Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye

by M C Beaton

  ‘I don’t know that my customers would like having their meals interrupted by photographs,’ said the maître d’.

  Toni noticed there was a service hatch from the kitchen. ‘I could shoot a few photographs through that service hatch,’ she said. ‘I’ll be very discreet. It’s best to take photographs when the restaurant is as busy as this.’

  The maître d’ hesitated only a moment. Although the lunch hour was still busy, attendance in the evenings had been falling off. The restaurant could do with the publicity.

  ‘Just for a little while,’ he said. ‘We don’t use the service hatch any more. The waiters carry the food straight in from the kitchen.’

  He led Toni into the kitchen. She raised the service hatch and then stood back. She wanted anyone looking over to get used to seeing it open. She studied the photograph of Mr Horrington and then cautiously approached the service hatch and looked through.

  She saw Mr Horrington just getting to his feet and helping a comparatively young woman into her jacket.

  Toni darted out of the kitchen and said to the startled maître d’, ‘I’ve left some equipment outside.’

  She positioned herself outside the restaurant. There would not be much point photographing the pair if they stood apart and showed no signs of affection. Mr Horrington could just claim it was a buyer.

  He emerged with the woman. Toni raised the camera. He whispered something in her ear and she giggled. Toni snapped a picture, glad the sound of the shutter was drowned by the traffic. Then Mr Horrington looked hurriedly up and down the street, not seeing Toni, who had crouched down behind a parked car. Toni rose to her feet again just in time to witness Mr Horrington and the woman engaged in a steamy kiss.

  ‘Gotcha!’ she muttered, clicking the camera and taking as many photographs as she could.

  Later, Agatha said, amazed, ‘You are lucky. I’ve followed him for days. Damn it. I concentrated on the evenings. He always seemed to be working late.’

  ‘Then she probably works at the shoe factory as well,’ said Toni.

  ‘Good. I’ll go and see Mrs Horrington. Do you want to come with me?’

  ‘No, I’ll leave it to you.’

  ‘Had lunch?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Go out and get something and we’ll go to that flat when I get back.’

  When Agatha had gone, Toni asked Mrs Freedman, ‘When do I get my pay? I’m running low.’

  ‘On Friday. I gather you don’t have a bank account so you will be paid cash until you set one up. But you haven’t yet claimed any expenses. I can give you some money out the petty cash for just now. Take an expenses sheet with you and fill it in. You can put down for lunch at that posh restaurant.’

  ‘I don’t have a receipt.’

  ‘We’ll assume you lost it. Here’s forty pounds for the moment.’

  Toni was determined to keep as much of the money as possible, so she went to the nearest Burger King. She was just finishing a burger when she looked through the window and saw her brother, Terry, lurching along the street. He looked drunk. She bent down and hid until he had passed.

  Later that afternoon, Agatha took her to see the flat. It was very small: one tiny living room, a small bedroom, a minuscule kitchen and a bathroom. The bathroom was surprisingly the largest room in the place.

  ‘I’m buying the furnishings as well,’ said Agatha. ‘They’re pretty horrible, but you can change them as you go along. You’ve got a bed at least and I put bedclothes on it and some towels in the bathroom. Now I’ll take you home and you can collect your bag. Everything went through quickly and so instead of waiting a fortnight, you can move in right away.’

  Toni was choked up with gratitude as Agatha handed her the keys. She had an impulse to hug her but reflected that one probably didn’t hug such as the formidable Agatha Raisin.

  Agatha, as she drove towards Carsely, was prey to mixed feelings. It was all right to think that Toni was just lucky, but she herself should have thought of that restaurant. Toni’s black eye was fading fast. How wonderful to be young again, thought Agatha. How marvellous not to suffer the indignities of approaching old age: spreading waistline, moustache, hair dye and aching hip. She resolved to go back to the beautician’s, Beau Monde, in Evesham and get Dawn to work her magic on her face before the weekend.

  The weekend! It all seemed a rather silly waste of time the more she thought of it.

  Chapter Four

  Agatha set out with Charles for the Manor House on Saturday morning feeling low in spirits.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ asked Charles. ‘You’ve gone all moody.’

