by M C Beaton
Half an hour later, Toni surveyed the new client. When Mary demanded that Agatha alone should deal with her missing cat, Toni said, ‘That is not possible. Mrs Raisin is abroad.’
‘When will she be back?’
‘Not until tomorrow. But we are perfectly capable of dealing with your missing cat in her absence.’
Toni noticed that the new client’s hands were trembling and that her face was covered in a thin film of sweat. Toni turned to Phil, who was fiddling with a camera lens.
‘Phil, take a photo of Miss Donovan for our files.’
‘No!’ shrieked Mary, heading for the door. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘You’ve left your handbag,’ called Toni.
Mary swung round and Phil snapped a photo of her. It was then that Mary realized she had her handbag over her arm. She scampered down the stairs and out into the street. She was sure that man hadn’t had time to get a picture of her. She wouldn’t tell Jessica. Just give her the news about Agatha Raisin’s return.
* * *
Charles and Agatha arrived back the following afternoon. Agatha suddenly felt awkward. ‘Coming in?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m tired. That side trip to Birmingham Airport to pick up your car was a killer. Got to get home. Things to do. People to see.’ He glanced at her downcast face. ‘Maybe a coffee to wake me up.’
‘We’ll have it in the garden,’ said Agatha. ‘It’s a real Indian summer.’
In the kitchen, she filled up the coffee percolator from the water filter jug on the counter.
When she carried the tray out into the garden, Charles was half asleep. He sat up. ‘Just what I need.’
Agatha poured black coffee for both of them.
The day had that lazy golden sunshine of autumn. They sat peacefully drinking coffee, Agatha, for once, not feeling she had to demand anything of him.
‘I was wondering,’ began Charles. ‘Wait a minute. I . . .’ He slumped forward over the table.
Agatha began to feel her senses swimming. ‘Charles,’ she croaked. ‘The coffee . . .’ And then she, too, collapsed.
Dressed as a boy, Jessica nimbly scaled the cedar-wood fence and dropped down into the garden. She was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes. She had shoved flyers for a charity through several doors in the village. No one really noticed what they thought was a boy delivering leaflets. It had worked before and it would work again. It was bad luck the trick with the Frasers hadn’t worked. Rex had gone to them to buy cannabis. They didn’t answer the door, so he had gone round to the garden and found a mess of rocks on the lawn and a hole already dug. He had kept a watch from the adjoining field and had seen them put a metal box in the hole and then begin to construct a rockery over it.
She felt secure. She had checked that the neighbour, James Lacey, was away. No one to disturb her. ‘Here comes your revenge, Rex,’ she said.
Jessica planned to make it look like a burglary. It had all gone so well. The day before, she had waited until the cleaner had gone into the cottage and listened until she heard her move upstairs. She had let herself in and poured Rohypnol into the water jug.
But first, to finish this precious pair off. She went into the kitchen and rummaged in the cupboard until she found a hammer.
She was just turning to go back into the garden when she was seized from behind. She screamed and dropped the hammer. Her hands were forced behind her back and she was handcuffed.
Bill Wong shouted, ‘Let them in, Toni,’ and suddenly the cottage was full of police.
Jessica shouted and raved as she was carried bodily outside.
‘If Agatha and Charles are dead,’ said Toni, ‘I’ll never forgive you.’
Agatha awoke eight hours later, puzzled to find herself in a hospital bed. Her mouth was dry. She could not remember anything. She turned in her bed and found Charles in a bed next to her.
Agatha pressed a bell beside her bed. A nurse came in, followed by Bill Wong and Alice Peterson.
‘Water,’ demanded Agatha. ‘What am I doing here?’
‘Maybe it should wait until you’re fully recovered.’
Agatha took a gulp of water from the glass the nurse was holding out to her. ‘No, I want to know now. What on earth happened? Why is Charles here as well?’
Bill pulled a chair up to the bed. ‘A woman, later identified as Mary Donovan from this hospital, called on the agency with some story about a lost cat and asking when you would be back. Toni got suspicious because Donovan was so nervous. She got Phil to take a photo and emailed it to me. I recognized it as being one of the nurses who had looked after Jessica.
‘So I got a set of keys from your cleaner and let myself in, along with Toni, and had a squad of police waiting concealed at the end of the lane. I looked down into the garden from the bedroom window and saw you and Charles slumped over the garden table. Then I knew Jessica had managed to put something in the coffee or the water.
