by M C Beaton
‘Yes, and I don’t understand it!’ wailed his sister. ‘He was always so popular.’
They moved off. The door slammed behind them. Agatha dragged herself from the sitting room.
‘Thanks, Toni,’ she said. ‘You can go home now.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ll look after her,’ said Mrs Bloxby firmly.
Toni hesitated. She wanted to give Agatha a reassuring hug, but somehow Agatha was not the sort of person one hugged.
‘I’ll be back in the office tomorrow,’ said Agatha wearily. ‘Open a file on George.’
Mrs Bloxby made tea and carried a tray out to the garden. It was a riot of colour: red, white and yellow roses, delphiniums, hollyhocks, pansies and wallflowers, and a large clematis with purple petals that bloomed in the summer instead of the spring. Agatha’s cats, Hodge and Boswell, played on the smooth lawn. A few wispy white clouds floated over the blue sky above.
‘This is the sort of summer people, when they get old, will remember as happening every year. People forget the rainy days.’
Agatha began to cry. ‘I d-don’t w-want to g-get old,’ she sobbed.
‘You’re ageless,’ said Mrs Bloxby briskly. ‘Dry your eyes, drink your tea, light one of your rotten cigarettes and start thinking. Someone murdered George Marston.’
Agatha meekly did as she was told. ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said. ‘Do you think it has anything to do with his military service?’
‘I think perhaps it was too personal a murder for that.’
‘Someone in the village?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But why?’
‘If you work very hard on this, I will pray you find out.’
‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Agatha.
‘Of course.’
‘Why?’
Mrs Bloxby put down her teacup, and said gently, ‘I need to believe in something perfect and unchanging in this imperfect world. Humans are apt to make other humans into gods and being human they let them down. I sometimes think that inside everyone is a desire for a spiritual belief and sometimes it gets twisted. Why else would people worship, say, Hitler or Elvis Presley?’
Agatha laughed, feeling her inner torment ease. ‘I think you could make a lot of Elvis fans furious with a statement like that.’
‘You must have had very little sleep,’ said Mrs Bloxby. ‘Go to bed. I will wait down here for a while. Go on!’
* * *
Before Agatha climbed into bed, she opened her window and looked down into the garden. Mrs Bloxby was sitting quietly, her face turned up to the sun.
Agatha left the window open and, despite the warmth of the day, pulled the duvet up to her chin and fell asleep.
After half an hour, Mrs Bloxby’s mobile phone rang. She walked down the garden with it. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me. Your husband. Remember me?’ came the vicar’s angry voice. ‘Are you still with that bloody woman? I haven’t had my breakfast.’
‘Put two rashers of bacon and two eggs in the frying pan,’ said Mrs Bloxby patiently. ‘Make coffee. Put two slices of bread in the toaster. I will be home shortly.’
Then she rang off and went to resume her seat in the garden. After another half-hour, she went upstairs and looked at Agatha, who was sleeping peacefully.
It’s safe to leave her now, thought Mrs Bloxby. When she is stronger, that’s when I will tell her that her precious gardener was sleeping with quite a few women in the village.
In her office the next morning, Agatha said, ‘Until we know exactly how George was killed, I don’t really see how we can begin investigations. We’ll just get on with the regular work at the moment. I’ll take the Callen case. Mr Callen wants proof of his wife’s infidelity. You’d better get your camera stuff and come with me, Phil.’
Before she left, she allocated cases to the rest of her staff.
‘I really wonder who killed George,’ said Phil when he and Agatha were parked outside Mrs Callen’s house.
‘Like I said, better wait for the autopsy and then we’ll have a clearer idea. I’ll get Patrick to keep in touch with his old police contacts so we’ll know when the results come through,’ said Agatha. ‘There’s Mrs Callen, getting in her car. I hope it isn’t going to be just another day’s shopping.’
With Agatha driving, they followed Mrs Callen at a sedate pace. Unlike previous times, she did not go into the centre of Cirencester but turned off on to the motorway.
‘A change at last!’ said Agatha.
