by M C Beaton
Unfortunately, they had only one room. Madame and Monsieur would have to share. Madame said angrily that they would look for another hotel. She did not want to find herself renewing her amorous relations with Charles and doubted her own strength of will if she found herself in bed with him. Charles told her to stop behaving like an outraged virgin. He spoke in rapid French and then said, “Aggie, stop wittering. It’s got twin beds.”
After they had unpacked, they had lunch in a nearby restaurant. After lunch, Charles said that he felt tired after the dawn start and suggested going back to the hotel for a siesta.
Agatha did not think she would sleep and was startled to find it was early evening when she woke up.
They both went out for a long walk along the Seine as night descended on one of the world’s most beautiful cities. The terraces of the restaurants were filling up with people stopping for a coffee or an aperitif after work.
“Look how slim everyone is,” marvelled Agatha, “and they all walk as if they’ve got books on their heads. They must teach them deportment in French schools.”
“The women look fabulous,” said Charles and Agatha experienced a pang of jealousy. “Let’s find a restaurant.”
“There’s quite a reasonable one at Maubert -Mutualite,” said Agatha. “They have snacks and things. We had quite a big lunch.”
The restaurant was crowded but they managed to find a table at the back. They ordered croques monsieurs and a decanter of the house wine.
Agatha became uneasily aware that someone was staring at her and looked across the restaurant. With a sinking heart, she recognized Phyllis Hepper, a public relations officer she had known in her London days. Phyllis was a famous lush.
To Agatha’s horror, Phyllis rose and came over to their table. “It’s Agatha, isn’t it?” she said.
“Phyllis,” said Agatha, relieved the woman appeared to be sober. “What are you doing in Paris?”
“I got married to a Frenchman.”
“This is Charles Fraith, Charles, Phyllis. Phyllis and I knew each other when I was working in London.”
Phyllis laughed. “I’m surprised you recognized me. I must have been drunk the whole time.”
“Well. ..”
“It doesn’t matter. I was a terrible drunk,” said Phyllis to Charles. “But I joined AA. I go to meetings, or reunions Al-cooliques Anonymes, as they call them here in Paris.”
“Your French must be very good.”
“Not yet. I go to the English-speaking ones at the Quai D’Orsay. Quite a lot of French people go as well. There was this terrible raggy old drunk came in, but he got it and now you wouldn’t recognize him. He looks so well and handsome. You must come and visit me. Here’s my card.”
Agatha said they were leaving the next day, but if she was ever back in Paris she would look Phyllis up.
After she had left, Charles said, “I thought it was supposed to be Alcoholics Anonymous”
“She must be very new in the programme. I met people like her in London. Just in, they wanted to tell the world.”
They finished their decanter of wine and Charles ordered another, saying it would help them sleep. They chatted idly about previous cases and then Charles asked suddenly, “What about Emma?”
“What about her?”
“I think she’s stalking me.”
“Oh, Charles. Such male vanity.”
“No, really. I was up on the platform at the fete and I looked across and I’d swear it was her. I asked Gustav and he said he’d told her fortune.”
“What was Gustav doing telling her fortune?”
“The woman who was supposed to tell them fell ill and I made Gustav dress up and do it. He turned out to be a wow. People like being frightened and he told them such dire things.”
“What did he tell Emma?”
“He said he felt sorry for her, so he’d given her the usual rubbish about meeting a tall, dark stranger.”
“I’ll have a word with Emma. Do you know I’ve put a codicil in my will, giving her the detective agency?”
“Oh, Aggie. Did you tell her?”
“Yes.”
“Cancel it.”
“I’ll have a talk to her about trailing around after you. But what did you expect? You took her to lunch a couple of times. Maybe she’s lonely.”
“You obviously don’t think much of my charms.”
Agatha looked at him. Even in an open-necked blue shirt and blue chinos, he looked neat and impeccably barbered.
“Eat your food,” she said.
