The Witches' Tree--An Agatha Raisin Mystery

by M C Beaton

  “Put the fecking telly back on, you miserable gauleiter,” she yelled. “I’ll see them in my room in fifteen minutes.”

  Mrs. Bentley shrugged and switched on the television and left the room.

  “Let’s wait outside,” urged Agatha. “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Turning oneself into a foul-mouthed old character. I am not a sweet old lady and you can’t bully me. That sort of thing. So whatever one really was gets buried under layers of an act.”

  Charles felt a lot of that description could be applied to Agatha herself.

  They waited until the Coronation Street theme tune sounded the end of the programme. “You know,” said Charles, “I once had this friend who worked on a newspaper and his job was to look through Hansard to find out who was changing their name. He said it was odd that a lot of people called Smellie would change their names to something like John Smellie or Robert Smellie, but they wanted to keep the Smellie bit.”

  “It is not odd at all,” said a harsh voice in his ear. “I am of the Somerset Smellies.”

  Charles had a mad desire to say he was from the Warwickshire Stinkers but felt Agatha would not forgive him for antagonising the old bird who was now urging them to “Get on with it.”

  Tottering on two sticks, Mrs. Smellie led the way into a sort of waiting room. “You’ll have heard about the murder of Margaret Darby,” began Agatha. “What can you remember about her?”

  “Pathetic little flirt. After my husband, she was. Here, I got a photo of him. All the women were mad about him.”

  Agatha examined a photograph of a small, low-browed, thick-lipped troll of a man. Love is blind, she thought. I’m suddenly fed up with this detective business. I want to go home, sit by the fire and cuddle the cats. She realised the old woman was speaking again.

  “Mind you, it’s a wonder Miss Darby didn’t get married. I mean all that money!”

  “Where did the money come from?” asked Charles.

  “Steel. The parents sold the works a long time back, long before the price of steel dropped.”

  “So why do you think she didn’t get married?” asked Agatha.

  The old eyes were suddenly shrewd. “She lived in a dream world. Read every trashy romance you can think of. She was engaged to John Hardcotte over in Ancombe. Has the garage. Lusty fellow. Then she breaks off the engagement. Lord! Was he ever mad!”

  “Anyone else?” pursued Agatha.

  She sniffed the air like a questing hound. “I’m off! Lunch! Boeuf bourguignon.” And with amazing speed, she creaked to her feet and hurried like a racing land crab out of the room.

  “This place must cost a mint,” said Charles.

  “They all do,” said Agatha. “A lot of them cheat the clients, or so I’ve heard, but this one seems okay if the smell of that food is anything to go by. Should we hang around until after lunch or go and visit this John Hardcotte?”

  “We can do both,” said Charles. “Some pub grub at Ancombe and then see if this chap is still at the garage.”

  Agatha felt a sudden rush of affection for him, but quickly supressed it. Somewhere out there was a simply gorgeous man to wrap her dreams around.

  The pub in Ancombe had obviously changed owners. Formerly called The Wheatsheaf, it had changed the name to The Drop Inn. It was a Victorian building, built to attract the railways workers in the days when Ancombe actually boasted a railway station. But the brewery who had taken it over had decided to Tudorise it with fake plastic beams, uncomfortable settles, and things like brass bedpans which the new owners fondly believed to be some sort of cooking equipment. They sat down on a couple of uncomfortable settles facing each other, Agatha scowling at a sign which said, YE CUSHIONS, 10P EACH.

  “I never thought to say this,” said Agatha, “but we would be better eating at my place, and I refuse to pay for a cushion.”

  “My bum’s numb,” said Charles. “I remember there’s a café by the church.”

  “Let’s go.” As they left, a waitress with large bosoms spilling over a laced bodice leered at Charles and said, “Whither off?”

  “Oh, shove your tits back in and get a bra,” snapped Agatha.

  “My, my, sweetie,” exclaimed Charles outside. “That poor girl. You’re like some sort of wild animal balked of its prey.”

  “Oh, hell. Should I apologise?”

  “Don’t bother. She probably hears worse around closing time. Look, the café is along there.”