‘I saw her arrive, dressed as a boy – good disguise, you’d never believe it was her – and saw her go into the house. I crept down the stairs and saw her take a hammer out of one of the cupboards. That’s when I arrested her. It seems possible that she put Rohypnol into the water jug.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Agatha. ‘Let me get this straight. You looked down from the bedroom window and saw me and Charles passed out. We could have been given poison. Why didn’t you rush us off to hospital?’
‘Inspector Wilkes said if we did not catch her in the act, then we would not have a case. I mean,’ he pleaded, ‘look at it this way, if you were dead, you were dead. Right? And if she had drugged you, which seems to have been her modus operandi, then she was bound to turn up to finish you off. Don’t glare at me, Agatha. We got her at last.’
‘No, I damn well don’t see it that way,’ said Agatha. ‘If she had poisoned us and you had been quick off the mark, there might have been time to get our stomachs pumped out.’
‘We had to take a risk,’ said Bill.
‘You took a risk with our lives.’
‘You probably don’t feel up to making a statement now . . .’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Agatha. ‘Furthermore, I can’t remember a thing. That’s Charles waking up. See what he thinks of your story.’
Agatha lay back, drifting in and out of sleep as Bill told the story again. She came fully awake at Charles’s cry of ‘What right bastards you are!’
‘It was such a long shot,’ pleaded Bill. ‘She might not have turned up at all.’
‘Just get the hell out of here and give us some peace,’ said Charles.
‘We’ll be back later when you are feeling yourself again.’
‘I don’t go in for masturbation,’ said Charles.
A few minutes after Bill and Alice had left, Toni and Simon came in bearing fruit and chocolates.
‘I’d like to tell you what happened,’ said Agatha, ‘but I can’t remember a thing. What about you, Charles?’
‘The same.’
‘Any more news?’ asked Agatha.
‘Patrick got it from his contacts. There’s a fear she might not stand trial. She was all right until they told her that the ancient double jeopardy rule didn’t apply anymore and charged her with the murders. They say that was when she went absolutely bonkers.’
‘I didn’t know double jeopardy didn’t apply anymore,’ said Charles.
‘There was this chap Billy Dunlop,’ said Simon, ‘who was charged in nineteen eighty-nine with the murder of twenty-two-year-old Julie Hogg. Julie’s mother, Mrs Ming, ran a fifteen-year campaign to change the double jeopardy rule and finally succeeded. In two thousand and six, Dunlop was charged with the murder again and found guilty.’
‘It’s the cunning of it all!’ exclaimed Agatha. ‘The attempt to frame the Frasers. The viciousness of George’s murder. The woman is a monster. She cannot possibly get off this time.’
‘But she may not stand trial,’ said Toni.
‘I still cannot underst
and why Bill just lurked around, not trying to see whether Charles and I were still alive.’
‘He wanted to catch her in the act. If he had called for an ambulance, then Jessica would have cleared off and she would have tried again.’
‘I want to go home,’ said Agatha. ‘Call for the doctor, Toni, and let’s see how quickly I can get out of here.’
A week later, Patrick burst into the office with the news that Jessica had hanged herself in her cell. Remand prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes and Jessica had been wearing a thin muslin blouse. She had torn the blouse into strips to make a noose and had hanged herself from the bars of her cell. She had left a note to say that she was ‘joining dear Rex, the love of my life’.
‘Bollocks!’ said Agatha, exasperated. ‘The press will have a field day. The fact that Rex was gay will be hidden and she’ll turn out to be some sort of tragic heroine.’
‘Do they have to tell the press about that note?’ asked Toni.
‘Bound to,’ said Agatha gloomily. ‘They’ll be such an enquiry.’
Agatha’s prediction turned out to be true. Fans were even suggesting that there should be a memorial to her in Hyde Park, just like the one to Princess Diana. It was firmly believed by the unbalanced minds in Britain that poor Jessica had being hounded to her death by the police and the Agatha Raisin Detective Agency.
Only when the full report of Jessica’s part in the murders came out did the hate mail stop arriving at the agency and the story die in the newspapers.
Agatha still had miserable nights, plagued by nightmares. Added to that, Charles seemed to have disappeared again. It was all very well to be modern and claim that casual sex was healthy exercise, but Agatha wondered why she fretted so much and felt like a discarded slut.
But two months after Jessica’s suicide, Charles phoned, his voice sounding unusually diffident. ‘I’ve got two tickets for Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company,’ he said. ‘Feeling like coming?’
