by M C Beaton
He waved his stick and two schoolchildren turned the box round and round.
Then Fred, with a flourish, opened the door. Mrs. Hardy had vanished.
Warm applause.
Fred beamed with relief and signalled to the schoolchildren, who revolved the box again.
“Viola!” cried Fred. He meant ‘voila’, thinking French some magical language. He opened the door. His face fell and he slammed it shut again and muttered something to the schoolchildren. The box was revolved again.
Again Fred cried, “Viola!” and opened the door.
No Mrs. Hardy.
It must be part of the act, thought the audience, as Fred, with his face red and sweating, began to search inside the box.
“You couldn’t even find my cat,” shouted Mrs. Boggle. “No wonder you can’t find that woman. Can’t even find your brains on a good day, Fred.”
Fred glared down at her. Then he bowed. Schoolchildren ran forward to clear his props from the stage and a villager called Albert Grange came on and began to play the spoons.
Agatha slipped out of her seat and went quickly out of the village hall. She hurried towards Lilac Lane. She was beginning to wonder if something awful had happened to Mrs. Hardy.
And then, as she turned the corner into Lilac Lane, she saw the stocky figure of Mrs. Hardy in front of her.
“Mrs. Hardy!” called Agatha.
She swung round. “Whatever happened?” asked Agatha, coming up to her. “It was such a boring, awful affair,” said Mrs. Hardy with a grin, “that I just walked out of the back of the box and out of the back of the hall.”
“But poor Fred,” protested Agatha.
“Why bother? He’d got everything else so mucked up that I reckoned another failure wouldn’t matter.”
Agatha looked at her doubtfully. “It seems a bit cruel to me.”
“I can’t make you out,” said Mrs. Hardy. “I know you used to run a successful business and yet here you rot, wasting your time and energy going to a dreadful affair like that. How can you bear it? I’ve never met such a dreary bunch of yokels in my life before.”
“They’re not dreary! They are very kind and warmhearted.”
“What? People like that smelly old Boggle woman? Those pathetic village women cavorting around in the Charleston? Get a life!”
Agatha’s eyes narrowed. “I was beginning to think you were all right. But you’re not. I’m glad you’re leaving Carsely. You don’t belong here.”
“No one whose brains haven’t turned into mush belongs here.”
“There are brilliant people living in the Cotswolds! Writers.”
“Middle-aged menopausal women churning out Aga sagas about naughty doings in the vicarage? Ancient, creaking geriatrics making arrangements out of dried flowers and painting bad water-colours and all pretending to be upper-class?”
“Mrs. Bloxby is a good example of all that is fine about village life.”
“The vicar’s wife? A sad creature who lives through other people because she has no life of her own. Oh, don’t let’s quarrel. You like it. I don’t. I’ll see you later.”
Agatha went slowly back to the village hall. A woman she only knew slightly was at the microphone singing ‘Feelings’. Mr. and Mrs. Boggle had fallen asleep.
Agatha sat down and looked about her. Mrs. Hardy’s words seeped like poison into her brain. How pathetic and shabby the village hall looked. Rain had begun to fall, blurring the high windows. Surely there was more to life than this. Perhaps her loneliness had caused her to look at the whole thing through a pair of distorting, rose-tinted glasses. And what of her non-relationship with James? A woman of any maturity, of any guts and courage would have given him up as a bad job. And what would married life with him have been like anyway? He was handsome and clever, but so self-contained, so cold, that even if they were married, life would be pretty much the same. And what about sex? Didn’t he miss it? Didn’t he ever think of the nights they had spent together?
It seemed to Agatha that he preferred to return to a life of celibacy, a celibacy broken by a few affairs.
She had never really given London a chance. Yes, she had been friendless there, but that was because of the way she had gone on. She had changed. She had invested the money from the sale of her business very well. She would not need to work if she returned to London.
The concert mercifully drew to a close with the cast singing ‘That’s Entertainment’.
