by M C Beaton
“I do like to get certain things out of the way first,” he said. “Have you ever had any sexually transmitted diseases?”
Agatha looked at him with eyes of stone. “Anything else or do you have a very long catalogue?”
He grinned boyishly. “Don’t know how it is, but I never could bear pubic hair on a woman.”
“Neither can a paedophile. Listen, Tom, this is one horrible mistake. If you want to lay down terms like this, I suggest you go somewhere and pay for it. Now, if you don’t mind—”
Her mobile rang. She was later to thank God for the crassness of Tom’s approach or she might never have answered it. She listened in alarm to Roy’s message.
“It’s Roy! He’s hurt.”
She called the police, she called the ambulance, and then got to her feet and hurried to the door. “You’ve been drinking. You can’t drive,” exclaimed Tom.
“Oh, bug off, nancy boy,” hissed Agatha, and ran out of the room.
When Agatha got to Odley Cruesis, she saw the police were already there and Roy was being loaded into an ambulance. She saw Bill Wong and hurried towards him. “Is Roy alive?”
“Just. It’s a bad blow.”
“I’ll go in the ambulance with him.”
“Agatha, you’ve been drinking.”
“So what? I’m not going to drive the ambulance.”
Agatha waited miserably at the hospital and was soon joined by Toni and Sharon. Bill had phoned Toni. “Any idea who did this?” asked Agatha.
Toni shook her head. “But it seems that Roy went to a bingo meeting at the village hall and claimed he knew the identity of the murderer and the murderer should speak to him outside and confess all.”
“I should never have given him that boxed set of Poirot for Christmas,” mourned Agatha. “What on earth came over him? And which of the murders was he talking about? It must be the first one because he knew I was having dinner with Tom.”
“Here’s Bill,” said Sharon.
“It’s bad,” said Bill. “There’s bleeding in the brain. They’re operating now. You may as well all go home. There’s nothing more you can do here.”
“Will he live?”
“They don’t know. But evidently for such a weak-looking fellow, he’s got a skull like iron and that might save him.”
“Didn’t anyone see anything?”
Bill told her about the call to the vicar’s wife.
“But that’s ridiculous!” exclaimed Agatha. “Roy tells them he knows the identity of the murderer, then he’s reported lying on the road and no one thinks they should go and have a look at him?”
“According to village report, they estimate he was drunk and sleeping it off.”
“Any idea what struck him?”
“Blunt instrument. Maybe a hammer. I don’t like Sergeant Collins, but I was glad of her because she ripped into all these villagers, banging on doors, waking them up, shouting at them—it would have done your heart glad, Agatha. Now, go home.”
“Maybe I can sit by his bed,” pleaded Agatha, “and, you know, talk to him.”
“Agatha, it’s not a soap. He’s not in a coma. He’s under anaesthetic on an operating table getting a couple of holes drilled in his head. You’ll maybe be able to see him in the morning. Go home and get some sleep.”
Agatha was just wearily climbing into bed when the door opened and Charles strolled in.
“Roy’s been hit on the head,” said Agatha. “He might not live.”
She burst into tears. Charles sat down on the bed and hugged her until she had finished crying. “Now, tell me all about it.”
So Agatha did. When she had finished, Charles said, “I’ve been wondering about Tom Courtney.”
“Why him?” asked Agatha. “Anyway he was having dinner with me while someone was trying to kill Roy. And why would he want to kill John Sunday?”
“Oh, I just thought that maybe he had already planned to bump off Mum and torch the place and wanted Grudge out of the way before any objections to an expensive building site started up. So he was having dinner with you and you’re back at dawn still smelling of Mademoiselle Coco. Did you get seduced?”
“The call about Roy interrupted dinner, thank God. Do you know he asked me if I had shaved?”
Charles ran a hand over Agatha’s face. “Smooth as a baby’s bum. Oh, you mean the other end. What larks! What a chat-up line!”
