Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet

by Beaton, M. C.

  They both nodded like mandarin dolls.

  ‘Everyone seems to have known she was a diabetic and injected herself with insulin. What if someone gave her a jab of something lethal and then dragged her up to the bathroom where she kept her syringes and left her there hoping we would think she had died as she was giving herself one of her usual injections?’

  James shook his head, to Agatha’s irritation. ‘I still don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows about the wonders of forensic science these days.’

  ‘Any murderer is usually desperate or deranged,’ said Bill. ‘It would amaze you how little they think.’

  ‘Did the neighbours see anyone calling at the house?’ asked James.

  ‘No, but there’s a lane runs along the end of the back gardens. Mrs Dunstable at the other end of the terrace said she thought she heard a car stopping just at the end of the back lane – you can’t get a car along there – about eight in the morning. But she’s deaf! She says she felt the vibrations of a car, can you believe it?’

  ‘It would be odd if it turned out to be murder,’ said James slowly. ‘After what she said to Agatha in front of all those women, it might cast doubts on the death of Paul Bladen.’

  ‘She might have committed suicide,’ Bill pointed out. ‘Everyone said she was very depressed since the death of her cat. The scuff marks could have been made when she dragged herself upstairs. That’s the news so far. I’ve got to get back to work. Thanks for the coffee, Agatha.’

  When Bill had left, Agatha returned and sat down at the coffee-table and closed her eyes. ‘Want me to go?’ asked James.

  ‘No, I’m thinking. If I had murdered Mrs Josephs and injected her with something, I wouldn’t leave that lethal something among her bottles and pills in the bathroom. I’m not a very clever murderer. Think of the scuff marks. So I’m driving off with this bottle or ampoule I’ve used in my pocket. I’m sweating and panicky.’ She opened her eyes. ‘I’d chuck it out the car window.’

  ‘It’s a thought,’ said James. ‘And the road from the end of the back lane goes up to Lord Pendlebury’s. No harm in just having a look, I suppose. We’ll take rubbish sacks so that people will think we’re volunteers from the village keeping the countryside tidy. But if you find anything sinister, leave it there and call the police or they might think you planted it.’

  They took Agatha’s car. She drove to the back lane and sat there with the engine idling imagining she had just committed murder. She then drove off up the hill and suddenly stopped.

  ‘Why here?’ asked James.

  ‘Because here’s where I would chuck it if I were a murderer,’ said Agatha.

  They started searching up and down the road on the right-hand side where anything a driver might have thrown out would have landed. Fortunately people in the Cotswolds are very litter-minded and so there was hardly anything after an hour’s careful search to be found but an old broken fountain-pen and one sandal.

  ‘The light’s fading and I’m hungry,’ complained James.

  ‘Let’s try further up, nearer the estate,’ pleaded Agatha. ‘Just a bit more.’

  ‘Damn, I promised Freda Huntingdon a few days ago that I would meet her for a drink at seven in the Red Lion. Besides, it’s getting dark.’

  ‘I’ve a torch in the car,’ said Agatha, now determined to keep him out as long as possible.

  ‘Oh, well, just a little longer.’

  They drove farther up the road and got out again, Agatha taking the torch and James poking aimlessly now in the hedgerow.

  When Agatha after half an hour of patient walking and searching suddenly cried, ‘Eureka!’ James said crossly, ‘Look, is it another shoe or something? Freda will be –’

  ‘Come here! Look at this!’

  He stumped over. Agatha pointed the torch at some tangled shrubbery and nettles in the ditch. Down in the bottom of the ditch was a little brown pharmacist’s bottle.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, giving her a hug.

  Glad of the darkness, Agatha blushed with pleasure.

  ‘You wait here and guard it,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’m off to phone Bill Wong.’

  James waited and waited. He glanced at his watch, noticing by the luminous dial that it was nearly eight. Then he thought, I don’t really need to stand here. He took a stick which he had cut earlier from the hedgerow to help him in poking around, stabbed it down into the ditch beside the bottle and tied his handkerchief like a flag to the top of it. Now he could go safely off to the pub and the police and Agatha would easily find his marker. He strode off down the road.

