by M C Beaton
Before Roy left, Agatha had drafted out a whole series of proposals for the launch of Duluxe. As soon as he got to the office on Monday morning, Roy sent the proposals in to Mr Pedman, without mentioning Agatha’s name, and found himself back in favour again. He was told that Sarah Andrews, director of Duluxe, wished to take him out to dinner that evening at the Ivy restaurant.
Roy met her clutching a spare set of Agatha’s proposals, by which time he had convinced himself they had all been his own idea. But he had phoned Agatha before he left for dinner to thank her. She warned him severely to dress conservatively.
At the Ivy, Roy basked in the praise of Sarah Andrews. He was in a part of the restaurant which was cut off from the main room by a glass-and-wood screen. A couple on the other side were chattering in rapid French. When Sarah left to go to the toilet, Roy, always on the lookout for celebrities, peered round the screen and then drew back. The couple speaking in rapid French were Charlotte and some man.
He returned to his chair, his mind working furiously. Agatha and Charlotte had told him how they had met. When Sarah returned, she teased him about seeming abstracted and Roy said he couldn’t stop thinking up new ideas for Duluxe.
Roy returned to his flat after dinner feeling worried. He should have spoken to Charlotte. He wondered if Agatha was being set up by a friend of Sylvan’s. It seemed very far-fetched.
He phoned Agatha, who listened to him carefully and then said, ‘But you don’t speak French.’
‘I know a few words,’ said Roy huffily. ‘And she was rattling along like a native.’
‘Why didn’t you speak to her?’
‘I got worried. I thought Sylvan might have got someone on the outside to get to you.’
‘Rubbish! Oh, well, I’ll do some research. I’ve got a week.’
Agatha went to her computer, switched it on, and Googled Charlotte Rother, not really expecting anything to come up. To her surprise, there were three news stories featured. She opened one. Charlotte Rother had made the papers when she had obtained a divorce settlement of five million pounds from her entrepreneur husband, John Rother. There was a photograph of her leaving court. She had put a hand up to shield her face, but the blonde hair, the clothes and the mink coat worn open were all the same as her Charlotte’s.
Agatha tried the other two stories. All pretty much the same, but one had a clear photo of Charlotte. She looked strained and had obviously been crying, but it was the Charlotte Agatha knew. She phoned Roy back in triumph.
‘Now I feel silly,’ he said. ‘But be careful all the same.’
But Roy somehow couldn’t let the matter go. He phoned Toni and suggested it would do no harm if one of them could check up on this woman without letting Agatha know.
Toni decided that as her photograph and Sharon’s had been in the newspapers, she’d better see if someone else at the agency might like to find out a few things.
Early next morning, she called on Phil Marshall. He listened to her carefully and then said, ‘But Agatha seems to have checked her out very well. I mean, what if she does speak French? Lots of rich cosmopolitan people do. Oh, well. I’ll tell Agatha I want a few days off and I’ll see what I can dig up.’
Phil went first to the offices of the Cotswolds Journal and painstakingly began to read through the property advertisements in the back numbers. At last, after almost a whole day of searching, he found an advertisement for the bungalow in Ancombe.
He went to the estate agent’s and asked when the sale had gone through. ‘Just three weeks ago,’ said the agent. ‘With the market being so bad, we thought we would never shift it. In fact, it’s difficult to sell anything. Mrs Rother paid the asking price provided the furnishings were thrown in as well. It belonged to a middle-aged lady who died last year and her daughter lives abroad and didn’t want the job of clearing the house and asked us if we could find a buyer who would take everything.’
‘Did she pay by cheque?’ asked Phil.
‘Of course.’
That seemed to be that. He phoned Toni.
But somehow, a nagging doubt would not leave Toni. Identities could be pinched. She Googled the divorce case and took a note of Mr John Rother’s office address. She phoned, and reverting to her original Gloucestershire accent, which she had ‘poshed up’ after working for Agatha, said that she had been cleaning for Mrs Rother, who wanted her services again but she did not have an address for her.
