by M C Beaton
“I really should be going,” said Paul. “Thank you for your time.”
“There’s just one other place you should see. It’s where I keep all the history books in storage that I haven’t room for at home. You’ll be amazed at the amount I’ve got.”
Might as well see it, thought Paul. Might just be something there.
Frampton strode ahead. They were reaching the end of the development and Paul could not see any building in sight. The main buildings seemed a long way behind them.
Frampton came to a stop. “Down here.”
“Down where?” asked Paul.
Frampton laughed. “Can’t see anything yet, can you? It’s an old Anderson shelter left over from World War Two.”
He pointed, and now stepping forward, Paul could see steps leading down underground. The shelter on the surface was totally covered in grass and weeds.
“Damn, I’ve something in my shoe. Go on down and I’ll join you.”
Paul went down the steps and pushed open the door. It was pitch-black inside. He groped forward, feeling for a light switch. The door behind him slammed shut. He whipped round and flung himself at the door just as he heard a bar being lowered on the outside.
“Stay here until you come to your senses.” Frampton’s voice came faintly through the door. “I’ll come every day. If you tell me where that diary is, I’ll let you out. Twenty-four hours in here and you’ll feel like talking.”
Paul hammered on the door and shouted until he was exhausted. Then he groped his way around his “prison” until his hands felt the outline of a candle. He remembered he had picked up a book of matches in the French restaurant. He was wearing his best suit, the one he had worn the night before. He fished out the matches and struck one and lit the candle. There was a bench running along the earthen walls. He was too young to remember Anderson shelters, but he suddenly remembered hearing about them in a documentary about the war. There must have been houses here at one time. They were usually built at the bottom of gardens, the idea of the underground shelters being that they could not be seen from the air. He slumped down on the bench. He would have to tell Frampton where the diary was. He would go mad if he was locked in here for days.
Bill and two policemen called at the building works in the late afternoon, to be told that Mr. Frampton had gone home. But when they called at his house, there was no answer.
“Paul still isn’t home,” fretted Agatha. “Do you think we should go along to his cottage and get the diary?”
“We can’t break in.”
“I’ve still got a key. The lock hasn’t been changed since James lived there.”
“Okay,” said Charles. “It’s better than sitting here doing nothing.”
They walked along and went into Paul’s cottage.
“His MG isn’t outside,” said Agatha.
Inside the cottage, Charles went straight to the bookshelves. “It’s not here!” he said. “Maybe the silly bugger took it somewhere.”
“I don’t think he would. Look around.”
They searched carefully through the books and behind the books. Then they went through the drawers in his desk. “I’ll try upstairs,” said Charles. “You look in the kitchen.”
“Why the kitchen?”
“People always seem to think the kitchen’s a safe hiding place. I had a great-aunt who kept a diamond necklace inside a bag of frozen peas.”
Agatha discounted the freezer and the fridge. Surely Paul would not be stupid enough to hide a valuable diary there. She checked behind the cans and boxes of groceries, in the rubbish bin, and behind the plates on the dresser. She remembered taking plates off this very dresser and smashing them on the floor in a rage in one of her fights with James. She sat down at the table, suddenly torn with memories. Would she ever see James again? Her eyes blurred with tears and she wiped them angrily away. She found herself looking at a neat row of canisters on the counter of the dresser-sugar, coffee, flour and pasta.
She got to her feet and began to prise open the lids. In the pasta one, she found the diary.
Agatha went to the foot of the stairs and called, “Found it!”
Charles came pattering lightly down the stairs. “Good, let’s keep it until Paul comes back.”
“If the police ever find we’ve got it, we’ll be in real trouble,” said Agatha.
They walked to Agatha’s cottage. The village was quiet and peaceful. This is the last case, thought Agatha. To throw away peace and quiet for all this business-it’s ridiculous.
“What are you thinking?” asked Charles as they walked through to the kitchen and petted the cats.
“I’ve just been thinking that I could have such a pleasant quiet life in this village if I left it all to the police in future,” said Agatha.
“You’d go mad with boredom. Ever think of moving back to London?”
“I don’t fit in there any more. It doesn’t seem the same.”
“Ever think of opening a detective agency?”
“I’ve been asked that before. It would involve missing cats and messy divorces.”
“Still, it might be better than just sitting here.”
“I wouldn’t just sit here,” protested Agatha. “I’d become like Mrs. Bloxby and involve myself in good works.”
“You’re not Mrs. Bloxby and never could be.”
“Oh, she’s a saint and I could never rise to her heights?”
“Don’t quarrel, Aggie. Let’s go out for dinner. Bill will contact us if he’s got anything.”
They enjoyed a pleasant dinner. I’m glad Charles is back in my life, thought Agatha. I was silly about Paul. But Charles would not stay for long. He never did. She often wondered what he really thought of her.
When they returned to her cottage, she phoned Paul but there was no reply. She locked up for the night and they both went to their respective beds. The night was humid and warm. Agatha tossed and turned, suddenly uneasy about Paul. Where had he gone?
She groaned and got up. She would just look out of her front door and see if his car was outside. The old banger he had bought had been there earlier but the MG had been missing.
