The Dead Ringer

by M C Beaton

  For Charles had seized the remote and turned up the sound. Agatha was being taken in for questioning over the murder of a reporter, Terry Fletcher. Charles gazed in horror at Agatha’s white face and said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “The lawyers!”

  “Get Gustav to cancel everything for the day.”

  “Charles! I can sue you for breach of promise.”

  But the slamming of the door was the only answer.

  * * *

  Chief Inspector Wilkes was a disappointed man as piece after piece of evidence arrived to show that Agatha Raisin could not have murdered Terry Fletcher. She had her booking at the hotel and petrol receipts and roadside restaurants for the journeys down and back from Devon.

  But Agatha felt it was as bad as being found guilty. Her quickly summoned lawyer had told her that Mrs. Fletcher had appeared on television, blaming Agatha for the break-up of her marriage. Agatha realised that she would probably have to move out of the Cotswolds altogether. Her badly damaged reputation would affect the business of the agency. And she would be damned forever as a breaker of marriages.

  How had he got into Agatha’s cottage? It turned out Doris’s husband had let him in, but did not tell Agatha because Terry had made it sound like a romantic surprise and Mr. Simpson had heard nothing about Agatha’s scandalous affair.

  She left the police station late that evening with Toni to find Charles waiting outside.

  He didn’t say anything, just put an arm around her shoulders. “I’ll drive you home,” he said. “Toni can fetch you in the morning. Didn’t they offer you a police car?”

  “Couldn’t bear it,” said Agatha. “Anyway, it’ll need to be the George. I can’t go home for a bit with forensics crawling all over the place and ‘make yourself ready for questioning, Mrs. Raisin’ being shot at me. Thanks, Toni. Just put my case in the boot. Thank goodness I’ve got luggage with me.”

  * * *

  Agatha booked one of the hotel suites on the top floor, feeling that, as she would be in the hotel for a while, she would need the space. Doris had taken her cats home with her, but Agatha found herself missing their furry company and despite the hotel’s no-pets policy hoped to sneak them in.

  “You can go now, Charles,” said Agatha. “Strangely enough, I think I will be able to sleep.”

  “In a while,” said Charles, beginning to pace up and down. “Did Fletcher’s wife have a good alibi?”

  “Evidently. Never near the Cotswolds. Never left London. They were due to leave for Australia on the following day.”

  “Agatha, if you had been there, I feel you would have been the one getting murdered. There seems to be a sort of hysterical hatred behind all this. And somehow, it all comes back to our bishop. He romances a lot of silly biddies to get money out of them for his old folks’ home and they go bonkers and see you as a rival. Got to get rid of you and come across Terry instead so he gets it.”

  “Charles!” Agatha clutched his sleeve, and whispered, “Someone is standing behind the door.”

  She pointed with a shaking finger. The light was in the passage outside, brighter than the dimmer lamplight inside the suite. Charles could see, under the gap at the bottom of the door, the shadow of a pair of trousered legs.

  He ran nimbly forward and jerked open the door. “Good evening, sir,” said Gustav.

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I assumed, sir, that you had gone to join Mrs. Raisin because your fiancée told me about the news on television, and knowing that Mrs. Raisin could not yet return home, I assumed she would be at the George.”

  “Yes, well, push off.”

  “I gather this suite has two bedrooms and I packed a case for you. Or I can drive you home.”

  “Oh, sit down, Gustav,” said Agatha, guessing that Charles’s engagement was causing trouble and wanting to hear about anything other than dead Terry. “Before you do, get me a brandy out of the mini bar and open that window. I am going to smoke. And then help yourself.”

  “Thank you, madam. But there is no need to open the window. The night has turned unseasonably chilly. I have become expert at disabling smoke alarms.”

  “Let me see you do it.”

  Gustav was tall. He reached up his long arms and simply jerked the smoke alarm so that it swung crazily on two wires.

  “That’s vandalism and I’ll get billed for it,” complained Agatha.

  “I always say that it just fell down,” said Gustav. “No one has ever contradicted me.”

