The next morning James rose early and went out and bought all the newspapers. Black headlines screamed at him. Yeltsin had been overthrown. The generals in Moscow had made a coup. The Cold War was on again. The papers were full of reports on the front pages, and on the inside were endless articles by pundits. The murder of one elderly spinster in Mircester rated only a small paragraph in each. The rump of Serbia was supporting the generals. Russia was beginning to be torn apart by civil war.
He took the newspapers back to Agatha, who was playing with her cats on his kitchen floor. She rose to her feet and studied them in silence.
‘At least,’ said Agatha at last, ‘we can go on detecting. If we had been the focus of press attention, it would have been hard to do.’
They talked about the world situation and then decided they might as well go into Mircester and make their statements, go somewhere for lunch, and then call on Mrs Gloria Comfort.
Maddie and Bill Wong were having a cup of tea in the canteen later that day. It was the first time since interviewing Agatha and James that they had been able to have a private conversation.
‘So what do you think of your precious Agatha Raisin now?’ demanded Maddie. ‘That woman’s like a vulture. Dead bodies wherever she goes.’
‘That’s a bit hard,’ protested Bill. ‘Their visit to Derrington may have touched off his suicide, but they were only a bit ahead of us and if the old boy was going to top himself, he would have done it sooner or later. And they had nothing to do with the murder of Miss Purvey. Agatha’s alibi checks out. Look, Maddie, I must make one thing clear. Agatha’s a friend of mine and I wish you’d stop bitching about her. I don’t know if she exactly solved those last crimes, but she made things happen by poking her nose in; otherwise we’d never have got to the murderers.’
‘I’m entitled to my own opinion,’ said Maddie. ‘Look at her odd relationship with Lacey. Their engagement breaks up because she’s lied to him and yet they’re living together.’
‘I think they’re very well suited,’ mumbled Bill. He had invited Maggie home to meet his parents for dinner that very evening and he did not want anything to go wrong. ‘Can’t we just agree to disagree?’
‘Have it your way. Haven’t got the hots for old Agatha, have you?’
‘She’s old enough to be my mother!’
‘Just wondered.’
Bill had been looking forward to showing off Maddie to his parents. Now a worm of uneasiness was beginning to wriggle in his brain. Could it be that his darling was, well, just a tiny bit abrasive?
Agatha and James drove in the direction of Mircester. The fog had lifted and it was a beautiful autumn day. The hedgerows were bright with hawthorn berries, and red-and-gold trees lined the edges of brown ploughed fields.
‘The country doesn’t seem beautiful at first,’ said Agatha. ‘I used to long for London. Then I got used to it. I started noticing the changing seasons, and then it began to look beautiful, like watching a series of landscape paintings, one after another. Except for those clouds. Someone ought to do something about those clouds, James. They’re like those neat and regular watercolour ones painted by the Cotswold amateurs. The light is different, too. It sort of slants in the autumn.’ Shafts of golden sunlight cut through the trees on to the winding road ahead. James braked sharply as a clumsy pheasant dithered about in front of his wheels which crunched on a carpet of beech nuts.
‘I don’t often want to put the clock back,’ said Agatha in a small voice. ‘But on days like this, I wish I had never got into this mess, and I know I won’t be free until it’s over. I can’t even grieve for Jimmy. I think he’d turned into a right bad lot and if he hadn’t been so bad, he would be alive and kicking. I could deal with a live Jimmy and get him out of my hair forever, but I can’t fight a dead man. He came between us, James.’
‘You put him there, Agatha. If you had found out his existence, we could have dealt with it.’
Agatha gave a small dry sob.
James took one hand off the steering wheel and gave her a quick hug. ‘You need to give me time,’ he said, and Agatha’s heart suddenly rocketed with hope, like another pheasant which flew up at their approach and sailed over a hedge.
They received a setback after they had made their statements at police headquarters and gone in search of Mrs Gloria Comfort. They learned from neighbours that she had moved to one of the outlying villages. No one knew her new address but one of the neighbours remembered the house had been sold by Whitney and Dobster, estate agents.
