by M C Beaton
“Back to Mircester,” groaned Paul, as they set out again. “We’re clutching at straws.”
“It’s better than sitting around doing nothing,” said Agatha. She looked out of the car window as they cruised down Fish Hill. Black clouds were covering the Malvern Hills. “Rats! I think it’s going to rain.”
“Never mind,” said Paul, who was driving. “I’ve got a couple of umbrellas in the back.”
“Quite the Boy Scout, aren’t you? Prepared for everything. It’s getting late. Think she’ll still be at the bank?”
“They close at four-thirty, but they stay at work until around five-thirty to do the books or whatever bank people do.”
They arrived outside the bank just before five-thirty. “There are lights on inside,” said Agatha. “Wait and see who comes out.”
They waited by the door. Exactly at five-thirty, several women came out. “Miss Emery?” Agatha asked them.
“Maisie’ll be out in a moment,” said one.
A thin girl with a rabbity face appeared a few minutes later. “Miss Emery?” asked Agatha.
“Yes, what do you want? The bank’s closed.”
“It’s nothing to do with banking,” said Agatha. “It’s about the murder of Mrs. Robin Barley.”
Her mouth dropped farther open, exposing long irregular teeth. “Robin! Murdered!”
“Yes, last night. In her dressing-room. Didn’t you know? Weren’t you at the theatre?”
“No, there wasn’t a part for me. They wanted to put me in a gas mask to play one of the soldiers, but I knew Robin had suggested that to humiliate me, so I told them to stuff it.”
“But surely one of the customers said something. It must be all over the town.”
“No. One of them, mind, said she’d heard there been an accident at the theatre, that’s all.”
Paul said, “Would you like to come for a drink with us? We’d like to ask you about Robin.”
She looked at them suspiciously. In that moment, Agatha felt the loss of her one-time friend, Sir Charles Fraith. She had only to mention his title and people always talked to them.
“Let me introduce ourselves,” said Agatha. “I am Mrs. Agatha Raisin and this is Mr. Paul Chatterton. We are helping the police with their inquiries.” And that was true enough, thought Agatha.
Paul smiled charmingly at Maisie and she visibly thawed. “All right, then,” she said. “But I don’t like going into common pubs. There’s a cocktail bar in the George Hotel.”
The cocktail bar in the George was more like a fusty little over-furnished ante-room with a small bar manned by an ancient barman. Maisie said she would like a vodka and Red Bull and showed a tendency to sulk when the barman informed them with a gleam of surly pleasure that he did not stock Red Bull. Paul quickly suggested she try something more exotic and ordered a cocktail for her called a Sunrise Special. Maisie looked pleased with the choice when she was served a tall blue drink with dusty little paper umbrellas sticking out of the top. Agatha privately thought those umbrellas had done the rounds more than once.
“So what can you tell us about Robin?” asked Paul.
“How did she die?”
“Cyanide poisoning. Someone gave her a bouquet of flowers and slipped cyanide pellets into a vase of water. The gas that came off killed her.”
Maisie’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Well, I never! Where was this? At that studio of hers?”
“No, in her dressing-room after the dress rehearsal. Did she have any enemies?”
Agatha was happy for once to let Paul take over the questioning. Maisie was already casting flirtatious little looks at him.
“She had loads of people who hated her. The audience was mostly made up of friends and relatives. She was turning us into a joke. Some of the gay boys in this town would turn up, mind you, just for a laugh. I tried to tell the producer that we wouldn’t need her money if we could put on decent shows, but she paid an awful lot for costumes and scenery and she owned the theatre.”
“Where did she get her money from?” asked Paul.
“The late Mr. Barley owned a chain of supermarkets. When he died, she sold them all for millions.”
“Did anyone dislike her more than the others?”
“Reckon we were all pretty much the same. But I mean, none of us would have poisoned her. We wouldn’t know how.”
“Was Harry Witherspoon at the dress rehearsal?” asked Agatha.