  Agatha was beginning to feel she had wandered into the Mad Hatter’s tea party. But she gratefully lit up a cigarette, thinking that British prices for tobacco were now so enormous that the fags ought to be gold plated. Charles and Gustav had brandies as well, helped themselves to Agatha’s cigarettes and settled into armchairs.

  “Oh, do make yourself at home,” said Agatha sarcastically. “Don’t let’s even think about murder.”

  “No, indeed,” said Gustav solemnly. “There are more immediate and serious concerns.”

  “Like what?”

  “Miss Devenham plans to fire me. I told her you would not allow it. She asked why.”

  There was a long silence while Gustav hunched forward, cradling his brandy glass between knobbly fingers and staring at the floor.

  “Out with it, man. What did you say?”

  “I said you would never get rid of me.”

  “Yes, for what reason?”

  “I said we were lovers, sir. Miss Devenham was sick on the carpet, sir. Then she ran away. She crashed her car at that ash tree at the bottom of the drive, but only a few cuts and bruises were the result. The doctors at Stratford hospital and the nurses were most sympathetic, especially a Dr. Clearly who said he was queer as well and that Miss Devenham should be more understanding.”

  “Gustav! Have you run mad? Of course I will sack you now. So, is the engagement off?”

  “I am sure if you explain, sir, that I lied out of fear and distress, she will understand. She really does want to get married. She finds it hard to do so. It is said that in moments of ecstasy the young lady smells like stale kippers, very strong and pungent. Lady Sutcombe’s carer told me as much. Said Tommy Gresham couldn’t believe it and thought the cat had left some old fish under the bed. But he spoke later to Jimmy Talbot and he said, no, it was definitely her and it was all he could do to stop himself from shooting his cookies, which is an American expression, Mr. Talbot hailing from Nantucket.”

  “To think she was going on like the veriest virgin with me,” explained Charles. “I don’t care what she stinks of. I need that money. I know you helped me out, Agatha, but it doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Look, you precious pair,” said Agatha. “I have just found a dead body in my sitting room and all you can do is talk about some deb who stinks of kippers but you don’t mind because you need the money.”

  Charles looked at Agatha’s white, strained face. “Off you go, Gustav,” he said quietly. “Okay. Send a notice to the papers. Engagement off. Or does anyone bother announcing one these days?”

  “I do not believe so. Thank you for the brandy, Mrs. Raisin. I would like to say—”

  “Just go,” said Charles.

  When Gustav had left, Charles said, “Come on, Aggie. Let’s get you to bed.”

  With his help, Agatha staggered to her feet and then fainted dead away. Charles lowered her back into an armchair and called for a doctor. The doctor gave her a heavy sedative. After the doctor had left, Charles got her into bed by efficiently stripping off her clothes and putting her nightgown on.

  “Never fainted before,” mumbled Agatha. “Thought you had to wear corsets to faint.” And that was the last thing she said for the rest of the night.

  * * *

  Charles phoned Toni the next morning to come and look after Agatha and then he went in search of Ducksy. He obscurely felt that if he let Agatha go on handling his financial affairs and if he did not marry anyone else, then he might marry A
gatha. And that, he firmly believed, would be the end of a friendship.

  He was just standing outside the hotel when the bishop’s palace limousine, driven by the dean, sailed past. In the backseat were Bishop Peter and Ducksy.

  Setting off in pursuit, once he had remembered where he had parked his car, Charles did wonder what on earth he was going to say.

  The palace had once been a great mediaeval house and in parts, only bits of its former grandeur could be seen. The great hall was divided up into sections with cheap board partitions where various charities had small offices; offices for the Mothers’ Union, the Women’s Institute, the Book Reading Group and so on. The building itself had been rebuilt in a neo-Tudor style, looking every bit as fake as Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe in the courtyard.

  But linked to the palace was Bishop Peter’s pride and joy, the chapel of St. Mary, mostly used in preference to the abbey for ecclesiastical services. It had two beautiful fourteenth-century stained glass windows and a magnificent Victorian wooden pulpit carved by Grinling Gibbons.

