by M C Beaton
Agatha Raisin The Deadly Dance
( Agatha Raisin - 15 )
M.C. Beaton
Bossy, impulsive, and unlucky in love, the all-too-human Agatha Raisin has proved to be a surprisingly effective---and endearing---amateur sleuth. But can Agatha make it as a private investigator? After getting mugged on vacation, in what she will always think of as the Paris Incident, she decides to find out.
Agatha soon learns that running her own detective agency in the Cotswolds is not quite like starring in a Raymond Chandler movie. Instead of dames in distress with big shoulder pads, her clients are ladies with missing cats and a man whose son has run off with his car. Agatha even worries that she might be outclassed by her sixty-seven-year-old secretary, Emma Comfrey.
But then wealthy divorcée Catherine Laggat-Brown walks in with their first "real" case. Mrs. Laggat-Brown's daughter has received a death threat, and when Agatha thwarts an attack on the girl at a dinner dance, she recognizes an opportunity to show what Raisin Investigations can do. Even better, the case gives her a chance to reunite with her long-absent friend, Sir Charles Fraith. As they scour the Cotswolds in search of leads, Charles' insights prove invaluable and his charms irresistible, leading poor Emma to fall madly in love with him.
As ever, Agatha bumbles her way through the case, trying her friends' patience and flirting shamelessly with the chief suspect. Will she put her tiny agency on the map, or has even the outrageous Agatha finally bitten off more than she can chew?
CRITICS HAIL AGATHA RAISIN AND M. C. BEATON!
“Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series just about defines the British cozy.”
—Booklist
“Few things in life are more satisfying than to discover a brand new Agatha Raisin mystery.”
—The Tampa Tribune-Times
“Beaton has a winner in the irrepressible, romance-hungry Agatha.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“The Raisin series brings the cozy tradition back to life. God bless the Queen!”
—Tulsa World
THE DEADLY DANCE
“Its been 40 years since Dame Agatha Christies death, and in that time, reviewers have often bestowed her mantle on new authors. M. C. Beaton is one of those so honored, and she deserves it. When it comes to artfully constructed puzzle plots and charming settings, Beaton serves it up … This is a classic British cozy plot, and a setting done with panache. Maybe M. C. Beaton really is the new ‘Queen of Crime.’”
—The Globe & Mail
“It is always fun to read an Agatha Raisin mystery, but the latest installment freshens up a delightful series by converting the heroine from amateur sleuth to professional without changing her caustic wit. Agatha remains crude and rude even to clients, but also retains that vulnerability that endears her to readers ”
—Midwest Book Review
“A very satisfying change for the smart woman of mystery with a new cast of colorfully realized characters blending with a few old favorites.”
—Mystery Lovers Bookshop
“The story was first-rate and moved along with many twists and turns that kept me always guessing … I read this book in one sitting, which I think speaks for itself”
—I Love a Mystery
“Fans of Agatha Raisin will be absolutely delighted at this latest addition to the series. Ms. Beaton has surpassed herself in The Deadly Dance.”
—Reviewing the Evidence
ALSO BY M. C. BEATON
Agatha Raisin
Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House
Agatha Raisin and the Case of the Curious Curate
Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came
Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell
Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam
Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden
Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham
Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death
Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist
Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage
Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley
Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener
Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet
Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death
The Skeleton in the Closet
Writing as Marion Chesney
Snobbery with Violence
Hasty Death
Sick of Shadows
THE DEADLY DANCE
M. C. BEATON
For Richard Rasdall of Stow-on-the-Wold,
his wife, Lyn, and children, Luke, Samuel, and Bethany,
and with many thanks to Richard for freeing up Agatha’s brain
THE DEADLY DANCE
Copyright © 2004 by M. C. Beaton.
ONE
THE thing that finally nudged Agatha Raisin into opening her own detective agency was what she always thought of as the Paris Incident.
Made restless by the summer torpor blanketing the village of Carsely in the Cotswolds, Agatha decided to take a week’s holiday in Paris.
She was a rich woman, but like all rich people was occasionally struck by periods of thrift, and so she had booked into a small hotel off Saint Germain des Prés in the Latin Quarter. She had visited Paris before and seen all the sights; this time wanted only to sit in cafés and watch the people go by or take long walks by the Seine.
But Paris, after the first two days, became even hotter than Carsely and her hotel room did not have any air-conditioning. As the heat mounted to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and she tossed and turned on her damp sheets, she discovered that Paris never sleeps. There were two restaurants across the road with outside tables, and, up until one in the morning, the accordion players came around to get money from the diners. Agatha, as she listened to another rendering of “La Vie en Rose,” fantasized about lobbing a hand grenade through the window. Then there was the roar of the traffic and the yells of the tourists who had drunk not too wisely. Later on, as they felt not too well, she could hear moans and retching.
