by M C Beaton
To Agatha's relief, James abruptly lost interest in anything further that Miss Purvey might have to say. He put down his cup.
"Thank you for your hospitality. We really must be going."
"Oh, must you? I could be of help to you, I think."
"You have already been of great help," said James courteously.
"That's very kind of you." Agatha said, getting to her feet and gathering up her handbag and gloves. "But I don't see - "
"My powers of observation," she cried. "I would make a very good detective. Now, now, Mr. Lacey," she said roguishly, "you have already marked me down as an expert sleuth!"
"Quite," he said hastily. He took out a card and gave it to her. "If you find anything, I will be at this address."
After they had gone, Miss Purvey paced up and down her small cottage living-room. She felt excited, elated. That handsome Mr. Lacey had looked at her in such a way! She walked to the window and peered up, rubbing the glass. The mist had taken on a yellowish light showing that, far above, the sun was trying to struggle through.
Miss Purvey had a sudden longing for the lights and shops of Mircester. She had one close friend, Belinda Humphries, who ran a small dress shop in a shopping arcade in Mircester. Miss Purvey decided to go and see her, relishing the joys of describing James Lacey and the way he had looked at her. Of course, he had had Mrs. Raisin with him, but she had asked him in the kitchen if they were going to be married after all and he had said quietly, "Not now," and she, Miss Purvey, was only a teensy bit older than Mrs. Raisin.
She put on her coat and that sort of felt hat beloved by middle-class Englishwomen and damned as 'sensible', and made her way out to her Ford Escort, which was parked on the road outside the cottage.
Driving slowly and carefully, she joined the dual carriageway road some miles outside the village, and moving into the fast lane, drove at a steady thirty miles per hour, seemingly deaf to the furious horns and flashing lights of the drivers behind her.
To her dismay, the fog began to thicken as she approached Mircester. She found a parking place in the central square, got out, locked her car and went to the shopping arcade. A neat sign hanging on the glass door said CLOSED. She gave a little cluck of dismay. She had forgotten it was half-day in Mircester.
She felt too strung up to go home. Of course she could have gone to Belinda's cottage, but that lay in a village twenty miles in the opposite direction out of Mircester from where she herself lived.
Miss Purvey decided to treat herself to a visit to the cinema. A Bruce Willis Die Hard movie was showing and Miss Purvey found Bruce Willis exciting. She had seen it before but knew she would enjoy seeing it again.
She bought a ticket at the kiosk and took a seat in the still-lit cinema. The programme was due to start in a few minutes.
Miss Purvey settled down and took a packet of strong peppermints out of her handbag, extracted one and popped it in her mouth. There were not many people in the cinema. She twisted round to see if there was anyone she knew and then her gaze fastened on the person in the row behind her, a little to her left. She turned away and then stiffened in her seat. Surely she had seen that face before.
She twisted round again and said in her loud, plummy voice, "I've seen you somewhere before, haven't I?"
Kylie, the usherette, was fifty-something, with bad feet. The days when usherettes were pert young things with trays of ices had long gone. The ices and popcorn were bought at a kiosk in the foyer, and inside, tired middle-aged women showed people to their seats and then searched while the cinema was empty to make sure no one had left anything valuable.
Kylie saw the solitary figure sitting in the middle of one of the rows in the centre and thought, here's another old-age pensioner fallen asleep. It was hard to be patient with these old people. Some of them didn't even know where they were or who they were when they woke up. The Cotswolds was turning into geriatric country.
She edged along the row behind the still figure and, leaning forward, shook one shoulder. It was like a Hitchcock movie, thought Kylie, her heart leaping into her mouth. The figure slowly keeled sideways. Kylie gasped, leaned over and shone her torch into the figure's face, for although the lights were on in the cinema, they were still quite dim.
The bulging eyes of Miss Purvey stared glassily back at her. A scarf was twisted savagely around the old scrawny neck.