And Agatha, who felt like berating him and screaming at him that he had no right to use her and walk out of her life, said, ‘I haven’t seen the new theatre at Stratford. When are we going?’
‘Tonight, if you’re free.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll pick you up at six this evening. We’ll have a drink in the bar first.’
Agatha called on Mrs Bloxby. ‘Charles has asked me out on a date,’ she said.
Mrs Bloxby looked puzzled. ‘But you have been lots of places together before.’
‘But this is a real date! The theatre! I mean, it’s only been foreign stuff before and meals – but he is taking me out!’
Mrs Bloxby felt her heart sink. If Agatha fell in love with Charles, it would be a disaster. She would expect nothing less than marriage and that would mean a lifestyle as lady of the manor that Mrs Bloxby felt sure Agatha would find crippling.
‘Perhaps he won the tickets in a raffle and no one else was available to go with him,’ said the vicar’s wife.
‘What a catty thing to say,’ said Agatha huffily. ‘I’m off!’
But deep down, Agatha felt, as she dressed for the evening, that there had been something that might just be true in Mrs Bloxby’s comment.
Charles arrived, casually dressed in jacket and trousers and open-necked shirt. Agatha was in the full glory of a little black dress, a ruby necklace and scarlet high heels.
‘You’re very grand,’ said Charles. ‘Won’t you feel cold?’
‘I’ve got a stole,’ said Agatha. ‘Should I change?’
‘No, you’re fine. It’s just that people don’t dress up anymore.’
Charles parked the car in Stratford-Upon-Avon and they approached the new theatre on foot. ‘Is that it?’ exclaimed Agatha. ‘It looks like a fire tower, and all that red brick!’
They walked into the stalls bar, a bleak place in grey and black. It did not look like a theatre bar, but like part of some warehouse that had been hurriedly transformed for the evening.
‘At least I know the play,’ said Agatha.
‘Well, let’s hope they’re faithful to it,’ said Charles. ‘How are you anyway? Got over all the frights?’
‘I still get a few nightmares,’ said Agatha. ‘In fact,’ she said, casting him a sideways look out of her bearlike eyes, ‘I’ve sometimes thought of chucking the whole thing in and settling down.’
‘Settling down as what?’ asked Charles.
As your wife, would have been the honest reply. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Agatha warily. ‘My shares are doing well, despite the recession. I may give up work. I’m quite domesticated, really.’
‘If nuking every meal in the microwave is your idea of domesticity – sure.’
The bell for the start of the performance rang and they went into two good seats in the stalls.
There were several shocks for Agatha. The actor playing Macbeth was small and balding. Banquo, on the other hand, was a tall, powerful black man with dreadlocks. There were no witches. The witches had been cancelled and replaced with three child actors with piping voices. Sometimes it was hard to hear the actors because of it being a theatre in the round. Instead of talking out to the audience as they would have done in a more conventional theatre, the actors spoke to one another, often with their backs to where Agatha and Charles were seated. The interval came as a relief.
Or that was until Charles introduced Agatha to two friends of his, Barry and Mary Tring.
‘Enjoying it?’ boomed Barry, a tall man with a florid face.
‘Not much,’ said Charles.
‘You should have seen The Merchant of Venice,’ said Barry. ‘Set in Las Vegas and opened with an Elvis Presley impersonator, singing “Viva Las Vegas”.’
‘Well, it’s never about Shakespeare,’ said Charles, ‘but all about the producer. I’m sorry for the American tourists. They like their Shakespeare straight.’
‘Just be glad you won those tickets at the cricket club do,’ said Barry.
Agatha suddenly wanted to go home. But the bell was ringing, and back they went to endure the rest of the play. At one point the stage seemed to be messy with small children. The ghosts of Macduff’s children scurried about with the three elves who had replaced the witches.
At last it was over. Some brave man behind Agatha shouted, ‘Boo!’ very loudly, but everyone else clapped politely.
On the road home, Charles kept up a polite chatter about the play.
Outside Agatha’s cottage, she surprised him by getting out of the car and saying briefly, ‘See you.’ No invitation to come in for a drink.
Agatha slammed the door and stormed into her kitchen. He hadn’t even suggested taking her for dinner. She kicked off her shoes and put a curry in the microwave.
‘I’m a silly old slut,’ she said to her cats. ‘Men! I’ve given them up.’
But after she had eaten and had downed two large glasses of wine, she began to relax.
The world was full of men. Out there, surely, was some man who would cherish her.
Until then, there were cases to solve.
Damn Charles!