At the estate agents’, they found to their relief that the man who had organized the sale of Mrs Comfort’s house in Mircester was still working there and cheerfully accepted their story that they were old friends trying to get in touch with her. He produced an address in Ancombe.
‘Well!’ exclaimed Agatha outside the estate agents’ office. ‘That’s very close to Carsely, and to the scene of Jimmy’s murder, too. Do you think the police will have been there before us?’
‘Don’t know. They always have such a lot of red tape to get through and we don’t.’
Agatha suddenly hesitated. ‘They’ll be furious if they arrive and find us there.’
‘It’s getting late. They’ve either been there or they’re getting there tomorrow.’
Ancombe was one of those Cotswold villages about the size of Broad Campden that seemed too perfect to be true. Very small but with an old church in the centre, thatched cottages, beautiful gardens, and everything with a manicured air.
Mrs Gloria Comfort lived in one of the prettiest of the thatched cottages under the shadow of the church. There was no answer to the door. ‘Let’s try round the back,’ said James. ‘I can hear some noises coming from there.’
‘Probably writhing in her death agonies,’ said Agatha gloomily.
They walked up the narrow path which led to the back garden. A plump blonde woman was weeding a flowerbed. ‘Excuse me,’ began James, and she rose and turned around.
Her hair was gloriously bleached blonde, not a dark root showing, but her middle-aged face was puffy and her eyes held that glittering look caused by a film of moisture, the sign of a heavy drinker. She was dressed unsuitably for gardening in a sort of Lady Tart outfit of tightly tailored tweed jacket and skirt, frilly white blouse, pearls and high heels.
‘Mrs Comfort?’ said James.
‘Are you collecting for something?’
‘No, I am James Lacey and this is Agatha Raisin.’
‘Oh, dear, you’re the wife of that man who was murdered. You’d better come indoors.’ She teetered across the lawn, her spiked heels making holes in the green turf. ‘Good for the lawn,’ she remarked. ‘It aerates it.’
Indoors was in keeping with her dress. Everything was amazingly vulgar. Awful ruched curtains at the windows, fake horse brasses, fake old masters on the walls, and a padded white leather bar in one corner of the living-room. Mrs Comfort headed straight for the bar. ‘Drink?’
Agatha said she would have a gin and tonic, and James, a whisky.
‘Now,’ Mrs Comfort said, perching on the very edge of an overstuffed sofa, ‘what’s this all about?’
‘You were at the health farm at the same time as Jimmy,’ began Agatha. ‘We’re interested in who he talked to. We’re also very interested in the woman who accompanied him, a Mrs Gore-Appleton.’
Mrs Comfort took a strong pull of the very dark liquid in her glass. Then she said, ‘It’s hard to remember. It all seems so long ago. Jimmy Raisin was hailed as one of the successes. He arrived looking like a wreck, and by the end of the first week he looked like a different man. I can’t tell you anything about Mrs Gore-Appleton. I didn’t talk to her much except for the odd remark about the weather and how awful it was to feel so hungry – that sort of thing. I can’t really be of much help to you, I’m afraid.’
James said, ‘Have the police been to see you yet?’
‘No. Why should they want to see me? Oh, because of Mr Raisin being murdered.’
‘It’s not as simple as that. You may not have noticed in the newspapers today because of all the world news, but a certain Miss Purvey was murdered in Mircester.’
‘Purvey? Purvey! She was there at the health farm. Thin spinster. But surely that has nothing to do with anything.’
‘Jimmy Raisin was a blackmailer,’ said Agatha.
Mrs Comfort choked on her drink and then appeared to rally. ‘Really?’ she said brightly. ‘How sickening.’
Agatha took a gamble. ‘The real reason we are here is because we think he may have been blackmailing you.’
‘How dare you! There is nothing about me that anyone could blackmail me about. I think you should both go.’
Mrs Comfort got to her feet. They rose as well. ‘You would not like to try the real story out on us first?’ asked James gently.
‘What do you mean, on you first?’
‘The police will be here soon and they will ask you the same questions. Then they will check your bank statements to see if you have been drawing out regular sums of money to pay blackmail, or if you ever issued a cheque to Jimmy Raisin.’