Then there was a general movement as chairs were drawn back and tables were set out for the lunch in honour of the Ancombe ladies. Agatha shivered. The hall was cold. Lunch turned out to be the inevitable quiche and salad. There was not even any home-made wine to wash it down, as there usually was at these functions, only rather dusty tea.
Conversation was desultory. Agatha looked around. What have I done? she wondered. How could I ever have thought I would fit in here? I don’t really belong. I wasn’t born in a village, I was born in a Birmingham slum, where trees and flowers were things you ripped out of the earth as soon as they dared to show a leaf. There was a lot to be said after all for anonymous London. Perhaps Bill Wong would come up and visit her from time to time. Well, maybe Mrs. Bloxby, too. As for James…well, she, Agatha Raisin, was worth better than James Lacey. She wanted a man with red blood in his veins, a man capable of intimacy, warmth, and affection.
“Dark thoughts?”
The woman who had been sitting at one of the long tables next to Agatha had left. Mrs. Bloxby had slid into her place.
“I don’t really belong here,” said Agatha, waving a hand about the room. “And do you know, I’m worth better than James. I want someone capable of intimacy. I don’t mean sex. I mean warmth and affection.”
Mrs. Bloxby looked at her doubtfully. “I have thought that perhaps the attraction James Lacey holds for you is because he lacks those things. By the very absence of them, the relationship lacks proper commitment. It did cross my mind recently that you were more like two bachelors living together than man and woman. And I wonder how you would cope with a man who demanded intimacy and love and affection from you, Mrs. Raisin.”
“Agatha.”
“Yes of course, Agatha.”
“I should think myself in seventh heaven.”
“Why this sudden disgust at Carsely and all who sail in her?”
Agatha bit her lip. She was too proud to admit she had been influenced by Mrs. Hardy.
“I just thought of it,” she said.
The vicar’s wife studied her averted face for a moment and then said, “I saw you leave the hall shortly after Mrs. Hardy disappeared. Did you find her?”
“Yes, she was heading home.”
“Did she give any reason for humiliating Fred Griggs in that way?”
Agatha still did not want to repeat any of Mrs. Hardy’s remarks about the village and villagers.
“I think Mrs. Hardy considered Fred had already humiliated himself and wanted to leave and saw a convenient way to do it.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Bloxby, “perhaps my first impression of her was right.”
“That being?”
“That she was an unkind and unhappy woman.”
“Oh, no, I think she’s a bit like me, used to a faster pace of life.”
“Is that what she tried to make you think?”
“I am not influenced by what anyone says to me,” said Agatha defiantly.
“And yet you have appeared quite contented with all us rustics up till now.”
“Perhaps it’s the cold in this hall and the weather, and that was a truly dreadful concert,” said Agatha.
“Yes, it was awful, wasn’t it? But then the Ancombe ladies’ concert was pretty dire as well.”
“Why do they do it to each other?”
“Everyone likes their moment on stage. There’s a bit of the failed actor in all of us. At these village affairs, everyone gets a chance to perform, no matter how bad they are. People applaud and are kind, because all of them want
their time in the limelight as well.”
The old steam radiators against the wall gave a preliminary rattle.
“There you are,” said Mrs. Bloxby, “the heating has come on. And look, the Ancombe ladies have brought a case of apple brandy, so we can all have a drink during the speeches. The atmosphere will soon lighten.”
The combination of heat and apple brandy did appear to work wonders. Agatha began to relax. Instead of standing outside looking in, she began to feel part of it again. The chairwoman of the Ancombe Ladies’ Society made a speech and told several jokes which were received with gales of laugh-ter.
Stuff London and Mrs. Hardy, thought Agatha. I’m happy here.
James and Agatha went out for dinner that evening. James appeared to have recovered his good humour and he wanted to discuss ‘our murder case’. Agatha was too content to have regained her feeling at being at home in the country to crave a more personal conversation, but James did start by asking her to remember all she could about her late husband. “How did you meet him, for example?”
