by M C Beaton
Mrs. Bloxby, who was now chairwoman – no PC rubbish about chairpersons in Carsely – rose to put forward the arrangements for the forthcoming village fête. For once, Agatha did not volunteer to do anything. She was tired of village affairs and felt she had done enough in the past.
The other women there did not cut her dead once the business part of the evening was over. But they would ask her if she had any word of her husband and then move quickly away. Only Miss Simms pulled up a chair next to Agatha and said, “Wouldn’t you feel better doing something at the fête, dearie? I mean, we need someone for the tombola. Take your mind off things.”
“The way I feel at the moment,” said Agatha, “a village fête would be incapable of taking my mind off things.”
Miss Simms tugged ineffectively at her short skirt, which was riding up over her lace-topped stockings. “Anything I can do to help?”
“I keep trying to find out what sort of person Melissa Sheppard really was.”
“Bit of a tart, if you ask me.”
“How come?”
“Went up to London with her a couple of months ago. I don’t have a gentleman friend at the moment, and she says there’s this singles’ bar with good talent and why don’t I come along. So I did. Well, it was really rough stuff, if you get me. I like my gents in suits and with their own car. We get tied up with three bikers, all leather and medallions, and Melissa, she says, “We’re all going back to Jake’s place,” Jake being one of the blokes. I take her aside and say, “What you on about, Liss? They’re a bit common and there’s three of them.” She’d drunk a bucketful, pretty quick, and she says, says she, “The more the merrier.” So I got the hell out of there and had to find me way to Paddington and pay for me fare home, ‘cos we’d come up in her car. I asked her later how she’d got on, and she says, “Okay, and I didn’t take you to be a Miss Prim,” so I never spoke to her again.”
At last I’m getting somewhere, thought Agatha. “I’d like to speak to those bikers,” she said. “Would you like to go to London with me and spot them for me? Did they seem like regulars?”
Miss Simms looked at her doubtfully from under a pair of improbably false eyelashes. “They did seem to be regulars, but…”
“Don’t worry,” said Agatha. “I’ll pay for everything, even for your baby-sitter, and I’m not looking for a fellow.”
“Right. You’re on.”
“What time did you turn up there before?”
“Bout nine in the evening.”
“Right. We leave about seven. Should make it in good time. The rush-hour traffic should be thinning out by then.”
Shortly after Agatha got home, the phone rang. It was Charles. “How’s it going?” he asked.
Agatha, glad that he had not abandoned her after all, felt relieved and told him about the singles’ bar.
“I’ll come with you.”
“Okay,” said Agatha after a little hesitation. “It’s a bit rough, so don’t look too posh.”
He laughed. “As if I could.”
And he really believes that, thought Agatha. How odd.
∨ The Love from Hell ∧
5
HAD London always been so dirty and shabby? wondered Agatha. Surely not. The singles’ bar was off Piccadilly Circus, and not, as Agatha had guessed, in some dreary suburb. Certainly it was a hot summer which always gave the city a tired, exhausted air. Charles managed to find a space in an underground car-park a short walk from the bar.
Agatha was wearing a silk trouser-suit which had looked very sophisticated and smart in her bedroom mirror at home. But as they walked through the crowds, she noticed women wearing floaty summer dresses, or very short skirts and brief tops, and began to feel like a frump. She was wearing flat gold leather shoes and wished now she had worn heels. Miss Simms teetered along in very high heels and a skirt that verged on the indecent as she was showing her usual glimpses of stocking tops. Charles was dressed in a soft blue cotton shirt, chinos, and moccasins. Agatha felt she was the only one who didn’t fit in with the cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Miss Simms’ singles’ bar turned out to be a disco called Stompers. “Are you sure this is the place?” asked Agatha. The young people trooping in ahead of them all looked trendily dressed.
“Yeah, this is it,” said Miss Simms, clutching Charles’s arm. “Not my sort of place.”