She sat down as if her legs had suddenly given way. Her puffy face crumpled and she looked about to cry. Agatha and James slowly sat down again.
She mutely held out her now empty glass to James. He took it, sniffed it, and then went behind the white leather bar and filled it with neat whisky and carried it back to her. They waited while she drank in silence and then she said, ‘Why not hear it all?
‘As I said, Jimmy Raisin was a wreck when he first came, but he soon smartened up. He was charming and amusing and . . . well, the others seemed a lot of stuffed shirts, and because I was a woman on my own, I was put at the same table as Miss Purvey, and that made me feel like shit.
‘Jimmy started to flirt with me and then he said he’d been down to the village that afternoon and he had a couple of Cornish pasties in his room. I went along to have one because I was so hungry and we were giggling like schoolchildren at a midnight feast. One thing led to another and we ended up spending the night together. We were very civilized about it the next day. As far as I was concerned, it was a one-night stand. I was married, and happily married, too, but those Cornish pasties had seduced me in the same way as vintage champagne would have done on another occasion.’
She paused to drink more whisky thirstily.
‘Do you know, I almost forgot about the whole episode? It meant that little. Then one day, when my husband had just gone off to work – we were living in Mircester then – Jimmy turned up. He said that unless I paid him, he would tell my husband about our night together. I told him to get lost. It was his word against mine, and I would deny the whole thing. But he wrote to my husband and described certain details about me and . . . and . . . my husband divorced me.’
There was a long silence.
Agatha said quietly, ‘Why did you tell us this? You paid him nothing, so there would be no way anyone could find out anything from your bank statements.’
She shrugged wearily. ‘I’ve never told anyone. Can you imagine the shame? Thirty years of married life down the tubes, just like that. I hated Jimmy Raisin, but I didn’t kill him. I’m too much of a wimp. I was shattered. All those years of marriage, and Geoffrey, my husband, wouldn’t forgive me. He rushed the divorce through. I was amazed at the generous settlement, and then I found out why. I found out why after the divorce because that’s when your best friends come forward and tell you what they should have told you before. He’d been having an affair with a woman in his office and all I did was hand him a big golden opportunity on a plate.’
‘This Mrs Gore-Appleton,’ said James. ‘Didn’t Jimmy talk about her, explain to you why he was there with her?’
‘He said she was some sort of do-gooder who was paying for his treatment, but that was all. We didn’t talk much except about the health farm and joked about the awful exercises and the food.’
She began to cry quietly. ‘We’re sorry,’ said Agatha. ‘We’re just trying to find out who murdered Jimmy.’
She dried her eyes and blew her nose. ‘Why? Who cares?’
‘Until we find out who murdered him, we’re all suspects, even you.’
Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘I shouldn’t have told you about sleeping with Jimmy. You won’t tell the police?’
And the two amateur detectives, who were still smarting over having been told to keep out of the investigations, both nodded their heads. ‘We won’t tell,’ said Agatha. She fished in her handbag and found one of her cards. ‘Here’s my address and number. If you can think of any little thing that might help, please let me know.’
‘All right. I’m thinking already.’
‘You see,’ said James, ‘if we could find this Mrs Gore-Appleton, I feel we could get somewhere. There’s no evidence that she was in on this blackmailing lark. Jimmy was taking only five hundred pounds a month from Sir Desmond Derrington. Mrs Gore-Appleton gave an address in Mayfair to the health farm. Mind you, it seems to have been a false address, but believe me, if she had been in on the act, I feel the demand would have been higher. I don’t know why. Just an idea. What was she like?’
Mrs Comfort frowned. ‘Let me see . . . blonde, good figure, bit muscular, loud laugh, sort of plummy voice, was very close to Jimmy but more like a mother looking after her child.’
James remembered Miss Purvey saying that she had seen Jimmy going into Mrs Gore-Appleton’s bedroom one night but kept silent. ‘She didn’t speak to me much or to anyone else, for that matter,’ Mrs Comfort went on. ‘Apart from Jimmy, that is.’ Her watery eyes suddenly focused sharply on Agatha. ‘Why did you marry him?’
