Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

by Beaton, M. C.

  She thought of the vet, Paul Bladen, again. Now she had a new cat, she had every excuse to take it to the vet for a check-up. On the other hand, if Bill Wong was to be believed, Paul Bladen did not like cats. She decided to go along and say she needed some eye ointment.

  She had really only half believed Bill, however, and was surprised to find the waiting-room empty. Miss Mabbs looked up listlessly from a torn magazine and said Mr Bladen was up at Lord Pendlebury’s racing stable but would be back soon. Agatha waited and waited.

  After an hour, Paul Bladen walked into the waiting-room, nodded curtly to Agatha and disappeared into the surgery. Agatha had half a mind to leave.

  But after only a few moments, Miss Mabbs told her to go through.

  He listened to Agatha’s tale of the cat’s eye infection and then scribbled out a prescription, saying they were out of the ointment, but that she could get it at the chemist’s in Moreton-in-Marsh. He then obviously waited for Agatha to leave.

  ‘Don’t you think you owe me an explanation?’ demanded Agatha. ‘I tried to go to that restaurant in Evesham but the snow was so bad, I crashed. I tried to phone you but some woman answered the phone, saying she was your wife. I thought you might have had the decency to phone me.’

  He was suddenly all charm. ‘Mrs Raisin, I am very sorry. The weather was so dreadful, I was sure you would not even try to make it. The woman on the phone was my sister, being silly. Do forgive me. Look, what about tonight? There’s a new Greek restaurant in Mircester, just near the abbey. We could meet there at eight.’ But when he smiled into her eyes, Agatha was reminded bitterly of Jack Pomfret.

  She hesitated, looking out of the surgery window. It was then that she saw James Lacey, looking the same as ever. He was a very tall, well-built man with a handsome, tanned face and bright blue eyes. His thick black hair had only a trace of grey at the sides. He was strolling past with that easy, rangy stride of his, James Lacey without a care in the world.

  ‘I’d love to go,’ she said. ‘See you then.’

  When Agatha got home, the phone was ringing and she picked up the receiver. Jack Pomfret’s voice sounded down the line. ‘Agatha, Agatha, I can explain . . .’

  Agatha slammed the receiver back on its stand. The phone immediately began to ring again.

  She snatched it up. ‘Look, bugger off, you useless con,’ she snarled. ‘If you think –’

  ‘Mrs Raisin, it’s me, Bill.’

  ‘Oh! I told you to call me Agatha.’

  ‘Sorry. Agatha. So business wasn’t business?’

  ‘No,’ said Agatha curtly.

  ‘Pity. What about dinner tonight?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You, me, dinner.’

  Bill Wong was in his twenties, so any invitation to dinner was prompted by pure friendship. Nonetheless she was flattered and almost tempted to dump the vet. But the vet was nearer her age.

  ‘I’ve got a date, Bill. What about next week?’

  ‘Right. I’ll probably see you before then. Who’s your date with? Lacey?’

  ‘No, the vet.’

  ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean? You mean he’s after my money? Well, let me tell you, Bill Wong, that a lot of men find me attractive.’

  ‘Sure, sure. Talking off the top of my head. See you soon. Only joking. He’s probably loaded.’

  Agatha tried on one dress after the other, gave up and changed into an old skirt and blouse, was about to leave and hurried back indoors to put on the body stocking, the Armani dress, the pearls, and gummed on a pair of false eyelashes she had bought in London.

  James Lacey saw her drive off. He noticed that she no longer went slowly past his house, looking eagerly out of the car window.

  Agatha drove along the Fosse to Mircester, an old cobbled town dominated by a great medieval abbey. She found the restaurant without difficulty. It was more like a dingy shop with closed curtains rather than a restaurant, but she was sure all would be warmth and elegance inside.

  The Stavros Restaurant came as a bit of a shock to her when she walked inside. There was cracked linoleum on the floor and checked plastic table-cloths covered the tables. A few rather dingy enlarged photographs of views of Greece, the Acropolis, Delphi, and so on stared down from the walls.

  Paul Bladen rose to meet Agatha. He was wearing his old tweeds and an open-necked shirt.

