by M C Beaton
Then, from behind them, they heard a familiar voice shouting, “Harder, boys, harder! You’re not pulling hard enough. I’ll show you.”
Agatha and James stopped and turned round and looked back.
Bernard Spott had taken off his jacket and was rolling up his sleeves to expose sinewy arms. He edged the boys at the ‘mountain rescue’ display aside and seized the rope and pulled one of the boys up easily. “You see how it’s done?” said Bernard. “You use the strength of your forearms. Don’t jerk the whole body. Just the forearms.”
“Walk away with me,” said James urgently. “Don’t show too much interest.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how it could have been done.” He put an arm about her waist and drew her along.
Good heavens, thought Mrs Bloxby, I do believe Agatha has succeeded in attracting James at last.
“Bernard? You can’t mean Bernard. He’s an old man.”
“But a very fit one. We kept discounting people because they weren’t strong enough. But all anyone would have to do would be to bind her ankles with rope, leaving one long end, throw the end up over the hook, and pull the body up. Tie it up and cut the end.”
“Granted. But why Bernard?”
“I don’t think it’s Bernard,” said James, stopping suddenly. “We’ve been arguing and thinking and speculating for so long, I’m jumping to mad conclusions.”
They had reached the entrance to the field.
Agatha looked back. Bernard Spott was standing quite still, staring across the field at them.
“I say,” said Agatha, “let’s go to his house and wait for him. We could ask him if he knew of anyone else in the village who has his way with ropes. Don’t look now, but he’s staring and staring at us.”
“May as well try,” said James. “But why not ask him now?”
“I don’t know. I want a look at his back garden. We could even spot something the police have missed. I mean, they’re not going to have searched the garden of a respectable old villager like Bernard very thoroughly.”
“I wish I’d never mentioned Bernard,” said James peevishly. “I’ve had enough of this for one day.”
“Then drop me off,” said Agatha. “I’ll go on my own.”
“Oh, in that case I’d better go with you in case you make a fool of yourself,” said James ungraciously. “Must you smoke?” he demanded, as Agatha lit a cigarette as soon as she was in the car.
“I thought you didn’t mind people smoking.”
“So I lied.”
Agatha tossed the lit cigarette out of the car window.
He had moved off as he was speaking, but he immediately slammed on the brakes. “Of all the stupid things to do, Agatha. The ground’s as dry as tinder. You could set the countryside alight.”
Agatha stayed in the car, a mulish look on her face, as he searched the ditch until he had found her discarded cigarette and put it out. He had no right to speak to her in that tone of voice.
“You’re a male chauvinist pig,” she said as soon as he got back in.
“And you, my dear Agatha, are the greatest female chauvinist sow it has ever been my ill luck to come across.”
“Oh, sod you, James, and bugger the countryside and all who sail in her. Are we going to Bernard’s or not?”
“I’ve a good mind not to go. Do you know what? We’re being childish even thinking that old man could do such a thing.”
“I didn’t like the way he was looking at us,” said Agatha.
“Woman’s intuition?”
“Something like that, James dear.”
“So what are you going to do if he comes back while we are ferreting around, looking for God knows what? Point a finger at him and say, ‘You did it!’ and he will break down and say, ‘Mea culpa, O great detective lady’?”
“Why are you so beastly angry all of a sudden?” demanded Agatha.
There was a silence while he steered the car round a corner and then up the hill to Bernard’s cottage. “I don’t know,” he said in a mild voice. “I really don’t know.”
“Well, figure it out next time before you open your trap,” said Agatha, still ruffled. When the car stopped she got out and went up the garden path and round the side of Bernard’s house to the back.
James sat tapping the wheel and watching her disappear. Then he shrugged and got out as well and followed her.
The sky above was growing darker. Little snatches of sound from the scouts’ band filtered to his ears. He went round the side of the cottage. The back garden was quite large, heavy with the scent of roses. A sharp wind sent a drift of blossom scattering over the grass. In the middle of the garden was a round pond where goldfish darted here and there in the greenish water.
Agatha turned and saw him and said in a quiet voice, “Come here and look at this.”
He went to join her. There was a square patch of bare, well-raked earth planted with neat little wooden crosses. On each cross was a carved name, Jimmy, William, Harry, George, Fred, Alice, Emma, Olive, and so on.
“Animals’ cemetery?” asked James.
“Do you know what I think those are?” said Agatha. “I think they’re the graves of those goldfish that were poisoned.”
“Come on, Agatha. Nobody gives names to goldfish,”
“I think he did. There’s one way to find out.” She bent down and started digging in the earth with her fingers.
“Stop that, Agatha,” said James. “It’ll be a cat.”
“Then, if all these graves are animals, there’s still something up with him. Aha!” She straightened up and pointed downwards. The remains of a nearly decomposed goldfish lay unearthed. “Don’t you see?” she said, her eyes gleaming. “If he was as potty as this about a lot of goldfish and if Mary poisoned them and he knew about it, it could have turned his brain.”
They both stiffened as they heard the front-garden gate squeal on its hinges. “Cover that up, quick,” said James.
