by M C Beaton
But she drove along Palace Gate instead, made a left at Kensington Gardens and headed over to the City.
Roy was in his office. He backed away behind his desk when he saw the grim look on Agatha's face. "What have you been up to, sweetie?"
Agatha told him all about the fire, the attempted shooting, and their investigations. Roy visibly relaxed, assuming that all this mayhem was the reason for Agatha's angry face and not anything to do with himself.
"Perhaps it's that Hardy woman after all," he said when Agatha had finished. "She turned up out of nowhere to live in Carsely. What if she's really Mrs. Gore-Appleton? I mean, coincidences happen the whole time. Lots of people move to the Cotswolds and find themselves living next to someone they've been trying to avoid all their lives. So how's this? She takes your cottage. The fact that your name is Raisin and you're probably Jimmy's wife amuses her. It's not all that usual a name. She knows about your proposed wedding to James but thinks you must be divorced. Jimmy may not even have mentioned you. Then, in his fumbling, drunken wanderings, he runs into her, recognizes her as his old buddy and tries to put the screws on her. She bumps him off. Then she goes to that cinema in Mircester and there, in the cinema, she sees Miss Purvey and, what is worse, Miss Purvey sees her, so Miss Purvey must be silenced...
"Now she's running scared. She tries to burn the pair of you to death, but some neighbour starts screaming, 'Fire!' and she sees your light upstairs and hears you shouting, 'James!' or something and decides, as you are not going to die, she'd better start heaving buckets of earth around to make sure she's not suspected. Then she thinks up a scheme to throw you off the scent. She hires some actor or villain to stage that hold-up and give you a fright and at the same time she can figure as the heroine of the piece, and who's going to suspect a heroine?"
"That's very clever, Roy, and I wish it could stand up, but the fact is James and I went into her cottage - I've still got the keys - and we went through her papers and she is exactly who she says she is."
"Damn."
"Your detective seems to have a touch with the down-and-outs that the police lack."
"The problem with Iris is that she's very busy at the moment. She's overworked. She's got at least a couple of battered wives on her books."
"See if you can get her. I'll pay her." Agatha walked to the window and stared out unseeing at the jumble of City roofs and spires.
Then she swung round. "I know, we'll go and see what we can find out."
"We, Paleface? I've a job to do here, remember?"
The door opened and Bunty, Agatha's former secretary, popped her head round the door. "Oh, hallo, Mrs. R. Roy, Mr. Wilson wants to see you."
"I'll wait for you," said Agatha.
Roy went off, straightening his garish tie and wondering whether it was too gaudy for a rising young executive.
Mr. Wilson surveyed Roy for a few moments and then said, "You've got the Raisin woman there."
"Just dropped by for a chat."
"That one never drops by for a chat. What does she want? To wring your neck for having buggered up her love-life?"
"No, she wants my help. She's crazy. She wants us to go among the down-and-outs and find out more about her husband's background."
"Then do it."
"What?"
"I said, do it. Agatha Raisin may be the nastiest, most ball-breaking woman I have ever come across, but she's the best PR in the business and I would like her on the payroll. I want you to be very nice to her. I want you to point out to her that since she retired, her life has been nothing but stress and murder down in that village. Hint that there's a good amount of money to be made. Put her in your debt."
"But I've got a meeting with Allied Soaps this afternoon."
"Patterson can take that. Off with you, and keep the old girl sweet."
Roy trailed miserably back to his office. Allied Soaps was an important account and Patterson would dearly like to get his hands on it. Life just wasn't fair.
He opened the door of his office and pinned a resolute smile on his face. "Guess what? I've got a slow day, so we can go."
Agatha looked at him suspiciously. "What did Wilson want with you? Not trying to get me back on the payroll?"
"No, no." Roy knew that if he told Agatha that was the only reason he was going to help her, it would alienate her for all time.
"Well, we'd better get some old clothes and look the part."