Toni was lucky in that Mr Rother’s secretary loathed the ex-Mrs Rother and saw no need to protect her address. ‘It’s fifty-one Alexandria Mews, Kensington,’ she said.
Toni found the telephone number was ex-directory and resolved to go up to town the following Saturday. Why should Charlotte Rother still have the London address and yet want some undistinguished bungalow in Ancombe?
Agatha had invited Charlotte around to her cottage for lunch on Saturday. Charlotte made flattering comments on the beauty of the old cottage. But she ignored Agatha’s cats and they ignored her in turn. Agatha felt obscurely like a mother whose children have been insulted and then chided herself for being weird.
They had a pleasant lunch. Charlotte complimented Agatha on her cooking and Agatha hoped that the empty packets of Marks & Spencer meals were carefully hidden.
After lunch, Charlotte said, ‘It’s a lovely day. I’ve always wanted to see Warwick Castle.’
‘It’s not far,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ll drive you.’
‘No, I’ll drive. After all your hard work preparing lunch, it’s the least I can do.’
Agatha’s phone rang just as they were leaving. It was Toni. ‘I wondered how you were getting on,’ said Toni.
‘Fine,’ replied Agatha. ‘Can’t speak. Just off to Warwick Castle.’
Toni found the address in Alexandria Mews and rang the bell. There was no reply. Well, that figures, thought Toni. If she is who she says she is, then she’ll be down in the Cotswolds.
But she knelt down and looked through the letter box. A sports car roared past behind her. Then there was relative silence. Toni thought she could hear something. She pressed her ear to the letter box. There were faint sounds like, ‘Mmmph. Mmmph.’
Toni thought quickly. She took out her mobile and called the police and waited anxiously until ten minutes later, and with agonizing slowness, a police car cruised into the mews.
A large beefy police sergeant got out. ‘What is all this then about someone trapped inside?’
‘I can hear sounds from inside but she doesn’t answer the door,’ said Toni. ‘Put your ear to the letter box.’
He bent down. His colleague stood behind him, grinning.
Then the sergeant straightened up. ‘Can’t hear a thing.’
‘But I heard something,’ pleaded Toni.
‘Like what?’
‘Sort of muffled, strangled noises.’
The sergeant rang the bell. A neighbour came out of the next mews cottage and stared at them curiously. ‘What’s the person’s name?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Mrs Charlotte Rother.’
‘That’s that woman who was divorced recently,’ said his colleague.
The neighbour came up to them. ‘What’s going on?’
‘This little lady,’ said the sergeant, ‘thinks she can hear sinister noises from inside. Have you seen Mrs Rother lately?’
‘Not for a couple of weeks or something like that.’
‘There’s a pane of glass on the door,’ said Toni. ‘You could smash that and maybe get in.’
‘Here now, Miss…’
‘Toni Gilmour.’
‘Miss Gilmour. We don’t go around breaking into property just like that. What’s your business with her?’
‘I’m a private detective and I think someone may have stolen her identity.’
‘And why would she do that?’
Fighting for patience, Toni explained about Sylvan Dubois and how he might have sent an impostor after Agatha.
The sergeant said heavily, ‘We’ll go
back to the station and make some phone calls.’
‘But it may be too late!’
He gave her a cynical look, nodded to his colleague and both got back in the car and drove off. The neighbour went back indoors.
Toni looked up and down the quiet mews. No one was about. She saw a brick lying some distance away. She went and picked it up and smashed the pane of glass on the door, reached inside and turned the handle. There was nothing in the small downstairs living room. She ran upstairs. There was a kitchen on the landing area with a corridor leading off it.
Toni thrust open the door of a bedroom. Handcuffed to the bed lay a woman with a gag over her mouth. Toni ripped off the gag and felt for a pulse on the woman’s neck. The pulse was faint but she was alive.