  Charles saw the bishop’s Bentley was parked outside. He approached the entrance to the chapel and found his way blocked by the dean. “Wrong way,” said Dean Whitby. “This way.”

  Charles had never been in this section of the abbey and found himself suddenly thrust into some sort of mediaeval cell. An oak door was slammed, a key was turned and the dean’s voice came through a grille on the door. “I’ll let you out when there is no chance of you interfering. Just sit down in that nice cell. The prison was originally for felonious priests.”

  “I’ll sue you for unlawful imprisonment,” said Charles.

  “Oh, yes? And I will say that I and the bishop were protecting Miss Devenham from a homosexual who only wants to marry her for her money.”

  “I am not a homosexual!” raged Charles.

  “So hard to prove these days, is it not?”

  And with that, the dean walked off, laughing.

  Charles took stock of his situation. He wondered if the dean had left the key in the door. In the boys’ books of his youth, boys were always escaping by putting a handkerchief under the door, pushing the key onto it and drawing it through.

  After examination, he discovered the key was indeed in the door but no amount of poking and pushing would make it fall.

  Then, as a last resort, he tried the handle, and found that the Dean had forgotten to lock it.

  Charles was just leaving the cell when he saw bundles of old newspapers stacked against the wall outside. He bent down and felt them. They were tinder dry. He set fire to the lot and fled before the flames could block his way. Smoke billowed after him down the corridor. The dean erupted through the smoke, howling, “What have you done?”

  Charles punched him as hard on the face as he could, skirted round him and managed to find a way out into the courtyard.

  Ducksy was in the middle of the courtyard in the arms of the bishop. Peter gazed into her eyes and said, “Do you feel the ecstasy of the spirit?”

  “Oh, yes, darling,” said Ducksy, and Peter screwed up his face before a sudden waft of rotting kippers.

  Charles gave up in that moment. He felt ridiculous at even having contemplated marriage. He would go back home and get Gustav to shut all visitors out.

  * * *

  But he should not have been as surprised as he was a week later when, venturing out for the first time to join Agatha, who had been allowed back into her cottage, he got the news on his phone from Gustav that an engagement had been announced between Bishop Peter Salver-Hinkley and Miss Sophy Devenham.

  “She must be really awfully rich,” said Agatha.

  “Gustav just found out. Daddy is First Plastico.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It is a form of biodegradable plastic. All that rubbish polluting the sea just melts away. The family is worth millions, Aggie.”

  “Don’t call m—”

  “Oh, God, and I threw it all away to go rushing to your side. Brings tears to my eyes. So, let’s talk murder.”

  “I want to come over!” called a voice over the garden fence.

  “Over you come, James,” shouted Agatha.

  James Lacey nimbly scaled the high fence that blocked Agatha’s garden from his own to join them round Agatha’s garden table. “You should lower that fence, Agatha,” he said. “It blocks out the sunlight from half our gardens. Charles, I see your ex-fiancée is to wed the bishop,” said James. “There’s talk that Peter Salver-Hinkley wants the whole of his palace restored to its original glory.”

  “He should have waited until they were actually married. I never saw the marriage settlements but I gather they were pretty stiff. I don’t think he’ll be able to touch her money,” said Charles.

  “If you knew all that, why on earth were you so keen to marry her to settle your debts?” demanded Agatha.

  “I dunno. Thought I could be the one to winkle some of it out of the family coffers. Father is a bully. Takes all the credit for plastic and gives long boring speeches about how he discovered it although it was actually discovered by Wayne something, a dweeb in the lab.”

  Agatha looked at him. He was as impeccably barbered and tailored as usual. There was something almost oriental about his imperturbability. She wondered what he really felt.

  As if conscious of her gaze, Charles turned and stared at her for a long minute as if trying to make up his mind about something. Then he said, “Time for drinks. After eleven in the morning on a Saturday. No, don’t get up, Agatha. Give me a hand, James, and we’ll just wheel the drinks trolley into the garden.”