Emma clutched her hair. What if Charles drank the coffee? And Doris would tell the police that she had given her the keys, so she would be first suspect. How stupid and crazy she had been. There was a ring at the doorbell. When she opened the door, Doris Simpson was standing there.
“I’d better take the keys back,” she said. “My Bert, he points out that Agatha is paying me for looking after them cats and it’s cheating on her to have you do it.”
“I don’t mind,” pleaded Emma.
“I must have the keys,” insisted Doris. “Where are they?” Really, thought the cleaner, Mrs. Comfrey looks as if she’s about to faint.
“Oh, there they are,” said Doris, seeing the keys on a small table inside the door. She pushed past the trembling Emma and picked up the keys.
“I think it would be best,” said Doris, who was about the only woman in the village who called Agatha by her first name, “if you didn’t tell Agatha about me giving you the keys. I need all the money I can get these days and I wouldn’t want her to go thinking I had cheated her.”
“I won’t breathe a word,” said Emma passionately. “Not a word.”
When Doris had gone, Emma sat down and hugged her thin figure. Then she rose and went down to the shed in the garden and collected the rat poison and buried it under the compost heap.
She decided she would wait and wait until she saw them return and follow them in. She would knock over that jar of coffee, sweep it up and take the contents away. Miss Simms would know when they were due back because Agatha kept in touch with her.
“Aren’t you coming to bed with me?” asked Charles.
“No,” said Agatha. “And I wish you wouldn’t parade around the room naked. It’s disconcerting.”
Charles climbed into his bed with a sigh. “You’re getting old, Aggie.”
“No, I’m not,” said Agatha furiously. “You’re amoral, that’s what you are.”
“I’m the same as I’ve always been. Good night.”
Agatha lay awake for some time. She had slept with Charles before—and enjoyed it. But their intimacy never seemed to affect Charles, and Agatha, in the past, had been left feeling that she had been used, that sex with her was like a drink or a cigarette to Charles.
But soon the amount of wine she had drunk lulled her off to sleep and down into uneasy dreams.
The man could not believe his luck. He had climbed over the fence into Agatha’s garden and crept up to the kitchen door. The kitchen door was slightly open. Emma had forgotten to close it when she let the cats back in.
He eased in and began to search the house. No one here, he thought. Well, a job’s a job. I’ll wait here until she gets back. Two pairs of eyes gleamed at him in the darkness. “Damn cats,” he muttered. But he was fond of cats, so he shooed them out into the garden and closed the door.
Where on earth was the woman? His informant had told him she would be back this evening. Still, it was only midnight. Better to wait.
In the moonlight streaming in through the window, he saw a jar of instant coffee beside the kettle. May as well have some of that, he thought, and keep myself awake.
Emma awoke at dawn, sitting fully dressed in an armchair. She could not remember having fallen asleep. She suddenly wondered if she had shut the back door of Agatha’s cottage after she had let the cats in. She went out of her cottage and looked nervously around, but no one was about. She went up the side path of Agatha’s cottage and round to the garden d
oor and slumped in disappointment. Then she saw the cats in the garden.
But I’m sure I let them in, thought Emma. Putting on her gloves, she tried the door and to her relief it opened. She switched on the light. Then she let out a stifled scream. The kitchen smelt of vomit and a man was lying on the kitchen floor. There was a revolver on the table. She grabbed the jar of coffee and retreated to the door. She sped to her own cottage. She had an identical jar of instant coffee in her kitchen. She wiped it down with a cloth to get rid of fingerprints and hurried back to Agatha’s with it and placed it on the counter. Then she took out a cloth and wiped away her footprints as she backed out of the door. Wait, Emma! screamed a voice in her brain. How did he get in? Doris will say she gave you the keys, surely, and you will be accused of letting some man into the cottage. He couldn’t be anyone Agatha knew. Not wearing a black mask and with a revolver on the table. She picked up a rock from the rockery and smashed a pane of glass on the door. Why hadn’t the burglar alarm gone off? I can’t have set it, thought Emma. I’ll reset it. That means I’ll have to let myself out through the front of the house.