  The Dingle Dell café was in the old tradition, run by two elderly ladies. It had lace tablecloths and had decorated menus. They ordered macaroni and cheese followed by apple crumble and cream. “There you are,” said Charles. “Excellent unpretentious food.”

  “Pity they don’t have a licence,” said Agatha.

  “Craving a gin?”

  “No, it’s just I usually have some wine with a meal.”

  “Oh, yeah! Watch it or you’ll end up in the Priory rehab.”

  “Don’t be silly. Let’s find out where this John Hardcotte lives.”

  * * *

  The garage was at the far end of the village. Charles, because his old Bentley was a gas guzzler, insisted they walk there. Agatha wished she had worn flat shoes and as the rain began to fall, decided boots would have been even better.

  There was only one man working on the engine of a Volvo. He was middle-aged and grey haired with a strangely empty face: unwrinkled and expressionless. Even when they introduced themselves and explained the purpose of their visit, he exhibited neither anger nor curiosity. He straightened up and wiped his hands on an oil rag. “I was engaged to Muss Darby.” His voice had a soft Gloucestershire burr. “Her did lead me on. Then she up and says she’s fallen for someone else. Well, my sainted mother, may she rest in peace, always did say I had a tidy business and the women were only after my money. Yes.”

  He fell silent, staring out at the now steadily falling curtain of rain outside the double doors of the garage.

  “But Miss Darby was a very rich woman,” said Agatha.

  “That’s the trouble, see. Then rich folks are tighter than the bark on the tree when it do come to money.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Agatha. Flicking a glance at Charles. “But weren’t you angry?”

  “I dunno. Bit puzzled like. I mean we wasn’t officially engaged. Few folks knew about it. There weren’t no presents to send back.”

  “Who was the man she said she was in love with?” asked Charles.

  “Never did say. And I never did ask. The old vicar, maybe he’d know but he died and his missus went to a nursing home.”

  * * *

  “And that’s where we’ve got to go back to,” said Agatha. “We’ll have to ask her who the latest beau was.”

  “If you’re sure she’ll be awake. Don’t old folks sleep after lunch?”

  “How should I know?” snapped Agatha, ever sensitive about her age.

  “Calm down, old girl, or I’ll take myself off. I’m getting bored.”

  And that was Charles’s fatal weakness, thought Agatha gloomily. He flitted from one thing to entertain him to another … and from one woman to another. Bad husband material. Hard on those thoughts came Agatha’s worry that she was not independent enough. Surely today’s women weren’t hungry for marriage. But then there was that business about children. Perhaps because of her rotten upbringing and drunken parents, she had never craved children. There had been that disastrous marriage to Jimmy Raisin and then the failed one to James Lacey. Jimmy had been a hopeless alcoholic, but James? James, still handsome enough to turn heads? But he had kept to his old bachelor ways and had not wanted her to work and had started to criticise her clothes. She heaved a little sigh. Somewhere out there was some man who would get down on one knee and say …

  “We’re here, Aggie. Say goodbye to your dreams.”

  “I wasn’t dreaming. I was thinking about the case.”

  “Oh, yeah? Come on. Back
to God’s waiting room. Oh, an ambulance is just leaving. One less, I suppose. Oh, look who’s rolling up! Two coppers followed by Bill and Alice. I’m getting a bad feeling.”

  Agatha was already out of the car, shouting, “Bill!”

  He swung round, his almond-shaped eyes looking at her suspiciously. “I must ask you what you’re doing here, Agatha.”

  “We came back to interview Mrs. Smellie again.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me. Why are the police here?”

  “Sudden death. And yes the name is Smellie. So why are you here?”

  “She was the old vicar’s wife and Margaret Darby was engaged and then broke it off and we wondered if she would know who the new beau was.”

  “It’s probably a heart attack. She was very old.”

  “Then why are you both here and not just a uniformed police officer?”

  “A Mrs. Bentley who seems to be a matron type is muttering suspiciously. Mrs. Smellie has no living relatives. We’ll see. Now, get out of my hair, Agatha.”

