by M C Beaton
"Tart!"
Agatha stifled a sigh. "I mean, did she upset you in any way?"
"Bitch!" muttered Mr Boggle.
"Perhaps you could tell us what happened." James's voice was patient.
"Her had told Mrs Bloxby she wanted to help in the community...and it's no use you two expecting tea or coffee. I've got more to do with my savings,"
Agatha ignored this. "Go on," she said. "Mary asked Mrs Bloxby how she could help out in the community?"
"Yes, so she told that Mrs Fortune to take us out for the day. The painted hussy called round here, mutton dressed as lamb, if you ask me.
"I said we wanted to go to Bristol to look at the ships. Didn't I, Boggle?"
"Yurse," said Mr Boggle morosely.
"Her said, 'Oh, come now, that's too far. What about Evesham?'
"I said, didn't I, Boggle, that it was her duty to help the old get about? I told her that not all of us had money to go gallivanting around in large cars. Yes, and I told her that the way she was going on with Mr Lacey here was a fair scandal. In my day, we got married, that's what I told her. I was never one to mince my words, was I, Boggle?"
"No," said Mr Boggle, staring at the blank television screen.
"To which Mary replied?" prompted Agatha.
"That Mrs Fortune then had the cheek to say that we would be better off in the old folks' home than leeching off people. Can you imagine? Did you ever hear the like? I told her to get out and take her trollopy ways with her."
"Have you any idea who damaged your roses?" asked James.
"Never had any doubt," said Mrs Boggle. "It was her, Mary Fortune. Did it out of spite. Knew we would take first prize with them roses."
"But you didn't get a prize," said Agatha.
"Cause we didn't have nothing left for the show to match them roses," said Mr Boggle suddenly and violently. He leaned forward and switched on a large electric fire and a blast of heat scorched into the already hot room. Outside, the sun was blazing down out of a clear sky. The temperature must have been in the high seventies. The room was suffocating. The windows were covered in thick white net, and curtains which looked as if they had been made out of red felt blocked out what was left of the light. The very stifling air seemed to be full of years of shared marital venom.
"The wicked shall be cut down like the green bay tree," Mrs Boggle quoted inaccurately but viciously.
"You mean you are glad Mrs Fortune is dead?" asked Agatha.
"Course. That one got what was coming to her. Unnatural to sneer at the poor aged like us. We never did get that trip to Bristol. We - "
"Good heavens! Is that the time?" Agatha leapt to her feet. "Come along, James. Thank you for your time, Mrs Boggle."
Seeing her prey escape her, Mrs Boggle also got to her feet, but by the time she did that, Agatha and James had made their escape.
"Whew," said Agatha. "Wouldn't it be fun if it turned out they did it? At the back of my mind, there's always a fear that the murderer might turn out to be someone quite nice who was temporarily deranged by Mary. But who could feel sorry for the Boggles?"
"Mrs Raisin!" Mrs Boggle's voice sounded from Culloden. "Come back. Boggle's fainted."
James took a half-step towards the garden patih but Agatha seized his arm. "Running for the doctor," she shouted back and set off down the street, with James after her.
"Are we going for the doctor?" asked James when he caught up with her.
"Waste of time. She wanted us back there so she could bully that trip to Bristol out of us. But I'll phone the doctor when I get home, just to be on the safe side. Yes, I know they've got a phone there, but it would be just like one of them to die to spite us. Come and have a coffee with me while I phone and then we'll try Miss Simms."
Although he accepted her invitation, Agatha, still relishing her new freedom, realized that she would not have been devastated if he had turned it down.
She phoned the doctor, a new one in the village, a woman called Dr Sturret, and reported Mr Boggle's 'faint'. Then she made coffee for herself and James.
"I'm beginning to wonder if there is anyone in this village that Mary hasn't riled up," said Agatha.
"And it's all making me feel a bit of a fool." James looked at her uneasily.
"Surely you have nothing to reproach yourself with," said Agatha. "Think of Mary as an easy lay."