“I dunno. I don’t see why he should have been. He’d just have been one of the clansmen or soldiers, you see.”
“Wasn’t he usually in a small part anyway?” asked Agatha.
“Well, it was his asthma and hay fever, you see. First, he didn’t want to wear a gas mask. He said he couldn’t breathe properly. Then this idiot of a producer, well, when Birnam wood’s supposed to come to Dunsinane, instead of carrying tree branches, the soldiers were to carry bouquets of flowers. Someone asked him why. He said it was to highlight the atrocities of war. Prick!” she added with venom. “Any chance of another of these?” She held up her empty glass.
“I’ll get it,” said Agatha.
The barman was sitting reading a newspaper and showed no signs of paying any attention to Agatha Raisin until she thumped her fist on the bar and shouted, “Service!”
“And this producer, what’s his name?”
“Brian Welch.”
“And what’s his history?” Paul asked as Agatha returned, triumphant, having made the barman decorate Maisie’s cocktail with fresh paper umbrellas.
“Who are we talking about?” asked Agatha.
“The producer, Brian Welch. I was just asking what his background was.”
“He said he used to produce for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” said Maisie, “but someone said he was only the producer for some amateur production in Stratford. He loathed Robin.”
“You don’t know where he’s living, do you?” asked Paul.
“No, but when he’s not in the theatre, he spends his time in the Crown.”
“And what does he look like?”
“Small and fat. Wears tacky clothes. Got a lot of fair hair.”
They asked her more questions but without gaining much of importance, and then said good night to her and set out for the Crown, which Agatha remembered was one of Mircester’s seedier hostelries.
The first person they saw in the nearly deserted pub was a man answering Maisie’s description.
They went up to him and Paul asked, “Mr. Welch?”
“Yes. Who wants to know?”
Paul performed the introductions and explained what they were doing.
“Can’t you leave that sort of thing to the police?” he demanded, glaring at his empty glass.
“What are you drinking?” asked Agatha quickly.
“Whisky.”
“A double?”
He suddenly smiled. “Sure.” Agatha went to the bar thinking that at one time that pudgy face would not have been swollen and covered in broken veins and he might have been an attractive man.
She returned with his drink, and soft drinks for herself and Paul, in time to hear Paul saying, “But it couldn’t have been suicide.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her. Cheers! That bitch seemed out to wreck the show.” He viciously mimicked Robin’s voice. “‘You have no conception of history.’ Pah! Silly cow. I gave her a dressing-down in front of the cast to try to get some humility into her. She couldn’t act.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” asked Agatha. “She had the power to sack you, didn’t she? I mean, she was the money behind the whole thing. She hired you, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but I got a contract out of her, so she could do bugger all about it.”
“Why Bosnia?” asked Agatha.
“That’s what she kept asking. Don’t you see, that whole play was about the abuse of military might?”
Agatha decided to leave that one. “I gather Harry Witherspoon wasn’t in the cast.”
“Oh,
that little shopkeeper who murdered his mother? No. He was beefing about his hay fever and asthma.”
Agatha sat up straight. “Blast! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
“What?” asked Paul.
“Gas masks, of course. Not only a disguise, but a protection against gas. Robin would just think it was one of the cast. But it needn’t have been. Could have been anyone from outside.”
“You’ll need to ask Freddy, who mans the stage door.”
“Where can we find him?”
“If the police aren’t grilling him, you’ll find him at his digs in Coventry Road. Little cottage at the end.”
“Where’s Coventry Road?” asked Paul.
“It’s nearly in the country on our road out. One of the roads leading off the Fosse. I’ll tell you when to turn off.”
“We never ask the right questions,” mourned Paul.
“Like what?”
“Simple ones. Like what’s Freddy’s second name? What kind of person is he?”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Agatha. “Turn off down here on the left, just past that garage.”
