The Dead Ringer

by M C Beaton

  There was a sudden silence. The pub was an old-fashioned country one with worn linoleum on the floor and whitewashed walls, stained with nicotine from the days before the smoking ban.

  Then Sydney said, “You are nothing more than a publicity seeker. Miss Dupin here lost her sister and now you are opening old wounds. Shame on you!”

  “I am not a publicity seeker. I am a murderer seeker,” said Agatha.

  “So, where’s the big announcement to be made?” asked Julian.

  Agatha thought quickly. “In the church hall in Carsely.”

  Helen Toms looked doubtful. “I am surprised to hear that the Bloxbys are letting you have the use of the hall. It is the rehearsal night for Whither Britannia?”

  “Never heard of it,” said Agatha.

  Helen gave a patronising little giggle. “You should know what goes on in your own village. Mr. Carton here says we are forgetting how to be British and he has prepared tunes and songs to give a patriotic feel.”

  Agatha scowled. She did not want to offend Mrs. Bloxby, who handled all the bookings for the church hall.

  “Why not have it in the church hall here?” said Gloria. “I, for one, will be there to see you make a right fool of yourself. I don’t for one moment believe you know who it is. And why won’t you tell us now?”

  “I want the press there so that the whole of Britain will be on the lookout for him.”

  “Well, you’re not getting the hall here,” said Helen.

  Agatha took out her phone and dialled a number. “Ah, vicar,” Helen heard her say. “May I rent the church hall here from you for tomorrow evening? Good. That’s settled.”

  Agatha rang off and gave a wide smile across the table at Helen. “Easy-peasy. Nothing to worry about.”

  Colin Docherty said in his high reedy voice, “Aren’t you forgetting one thing? That the killer may kill you tonight to shut you up?”

  “By this time, he will think I know nothing,” said Agatha.

  “Why?” asked Mavis.

  “He’s had a lot of time to paste over the cracks.”

  * * *

  Agatha, as soon as she got home, began to phone round all the newspapers, news agencies and television channels. Then she took her cats round to Doris, returned home, packed a suitcase and checked in at a Premier Inn outside Mircester on the ring road.

  It was then she wondered uneasily if she had found a new way of committing suicide. She now thought of Terry as “an unfortunate episode,” no longer wanting to dignify the experience with the name of love. It had begun to rain and the passing traffic made swishing sounds, coming and going through the dark night.

  She tried to be philosophical. “I’ve had a good life,” she said to the uncaring walls.

  Then she found herself thinking rebelliously that her life had been nothing but easy. And why did it always feel a bit empty if there wasn’t a man around? The new woman was surely supposed to be self-sufficient. I suppose she could be, thought Agatha, if her hormones had been surgically removed. It was then she realised with a jolt that she had booked the room under her own name. Better change the hotel. But comfort food first.

  She walked through to the restaurant attached. One window was opened because it was an unusually warm November, if damp. “Have you ordered yet?” asked a voice behind her.

  “Give me a chance,” grumbled Agatha. “I just got here.”

  She studied the menu and did not see the hand that went into her handbag on a chair beside her or remove her car keys. Nor did she notice as the key fob was clicked at the window, opening her car parked outside.

  * * *

  Charles elbowed his way into the church hall at Thirk Magna the following day. He could not find a free seat but propped himself up against the wall, next to the platform. Agatha had declared she would make her announcement at eleven o’clock in the morning. Eleven came and went. No Agatha.

  “Silly cow,” came a masculine voice in the hall. “Just another publicity hunter who knows bugger all.”

  There was a rumble of agreement. Charles began to worry. Agatha would not have run away from the situation. She would have turned up and either waffled her way out of it, or, although he doubted it, she now had a good idea as to the identity of the murderer. He knew that she often, in a way, forced herself into a mental corner and that was sometimes when that acute intuition of hers took over. Perhaps this was one of the times it hadn’t worked. But she still would have shown up. Where the hell was she? He scrambled up onto the platform and surveyed the room Who was missing? All the bell ringers were there. What about the dean and the bishop?

  He went outside and saw Agatha’s small staff huddled together. Toni ran to meet him. “We didn’t know about this until I heard it on the radio yesterday. She hasn’t contacted us. I phoned the bishop and got the dean. The pair of them are over at Whiton opening a sale of work and they stayed at the hotel there last night and no one saw them leave. Locals swear they never left the hotel.”