"I am not in the habit of thinking of women as easy lays," said James crossly. "Can we drop the subject of my affair? I'm heartily sick of hearing about it."
"Okay," said Agatha reluctantly, because there was still enough of her old obsession for James left to make her enjoy the trashing of Mary Fortune. "When you've finished your coffee, we'll call on Miss Simms."
"Why don't we call on Mrs Bloxby first?"
"Why her?"
"As the vicar's wife, she must hear a lot of gossip. And the women of the village will talk to someone like her more openly than they would talk to anyone else."
"Maybe, after Miss Simms, if we have time," Agatha pleaded.
"You know what, Agatha, I get a feeling Mrs Bloxby told you something and you don't want to tell me."
"She told me something in confidence, James. It bears no relation to the murder. I can't tell you."
"Fair enough. Miss Simms it is. Isn't she working?"
"Not any more. She stays at home and looks after the kids. The new man in her life is pretty generous."
"It's amazing," said James, "how the ladies of Carsely not only accept having a blatantly unmarried mother in their midst but even make her the secretary of the Ladies' Society."
"I think it's because villages have always accepted an unmarried mother or two in their midst before it became fashionable," said Agatha. "Let's go."
Miss Simms answered her door. She was wearing the very high stiletto heels which she always wore, winter or summer. "This is nice," she said when she saw them. "Come into the lounge and put your feet up. Gin? Lots of ice and tonic?"
"Lovely," said Agatha, reflecting it was a treat to call on Miss Simms after such as the Boggles. Miss Simms was a pale, anaemic-looking woman in her late twenties. She had a long pale face and long mousy hair. She wore a short tight jersey skirt and a cheap frilly blouse, transparent enough to show a black brassiere underneath. Mrs Bloxby had told Agatha that Miss Simms was a competent and hard-working secretary and did a great deal of voluntary work in the village. Agatha found Miss Simms a very pleasant sort of girl. She had seen glimpses of her latest gentleman - a thick, beefy, florid man who drove off with her in the evenings.
"Are you investigating this murder?" asked Miss Simms after she had poured them drinks. She was sitting with her skirt hitched up, unselfconsciously exposing a border of frilly French knicker.
"Just asking a few questions," said Agatha self-importantly.
"So what can you ask me?"
"We thought that if we could find out more about Mary, we could find out why someone killed her, and if we could find out why, we might find out who."
"I know that line," said Miss Simms. "It was in Morse, or one of them detective things. Well, let me see. Mary...I didn't like her, of course. Sorry, Mr Lacey."
"It doesn't matter," he said gloomily. "I'm beginning to think I didn't know her at all, although I can't get anyone to believe me."
"I can," said Miss Simms. "I had a gentleman over in Pershore once. We had a few good times and then the police came around and said he'd disappeared with the firm's takings. He worked for Padget, the paper people. I was shocked, but could I tell them a blind thing about him? I said he had a loud laugh and he wore his socks in bed, but the police said that was no good at all."
"So what about Mary?" asked Agatha. "I mean, I thought you liked everyone."
"Usually. But that one got up my nose. She wanted to chair the Ladies' Society. I told her roundly we was all happy with Mrs Mason, but if she had any doubts about that, she could call for a vote. She said a few nasty things about Mrs Mason and I told her what I thoug
ht of her. No one criticizes any of my friends to me." Miss Simms paused and took a birdlike sip of her drink. "So then she got stuck into me."
"What did she say?"
Miss Simms turned pink. "Reckon as I don't want to say."
"You mean what she said hurt." Agatha looked at her sympathetically. "You're not the only one."
Miss Simms looked at her in surprise. "I'm not? But everyone else said how she was an angel."
"Because no one wanted to tell about the things she had said to them," said Agatha. "Come on, you can tell us."
"I s'pose. She said that unmarried mothers like me living off the state should be shot. She said that if she got the chair of the Ladies' Society, the first thing she would do would be to find a more respectable secretary. I told her I took nothing off the state. "You don't have to," she says. "You get the men to pay, and that's the same as being a prostitute." I said to her that we didn't all have money and the fact that she was doing it for nothing...Sorry, Mr Lacey. Anyway, I told her to get out and that was that. Do you know the next time I saw her, she was ever so nice to me that I began to think I'd imagined the whole thing."