"Do we have to dress up?"
"Don't worry. I'll go and find the right stuff. See you back here in about an hour."
Some time later, two shabby individuals stood outside Ped-mans in Cheapside and tried to flag down a cab. Agatha had gone to an Oxfam shop for the clothes they were now wearing. Roy was dressed in jeans which Agatha had ripped at the knees for him, a denim shirt, and an old tweed jacket. Agatha was wearing a long floral skirt and two lumpy cardigans over j a blouse and carrying various plastic bags. Both stank of j methylated spirits, Agatha having doused their clothes liberally in the stuff. She had also dirtied their faces.
"This is no good," said Roy as the third empty cab sailed by them without stopping. Agatha went back into Pedmans and hailed the commissionaire.
"What d'ye want?" he growled.
"It's me, Agatha Raisin," she snapped. "Get out there and get a cab for me."
The commissionaire, who loathed Agatha, stared down at her, a smile breaking across his face. So the old bag had fallen on hard times. Let her get her own bloody cab.
"Shove off," he said. "We don't want the likes of you in here."
Agatha opened her mouth to blast him, but a quiet voice behind the commissionaire said, "Jock, get Mrs. Raisin a cab, and hop to it."
Mr. Wilson stood there. "Going off to a fancy dress party, Mrs. Raisin?"
"That's it," said Agatha.
Jock ran out into the street and flagged down a cab, and with his face averted held the door open for Agatha and Roy. Agatha pressed something into his hand. He touched his hat. The cab rolled off. Jock opened his hand. A penny! He hurled it into the gutter and stumped back inside.
"You haven't brought your handbag?" asked Roy.
"No, I left it with your secretary. It's in her desk. You left your wallet, I hope?"
"Yes, but who's paying for this cab?"
"You are!"
"But I left all my money behind!"
"So did 1.1 mean, I've got about a pound in change, but that won't pay for this cab to Waterloo."
"What are we going to do?" wailed Roy. "Of all the stupid - "
"Let's just hope it's not one of those cabs where they lock the doors." The cab slowed and stopped at traffic lights.
"Now!" said Agatha.
She wrenched open the door and, followed by Roy, dived out into the street, pursued by the outraged howls of the cabby.
"You can still run," panted Roy when they finally came to a halt. Agatha clutched her side. "I've got a pain. I really must get back into condition."
They started to walk, an aroma of methylated spirits floating out from them. "I think we had better do some begging," said Agatha, stopping in the middle of London Bridge.
"We don't look appealing enough. We need a dog or a child."
"We haven't got one. Can't you sing or something?"
"Nobody would hear a note with this traffic noise. Beg- i gars who get money are either pathetic or threatening."
"Okay." Agatha stepped in front of a business man and held out her hand. "Money for food," she said. "Or else."
He stopped and looked her up and down.
"Or else what?"
"Or else I'll hit you with my bottle."
"Get lost, or I'll call the police, you scum. It's layabouts like you that are bringing this country to its knees. You're too old to work, but you should get your son to support you."
Roy giggled maliciously.
The business man appealed to the passers-by. "Can you believe this? They're demanding money with menaces."
"Come on, Aggie,
" pleaded Roy, getting frightened, as a crowd started to collect. "Police!" a woman started to shout. "Police!"
They took to their heels and ran again, thumping their way over the bridge until they had left the crowd behind.
"All this running, birdbrain," snarled Agatha. "We should have run back to the office and got some money."
"Not far now," said Roy. "Let's get it over with."
Dusk was falling. The roar of the going-home traffic drummed in their ears. Agatha thought of James and wondered what he was doing.
James was feeling guilty. He had taken Helen Warwick out for lunch and then gone back to her flat at her suggestion for coffee. She had a day off, she had explained. Life was quiet when the House wasn't sitting.