  ‘You look very grand,’ he said by way of greeting.

  ‘I didn’t know it would be such a . . . quaint . . . restaurant,’ said Agatha, sitting down.

  ‘The food makes up for the decor.’ He poured her a glass of retsina from a carafe, and Agatha took a swig, mentally damning it as lighter fuel but hoping the alcohol content was enough to give courage.

  A skinny waitress with dead-white Return of the Mutant Women make-up came up with a notebook.

  ‘Watyerwant?’ she asked laconically.

  Agatha, who would normally have told her to buzz off and give her time to choose something had, that evening, decided to play the feminine and submissive woman, so she batted her false eyelashes at Paul and said, ‘You choose for me.’

  The dish was supposed to be stuffed vine leaves. Agatha, poking at it after it had arrived at their table with depressing speed, decided the vine leaves were cabbage and the filling was watery rice.

  She found that by dint of breaking the little packets open and spreading them about her plate she could actually make it look as if she had at least eaten some of it.

  Paul Bladen talked all the while about his hopes to supply Carsely with a really good veterinary service and ordered another large carafe of retsina, as Agatha was making up in drink what she was not getting in the way of food.

  ‘Now,’ he said, smiling into her eyes, ‘tell me all about yourself. How is it that such a sophisticated lady ends up in a Cotswold village?’

  A sober Agatha might have remembered that the Cotswolds, being fashionable, abound in quite a lot of interesting people, but the tipsy Agatha was flattered and told him all about her childhood dream of owning a cottage in the country, how she had built up a successful business, sold it and retired early. ‘Very early,’ said Agatha.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. ‘You haven’t mentioned your husband.’

  Agatha shrugged. ‘I left him years and years ago. I suppose he’s dead.’ Agatha had never even bothered to get a divorce. Paul’s hand was warm and dry and firm. She felt fluttery and breathless, almost as if she were on a first date.

  ‘I’m doing all the talking,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I am working on a dream,’ he said. He released her hand as the waitress came up and put two Levantine sticky cakes, oozing watery honey, in front of them and two cups of black sludge masquerading under the name of Greek coffee.

  ‘I plan to create a really good veterinary hospital,’ he said, ‘but that takes money.’

  ‘You should ask the Carsely Ladies’ Society,’ said Agatha. ‘They’re terribly good at fund-raising.’

  ‘Unlike you, I think they are all too provincial to grasp such a grand concept.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Agatha thought of Mrs Bloxby. ‘They’re really dedicated workers . . . I tell you what. I’ll give you a contribution to start your fund off.’

  Twenty pounds, thought Agatha charitably. After all, he is paying for this quite hideous dinner.

  He seized her hand again. ‘You don’t seem to like your coffee.’

  ‘I like filter coffee.’

  ‘Then let’s go to my place and have some.’ He stroked his thumb over the palm of her hand.

  Well, this is it, thought Agatha, as she drove after his car through the dark winding streets of the old town, this is what I got all dressed up for. But the euphoria induced by all she had drunk was leaving her.

  Paul, in the car in front, stopped outside a small Victorian villa on the outskirts of the town.

  As Agatha followed him into a
gloomy hall, she was suddenly seized with panic as he turned and smiled slowly and intimately at her. Sex! Here it was and here were all the fears. She hadn’t shaved her armpits. What if she wasn’t . . . er . . . gymnastic enough? The house was cold. One of her false eyelashes was beginning to slip. She could feel it. What if she had to undress in front of him and he saw her trying to get out of that body stocking?

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said suddenly. ‘I forgot to leave the cats any water.’

  ‘Agatha, Agatha, they’ll be all right. Come here.’

  ‘And I’m expecting an important phone call from New York and . . . I mean, thanks for the dinner. My treat next time. Honestly, got to rush.’

  Agatha fled down the garden path, stumbling on her high heels.

  She unlocked her car and dived into the driving seat and then drove off, not feeling the panic ebb until she was safely back out of the town and on her road home. Along the Fosse, a police car loomed up in her rear-view mirror. She thought of all she had drunk and prayed they would not stop her and breathalyse her. She dropped her speed to thirty and the police car moved out and passed her.