  Agatha looked at her packet of cigarettes on the garden table. All over the place, people were giving up smoking. Why couldn’t she? Well, she would resist this morning and take it from there.

  But Charles helped himself to a whisky and soda, opened Agatha’s packet of cigarettes, extracted one, lit it up and blew a lazy smoke ring up to drift among the roses. That was it. Agatha followed suit. The doorbell rang. James went to answer it and came back with Bill Wong and Alice Peterson. Agatha repressed a sigh. She could remember, although she was much older than Bill, when she was the only female in his life, although not romantically, thanks to his parents scaring anyone else who came near. But Bill was so much in love with Alice than he had at last moved out of the family home and had stood up to his parents for the first time.

  “Now, what?” asked Agatha.

  “We wondered if you knew about this,” said Bill.

  “About what?”

  “Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sakes, what’s the wretched woman whining about now? Does she expect me to go around wearing sackcloth and ashes?”

  “Evidently not. She had a very strong alibi for the day her husband was murdered.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like she had a friend pick the kids up from playschool while she rollicked in bed with Terry’s best friend, Jerry Milne. They then went to Melbourne together and they are to be married tomorrow.”

  “The guilt that woman caused me! Hey! You didn’t believe that alibi. You can’t rollick around when you are so far gone in pregnancy.”

  “Sometimes Agatha’s innocence can be quite touching,” said Charles.

  “Well, canoodle or rollick,” said Alice. “She did.”

  “I mean, you are taking her word for it?”

  “No, her neighbour, Mrs. Josie Burns. She said they did not pull the curtains and pranced about in the altogether.”

  “Surely that’s fishy,” said James. “I mean, they are making pretty sure they have an alibi, maybe even before he landed dead on Agatha’s carpet. When did he die exactly?”

  “From the stomach contents, about two hours after a hamburger which he bought in the Red Lion had been digested. And during those two hours was when Mrs. Burns saw what she called ‘disgusting behaviour. Like the fall of Rome.’”

  “There’s a programme on the telly called The Fall of Rome,” said the voice of Roy
Silver, Agatha’s former employee, from the doorway. “It’s a toga ripper.”

  “Come in, Roy. Who left the door open?”

  “I must have done,” said Bill.

  “It can’t be very sexy ripping togas,” said Agatha. “Fellows wear togas.”

  “It’s to celebrate queers in the arts,” said Roy. “Where are all the press?”

  “Don’t you of all people read the newspapers? Better stories elsewhere.”

  “But this place has never been out of the headlines,” complained Roy. “They’ve named it Death Village. I heard all the press were here from Japan to Paris Match.”

  “It’s like this,” explained James. “Horrible news all round. Massive shooting in a school in Texas, the worst ever. Supermarket hostages all night in Marseilles and a mosque in Belgium set on fire with the worshippers locked inside. So, every journalist packed up. They’ve been writing the same thing here over and over again.”

  Agatha could feel a warm sensation of relief coursing through her body. Mrs. Fletcher would be all right now. She tried to remember the power and the glory of her feelings for Terry and could not experience them again.

  She felt she had a new perspective on Terry’s murder. She was now sure that not only Terry but his wife were possibly amoral. Terry may have seduced a colleague’s wife. “Bill,” she ventured, “isn’t it possible that Mrs. Fletcher paid for Terry to be killed?”

  “We thought of that. But she didn’t seem to have those sorts of connections.”

  “Oh, well, I wonder if I will be invited to the bishop’s wedding,” said Agatha.

  “I saw his photo,” said Roy. “You simply must introduce me, Agatha. He is gorgeous.”

  Agatha sighed. “Now that the stigma of marriage breaker has been taken away from me, or will be tomorrow when the newspapers report Mrs. Fletcher’s wedding, it means I don’t need to sell my cottage. I think I know where we can find the bishop this evening, Roy.”

  “Be careful,” warned Charles. “That dean of his is a thug. I think I might have broken a little bone on my finger when I socked him on the nose. I’ll come with you.”