by M C Beaton
‘If you will sit here, Mrs Raisin.’ The secretary drew out a chair at the end of the table. ‘Coffee?’
‘Black, please, and an ashtray.’
‘I don’t think we have an ashtray.’
‘If I am going to work for you, you’d better find one,’ said Agatha, made tetchy with all the guilt the smoker feels these days.
The secretary had wide blue eyes fringed with black lashes. A little flicker of dislike flashed in the blue shallows of her eyes and then was immediately gone.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Agatha.
‘Portia Salmond.’
‘Well, Portia, are we going to get down to business this day?’
‘Mr Peter and Mr Guy will be with you directly.’ Portia went to the coffee machine and poured a cup of coffee for Agatha. She returned and put it down in front of her, along with an extra saucer. ‘You can use that until I manage to find an ashtray.’
The door at the far end of the room opened and a man entered, hand outstretched.
‘I am Peter Freemont,’ he said. ‘Guy will be along in a minute.’
Peter Freemont was about forty years old, powerful and swarthy with black hair already greying at the temples. He had a large fleshy nose and a small mouth, thick bushy eyebrows and a very large head. His broad figure was encased in a pin-striped suit and his feet, which were tiny, in black lace-up shoes, like children’s shoes. He looked like the figure of a man painted on the side of a balloon. Agatha wondered madly whether, if she tied string around his ankles and held him out of the window, he would float up to the sky.
But then brother Guy walked in and Agatha promptly forgot about Peter. Guy Freemont was beautiful. He was tall and slim, with jet-black hair and very blue eyes, a tanned skin and an athlete’s body. Agatha judged him to be in his middle thirties. He gave Agatha such a blinding smile that she searched in her briefcase for her notebook to cover her confusion.
They both sat down at the table. ‘Now, to business. You come highly recommended,’ said Peter.
‘I would like to know first,’ said Agatha, ‘if this meeting to be held by Mary Owen in the village hall is going to pose problems. What if the villagers all decide they don’t want the water company?’
‘There’s nothing they can do,’ said Peter, clasping his plump hands covered in black hairs on the table in front of him. ‘The spring rises in Mrs Toynbee’s garden. Mrs Toynbee is a direct descendant of Miss Jakes, who first channelled the spring out to the road, and Mrs Toynbee has given us her permission.’
Guy opened a folder and slid a piece of artwork in front of Agatha. ‘This is what the bottle will look like.’ Agatha was surprised to see that the label showed a photograph of the skull with the water gushing out of it. ‘Isn’t that a bit grim,’ she asked, ‘particularly in view of the murder?’
‘They’re not sure it is murder yet,’ said Guy. ‘Anyway, death’s heads and skulls always promote a product. There was a cigarette company that always had something like the shape of a skull in their ads and a brand of gin used to have an ad with the ice cubes in a glass in the shape of a skull.’
‘It could be argued,’ said Agatha, lighting a cigarette, ‘that people who drink and smoke have a death wish. But people who go around drinking gnat’s piss like mineral water are usually the healthy type.’
‘Not any more,’ said Peter. ‘They can be reformed alcoholics who still have the death wish. They can be business people at the new fashionable “dry” lunches, or they can be people who just can’t stand the taste of the drinking water from the tap, which often smells like swimming pools. But everyone is fascinated by death. Now there needs to be some big event to launch the water. What about taking over some stately home like Blenheim Palace . . .?’
‘They’d hardly agree to that, seeing as how they are producing their own water,’ Agatha pointed out.
‘Perhaps hire a boat and go down the Thames, lots of celebs, lots of booze for the press?’ suggested Guy.
‘Old hat,’ said Agatha. ‘I have it, and it’d be a way to get the goodwill of the village. A village fête.’
‘Oh, come on,’ protested Peter. ‘Tacky cakes and home-made jam and women in 1970s Laura Ashley dresses.’
‘No, no, listen to me,’ said Agatha eagerly. ‘Why do you think tourists come to the Cotswolds?’
‘Beauty spot?’ suggested Peter.