Nonetheless, she decided to see as much of Paris as possible. The Metro was cheap and went all over the place.
On the fourth day of her visit, she went down into the Metro at Maubert-Mutualité. She sat down on a hard plastic seat on the platform and pulled out her subway map. She planned to go to W. H. Smith on the Rue de Rivoli and buy some English books.
As she heard the train approaching, she stuffed the map back in her handbag, flipped open the doors of the carriage with that silver handle which had so bemused her when she had first tried to board, and went inside, aware that someone was crowding behind her, and at the same time feeling a sort of tremor reverberating from her handbag up through the shoulder strap.
She glanced down and saw that her handbag was open again and that her wallet was missing.
Agatha stared wrathfully at the man who had crowded behind her. He was of medium height, white, with black hair, wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans.
“Here, you!” Agatha advanced on him. He nipped out of the carriage and into the next one, with Agatha in pursuit. Just as she was leaning forward to grab him and the train was moving out, he wrenched open the doors of the carriage and escapedonto the platform, leaving Agatha, who did not have the strength to do the same thing, being carried furiously away to the next station.
Agatha blamed the hairdresser. A Parisian hairdresser had told her that there was no crime around Maubert because of the huge commissariat. So Agatha took the Métro back to Maubert, darted up the escalator and demanded directions to the commissariat. She was told it was just round the corner.
It was an ugly modern building with steep steps up to the main entrance. Dripping with sweat and bad t
emper, Agatha erupted into the entrance hall. There was a very beautiful girl with long dark hair sitting behind bulletproof glass.
Agatha poured out her tale of the mugging, expecting to be shown to some detective’s room immediately, but the girl began to interview her. Agatha thought sourly that someone so young and attractive should give way to someone with a bit more authority.
She was fortunate in that she had only had sixty euros in her wallet and that she had left her credit cards in the hotel safe. Her passport was in another compartment of her bag.
After she had been interviewed and had handed over her passport, she was told to take a seat and wait.
“Why don’t you have air-conditioning in this place?” she grumbled, but the beautiful girl merely smiled at her benignly.
At last a tall policeman came out and led her into a side room. He sat down behind a desk and waved her into a chair opposite. He looked like those illustrations of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Once more, she described the mugger in detail, ending with “Paris is crawling with gendarmes. Why don’t you get down the Metro and catch thieves?”
“We do, every day,” he said calmly in perfect English.
“I myself am a detective,” said Agatha grandly.
“Indeed!” said Don Quixote, showing a glimmer of interest. “To which police station in England are you attached?”
“I’m not. I mean, I’m going to open my own detective agency.”
The flicker of interest died. “Wait here,” he said.
There was a mirror behind his desk. Agatha rose and stared at her face in it. She was bright red with heat and her normally glossy brown hair was damp and limp.
Agatha sat down again as he re-entered the room with a typed letter for her to sign. All in French.
“What’s this about?” demanded Agatha.
“It is for your insurance and states that if we catch him, he will receive three years in prison and a fine of three thousand euros. If we find your wallet it will be sent to the British Embassy. Sign here.”
Agatha signed.
“That will be all.”
“Wait a minute. What about mug shots?”
“Please?”
“Photographs of criminals. I’d know that bastard anywhere.”
“Three other people have had goods stolen this morning by the same man. They are French. There is no need for your services.”
Wrathfully, Agatha got to her feet. “I could do a better job than you any day.”
He gave a faint, uninterested sort of smile. “Then I wish you luck.”
Agatha went straight back to her hotel and checked out. She was going home and she was going to start her own detective agency. She had been dithering about it for weeks, but the theft of her wallet had left her with a feeling of not being in charge of events. Agatha Raisin liked to be in charge of everything.
At Charles de Gaulle Airport, she was just heading for the gate but ran into a crowd of people being held back by police. “What’s happening?” she asked a man next to her.
“Someone’s left a suitcase or package unattended.”
Agatha waited, fuming. Then there was a huge blast. From the chatter around her, she gathered that they had blown up whatever it was with a controlled explosion. At Heathrow or other airports they might appeal to the owners to come and claim their suitcase or package, but in France it seemed that they just went ahead and blew it up.
As Agatha drove from Heathrow, black clouds began to pile up in the sky and by the time she turned down the road to Carsely, the countryside was rocking and rolling under the blows of a tremendous thunderstorm.
Agatha’s two cats, Hodge and Boswell, came to meet her when she opened the door. Her cleaner, Doris Simpson, came round every day while Agatha was away to feed the cats and let them in and out of the garden.
Agatha dumped her suitcase in the hall and went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. Rain poured down from the thatch overhead, but the air was cool and sweet. Anxious not to lose her determination to set up her own detective agency, Agatha decided to visit her friend, Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife.
Ten minutes later, Agatha rang the bell of the vicarage with a guilty feeling that she should have phoned first.