  “I phoned round all the hotels,” said Phil Marshall. “She booked into a Premier Inn out on the ring road under her own name. But when I rang she had gone to bed.”

  “What came over her to make such an amateur mistake?” raged Charles.

  “But she wanted to be found,” Simon pointed out.

  “In the hall and on her own terms,” said Toni. “Where is she?”

  * * *

  Agatha recovered consciousness. It was pitch black. Her head throbbed and there was a crust of something over most of her face. Bits of things were stabbing into her back. She tried to cry for help, but her voice was a weak croak and she fell unconscious again.

  When she recovered again, her chest was heaving, trying to get air. There was a little chink of light to the right. Although her arms were folded across her chest, she found she had some wiggle room. Agatha remembered she had a pen in her inside pocket and after a lot of wiggling, got it out. She managed to get the pen inside the hole and screwed it round and around it until she felt some air coming in.

  Agatha opened her mouth to call for help and then decided against it. If the murderer were out there, then he or she might finish the job. And as bits of memory came back in flashes, Agatha realised that the murderer had probably thought her dead when she had been put in this hole. Think! She remembered getting in her car, surprised to find out that she had apparently not locked it. Then pain and darkness.

  Mrs. Bloxby would urge her to pray. It wasn’t that Agatha never prayed: it was more that her prayers consisted of doing deals with God—“Get me out of this, God, and I will never smoke again” type of thing.

  But for some reason, she found herself begging the Almighty to look after her friends and see that Toni found a decent man if she ever got married. Then she lay very still and prepared to welcome death.

  But a little flicker of sunlight glinted at the airhole and she heard a voice intone, “‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’”

  The burial service, thought Agatha. They don’t know I am not dead. Let me think. That bit is said at the graveside which we all know, thanks to the telly rather than church attendance. Oh, damn it to hell. They’d all have been in here beforehand because I must be somewhere in the church but at ground level or I wouldn’t have heard the service coming in from the grave. I can’t accept death anymore.

  But she blacked out again.

  She came to some hours later and realised there were a lot of footsteps above her and that the church was filling up. She tried shouting but her voice was dry and weak and the organ was playing.

  Then she heard the voice of the vicar, “We are gathered here together to pray for Agatha Raisin. And so we have this special evening service requested by her friends to send her hope and courage if she is still alive. So please be upstanding and join together in the twenty-third psalm.”

  It was dur
ing the singing of the psalm that Agatha remembered her cigarettes and lighter were in the inside pocket of her jacket. She wriggled her hand into the pocket. The movement of her body caused again a crunching sound from underneath her. Agatha realised it was probably an old, old skeleton that she was grinding into bone meal.

  She found the packet and dragged it out. Then it seemed to take forever to find that lighter.

  Charles sat at the end of a pew feeling bleak and lost. The Reverend Toms’s voice rose in the evening prayer. “‘O praise the Lord for it is a good thing to sing praises unto our God; yea, a joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful. The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: and gather together the outcasts of Israel. He helpeth those that are broken in heart: and giveth medicine to heal their sickness.’”

  Maybe we should have got married, he thought. But husband or not, I cannot see Agatha letting me stop her behaving like this.

  “‘He telleth the number of the stars and…’ Well, really! This is too bad. Smoking in church and on such a solemn occasion.”

  Charles stood up and looked wildly round. James, who was in another pew, came to join him.

  “Look!” he said.

  From a hole in a slab of gravestone on the floor of the aisle of the church a pathetic little smoke ring wavered up.

  Chapter Nine

  “Get a crowbar!” yelled Charles. “I think she’s under here.”

  “Here’s one,” said the sexton. “Hang on. I’ll get another.”

  “I beg you to go carefully,” admonished the vicar. “That is the grave of Abigail Torine, buried in 1722. Such a pretty poem and so apt.”

  Done with working

  Gone to God

  Don’t forget

  To feed the dog.

  “Quite moving, is it not?”

  “Oh, shut the hell up,” shouted Charles. “Ah, right now. Don’t want to drop it back on her.”

