A Spoonful of Poison

by M C Beaton

  “Could you please say a few words to the press outside after the service about Betsy?” asked Agatha. “Something nice about such a famous pop star giving up her time?”

  “Of course,” said Arthur.

  “I’ll come with you,” said George.

  “Good idea,” said Agatha brightly.

  “Shouldn’t we be out there interviewing people?” whispered Toni.

  “They’ll all be in church,” muttered Agatha as the vicar rushed off, clutching his sermon.

  The church of Saint Odo The Severe had not escaped the attentions of Cromwell’s troops. There was no stained glass in the windows and bright shafts of sunlight shone through mullioned panes of clear glass. The church was full. Toni fretted. Instead of getting on with the job, they were now trapped inside for a full morning service.

  Agatha wondered where the vicar’s wife had managed to find a hairdresser on a Sunday.

  As the service dragged on, Agatha’s conscience began to get the better of her. George was in the pew in front and all she could do was stare at the back of his head.

  She pinched Toni’s arm in the middle of a rendering of “Abide with Me” and jerked her head to indicate they should leave.

  They both emerged, blinking in the sunlight. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides-or did they call them Girl Scouts these days?-were moving about the village, filling up plastic bags with rubbish. Either they had drafted in troops from surrounding villages, thought Agatha, or this was a very fecund village. “We’ll start with Hal Bassett, the pig farmer,” said Agatha.

  She stopped one of the Scouts and asked the boy if he knew where Bassett’s pig farm was. “I don’t come from here,” said the boy, moodily poking a plastic bag with a pointed stick. “Ask her over there, the girl with the carroty hair. She’s from here.”

  The girl when questioned said that Hal Bassett’s farm was outside the village up on the hill to the left.

  “Is it far?” asked Agatha. She was wearing high-heeled sandals.

  “No,” said the girl, pointing to the left. “You go along to the end of the village and walk straight up the hill. You’ll see a sign to the farm. It’s called Bassett’s Piggery. You can’t miss it. It smells.”

  “What if he’s in church?” asked Toni as they set off.

  “Don’t think so.” Agatha had convinced herself that a jam-loving pig farmer would not be religious.

  It was a long straggling village, possibly built along one of the old drove roads. The church was at one end and the road leading to the farm at the other. The small cottages on both sides of the road did not have any gardens at the front. They seemed to crouch beside the road, small, old and secretive. Nobody moved on the deserted main street. Unlike Carsely, there were no streets leading off the main one. One main street was all there was to Comfrey Magna. In a few gaps between the houses, Agatha could see gardens at the back full of spring blossom, but no one had thought to plant anything in the little bit of earth between the houses and the road in the front. The place was deserted.

  The street was cobbled. A heel of Agatha’s sandal got stuck between the cobbles and was wrenched off.

  “You wait here,” said Toni. “I’ll run back and get the car.”

  Agatha enviously watched her flying figure as Toni raced off down the street. Toni’s fair hair gleamed in the sunlight. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and flat sandals. Why did I get all dressed up? mourned Agatha in all the glory of a mustard-coloured linen suit with a short skirt. Because you wanted to get Gorgeous George’s attention, said the inner governess. Agatha was not plagued by any inner child but by this governess, who yakked on, “Why were you so stupid? What do you know of George? Has he shown any wit, humour, charm or anything? No. So here you are, all dressed up like a dog’s dinner.”

  Agatha began to wish Toni would hurry up. It was as if there was a feeling of dislike emanating from the very stones of the old cottages. She kept feeling there was a face at one of the windows, just seen out of the corner of her eye, but when she whipped round, the window was empty and blank.

  She heaved a sigh of relief when she saw Toni arriving with her car at last. Agatha climbed in. “I’ve got a pair of flat shoes in the back,” she said. “I’ll put them on when we get to the farm.”

  The farm turned out to be nearly at the top of a very steep hill leading out of the village. “I bet he looks like one of his pigs,” said Agatha. “All that jam. He’s probably round and pink like a porker.”

