The Witches' Tree--An Agatha Raisin Mystery

by M C Beaton

  “‘From Hell to Hell. The Nightmare of the Priest’s Wife.’”

  Rory’s not a priest, he’s a vicar.”

  “It’s a French mag. Oh, that poor woman. She’ll be mobbed by the press again.”

  Agatha was quiet and thoughtful on the road home. As the train lurched over the points out of Paddington Station, she thought of all the times as a young girl, she had dreamt that one day the miracle would happen and she would wake up beautiful and glamorous. But in her old work as a public relations officer, she had represented beautiful and famous girls. But most of them seemed to be destined to end up as arm candy, and then, like the trophy wives in the Cotswolds, start to fight a long and expensive battle with age, frightened that any wrinkles would land them in the divorce court. James had fallen asleep. He had loved her once. But what sort of love was it where the man laid down the law that you shouldn’t work for a living and what to wear? The opposite was Charles who had bedded her a few times. An expert lover but a silent one. Not one word of passion had ever escaped his lips. He had once asked her to marry him but they had both decided it wouldn’t work.

  “What are you scowling about?” demanded James.

  “Just thinking about Molly,” said Agatha.

  “She’s probably fled to relatives in Scotland.”

  “I didn’t know she was Scottish.”

  “Educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, hence the accent.”

  “What does the family do?”

  “Made a fortune out of slavery in the eighteenth century and then tea plantations in India and then railways. Hurry up. We’re at the station.”

  Agatha shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. All that money. She could have transformed that horrible vicarage.”

  “They’ve only just settled in. And she’s a woman, remember? She’s got three brothers so it could be she only gets a small allowance from a family trust.”

  “She wears supermarket clothes but I thought maybe she was being trendy. Supermarket chic is supposed to be the latest thing. You’re making me feel I haven’t been doing my job thoroughly, James. I didn’t know any of this. Why on earth do you think she married a vicar and went to live in that hellhole in London?”

  “It’s called love, Agatha. Heard of it?”

  “Once upon a time,” said Agatha. She closed her eyes and feigned sleep until sleep became a reality, only waking as the train pulled in to Oxford where they changed for the train to Moreton-in-Marsh.

  Once back in Carsely, she refused James’s offer of a drink. After she had petted her cats and fed them, she sat down and switched on her computer. Forget the murder of the policeman and of Mrs. Smellie, if Mrs. Smellie’s death should prove to be murder, and concentrate on Margaret Darby. She had dumped John Hardcotte. Why? Did she try to compete with her sister? Her sister had been married three times and that was a lot to try to rival. Let’s see, thought Agatha, woman with a lot of money can get married easily. Maybe Margaret had been a romantic, always looking for the perfect knight. Think about that. How old did they say she was? Sixty-four. “Sixty-four and never been kissed,” said Agatha.

  “Who hasn’t?” demanded a voice behind her, making her shriek.

  “It’s me, Roy Silver, Aggie. Your cleaner let me in and I fell asleep on your sofa. Doris knows we’re old friends.”

  Roy Silver had once worked for Agatha when she ran her own public relations firm. He was weedy and effeminate. Agatha knew the only reason for his visit was his craving for personal publicity. He knew of old that a combination of Agatha Raisin and murder meant plenty of press coverage and he chased personal publicity as vividly as if acting as his own PR. People like Agatha might despair at what they saw as their lack of good looks, but every time Roy looked in the mirror, he saw a fascinating man. He was wearing jeans with holes at the knees and a denim jacket.

  “What’s with the retro look?” asked Agatha. “Ripped jeans?”

  “It’s back. And the cheap look is in. Anyway, what about this murder, or murders? You’ve just got to introduce me to this vicar’s wife.”

  “You must be joking. She’s probably fled the country by now.”

  “But I simply must see this village. Can we go tomorrow? Pretty please.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work? Wait a moment. Your employer has a difficult one and he sent you down here to pick my brains so you decided to kill two birds with one stone. Out with it.”

  “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

  “Help yourself and get me a G and T.”

  With a drink on her desk, Agatha lit a cigarette and swung her typing chair round to face Roy. “Don’t dare say anything about smoking. Out with it.”