‘Keep back a bit so she doesn’t notice us,’ said Phil. ‘Of course, I gather he did sleep around a bit.’
‘Who? Our client, Mr Callen?’
‘No. George Marston. Agatha! You nearly hit that lorry. Pay attention!’
‘My George?’
‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ said Phil. ‘If you don’t keep your wits about you, we’ll lose her.’
Agatha drove grimly on, her mind in turmoil. She could understand George falling for the charms of Jessica Fordyce – but who else?
‘Name one of the women,’ barked Agatha.
‘Later,’ pleaded Phil. ‘Keep your mind on the job.’
They followed Mrs Callen all the way into Oxford. She drove into the car park at the Randolph Hotel. ‘Drive on and park in Gloucester Green,’ Phil said. ‘We don’t want her seeing us. Your photo’s been in the newspapers and she might recognize you.’
The underground car park at Gloucester Green was expensive and they lost valuable time feeding pound coins into the meter. Then they hurried back to the hotel.
‘I forgot about being recognized,’ mourned Agatha. ‘I should have sent Patrick.’
‘Wait outside and I’ll take a look around,’ said Phil.
Phil looked in the bar first. Mrs Callen was seated in a corner with a young man. Could be her son, thought Phil. Does she have a son? Damn! The file’s in the car. He ordered a beer and sat down, covertly bringing out a micro camera from his bag.
They were laughing and joking. Mrs Callen, Phil guessed, was in her late forties and the young man must have been in his twenties. She was a hard-faced woman, heavily made up with a collagen-enhanced mouth. As Phil watched, the young man raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. He shot off a photograph. Then the young man leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. Bingo! thought Phil. Now if they go up to a room together, we’ve got her.
Outside, Agatha paced up and down in the sunlight. Over at the Martyrs’ Memorial, a preacher was waving a copy of the Bible and haranguing an audience of five on their sins.
To her relief, Phil emerged. ‘I got two good shots of them kissing,’ he said, ‘and now they’ve gone upstairs to a room. We’ll need to wait and follow the young man she’s with and find out who he is.’
‘A young man!’ exclaimed Agatha bitterly. ‘Some women have all the luck. It’s so hot. There’s a shady bit on the other side of the road. We can sit on the steps of the Ashmolean and wait for them to emerge.’
They sat down on the steps of the museum. Buses rolled past on Beaumont Street. Students walked to and fro. Agatha lit a cigarette.
‘You’ll damage your lungs,’ said Phil severely.
‘Leave me alone,’ snapped Agatha. ‘I suppose George was sleeping with Jessica.’
‘According to village gossip,’ said Phil. ‘But that’s not always reliable.’
‘Who else?’
‘There were rumours about Mrs Glossop.’
‘Can’t be!’ Agatha felt almost tearful. Mrs Glossop was her own age but was built like a cottage loaf and wore thick glasses. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I didn’t know it was important to you,’ said Phil defensively. ‘You’ve always said that village gossip is boring. I got them on my little camera and—’
‘Who?’
‘Callen and her fellow, of course. I’ve got my proper one at the ready. With all the tourists around, they won’t notice.’
The hot afternoon dr
agged on. ‘Here,’ said Phil, taking a plastic bag out of one of his capacious pockets. ‘Put your cigarette butts in this. You can be arrested for chucking them on the ground that way.’
Agatha picked them up, and then, as she straightened up, Phil said, ‘Here they are!’
Mrs Callen and her young man appeared. He caught her in his arms and kissed her passionately. Phil’s camera clicked busily. Then the couple walked into the hotel car park at the side.
‘Shall I get the car?’ asked Phil.
‘Wait,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ve a feeling that young man lives in Oxford. We’ve got enough for Mr Callen anyway.’
The young man emerged alone from the car park. Agatha and Phil set off in pursuit. They followed his long, rangy strides through the crowds of the Cornmarket and down the High, where he turned in at the gates of St Botolph’s.