  ‘It’s these divorce cases. I hate them. The two that Toni wrapped up weren’t too bad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No children involved. But there are in the two new ones.’

  ‘Not developing a conscience at this late time in life, Aggie?’

  ‘I am not late in life, but yes, it does seem dirty.’

  ‘You can’t avoid divorce cases if you’re going to run a detective agency.’

  ‘It’s not only that,’ said Agatha, ‘it’s this weekend. I’ve been lost in dreams of a Poirot-type set-up and I feel now it’s just the paranoia of one batty old woman.’

  ‘We’ll suffer today,’ said Charles, ‘and if we decide she really is bonkers, we’ll clear off. But from what you’ve told me, she certainly seems to have thought up a will to make herself a prime target.’

  ‘You’ve got the map,’ said Agatha, who was driving. ‘Remember to direct me to the entrance from Upper Tapor. I don’t want to have to endure that long walk across the fields again. Besides, it looks like rain.’

  ‘Occasionally it’s looked like rain in the past few days,’ said Charles, ‘but the clouds then disappear and the sun blazes down again. Cheer up. You’ll feel better once we’re there and suss things out. Then if the old girl is still alive by this evening, we could push off.’

  ‘I have to stay. She’s paying me handsomely by the day and now that I’m paying Toni full detective wages, I need the money.’

  ‘Your generosity surprises me sometimes, Aggie.’

  ‘Well, as someone who always forgets to find his wallet when we’re out for dinner, you should not be surprised at all.’

  ‘Miaow!’

  Just outside Upper Tapor, they saw a sign, THE MANOR HOUSE. Agatha drove along a well-kept drive and soon they found themselves at the house.

  Phyllis Tamworthy greeted them. ‘I thought you were bringing your son,’ she said to Agatha.

  ‘Roy Silver is not my son,’ said Agatha crossly. ‘This is a colleague of mine, Sir Charles Fraith.’

  ‘A “sir”?’ Phyllis grinned. ‘My snobby daughters are going to love you. I’ll show you to your rooms – or are you sleeping together?’

  ‘No,’ said Agatha, ignoring a whispered, mocking ‘Maybe’ from Charles.

  Agatha found her bedroom a surprise. Obviously Phyllis had decided to forgo the appearance of a stately mansion on the upper floors. Everything looked as if it had come from Ikea. Also, it was decorated in shades of brown: dark brown carpet, lighter brown curtains, mid-brown painted walls and a rust-coloured duvet on the bed.

  There was a television set on a table by the window. Agatha reflected that it looked exactly like a bedroom in a three-star hotel.

  Charles came in as she was unpacking. ‘I’m not a romantic like you,’ he said, ‘but I must admit the bedrooms come as a surprise. Hardly the right sinister setting. This house depresses me. It must have once been a charming family home.’

  Phyllis came in without knocking, drying her hands on her apron. ‘They’ll all be in the drawing room just after one o’clock. Jimmy closes the shop half day on Saturday. Stupid. It should be his busiest day, but there’s no arguing with him. When you’re ready, come down.’

  When she had left, Agatha said, ‘You unpacked quickly.’

  ‘Didn’t unpack at all,’ said Charles laconically. ‘Took one look at the bedroom a
nd decided a quick getaway might be a good idea. Let’s go down and face the music.’

  On entering the drawing room, Agatha surveyed the assembled company and decided with a sinking heart that she had never seen a bunch of such ordinary people before.

  As Phyllis introduced them, Agatha took mental notes so that she would remember who was who. Daughter Sadie, married to Sir Henry Field, was small and dumpy, and dressed in a bright blue silk trouser suit. Sir Henry was so bland and pompous that there was something not quite real about him, as if he had come from Central Casting. Divorced daughter Fran was as thin as her sister was fat, with tightly permed white hair, indeterminate features as if someone had taken a sponge and tried to erase her face, and wearing a baggy tweed skirt and Aertex blouse. I haven’t seen an Aertex blouse in years, thought Agatha.

  Son Bert was small and red-faced, bald and with pursed-up lips, as if perpetually discontented. He was wearing a suit which had obviously been tailored for him when he was a slimmer man.