  She felt bewildered by her reactions to the handsome vet. She had not had an affair with anyone in quite a long time. What a fool she had been. Not once did she allow the thought to form in her head that the idea of love-making without love had become repugnant to her. That was too old-fashioned an idea to admit to, and Agatha Raisin was determinedly modern.

  The next day Paul Bladen went back to Lord Pendlebury’s racing stables. He was to perform Hobday’s operation on a racehorse to stop its roaring. This involved cutting the vocal cords. He filled a syringe with a drug called Immobilon to anaesthetize the animal. Beside him on a small rickety table which he had carried into the stable for the purpose, he placed a glass bottle of Revivon to inject the horse when the operation was over, and also a glass bottle of Narcon, a powerful antidote in case he got any of the Immobilon into his bloodstream by mistake.

  ‘There now, boy, easy,’ he said, patting the horse on the nose as it shuffled and whinnied. He felt irritated that Lord Pendlebury had not even bothered to supply him with a stable-boy to help. The sun was shining in through the open stable door, casting a huge gold rectangle on the cobbles at his feet. He raised the syringe to inject the horse in the jugular vein. The gold at his feet darkened as if a cloud had passed over the face of the sun. Then something struck him savagely on the back of the head and he fell sprawling. Winded but not unconscious, he twisted round on the cobbles. ‘What the hell are you . . .?’ he began.

  A hand twisted the syringe out of his grasp and the next thing he knew, the syringe had been plunged into his chest. He scrabbled desperately at the table where the antidote lay. Even Revivon, the drug to revive the horse, would work if he couldn’t reach the Narcon, but the table was kicked over and he died a few seconds later.

  Agatha heard about his death the following day from Bill Wong, and her first feeling was one of selfish relief that the vet was no longer around to gossip about the way she had fled from his house.

  Agatha had replaced the electric cooker in her kitchen with an Aga stove. The door of the stove was open and a wood fire was burning briskly. A jug of early daffodils from the Channel Islands stood on the window-ledge. The square plastic table was gone and now there was a solid wooden one with a scrubbed top.

  ‘It was a tragic accident,’ said Bill. ‘Some vets won’t work with Immobilon. It’s deadly. There was a case not long ago where the vet put the syringe full of the stuff in his breast pocket and approached the horse. The horse nudged him on the chest, the syringe pricked the vet and that was enough. He died almost instantly.’

  ‘You’d think they’d have some sort of antidote,’ said Agatha.

  ‘Oh, they do, but there’s not often time to reach it. In Paul Bladen’s case, it was on a little table, but either he kicked it over in his death agonies, or the horse kicked it over.’

  ‘You mean it’s like cyanide? You writhe about?’

  ‘Come to think of it, you don’t,’ said Bill. ‘Good way to commit suicide . . . quick and painless. There was one curious thing.’

  ‘Yes?’ Agatha’s eyes brightened.

  ‘No, not that curious. Not murder. There was a lump on the back of his head, but of course it was assumed he got that striking his head when he fell, although he was found lying on his side. His fingerprints were on the edge of the table, as if he’d made an attempt to get to the antidote.’

  ‘And he was all alone?’

  ‘Yes. The reason for that, reading between the lines of old Lord Pendlebury’s statement, is that he high-handedly demanded help. Lord Pendlebury said his stable staff were all too busy and then made sure they were. It was an operation to stop the horse roaring. A lot of racehorses make a roaring sound on the course.’

  ‘Seems brutal.’

  ‘Everything to do with animals is brutal.’

  James Lacey hovered outside Agatha’s door. She had baked him a pie two months ago and he knew he should have returned the pie dish. He had been putting it off. But the fact that Agatha had apparently ceased to pursue him had given him courage. He rang the bell, thinking that with any luck she might be out around the village, and then he could safely leave the pie dish on the doorstep.

  But Agatha answered the door. ‘Come in and have coffee,’ she said, taking the pie dish. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’

  That ‘we’ encouraged James Lacey to step inside. He was writing a military history, and like most writers spent his days looking for excuses not to work.