Shock takes people in strange ways. Kylie walked quickly to the foyer and told her fellow usherette to call the manager, and then she phoned the police. She told the man in the ticket office to come out and close the cinema doors and not let anyone else in. Then she lit a cigarette and waited. The police and an ambulance arrived, the CID arrived, pathologist, and then the forensic team.
Kylie told her story several times, was taken to the police station, where she repeated everything again, and then signed a statement.
She accepted a lift home in a police car and told the pretty young policewoman that she would be perfectly all right after she had a cup of tea.
When she let herself into her house, her husband shambled out of the living-room. He was wearing his favourite old moth-eaten cardigan and he had bits of boiled egg stuck to his moustache.
"I hate you!" screamed Kylie, and then she began to cry.
FIVE
JAMES and Agatha walked through the fog back to Lilac Lane from the Red Lion that evening. They were silent. The villagers had decided that they were not murder suspects and so, instead of a chilly silence, they had received a warm greeting and then had had to endure a heavy sort of banter, being teased about when they were going to tell everyone the date of their wedding day.
James had not wanted to say firmly that he would never marry Agatha because that would have been rude, and so it was the blunt Agatha who had suddenly said loudly, "We're not suited; we're not marrying, and that's that!"
And instead of being grateful to her for having sorted the whole business out, James felt obscurely that Agatha had given him a public rejection and was in a mood remarkably like a sulk.
Agatha grabbed his arm. "Look!" she cried.
Under the security light outside James's door stood Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes, Bill Wong, and Maddie.
"What's happened now?" asked James. "Oh, God, I hope that Purvey woman hasn't committed suicide as well."
Wilkes waited until they approached and then said, "We'd better go inside."
James let them in. They all stood around in the living-room.
"Sit down," said Wilkes, his dark face serious. "This might take some time. Did you call on a Miss Janet Purvey today?"
"Yes," said Agatha. "What is this about?"
"And where were you both this afternoon?"
"Before you go any further," said James, "I thought it was only in the movies that the police keep asking questions without telling anyone the real reason they are being questioned. So, out with it? Something awful has obviously happened to Miss Purvey."
Bill Wong spoke up, his narrow eyes scanning both their faces. "Miss Purvey was found strangled in the Imperial Cinema in Mircester this afternoon. So we must ask again, what were you both doing this afternoon?"
"You should know, Bill, that neither of us could have anything to do with her murder," exclaimed Agatha.
"Just answer the question." Maddie, her voice flat and hard.
"Yes, we saw Miss Purvey this morning," said James. "As far as we could gather, she had not been blackmailed, nor had she had much to do with either Mrs. Gore-Appleton or Jimmy Raisin when she was at the health farm. After we left her, we stopped at a pub over in Ancombe for sandwiches, then we came back here. Agatha went into Moreton to do some shopping and I stayed here. Mrs. Bloxby called on me when Agatha was out and stayed for coffee."
Bill turned to Agatha. "Did anyone see you in Moreton?"
"Of course," said Agatha. "I went into Drury's, the butcher's, and then to Budgen's supermarket...oh, and then I went to that bookshop in the arcade. Then I had a coffee at the Market Ho
use Tea Room. People should remember me."
"We'll check all that," said Maddie and Agatha threw her a look of pure dislike.
Wilkes leaned forward. "So to get back to the beginning. I gather Wong here told you not to do any more amateur detecting. But you had to go ahead, did you not? So begin at the beginning to your visit to Miss Purvey."
James described all they had talked about but with one important omission that Agatha noticed but kept quiet about it. He said nothing about Miss Purvey's wanting to play detective as well.
Wilkes then turned to Agatha and she had to tell her version of events.
The questioning went on and on. Finally Wilkes said, "We'll need you both to come to the station and make a statement. Another death is just too much to swallow. Like I said, I gather that Wong here told you to mind your own business and leave the detecting to the police."
"Why did she go to Mircester after we left her?" asked Agatha.