Agatha went into the porter’s lodge, a crisp twenty-pound note in her hand. ‘That young man hurrying across the quad,’ she said. ‘I thought I recognized him. Who is he?’ The note changed hands.
The porter darted from his cubbyhole and looked across the green expanse of the quad. ‘Oh, that’s Mr Richard Thripp, one of our research fellows.’
‘Made a mistake,’ said Agatha. ‘But thanks all the same.’
They returned to the office in Mircester, Agatha to prepare her report and Phil to print up his photos.
But Agatha found Mrs Janet Ilston, George’s sister, in her office.
‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mrs Raisin,’ she said. ‘I want you to find out who murdered my brother. I looked you up on the Internet.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ll need to take some notes. Why did your brother say he wished to settle in Carsely? I never asked him.’
‘After he was injured and went through the rehabilitation process two years ago,’ said his sister, ‘he settled in a village in Oxfordshire, Lower Sithby. He started to do odd jobs, gardening, carpentry, things like that. Much as I loved my brother, he was always getting into trouble with women. He had so many affairs and caused a lot of bad feeling. So he moved to Carsely.’
Agatha wrote steadily while her mind admonished her sternly – how could you be such a fool? You, who pride yourself on your intuition.
‘Do you think,’ asked Agatha, ‘that one of the women from Lower Sithby might have followed him to Carsely to kill him?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Do you have the names of any of these women?’
‘Just one. Fiona Morton, calls herself Fee, very neurotic. She came to see me in Oxford, crying and threatening revenge and claiming George had taken her virginity.’
‘How old?’
‘Thirty-eight.’
‘Did you think she was telling the truth?’
‘Well, she was very plain and spinster-like. Could be. George vehemently denied the whole thing but that was when he decided to move to the Cotswolds.’
Agatha asked several more questions, took down Janet’s address and phone number, and then Mrs Freedman drew up a contract.
‘Do your best,’ urged Janet as she left. ‘George could be infuriating but no one deserves such a death.’
‘Are the results of the autopsy through yet?’
‘Not yet. They’ve promised to let me know immediately.’
Chapter Three
When Agatha returned to the office, Mrs Freedman told her that the police had called and she was to report to headquarters. What now? wondered Agatha.
She waited impatiently at police headquarters until she was ushered into an interview room. Inspector Wilkes entered with Bill Wong. The tape was switched on and the interview began. Agatha was taken through the whole thing again. Wilkes wanted to know what she had done the day of the ball, at the ball, and right up to finding George’s body.
Agatha answered as patiently as she could, and then Wilkes said, ‘That will be all for now, except for the fact that this is a search warrant for your home.’
‘What! Why?’ demanded Agatha furiously.
‘George Marston was drugged with Rohypnol, commonly known as the date-rape drug or roofies. He had ingested a massive dose. When he was unconscious, someone put, possibly, three adders in a bag and tied it over his head. The vipers bit his face and so he died of the venom. We are searching for anyone who may have purchased the drug.’
‘Adders? Snakes?’ said Agatha, bewildered. ‘Where would anyone get them?’
‘It’s a hot summer and that brings them out, but mostly in places like the Malvern Hills.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ wailed Agatha. ‘Why so elaborate and vicious?’
‘It could be,’ said Bill in his quiet Gloucestershire accent, ‘that someone meant to come back when all was quiet and remove the bag. That way it might look as if he had fallen asleep in his garden and had then been attacked by the adders.’
‘Did you find the adders in the bag?’ asked Agatha.
‘No, they had probably wriggled out,’ said Bill. Agatha repressed a shudder as she thought that the snakes might still have been in George’s garden when she found the body.
‘But do adders just attack like that?’ she asked.
‘We think that when the bag with them was forced down over the head, they panicked and struck several times. There were snakebites all over his face,’ said Bill. ‘You’re looking white. You had better go home.’
‘That will be all,’ said Wilkes. ‘A forensic team is waiting outside your cottage. Let them in to search and wait outside.’