  His wife, Alison, was a domineering woman in tweeds. She had a heavy truculent face and slightly protruding brown eyes. Fran’s daughter, Annabelle, made Charles’s eyes light up. She was in her late thirties with thick auburn hair and creamy skin. She stood out in the pedestrian-looking crowd. Sadie’s daughter, Lucy, on the other hand, looked as dreary as her mother, and her eight-year-old daughter, Jennifer, had ‘spoilt brat’ written all over her.

  Agatha had phoned Phyllis the night before to ask her where she should say they had met and Phyllis told her to say they had met five years ago in Bournemouth when she, Phyllis, had been on holiday at the Imperial Hotel.

  Jimmy, the favourite, was last to arrive. His shoulders were stooped. He had a long face and a beaten air, as if years of working at a job he hated had bowed him down.

  Agatha wondered if Phyllis planned to cater for and serve the lot of them lunch. Sherry was served. Even to Agatha’s uneducated palate, it tasted awful. Charles muttered he thought it was British sherry, and so it turned out. ‘Do you remember the days when you could buy British sherry?’ said Phyllis. ‘It was so cheap that every time I had an empty bottle, I would go down to the off-licence and get it filled up. It was on draught. I’ve still got bottles of it in the cellar.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ wailed Fran, casting an anxious look at Charles. ‘What will Sir Charles think of you?’

  They were summoned to the large dining room. Two women, who looked as if they came from the village from their appearance, and who behaved as if they were part of the local protest group, served the first course of ham-and-pea soup, slopping the soup into plates, and scowling all around.

  The long mahogany table shone and the china was of the finest, but placed strategically down the table were bottles of HP sauce and bottles of ketchup.

  The second course was steak and kidney pie with chips and peas. The meat was tough and there was more kidney than steak and the pastry was like a wet book. Phyllis’s choice of wine was served. Blue Nun.

  ‘I’m out of here – fast,’ whispered Charles, who was seated next to Agatha.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ pleaded Agatha.

  Conversation was stilted. They talked among themselves about the weather and about people Agatha did not know.

  Over the apple pie and custard – sour apples and lumpy custard – Phyllis, flushed with several glasses of Blue Nun, asked, ‘When do I get my presents?’

  ‘We all agreed we would give you your presents when the brandy and coffee are served.’

  ‘If you mean the end of the meal, fine,’ said Phyllis. ‘But you know I don’t like brandy. You’re all going to have some of my elderberry wine. Agatha,’ she shouted down the table, ‘I pick my own elderberries and make my own wine. Nothing like it.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ muttered Charles gloomily.

  As the coffee was served, one by one the family rose and went out, returning with their presents. Not one of them, it seemed, had thought it necessary to loosen the purse strings to buy the old woman a decent present. Several gave books which Agatha recognized as ones currently on sale in the sort of bookshops that specialized in remainders. Jimmy gave his mother a hot water bottle in the shape of a teddy bear. Fran gave her a necklace. Agatha had seen one just like it recently in the jewellery section of Marks & Spencer.

  Sadie stared at Agatha and Charles. ‘Haven’t you brought Mother a present?’

  ‘Hadn’t time to drop into the thrift shop,’ whispered Charles.

  Agatha could feel laughter bubbling up inside her. She tried to suppress it but up it came and she laughed and laughed.

  Phyllis’s voice cut across the laughter. ‘I didn’t tell Agatha it was my birthday,’ she said.

  Agatha recovered, mopped her eyes and apologized while they all looked at her suspiciously.

  Then just as they were all, with the exception of Phyllis, grimacing over their elderberry wine, eight-year-old Jennifer piped up. ‘My gran,’ she said, meaning Sadie, ‘says it’s not worth giving you anything good cos you’re out to screw the lot of us.’

  There was a shocked silence. Then Jennifer’s mother, Lucy, said, ‘The dear child was only joking. It’s that dreadful state primary school she goes to. If she went to a private school, she wouldn’t speak like that.’

  Phyllis rose to her feet. ‘I’m tired,’ she announced. ‘We will meet at six o’clock for high tea.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ groaned Sadie. ‘No one, but no one, has high tea any more.’

  ‘I do,’ said Phyllis firmly.