‘No, apart from that. The British are as bad as the Americans. The Americans want to believe in the good old days of June Allyson standing at the white picket fence with an apple pie. The British want the rural dream of croquet and skittles and my lord dishing out the prizes. Now usually these village affairs are tacky, I grant you that. But this one could be groomed to look like something out of a Merchant-Ivory film. And I’ll get that American film star, Jane Harris, to open it.’
‘The Commie?’
‘Doesn’t matter. Her health and beauty videos sell by the ton. And I’ll get some local doddering aristo as well.’
‘It could work,’ said Guy slowly. ‘But we can’t control the weather. Crowds aren’t going to come to an idyllic English fête if it’s pissing down with rain.’
‘July’s usually a lousy month,’ said Agatha. ‘Make it for the end of August, before the kids go back to school.’
They discussed the pros and cons of the village fête. Agatha clinched it by pointing out the obvious. It was being marketed as Ancombe water, so where better to have the launch than in Ancombe itself?
‘There’s one last thing,’ said Agatha. ‘This meeting in the village hall makes me uneasy. I think we should be there to represent the company. It will be very bad publicity if we end up with the villagers against us. I’ll let you know when the meeting is to be held.’
‘Guy will go along with you,’ said Peter.
Portia entered. ‘What is it?’ asked Peter.
‘That dead man,’ said Portia. ‘He was murdered.’
‘Thank you for telling us.’
Both men waited until the secretary had left. ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said Peter.
‘I can’t see how a murder is going to help us.’ Agatha looked at them. Then she said slowly, ‘Of course, it means there will be a lot of the press at that meeting at the village hall.’
‘Exactly,’ said Peter. ‘And good PR woman that you are, you’d better find a way to swing everyone one hundred per cent behind us. God knows, you’re being paid enough.’
Agatha did not like the flick of the whip. ‘You get what you pay for when you hire me,’ she said evenly. ‘Now, if that is all, gentlemen . . .?’
‘Bit tasteless that last remark of yours, bro,’ murmured Guy after Agatha had left.
‘Rolls off that sort of woman. Hard as nails.’
‘Sexy with it, though,’ said Guy reflectively, staring at the door through which Agatha had just exited.
Agatha arrived back in Carsely to find the press waiting on her doorstep. Mindful of her new role, she invited them all in for drinks and, after describing how she had found the body, put in a good plug for the new water company.
After the press had left, Roy Silver phoned her, eagerly asking how she had got on. ‘Very well,’ said Agatha, ‘although there was a nasty crack from Peter about what they were paying me. I assume you are giving me my usual fee?’
‘Told you so. Told them if they wanted quality PR, they had to pay for it.’ Agatha told him about the meeting in the village hall.
‘I’d better be there, too,’ said Roy. A picture of the glamorous Guy rose in Agatha’s mind.
‘Don’t want you around,’ she said gruffly.
‘Who got you this job?’
‘Want it back?’
‘Just my little joke, Aggie.’
Agatha hung up.
She realized that if she kept a bright picture of Guy Freemont at the front of her mind, then the image of James Lacey’s face was blocked out.
With more cheerfulness and energy than she had felt for a long time, she got ou
t her laptop and began to work busily, writing down the names of journalists she could lure to the opening.
After several hours she stretched and yawned, feeling all the satisfaction of having done a good job. She corrected what she had written, ran it off on the printer and then drove over to Mircester, where she left her papers at the reception desk addressed to the Freemont brothers.
She was driving back through Mircester when she saw Bill Wong just leaving police headquarters. She called to him and stopped the car. He came over.
‘What’s all the news?’ she asked.
‘Park and come for a drink. I’ll tell you the little I know.’
Agatha parked and walked with him to the George, a gloomy pub in the shade of the abbey.
‘It was murder,’ said Bill, when they were both settled. ‘Someone clubbed him on the back of the head.’
‘And laid him backwards in the spring?’
‘Yes, but forensic say there is every evidence that he was killed elsewhere, carried to the spring and dumped there.’
‘Must have been someone very strong, or more than one.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And do you think it had something to do with this water business?’
‘It certainly looks that way. Mr Struthers was a widower. He lived alone. He has a son down in Brighton who was certainly in Brighton on the night of the murder. He hadn’t all that much money to leave. Anyway, the son has a first-class job in computers and has no need of money.’
