by M C Beaton
“Calmly, dear lady,” admonished the solicitor, Mr. Times.
“You,” said Agatha, “have done bugger-all since you got here but looked sideways at me as if I am some sort of Lady Macbeth.”
There was a knock at the door. Wilkes snapped, “Come in.” Bill Wong put his head around the door. “A word, sir. Most urgent.”
Wilkes switched off the tape and went outside.
Inside, Agatha’s burst of anger had gone, leaving her weak and shaky. Everything was against her. She had attacked Jimmy in front of everyone at the registry office and she had been seen by Harry Symes to attack him that very morning. She was not free to find out who had actually done it should it prove not to have been an accident. Whom else could anyone possibly suspect? Who else would want to kill a drunk who normally lived in a packing-case in Waterloo? Only Agatha Raisin.
Wilkes came back into the room, his face grim. He sat down again, but did not switch on the tape.
“Where is James Lacey?” he asked.
“I do not know,” said Agatha. “Why?”
“He did not tell you where he was going?”
“No. Why?”
“I am withdrawing the charge against you, Mrs. Raisin, due to insufficient evidence, but must ask you not to leave the country.”
“What’s happened?” demanded Agatha, getting to her feet. “And why do you want James?”
He shuffled the papers in front of him. “That will be all, Mrs. Raisin.”
“Sod the lot of you,” said Agatha, furious again. Her solicitor followed her out.
“Should you need my services again…” began Mr. Times.
“Then I’ll find myself a decent lawyer,” growled Agatha. She strode out of the police station. They had not even given her a car home. What was she supposed to do? Walk?
“You need a drink,” said a voice in her ear. She turned and saw Bill Wong. “Come on, Agatha,” he urged. “I haven’t got long.”
They walked across the main square under the shadow of the abbey and into The George. Bill bought a gin and tonic for Agatha and a half-pint of bitter for himself. They sat down at a corner table.
“What has happened is this,” said Bill quickly. “The preliminary forensic evidence has discovered that Jimmy Raisin was strangled with a man’s silk tie. It had been chucked into the field a little down the road. Footprints other than yours were found near the body, the footprints of a man. So the hunt’s up for James Lacey.”
“What!” Agatha glared at him. “They knew all along that Jimmy had been strangled and yet they let me think I might have caused him to strike his head on a rock or something. I’ve a damn good mind to sue them. And as for James? James murder my husband? James? Believe me, the whole experience will have been so vulgar, so distasteful to my ex-lover that all he would want to do would be to put as many miles between us as possible. So he can’t have been hanging around the village to murder Jimmy. That takes rage and passion, and in order to experience that amount of rage and passion, he would need to have been in love with me!”
“Come on, Agatha. The man had a bad shock.”
“If he had loved me, he would have stood by me,” said Agatha. “And do you know what I feel for him now? Nothing. Sweet eff all.”
“Either you’re still in shock or you couldn’t have loved him all that much yourself,” said Bill.
“What do you know about it? You’re too young.” Bill was in his twenties.
“More than you think,” said Bill ruefully. “I think I’ve fallen myself.”
“Go on,” said Agatha, momentarily diverted from her troubles. “Who?”
“Maddie Hurd.”
“That hatchet-faced creature.”
“Now, you are not to talk about her like that, Agatha. Maddie’s bright and clever and…and…I think she cares for me.”
“Oh, well, chacun a son gout, as we say back at the buildings. Or everyone to their own bag. But if they think James did it, they’re wasting time. Look, Harry Symes saw me. Didn’t he see anyone else on the road?”
Bill shook his head. “I’ve got to be getting back. I’ll call on you as soon as I hear anything more.”
Agatha thought of asking him for a lift back to Carsely but then decided she had endured enough of the police for one day and went off to get a cab at the rank in the square. Bill went back to police headquarters. Maddie was waiting for him.
“Get anything out of her about Lacey?” asked Maddie eagerly.
