by M C Beaton
Agatha repressed a sigh and went forward to support the bulk of Mrs. Boggle, who smelt strongly of chips and lavender, towards the car.
They both got in the back while Agatha, chauffeur-like, got into the driving-seat. Mrs. Boggle poked Agatha in the back as she was about to drive off. "Us shouldn't be going with the likes of you," she said. "Poor Mr. Lacey. What a disgrace."
Agatha swung round, her face flaming. "Shut up, you old trout," she said viciously. "Or walk."
"I'll tell Mrs. Bloxby on you," muttered Mrs. Boggle but then relapsed into silence during the drive to Ancombe.
Agatha hoisted the two Boggles from the car outside Ancombe church hall and sent them inside and then went to join Mrs. Mason, the chairwoman of the Carsely group, Miss Simms, the secretary, and Mrs. Bloxby. "Shame about you landing them Boggles," said Miss Simms, Carsely's unmarried mother. "Don't worry, I had them last time."
"I didn't know you had a car," said Agatha.
"My gentleman friend bought me one. Hardly the wages o' sin. Not a Porsche but a rusty old Renault five."
Agatha turned to Mrs. Bloxby. "Has that woman who's bought my cottage joined the Ladies' Society?"
"I did ask her," said the vicar's wife, "but she said she couldn't be bothered and shut the door in my face."
"Nasty cow," said Agatha. "Oh, if only I hadn't sold my cottage! I'd better look for somewhere else. I can't live out of a suitcase at James's forever." She walked off into the hall.
"Now there's a thing," said Miss Simms, picking a piece of tobacco offher teeth. "I thought the wedding would happen sooner or later."
Doris Simpson, Agatha's cleaner, joined them. "Poor Agatha," she said. "She do miss her home and I miss the cleaning."
"Don't you do for Mr. Lacey, then?" asked Miss Simms.
"No, he does his own cleaning, and that's unnatural in a man, if you ask me."
"I had a fellow like that once. Went off and left me for another fellow," said Miss Simms. "It all goes to show."
"I do not think our Mr. Lacey is that way inclined," said Mrs. Bloxby.
"Never can tell. Some of 'em don't come out o' the closet till they're quite old and then they run around saying, "This is the life," and bugger the wife and kids," Mrs. Simpson said.
"'Bugger' being the word," said Doris Simms and gave a cackle of laughter.
"Shall we go in, ladies?" suggested the vicar's wife.
The revue consisted of songs and sketches. In the way of amateur productions, the singer most on stage was the one with the weakest voice and had chosen to sing a selection from the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, petering out in the high notes and dying in the low notes and shrill in the middle. The rendering of 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' was, Agatha reflected sourly, music to stun pigs by.
Usually when she was out at some event that bored her, she looked forward to returning home to her cottage and cats. But there was only James's cottage to return to, where she seemed to exist by sufferance on the periphery of his well-ordered life.
Damn that Hardy woman, she thought. And then she stifled a little gasp. Mrs. Hardy, that could be it! Come from God knows where. Who knew anything about her? And her arrival in the village had been coincidental with the death of Jimmy Raisin. Agatha barely heard the rest of the concert. She wanted to rush home and tell James about her suspicions, but there was tea to take afterwards and the grumbling Boggles to run home.
By the time she was free, her splendid idea had been replaced by doubts. But none the less she told James of her suspicions. To her relief, he listened to her seriously and said, "I've been wondering about that woman myself. There doesn't seem much point in trying to talk to her, she doesn't seem the chatty sort, to say the least."
There was a ring at the doorbell and Agatha went to answer it. Mrs. Bloxby stood there. "Come in," said Agatha.
"I can't. I brought your scarf. You left it at the hall. I'm just going to pick up the keys from Mrs. Hardy. For some reason she wants me to keep the spares while she's in London. I told her to leave them with our policeman, Fred Griggs, but she said she didn't want to."
"When does she leave?" asked Agatha. "About now, I think. I had better go." Agatha thanked her for the scarf and went thoughtfully back indoors.
"There's a thing," she said, sitting down opposite James. "The Hardy woman's off to London. Left her spare keys with Mrs. Bloxby. Wouldn't it be interesting to get a look in there?"