"This is dreadful," said James. "I never knew she was as bad as that."
"That's us women for you," said Miss Simms cheerfully. "We always show the fellows our best side. Any idea who dug that big hole in my lawn?"
"No," said Agatha. "And the more I think about those attacks on the gardens, the more puzzled I am. It must have taken a great deal of daring, combined with a great deal of malice. It was dug on your front lawn, wasn't it? Anyone passing could have seen what was happening."
"Fred Griggs asked all the neighbours and the people across the road, and no one saw anything," said Miss Simms. "But then, sometimes when I come back with my gentleman friend early in the morning, there's not a soul around."
"What about your children?" Miss Simms had a boy of four and a girl aged two. "Mrs Johns, next door, takes care of them," explained Miss Simms.
"And she didn't see anything?"
"Not a thing. My gentleman friend, he's from the north originally, and he says that the air down here is so heavy that it makes everyone sleep like the dead."
Agatha had to accept the truth of this statement. Any time she came back to Carsely after some time away, she found it hard to keep awake.
"You weren't at the last meeting of the Ladies' Society," said Miss Simms.
"I was busy," mumbled Agatha. The truth was she had known that Mrs Bloxby had been going to ask for a volunteer to take the Boggles on a day's outing and so had not gone, fearing that the gentle vicar's wife would somehow, by her very presence, constrain Agatha to offer to drive the horrible couple.
"There's another meeting tonight," said Miss Simms.
"I'll be there." Agatha stood up. "I think we'd better go. Anything to ask, James?"
He shook his head. "I think I've heard enough."
Outside, James said, "So you won't be going to the Red Lion?"
"I'll join you there after the ladies' meeting. What about rounding up the day with a visit to Mr Spott?"
"All right. But that one will have nothing but praise for Mary."
Mr Spotfs cottage, like Agatha's, was thatched. The external woodwork was painted bright harsh blue; window-frames, front door and fencing. It made the cottage look unsuitably garish, like a children's drawing executed in chalk colours. He had a small garden fronting on the road.
"The pond must be at the back," said Agatha as James rang the doorbell.
Bernard Spott answered the door promptly. He was in his shirt-sleeves and gardening trousers, but his thin hair was as carefully greased across his bald spot as ever.
"Come in, come in," he said.
They followed him into a pleasant living-room, low-beamed and with some fine old pieces of furniture.
"We have been trying in our amateurish way to find out what happened to Mary Fortune," said James pleasantly. "Strange as it may seem, Agatha and I feel we never really knew her and wondered if you had any insights."
"It was a shocking murder," said Bernard, "really shocking. All that beauty and life extinguished in such a barbaric way." He took out a handkerchief and blew his large nose in it with a trumpeting sound. "It hardly bears thinking about."
"How did you find Mary?" asked Agatha. "I mean, being chairman of the horticultural society, you must have known her quite well."
"Yes, we were very good friends," said Bernard. "She not only was a superb gardener, she used to bake me cakes and bring them round."
"We have found," said Agatha, "that contrary to what we both thought, she was not all that popular."
"You amaze me."
"It seems she had a way of riling people up. Did you experience any of that?"
"No." He looked bewildered. "She was always kind to me."
"To go on to another matter," said James, "have you any idea who poisoned your goldfish?"
"No, and our police force are inept, to say the least. I wrote to the chief constable to complain about Fred Griggs."
"That's not fair," protested James. "Fred's a good man."
"Tcha! What crime has he ever had to deal with? Those murders we had here before, it was the CID who solved them."
"It was more Agatha here than the CID," corrected James. "Besides, the CID have been investigating the garden sabotage and they haven't come up with anything, so it's not fair to blame Fred."
"He knows the people in this village. He should have come up with something," said Bernard mulishly.