  Agatha waited on her doorstep, biting her nails. Bill had said, ‘Wait right where you are,’ and so she had done just that. But James must be wondering what had happened.

  With a sigh of relief, she saw the police car nosing round into the lane and ran out to meet it. Bill and another detective were in the car. ‘Hop in,’ he said, ‘and take us to this clue of yours. We couldn’t raise Fred Griggs. It’s his night off.’

  Agatha could not believe it as they drove up the road and found no sign of James. Worse than that, she could not remember exactly where they had found the bottle and so they searched up and down the roadside for quite a long time before Bill finally found the stick with the handkerchief on top.

  ‘At least he’s marked the spot,’ said Bill, squatting down. He shone a powerful flashlight down beside the stick.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything there, Agatha.’

  Agatha peered over his shoulder. ‘But it was there,’ she cried. ‘Oh, where is James? If he just calmly went off to the pub to meet that tart, I’ll kill him.’

  Bill and the other detective searched slowly and carefully, but there was no sign of that bottle.

  He finally straightened up with a sigh. ‘Do you think Lacey’s in the pub?’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure he is,’ said Agatha viciously.

  It was a busy evening at the Red Lion. The whole village seemed to be crammed into the pub. James was surprised when he received a tap on the shoulder and a voice murmured, ‘Police. Would you step outside, Mr Lacey?’

  He followed the man out and started guiltily as he was confronted with an unusually serious Bill Wong and a baleful Agatha.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left, I suppose,’ he said in a rush, ‘but didn’t you find the stick with the handkerchief on it?’

  ‘We found that all right, but no bottle,’ said Bill. ‘When did you get to the pub?’

  ‘Just after eight. I was meeting Freda . . . Mrs Huntingdon.’

  ‘Did you tell Mrs Huntingdon or anyone else in the pub what you had found?’

  ‘Well . . .’ James shifted awkwardly from foot to foot.

  The policeman who had summoned him from the pub had gone back in and now emerged again in time to hear Bill’s last question.

  ‘If I might have a word with you, sir.’ He drew Bill aside. James Lacey stared at the ground.

  Bill came back and looked up at James. ‘So, I gather you said to Mrs Huntingdon that you and Mrs Raisin had found a clue to Mrs Josephs’s death, that there was a pharmacist’s bottle in the ditch and you had left your handkerchief as a flag to mark the spot. Mrs Huntingdon had said in a loud voice to a circle of locals, “We’ve got a sleuth in our midst. Isn’t James clever?” And she told about the bottle.’

  ‘Look,’ said James desperately, ‘I’m not a policeman. I’ve looked on it all as a sort of game. But I may have put the stick in the wrong place. Let’s go back and look again.’

  ‘Come along, then,’ said Bill. ‘I’d already thought of that and sent for reinforcements.’

  Agatha said not a word to James but climbed into the back of Bill’s car. ‘If you please, sir,’ said a policeman and ushered James to another police car.

  There seemed to be policemen all over the place when they returned, searching and searching the hedgerows.

  Then there was a shout of triumph. One policeman crouching down a few yards from whe
re James had marked the spot waved them excitedly over. And there, as he pulled some long grass aside, lay a small pharmacist’s bottle.

  It was tenderly lifted up with tweezers and placed on a clean cloth and shown to Agatha.

  ‘I am sure that’s a different shape,’ said Agatha. ‘And it hasn’t got any label. I’m sure the one I saw had a bit of a label on it.’

  ‘You may as well go home, Mrs Raisin,’ said Bill. ‘We’ll call on you when we need you.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry . . .’ began James miserably.

  ‘You too, Mr Lacey. We’ll be in touch with you.’

  James faced Agatha. ‘You must think I’m all sorts of a fool.’

  Agatha opened her mouth to say that, yes, she did think him a fool, but a sharp memory of how he had helped to extricate her over her own foolishness with the hand basin came into her mind and she said instead, ‘Let’s walk back to my place for some coffee and think about this.’