“Leave me alone now, Charles. I’ve set the alarm. I’ve got to get back to the hospital first thing. And then there’s Sharon’s eyes.”
“What about them?”
But a gentle snore was the only reply.
Three hours later Agatha was back on the road to Mircester Hospital with Charles driving. “I don’t suppose you want to work for Tom again,” commented Charles. “Do look at these stupid wood pigeons. All over the road.”
“Not really,” said Agatha. “But he may be connected to the murders somehow or he may know someone who is. I’ll forget about last night and go on as usual.”
“What about Sharon’s eyes? You mumbled something before you fell asleep.”
“Oh, that. Maybe it was because we were all so upset last night but the pupils of her eyes looked like pinpricks. I’ll get Toni to find out how she’s doing.”
“Do you ever think about that jolly fling we had in the South of France?”
Agatha glanced quickly at Charles but his face was calm and neutral.
She manufactured a little laugh. “From time to time. I was so glad to escape from my dreadful fiancé.” Agatha had been briefly engaged to a villager who had taken her on holiday to Normandy. But he had turned out to be so awful that Agatha had had to phone Charles to come and rescue her. Then she and Charles had driven down to the south of France for a brief holiday.
“And that’s all it was?”
“Just the way you put it yourself, dear,” said Agatha in a thin voice. “ ‘Well, that was a bit of fun,’ you said, ‘but troubles at home and I’ve got to dash.’ Never mind. Let’s see how Roy is doing.”
Roy looked like a fledgling abandoned by its mother. His head was shaved on one side. The matron came bustling in. “Relatives only.”
“Aunt and uncle,” said Agatha. “How are you doing?” she asked Roy.
“They’re ever so pleased with me,” said Roy. “I’ve got to rest up for a week and not get on any planes. I’ve got two holes in my head. Look! I feel like a bowling ball.”
“Whatever possessed you to do such a dangerous thing?” asked Agatha.
“I thought I could stir something up, just like you. Anyway, I phoned Pedmans and they’ve given the Bulgarian account to Mary.” Mary, a rival public relations officer, was always trying to poach Roy’s accounts. “As soon as I get out of here, I’ll hand in my notice.”
“And do what?” asked Charles.
“Don’t know. Maybe something in the country. I could work for you, Aggie.”
“It’s mostly work out in the countryside and villages, Roy. I always think of you as a town person.”
Roy suddenly remembered the sinister darkness and silence of Odley Cruesis with not even one jolly red London bus to break the brooding fear of the place.
“I’ll think of something anyway,” he said brightly. “Do you know a British surgeon goes out to the Ukraine every year and performs these operations with a Black and Decker electric drill because they haven’t the equipment out there?”
Bill Wong and Inspector Wilkes came in to interview Roy, and Agatha and Charles were banished to the waiting room. “I’ll be off,” said Charles. “See you later.”
Agatha flicked through the glossy pages of a magazine. There were photographs of jolly people at openings of this and that and at hunt dinners. How happy they all look, she thought. How the camera lies. Nothing to show the raving row on the road home or the imminent divorce or the threat of bankruptcy or the social pain because Lady Bollocks-to-You snubbed the garage owner’s wife. The magazine slipped from her lap and s
he fell asleep.
Charles came back late in the afternoon and woke Agatha up. “You’ve been asleep for hours,” he said. “Toni and Sharon have been around and Phil and Patrick. Pedmans has sent a hamper from Fortnum and Mason and everyone seems to be eating bits out of it except Roy. His real uncle and aunt have turned up and are going to take him away tomorrow to look after him. Funny that, I never think of Roy as having any family at all.”
They approached the room but were told by a nurse that Roy was asleep and it would be better to let him rest.
Agatha looked at her watch. “I’d better get to the office and find out if anyone has discovered anything.”
“See you tomorrow,” said Charles.