‘What are the other members of the parish council like? Miss Mary Owen, for example.’
‘She’s quite a commanding personality, tall, thin and leathery. One of those ladies who does good works, not out of any feeling of charity for the less fortunate, but because that’s the sort of work ladies do. She’s independently wealthy. Some family trust.’
‘She’s going to make some sort of protest speech. Has she enough personality to sway the villagers?’
‘Yes, I should think so.’
‘Rats. What about the others?’
‘The others against the water company. I’ll start with them. Mr Bill Allen. He runs the Ancombe Garden Centre. Very class-conscious and got a bit of an inferiority complex. Father was a farm labourer. So Mr Allen supports all the things he considers Right. Bring back hanging, slaughter the foxes, bring back National Service, that sort of thing.’
‘Then I would have thought he would have been all for this water company. Capitalism rules, okay.’
‘I believe Miss Owen implied that the Freemont brothers were not gentlemen. Enough said. Now the last of those against is Mr Andy Stiggs, a retired shopkeeper. He’s seventy-one and hale and hearty.’
‘Maybe there’s something in this water after all.’
‘Maybe. Anyway, he loves the village and thinks that lorries rumbling through it to take away the water will be a desecration of rural life. Do you remember that supermarket that was proposed for outside Broadway? Well, he got up a petition against it.’
‘So what about the ones in favour?’
‘There’s Mrs Jane Cutler. She’s a wealthy widow, sixty-five but doesn’t look it. Rumoured to be on her third face-lift. Blonde and shapely. Not very popular in the village but I can’t see why. I found her charming. She says the village could do with more tourist trade and Ancombe Water will publicize the village and bring trade in. Then there’s Angela Buckley, big strapping girl, forty-eight, but still called a girl. Not married. Rather loud and red-faced, good-natured, but apt to bully the villagers in a patronizing I-know-what’s-best-for-the-peasants manner which irritates the hell out of them. Fred Shaw is the last. Electrician. Bossy, sixty, aggressive manner, powerful for his age.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Agatha. ‘Those against sound more palatable than those for.’
‘So what did you make of the Freemonts?’
‘Peter Freemont seemed like the usual City businessman. Guy Freemont is charming. Where did they come from?’
‘I gather that they ran some export-import company in Hong Kong and got out like everyone else before the Chinese took over. What do you think, Agatha? That they murdered someone to get the publicity?’
‘Hardly. I’m sure it’s a village matter and it may have nothing to do with the water. People always think of villages as innocent places, not like the towns, but you know what it’s like, Bill. An awful lot of nasty passions and jealousies can lie just beneath the surface. I’ve a feeling in my bones that it’s got nothing to do with that spring at all.’
James Lacey was driving past when he saw Agatha and Bill emerge from the George. He longed to be able to call to them, to discuss the murder, but he had to admit to himself that after the way he had been treating Agatha, he could hardly expect a warm reception.
Give Agatha an inch, he thought sourly, and she’ll take over your whole life. He drove on, but feeling lonely and excluded and knowing he had only himself to blame.
Two weeks later, with the police no farther on in their murder investigations, Mary Owen’s protest meeting was scheduled to take place in the village hall. Agatha arranged that she and Guy Freemont should have places on the platform to present the firm’s viewpoint.
Agatha had visited the company’s offices in Mircester, presenting outlines for publicizing the water, but each time it was Peter Freemont who saw her. Agatha began to wonder if she would ever see Guy again, but on her last visit Peter had assured her that Guy would call for her before the village meeting so that they could arrive there together.
‘Calm down,’ Agatha told herself fiercely. ‘He’s at least twenty years younger than you.’ She was torn between trying to look sexy and trying to look businesslike. Common sense at last prevailed on the evening of the meeting, and businesslike won. She put on a smart tailored suit but with high-heeled black patent-leather shoes and a striped blouse, her hair brushed to a high shine, and painted her generous mouth with a Dior lipstick guaranteed not to come off when kissed.