"So," said Agatha helplessly, "you have absolutely no idea who might have poisoned your fish or who might have murdered Mary?"
"No, and if you will both take my advice, you will leave the whole thing to the police."
"But you just said the police weren't doing a good job!"
He stood up as a sign that he wanted them to leave. "I do not mind being interviewed by the police," said Bernard. "I accept that as one of the more unpleasant duties of being a British subject. Coming from you, however, it seems like vulgar curiosity."
There somehow did not seem to be anything to reply to that.
As they walked away from the cottage, Agatha said, "I'll find out what I can, and then I'll meet you at the Red Lion."
As they turned into Lilac Lane, Agatha exclaimed, "There's Beth waiting on your doorstep."
They hurried towards her. She held out a couple of books as they came up to her. "I just remembered my mother saying something to me about your interest in the Napoleonic wars, Mr Lacey, and wondered if these books might interest you."
"How very kind." James glanced at the titles. "Diaries! Where did you get these?"
"I borrowed them from the college. History is my subject." She smiled at him suddenly and that smile gave her face something like beauty.
"Come inside," said James. "We'll have coffee."
"I'd like that," said Beth, "but I would like to talk to you in private as well." She looked at Agatha.
"See you later, James," said Agatha and went slowly along to her own house, burning with curiosity.
She had just fed her cats when her doorbell rang. She was expecting to see James, come to report on Beth's visit, but it was Bill Wong who stood there.
"Oh," said Agatha, that 'oh' being a little dying fall of disappointment. She reminded herself about her new-found freedom from emotional involvement with James and invited Bill in.
"I've come to ask you about Mrs Bloxby," said Bill.
"Can't you ask Mrs Bloxby about Mrs Bloxby?"
"Don't be defensive, Agatha. I could tell she had told you something."
Agatha stared at him for a long moment as she remembered something that Mrs Bloxby had told her, not about Mary's disparaging remarks or about the horticultural show; something she should have told Bill.
"I've just remembered," said Agatha.
"I don't believe that, but out with it."
"Mary got Mr Bloxby, the vicar, to take her confession."
"Now that is something. Something must have been troubling her badly. I mean, the vicar doesn't normally take confessions, does he?"
"No, but he'll listen to anyone in trouble."
"I'd better go and ask him. I wonder what it was about."
It was about making a pass at him, thought Agatha, but there might have been something else there.
Bill left and Agatha prepared herself an early-evening meal. She wondered how Beth and James were getting along, and the more she wondered, the more she worried. Why had Beth, who had been so rude, done such an about-face as to offer books to her mother's ex-lover?
Eight
Bill Wong drove along to the vicarage. It was, he reflected, not like going to see a Roman Catholic priest. It had not been a formal confessional, surely, and the vicar was not High Church of England.
Mrs Bloxby welcomed him. "I always expect to see our Mrs Raisin with you," she said, ushering him in. "What can I do for you?"
Bill stood in the shadowy hall of the vicarage. "Actually, it was your husband I came to see."
"Alf's in the church."
"What is he doing?"
Mrs Bloxby looked surprised. "Praying, I suppose. You can step over. He's never very long."
Bill went back out of the vicarage and walked through the cemetery to the church next door. Huge white clouds were moving slowly above over a large summer sky. It was as if, during a good summer, the skies over the Cotswolds expanded in size, giving the impression of limitless horizons. Old gravestones leaned over the smooth cropped grass of the churchyard, the names faded long ago.
He went to the side door, pushed it open and walked into the warmth of the old church. The foundations were Saxon but the powerful arches were Norman. It was a simple church, with plain wooden pews and plain glass in the windows, Cromwell's troops having smashed the stained-glass ones. There was an air of benevolence and calm.
The vicar was kneeling in the front pew before the altar. What was he praying for? wondered Bill. For the murderer to be caught, or simply for his village to return to its usual sleepy calm?
As if aware of a presence behind him, the vicar rose and turned around.
"Mr Wong, is it not?" he said, walking down the aisle towards the detective. "May I be of assistance?"