Agatha had quite forgotten that, through snobbery, she had hidden her low beginnings from James, always implying without actually saying so that she had come from a middle-class background and had been to a private school.
“How did I meet Jimmy?” Agatha sighed and put down her knife and fork and looked back down the long years.
“Let me see. I’d just escaped from home.”
“Home being Birmingham?”
“Yes, one of those blocks of flats in what they now call the inner city but what they used to call a slum.” She was so intent on her memories that she did not notice the flicker of surprise in James’s blue eyes.
“Ma and Dad always seemed to be drunk. They wouldn’t let me stay at school after I was fifteen, even though the teachers begged them to let me complete my education. They put me to work in a biscuit factory. God, the women seemed coarse, brutal. I was a skinny, sensitive little wimp then.
“I saved as much as I could and took off for London one night when my parents were both drunk. I was determined to be a secretary. The secretaries I had seen up in the offices of the biscuit factory looked fabulous creatures to me, compared to what I was working with on the shop floor. So I got a job as a waitress and went to a secretarial college in the evenings to learn shorthand and typing. I worked seven days a week, and my ambition was so great, I don’t think my feet ached once. It wasn’t a very classy restaurant. Classy restaurants only employed waiters in those days. It was a bit like one of the Lyon’s Corner Houses. Good food but not French, if you know what I mean.”
Her eyes grew dreamy. “Jimmy came in one night. He was with a rather tarty blonde, a bit older than he was. They seemed to be quarrelling. Then he started to flirt with me and that made her even angrier. I didn’t think he was interested in me. I thought he was only doing it to get back at his girl-friend for something or other.
“But when I left by the back door that night after work, he was waiting for me. He said he would see me home. I had been working the evening shifts as well as the day ones while the secretarial college was closed for the summer vacation. He was very…merry. Very light-hearted. I’d never met anyone quite like Jimmy before.
“We got to my place, which was a bed-sit in Kilburn. I asked him where he lived and he said he had nowhere, because he had just been thrown out of his digs. I asked him where his stuff was and he said it was in the left luggage in Victoria Station. All he had in the world was one suitcase.
“I said he could sleep on the sofa just for one night. He did that. But the next day was a rare day off and we went to the zoo. Funny. I never liked zoos and I still don’t, but I had been so very lonely and here I was with a handsome fellow of my own and it all seemed marvelous. Somehow it was agreed, I don’t remember how, that he would move in with me. Of course he wanted to sleep with me, but the pill hadn’t really got going in those days, and I was terrified of getting pregnant. He just laughed and said we’d get married. And so we did. We went to Blackpool on our honeymoon.”
Agatha suddenly looked at James and realized that she had finally betrayed all the truth of her background. Then she gave a little shrug and went on.
“He got a job loading newspapers down in Fleet Street. I was still working as a waitress and going to the college. It took me a month of marriage to realize I had jumped right out of the frying-pan into the fire, that is, I had jumped from a drunken home life into marriage to a drunken husband.
“To this day, I don’t know why he ever married me. I mean, he was very attractive to women. He began to hit me. I hit back because I was still thin but pretty wiry. And then, I wasn’t drunk, and he was.
“He lost his job and drifted from one to another after that, but mostly was out of work. I stuck it for two years. But I’d landed a job in a public relations firm as a secretary and I wanted money for good clothes and I wouldn’t keep him in drink any more. I came back one evening and he was lying on the bed, snoring, with his mouth open. On the mat the post was lying unopened and in the post was a package of literature from Alcoholics Anonymous that I’d sent for. I pinned it on his chest, packed my things and left.