Paul swung round into Coventry Road and they cruised along slowly, past shops and council houses. “We’re nearly out into the country,” said Paul. “I don’t see any cottage.”
“Try round the next bend.”
“There it is,” said Paul.
A little white cottage stood on its own by the road. “And that’s another thing we should have asked,” said Paul. “What’s his phone number? He may be out for the evening.”
“Stop complaining. We’ll soon find out.”
A worried-looking woman with her hair in curlers answered the door. “We’re looking for Freddy, the stage-door keeper,” said Agatha.
“Dad’s at his allotment. Who’s asking?”
Patiently Agatha went through the whole thing again. “He’s a bit shaken up about things. You’d best leave him alone.” And with that, she slammed the door in their faces.
“Well, at least we know he’s at some allotments. Let’s ask along the road. Someone at that garage might know where the allotments are.”
At the garage, a man volunteered the information that the allotments were off Barney Lane. “Can’t miss them,” he said. “Go back to Haydon’s Close on your right, go along a few yards, make a left down Blackberry Road, then second right is Barney Lane.”
They made a few false turns, Agatha having forgotten the instructions and Paul unfairly saying that women never knew how to navigate to cover up the fact he had forgotten most of the instructions himself. At last they found the allotments, little strips of land where men were tending vegetables.
They asked the first man they came across for Freddy, and he jerked his thumb towards an old man who was bent over a vegetable bed.
They approached him and went through the usual preamble of who they were and why they wanted to speak to him. “Freddy Edmonds,” he said, holding out an earthy hand which they both shook.
“Come into my office,” he said, a grin creasing up the wrinkles on his face.
His “office” was a shed beside his strip of allotment where lines of lettuce, cabbage plants and potatoes and various other plants they did not recognize were stretched out in neat rows.
He sat on a box, removed a greasy cap from his head, and pulled a pipe out of his pocket. Paul sat on another box and Agatha on an old car seat.
“The police have been at me earlier,” he began, stuffing tobacco from a tin into his pipe. Agatha often wondered why anyone could be bothered smoking a pipe. There was always all that work of getting it filled, tamping the tobacco down, lighting it, then lighting it again frequently when it went out, and then scraping out the resultant mess from the bowl only to start the process again.
“They were asking me if anyone went in through the stage door while the performance was on. I told them, no one. First one was that reverend who came to see Mrs. Barley.”
“And what about people leaving? I mean, you would notice if someone walked past you still in costume? You see, it could have been someone not in the cast, but wearing a gas mask.”
“Well, you see,” he said, exhaling a cloud of foul-smelling smoke, “when the reverend raised the alarm, they were all still in their dressing-rooms, and the police, they arrived in minutes and two were left to guard the stage door.”
“And is there no other way out?”
“Not a one. They go past me or not at all.”
There was a long silence and then Agatha said, “It must be a very boring job. Have you always done it?”
“No, I worked on the railway until I retired. Saw an ad in the local paper and got the job. I remember when it was the Gaiety Theatre in the old days. It was lying empty for quite a bit until Mrs. Barley bought it.”
“Yes, we’ve just learned she actually bought it.”
“I was hoping they’d call it the Gaiety like the old vaudeville days, but it’s just the Mircester Players, and amateurs at that. Still, it’s a job.”
Above Freddy’s head was a shelf crammed with gardening books and magazines.
“You read a lot about gardening,” said Paul.
“Everything I can get.”
Agatha had a sudden mental picture of Freddy, sitting in his cubicle at the stage door-bound to be a sort of cubicle, they all were-and avidly reading some book or magazine on gardening while some shadowy figure slipped past him.
“It was a warm evening,” she said. “Was the street door open?”
“Yes, I had to let some air in.”
“So you wouldn’t hear anyone come in?”
“I’d hear their footsteps and look up.”
“Could someone got past you at a crouch-under your line of vision?”
“I s’pose they could,” he said uneasily.