Agatha suddenly remembered her last conversation with George. ‘I forgot!’ she said. ‘George had asked me about how to recognize a psychopath. I told him what I knew and asked him if he had met one and he said, “Maybe.” Then James Lacey arrived and George eventually left and that was the last I saw of him. Do they know when he died?’
‘It’s never accurate,’ said Bill, ‘but at least twenty-four hours before you found him.’
Agatha sat in a chair in her front garden. She still felt numb with shock. Mrs Bloxby, whom she had phoned on the road home, was sitting with her.
‘Did you know George had been tomcatting in the village?’ asked Agatha.
‘I did hear some gossip,’ said Mrs Bloxby cautiously.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because it would have hurt you and I had no proof. For all I knew, it could have been wishful thinking on the part of some of the women.’
‘What women?’
‘It is only rumour and gossip, Mrs Raisin. I can’t really . . .’
‘Out with it,’ commanded Agatha brutally. ‘I’ll find out anyway. I heard about Mrs Glossop.’
‘Well, if you must. It is rumoured he had affairs with Jessica Fordyce, Miss Hemingway and Mrs Freemantle.’
‘Jessica Fordyce I can understand,’ said Agatha bitterly. ‘But Joyce Hemingway is a shrivelled-up spinster, and Mrs Freemantle is just, well, ordinary. And isn’t there a Mr Freemantle?’
‘He’s abroad on business, I believe. He’s something in oil. I believe any of these three ladies could plot such a vicious death,’ said Mrs Bloxby.
Agatha sat silently for a few minutes, guiltily remembering the strength and madness of her own obsession. And it did now seem like madness. What on earth had happened to her?
At last she said, ‘George’s sister has hired me to investigate. I’d better start off with these three.’
‘Mrs Raisin! You can’t just go crashing in and demand whether they had been sleeping with Mr Marston and whether they killed him.’
‘Watch me,’ said Agatha.
The only pills in Agatha’s cottage turned out to be an old bottle of aspirin, yet the searchers bagged it up and took it away, no doubt in the hope that the innocent-looking aspirin tablets would turn out to be something more sinister.
When the police and Mrs Bloxby had left, Agatha phoned Toni and told her that she would be working on George’s case the following day and would not be in the office.
>
She slept uneasily that night, tossing and turning in nightmares through which long snakes slithered in and out.
When she awoke the next morning, the sunny dry weather had changed. It was still hot, but sticky and humid with a thin veil of cloud covering the sky.
Agatha washed and dressed, fed her cats, had her usual breakfast of two cigarettes and strong black coffee, and set out to interview Mrs Glossop.
Mrs Glossop’s garden glowed with flowers, a mute testament to the gardening skills of George Marston.
Agatha rang the bell. When the small, plump figure of Mrs Harriet Glossop answered the door, Agatha looked at her curiously. With her curly brown hair going slightly grey, round face and rosy cheeks, Harriet Glossop looked every bit of her fifty years.
‘Oh, Agatha,’ she said cautiously. ‘What brings you?’
‘Mrs Ilston, George’s sister, has asked me to investigate his murder.’
Tears welled up in Harriet’s faded blue eyes behind her thick glasses. ‘I can’t get over it,’ she said. ‘Come in. We’ll go through to the back garden. It’s too hot to sit in the house.’
When they were seated at a garden table, Harriet asked, ‘How did he die? Do they know?’
Agatha told her, with brutal frankness, which she immediately regretted, because the colour drained from Harriet’s face and she clutched on to the table for support.
‘Can I get you something? A glass of water?’ asked Agatha anxiously.
‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ said Harriet. ‘So awful! Such a shock. Such a dear man.’
‘I believe he did your garden,’ said Agatha.
‘Oh, yes, and little jobs around the house, like changing fuses and tap washers. My husband, Fred, is separated from me, and it was so nice to have a man to rely on.’
‘Were you close?’
‘We were such friends. He said no one could bake cakes like me.’
Agatha took the plunge. ‘Did you have an affair with him?’
Harriet’s cheeks were now red with embarrassment. ‘It was only the one time,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I never referred to it again. I was frightened it would scare him away.’