Wilkes sighed. "Presumably to go to the cinema. We can only guess the rest. She may have been holding something back and telephoned someone and arranged to meet them. Or someone saw her in the cinema, recognized her and judged her to be a threat. Just leave things to us."
They all asked more questions before taking their leave.
Agatha and James stared at each other in gloomy silence.
At last James said, "Look, Agatha, none of this is our fault. We didn't strangle her. But there is one good thing, if you can call it good, that will come out of all this. Press interest in the case will be renewed. They'll run that interview with us. People will know we are looking for Mrs. Gore-Appleton, and someone is bound to come forward."
"I wish the whole mess were over with," said Agatha wearily. "Perhaps we should leave the whole thing to the police."
"Well, we've only got one more name," pointed out James. "There's a Mrs. Gloria Comfort and she lives right in Mircester, near the abbey. And even if The Bugle doesn't run the story, some other newspaper will want to talk to you. It would take a world catastrophe to knock this out of the papers."
The next morning James rose early and went out and bought all the newspapers. Black headlines screamed at him. Yeltsin had been overthrown. The generals in Moscow had made a coup. The Cold War was on again. The papers were full of reports on the front pages, and on the inside were endless articles by pundits. The murder of one elderly spinster in Mircester rated only a small paragraph in each. The rump of Serbia was supporting the generals. Russia was beginning to be torn apart by civil war.
He took the newspapers back to Agatha, who was playing with her cats on his kitchen floor. She rose to her feet and studied them in silence.
"At least," said Agatha at last, "we can go on detecting. If we had been the focus of press attention, it would have been hard to do."
They talked about the world situation and then decided they might as well go into Mircester and make their statements, go somewhere for lunch, and then call on Mrs. Gloria Comfort.
Maddie and Bill Wong were having a cup of tea in the canteen later that day. It was the first time since interviewing Agatha and James that they were able to have a private conversation.
"So what do you think of your precious Agatha Raisin now?" demanded Maddie. "That woman's like a vulture. Dead bodies wherever she goes."
"That's a bit hard," protested Bill. "Their visit to Der-rington may have touched off his suicide, but they were only a bit ahead of us and if the old boy was going to top himself, he would have done it sooner or later. And they had nothing to do with the murder of Miss Purvey. Agatha's alibi checks out. Look, Maddie, I must make one thing clear. Agatha's a friend of mine and I wish you'd stop bitching about her. I don't know if she exactly solved those last crimes, but she made things happen by poking her nose in; otherwise we'd never have got to the murderers."
"I'm entitled to my own opinion," said Maddie. "Look at her odd relationship with Lacey. Their engagement breaks u, p because she's lied to him and yet they're living together."
"I think they're very well suited," mumbled Bill. He had invited Maggie home to meet his parents for dinner that very evening and he did not want anything to go wrong. "Can't we just agree to disagree?"
"Have it your way. Haven't got the hots for old Agatha, have you?"
"She's old enough to be my mother!"
"Just wondered."
Bill had been looking forward to showing off Maddie to his parents. Now a worm of uneasiness was beginning to wriggle in his brain. Could it be that his darling was, well, just a tiny bit abrasive?
Agatha and James drove in the direction of Mircester. The fog had lifted and it was a beautiful autumn day. The hedgerows were bright with hawthorn berries, and red-and-gold trees lined the edges of brown ploughed fields.
"The country doesn't seem beautiful at first," said Agatha. "I used to long for London. Then I got used to it. I sta noticing the changing seasons, and then it began to look beautiful, like watching a series of landscape paintings, one after another. Except for those clouds. Someone ought to do something about those clouds, James. They're like those neat and regular water-colour ones painted by the Cotswold amateurs. The light is different, too. It sort of slants in the autumn." Shafts of golden sunlight cut through the trees onto the winding road ahead. James braked sharply as a clumsy pheasant dithered about in front of his wheels which crunched on a carpet of beech nuts.