  “It does pong something awful,” said Toni when she drove into the farmyard.

  “I hope he’s at home after all this.” Agatha put on a pair of flat sandals and flexed her toes with relief.

  “It was a funny time of year for a jam tasting,” said Toni. “I mean, you would think maybe after the strawberries came out.”

  “In this backward dump, they probably make jam out of weeds,” said Agatha. “The farm door’s open. Hullo! Anybody at home?”

  A thin, commanding-looking woman dressed in jeans and a washed-up cotton blouse appeared in the doorway. She had thick grey hair, grey eyes and a thin mouth.

  She looked Agatha up and down and sighed. “You Jehovahs,” she said in an upper-class accent. “Dragging your poor children from door to door.”

  “I am not a Jehovah,” snapped Agatha. “My name is Agatha Raisin and this is one of my detectives, Miss Toni Gilmour.”

  “Oh, so you’re the female responsible for the deaths yesterday.”

  “Look,” said Agatha, “I would like to speak to Mr. Bassett.”

  “I am Mrs. Bassett.” Her eyes raked Agatha from head to foot. You could leave the Birmingham slum, thought Agatha, but it was always there, deep inside, waiting to make you feel inferior.

  “It’s Mr. Bassett I want to speak to.” Agatha’s small eyes bored truculently into Mrs. Bassett’s face.

  “Come in,” she said abruptly.

  They followed her into a kitchen which was like something out of the pages of Cotswold Life magazine. It shone and gleamed in the sunlight, from the latest utensils to the copper pots hanging on hooks above a granite counter.

  “Wait there,” commanded Mrs. Bassett, pointing towards a kitchen table surrounded by Windsor chairs.

  She strode out the back door and called in stentorian tones, “Hal!”

  There was a faint answering cry.

  “He’s coming,” said Mrs. Bassett, striding back into the kitchen.

  As usual, Agatha’s eyes ranged around the room looking for an ashtray, but she could not see a single one.

  Mrs. Bassett began to grind coffee beans. She had her back to them and seemed unaware of their very existence.

  Hal Bassett came into the kitchen. Mrs. Bassett swung round. “Boots!” she said.

  Hal retreated to the doorway, sat down on a small stool at the entrance and tugged off his green wellies.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “It’s that Agatha Raisin woman and her sidekick,” said Mrs. Bassett.

  Hal walked up to the kitchen table, twisted a chair round and straddled it. I hate men who do that, thought Agatha.

  He was a tall brown-haired man dressed in a checked shirt and cords. He smelt strongly of pig. “So you’re the female responsible for the mayhem yesterday,” he remarked. His voice was light and pleasant. He had a square regular face. He did not look at all like the kind of person to haunt a jam-tasting exhibition.

  “I’m not responsible for the LSD in the jam-if that is what the drug was,” said Agatha.

  “What did you expect, encouraging a load of riff-raff to come here?” said Hal.

  “It seems as if it had nothing to do with the visitors,” said Agatha. “The exhibition was set up in the marquee early in the morning by the organizers, Mrs. Glarely and Mrs. Cranton. The only people to visit the tent before the opening were yourself, Miss Triast-Perkins, the vicar and his wife and Mr. Selby. Did you taste any of the jam?”

  “No,” said Hal. “I tried to buy a pot of plum jam
from the ones on sale, but I was told I’d have to wait. Mrs. Cranton wouldn’t let me try any of the samples until the place was open to the public. Fair carried away with all this pop-singer nonsense.”

  “Did you go back?”

  “Couldn’t. Got a sow in farrow. I had to get back here.”

  Toni smiled at him. “We aren’t suggesting you had anything to do with it. Of course not. But we wondered whether you might have seen anything when you were in the marquee.”

  Hal smiled back. “What’s a pretty thing like you doing being a detective? No, I didn’t see anything out of the way. But if I remember something, I’ll phone you. Got a card?”

  Toni took out one of her business cards, but before he could take it, it was snatched by Mrs. Bassett, who said icily, “Hal has work to do. If you’ve finished, we’d like to get on.”