She was ready a good half-hour before Guy was due to arrive. Perfume! She had forgotten to put on any. She rushed upstairs and surveyed the array of bottles on her dressing-table. Rive Gauche. Everyone wore that, particularly now that cut-price shop had opened in Evesham. Champagne? A bit frivolous. Chanel No. 5. Yes, that would do. Safe.
She returned downstairs and checked her sitting-room. Log fire burning brightly, magazines arranged on the coffee-table, drinks on the trolley over at the wall. Ice? Damn, she’d forgotten ice. He wouldn’t have time for a drink before they left but perhaps, just perhaps, he might come back with her for one. She went to the kitchen, filled the ice-trays and put them in the freezer.
Then she felt a spot sprouting on her forehead. She tried to tell herself it was all her imagination and rushed upstairs. Her forehead looked unblemished, but she put a little witch hazel on it, just in case. The witch hazel left a round white mark in her mask of foundation cream and powder. She swore and repaired the damage.
By the time the doorbell went, she was feeling hot and frazzled. Guy Freemont stood on the doorstep, black hair gleaming, impeccably tailored, dazzling smile. Agatha felt miserable, like a teenager on her first date.
The village hall was crowded. The press were there in force, not only the locals, but Midlands TV, and some of the nationals. The murder had put Ancombe on the map.
Miss Mary Owen got to her feet to address the crowd. She had a high, autocratic voice and a commanding manner. She was dressed in an old print frock with a droopy hem but wore a fine rope of pearls around her neck.
She began. ‘I have been against selling the water all along. It is a disgrace. It is desecration of one of the famous features of the Cotswolds, something that by right belongs to the villagers of Ancombe. You have heard complaints, have you not, about how the life is being drained out of our villages by incomers?’ Agatha shifted uneasily. ‘I do not think the water should be sold off without the villagers’ permission. I suggest we put it here and now to a vote.’
Oh, no, tho
ught Agatha, not before they’ve heard me. She was about to get to her feet when a woman stood up in the audience. ‘It’s my water,’ she said.
‘Come up and let’s hear you,’ called Agatha, glad of the distraction.
The woman was helped up on to the platform. Miss Owen gave her a filthy look but surrendered the microphone to her. ‘Who are you?’ asked Agatha, lowering the microphone to suit the height of the newcomer.
‘I am Mrs Toynbee and the spring is in my garden.’
Mrs Toynbee was a small, ‘soft’ woman, rather like marshmallow, though not plump. She had silver hair which formed a curly aureole about her head. She had the kind of face which romantic novelists call heart-shaped. She had large light blue eyes and fair lashes. Her soft bosom was covered by a glittery evening sweater, white with silver sequins, worn over a long floral skirt. Agatha judged her to be in her forties but when she started to speak, she had a clear, lisping, girlish voice.
‘As you all know,’ she began, ‘I am Mrs Robina Toynbee and I have had a hard time of it since my Arthur passed away.’ She paused and carefully dabbed each eye with a small lace-edged handkerchief. Agatha, strictly a man-sized Kleenex woman, marvelled that there were obviously still lace-edged handkerchiefs on the market. ‘The water rights are mine to sell,’ went on Robina Toynbee.
‘But the actual fountain is outside your garden!’ cried Mary Owen, leaping to her feet.
Robina Toynbee cast her a look of pain and shook her head gently. ‘If that is what troubles you, then I have the right to block the spring and they can take the water from my garden.’
‘Too difficult,’ murmured Guy in Agatha’s ear, ‘we need that skull for the labels.’
Agatha marched forward. ‘If I might have a word, dear.’ She edged Robina Toynbee away from the microphone.
‘Perhaps I can explain things,’ said Agatha. Her eyes flew to where James was standing at the back of the hall, his arms folded. She gave her head a little shake, as if to free it from thoughts of James Lacey. She mentally marshalled her facts and figures and proceeded to bulldoze her audience.
‘The company are paying Mrs Toynbee for the water, yes, but they are also paying a generous yearly sum to the parish council which, I gather, if accepted, will go towards the building of a new community hall. Yes, the publicity will bring tourists to the village but tourists will bring trade to the village shops. From nine in the morning each day until the following dawn, the spring will belong to the villagers as it always has.’