  “You’ve heard of Pamela Forwith?”

  “Who hasn’t? Chain-store heiress addicted to la dolce vita. What’s she been up to?”

  “Someone sold photos of her to Husky mag. Three in a bed.”

  “Are the men saying it’s them with her?”

  “No.”

  “Right, get her on the phone and tell her to open an AIDS hospice.”

  “Not fashionable anymore. Not now people are living and Bill Gates has given just this year five billion to AIDS research.”

  “Decent men like him don’t need creeps like us to sort out their scandals,” said Agatha.

  “Think! You’re not helping,” poured Roy.

  “I’ve got it. Prince William and Kate and Harry and all red-hot for mental health support. Get her to open up a mental health clinic which will take the bad cases from the NHS and get a royal to be there at the opening. You got the photos? I thought so. Let’s see.”

  Roy passed the photos over. “You can’t really see her face, so the fly in the ointment is whoever sold the pix. Where did you get these?”

  Roy hung his head.

  Agatha gave a slow smile. “You got someone to break into the mag’s offices and pinch them. So what’s the big fat hairy deal? Without these pix, the story’s dead. Oh, oh. The photographer, yes?”

  “The mag’s not paying him and he’s going to sue.”

  “Where were the photos taken?” asked Agatha.

  “At her Chelsea flat.”

  “So he must have broken in to set up the equipment.”

  “Maybe not,” said Roy. “You can buy an alarm clock these days with a video camera in it.”

  “That’s an idea. Say she gets a present of an alarm. She might just put it beside the bed. Somehow the photographer—what’s his name?”

  “Barry Jinson.”

  “Right. He calls the next day after the orgy that one of the men had let slip was about to happen. Says the alarm was delivered in error. Apologies and all that. She hands it back and he’s got the pix. Phone her up and ask her if she got any odd sort of present before the orgy and someone came and wanted it back. Take the phone in the other room. I hate the sound of you grovelling.”

  * * *

  Agatha’s stomach gave a rumble. She was hungry again. It was too late to go anywhere for dinner. Restaurants in the Cotswolds closed down at nine-thirty in the evening. Of course, they could drive out to one of the motorway places and eat junk food.

  Roy came back. “Hear this. She got the most beautiful antique doll delivered. She put it on a chair in her bedroom.”

  “But how would anyone know she would put it there?”

  “Either it was a good guess or the man who put this Barry fellow up to it was confident he could shift it if it wasn’t in a good place.”

  “Has she still got the doll?”

  “No. It was gone the next morning.”

  “Rats,” said Agatha. “We have this unknown man to cope with. Did she know all these men?”

  “One she didn’t. Harold Peterson, some wrestler. He’s gone off to the States, didn’t know about it and the magazine never tried to contact him. The other is called Frank Aboty. I looked him up. Hedge fund banker.”

  “What’s he doing? What’s he got against her? Oh, sod
this. I haven’t time to play unpaid detective.”

  “I have,” said Charles, strolling in.

  “This is not Liberty Hall,” complained Agatha. “Oh, sit down and hear the story.”

  Charles listened carefully and said, “You haven’t done your research properly, Roy. Aboty has a twenty-two-year-old son who was engaged to Pamela and she jilted him. Leave it to the expert. Listen and learn. Give me this photographer’s phone number, Roy. Right. Agatha, there’s a rerun of The Bill on. Switch it on and if there’s a bit with police station noises, turn up the sound. Roy, the minute I tell him to call Scotland Yard, you dial a number on your phone, a number you know will just ring because no one’s there and come over and hold it against my phone.”

  He dialled a number and waited. Then Charles, in a broad Scottish accent, demanded, “Is that Mr. Barry Jinson?”

  “Yes, who is calling?”

  “My name is Detective Henry Channing of the hate crimes office. What? Oh, aye. Phone back. You’ve got the Scotland Yard number. That’s just fine. I’ll wait for your call.” He did not hang up at his end however. Roy rushed up and held his ringing phone against Charles’s receiver. Charles counted to five and then said in an Essex accent, “New Scotland Yard.”