  He fell into step beside her. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Agatha, ‘that the murderer might have been in the pub and heard Freda. So he or she nips out, up the road, and takes that bottle, hides nearby and sees the police arrive, waits till they’ve gone to the pub to question you and then puts another bottle there which will prove to have contained something innocuous.’

  ‘But a clever murderer would not have thrown the bottle there in the first place,’ protested James.

  They walked on in silence, each buried in thought.

  Once in Agatha’s kitchen and drinking coffee, Agatha, who had been silent for a very long time for her, suddenly burst out, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Surely clever murderers belong in fiction. To take a life you must be insane, or temporarily insane. What if some woman knew Paul was going to be up at Lord Pendlebury’s on that day? Mad with rage, she biffs him on the head, and then jabs the syringe into him without even knowing the contents of the syringe are lethal. He’s dead. She runs off. Now she has committed murder, she really is deranged and terribly frightened. She overhears Mrs Josephs talking to me at the vicarage and feels she’s got to be silenced and she knows she is a diabetic. She injects her with God knows what, panics again, thinks if the body is found in the bathroom, natural death will be assumed. Again, she’s in the pub, and hears Freda. More panic. Take the bottle away. More panic. Replace it with another.’

  They talked for another hour, writing out lists of the women who were at the vicarage and all the women in the pub that James could remember. Then the phone rang. Agatha went to answer it and then came back and sat down wearily at the table.

  ‘That was Bill. Mrs Josephs was murdered. Someone shot a good dose of Adrenalin into her bloodstream.’

  ‘But where would anyone get Adrenalin?’

  ‘At first I thought of Peter Rice because vets have it, but he was nowhere near the village. Bill said farmers usually have a supply, although their drugs cabinets are checked from time to time to make sure they are safely locked.’

  ‘Miss Mabbs!’ said James suddenly.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘That’s why I called on you in the first place. I found her address. She’s living in Leamington Spa.’

  ‘But wait a bit. She wasn’t at the vicarage, nor was she in the pub this evening, surely.’

  ‘No, but she might have been lurking around somewhere. In any case, surely she would know more about Paul Bladen than most. She worked with him.’

  Agatha made up her mind.

  ‘We’ll go tomorrow.’

  Chapter Six

  Agatha and James were not able to set out for Royal Leamington Spa until late the next day, for another drama had hit Carsely. The veterinary surgery had been broken into and the drugs cabinet smashed open. It had been neatly and efficiently done. A pane of glass on the back door had been broken, allowing the thief to reach in and unlock the door.

  ‘So that’s probably where the Adrenalin came from,’ said a harassed-looking Bill Wong, ‘except that PC Griggs says he kept checking the premises on his rounds and there was no sign of a break-in before last night.’

  ‘He probably didn’t even notice the broken pane of glass,’ commented James.

  ‘Fred Griggs is a conscientious village bobby,’ said Bill.

  ‘Then do you think someone meant the police to think the Adrenalin came from there?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘That could be the case. But how unnecessarily complicated! And this throws suspicion on the death of Paul Bladen. No one we can think of wanted Mrs Josephs dead.’

  Then statements were painstakingly taken from Agatha and James about the finding of the bottle.

  ‘They analysed the one we eventually found and it contains traces of a tranquillizer. We have checked with the local doctor and it would amaze you in this enlightened day and age how many women are on tranquillizers,’ said Bill. ‘Now I have something to say to both of you. The police at times seem very slow and plodding, but it’s a safer way of doing things than having amateurs running around stirring things up. Please do not interfere again.’

  ‘If we had not interfered, as you put it,’ said Agatha hotly, ‘you would have gone on thinking Paul Bladen’s death was an accident.’

  ‘And Mrs Josephs might still be alive. Leave it to us, Agatha.’

  After the police had gone, James said reluctantly, ‘It seems we’re not exactly popular.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we’d better drop it.’ Agatha looked reluctant. ‘Perhaps I should think about some gardening.’

  ‘Your lawn at the front could do with treatment,’ said James. ‘Come and I’ll show you what I mean.’

  Agatha was first out of her front door. She glanced down the lane and saw Freda Huntingdon standing on James’s doorstep and retreated so quickly she bumped into him.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said, slamming the door and leading the way back to the kitchen. ‘Have another cup of coffee and I’ll tell you about it.’