Perhaps because she had really nothing more to tell him than she had already told to James and Agatha, perhaps be-cause she did not seem nearly as charming as she had when he had first met her, James was able to realize that this visit had been prompted more by a desire not to let Agatha dominate his life than by any real interest in Helen. She was very clever at extracting information, and the information she seemed most interested in was the size of his bank balance. No question was direct or vulgar. Talk of stocks and shares, whether he had suffered over the Lloyd's or Barings disasters, things like that. And the friends they were supposed to have in common began to seem to James like people she had met at parties and in the course of her work but did not really know very well.
"Do you mind if I make a telephone call?" he said at last. "And then I really must go."
"Help yourself."
He dialed home and let it ring for a long time.
"No reply," he said with a rueful smile.
"Were you trying to get Mrs. Raisin?"
"Yes."
"Oh, she's in town."
"How do you know that?"
"I saw her driving past when we walked out for lunch."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"I was just about to, but you were talking about something and then the whole matter slipped my mind."
Now James felt like a guilty husband who had been caught out in an adulterous act. He then became angry because he was sure Agatha had come to town for no other purpose but to spy on him.
"I'd better go. Thanks for the coffee."
"Oh, do stay," said Helen. "I've nothing planned for this evening."
"I'm afraid I have."
She stood up and moved close to him. He moved back and found his legs pressed against the sofa. She raised her arms to put them around his neck, a slow seductive smile on her face. James ducked, stepped up on the sofa and walked over the back, his long legs taking him straight to the door.
"Goodbye," he said, opened the door, and ran down the stairs.
"Silly old fool," he said aloud, but he meant himself and not Agatha Raisin.
Agatha had had the foresight to buy two bottles of cheap sweet wine called Irish Blossom. They were the kind of wine bottles with screw-tops rather than corks. She and Roy found a group of down-and-outs near where Jimmy Raisin used to hang out. They were a mixed bunch, but more solid alcoholics than drug addicts, the drug addicts being younger and favouring better sites. The Celtic races predominated, Scottish and Irish, making Agatha wonder if there was any truth in the statement that alcohohsm got worse the farther north in the world one went.
No one seemed to want to know them, until Agatha fished in one of her plastic bags and produced one of the bottles of wine.
The others gathered around. Roy passed the bottle round. The contents were soon gone. An old man came up. He had two bottles of cider, which he proceeded to share. He had an educated voice and told everyone he used to be a professor. Soon they all began to talk, and Agatha and Roy found they were surrounded by jet pilots, famous footballers, brain surgeons, and tycoons. "It's a bit like those people who believe they had a previous life," muttered Agatha. "They were always Napoleon or Cleopatra or someone like that."
"They believe what they're saying," whispered Roy. "They've told the same lies so many times, they actually believe them now."
Agatha raised her voice. "We had a mate used to hang around about here," she said. "Jimmy Raisin."
The man with the educated voice, who was called Charles, said, "Someone said he got killed. Good riddance, sleazy little toe-rag."
They must have heard about the murder by word of mouth, thought Agatha. Few of them would ever look at a newspaper.
"What happened to his stuff?" asked Roy.
"Perlice took it away," said a thin woman with the sort of avid face and glittering eyes of a Hogarth drawing. "Took 'is box and all. But Lizzie got 'is bag o'stuff."
"What stuff?" Roy's voice was sharp.
"Just who the hell are you?" asked Charles.
Agatha glared at Roy. "I'll tell you who I am," he said, his voice slightly slurred. "I'm a big executive in the City. I only come down here evenings because I like the company."
There was a general easing of tension as the brain surgeons, jet pilots, and tycoons in general regarded what they thought was one of their own kind. "And I'll tell you something more." Roy fished in the capacious inside pocket of his Oxfam jacket. "I took this bottle of Scotch out of the desk before I came here."
This was nothing but the truth, but deep in the dim recesses of their brains they accepted him as a fellow liar. The Scotch was passed round. Since they were all, with the exception of Agatha and Roy, topping up from the last binge, it had the effect of knocking them into almost immediate drunkenness.
