by M C Beaton
The Day the Floods Came
( Agatha Raisin - 12 )
M.C. Beaton
Marital bliss was short-lived for Agatha Raisin. Her marriage to James Lacey was a disaster from the beginning, and in the end, he left her – not for another woman, but for God. After having been miraculously cured of a brain tumor, James has decided to join a monastery in France. Agatha can usually depend on her old friend, Sir Charles Fraith, to be there when times are tough, but even Charles has abandoned her, dashing off to Paris to marry a young French tart.
Miserable and alone, Agatha hops on a plane and heads for a remote island in the South Pacific. To Agatha’s surprise, she makes friends with her fellow travelers easily, and keeps herself out of mischief, despite the odd feeling she gets from one particularly attractive honeymooning couple. But when she later finds that the pretty bride has drowned under suspicious circumstances, Agatha wishes she had found a way to intervene.
Returning home to the Cotswolds, Agatha is grimly determined to move on with her life and to forget about James and Charles. They have, after all, forgotten about her. And what better way than to throw herself into another murder investigation? A woman, dressed in a wedding gown and still clutching her bouquet, has just been found floating in a river. The police say it’s suicide, but Agatha suspects the girl’s flashy young fiancé. With the help of her handsome, and single, new neighbor, Agatha sets off to prove the police wrong.
M.C. Beaton
The Day the Floods Came
Agatha Raisin #12
2002, EN
∨ The Day the Floods Came ∧
1
It was one of those grey days where misty rain blurs the windscreen and the bare branches of the winter trees mournfully drip water into puddles on the road as if weeping for summer past.
Agatha Raisin turned on the switch to demist the windscreen of her car. She felt that inside her was a black hole to complement the dreariness of the day. She was heading for the travel agent in Evesham, one thought drumming in her head. Get away…get away…get away.
For miserable Agatha felt rejected by the world. She had lost her husband, not to another woman, but to God. James Lacey was training to take holy orders at a monastery in France. Sir Charles Fraith, always her friend and supporter when James went missing, had just got married, in Paris, and without even inviting Agatha to the wedding. She had learned about it by reading a small item in Hello magazine. And there had been a photograph of Charles with his new bride, a Frenchwoman called Anne-Marie Duchenne, small, petite, young. Grimly, middle-aged Agatha sped down Fish Hill in the direction of Evesham. She would escape from it all – winter, the Cotswolds where she lived in the village of Carsely, a broken heart and a feeling of rejection. Although, she reflected, hearts did not break. It was one’s insides that got twisted up with pain.
♦
Sue Quinn, the owner of Go Places, looked up as Agatha Raisin walked in and wondered what had happened to her usually brisk and confident customer. Agatha’s hair was showing grey at the roots, her bearlike eyes were sad, and her mouth was turned down at the corners. Agatha sank down into a chair opposite Sue. “I want to get away,” she said, looking vaguely round at the posters on the wall, the brightly coloured ranks of travel brochures, and then back at the world map behind Sue’s head. “Well, let’s see.” said Sue. “Somewhere sunny?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. An island. Somewhere remote.”
“You upset about something?” asked Sue. In her long experience, unhappy people often headed for islands, unhappy people or drunks. Islands drew them like a magnet.
“No,” snapped Agatha. So deep was her misery, she did not want to confide in anyone and, in a sick way, she felt her misery still somehow tied her to James Lacey.
“All right,” said Sue. “Let me see. You look as if you could do with a bit of sun. I know; what about Robinson Crusoe Island?”
“Where’s that? I don’t want one of those Club Med places.”
“It’s in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago.” Sue swung her chair and pointed to the map. “Just off the coast of Chile. It’s where Alexander Selkirk was marooned.”
“Who’s he?”
“He was a Scottish seaman who was marooned there and Daniel Defoe learned about him and wrote Robinson Crusoe based on his adventures.”