  He knew Bill Wong and nodded a greeting. James settled down over a cup of coffee, relieved that Agatha was not staring at him in the intense way she usually did.

  ‘We’ve just been talking about Paul Bladen’s death,’ said Agatha. She described what had happened.

  The retired colonel despised what he called ‘women’s gossip’ and would have been amazed had anyone pointed out to him that he was just like the rest of the human race, a gossip himself.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said cheerfully, ‘that a man so generally loathed should be bumped off.’

  ‘But he wasn’t bumped off,’ protested Agatha.

  The people who claim not to be gossips are usually the worst kind, and James Lacey weighed in. ‘How can you be sure?’ he demanded. ‘For a start, did you hear about poor Mrs Josephs? You know she was devoted to that old cat of hers, Tewks. Well, she kept going to Bladen with one excuse or another. One day he asked her to leave the cat with him for a full examination. When she went back to collect her beloved pet, he had put it to death. He said the cat was too old and needed to be put out of its misery. Mrs Josephs was distraught.

  ‘Then there was Miss Simms. She kept going along on one pretext or another. The last time she went, she said, and I believe her, it was because the cat had a genuine complaint. It was scratching and scratching. Bladen told her coldly the cat had fleas, and not to waste his time and be more thorough with her housekeeping. She took her cat back to her former vet, who told her the animal had an allergy. Miss Simms returned to Bladen and ripped him up and down. You could hear it all over the village. But then Bladen had told Jack Page, the farmer, that he was sick of those women and their dreary pets. He only had time for working animals.’

  ‘This must have all happened when I was in London,’ said Agatha. ‘I mean, they all went to him when he first came.’

  ‘They were all in love with him,’ said James. ‘Then for some reason he started to get nasty to a few of them. There are still some who think he’s the best vet ever . . . or was.’

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Mrs Huntingdon, the pretty newcomer with the Jack Russell; Mrs Mason, the chairwoman of the Carsely Ladies’ Society; Mrs Harriet Parr from the lower village; and Miss Josephine Webster, who runs that shop which seems to sell nothing other than dried flowers.’

  ‘How did you learn all this?’ exclaimed Agatha, and then turned pink, fo
r she realized in that moment that he was every bit as much pursued by the village women as Paul Bladen had been.

  ‘Oh, people talk to me,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘You had a dinner date with Bladen,’ said Bill Wong, looking at Agatha. ‘The night before his death, in fact, for I asked you out for dinner and you told me you couldn’t go because you had a date with him.’

  ‘So what?’ demanded Agatha.

  James Lacey looked at her curiously. She was quite attractive, he supposed, in a pugnacious sort of way. In fact, now that she was not oiling all over him, he could see that she did have certain good points. She had a trim, if rather stocky figure, excellent legs, rather small, intelligent brown eyes, and shiny healthy brown hair, worn straight but cut by some no doubt expensive hairdressing master.

  ‘So I’m interested,’ Bill was saying. ‘Where did you go for dinner?’

  ‘That new Greek place in Mircester.’

  ‘Horrible dump,’ said James. ‘Took someone there for dinner myself. Never again.’

  Agatha wondered immediately whom he had taken for dinner, but she said, ‘I didn’t find out all that much about him. Oh, he said his dream was to open a veterinary hospital.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Bill maliciously. ‘Tried to get money out of you, did he?’

  ‘No, he did not!’ yelled Agatha, and added in a quieter voice. ‘It may come as a surprise to you, but he fancied me.’

  ‘I’m glad about that. I mean, you’d suffered enough already with that chap in London trying to cheat you,’ said Bill.

  ‘More coffee?’ said Agatha, glaring at him.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said James Lacey.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Bill. ‘Back to work.’ And he left the kitchen too quickly for James to change his mind and escape.

  Determined to be as remote and cool as possible, Agatha served James with another cup of coffee and then sat at the far end of the table from him. More for something to say than because she was interested, she said, ‘So you think someone might have murdered Paul Bladen?’

  ‘It did cross my mind,’ he said. ‘I mean, it would be so easy to do. Creep up on him when he had a syringe full, knock him on the head . . . No that won’t do. He hadn’t been knocked on the head.’