“No,” said Agatha. She turned to face the entrance to the back garden. Bernard came round the corner of the house, his jacket over his arm. He stopped short at the sight of them for a moment and then walked quickly up to them. He looked down at the open grave at Agatha’s feet and said in a quiet voice, “Why have you desecrated Jimmy’s grave?”
“You killed Mary,” said Agatha in a flat voice. “You discovered she’d poisoned your fish and so you killed her.”
“Oh, really, so where are the police, Agatha?”
“They’ll be here any moment,” said Agatha, moving behind James for protection. She improvised wildly. “The forensic people traced that rope to you.”
“That’s not possible,” he said. Then, as if realizing that by remark he had given himself away, he sat down suddenly on the grass.
“Why did you do it?” asked James.
“She humiliated me,” said Bernard, his head bowed. “She flirted with me and when I made a pass at her, she laughed in my face and called me a silly old man. I was furious. I told her that she had deliberately led me on to make a fool of me and that I would tell everyone so. But of course I didn’t. It would make me look too ridiculous, a man of my age.
“I heard a movement in the garden. The old do not sleep heavily. I looked out. There was bright moonlight. I saw her bending over the pond. I did not go out. I had become frightened of her, frightened she would laugh and jeer at me. But I found my goldfish dead in the morning, all my friends, my pets, my family. I used to sit by the pond and talk to them. I could think of nothing else but punishing her.
“It was surprisingly easy. The next time I saw her in the intervening weeks, she was easy and friendly with me, as if nothing had happened. She even called round, bringing me a cake. So I made my preparations. I called on her and asked her for a drink. I said I would like brandy, knowing that she often liked a glass of brandy. When she had poured two glasses, I said I thought I heard someone moving outside. When she went off to look out of the window, I put the poison i
n her glass.
“I had an agonizing time wondering whether she would drink it or not. At last I said when I was in the navy we used to drink our brandy down in one go, but I couldn’t expect a lady to be able to do that. She laughed and said, ‘Why not?’ and tipped the contents of her glass down her throat.
“I watched her die. I felt nothing at all. Nothing. I hadn’t yet touched my own drink. I poured it carefully into the bottle after I had pulled on a pair of gloves, and then put the top back on the bottle. I put my own glass in my pocket, along with the one she had drunk out of, to take away with me. I sponged the vomit from her mouth off the carpet. I knew traces of it would be found by the police, but I did not want to make matters easy for them.
“I lifted her up…and well, the rest you know. I wanted her to be found desecrated, the way she had desecrated those gardens and in revenge for killing my fish. I knew she was the one who had tried to destroy the other gardens. She was mad.”
“I’ll see if the police have arrived,” said Agatha in a thin voice.
She ran from the garden, round the front and to the cottage next door, where she screamed at the startled lady, a Mrs Bain, to let her use the phone. She called Fred Griggs and then went back reluctantly to join James and Bernard.
But when she reached the back garden, James was alone.
“Poor mad old man,” said James. “He’s gone in to lock up a few things before the police take him away.”
At that moment, Bernard reappeared. “I’ll just feed my new family before I go,” he said. He crossed to the goldfish pond. With a sigh of relief, Agatha heard the wail of a police siren in the distance.
James suddenly put his arms around her and she gratefully leaned against him and buried her face in his chest. “That’s that,” came Bernard’s now quavering voice. “I’ll just get something from the kitchen.”
Agatha raised her head. “You should go with him. He might run away.”
“We’d better go in anyway. The police will be hammering at the front door.”
They went in by the kitchen door. Sure enough, there was banging on the door. Agatha opened it and Bill Wong and two detectives came in. “We got your message on the police radio. Where is he?”
Agatha looked wildly around. “I don’t know. Somewhere.”
And then a drumming sound reverberated down from the ceiling overhead.
Bill and his colleagues raced for the stairs. James pulled Agatha back. “Don’t go,” he said. “It won’t be pretty.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think he poisoned his new fish – and then he poisoned himself. They may be able to pump him out in time, but I doubt it.”
Upstairs, radios crackled as they called for an ambulance. “Let’s go and sit in the garden, Agatha,” said James. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”
Epilogue
It was two days after the death of Bernard Spott. The rain, which had broken the long spell of good weather, had ceased and the sun once more shone down.
Agatha and James were sitting in Agatha’s garden. James was enthusiastic about the flowers and bushes, so much so that Agatha was almost able to forget about her deception. They had been questioned separately and this was the first time they had got together since they had discovered that Bernard was the murderer.
“Why did you let him go off alone into the house?” asked Agatha. “Did you guess he would take his own life?”
“I thought he might. He was a brave man during the war. As soon as I heard that awful drumming sound upstairs, I knew it was his heels drumming on the floor after a swig of poison. He poisoned his new fish as well. I should have kept an eye on him and let him stand trial. My only excuse is that I was so shocked and upset, I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
“He may have been a brave man,” said Agatha sharply, “but he committed a most dreadful crime and should have stood trial for it.”