  “I wish to speak to Detective Henry Channing,” said Barry.

  “Putting you through.”

  On the television screen, two policemen were talking against a background of ringing phones. Agatha turned the sound up.

  “Mr. Jinson?”

  “Yes.” Charles mouthed tape recorder at Agatha who opened her handbag, took out the powerful little recorder she always carried with her and switched it on.

  “Aye, well, it is like this. We have evidence that because a Mr. Aboty wished to ruin the reputation of a certain lady that he colluded with you to take photographs of her in a compromising position.”

  “It was Aboty’s idea,” wailed Barry. “Just a joke, see.”

  “But you subsequently sold these photos to Husky magazine.”

  “They’ve lost them,” gabbled Barry. “No harm done. Look, it was a joke. I promise neither of us will contact or go near her again.”

  “We’ll maybe have to take your word for it, laddie. Let me be having a wee word with my boss. Miss Pamela has been fairly generous to our Widows and Orphans Charity. I’ll be calling you back.”

  Charles rang off. “Let’s see if that works. What’s happening with your murders, Agatha?”

  “Nothing so far,” said Agatha, deciding not to talk about the rape of the vicar’s wife in front of Roy. Roy knew so many people and Roy gossiped. “I’m hungry. Anyone fancy going out to a greasy spoon on the nearest motorway?”

  “I’ve eaten,” said Charles, “but I’ll come with you and have a coffee.”

  “Actually, I could murder an all-day breakfast,” said Roy.

  As they were getting their coats on, Roy’s mobile rang. He turned a whiter shade of pale and shot out of the room, saying, “Oh, God. It’s her!”

  Agatha and Charles waited. “Why does he do it?” asked Charles. “Public relations, I mean. He’s always rushing to you for help.”

  “He’s in love with publicity and he’s in love with famous people. PR gives him a foot in the door.”

  “Maybe we should take our coats off,” said Charles.

  They waited anxiously. Finally Roy came back, looking radiant. “That was Pamela. Barry phoned her up in tears and swore on so many Bibles that no one is talking. I told her how I masqueraded as a Scotland Yard detective. She says I am the most brilliant man in the world to think up such a trick. And I told her my idea of opening a mental health clinic so as to give her a Princess Di profile and she said I was so wonderful that I have to handle all her publicity in the future. So, my darlings, I am going back to London pronto. Sometimes my sheer cleverness amazes me!”

  “Actually, it was my trick,” said Charles. “Sometimes your barefaced cheek amazes me!”

  “I could hardly tell her I’d been talking to friends about her sex life, now could I? I think I’d better go back to London,” said Roy.

  * * *

  Agatha and Charles headed for a restaurant called The Burger Basement on the nearest ring road. It wasn’t in a basement but someone had thought up the name and found it good. Agatha wolfed down a cheeseburger and fries. “I really must go on a diet,” she sighed.

  “Exercise is the thing. I thought you were going to a Pilates class.”

  “I was. The trouble was I felt so noble after each session that I rewarded myself with chocolate.”

  “So let’s get back to the case in hand,” said Charles. “The vicar seems to have pulled a lot of strings to keep his wife’s case out of the papers. So say Margaret Darby finds out. Maybe she’s jealous of Molly’s beauty and taunts her with it. That policeman finds the evidence when he’s snooping around her house and so he has to go as well.”

  “The one thing against that theory is the death of Mrs. Smellie. My money’s on some sort of lover who was after her money. What if the sister doesn’t inherit? I’ll get Patrick to find out the name of her lawyer.”

  “We could just go and ask her. Where does she live?”

  “Don’t know. I do know she’s called Laura Darby. Patrick said she came in to talk to Wilkes and then stayed at the George which means she can’t be local. I’ll call Patrick.”

  Patrick said he had found her address in Oxford. Number four, Bentley Lane in Jericho. “Why is it called Jericho?” Agatha asked, after she had rung off.

  “It used to be outside the city walls where travellers rested. So they say that’s how it got its name. Anyway, it was a red-light district in the fifties and the whole place was nearly demolished, but the preservationists saved it and now it’s des res.