Bill told her what Agatha had said, feeling treacherous because Maddie had sent him to find out what he could from Agatha.
“She trusts you,” said Maddie. “Keep close to her.”
“Are you doing anything tonight?” asked Bill eagerly. “I thought we could take in a movie.”
“Not tonight, Bill,” said Maddie. “Too much to do. And don’t you want to be around when they pull Lacey in?”
“Of course,” said Bill, banishing romantic pictures of the back row of the cinema and his arm around Maddie’s shoulders.
There was only one good thing, thought Agatha wearily as she paid off the taxi outside her cottage – nothing else could possibly happen that day. That was until she turned around and saw a large, tweedy woman standing by the gate.
“Have you forgotten me, Mrs. Raisin?” demanded the woman. “I am Mrs. Hardy, to whom you sold this cottage, and I am appalled to see your stuff is still here.”
“I know we signed the papers and everything, but I told the estate agents it was now not for sale,” said Agatha desperately.
“You took my money. This cottage is mine!”
“Mrs. Hardy,” pleaded Agatha, “cannot we come to some arrangement? I will buy it back from you and you will make a profit.”
“No, this place suits me. I am moving in tomorrow evening. Get all your stuff out or I will take you to court.”
Agatha pushed past her, put her key in the door, let herself in and went wearily through to the kitchen. How could she, who prided herself on her business sense, have assumed that because she had told the estate agents the house was no longer on the market, all she would have to do was to transfer the money for the sale back to Mrs. Hardy?
She glanced at the clock. She phoned the removal company and told them to call the following morning and take her stuff into storage. She then went along to the Red Lion, where she knew they often let out rooms to holiday-makers. But the landlord, John Fletcher, mumbled that he did not have anything to spare and would not meet her eyes. No one else in the pub seemed to want to talk to her.
Agatha left her drink untouched in the bar and walked out. There was now nothing left for her in Carsely. The only thing left for her was to move back to the anonymity of London with her cats and wait for death. She was comforting her battered soul with equally gloomy thoughts when she turned into Lilac Lane. Her heart began to thud.
James Lacey was getting out of his car outside his cottage. He went round to the boot, unlocked it and took out two large suitcases. Then, as if aware of beingjwatched, his shoulders stiffened. He put down the suitcases and turned around.
A weary Agatha came towards him. The rash had gone from her face, leaving it unnaturally white, and there were purple bruises under her eyes.
“Where did they find you?” asked Agatha.
“I hadn’t gone far,” he said. “I stayed the night at the Wold Hotel in Mircester and had nearly reached Oxford when a police car flagged me down. They couldn’t hold me. Too many witnesses to the fact that I was far from Carsely at the time of the murder. How’s Mrs. Bloxby?”
“All right, I suppose.” Agatha looked surprised. “Why?”
“Well, she found the body.”
“What?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“They didn’t tell me a damn thing. They charged me with the murder and then asked me the same questions over and over again, but they didn’t tell me how he was killed or who had found him. The bastards let me go on thinking that it was all my fault, that
I had pushed him and he had broken his neck or something. Then they said they were dropping the charges because Jimmy had been strangled with a man’s silk tie and that there were masculine footprints found near the body.”
There was a silence and then James asked, “Have the press been bothering you?”
“By some miracle, no.”
“I suppose they’ll be all over the village by tomorrow.”
“It won’t bother me,” sighed Agatha. “I’ve got to leave. I sold my cottage to a Mrs. Hardy and, like a fool, I thought I could cancel the sale. But she’s moving in tomorrow and I’m out. I went to the Red Lion to see if I could take a room there, but it seems I am still number-one suspect in the village. John Fletcher said he hadn’t a room, he wouldn’t even look me in the eye, and neither would anyone else.”
“But, Agatha, you told me all about the Hardy woman and that you didn’t like her much but she had offered a good price. How on earth could you expect her to change her mind?”