Agatha scowled in thought. She had read Robinson Crusoe in school. She couldn’t remember much about it except it conjured up a vision of remoteness, of coral beaches and palm trees. She would walk along the beach and feel the sun on her head and get her life together.
She gave a weary shrug. “Sounds okay. Fix it up.”
♦
Three weeks later, Agatha stood in the hot sunshine at Tobalaba Airport in Santiago and stared at the small Lassa Airlines plane which was to carry her to Robinson Crusoe. There were only two other passengers: a thin, bearded man, and a young pretty girl. The pilot appeared and told them to climb on board. The girl sat in the co-pilot’s seat and Agatha and the bearded man on one side of the plane. The other side was laden with a cargo of toilet rolls and bread rolls. Agatha’s luggage, as per instructions, was limited to one travel bag. But the temperature in Santiago had been a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, so she had only packed underwear and light clothes. Her lunch was in a paper bag: one can of Coke, one sandwich and a packet of potato chips.
The plane took off. Agatha gazed down at the vast sprawl of Chile’s capital city and then at the arid peaks of the Andes. Then, as they headed out over the Pacific, her eyelids began to droop and she fell asleep. She awoke an hour later. She knew it was no use trying to talk to her fellow passengers because she didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English. There was nothing to see but miles and miles of ocean. She shifted miserably in her seat and wished she had brought a book to read. The pilot had a newspaper spread over the controls. She hoped he knew where he was going.
And then, suddenly, after another two hours of flying over the seemingly endless ocean and just when Agatha was beginning to think they would never arrive, there was Robinson Crusoe Island. Boo! It seemed to rear up out of the sea in front of them, black and jagged, as if the Pacific had just thrown it up. The small plane chugged towards a cliff, closer and closer. What’s happening? thought Agatha as the plane appeared to start heaving its way up the cliff face. He’s not going to make it. But with a sudden roar the plane lifted up and over the cliff top and came to land on an airfield. No airport buildings, no control tower, just a flat cliff top of dusty red earth.
It turned out the pilot had some English. Agatha gathered they were to walk down to a boat and the luggage and cargo would be taken down separately. She could feel goose-flesh rising on her arms. It was cool though sunny. Like a good Scottish summer’s day in the Highlands. Agatha did not grasp she had moved into a subtropical zone. She only knew that she should have packed a sweater. The pretty girl who had been one of her fellow passengers indicated the road they were to take, and, with the bearded man, they walked across the airfield of dry red earth where locusts flittered in front of them like so many pieces of blown tissue paper.
The road curved down and down. The Jeep with the cargo and luggage roared past them. “Bastards,” muttered Agatha, who was a strictly five-star-hotel traveller. “They might have given us a lift.”
Just when her legs were beginning to ache with all the walking, she saw the sea below, a cove and a launch bobbing at anchor. Seals floated on their backs in the green-and-blue water. Hundred of seals. There were already people waiting on the jetty, all young men carrying backpacks. Agatha, when she was miserable, liked to be fussed over and cosseted. When the luggage was stowed and they climbed on board and were given life jackets
and told to sit on the hatches, Agatha suddenly wished she had stayed at home.
“You English?” asked a tall hiker type.
“Yes,” said Agatha, grateful to be able to speak after such an enforced silence. “How long until we get there?”
“About an hour and a half. You could have gone by road, but it’s pretty rough.”
“Everything seems pretty rough,” remarked Agatha. Above her, black mountains and sheer cliffs soared up to the blue sky. No beaches. Nothing but barren rock. A great setting for a horror movie or a movie about aliens. Amazing, thought Agatha, how, because of satellite television, one forgot that the world was really still a large place.
“I thought it would be tropical,” she said.
“That’s because Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe in the Caribbean.”
“Oh,” said Agatha and relapsed into gloomy silence.
She brightened only when the launch cruised into Cumberland Bay and she saw a small township and trees and flowers. She turned to the hiker. “Where is my hotel? The Panglas?”
“Over there. That red roof.”
