commented Agatha. “I used to walk everywhere.” This was not true, but Agatha only remembered her rare bursts of exercise. She even had a bicycle rusting in the shed at the bottom of her garden that she had not taken out for over a year. She remembered cycling with Roy Silver, her one-time assistant in the days when she had her own company. Strange, she thought, that he hasn’t phoned. He must have read about the murders in the newspapers. And what of Sir Charles Fraith, her one-time friend and “Watson?” She gave a little shiver. Her friends were deserting her. Even Bill Wong looked at her with a policeman’s eyes these days rather than with the eyes of a friend.
The pub was noisy and full of smoke, not from cigarettes but from the open fire. The landlord, John Fletcher, was bending over it, coughing and spluttering. “It’s that last load of wood,” he said when he saw them. “Green.” He lit a fire-lighter and threw it in among the logs. Reluctant flames started to lick up round the wood. “That should do it.” He straightened up, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Now, what can I get you?”
They both ordered beer and sandwiches and retreated to a table in the corner by a window, propped open to let out the smoke. The fire crackled, a comforting sound. Outside the open window and beyond the small car-park, golden fields of stubble stretched out under a pale sun. The air coming in through the window held the chill of autumn. If only these murders hadn’t happened, thought Agatha, forgetting how bored she had been recently, it would be nice to sit here and eat sandwiches and drink beer and then go home and play with the cats.
John brought over their beer and sandwiches. “So what’s the gossip?” asked Agatha.
“Nothing much,” said the landlord. “At first they all thought the vicar did it, but there’s been talk that our curate wasn’t really a very nice person, and so people think it was someone outside the village.”
A customer at the bar shouted that he wanted a drink and John left.
Agatha took a sip of her beer and made a face. She preferred gin and tonic but often ordered beer, knowing she wouldn’t finish her half pint or want another. Alcohol was just about the most ageing thing a middle-aged woman could take.
There was the brisk tap of high heels on the stone-flagged floor to herald the arrival of Miss Simms, secretary of the ladies’ society.
She was clutching a glass of rum and vodka. “Mind if I join you?”
“Please do,” said John Armitage.
Miss Simms sat down on a chair next to Agatha. “Terrible about Miss Jellop, innit? But she had it coming to her.”
“How’s that?” asked Agatha.
“Always complaining and poking her nose into things. Terrible gossip, she was. You should have heard the things she said about you, Mrs. Raisin.”
“I don’t want to know,” snapped Agatha. “Do you still think Tristan was a saint?”
“No, he did a nasty thing.”
“What?”
“I met
him in the village on the day before he was murdered. He asked me out. Said he was tired of all those old women in the village. Now, that wasn’t a nice thing to say, but at the time, like, I was so flattered that he wanted my company because he asked me out for dinner.”
“But that was for the evening I had dinner with him!” exclaimed Agatha.
“I know. I’m coming to that. I was to meet him in that new restaurant, Stavros, in Chipping Norton, at eight o’clock. By ten past eight, I’d ordered a drink. He still didn’t show. By eight-thirty, I decided to leave. Well, I’d had a look at the menu and I knew I couldn’t afford their prices, so I just paid for the drink, picked myself up some fish and chips in Sheep Street and went home. I phoned and Mrs. Feathers said he was entertaining you and couldn’t be disturbed. When did he invite you?”
“The day before he was murdered.”
“But he asked me out for dinner in the afternoon of that day,” wailed Miss Simms. “I just don’t understand it.”
“Maybe he did it deliberately,” said John. “He’d already made a dinner date with Agatha here. Maybe he enjoyed the thought of you sitting, waiting.”
“But he seemed so nice, ever so nice, but now there’s some murmurs that he could be a bit, well, cruel, like.”
“Got any examples?” asked Agatha.
“Well, Mrs. Brown, her what comes with the mobile library, she said he was charming to her one week and then, the next, he announced in front of the other customers that the selection of books was for morons and some moron must have chosen them. Mrs. Brown chooses most of the books herself, everyone knows that. There was a bit of a shocked silence, but he stood there, looking so gorgeous and smiling so sweetly, that everyone sort of decided they must have misheard. Then old Mr. Crinsted near me at the council houses, Tristan used to call round and play chess with him. Mr. Crinsted said he was so glad of the company that he let Tristan win the first couple of times, but on the third, he beat him and he said Tristan got very angry and accused him of cheating.”
“There’s one good thing about stories like that going round the village,” said Agatha: “people can’t be thinking Alf Bloxby murdered Tristan in a fit of jealousy.”