  They were just getting into the car in the farmyard when Hal came hurrying out. He thrust a packet of sausages at Toni. “Here you are,” he said. “Prime pork. My own pigs.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Toni. “Does it always pong like this round here?”

  He laughed. “I’ve got a load of pig muck stacked up to sell to the farmers for fertilizer. It’ll be cleared out tomorrow. My pigs don’t smell. Come back sometime and I’ll give you a tour.”

  “Hal!” called Mrs. Bassett from the doorway.

  “Coming.”

  “You’ve made a conquest there,” said Agatha, feeling low. How great it would be to be young and pretty like Toni. George would surely pay attention to her.

  “George was in the tent as well,” said Toni. “I forgot about that. Do you know anything about him?”

  “No, only that his wife died.”

  “Maybe he poisoned her.”

  “Just drive,” said Agatha sourly. “And find the manor house. We’d better have a word with Miss Triast-Perkins.”

  Toni drove back down into the village. “Aren’t we supposed to be reporting to the police?”

  “Later.”

  People were returning from the church service. Toni lowered the window and asked for directions to the manor, and was told it was at the other end of the village, just beyond the church. “Did you see the way they were all looking at us?” asked Toni. “They’re all in their Sunday best, but if you put them in, say, medieval dress, their faces would fit. They looked as if they would really like to lynch us. I bet there’s a lot of nasty things go on behind closed doors here-wife beating, incest and drunkenness.

  “Or maybe they’re too God-fearing to get up to anything nasty,” said Agatha. “Anyway, I could imagine one of them poisoning the jam with some nasty poisonous plant. But LSD? I don’t think any of them would even know where to get it.”

  “Oh, oh.” Toni braked suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Bill’s waving us over to the mobile police unit.”

  Another hour and a half of rigorous questioning by Collins and Wilkes left Agatha beginning to feel as if she had put the LSD in the jam herself.

  When she and Toni were finally allowed to go, Agatha looked around, hoping to see a sign of George, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  They got in the car and drove to the manor house. The large iron gates were propped open. Beside the gates was a lodge house, fallen into disrepair. “I wonder why the lodge was left like that,” said Agatha. “With the clamour for housing these days, you’d think she’d have sold it off.”

  The manor house was a square Georgian building, the front of which was covered by the twisting branches of an old wisteria just coming into flower. Like the village, it had a blank, secretive air. Several of the windows had been blocked up from the days when owners tried to avoid the window tax.

  They got out of the car and Agatha rang the bell. They waited patiently. Turning round, Toni noticed that the garden was unkempt-just a weedy lawn and several bushes planted around it.

  The door opened. “Are you Miss Triast-Perkins?” asked Agatha.

  She was a small thin woman with grey hair worn straight from a centre parting. Her face was thin and her large eyes were pale blue. She was wearing a faded print summer dress.

  “You are that woman who organized the fête,” she said. “You’d better come in.”

  They followed her into a gloomy sitting room where nothing seemed to have been changed since Victorian times: heavy furniture, stuffed birds in glass cases, framed photographs, and a grand piano covered by a fringed shawl.

  “You were in the jam-tasting exhibition before it opened,” began Agatha. “I wonder if you noticed anyone lifting the covers over the jam.”

  “No. I asked Mrs. Glarely if I could see that my marmalade was in a prominent position, but she went all bossy and refused to let me see. Those normally quiet sheepish women can turn quite bullying when they are put in charge of anything. Mr. Bassett came in to see if he could get a taste, but she refused him as well. Mr. Bassett and I talked to the vicar and that silly wife of his, who had just turned up. Oh, and dear Mr. George Selby. Poor man. He does mourn for his wife. She was such a pretty woman and did a lot of work for the parish.”

  “How did she die?” asked Agatha.

  “The poor thing fell downstairs. She was carrying a tray of things and missed her footing. George is an architect and I’d warned him about those stairs. He has an old cottage near the church. Very old staircase, stone, you know, with deep steps.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last year, in June. I don’t think he’ll ever marry again. No one could match up to Sarah.”