But Mrs. Bloxby answered the door, her gentle featureslighting up in a smile of welcome. “Mrs. Raisin! How nice. Come in. Why are you back early?”
“I got mugged,” said Agatha. She recounted her adventure.
“Well, you got pickpocketed,” corrected Mrs. Bloxby mildly. “Unlike you to let something like that put you off Paris. I thought you loved Paris.”
“I do, most of the time,” fretted Agatha. “It was mainly the heat and the lack of sleep. And being dismissed by the police, just like that! The trouble is they spend all their time policing demonstrations, they haven’t got time for the public.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Anyway, it gave me the jolt I needed to start my own agency. You do think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Mrs. Bloxby. Although she thought the work would be dreary and sordid, it would occupy her friend’s restless mind and keep her from falling in love again and getting hurt. Agatha was addicted to falling in love.
“I’ve been thinking about starting a detective agency for a time,” said Agatha. “I feel I need some official status. I’m a good businesswoman and I feel sure I could make it work. The police are so busy these days and the countryside police stations have been closed one after the other. The police haven’t got time for small burglaries, missing teenagers, or errant wives and husbands.”
“And if it doesn’t work out?” asked the vicar’s wife.
Agatha grinned. “I’ll take it off my taxes. Anyone taken James’s cottage?”
It had not been Agatha’s ex-husband James Lacey’s cottage for some time, but Agatha always dreamt that one day he would come back to the village. She could never think of that cottage next to her own as belonging to anyone else. Agatha had fallen in love with two of the previous owners.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. A Mrs. Emma Comfrey, retired civil servant. You should call on her.”
“Maybe. But Eve got a lot to do. I’ll go to the estate agent’s in Mircester tomorrow and see what’s on offer in the way of an office.”
Mrs. Bloxby reflected ruefully that Agatha’s interest in her new neighbour had died as soon as she found out it was a woman, and a retired one at that.
It took much more money to set up a detective agency than Agatha ever dreamt it would. Brought up on Raymond Chandler-type movies, she had assumed that one sat in an office and waited for the beautiful dame with the shoulder pads to come swaying in—or something like that.
She quickly found out by surfing the net that detective agencies were supposed to offer a wide range of services, including all sorts of modern technology such as bugging and de-bugging, photographic or video evidence and covert and electronic surveillance.
Then someone would be needed to man the phones while she was out of the office. Agatha was shrewd enough to know now that one-woman operations were for novels. She would need to invest heavily in employing experts if she expected to get any return.
Once she had found an office in the centre of Mircester, she put advertisements in the local newspapers. For the photographic and video evidence, she hired a retired provincial newspaper photographer, Sammy Allen, arranging to pay him on a free-lancebasis; and she secured the services of a retired police technician, Douglas Ballantine, under the same terms to cope with the electronic stuff.
But for a secretary, Agatha wanted someone intelligent who would be able to detect as well.
She began to despair. The applicants were very young and all seemed to be decorated with various piercings and tattoos.
Agatha was just wondering whether she should try to do any secretarial work herself when there came a knock at the door of the office. The door did not have a pane of frosted glass, which Agatha would have foun
d more in keeping with the old-fashioned idea she had of detective agencies.
“Come in,” she shouted, wondering if this could be her first client.
A very tall, thin woman entered. She had thick grey hair, cut short, a long thin face and sharp brown eyes. Her teeth were very large and strong. Her hands and feet were very large, the feet encased in sturdy walking shoes, and the hands were ringless. She was wearing a tweed suit which looked as if she had had it for years.
“Please sit down,” said Agatha. “May I offer you some tea? Coffee?”
“Coffee, please. Two sugars, no milk.”
Agatha went over to the new coffee machine and poured a mug, added two spoonfuls of sugar and placed it on the desk in front of what she hopefully thought was her first client.
Agatha was a well-preserved woman in her early fifties with short, shining brown hair, a good mouth and small bearlike eyes which looked suspiciously out at the world. Her figure was stocky, but her legs were her finest feature.
“I am Mrs. Emma Comfrey.”
Agatha wondered for a moment why the name was familiar and then she remembered that Mrs. Comfrey was her new neighbour.
Agatha found it hard to smile spontaneously but she bared her teeth in what she hoped was a friendly welcome. “And what is your problem?”
“I saw your advertisement in the newspapers. For a secretary. I am applying for the job.”
Mrs. Comfrey’s voice was clear, well-enunciated, upper-class. Agatha’s working-class soul gave a brief twinge and she said harshly, “I would expect any secretary to help with the detective side if necessary. For that I would need someone young and active.”
Her eyes bored into Mrs. Comfrey’s thin face and flicked down her long figure.
“I am obviously not young,” said Mrs. Comfrey, “but I am active, computer-literate, and have a pleasant phone manner which you might find helps.”