She watched his well-tailored back disappear along the corridor. Had that brief fling in the south of France meant anything to him? He had never mentioned it before today. She took a small mirror out of her handbag and squawked in dismay at her face. Her mascara was lying in little black blobs under her eyes in that irritating way that supposedly waterproof mascara is apt to do. It was a magnifying mirror and she felt her pores made her face look like part of the surface of the moon.
By the time she had washed her face and repaired her make-up and had driven to the office, it was to find Mrs. Freedman just about to close up and Sharon brushing out her long tresses, blond streaked with purple.
She told them the latest news of Roy. “The others are all still over at that terrible village trying to find out something,” said Mrs. Freedman. “Would you like me to stay on?”
“No, you can go. Sharon, I want a word with you.”
Sharon threw down the hairbrush and retreated to her desk. “What is it now?”
Agatha waited until Mrs. Freedman had closed the office door behind her and then said, “What drugs are you taking?”
“I ain’t taking none.”
“Don’t lie to me. What is it? Coke, crystal meth, heroin—what?”
“Nothing. Gotta go.”
“The pupils of your eyes are tiny. You’re on something. You can’t work for me and be on drugs.”
“What about you, you boozy old bat with your fags and gin?” demanded Sharon. “Stuff your job.”
Sharon rushed out of the office, leaving only an aroma of sweat and cheap perfume behind her.
Why should I bother? thought Agatha mutinously. I’m not her mother.
_______
When she arrived at her cottage it was to find a large bouquet of pink roses on the kitchen table with a note from Doris, which read: “These arrived today. Got yourself a fellow?”
Agatha read the card attached to the roses. “Don’t be mad at me. Love, Tom.”
Freak, thought Agatha bitterly. She fed her cats and then carried the bunch of roses up to the vicarage. “These might look nice in the church,” said Agatha, handing them to Mrs. Bloxby.
“How kind of you!”
“I’m afraid kindness doesn’t enter into it. I’m getting rid of them.”
“Come in anyway. We’ll have coffee. How is Roy? I heard it all on the news.”
“He’s recovering all right.”
Agatha sank down wearily into the feathered cushions on the old vicarage sofa. “The flowers are from Tom Courtney. He took me out to dinner last night. He asked me if I had any sexually transmitted diseases and then he asked me if I had shaved.”
“Shaved! Oh, I see.” The vicar’s wife turned a little pink. “I never will understand the lack of romance in this modern age. We get a lot of couples coming to the vicarage for advice on marriage. They only do it, mainly, because the girl wants a church wedding and usually they’ve never been near the place since they were baptised. There was one young man who said to his fiancée in front of Alf, ‘We’re going to Antigua on our honeymoon so she’d better get to one of those tanning parlours and get an allover tan. Don’t want her looking like a shark’s belly on the beach.’ It seems men can make demands these days and without even paying for it like the days when they had to go to a brothel.”
“Nothing like the good old days.” Agatha giggled.
“Well, no romance like there used to be. Nothing like a bit of frustration for engendering romance. You’re surely not still going to go on working for him?”
“Sure. Money’s short these days and he pays generously. It’s funny. I have a gut feeling that Tom Courtney is the sort who might be capable of murdering his own mother, but he’s got such a cast-iron alibi. I wonder, too, about that sister of his. I mean she could have got her friend to swear she was there at the time of the murder. Oh. I forgot. There’s no record of her entering the UK.”
“There is a such a great deal of money involved,” said Mrs. Bloxby.
“They could have paid someone,” said Agatha slowly. “I’ve a good mind to nip over to Philadelphia and take a look around. I know, I’ll go back and see Roy and get him to put it about that I’m taking him off to a health resort and I’ll be back in a few days.”
_______
Roy was sitting up in bed, eating grapes from a huge basket of fruit on the table beside his bed. “Guess who’s just been to see me, Aggie?”
“The fruit fairy?”
“Mr. Pedman himself! He brought me all that lovely fruit. Do you remember that idea of mine of sending an anonymous letter to the police saying the Bulgarians were into sex trafficking?”
“My idea, actually.”