“But how do I get there? It seems miles.”
“Walk,” he said, and he and his companions laughed heartily.
They disembarked at a quayside. The pretty little girl tugged Agatha’s sleeve and led her towards a Jeep. “We get a lift,” said Agatha with relief. But the relief was short-lived.
The Jeep set off up a mountainous dry river bed of a road, lurching and bumping, swinging round to hang off the edge of a cliff, and then plunging down a steep gradient and roaring up the other side almost at the perpendicular. I’ll kill Sue when I get back, thought Agatha, and then realized with a little shock that from the airfield to this scary journey to the hotel, she had not thought of James once.
To Agatha’s relief, the hotel was beautiful. There was a huge lounge with picture windows looking out over the bay. Her room was very small, but the bed was comfortable. Outside the lounge was a deck with easy chairs. She searched through her luggage and put on a T-shirt with a long-sleeved blouse over it.
She went out onto the deck and ordered a glass of wine from an attentive waiter. It was warm in the sun and the air was like champagne. An odd feeling of well-being began to permeate her body. What a strange place, she thought. She could almost feel the darkness lifting out of her.
Her spirits rose even further at dinner, when as a starter she was served with one of the biggest lobsters she had ever seen. She tackled it with gusto and then looked round at her dinner companions. The pretty girl was there, but not the bearded man. The central table was dominated by a large family, speaking in Spanish. They were made up of an obviously married couple, thin and athletic, with three children – beautiful little girls – a middle-aged woman, and a young man. To Agatha’s right, a husband and wife sat eating lobster in silence. Some of Agatha’s old misery crept back. She did not know any Spanish. She was marooned on Robinson Crusoe island and condemned to silence for the rest of her stay.
The middle-aged woman, who had been casting covert glances at her, suddenly rose and came over to Agatha’s table.
“I hear from the staff you are English,” she said. She had a plump, motherly face and little twinkling eyes. “I am Marie Hernandez and I am here with my daughter and her husband and my son, Carlos. The hotel does not hold many guests. Perhaps we should all sit together?”
Agatha happily agreed. She joined the Hernandez family, as did the pretty girl, but the silent couple in the corner merely shook their heads and stayed where they were. All the Hernandez family, from Santiago, spoke English, apart from the small children, and they translated for the young girl, who said her name was Dolores. They all said, like Agatha, that they had expected a tropical island. Marie said she had a spare sweater in her luggage and would lend it to Agatha.
Marie told Agatha that the island was a national park. Her son, Carlos, proceeded to give Agatha a lecture on the history of Alexander Selkirk. He had been a seaman aboard the Cinque Ports, a privateer, and he had complained all the way around Cape Horn about the accommodation and the food on board. When the ship reached Juan Fernandez to take on fresh water, he had demanded to be set ashore with a musket, powder, and a Bible. But when he saw the captain was actually going to go ahead with it, Selkirk said he’d changed his mind, but the captain had had enough of the grumbling seaman and so he was left. Most castaways would have shot themselves or starved, but Selkirk was saved by goats, introduced by the Spanish, which he hunted down, using their skins for clothes and their meat for food. He survived for four years, until 1709, when his saviour arrived: Commander Woodes Rogers of the privateers, Duke and Duchess, with famed privateer William Dampier. When Selkirk returned to London, he was a celebrity.
Agatha, not used to making friends easily, found at the end of the meal that she felt as if she had known this family for a long time. Dolores seemed to be picking up words of English with amazing rapidity.
When Agatha finally made her way to bed, she glanced curiously at the couple who had not joined them. The woman was blonde, dyed blonde, but very attractive in a baby-doll way, and the man, dark and Spanish-looking. They were sitting side by side on one of the sofas in the lounge. The woman was whispering to him urgently and he patted her hand.
Agatha felt there was something wrong there. Perhaps the journey had made her tired enough to give her odd fancies. She went to bed and plunged down into the first dreamless sleep she had experienced for a long time.