Toni called the police and asked for an ambulance. Then she phoned Agatha. There was no reply, not even from an operator to say the phone was switched off. Charles lived in Warwickshire. Toni phoned him and got past his manservant by screaming it was a matter of life and death. Charles listened and said, ‘Warwick Castle? I’m on my way. I’ll phone the police on the way there.’
Agatha had been to Warwick Castle before. Charlotte exclaimed over the beauty of the medieval building. They visited the battlements, the towers and the torture chamber, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks inside, and then Charlotte said, ‘I’m exhausted. I could do with a cup of tea.’
‘And I could do with going to the loo,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ll join you in the tea room.’
‘Want any cakes or buns?’
‘No, just tea,’ said Agatha.
In the toilet, Agatha fought down a feeling of uneasiness about Charlotte. In the castle drawing room, when she had been looking at a picture, she had seen a reflection of Charlotte’s face in the dark glass-framed portrait. Charlotte’s face seemed to be distorted by a look of malice. I’m imagining things, thought Agatha. But no one knows where I am. I’ll just make a few phone calls. Agatha had left her BlackBerry at home and was carrying her old mobile phone with her. Sometimes she felt more at ease with a simple phone and took it on local trips in case her car broke down.
In the toilet, she checked her phone for messages and found it was totally dead. She scowled down at it. She had charged it up the night before.
Agatha suddenly had a memory of walking down the garden with her cats before she left and when she had walked back up, Charlotte was bent over the kitchen table and Agatha’s open bag. Agatha could now not remember leaving her bag open.
She opened up the back of her phone and searched for the SIM card. It had been taken out.
Agatha found her hands were beginning to shake. She used the toilet and washed her hands, wondering what to do. Why should Charlotte disable her phone? So that you can’t call for help, you gullible idiot, sneered a voice in her brain.
Why Warwick Castle? Maybe Charlotte planned to take her on a walk round the rose garden, say, plunge a hypodermic into her in a quiet corner and leave her to rot.
Sylvan, thought Agatha bitterly. His long arm had reached out from the prison. She pinned a smile on her face and returned to the table.
‘I nearly came to look for you,’ said Charlotte. ‘You were ages.’
Agatha noticed Charlotte had a small clutch handbag whereas her own was a large leather one.
‘Goodness, look at that!’ shrieked Agatha suddenly. ‘Over there!’
‘What? Where?’
‘Stand up and have a look out of the window.’
When Charlotte got to her feet, Agatha deftly slid Charlotte’s little handbag across the table and dropped it into her own. Then she emptied her cup of tea back into the pot in case Charlotte had put something into it.
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Charlotte, coming back to the table. ‘What was it?’
‘A peacock.’
‘Agatha, the place is full of peacocks.’
‘I still get excited when I see one,’ said Agatha.
‘Where’s my bag?’ said Charlotte.
‘I don’t know. Did you have it when we came into the restaurant?’
‘I’m sure I did.’
‘Charles!’ cried Agatha, feeling she could have wept with relief as his familiar figure walked into the tea room.
‘Hi, Agatha,’ said Charles. ‘Do you know the place is swarming with police? I wonder what’s going on.’
Charlotte rose unsteadily to her feet. ‘Just going to get some air,’ she said.
Agatha made a grab for her but she twisted away and ran for the door. Agatha followed, shouting to the nearest policeman, ‘That’s her!’
‘Hold back, Agatha,’ said Charles quietly. ‘It’s up to the police now.’
Charlotte zigzagged across the lawn and then dived into the entrance to the battlements. Charles and Agatha walked outside the tea room and watched the chase.
Charlotte appeared, a tiny figure up on the battlements, rushing this way and that, but her escape was now blocked by the police.
Her last cry was faintly borne to their ears as she threw herself off.
People rushed forward and then were herded away by the police. ‘Let’s not look,’ said Charles. ‘Let’s just go and sit down in the tea room.’
‘How did you know?’ asked Agatha.
Charles told her about the phone call from Toni and about how Toni had found the real Mrs Rother.