Agatha paid the entrance fee and they went downstairs to a large room where couples gyrated under darting strobe lights. The music was loud, horrendously so. It beat upon their ear-drums and made conversation impossible.
They made their way to the bar and in a brief moment when the music ceased, Agatha said, “Do you see them?”
“Not yet,” said Miss Simms. She hitched herself up on the bar-stool and the resultant display of lace stocking tops and frilly knickers meant that she was immediately asked to dance.
Agatha put her mouth to Charles’s ear and shouted, “Waste of time.”
As dance number followed dance number – hadn’t they moved on from The Village People? – Agatha began to get angry. Miss Simms hadn’t returned. This was not a singles’ bar. It was a disco for young people. She was feeling hot and tired and deafened.
She was just about to shout to Charles to go and collect Miss Simms and get them out of the noise and into the fresh air when Miss Simms suddenly appeared in front of them accompanied by a burly young man.
“Ere’s one of them,” she roared.
Charles took the young man aside and shouted something. Then he jerked his head at Agatha and they all made their way out of the club.
“Thank God for that,” said Agatha, taking in great gulps of polluted air. “This here is Jake,” said Miss Simms. “He was one of them that was with Melissa.”
Jake did not look like a bit of rough stuff to Agatha. He was wearing a black T-shirt, black trousers and enormous boots, but; he had a pleasant-enough face.
“What’s all this about?” asked Jake when they had managed to get a table at a nearby pub. “I read she’d got topped. Nothing to do with me.”
“The thing is,” said Agatha, “my husband’s missing and he’s suspected of having committed the murder. I don’t know what Melissa was really like. I mean, what did you make of her; what really happened?”
“Well, for a start, you can’t tell with the lights in there and she was heavy made up, you see. When we got back to our flat, and I got a good look at her, I thought; blimey, I thought, I ain’t reduced to screwing someone as old as my mum. Besides, she was as pissed as a newt. Must have been drinking a lot in the club.”
“She was,” interjected Miss Simms.
“So me and the others had a confab in the kitchen and my mates, that’s Jerry and Wayne, they says, get rid of the old bird. So I go back in and tells her, “You’ll need to go, we’ve got a date later with our girl-friends.” She says she could teach us a few tricks, like we didn’t know. Disgusting, it was.” He grinned cheekily at Agatha. “Don’t know what the older generation’s coming to.” Miss Simms giggled and sipped at a blue drink which seemed to be full of fruit and decorated with small paper umbrellas.
“Told her she wasn’t on. No way. ‘Get the hell out,’ I said. She asks for a drink for the road, so I gives her one and goes into the kitchen to tell my mates I’ll soon have her out and I go back and the old bird’s passed out on the sofa. So we all carry her downstairs and sit her on the pavement with her back to the railings and then we all went back to the club. When we got back – oh, ‘bout two in the morning – she’d gone.”
Charles looked at Jake thoughtfully. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “I can understand you mistaking her age and going off with her, but why bring your mates along? Did you all mean to have her?”
“What sort of blokes do you think we are?” demanded Jake truculently.
“We’re not the police,” said Agatha, “and we’re not interested in your motives. Can I tell you what I think? There’s one thing I do know about Melissa and
that is she was a fantasist. So what would get you all to go along? And I don’t think any of you made a mistake about her age. Drugs! The silly cow probably told you she knew where to score.”
“Do I look like a junkie?” demanded Jake.
“Come on, tell us,” pleaded Agatha. “We won’t go to the police. I just have to know how far she would go with lying.”
“It’s worth fifty pounds,” said Charles suddenly.
Jake sat with his head down. Then he said, “How can I trust you?”
“Simply because we’re not the police,” said Charles. “You don’t look like a junkie. So what was it? Pot?”