  “I’ll come with you, or is James going?”

  “No, I didn’t ask him.”

  “It’s late. Get me back to my car and I’ll see you at what? Nine?”

  “Fine,” said Agatha.

  Chapter Six

  “Will the sun never shine again?” mourned Agatha as she cruised along Walton Street in Oxford. Her windscreen was smeared with a greasy drizzle. Brown autumn leaves swirled in front of the car, blown by a gusty wind. “We should be nearly there.”

  “There! Turn right,” ordered Charles. “You must be the last person in the world who doesn’t have a sat-nav.”

  “It’s all that technical guff,” protested Agatha. “Maybe next year. Here we are. You park this damned thing. That space is too small.”

  “That space is big enough for a flatbed truck,” said Charles. “Oh, don’t glower. I’ll do it.”

  Agatha turned her head away as Charles efficiently parked her car. She hated people parking the car for her. They always looked so smug. She looked instead at the two-up two-down house where Laura lived. No garden at the front. Originally a worker’s cottage. Cheap brick, north facing, probably damp. Fashion was an amazing thing, reflected Agatha, when someone as rich as Laura should choose to live in a dump like this.

  When Charles joined her Agatha said, “There’s a sign there. It’s residents’ parking only.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be out of here before they catch us.”

  Agatha rang the bell in a box on the wall beside the red-painted door.

  Above the bell, a camera swivelled to look down at them. “Who are you?” demanded a tinny voice from the bell box.

  “Agatha Raisin, private detective and Sir Charles Fraith.”

  “Well, you can just push … Did you say Charles Fraith?”

  “Yes,”

  “Wait a minute!”

  Rattle of locks being opened before the door swung open. “Why, it is you, Sir Charles,” cooed Laura. “I went to your fete last year. Such a pity about the rain. Do come in to my humble abode.” Ignoring Agatha, she seized Charles by the arm as if arresting him.

  “We’ll talk in my little sanctum,” she said, propelling Charles into a front room and shutting the
door on Agatha. To Charles’s surprise, Agatha didn’t open the door and follow them in. Laura’s “sanctum” looked like a stage set. Shelves of hardback books lined one wall, all the covers still bright and new. A painting of a green and orange nude was hung over the fireplace which did not boast a fire but an arrangement of pinecones painted silver. Tables and whatnots were covered with framed photographs of Laura at different points in her life. There was, however, one stylish piece of what Charles at first took to be modern sculpture until it dawned on him it was a Dyson heater looking like a piece by Henry Moore.

  “Do sit down,” gushed Laura. “A leetle sherry?”

  “No, I’m fine. We wanted to know if your sister had any beau other than John Hardcotte.”

  “Not that I know of, but she did hint. She was always hinting that some man was desperately in love with her. Poor Margaret. She was quite smitten with the new vicar until she saw his wife. Can’t compete with that! Then she was always haunting Sir Edward’s place until his wife told her to go away although one could compete with her. Sir Edward, poor man, is quite dotty. I believe something nasty happened to him in the jungle.”

  “Amazing,” said Charles. “You live here and yet you seem to have picked up an enormous fund of gossip about Sumpton Harcourt.”

  “I used to visit Margaret until recently when she went all funny about my diamond brooch. Said Mother had left it to her. Rubbish! Said she wanted to wear it on her wedding day. I asked her what she was talking about and what wedding and she did that silly wouldn’t-you-like-to-know smirk of hers. Poor deluded Margaret. She was always fancying herself in love with this or that. But usually it was someone unobtainable. Then she could dream without really having to commit.”

  Charles was seated in an armchair beside the fireplace. “Now, little me has no trouble at all in committing to all sort of naughty, naughty things.” To Charles’s horror, she rose swiftly from the sofa, crossed the room and perched on the arm of his chair.

  He leapt to his feet, nearly knocking her over. “Good gracious. Is that the time? Such good company I quite forgot I have to see my bank manager.”

  He fled from the room and out into the windy street to find Agatha behind the wheel placidly smoking a cigarette. “Drive on,” ordered Charles, getting into the passenger seat.