‘I knew there was something up when my phone didn’t work,’ said Agatha. ‘She’d disabled it. I pinched her handbag in case she had something nasty in there for me.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
The tea room was empty, everyone having rushed outside to see what was happening.
Agatha took out the small clutch handbag and opened it. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Charles. ‘Just look.’
‘There’s a syringe in here,’ said Agatha. ‘Why didn’t she just bump me off at home? Why Warwick Castle?’
‘She must have wanted you really off guard and surrounded by crowds of tourists.’
Two plain-clothes detectives came in. ‘Mrs Raisin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you come with us? We have a lot of questions to ask you.’
Agatha was interviewed at police headquarters in Leamington Spa for a long time. Then she was taken to Mircester headquarters, where the questioning started all over again.
Wilkes asked her at one point why she had not suspected Charlotte earlier. Agatha said she had no reason to. She had thought that there might be a remote chance that Sylvan would send someone after her, but she had thought that person would be a man. And all the time during the questioning, Agatha’s spirits sank lower and lower. Had it not been for discovering her phone had been tampered with, had it not been for Toni’s and Roy’s suspicions, then she might have been killed.
The police obviously thought she was a bumbling amateur, and by the time she was released and returned wearily to her cottage, that is exactly how she felt.
There were only two local reporters waiting on her doorstep to interview her. Agatha rallied enough to give them a few brief quotes but wondered where the national press and television were. She was to find out next day that they had decided to go with the better story.
Toni’s face was all over the front pages. The real Charlotte Rother, photographed in hospital, was hailing her as the heroine who had saved her life. She said that the woman who had stolen her identity had drugged her and tied her to the bed. Her real name turned out to be Clarice Delavalle, one of Sylvan’s former mistresses, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Charlotte. Clarice had returned from time to time to feed her and then had not come back and Charlotte was suddenly sure she meant to leave her to starve to death. Also, Clarice had taken her fur coat and jewellery.
Roy Silver had also been interviewed, saying he had seen and heard Clarice in the Ivy talking in French, and had urged Toni to check up on her. The Warwick Castle adventure was reported on the inside pages. There was a head and shoulders photograph of Agatha taken some time ago, scowl
ing at the camera. Reports of the fake Charlotte’s suicide had been taken from eyewitnesses amongst the tourists.
Like all people who don’t really quite know who they are, Agatha considered her job to be her identity. Now she felt totally diminished.
She went up to her bedroom, undressed and showered and then crept under the duvet.
She fell down into a dream where she was trying to get into the office in the morning but her keys would not work. She phoned Toni, who said they had all decided for the health of the agency it would be better if she retired.
Chapter Eleven
AGATHA WAS AWAKENED by the harsh ringing of the phone beside the bed. It was Mrs Bloxby. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Raisin?’ came her anxious voice. ‘I have called at your cottage several times but you did not answer the door.’
‘I’m in bed,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ll be round to see you as soon as I get dressed.’
‘Actually, I’m outside.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
When Agatha opened the door, Mrs Bloxby looked at her worriedly. Agatha had not removed her make-up properly before going to bed and melting mascara had left black rings under her eyes.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ said Agatha. ‘I need a black coffee and a cigarette.’
Before sitting down at the kitchen table, Agatha switched on a recently installed extractor fan in the window before lighting a cigarette.
Mrs Bloxby watched her friend sucking smoke down into her lungs and said anxiously, ‘Don’t you ever worry about lung cancer?’
‘From time to time. I’ll stop next month.’
‘Why next month?’
‘Because I need a holiday. Toni can run things,’ added Agatha bitterly.
Mrs Bloxby saw the newspapers spread out on the table. ‘You must be very grateful to Miss Gilmour,’ said the vicar’s wife.
‘I should be, I know. But she’s made me feel like a rank amateur.’
‘Think of all the cases you’ve solved.’
Agatha took a gulp of black coffee. ‘So what? That was then. This is now.’
‘You have had several bad frights and yet you refuse to go for counselling. You should get some help.’