"Can't very well ask Mrs. Bloxby for the keys. And I wouldn't like to try lock-picking in broad daylight."
"But I've got another set to the cottage. I found them in my case."
"Won't she have changed the locks?"
"I've a feeling that one would not go to any expense if she could do otherwise. Oh, just think, James, what if she proves to be Mrs.- Gore-Appleton?"
"Too much to hope for. But I'd like to find out more about her. How do we get in there without anyone seeing us? There always seems to be someone about in this village when you don't want them to be, and we can't wait until the middle of the night. Did Mrs. Bloxby say anything about when she planned to return?"
"No. But I have the key to the back door. All we need to do is to go out and over the fence of your garden and then over the fence and into mine - I mean hers."
"Okay. I'll go outside and weed the front garden so I can see her leaving."
James, bent double over a flower-bed, thought after half an hour that Mrs. Hardy might have changed her mind, but then, as he straightened up, he was rewarded by the sight of her truculent face behind the wheel of her car, heading off down Lilac Lane. He stood and craned his neck, hearing the sound of the car retreating through the village, and then seeing it climbing up the hill out of Carsely.
He went back indoors. "Right, Agatha," he said. "Let's go."
Agatha shinned over James's garden fence, thinking that detective work might prove too energetic a business for a middle-aged woman. James had gone over lightly and had crossed the narrow alley between his garden and that of Mrs. Hardy and was already climbing over her fence.
That James should expect her to scramble after him with-out an offer of help riled Agatha. She felt she was being treated like a man. She suddenly wanted James to notice her again, really look at her as a man ought to look at a woman. She thought that when she reached the top of Mrs. Hardy's fence, she would call to him for help. He would stretch his arms up to her and she would drop down into them, her eyes closed, and she would whisper, "James, oh James."
"Help!" she called softly. She dropped down the other side of the fence, stumbled and landed face-down in a flowerbed. She got to her feet and glared. James, totally oblivious to the romantic script she had written for him, was unlocking the kitchen door. Agatha gave herself a mental shaking. She did not love him any more, she told herself. It was just that she had become so used to being in love, to having her brain filled with bright dreams that without them she was left with herself. Agatha did not find herself very good company.
She looked around her garden as she headed for the back door. It had a weedy, neglected air.
Inside the house, she looked around the kitchen. It was gleaming and sterile. She opened the fridge. Nothing but a bottle of milk and some butter. She was about to open the freezer compartment when James said angrily from behind her, "We're not here to find out what she eats but who she is."
She followed him through to the living-room. Agatha had never credited herself with having much taste, but looking around what had once been her cosy, chintzy living-room, she felt her cottage had undergone a species of rape. There was a mushroom-coloured fitted carpet on the floor. A three-piece suite in mushroom velvet was ornamented with gold tassels on the arms and gold fringe above the squat legs. A low glass coffee-table glittered coldly. No pictures or books. Her lovely open hearth had been blocked up and an electric fire with fake legs stood in front of it.
"Absolutely nothing here," said James. "Let's try upstairs. You'd best stay down here in case you hear her coming b
ack." And Agatha was glad to agree, not wanting to see what Mrs. Hardy had done to the rest of the cottage. She went to the window and peered out. Autumn had come. A thin mist was curling around the branches of the lilac bush at the gate. Water dripped from the thatch with a mournful sound.
Agatha suddenly wondered what on earth she was doing living in the country, a feeling that only assailed her during the autumn. It was the Cotswold fogs that were the problem. Last winter hadn't been too bad, but the winter before had been awful, crawling into Moreton-in-Marsh or Evesham to do the shopping with the fog-lights on, sometimes not knowing whether she was still on the road or not, driving home at night where the fog seemed to rear up and take on tall pillared, shifting shapes, eyes aching, longing for the wind to blow and lift it.
In London there were shops, brightly lit, and tubes and buses, theatres and cinemas. Of course, she could get all that in Oxford, but Oxford was thirty miles away, thirty miles of fog-filled road.
She heard James call softly, "You'd better come up here."
She ran up the stairs. "In here," he called. "The main bedroom."