A cold determination had set in. She opened a cupboard under the stairs and found a hand vacuum cleaner that Agatha used for her car. She carefully vacuumed after herself to the front door and set the alarm, praying it wouldn’t go off. It shouldn’t go off because the glass was already broken. Then she remembered he must have drunk out of a cup. Should she leave it? Yes, she must. She couldn’t bear to go back. The path round the side of the house was gravel, so she was sure she hadn’t left any incriminating footprints when she arrived. She didn’t have the keys but the locks clicked shut automatically. She took the vacuum with her.
Emma went home, got undressed and went to bed. Her last waking thought was that dear Charles would never know how she had saved his life.
Agatha was shaken awake at nine the following morning by Charles. “Get up,” said Charles urgently. “The French police are downstairs and want to speak to you.”
“What’s the time?”
“Eleven o’clock. All that wine. We slept in. You didn’t even hear the phone. Get dressed and I’ll go down first and see what they want.”
Agatha scrambled into her clothes, wondering what on earth had happened. When she went down to the reception area, it was to find two policemen and what she judged to be two French detectives.
“Ed better explain,” said Charles, “because their English isn’t very good. A man has been found dead in your kitchen in. Carsely. He looks as if he’s been poisoned.”
“Who is it?”
“Blessed if I know. All they want at the moment is a timetable of when we arrived in Paris and where we were. I’ve told them everything and they can check it.”
Charles turned away from her and launched into rapid French. One of the detectives replied. Agatha waited impatiently.
“Seems to have been an intruder. The pane of glass in the kitchen door was smashed. There was a black Balaclava on the table and a revolver. Someone was out to get you, Aggie. We’re to wait at the commissariat.”
He turned again and spoke to the detectives.
“He says we’d better pack our bags and check out. It looks as if it’s going to be a long day.”
One of the detectives spoke again. Charles translated, “We’re to have breakfast if we want while they search our room.”
Agatha nodded. It was one of the few times in her life when she felt speechless.
That morning, Emma watched at her window. At last, she saw Doris walking past. She waited for a scream, but all was silent. And then in the distance, she heard police sirens.
Emma jumped to her feet. She would rush next door and get into the house before they arrived. Then, if she had left any footprint unvacuumed, it wouldn’t matter.
The front door was standing open. Emma went in. Doris emerged from the kitchen, her face ashen. “Don’t go in there. There’s a dead body.”
“Who is it?”
“Some man I’ve never seen before.”
“Let me have a look,” said Emma, “I might recognize him.”
She walked into the kitchen. She had not taken a close look at him before. He was a stocky man with thick black hair. His face was so contorted that Emma could not judge what he had looked like normally.
Bill Wong was the first to arrive.
“Both of you get out of here immediately,” he snapped. “Where’s Agatha?”
“In Paris,” said Emma.
“Do you know where she is staying?”
“Miss Simms will know.”
“Mrs. Comfrey, you are walking all over the crime scene. I must ask you to leave.”
“Certainly. Oh, what a shock.” Emma burst into tears, her nerves stretched to the limit.
Doris led her away. Emma dabbed at her eyes, wondering desperately if she had covered everything. She had buried the coffee jar under the compost heap where she had put the rat poison. But if Doris told them that she had had the keys, they might come and search her cottage and garden.
“Eve got to get back and make a statement,” said Doris. “Will you be all right?”
Emma rallied. “I won’t go to the office today. I’ll do some gardening to take my mind off things.”
Agatha and Charles waited all morning in a room in the commissariat. Their passports and airline tickets had been taken away from them.
“They’ll ask us what we were doing in Paris,” whispered Charles. “We’d better say we tried to call on Felicity because George is an old friend of mine. We’ll say we just needed a break.”