He shrugged and then said, “Yeah, that was it. Told us her lover was a dealer and she could get us the best Colombian. She said she would phone him from our place. When we gets there, she starts to come on to us, and I mean all of us. It was right disgusting. “Phone your friend,” we says. She keeps saying, “Later, let’s have some fun.” So we leave her with the whisky bottle and have that confab in the kitchen and we decide she’s lying and when we go back in, she’s passed out, like I said, and so we leave her on the pavement, like I said. Silly old trout.” He focused on Agatha. “I saw your picture in the newspapers. She was knocking off your old man, wasn’t she?”
Agatha averted her eyes.
“Forget about that,” said Charles. He turned to Miss Simms. “You didn’t know anything about this?”
“No. You can’t hear a thing in that club.”
“What about my fifty pounds?” demanded Jake.
“Could you pay, Aggie?” said Charles. “I’m a bit short.”
“I paid the entrance fees to that disco.”
“I’ve got me cheque-book with me,” said Miss Simms with all the misplaced generosity of the poor.
“No, that’s all right.” Charles stood up and took out his wallet. He peeled off notes and handed them to Jake. “Give him your card, Aggie. Ring us if you think of anything else, Jake.”
“Right. I’m off then.” Jake stood up and then looked down at Miss Simms. “I’m going back to the disco. You coming?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Simms primly. “I’m going home with my friends.”
Miss Simms looked disapprovingly after Jake’s retreating back. “Cheek!” she said. “I like my gentlemen to be more mature. In fact, Eddie’s back again.”
“Who’s Eddie?” asked Agatha.
“He’s the one before last,” said Miss Simms. “Ever so nice. In bathroom fittings in Cheltenham. His wife’s left him. Not for me. They never find out about me. I’m not a tart, like some I could mention. No, she left him for a man in surgical goods.”
♦
After they had deposited Miss Simms at her home, Agatha and Charles sat in the kitchen of Agatha’s cottage and mulled over the little information they had. “You know what hurts?” said Agatha. “It’s just that the more we find out about Melissa, the more horrible it seems that James had anything to do with her.”
“I think men under sentence of death will do things they might not otherwise have contemplated. Then James was always a violently jealous man.”
“James!”
“Yes, James.”
“I never really thought of him as being jealous,” said Agatha. “I was always so violently jealous myself.”
“Agatha admits to a fault! Goodness me.”
“Never mind that. What about this business of Melissa saying she had a lover who was a drug dealer?”
“That was sharp of you to guess about drugs. What put you on to that?”
“Just a wild guess. And all this nonsense of Miss Simms about rough trade. I mean, she’s very genteel. I thought it would be a real dive, but it seemed a respectable Piccadilly disco. It wasn’t even a singles’ bar either. What took Melissa there?”
“Sex?”
“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think she was a real murderee. I mean, those lads could have turned out to be dangerous. Anyway, to get back to the drug-dealer lover. If only that would turn out to be true. It would supply a motive.”
“I can’t believe in this drug dealer. If Melissa coerced Miss Simms into going up to London with her, maybe she got friendly with someone else in the village.”
“She probably mistakenly picked on Miss Simms,” said Agatha bitterly, “because she thought her morals were as loose as her own. No one else in the village fills that bill.”
“There might be someone. I mean, on the face of it, Melissa was just the perfect village housewife, apart from her fling with James. You know, Aggie, we can’t keep leaving James out of the equation.”
“He didn’t do it!”
“But he got involved in something that meant he was attacked and probably by the same person who killed Melissa.”
“That might bring us back to the husbands. We never really got to talk to Mr. Dewey properly.”
“Let’s leave him alone for a bit,” pleaded Charles. “Gosh, I’m tired. Mind if I stay the night?”
“You know where the spare room is.”
“I’ll get my bag out of the car.”
Agatha watched him go, half amused, half exasperated. In the past, Charles had sometimes moved in with her. It was always because he was bored, or because the elderly aunt who lived with him had decided to hold a charity party and he wanted to stay out of the way until it was over. She knew that if Charles was courting some girl – for he was ever hopeful of getting married – he would disappear from her life for months. The fact that he never managed to secure any sort of lasting relationship Agatha put down to his being tight with money. Then, people who were tight with money were also inclined to be tight with emotions. Not much giving, emotionally or physically.