Agatha remembered Jimmy when they had first married – reckless, handsome, full of fun. Then Jimmy slowly sinking into alcoholic stupors while she worked hard as a waitress, Jimmy surfacing occasionally from an alcoholic coma to beat her. Their marriage had been short and violent and she could still remember that feeling of glorious freedom when she had walked out on him for the last time, never to return.
‘I was very young,’ she said. ‘Jimmy began to drink heavily soon after we were married and so I left him. End of story.’
James said suddenly, ‘Be careful, Mrs Comfort.’
‘Why?’
‘There’s a murderer at large and it’s someone who was at that health farm, I’m sure of it. Someone recognized Miss Purvey and decided to shut her up. It could be that Jimmy had something on Miss Purvey and was blackmailing her. That someone could be carrying on the blackmail where Jimmy left off. Are you sure there is nothing else you can remember, however small and insignificant it might seem, which might help?’
‘There was only one stupid thing,’ she said. ‘It’s about Mrs Gore-Appleton.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Agatha eagerly.
‘Well, there were times when I thought she would have made a very good man.’
James and Agatha stared at her in surprise.
‘It’s just a feeling. She had a very muscular body. She wasn’t exactly mannish. It was just something about her. Have you checked out everyone else who was there at the same time as me?’
James shook his head. ‘Just the ones who lived near Mircester. There was Sir Desmond. Then there was Miss Purvey, and then yourself.’
‘But why did you assume the murderer was someone from near Mircester?
‘Because Jimmy Raisin was murdered in Carsely. It must have been someone who lives locally.’
‘But if you’re dealing with a blackmailer, or maybe a couple of blackmailers,’ protested Mrs Comfort, ‘then they could have followed their victims to London or Manchester or wherever! Then Jimmy Raisin could have let slip that he was going to your wedding.’
‘I don’t like that idea,’ said Agatha. ‘A friend of ours got a detective to find Jimmy Raisin and he was living in a packing-case at Waterloo. He was hardly in a state to go around blackmailing anyone.’
‘But when he heard you were getting married
, he managed to get down to Mircester all right. He could have sobered up enough to go out from his packing-case to try one of his old victims and then said something like, oh, “I’m going to Mircester.”’
Agatha groaned. ‘How many people were there at the same time as you?’
‘Not many. It’s so expensive. Only about thirty of us.’
‘Thirty,’ echoed Agatha in a hollow voice.
‘It’s got to be someone local,’ insisted James.
‘But who?’ demanded Agatha. ‘It’s obviously not Mrs Comfort here. Miss Purvey is dead. Sir Desmond is dead. Who’s left?’
‘Both of you,’ suggested Mrs Comfort with a tinge of malice in her voice.
‘Or Lady Derrington,’ said James. ‘What about Lady Derrington? She may have known about the blackmail all along and decided to get rid of Jimmy herself.’
‘Or what about Sir Desmond?’ put in Agatha. ‘He could have killed Jimmy and then committed suicide in a fit of remorse.’
‘So who killed Miss Purvey?’
‘That could have been Lady Derrington,’ said Agatha eagerly. ‘Miss Purvey said she was going to do some detecting. What if she knew something about the Derringtons?’
‘Or,’ said Mrs Comfort, ‘it could have been that woman Derrington was having an affair with.’
They both looked at her in surprise. Then James said slowly, ‘We never thought of her.’
Mrs Comfort suddenly stood up. ‘Well, if that’s all . . .?’
They got to their feet as well, thanked her for her hospitality, put their glasses on the horrible bar, and left.
Mrs Comfort watched them go, watched them get into James’s car, watched them drive off. Then she picked up the phone.
Maddie was seated that evening at the Wongs’ family dining table and wondering how soon she could escape. That Bill was immensely fond of his parents was transparently easy to see. But Maddie wondered why. Mrs Wong was a massive, discontented Gloucestershire woman and his father a morose Hong Kong Chinese. The food was frightful: microwaved steak and kidney pie with potatoes made from that dehydrated stuff that comes in a packet – just add water – and tinned green peas of the type that ooze a lake of green dye all over the plate. The wine was a sweet Sauternes.
Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage Page 9