“By staying at the same hotel as Laggat-Brown stayed?”
“Well, Mrs. Laggat-Brown has employed you, so you can say you were double-checking his alibi.”
“Okay. I wonder how long we’ve got to wait here.”
The door opened and a French police inspector who spoke English came in. He handed them their passports and two airline tickets. “The English police say you must leave on the one o’clock flight for Heathrow. They have decided that it is important that you return to England. A police car will be waiting for you at Heathrow.”
Charles looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving.”
“A police car will take you to Charles de Gaulle.”
On the road to the airport, Charles said uneasily, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Which is?”
“The revolver and the black Balaclava. Agatha, do you think someone might have taken a hit out on you?”
“In the Cotswolds?”
“Think about it. Whoever fired at Cassandra had a first-class sniper rifle. That wasn’t amateur stuff.”
“This is getting scary. Let’s hope he turns out to be a well-known burglar. But why didn’t the burglar alarm work?”
Emma unearthed the rat poison and the coffee jar, put them in a bag, and took them out to her car. She had made a statement to the police, saying that she had slept soundly and had not heard a thing. She breathed a sigh of relief when she drove off. Doris would surely tell the police about her having had the keys to Agatha’s cottage. She drove out onto the old Worcester Road and up to where she knew the council tip was. She put the bag containing therat poison and the coffee jar into a container of general rubbish and heaved a sigh of relief.
Then she thought, there was really nothing to worry about now. They would think the man had broken in. It would be assumed that the burglar alarm was faulty. She suddenly felt ill as she remembered the dead body on the kitchen floor, and stopped the car, got out and was violently sick.
EIGHT
AGATHA and Charles were taken straight to Mircester Police Headquarters and put in an interviewing room.
Then Detective Inspector Wilkes appeared with another man whom he introduced as Detective Inspector William Fother of the Special Branch. Another man followed them into the room and leaned against a wall, his arms folded.
“What have the Special Branch got to do with this?” asked
Agatha.
“We’ll ask the questions,” said Fother.
He was a dark-skinned man with thinning brown hair and large ugly hands which he folded on the table in front of him. His first question surprised Agatha.
“Mrs. Raisin, when did you last visit the Republic of Ireland?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Please just answer the question,” he rapped out.
Despite his unremarkable appearance, there was something menacing about Fother.
“I haven’t,” said Agatha. “I mean, I never got around to going there. On holidays, you know, I think of sun.”
“And Northern Ireland?”
“Never been there either.”
“We can check.”
“Oh, please do,” said Agatha, her temper beginning to rise. “Have you heard of a man called Johnny Mulligan?” “No. Who is he?”
“He is the dead gentleman on your kitchen floor. He was a foot soldier with the Provisional IRA. He was in the Maze Prison for murder but released under Tony Blair’s famous amnesty.”
“Could he have got the wrong house?” asked Charles. “I mean, Agatha’s got nothing to do with anywhere in Ireland or politics.”
“We’ll get to you later, Sir Charles. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you would remain silent.”
Fother fastened his gaze on Agatha again. “Mulligan was killed by some sort of poison. There was an empty coffee-cup on the table. The contents are being analysed, as is the jar of coffee. So far, we know the jar of coffee did not have any prints on it, which looks as if someone doctored it with poison. Perhaps someone who expected a visit from him?”
“I used the coffee I left in the kitchen before I left for Paris. I had a cup of it. Are you feeling well, Charles? You’ve gone rather white.”
“What if,” said Charles, “someone not connected at all decided to try to poison Agatha and whoever this Mulligan was drank it instead?”
“Who, for instance?”
Should I tell them about Emma? wondered Charles desperately. It would be awful if she turned out to be completely innocent. He rallied, “Maybe someone from one of Agatha’s cases.”
“Police are going through her files at the moment. You look upset. Are you sure you have no idea who put the poison there?”