The room was dominated with a large four-poster bed, a modern four-poster bed. "How did she get that up the stairs?" marvelled Agatha.
"Never mind. Look at this. Don't touch anything. I'm going to put it all back the way I found it." There were papers spread out on the floor. Agatha knelt down and studied them. Any hope Agatha might have had that the mysterious Mrs. Hardy might turn out to be the missing Mrs. Gore-Appleton quickly fled.
There was a birth certificate: Mary Bexley, born in Sheffield in 1941. Then marriage lines. Mary Bexley had married one John Hardy in 1965. Death certificate for John Hardy. Died in car crash 1972.
Bank-books and statements in the name of Mary Hardy. There were photographs, dull and boring. It appeared that the late Mr. Hardy had been the company director of an electronics firm. Photos of Mr. Hardy at firm functions. No children.
"So that's very much that," commented Agatha gloomily as she straightened up. James carefully replaced everything.
"We'll try Miss Janet Purvey tomorrow," he said.
Miss Janet Purvey lived in Ashton-Le-Walls, quite near the health farm. It was a sleepy village wreathed in the thick mist which still persisted to haunt the countryside. Late roses drooped over cottage walls, blackened busy Lizzies, suffering from the first frost of the autumn, drooped along the edge of flower-beds. The trees were turning russet and birds piped dismally, seemingly the only sounds in the village of Ashton-Le-Walls, where nothing and no one but Agatha and James seemed to be alive in the fog.
The year was dying and Agatha felt lost and strange and loveless. The only thing that seemed to be keeping herself and James locked together was this detective investigation. She felt that once it was all over, they would drift apart, farther than they had ever been before, as if they had never lain in each other's arms.
A poem she had learned at school suddenly ran through Agatha's brain:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow? The small rain down can rain, -
Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!
She felt if only the wind would blow away the mist and fog, her spirits would lighten. Autumn seemed to be inside her very brain, darkness and falling leaves and the haunting spectre of decay and old age.
Miss Purvey lived in a cottage called The Pear Tree in the middle of the village. It was in a terrace of other small cottages, dark, secret, and lightless in the fog.
Agatha had not asked James whether he knew how old this Miss Purvey was and dreaded finding out she was a sophisticated blonde who might capture James's affections.
Her first feeling on seeing Miss Purvey when she answered the door was one of relief, the second, contempt accompanied by the thought, what a frumpy old bag.
The middle-aged, like Agatha, can be extremely cruel about the old, possibly because they are looking at their immediate future. Miss Purvey was, in fact, only about seventy, with a mouth like Popeye, a small nose, twinkling watery eyes, and rigidly permed white hair. Her face was wrinkled and sallow. Only in Britain, thought Agatha, looking at the sunken line of the jaw and the thin, drooping mouth, could you still come across women of means who went in for having their teeth removed. It was still George Orwell's country of people with bad teeth or no teeth at all.
"No reporters," said Miss Purvey in a plummy voice.
"We are not reporters," said James. "Have you had the press here?"
"No, but the police have been asking me impertinent questions. Are you Jehovahs?"
"No, we're - "
"Selling something?"
"No," said James patiently.
"Then what?" The door began to inch closed.
"I am Mrs. Agatha Raisin," said Agatha, stepping in front of James.
"The widow of that man who was murdered?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm very sorry for you, but I can't help you."
James took over. "I feel perhaps you can, Miss Purvey. You look like a charming and intelligent woman to me." He smiled and Miss Purvey suddenly smiled back. "We are concerned to find out what Mrs. Raisin's husband was doing at the health farm. We need a lady with good powers of observation rather than some dry police report."
"Well..." She hesitated. "Mother always used to say I noticed what the average person missed. Do come in."
Agatha followed James into the cottage quickly, feeling that Miss Purvey would have been quite happy to shut the door in her face.
The cottage was as dark as the day outside. A small fire burnt in the living-room grate. There were photographs everywhere, on the many side-tables, on the upright piano in the corner, and on the mantelpiece, old photographs taken on forgotten sunny days.
"So," began James when they were seated, "did you speak to Mr. Raisin?"