  * * *

  Agatha and Charles drove to the vicarage to tell Molly the latest news. “How convenient!” exclaimed the vicar’s wife. “But it seems one too many. I think it’ll turn out to be a coincidence. Unless she got hold of some nasty hash.”

  “Never tell me she was a pothead,” exclaimed Agatha.

  “Arthritis. She was crippled with it and in great pain. Someone introduced her to cannabis and she found it relieved the pain a lot. Of course, contrary to what a lot of people think, unless you are a savvy street person, it’s not easy to buy.”

  “I can’t see the stern Mrs. Bentley allowing the smell of cannabis to drift along the corridors,” said Charles.

  “No, but she could eat it,” said Molly.

  “You mean like teenagers and so on who bake up cakes full of hash?” exclaimed Agatha. “What an amazing fund of knowledge you have for a vicar’s wife.”

  “You should have seen our last parish.”

  “But she can’t start baking up cannabis cakes without the smell being noticed or asking for use of the kitchens,” protested Charles.

  “I think she would have had some sort of supplier from around here,” said Molly. “They’re encouraged, surely, to take the air in the garden. She could find a quiet spot and puff away. Now, say somebody knows her habits and gives her some hash-laced cakes. It isn’t like smoking. People often go on eating more than they should, waiting for that high, the one you get immediately from smoking, they take too much, the heart starts racing and they die of a heart attack.”

  Agatha noticed that Charles was regarding the vicar’s wife with a mixture of amusement and admiration. She felt a pang of jealousy. Anxious to take centre stage, Agatha said loudly, “I’ll bet such as Mrs. Bentley didn’t like her suspicions being dismissed by the police. Let’s go back and see if Mrs. Smellie had any visitors after we left.”

  “You go,” said Charles lazily. “If Molly can give me a coffee, I’ll drink it and then be on my way.”

  “I thought you were helping me!” shouted Agatha and then turned red with embarrassment.

  “Aggie, I am not your employee. You’ve got an office of detectives. Summon one if you think you need help.”

  Muttering something that sounded like, “gerrumph,” Agatha left.

  “That is one very lonely and vulnerable lady,” said Molly after the door had slammed. “No, you’re not getting coffee and I have parish work to do.”

  * * *

  Agatha felt uneasily ashamed of herself. It had been a clever suggestion of Molly’s. Charles caught up with her. “You forgot. No car. I’ll drive you to yours.”

  “Okay,” said Agatha sulkily.

  When he dropped her at her car, he studied her brooding face and said, “I do have my own life and my own things to do, Agatha.”

  “I know that,” mumbled Agatha.

  As Agatha climbed into her own car, she noticed smoke rising from James Lacey’s chimney. So he was home. Agatha hesitated. But down inside her was an old fear of rejection and a longing for it at the same time. She remembered reading somewhere that children of unloving parents grew up mistaking rejection for love.

  “Psychobabble,” she muttered, driving off, but deciding to call on her ex-husband later.

  There was no police presence outside the nursing home. Agatha rang the bell and waited. Eventually Mrs. Bentley answered the door. “Oh, it’s yourself,” she said. “Come in. I think we should be having a wee word.”

  She led the way into a side office. She was wearing a plain blue dress with a soft white collar but she seemed, metaphorically, to crackle with starch.

  “It’s like this,” she said, “there’s not going to be a police enquiry although there will be an autopsy. They say it’s a heart attack and as she was in her nineties, what’s the difficulty accepting that?”

  “I’ve just learned she smoked cannabis,” said Agatha.

  “I knew she smoked in the grounds sometimes, but I didnae know it was hash. She was prescribed a cannabis-based drug called Sativex.”

  “You seem to believe there is something suspicious about the death,” said Agatha.

  “It was like this. Just after lunch, she had a visitor, an old lady carrying a box of cakes. Mrs. Smellie had a sweet tooth, but we don’t encourage too many sweet things because they put on weight and it hurts their mobility. She only stayed a few minutes.