“What are you brooding about?” Agatha started. She had been so immersed in her thoughts, she had not heard Charles coming back into the kitchen.
“You,” said Agatha.
He sat down and looked at her, amused. “What about me?”
“I was wondering why you never had a permanent girlfriend.”
“And what do you think is the reason?”
“I think it’s because you’re mean about money. What woman is going to put up with someone who takes her out for dinner and forgets his wallet, or, in your case, pretends to forget it?”
“What a funny woman you are. That reminds me. You owe me half of that fifty quid.”
The next morning Agatha arose late and to the smell of frying bacon. She was half-way down the stairs in her night-gown when she remembered that Charles was staying. She retreated up the stairs and quickly showered and dressed. When she went back down again, it was to find Charles eating breakfast and chatting to her cleaner, Doris Simpson.
Agatha and her cleaner were two of the few women of Carsely who called each other by their first names. “Hullo, Agatha,” said Doris. “Just about to get started. If you’re finished upstairs, I’ll begin with the bedrooms. Late night?” Her eyes slid from Charles to Agatha.
“A celibate late night,” said Agatha firmly. “We’ve been up to London, trying to find out more about what a sort of person Melissa was.”
“I cleaned for her, you know,” said Doris, her voice muffled as she bent down to take out more cleaning material from a kitchen cupboard.
Agatha and Charles stared at each other. “Sit down, Doris,” said Agatha. “I didn’t know you cleaned for her. You didn’t say anything.”
Doris sat down reluctantly. “Didn’t like to, given the circumstances. Didn’t think you’d want to hear her name mentioned. And you’ve been looking so ill. I was right worried about you.”
“We’re trying to establish what sort of person Melissa was,” said Charles. “You see, that way we might figure out why she was murdered.”
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about this,” said Doris. “It was all hush-hush. But, then, she’s dead.”
Agatha and Charles looked at her eagerly. “What do you; mean, hush-hush?”
“She told me,” sai
d Doris, looking over her apron shoulder and dropping her voice to a whisper, “not to touch anything on her desk. She said she was working on a secret project for the government. I should’ve told the police.”
Agatha sighed. “The one thing we have found out about Melissa was that she was a fantasist and a liar. But how long did you work for her?”
“Just a day a week.”
“Until she died?”
“No, I quit before then.”
“Why?”
Doris turned an uncomfortable red. “Do I have to tell you?”
“I think you’d better.”
“I went along one morning. She wasn’t around. She had given me a key, so I got started. I thought I would do the bedrooms first.”
She stared at Agatha.
Agatha sighed wearily. “You found her in bed with James.”
“Yes.”
“I gave her a piece of my mind and handed the key back and got out of there.”
James, James, how could you, and with such a woman? mourned Agatha.
Aloud, she said, “Forget about that part, Doris, and the hush-hush business. What else did you think about her?”
“She was very fussy. She would check up on my work. I said if she wasn’t satisfied, I’d quit, and she laughed and said that one time she used to have a lot of servants, butler and footmen and all that, and she was used to supervising and checking. Funny, I didn’t believe her. I mean, no one outside a few and the Queen has servants like that these days. But I didn’t think much about her one way or the other.”
“Even though you believed she was working for the government?” asked Charles.
“I didn’t think much about that. I mean, the Cotswolds are full of retired military people who like to hint they were in intelligence during the war. “I worked for the little grey men of Whitehall, for my sins.” And then you find they had some sort of minor desk job. I thought maybe she was doing some typing for a local MP, something like that. But the reason I didn’t tell the police was because she had made me promise not to tell anyone and there could have been some truth in it. I sometimes reckon I’m too cynical. You get that way cleaning houses. I’d better get on, Agatha.”