  ‘Wanna go home!’ screamed Jennifer.

  ‘A very good idea, darling,’ said her mother, Lucy.

  Jennifer’s grandmother, Sadie, chimed in. ‘Yes, do go, my darlings. She’s not going to leave us anything no matter how long we stay here.’

  ‘Good idea,’ echoed Annabelle. ‘I’m leaving as well.’

  ‘Come on,’ Charles said to Agatha, ‘let’s go for a walk.’

  Outside, Charles looked at the sky. ‘I think the Indian summer’s finally coming to an end. What an awful lunch.’

  ‘You mean dinner,’ Agatha corrected him. ‘At least with Annabelle, Lucy and the horrible child gone, it will mean fewer people to watch. That leaves Sadie, Sir Henry, Fran, Bert, Jimmy and Alison. And I can’t see one of them as a potential murderer.’

  ‘Let’s suffer it all until tomorrow. Or do you want to leave now?’

  ‘Phyllis is paying me for the whole weekend. Don’t abandon me, Charles.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Charles, who was already planning to get a friend to phone him with some urgent news that would give him an excuse to leave.

  ‘I think they all might still be in the dining room,’ said Agatha. ‘It might be a good idea to listen. That’s the dining room over there. I can see Sir Henry pacing up and down and waving his arms. The windows are open. If we stroll nearer and stand behind those laurel bushes, we should be able to hear everything.’

  They made their way cautiously forward until they were screened by the bushes. Sir Henry’s well-articulated voice reached their ears. ‘I have tried to reason with her. Cutting off her own flesh and blood.’

  Bert said, ‘What about you pleading with her, Jimmy? You were always her favourite.’

  Jimmy’s voice reached Agatha and Charles, loaded with venom. ‘Favourite?’ he spat out. ‘Chained to that bloody shop. How are your bunions this morning, Mrs Smith? Pah! And now they all hate me because she’s selling up here. I’ll soon be in debt. I asked her to help me out and she said it was up to me to run a successful business.’

  Sadie chimed in. ‘I happen to know she’s changing something in her will.’

  There was a startled silence.

  ‘She told me,’ said Sadie. ‘She enjoyed telling me. She’s going to alter it next week. She said she’d been on the phone to her solicitor the day before she spoke to me. She’s going to leave it all to build a technical college in Daddy’s name. She’s going to start the building of it as soon as she sells this
place, and if she dies, she’s making sure the building goes on. And she’s leaving the college to the state, so we can’t even sell it.’

  Alison, Bert’s wife, snarled, ‘If only she would drop dead.’

  ‘I’m going for a lie-down,’ said Sadie. ‘Oh, Miss Crampton, yes, you can clear the table now.’

  There came a scraping back of chairs. Charles and Agatha moved away.

  ‘Gosh and double gosh,’ said Agatha. ‘They sound murderous.’

  ‘They sound like a lot of bores,’ said Charles. ‘Relax. Nothing’s going to happen.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll get the dreadful high tea over with and clear off in the morning. Will you be free for Christmas dinner?’

  ‘Aggie, it’s October.’

  ‘I know, but I am going to have a really splendid old-fashioned Christmas.’

  ‘Your last Christmas dinner was a disaster. What’s with you and Christmas?’

  ‘I want to have one Christmas the way it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘It never is, Aggie. Grow up. People are under stress. They drink too much, they fight, they decide they’ve always hated each other. You’re a romantic.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that? It’s all sex, sex, sex these days.’

  ‘Love usually comes along disguised as lust or because of delayed gratification like Brave New World.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Agatha. ‘Just turn up for my Christmas dinner, that’s all.’

  ‘Aha, there’s more to this than meets the eye. Where’s James?’

  ‘Travelling. But I’m sure he’ll be home for Christmas.’

  ‘And standing under the mistletoe?’

  ‘I’m going in,’ said Agatha crossly. ‘Oh, was that a spot of rain?’

  Charles looked up at the sky. ‘Feels like it.’

  ‘I thought the weather would break with a magnificent thunderstorm,’ said Agatha.

  ‘And Phyllis would slump dead over the dining table to crashes of thunder, her dead face lit by flashes of lightning?’