“He knew where I worked and I fully expected him to come after me, looking for money. But he never came. Gradually the years went by and I was really sure he was dead. I thought no one could drink that much and go on living. Ambition took over completely. So what did I know of Jimmy? He had great charm. Hard for you to believe now. When I first met him, he had a way of making me feel like the only woman in the world that mattered, and he was the only man in my life who ever made me feel pretty. He never said anything clever and his jokes were always feeble, but before it all went sour, he made me feel good, made me feel exhilarated, as if the world was a funny place where nothing much mattered.” Agatha heaved a little sigh. “Will the real Jimmy Raisin stand up? I don’t know. At first, after each drinking bout he would be genuinely contrite. Oh, I know. He always talked about making money and he was always sure he would make it. I suppose he lived on dreams.”
“And I gather,” said James harshly, “that he was a budding con artist when you met him. Too lazy to work. He got a taste through you of the benefits of being kept by a woman. You had got wise to him. So he probably sobered up just long enough to get some other female involved. What you have described, Agatha, is a greedy, selfish man. A natural blackmailer.”
“I suppose I’ve told you nothing you didn’t know already,” said Agatha in a small voice.
“Not really. Except I did not know that you had such a hard life.”
“Did I? Ambition is a great drug, you know. I just forged ahead the whole time. Never really looked back at yesterday. Anyway, to get back to this murder, or murders. It must be one of the people that Jimmy met at the health farm. I’ve come back to that idea. I wish that Comfort woman hadn’t escaped us. I think she was lying to us.”
“There was certainly something about our visit that sent her running off to Spain,” said James. “Then there’s her ex. He was very truculent.”
“But he wasn’t even at the health farm,” protested Agatha. “How would he know what Jimmy and Miss Purvey looked like?”
“It could be the something that Gloria wasn’t telling us. Perhaps Jimmy didn’t write to Mr. Comfort. Perhaps he called on him.”
“Fine. So what about Miss Purvey?”
“If Miss Purvey’s murder was not connected to Jimmy’s, it might make the field wider.”
“I think our only hope is that Roy’s detective might find something in that bag that the mysterious Lizzie took.”
Agatha sneezed.
“Are you getting a cold?” asked James.
“I don’t know. I might have a bit of a chill. That church hall was freezing today during the concert.”
“Home and bed, then. We’ll think some more about it tomorrow.”
As they were driving down into Carsely, a car passed them going the other way. James braked suddenly. “
I think that was Helen Warwick! She must have been to see us.”
“To see you, you mean,” said Agatha.
“I’d better catch up with her.” James swung the wheel around.
“What for?” demanded Agatha as they began to race back up the way Helen Warwick had taken. “You said she had nothing more to tell us.”
“But she must have had, for why did she come all this way to see us?”
“To murder us in our beds,” said Agatha gloomily.
All the way down the hill and towards Moreton-in-Marsh, James looked ahead for Helen’s car. She had been driving a BMW. He saw one ahead at the first roundabout in Moreton. They managed to catch up with it on the Oxford Road, only to find that the driver was an elderly man, not Helen Warwick.
They drove on a few more miles before James said reluctantly, “That’s that. We’ve missed her.”
“I’m not sorry,” said Agatha. “She only came down here to chase after you.”
“Probably right,” agreed James, and Agatha scowled at him in the darkness. By the time they got home, she was coughing and wheezing and her head felt as if it were on fire.
At James’s urging, she took two aspirins and went to bed and plunged down into a hell of noisy dreams, of raging fires, of gunshots, and of running and running along the Embankment in London with Roy at her heels, both of them fleeing from someone they did not know.
The next day Agatha felt too ill to care about anything at all. She lay in bed all day, drifting in and out of sleep. James carried her in snacks on trays and bottles of mineral water. Agatha refused to let him call the doctor, saying that all she had was a bad cold, and if there were a cure for the common cold, it would have been front-page headlines by now.
At seven in the evening, she heard the doorbell and then the sound of voices and James’s voice raised in sudden shock. “What!”
She groaned and fumbled for her dressing-gown. Cold or no cold, red nose or no red nose, she simply had to find out what was going on.
She made her way down the stairs and into the living-room. At first she thought the scene before her eyes was part of a fever-induced hallucination. There was Wilkes, flanked by Bill Wong and two constables.