Agatha unbolted and unlocked the front door after switching off the burglar alarm. She glanced at her watch. One in the morning. Paul’s MG was outside his cottage. Good. He was safe and sound.
She was about to close the door when she stiffened. Something was not quite right. She opened the door wide and walked out onto the step and looked along. Suddenly she saw a flickering light at one of the downstairs windows. It was like the light from a pencil torch. Paul would hardly be looking around his own cottage with a torch.
Agatha closed the door quietly and ran upstairs and woke Charles. “What is it?” he grumbled. “I’ve only just dropped off. Too hot in this cottage. Why don’t you get air-conditioning?”
“Listen. Paul’s MG is parked outside his cottage but someone’s in there with a torch. It can’t be Paul.”
Charles got up and dressed hurriedly. “You wait here and I’ll creep along and have a look.”
Agatha went to her own room and got dressed. Maybe Paul had had some sort of power cut. She went downstairs to meet Charles, who was coming back. “There’s a full moon,” he said. “I knelt down and peered in the front window. It’s Frampton!”
“Oh, my God. What has he done with Paul?”
“Phone Bill,” said Charles. “If he’s killed three people, he won’t hesitate to kill us.”
Agatha phoned Bill’s home. He answered the phone himself and she was grateful she did not have to explain anything to his mother.
She told him about Frampton being in Paul’s cottage.
“Sit tight,” ordered Bill. “We’ll be along as fast as possible.”
After she had rung off, Charles said, “Let’s have a drink. All we have to do is wait. Even if he’s gone by the time the police arrive, he’ll need to explain why he was driving Paul’s car and what he was doing in the cottage.”
&nbs
p; Agatha shuddered. “He may not have been driving Paul’s car. He may have forced Paul to drive it.”
Charles poured drinks and they sat uneasily, waiting. Half an hour passed.
“Did you lock the front door?” asked Charles.
“I was so upset I forgot,” said Agatha. “I’ll do it now.”
She was just getting to her feet when the sitting-room door opened and Peter Frampton walked in, a small pistol in his hand. “The diary,” he snarled. “Where is it?”
“What diary?” asked Charles.
“Don’t waste my time.” Frampton’s pupils were like pinpoints. Agatha was sure he was on some sort of drug.
“You can’t shoot us,” said Agatha. “You’ve already murdered three people. I mean, why go to such elaborate lengths when you could just have shot them?” She thought she heard a movement outside. Bill?
“The first,” said Frampton calmly, “was supposed to look like an accident. I knew about that secret passage. I thought I could frighten the old bitch out of there, but she wouldn’t move. Then dear Robin came on the phone. I’d had an affair with her. She knew nothing, but she was hinting that she would tell the police about what she called my obsession with finding that diary. So she had to go. And just when I thought I was in the clear, that idiot, Briar, started to blackmail me. He’d been out in the fields with his dog during the night I was at Ivy Cottage and he said he had seen me leaving. Diary, and quick about it.”
“I don’t know what diary you’re talking about,” said Agatha loudly.
“Sir Geoffrey Lamont’s diary. I read in an old manuscript that he had told one of his fellow prisoners before his death that it was hidden in Ivy Cottage. If I had that, I’d publish my findings and make my mark on the historical scene. I need it. Get it. I’ll show that dried-up old stick of a professor. No one humiliates me! I’ll start off by shooting you in the kneecaps and I’ll keep on shooting until one of you cracks.”
The door crashed open. Bill stood there, flanked by two armed policemen. “Drop your weapon and lie on the floor,” he ordered.
Frampton looked down at the gun in his hand. Then, quick as a flash, he raised it and shot himself through the head.
Agatha stood white and shaking as his body slumped to the floor.
Charles put an arm around Agatha and led her from the room and Bill took out his mobile phone and dialled and began to rap out instructions.
They waited in the kitchen. The forensic team arrived, Run-corn and Evans arrived and the police pathologist arrived.
At last Runcorn, flanked by Evans, joined them in the kitchen. They made statements about how they had seen someone shining a torch in Paul’s cottage, how Charles had gone along and recognized Frampton and how they had phoned Bill.
Runcorn eyed them narrowly. “DC Wong heard Frampton confess to the three murders. It seemed he wanted to get his hands on some old diary. He thought you’d got it. Have you got it?”
“No,” lied Agatha. If she admitted they had it, she could be charged with obstructing the police in an investigation and then she would have to tell them where she’d found it.
“Sir Charles?”
“Haven’t a clue what he was babbling on about,” said Charles.
“Then you don’t mind if we search this cottage? I can always get a warrant.”
Charles felt a stab of alarm. He didn’t know where Agatha had hidden it.
“Go ahead,” said Agatha. “But we’ve got to find Paul.”
“You’ll stay right where you are until we search the place.”
Charles and Agatha sat huddled together at the kitchen table. “Where did you hide it?” whispered Charles.
“Where he’ll never find it.”
“Aggie, they’ll even look in the flowerpots.”
“Shh. Here’s Bill.”
Bill sat down next to them. “We’ve got our murderer, thanks to you, Agatha. But what’s all this about a diary? And what put you on to Frampton?”