“Didn’t you have to go and pee?” asked Paul.
He puffed at his pipe for a long moment. “That I did. But I shut and locked the outside door while I went off.”
“And how often did you go?” asked Agatha.
“Three times. My bladder ain’t what it used to be. Age. You know what it’s like.”
“Not yet,” said Agatha frostily.
“And you shut the door each time you went?” asked Paul.
Another long silence while Freddy puffed energetically on his pipe. “Sure I did,” he said.
“Tell us about Robin Barley,” said Agatha. “Did anyone really hate her?”
“She got up the noses of a lot of people, that’s for sure. But they’re all a bunch of prima donnas. Sometimes I come across them in their day jobs, at the bank or in the shops, and they’re as quiet as mice. But the minute they get in their theatre, they all think they’re Alec Guinness and Edith Evans.”
“Did you know Robin very well?”
“As well as anyone, I suppose,” said Freddy. “Mind you, she did a lot of good work for the church, and let’s face it, without her money there wouldn’t be any Mircester Players and I wouldn’t have a job. She loved the theatre. When she interviewed me, I felt she saw me as a character part-good old Freddy, touching his forelock at the stage door as the star went by. So I acted the way she wanted me.”
“What did you do when you were working on the railways?” asked Agatha, suddenly feeling that Freddy in his way was as much an actor as the rest of them.
“I was an area manager.”
“I think you are a very clever man,” observed Agatha. “Why the allotment?”
“I love growing things. It’s peaceful here. No one to bother me.”
“I suppose the show is suspended?”
“It’ll open tomorrow. That producer, he thinks Robin’s murder should bring a good audience and he’s anxious to cash in on it. Maisie Emery’s playing Lady Macbeth.”
“Robin was a widow. Did she have any male friends? Was she going out with anyone?”
“Not that I heard. I did hear she was a great joiner of things, getting one enthusiasm after another and
letting it drop-Pilates, transcendental meditation, salsa, you name it.”
Agatha produced her card and gave it to him. “If you do hear anything, let us know.”
“I don’t feel that was a waste of time,” said Agatha as they drove home. “He’s very sharp. When he first said he’d been working on the railway, what with his pipe and his greasy cap and his old gardening clothes, I thought he might have had something to do with repairing the tracks. But when I listened to him, I realized he was much brighter than I’d first thought.”
“Don’t be snobbish, Agatha. “I am sure there are bright labourers all over the place.”
“No, it’s you who’s being snobbish.”
The argument occupied them all the way home.
Outside Agatha’s cottage, Paul said, “Enough about the working-man. Where do we go from here? I’m stumped.”
“We’ll sleep on it,” said Agatha. Unusually for her, she wanted to be alone. There was something diminishing about spending so much time with a man who did not flirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She let herself into her cottage, petted her cats and turned them out into the garden. She was relieved for once to get a break from blundering around, asking people questions, trying to get a breakthrough.
Agatha ferreted in the freezer and took out a frost-encrusted package and deposited it in the microwave. She took it out when the bell pinged and noticed it was a Marks & Spencer’s lasagne. Could be worse, she thought, and turned the microwave on to full heat. After she had eaten, she cooked a couple of herring for her cats, not seeing the irony in a woman who would cook fresh food for her cats but not for herself.
Nine
AGATHA did not hear from Paul the next morning, and found herself reluctant to call on him or phone him. She was suffering from delayed shock over the death of Robin Barley and felt angry, guilty and obscurely responsible. Who would be the next to go because of her interference? The stage-door man, Freddy?
On impulse, she locked up her cottage and drove to London. She went to a beauticians in Bond Street that she had patronized in the old days when she was living in London, and when they told her they were fully booked became so cross and irritable that when the receptionist happened-“By a miracle, sweeties,” as she told her flatmates that evening, “I thought she was going to assault me!”-to receive a phone call cancelling an appointment in the middle of Agatha’s tirade, she gladly booked her in.