Bill Wong appeared around the side of the house, Agatha having no reason to lock the gate any more.
He sat down and studied them for a few moments and then said, “We were almost on to Bernard, you know.”
“You’re just saying that,” said Agatha.
“No, we had been scouring the nurseries far and wide for someone who might have bought that particular brand of weedkiller around the time of the murder.”
“What brand?”
“Clean Garden. An innocuous name for some quite lethal stuff.”
“But lots of people buy it, surely?”
“We had photographs of people in this village, even you pair, which we had taken when you weren’t looking. We showed them around the nurseries, and right over in darkest Oxfordshire they recognized Bernard Spott. That and his navy background and the fact that he was once a keen yachtsman made him look like our man. The knots on that rope had been done by an expert.” He looked at their outraged faces and laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not taking the credit away from you. We had no real proof. What put you on to him? I mean, you said you had watched him helping the boy scouts, but surely that wasn’t enough.”
“It was the graves in his garden,” said Agatha.
“Graves? What graves?”
“All those little graves for his poisoned fish, all with crosses and names.”
“We saw those,” said Bill. “But we asked him and he explained it was part of his garden which he reserved as an animals’ cemetery, and when anyone in the village had a dead cat or dog, they brought it to Bernard. But what I cannot understand is why you two gave him time to poison himself.”
James flashed a warning look at Agatha. “We were in shock,” he said blandly. “We did not think he would take his own life.”
Bill gave a little sigh and clasped his tubby hands over his chest. “Mad. All mad. What exactly was up with Mary Fortune, I doubt we’ll ever know. She was diagnosed in America as being depressed, which seems to cover a multitude of mental ailments.” He looked at James. “Why it was you never suspected anything was wrong with her, considering the circumstances, is beyond me.”
“Even Agatha here did not know she was that deranged,” said James. “Look, she seemed a flirtatious, easy-going woman out for a good time, with no strings attached. When she was quite foul to me when I broke it off, I felt so guilty about having misunderstood her – by that I mean that it had never crossed my mind before that she was considering marriage to me – I felt guilty. Then, as other people might have told you, and even Bernard told us, she could be really nasty and then, the next time you met her, so warm and charming, it was as if you had imagined it all.”
“And Beth and John are completely in the clear.” Agatha sounded as if she regretted that fact. “I suppose the dreadful couple will be settling in the village.”
“No, they’re putting the house up for sale,” said Bill. “I expected to see your pictures all over the newspapers, Agatha – ‘Village Sleuth Strikes Again’.”
“I thought you might have told them it was I who solved your bloody murder,” said Agatha peevishly.
“Not my decision. My superiors seem to have carefully omitted that fact when they spoke to the press.”
Agatha looked huffy. “You would think, with my reputation, they would have called round here.”
Bill smiled. “You’ve still got time to let them know it was you.”
“Too late,” said Agatha, wise in the ways of newspapers. “The story is dead already. That find of two headless corpses in Birmingham knocked it off the pages. If I step in now, they’ll just think I’m some bragging old trout trying to get in on the act.”
“You forget,” put in James, “that if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have got on to Bernard in the first place.”
Agatha’s bearlike eyes fastened on him. “What had you got to do with it? Yes, you did say it was Bernard and then immediately went back on it and if I hadn’t insisted on going, if I, I repeat, I hadn’t discovered those graves and dug one up, he’d still be at liberty.”
“Well, I think I did brilliantly,” said Agatha, “and if I don’t say so, who else is going to? Oh, here’s Mrs Bloxby. Mrs Bloxby…”
“Margaret.”
“Margaret, I mean. I solve this murder and James and Bill are trying to take the credit away from me.”
Mrs Bloxby sat down. “Such a sad affair. And Bernard had been in this village for quite a long time. Who would have thought it? One never really knows what goes on inside people’s brains. I went up to Bernard’s after his fish had been poisoned to sympathize with him and he shrugged and said, “They were only fish. I can get more.” Bernard Spott was one of the fixtures of the village that no one ever really thought much about. He has a sister, a spinster of seventy-five, called Beryl Spott, who has inherited the cottage. I must warn you, Agatha, that she has already visited the vicarage to say she intends to reside here.”
“Why warn me?”
“She is convinced that her brother was innocent and that you, Agatha, hounded him to his death.”
“Just as well I’m going to London.”
“Must you?” Mrs Bloxby looked at her sympathetically. “Have you a copy of the contract? There might be some clause in it letting you off the hook due to illness or something like that. I mean, if you were ill, you could not go.”
Agatha brightened. “I’ll go and get it. Roy sent me a copy.”
She went into the house and a short time later returned with the contract. She bent over it and scanned every line and then sighed. “No let-out that I can see. I’d better just go and get it over with. It might be fun to be back in harness.”
“You could fail miserably and be a rotten PR,” said Bill, “and then they would be glad to send you home.”
“I couldn’t do that,” exclaimed Agatha. “My pride wouldn’t let me. What about my poor cats, Hodge and Boswell, locked up for six months in a London flat?”