  “Sarah being his late wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was pretty?”

  What on earth was Agatha doing? wondered Toni.

  “Oh, so dainty. A little slip of a thing.”

  Agatha began to feel large and lumpy.

  Toni said, “The problem is this. We believe that someone put LSD into the jam-tasting dishes. But the young people at the fête did not begin to queue up, having heard there was some drug available, until after the damage had been done. So it could very well have happened at the beginning, when the jam tasting was open to the public.”

  “You’ll need to ask the organizers who was there. I went off to walk round the other displays.”

  “Where do Mrs. Cranton and Mrs. Glarely live?”

  “On either side of the pub in the main street. Mrs. Glarely on the near side and Mrs. Cranton on the far side.”

  “If you can think of anything at all that might help, please phone me,” said Agatha, handing over her card.

  Outside, Toni asked, “Why all the questions about George?”

  “He was in the tent at the beginning,” said Agatha defensively.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Toni, “it wouldn’t take much effort to slide some LSD into the jam. It’s a clear liquid. Instead of tabs of the stuff, someone could have had a small flask concealed in the palm of their hand. There are too many suspects. How are we ever going to find out who did it?”

  “We’ll just need to push on.” Agatha took the wheel this time, but as they were approaching the vicarage, she saw George going in and slammed on the brakes.

  “Toni, I think it would be a good idea if you could go ahead and interview these ladies on your own. I want to check something with the vicar.”

  And she’s just seen George going in to the vicarage, thought Toni. She really is in pursuit of that man. Aloud, she said cheerfully, “Just park the car. I’ll walk.”

  When Toni had left, Agatha got a bag of make-up out of the glove compartment and repaired her face and brushed her hair.

  The vicarage door was open. She walked in, hearing the sound of voices coming from the back of the house. Through the kitchen window she saw, to her dismay, not only George and the vicar and his wife but Charles Fraith. They were sitting round a garden table under the shade of a cedar tree, chatting animatedly. Trixie Chance had turned into a blonde. Her long hair fell in golden waves to her shoulders. Where
the hell did she get a dye job like that done on a Sunday? wondered Agatha. And blast and damn Charles.

  As she approached the group, Charles called out, “Hi, Aggie. Why didn’t you wake me up when you got home last night?”

  Trixie looked amused. As Agatha sat down in a chair at the table, Trixie asked, “Are you pair an item?”

  “Just friends,” snapped Agatha.

  “Thought so. Bit young for you.”

  Agatha was in her early fifties and Charles in his forties. She decided she actually hated Trixie. A breeze blew across the garden, sending a shower of petals from a fruit tree swirling across the grass. It blew a strand of Trixie’s golden hair onto George’s shoulder. He was sitting very close to her.

  “How have you been getting on with the investigation?” asked Charles.

  “Not very far. The list of suspects gets longer and longer.”

  “I wonder if it was simply one kind of jam that had the LSD in it,” said Charles. “If they could find that out at the autopsy, we could focus on the person who made that jam.”

  “Won’t work,” said Agatha. “Too many people were getting stoned. Toni says someone could have had a small flask of the stuff. Maybe the police should try to trace where that came from. Can’t see the drug dealers selling flasks of the stuff.”

  “It also comes in gelatine squares,” said Charles.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Googled it on your computer this morning,” said Charles.

  Charles looked as lazy and relaxed as always. He was wearing a short-sleeved checked shirt and jeans of that soft expensive blue look which costs a fortune. His fair hair was barbered and his neat features looked amused as he glanced from Agatha around the group.

  “I came to help you,” he said to Agatha. “Perhaps we should start with the jam makers.”

  “Toni’s talking to two of them, so that leaves four.” Agatha took out her notebook. “No, it leaves two. Mrs. Andrews and Mrs. Jessop were jam makers. The two remaining ones are Miss Tubby and Miss Tolling. Was there a lot of competition amongst the jam makers?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the vicar. “Mrs. Andrews usually won. Her chunky marmalade was superb.”