"Only a little," said Miss Purvey. "And to be quite frank, I was amazed that such a type of person should be at such an expensive health farm."
"But you saw him," said James. "What was your impression of him?"
She put her finger to her forehead, rather like the Dodo in Alice, and frowned. "He was very friendly to everyone, chatting here and there and table-hopping at meals. He had a very loud laugh. His clothes were good, but they didn't seem to belong to him. Not a gentleman."
"And Mrs. Gore-Appleton?"
"She seemed quite all right. But too old to have her hair dyed that improbable shade of gold and her exercise clothes were much too flashy."
"Was she in love with Mr. Raisin?" asked James.
"They were very much a couple and I saw her coming out of his room in the middle of the night." Miss Purvey's lips folded in such disapproval that they disappeared into the lines of her face.
"But you personally did not have anything to do with him?" Agatha put in.
"He did...er...come on to me. That is the modern expression, is it not? But I would have none of it."
Both Agatha and James were struck by the same thought at the same time - that it was hard to imagine Miss Purvey repulsing the advances of any man. There was an avid eagerness about her as she looked at James and she constantly reached out to touch his arm. "But then," she went on, "he turned his attentions to Lady Derrington, or the woman who, I now gather, was not Lady Derrington. I fear these health clinics nurture lax morals."
"Did the police broach the subject of blackmail to you?" asked James.
"Yes, they did. But as I pointed out, there are still ladies around in these days." Miss Purvey's eyes rested briefly on i Agatha, as if dismissing her from the lady class.
"Can you think of anyone he might have been blackmailing?" Agatha's voice was thin with dislike.
"I don't know if he was blackmailing her. But there was a certain Mrs. Gloria Comfort. He was all over her. Mrs. Gore-Appleton didn't seem to mind."
"What was Mrs. Gore-Appleton really like?" asked Agatha. "I don't mean her appearance, but her character."
"Well, as I said, she was a lady," said M
iss Purvey reluctantly. Again those eyes fastened on Agatha. "And although her clothes were unsuitable, they were very expensive. She was well-made-up and quite thin, but very fit." So goodbye, Mrs. Hardy, thought Agatha, conjuring up a picture of that powerfully built woman. Agatha still nourished hopes that Mrs. Hardy would miraculously turn out to be the missing Mrs. Gore-Appleton, but then she desperately wanted her cottage back.
Agatha began to fidget. She now loathed Miss Purvey and felt the small dark living-room claustrophobic.
But James seemed determined to discuss the matter further, and to Agatha's dismay accepted an offer of coffee. He followed Miss Purvey into the kitchen to help her. Agatha walked around the room looking at the photographs. They all featured Miss Purvey at various stages of her life. Agatha was surprised to note that as a young woman she had been very pretty. Why hadn't she married? There were parents and what looked like two brothers. There was a photo of Miss Purvey at her coming-out in the days when debs were still presented to the queen, so the family must have had money. She could hear the voices from the kitchen and then heard Miss Purvey give a flirtatious laugh. Damn James!
They returned from the kitchen together, Miss Purvey's old face slightly pink. To Agatha's amazement, Miss Purvey's attitude to her had changed. She pressed Agatha to try her cakes and then chatted about life in the village and the work she was doing for the Women's Institute. "Ladies like us, Mrs. Raisin," she said, "must do our bit."
"Yes," agreed Agatha faintly, wondering what had brought about this change and not knowing that James had whispered to Miss Purvey the lie that Agatha was a niece of the Duke of Devonshire.
"Now although I said Mrs. Gore-Appleton was a lady," confided Miss Purvey, putting a wrinkled hand on Agatha's knee, "I did get the impression that she had gone to the bad, if you know what I mean. It's hard to put my finger on it, but there was a raffishness about her, a seediness, and something else...I don't know what, but I was quite frightened of her. As I was telling Mr. Lacey, I remember she did begin to talk to me towards the end of my stay. She was talking about money and business and told me she was running a charity. She said that everyone had money worries today and I said I was quite comfortably off, thank you, and she asked me if I would contribute to her charity, but when I heard it was for the homeless, I refused. I said if these people were homeless, then it was their own fault."