“Woman’s intuition. I never liked him,” said Agatha. “It was when we searched Robin’s studio and found that portrait we knew he had lied about never having met her.”
“They’ll be in here shortly to search the kitchen for that diary he was talking about.”
“The man was mad,” said Agatha. “Obsessed over some old diary. We went to see a history don in Oxford.” She told him how Frampton had been humiliated by the professor.
“And you’re sure you don’t have that diary?”
“Absolutely not.”
“If you say so. Of course, it wouldn’t surprise me if you and Paul had found that secret passage and somehow found this diary.”
The police entered the kitchen to start their search.
Agatha felt a wave of delayed shock. She said, “I’m going up to bed. You know where I am.”
Charles followed her upstairs. On the landing, he said, “Where did-” but was silenced by Agatha putting a hand over his lips.
“Go to bed, Charles,” she said.
Fully dressed, Agatha huddled under the duvet, shivering despite the warmth of the night. She fell asleep and was wakened two hours later by Bill shaking her shoulder.
“They haven’t found anything,” he said. “You must have hidden it well.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Agatha, struggling up.
“You’re both to report to police headquarters in the morning and we’ll go over your statements.”
“Okay. Just go away,” moaned Agatha.
But after Bill had gone, she lay awake, listening until she heard them all drive off. She went downstairs, her face tightening in anger when she saw the mess in the kitchen. Even a bag of flour had been slit open. The fact that the bag had been lying on the shelves for two years waiting for her to blossom into a baker did nothing to appease her anger.
She swung round as Charles entered the kitchen. “What a wreck!” he exclaimed. “Where’s the diary?”
“Come upstairs and I’ll show you.”
Agatha went into her bedroom and over to an antique travelling case on her dressing-table which she used to keep her bits of jewellery and the few letters she had once received from James. “It’s got a secret drawer,” she said. “I bought this on a whim in that antique market in Oxford, the one that’s now closed down. She fumbled at the back. “See!” She turned the case around. A drawer had sprung open at the back and inside lay the diary.
“What are we going to do with it?”
Agatha closed the drawer. “I don’t know about you, but I need more sleep and then I’ll think of something.” She suddenly put her hands up to her face. “Charles! We’ve forgotten about Paul. What’s happened to him?”
Eleven
PAUL sat in the darkness of the Anderson shelter. He had tried shouting and screaming but it had only left him feeling helpless and exhausted. He thought of his wife, Juanita. Why on earth had he been so stubborn about staying in the Cotswolds? Why hadn’t he gone to Madrid? It was all Agatha’s fault-silly blundering woman.
He wondered whether he should try praying. He didn’t believe in God. Never had. Still, he had once heard someone say there are no agnostics on the battlefield. He would give it a try. He sank to his knees on the earthen floor and prayed desperately for deliverance.
As he rose from his knees, he heard police sirens faintly in the distance and was overcome with religious awe. Juanita was a devout Catholic. He would no longer mock her faith. They would go to church together, start a family, live a decent married life. He waited and waited. Then he flung himself at the door and shouted and screamed.
Nobody came.
Agatha phoned Bill at police headquarters and listened in fear as he said that they had been out to the building works and combed the place from end to end, they had turned over Frampton’s cottage, but no sign of Paul. Zena and workers at the building works remembered seeing Paul, but no one had seen him leave. Agatha rang off and told Charles what he had said.
“
Let’s go over there,” said Charles. “We might find out something they haven’t.”
But when they got to the building works it was to find out the place had been closed down after the police left. A solitary watchman told them that the workers had decided to go home until they found out whether some executor of Frampton’s estate was going to pay their wages.
Agatha said they wanted to search the buildings. He was about to refuse until Agatha crackled a fifty-pound note in front of his eyes. So through the buildings they went, hoping to see something that the police had missed, but it seemed hopeless.
The day was very hot and sunny. A heat haze shimmered across the fields beside the works. They thanked the watchman and then stood wondering what to do.
“If he wanted to get rid of Paul,” said Agatha, “he wouldn’t surely do it anywhere there was a chance of being seen. Let’s walk round the perimeter fence-like over there.”
“But there’s nothing over there, Aggie, except grass and weeds.”
“Come on. There might be a dead body in the grass.”
“Bang, bang! You’re dead!” shrilled a voice and Agatha clutched her heart. A small child rose out of the long grass, followed by another. Both were wearing miniature Stetsons and carrying toy guns.
“Beat it!” snarled Agatha.
The children looked up at her, not in the least afraid. They were both white-faced and spotty and had calculating eyes. Why do people insist that kids are innocent? wondered Agatha.
“Got any sweets?” asked one.
“Get lost.”
“If you give us sweets, we’ll show you where the ghost lives.”
Agatha was just wondering whether to bang their heads together when Charles said, “What ghost?”
“No sweets, no tell,” they chorused.
Charles held out a pound coin. “Tell us.”
They looked at each other and solemnly shook their heads. “Not enough,” said the spottier of the two.
“Oh, here!” said Agatha impatiently, handing over a five-pound note. Anything that might lead them to Paul was worth any money.