♦
At breakfast the next day, Marie said they planned to walk up to Alexander Selkirk’s lookout. She indicated the silent couple. “I’ll ask them if they would like to go.” She approached their table and plunged into rapid Spanish. But it appeared the couple did not want to go.
They all went down the cliff steps from the hotel after breakfast, where one of the staff relayed two lots of them in a rubber dinghy over to San Juan Bautista, the only settlement on the island. “High Noon,” said Dolores who, it transpired, had an English vocabulary confined mostly to film titles. She looked down the wide and dusty deserted main street and they all laughed as she drew and twirled an imaginary pistol. They began to climb, first up shallow steps leading up from the township, then onto an earthen track. The stream below them was surrounded by various varieties of wild flowers. Then they entered the silence of a pine forest. Agatha’s legs began to ache, but she felt she could not give up while plump Marie soldiered on and even the little girls showed no signs of flagging. On and up they went until Agatha stopped and exclaimed at a flash of red. “What was that?”
“Hummingbirds,” said Carlos. They waited and watched. Green-and-red hummingbirds whirred about. There was something about the beauty of them that caught at Agatha’s throat and she suddenly sat down on a rock and began to cry. They gathered around her, hugging her and kissing her while Agatha poured out the whole story of her divorce. When she had finished, Marie said, “So you begin a new chapter, here on Robinson Crusoe Island. A great place for beginnings, no?”
Agatha gave her a watery smile. “Sorry about that, but I feel miles better.”
“We’ll have our packed lunches now,” said Marie comfortably, “and take a rest. Before you arrived at breakfast, I was wondering about the couple that would not come with us. They are Concita and Pablo Ramon, also from Santiago. They are on honeymoon.”
“Something odd there,” said Agatha, unwrapping a sandwich. “They don’t look like a honeymoon couple.”
“No. She is very much in love with him, I think. But he looks at her as if he’s waiting for something.”
“Perhaps he feels he has made a mistake,” volunteered Carlos.
They finished their lunch and though no mention was made of Agatha’s outburst, she felt enfolded in a warm blanket of friendship and sympathy.
To get to the lookout involved a final climb, up sheer rock.
Agatha and Marie said they would wait below with the children while the more athletic ones ma
de the ascent. “Are you Catholic?” asked Marie.
“No,” said Agatha. “Not anything, really. I go to the village church – that’s Church of England – because the vicar’s wife is a friend of mine.”
“And your husband? Was he Catholic?”
“Before? No.”
“But I do not understand. How can he become a monk if he was divorced and not even Catholic?”
“He didn’t tell them when he first went there.”
“But they surely know now.”
“Maybe because I am not a Catholic, they do not consider it to have been a real marriage. Let’s talk about something else,” said Agatha quickly.
Marie’s attention was taken up then with the children. Agatha looked out at the vast stretch of the Pacific and was hit by a sudden thought. What if James had not really planned to take holy orders? What if he simply wanted to be rid of her and had found the monastery a convenient excuse? They had gone through an amicable divorce. They had talked about safe things – village gossip, James’s plans to sell his house, but not once had he discussed his newfound faith.
♦
Like the rest of the guests, Agatha had only booked into the Panglas for a week. The following few days took on a dreamlike quality of fresh air and exercise. They went to Robinson Crusoe’s cave, they tramped the hills, returning at night, happy and exhausted. There was something about the remoteness and strange beauty of the island that seemed to heal the past and restore courage.
In the evenings, Agatha found her eyes drifting over to the honeymoon couple. On the last evening, the new bride was flushed and animated and talking in rapid Spanish. Her husband leaned back in his chair, listening, his face expressionless, but with that odd waiting feeling about him.
♦
The farewells were affectionate and tearful. Agatha and Dolores were going on a later plane than the family. They exchanged addresses and promised to keep in touch. “Sad,” said Dolores. “Yes, sad,” agreed Agatha, “but I’ll be back.”