  “I went in an hour later to give her her medicine and she was lying on the floor. The windows were open and a freezing wind was blowing in. There was no sign of any of those cakes or the box they came in. That’s why I called the police. I tell you this, Mrs. Raisin, don’t ever get old because your relatives can poison you, shove you downstairs, and the hospitals or nursing homes can bugger up your medicines, but it all comes down, according to the law, as natural causes. You’re old so it doesn’t matter. But there were some crumbs on the table. There was that Chinese-looking detective. He seemed intelligent and sympathetic. I was about to suggest he get the crumbs analysed, but he got a phone call ordering him back to the office.”

  “Have you still got them?” asked Agatha.

  Mrs. Bentley pulled a cellophane packet out of a pocket in her dress.

  “I’ll give you a receipt for that,” said Agatha. “I also want you to sign a statement and date it, saying you gave the crumbs to me for analysis. I’ll send them to the lab in Birmingham and tell them it’s a rush job, although with so much DNA stuff now, they’re mostly overloaded.”

  “Remember if you ever need a place here, it’s a good idea to book in advance.”

  “I hope that’s a long, long time away,” said Agatha.

  “It’d surprise you. It’s like folks put their sons down for Eton the day they’re born. We’ve got a waiting list. Look, if there is something nasty in those crumbs, does that mean there’s a serial killer on the loose?”

  * * *

  Agatha, as she drove off, found herself hoping that the cake crumbs would prove to be innocent. Another murder would bring the world’s press back in full strength and that would mean enormous pressure on the police. They’d be everywhere, blocking off Agatha’s own investigations. She drove to Birmingham and dropped off the packet of crumbs at the laboratory, wincing as they charged her extra for a rush job, rush meaning two weeks’ time at the earliest.

  She stopped off at a large supermarket on the road home intending to buy a microwaveable meal but her eye was caught by a glass case of jam doughnuts. Deciding to buy them for James, she picked out three and put them in a box. Feeling tired, she went into the café and bought a cardboard container of coffee to drink in the car. But the smell of sugar from the doughnut box on the passenger seat was reaching out sticky tentacles to all her senses. One wouldn’t hurt. So Agatha had one, and, before she knew it, she had eaten all the doughnuts and her waistline felt tight.

  Oh, lost youth! Agatha remembered when, not all that long ago, she could
wolf down greasy hamburgers and swallow ice cream sundaes and feel fit, instead of bloated and guilty as she was feeling now. When you entered middle age, guilt set in: guilt about failed marriages, guilt about lost chances, guilt about doughnuts. “Oh, bugger it all!” yelled Agatha to the rain-smeared windscreen.

  * * *

  When James answered the door, Agatha felt a pang of lost possession. The marriage hadn’t worked and she no longer lusted after him, but he was so handsome, he was still a man to parade with a smirk on one’s face of see-what-I’ve-got.

  “Come in and tell me about this local murder,” said James.

  “Murders,” said Agatha gloomily.

  James’s living room was the same as she remembered it to be: book-lined, bright fire and impeccably clean. For the first time, looking at the way the magazines were carefully aligned on the coffee table, she wondered if James suffered a bit from obsessive-compulsive disorder. But then, thought Agatha with a rare burst of self-honesty, housekeeping slobs like herself always regard tidy people as obsessive.

  Agatha began to tell him all about the murders and how Sir Edward had hired her.

  “That’s odd,” said James. “I mean, the man was an ambassador. Why would someone like that employ a sleuth so that he could show off?”

  “I think something nasty happened to him in the African woodshed and he went a bit dotty.”

  “But you said he got another posting!”

  “Yes, but somewhere in the arsehole of the world!”

  “It is all very odd. You’d better take me to see him,” said James.

  “All right. But don’t put him off! I want to solve this case and no one else is going to pay me.”

  “Before we go, let’s check up on his background.” James picked up his laptop from a nearby table and switched it on. After some minutes, village internet in the Cotswolds, being rather slow, James said, “Here we are. Harrow and Winchester. Studied Medieval History at Oxford. Got a first. Weedy-looking fellow. Wait a bit. Joined the Foreign Office but on assignment in Gambia. Worked there as military attaché.”

  “That can’t be him. Let me see. No, James. Although that photo must have been taken some time ago, that’s not Sir Edward.”