“I don’t find myself disgraced in a registry office every day and then accused of murder. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just want to get away, from you, from everyone.”
He picked up his suitcases and then put them down again. “I really don’t think that’s the answer, Agatha.”
“And what is?”
“I assume we both still want to stay here?”
Agatha shook her head.
“You do what you like,” said James, “but until I find out who killed your husband, despite every proof to the contrary, we are both going to be suspected of his murder.”
“I don’t know,” said Agatha wretchedly. “I’ve got to get all that stuff of mine moved out and into storage again and then I have to think where I will live.”
“You can move into my spare room if you. like.”
“What? I thought you never wanted to see me again.”
“The situation has somewhat changed. I think I will always be too sore at you, Agatha, to ever want to marry you. But the hard fact is that we have worked well together in the past and together we might clear this up.”
Agatha looked at him in wonder. “I don’t think I ever really knew you.” She thought that if he had entertained any feelings for her at all, he would not ask her now to move in on such a businesslike basis. It would have been more human to have been totally spurned and totally rejected.
But she felt she no longer loved him and what he was offering was a very practical solution.
“Okay. Thanks,” she said. “I think I’ll call on Mrs. Bloxby. She must be feeling awful.”
“Good idea. Wait a minute until I put these bags inside and I’ll come with you.”
When they walked along together in the twilight, Agatha thought that the women’s magazines who wrote all that crap about low self-esteem might have something after all. She was walking along beside a man with whom she had shared passion and listening to him complain about the pot-holes in the road and suggesting that they both attend the next parish council meeting to protest about them. Women of low self-esteem, she had read recently, often loved men who were incapable of returning love and affection.
“Do you think I suffer from low self-esteem?” she asked James abruptly, interrupting his discourse on pot-holes.
“What’s that?”
“Feeling lower than whale shit.”
“I think you’re miserable because you tried to commit bigamy and got found out and then found yourself accused of your husband’s murder. There’s too much psychobabble these days. It leads to self-dramatization.”
“Any woman ever struck you, James?”
“Don’t even think about it, Agatha.”
Mrs. Bloxby blinked at them in surprise when she opened the vicarage door. “Both of you? That’s nice. Come in. What a terrible thing.”
They followed her into the vicarage living-room, which as usual enfolded them in its atmosphere of peace. The vicar, on seeing Agatha, hurriedly put down the newspaper he had been reading, mumbled something about a sermon to write, and fled to his study.
“Sit down,” said Mrs. Bloxby. “I’ll get some tea.”
She always looks like a lady, thought Agatha wistfully. Even in that old Liberty dress and with not a scrap of make-up on, she looks like a lady.
James leaned back in a comfortable leather armchair and closed his eyes. Agatha realized as she looked at him that she had not stopped to think for a minute how he had felt over the aborted marriage and the wretched murder. He looked tired and older, the lines running down either side of his mouth more prominent.
Mrs. Bloxby came back in carrying the tea-tray. “I have some excellent fruit-cake, a present from the Mircester Ladies’ Society. And some ham sandwiches. I suppose neither of you has had much time to eat.”
James opened his eyes and said wearily, “We have both been suspected of this murder, it’s been a long day, and yes, I would love some sandwiches. According to Agatha, we are regarded by the village as murder suspects.”
“Are you sure, Agatha?” asked Mrs. Bloxby.
Agatha told her story of trying to find a room at the Red Lion.
“Oh, how sad. We could put you up here. We could…”
There was a warning cough from the doorway. The vicar stood there with a distinctly un-Christian light in his eyes.
“That won’t be necessary,” said James quickly. “Agatha’s moving in with me.”
“What did you want to say, Alf?” Mrs. Bloxby asked her husband.
“Er…nothing,” he said and disappeared again.
“You found the body, didn’t you?” said James. “Tell us about it, if it isn’t too painful.”