Agatha found the avid-faced woman was called Clara and sidled over to her. "Tell you a secret," she whispered.
Clara looked at her, her glittering eyes slightly unfocused. "I was married to Jimmy," said Agatha.
"Go on!"
"Fact. So that bag this Lizzie took belongs to me. Where is she?"
"She'll be along."
So Agatha and Roy settled themselves to wait. More joined them. More cheap drink. A man built a bonfire in an old oil drum. Clara began to sing drunkenly.
It was an almost seductive way of life, thought Agatha, provided the weather wasn't too cold. Just chuck up reality, goodbye to work, to family, to responsibility, beg during the day and get stoned out of your mind at night. No conventions to bind you, no getting or spending, no hassle.
"I wash not allush like thish," slurred Charles at one point. "I wash a profeshor at Oxford."
Perhaps he was, thought Agatha with a sudden stab of pity. But whatever Charles had been at one time in his life, it had obviously been something better than sitting under the arches in Waterloo scrambling what was left of his brains.
The night wore on. Fights broke out. Women cried, long maudlin wails for lost men and lost children. It's not a seductive way of life, thought Agatha. It's a foretaste of hell. There was a brief scramble of activity when the Silver Lady came round, a van with sandwiches and hot coffee, some of them trying to trade their sandwiches and coffee for another swig of drink.
Gradually, like animals, they crept off into their packing-cases. Still this Lizzie had not come.
Dawn was rising over grimy London. A blackbird perched up on a roof-top sent down a chorus of glorious sound, highlighting the degradation and misery and wasted live of those in the packing-cases beneath.
Agatha got stiffly to her feet. "I've had it, Roy. Give your detective lady the job of finding Lizzie and double her pay to do it. I'm going home."
"Haven't we even got enough between us for the tube?" asked Roy.
Agatha scraped in her pockets and finally found a pound. "That's for me to take the tube," she said firmly.
"You'll have to stick with me, sweetie, if you want to get into the office to get your bag and car keys. I have the keys to the office."
"Let me have them."
"No."
"Do you mean you're going to make me walk back all that way?"
"Yes."
Not speaking to each other, each stiff and sore and exhausted from their long
night and with queasy stomachs from the awful mixture they had drunk, they headed in the direction of Waterloo Station.
A well-dressed man in evening dress approached them. He stood in front of them, stopping their progress, his face a mixture of pity and disgust. He fished in his pocket, took out his wallet and extracted a ten-pound note. "For God's sake," he said to Roy, "get your mother a decent breakfast and don't spend this on booze."
"Oh, thank you, thank you." Roy seized the note.
"Taxi!" he yelled, and, miracle of miracles, a taxi came to a stop. Roy shoved Agatha inside, shouted "Cheapside," and the cab drove off.
The man in evening dress gazed after them in a fury. That's the last time I waste money on people like that, he thought.
James had suffered a sleepless night as well. At first he had thought Agatha was staying away to get revenge, but then he began to think something might have happened to her. At last he settled down in an armchair in front of the cottage window, jumping to his feet every time he heard the sound of a car, but there was only, first, the milkman, and then Mrs. Hardy going off early somewhere.
His eyes grew heavier and heavier. Why hadn't she even phoned?
He fell asleep at last and in his dream he was marrying Helen Warwick. He only knew he did not want to marry Helen but that somehow she had blackmailed him into it. He was standing at the altar, hoping that Agatha Raisin would come and rescue him when the sound of a key in the lock made his eyes jerk open.
He jumped to his feet, shouting, "Agatha! Where the hell have you been?"
Agatha had not bothered to change out of her down-and-out outfit. James stared at the wreck that was Agatha, the black circles under her eyes and the terrible smell of stale booze mixing with the meths with which she had sprinkled her clothes at the beginning of the masquerade.