“Whatever. Anyway, it turns out to be true. Drugs as well as girls. Bitch, Mary, had been singing their praises and said I had only been reluctant to work for the vulgar Bulgars because I was running out of steam. She is definitely not the flavour of the month. I’m getting a raise in pay!”
“Okay. In return for my help—my help, mind—I want you to do something for me. Tell everyone who calls on you, including Bill—especially Bill—that I’ve gone off to a health farm for a few days and, no, you don’t know which one.”
“Do you want to see my picture in the local paper?”
“No, Narcissus. I’m off.”
Chapter Five
Agatha was feeling very low as it was announced that the plane was approaching Philadelphia. She had begun to question her own motives in taking this expensive trip. What did she know of men these days? Maybe they all went around asking intimate questions before they’d even opened the bedroom door. It had been a gut conviction that there was something seriously weird about Tom Courtney that had driven her on.
Alibis had been checked by the police on both sides of the Atlantic. What on earth did she expect to find out?
Once through immigration, she took out the Google maps she had run off her computer before leaving and asked a taxi driver to take her to Sellivex Drive, home of Dr. and Mrs. Bairns.
What if they’re not at home? fretted Agatha as the taxi eventually swung round into a leafy drive. She asked the driver if he would wait. “Sure thing, lady,” he said. “But pay this part first.”
Agatha did, and added a generous tip.
The house was pseudo-Colonial, built of red brick and with white columns at the entrance. Manicured lawns separated it from its identical neighbours on either side. No children played.
Agatha went up the red brick path which ran along the right side of the lawn, past a garage pretending to be a stable with a brass horse on the roof and so round to the door.
She pressed the doorbell. A voice from inside called out, “See who that is, Sally.”
The door opened. A stout woman with grey hair stood there. “Yes?”
Agatha presented her card. “Mrs. Bairns, please.”
“Just you wait heah.”
Agatha waited.
After a few moments, Sally reappeared. “Step this way, ma’am. Remove your shoes first.”
Agatha walked into a blast of freezing air conditioning and through to a large, spacious room furnished with very little indeed. The Bairns family seemed to prefer minimalism. The walls were white. The paintings seemed to be totally black. There were only three leath
er chairs with spindly steel legs in the room and one black marble coffee table.
Mrs. Amy Bairns remained seated. She was a tall blonde with that California face-lift look which makes a lot of face-lifted women look the same—like creatures from the Planet Botox.
She did not smile. Probably would crack her face if she did, thought Agatha.
“How can I help you?” asked Amy. Agatha sat down.
“Tom Courtney has asked me to help find out who murdered your mother,” began Agatha.
“So what brings you here?”
“As you are his sister, I thought you might remember something, something that might give me a clue as to who might want your mother dead. Did she have any enemies?”
“Mother was not popular. But, no, no one hated her enough to kill her.”
“Perhaps I might have a word with your friend Harriet Temple.”
“Are you trying to tell me you dare to doubt my alibi?”
“No, nothing like that. But she may remember something about Mrs. Courtney.”
“She barely knew Mother. Now, my time is valuable even if yours is not.” Amy must have pressed a hidden bell somewhere because Sally promptly appeared.
“Mrs. Raisin is just leaving.”
Agatha threw her a baffled look. Why such animosity when all she was doing was trying to find out who murdered the woman’s mother?
She followed Sally out into the hall, sat down on a white leather chair and put on her shoes. Agatha drew a hundred-dollar bill out of her wallet. “Meet me later?”
Sally knelt down at Agatha’s feet. “You got a speck on that there shoe. I’ll just wipe it off.” And in a whisper, “Jimmy’s Bar down on Peach Tree. Eight o’ clock.”
Agatha nodded. She went out to her waiting taxi and asked to be driven to the nearest hotel. “There’s a motel out on the freeway, not far,” said the driver. “But you ain’t got a car.”
“Give me your card and I’ll phone you if I need you.” He passed over a grimy card.