  ‘Now,’ she began when they were seated, ‘the way I look at it is this.’

  Her doorbell rang, sharp and peremptory.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose so.’ Agatha got reluctantly to her feet. She peered through the spyhole. Freda was standing on the step. Agatha returned to the kitchen and sat down.

  ‘Double-glazing salesman,’ she said. ‘They’re so pushy. Not worth answering the door.’

  The bell shrilled again and Agatha winced. ‘I’ll go,’ said James, rising.

  ‘No, sit down, please. I think we should go to Leamington and question Miss Mabbs. How can that be called interfering? Just a few questions. If we knew more about what Paul Bladen was like, then we might know what lies behind his death. After all, what makes someone kill?’

  ‘Passion,’ said James. ‘One of his jilted ladies.’

  ‘Or money,’ said Agatha, thinking of her unfortunate experience in London.

  But James, secure in the comfort of a private income and an army pension, shook his head. ‘He hadn’t much to leave, not by today’s standards.’

  The doorbell rang again.

  ‘No,’ said Agatha sharply. ‘Just wait and whoever it is will go away. Whereabouts in Leamington does Miss Mabbs live?’

  He took out a notebook and flipped the pages. ‘Here we are. Miss Cheryl Mabbs, aged twenty-three, employed for only the short time the surgery lasted in Carsely, lives at 43, Blackbird Street, Royal Leamington Spa.’

  Agatha’s straining ears could not hear anything from outside, but then the cottage was so insulated, she hardly ever did. ‘I’ll just go upstairs and put some make-up on,’ she said, ‘and then we’ll go. If that doorbell rings again, ignore it.’

  Upstairs, she peered out of her bedroom window and saw with satisfaction the slim retreating figure of Freda.

  She put on a little make-up, not too much or he might be frightened off again, sprayed some Rive Gauche over herself, and went back downstairs. She fe
d the cats, and as the day was not particularly cold, let them out into the back garden.

  ‘Why don’t you get a cat door?’ asked James.

  ‘I’ve had a few scares before,’ said Agatha, ‘and when I think of a cat door, I think of a small burglar, writhing his way through it like a snake.’

  ‘That doesn’t happen. Tell you what,’ said James, feeling obscurely that he had to make amends for deserting his post the night before, ‘buy one and I’ll fix it for you.’

  Agatha beamed at him. How domestic they were becoming. A simple wedding in Carsely Church. Too old to wear white. Perhaps a silk suit and a pretty hat. Honeymoon somewhere exotic. ‘Famous Detective Agatha Raisin Weds,’ that’s what the local headlines would say.

  James looked at her uneasily. Her small eyes had an odd glazed look. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ he asked. ‘You look just the way I feel when I have indigestion.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Agatha, returning to earth with a bump. ‘Let’s go.’

  Leamington, or Royal Leamington Spa, to give it the full title which few people hardly ever use, was a relatively short drive and they arrived there in under an hour.

  The day had become grey and overcast, but unusually mild. Although in the centre of the country, Agatha thought Leamington had the air of a seaside town like Eastbourne or Brighton and kept expecting to turn a corner and see the sea.

  James, to her irritation, said he wanted to view the public gardens before they started any detective work. Agatha stumped along angrily beside him while he enthused over plants and blossom. She was obscurely aware she was jealous of the scenery and wished some of his raptures could be directed at her. She glanced at him sideways. He was strolling easily along with his hands in his pockets, at peace with the world. She wondered what he thought about her. She wondered what he thought about anything. Why wasn’t he married? Was he gay? And yet look at the way he had left that splendid clue to go running after a stupid bitch like Freda Huntingdon.

  He was staring up in dazed wonder at the cascading blossoms of a cherry tree when Agatha suddenly snapped, ‘Are we going to commune with nature all day, or are we going to get on with it?’ He gave her a glance, half-rueful, half-amused, and all at once Agatha had a picture of him escorting some woman who would share his enthusiasm for the scenery, who would know all these county names he had talked about at that old manor house, and felt bullying and coarsegrained.