"I don't often want to put the clock back," said Agatha in a small voice. "But on days like this, I wish I had never got into this mess, and I know I won't be free until it's over. I can't even grieve for Jimmy. I think he'd turned into a right bad lot and if he hadn't been so bad, he would be alive and kicking. I could deal with a live Jimmy and get him out of my hair forever, but I can't fight a dead man. He came between us, James."
"You put him there, Agatha. If you had found out his existence, we could have dealt with it."
Agatha gave a small dry sob.
James took one hand off the steering wheel and gave her a quick hug. "You need to give me time," he said, and Agatha's heart suddenly rocketed with hope, like another pheasant which flew up at their approach and sailed over a hedge.
They received a set-back after they had made their statements at police headquarters and gone in search of Mrs. Gloria Comfort. They learned from neighbours that she had moved to one of the outlying villages. No one knew her new address but one of the neighbours remembered the house had been sold by Whitney and Dobster, estate agents.
At the estate agents', they found to their relief that the man who had organized the sale of Mrs. Comfort's house in Mircester was still working there and cheerfully accepted their story that they were old friends trying to get in touch with her. He produced an address in Ancombe.
"Well!" exclaimed Agatha outside the estate agents' office, "that's very close to Carsely, and to the scene of Jimmy's murder, too. Do you think the police will have been there before us?"
"Don't know. They always have such a lot of red tape to get through and we don't."
Agatha suddenly hesitated. "They'll be furious if they arrive and find us there."
"It's getting late. They've either been there or they're getting there tomorrow."
Ancombe was one of those Cotswold villages about the size of Broad Campden that seemed too perfect to be true. Very small but with an old church in the centre, thatched cottages, beautiful gardens, and everything with a manicured air.
Mrs. Gloria Comfort lived in one of the prettiest of the thatched cottages under the shadow of the church. There was no answer to the door. "Let's try round the back," said James. "I can hear some noises coming from there'. 'Probably writhing in her death agonies," said Agatha gloomily.
They walked up the narrow path which led to the back garden. A plump blonde woman was weeding a flower-bed. "Excuse me," began James, and she rose and turned around. Her hair was gloriously bleached blonde, not a dark root showing, but her middle-aged face was puffy and her eyes held that glittering look caused by a film o
f moisture, the sign of a heavy drinker. She was dressed unsuitably for gardening in a sort of Lady Tart outfit of tightly tailored tweed jacket and skirt, frilly white blouse, pearls, and high heels.
"Mrs. Comfort?" said James.
"Are you collecting for something?"
"No, I am James Lacey and this is Agatha Raisin."
"Oh, dear, you're the wife of that man who was murdered. You'd better come indoors." She teetered across the lawn, her spiked heels making holes in the green turf. "Good for the lawn," she remarked. "It aerates it."
Indoors was in keeping with her dress. Everything was amazingly vulgar. Awful ruched curtains at the windows, fake horse brasses, fake old masters on the walls, and a padded white leather bar in one corner of the living-room. Mrs. Comfort headed straight for the bar. "Drink?"
Agatha said she would have a gin and tonic, and James, a whisky.
"Now," Mrs. Comfort said, perching on the very edge of an overstuffed sofa, "what's this all about?"
"You were at the health farm at the same time as Jimmy," began Agatha. "We're interested in who he talked to. We're also very interested in the woman who accompanied him, a Mrs. Gore-Appleton."
Mrs. Comfort took a strong pull of the very dark liquid in her glass. Then she said, "It's hard to remember. It all seems so long ago. Jimmy Raisin was hailed as one of the successes. He arrived looking like a wreck, and by the end of the first week he looked like a different man. I can't tell you anything about Mrs. Gore-Appleton. I didn't talk to her much except for the odd remark about the weather and how awful it was to feel so hungry - that sort of thing. I can't really be of much help to you, I'm afraid."