“It was a shock at the time. I did not recognize him,” said Mrs. Bloxby, pouring tea into thin china cups. “Dead people look quite different when the spirit has left. Then he had been strangled, so his face was not pretty. I had gone out for a walk. I was worried about you, Agatha, and I could not sleep.”
Agatha’s eyes suddenly filled with weak tears. The idea that anyone could actually lose sleep over her was a novelty.
“At first I thought it was a bundle of old clothes in the ditch, but then, when I took a good look, I saw him. I felt for his pulse and finding none, I ran to the nearest cottage and phoned the police.”
“Was there anyone else about?” asked Agatha.
“No, and it must have happened after you reached home, Agatha, or I would have met you on the road or seen whoever killed him. Of course the murderer could have cut across the fields.”
“We’ll just need to find out who did it ourselves,” said Agatha.
“Oh, you’re been through so much. Why not leave it to the police?”
“Because we want to know who did it,” said James. “I’ve been thinking – what is the etiquette about wedding presents? I suppose we return them.”
“I would just keep them,” said the vicar’s wife, “and then when you do get married, no one needs to bother giving you anything else.”
“We will not be getting married,” said James in a flat voice.
There was a heavy silence. Then Mrs. Bloxby said brightly, “More tea?”
Roy Silver had had a sleepless night. Not usually plagued with an uneasy conscience, he found he was actually suffering. The story of the wedding-that-never-was, spiced up by the murder of Agatha’s husband, was all over the newspapers, and some enterprising reporter had found out that he, Roy Silver, had been the one who had alerted Jimmy Raisin to his wife’s attempt to marry someone else. As soon as he got to bis office, he phoned Iris Harris, the detective, and asked her to call on him as soon as possible.
He fretted and fidgeted until she arrived. Ms. Harris had read the newspapers and listened calmly as Roy said she must find out more about Jimmy Raisin. If Agatha did not kill him, someone did, and that someone might have some connection with his London background. He could not have spent all those years drinking methylated spirits and stayed alive.
Only when Iris Harris had agreed to
work for him again and had left did Roy feel more comfortable with himself.
Agatha and James stayed indoors most of the day during the following week, only venturing out at night for dinner. The press besieged James’s cottage at all hours of the day. It would have been normal, Agatha thought, for them to have discussed their relationship, discussed what had happened, but James discussed only the murder, politics, and the weather. He worked away steadily at his military history while Agatha played with her cats in the garden and read books.
At night, she slept in the spare room, strangely undisturbed by any longing for the body asleep along the narrow corridor. The shocks of the wedding and the murder had driven passion from Agatha’s mind. She was itching to get started on the murder investigation. Bill Wong had not called and she felt desperate for news. But soon the press would give up and go away to fresh woods and murders new and leave them in peace.
On the morning the doorbell finally stopped ringing and the telephone at last was silent, Agatha decided to go to Mircester to try to see Bill Wong. James said he would stay and work at his writing.
On arriving at police headquarters, Agatha found out it was Bill’s day off. She wondered whether to call at his home, but decided against it. He lived with his parents and Agatha found them rather intimidating. So she shopped for a new dress, although she did not need one, and for a new lipstick to add to the twenty or so already cluttering up the shelf in James’s bathroom. The lipstick promised to make ‘lips full and luscious as never before’. Agatha, who never believed a word of most advertisements, was a sucker for any cosmetic promotion. Hope sprang eternal and she believed every word until she tried it out. She decided to treat herself to a bar lunch in The George, but she would put on that lipstick first.
She went into the pub toilet, read all the claims of the lipstick as if reading her horoscope, unscrewed it and decided to apply it.
She had it half-way to her mouth when a familiar voice said, “But Agatha’s my friend. It makes it difficult.”
Agatha turned round, startled. Then she remembered the odd acoustics of The George. There was a fanlight window above the door, usually open, as it was that day, so that any diners sitting at a table on the other side of the door almost sounded as if they were in the toilet itself.