  Harry put his crowbar on one side and James on the other. Patrick and Simon waited until the stone was raised up a bit and put their hands under it to balance it. They tipped it away. It fell against a pew with a crash and broke into three pieces.

  Smiling up at them through a mask of crusted blood was Agatha. “Stay where you are,” ordered James. “Let the paramedics move you.”

  “No, I’ve got to look at who’s here. I’ll bet the beast who did this to me is hanging around.”

  Despite their protests, she eventually was supported out of the grave and looked around the congregation. Love, she thought. Crazy love. Aristowhatsit. Him. Whole thing with Terry was mad. The bishop is here and the dean. Now Bish might find the world well lost for money. The dean for the bishop. Julian for Helen. Oh, my goodness.

  “It’s Mavis Dupin,” she shouted before losing consciousness again.

  Chapter Ten

  Agatha was put into an induced coma in the hospital while her head was operated on. Her friends came and went. James was getting fed up with Roy Silver. In the grateful emotions of finding Agatha alive, he had offered Roy Silver house room. And Roy always seemed to appear looking camper than ever if some of James’s old army friends called.

  On one such visit, a retired general had put his hand on James’s knee, winked and said, “We must get together soon.”

  At last when Agatha was out of her coma, he got her keys to give to Roy, only to find that Roy had packed up and left for London.

  “What happened after I accused Mavis?” asked Agatha.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Proof, Agatha. Proof. Not a smidgeon.”

  “So, the police are calling me a fool,” said Agatha bitterly.

  “Strangely enough, they aren’t. Although they are looking at all the bell ringers. It was someone who knew the church intimately. Unless it was someone very strong, no one else would think of lifting that gravestone, but someone who knew the history of the church would know that the marble slab was quite thin. But there’s all sorts of electrical lifting equipment these days. Also, because of funerals, once the double doors to the main entrance are opened, anyone could drive a vehicle in.”

  “Did they check the Premier Inn for security cameras? Surely whoever was after me arrived by car.”

  “Quietest part of the year. But they got a brief shot of someone on a bike. You were attacked in your own car by someone hiding in the back and it is possible to get into your car if crouched down and out of sight of the cameras. Why Mavis?”

  “I think Bishop Peter drove her mad. He was desperate for money and he can switch on sexuality. Millicent was competing with her on every occasion so Millicent had to go. Larry was selling secrets to the newspapers. Off with him as well. I think she came to get me and found Terry. Maybe jealousy of me made her say things she shouldn’t have and so Terry got it.”

  “Agatha, there is no police guard on your door so we have organised our own guard. Charles should be here soon.”

  “I am sure I can look after myself.”

  “Getting buried in an old grave is not exactly what I would call looking after yourself, Agatha. Was it the madness of love that got you on to Mavis?”

  “Something like that. You know, when the bishop got engaged to Ducksy, it’s a wonder Mavis didn’t murder her as well. Oh, maybe she has. James, I see some angel has brought my makeup bag. Pass it over.”

  “You don’t want to be looking in a mirror this evening, Agatha. Wait until your hair grows back.”

  “What! I want a mirror now, pullease.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Agatha fumbled in her large makeup bag until she found a mirror and held it up. She let out a squawk of dismay. Three quarters of her hair had been shaved off. And on the bald bit were two holes where they had drilled into her head to stop the bleeding.

  “I look like a bowling ball,” mourned Agatha. “James, that small case of mine over there might have a scarf in it.”

  James looked amused as the transformation began. Soon she had a green-and-gold chiffon scarf cleverly wound round her head and her face made up.

  Charles arrived carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. “I don’t think she’s allowed to drink,” cautioned James.

  “More for me. Push off anyway, James. I’ve only two glasses.”

  “Simon will relieve you in two hours,” said James, consulting a list, “and Patrick is doing the late shift.”

  Agatha began to sob. “You are all so good that…”

  “Oh, stop bubbling and gabbling,” snapped Charles, shoving a glass of champagne under Agatha’s nose.

  “I’m off,” said James.

  “Anyway, I want to hear all about it,” said Charles.

  “Before they induced the coma, the police were here, making me go over everything again and again and making me feel like a fool. And that newcomer, Sydney Carton? That really is his name.”

  As Agatha talked Charles drank most of the champagne and when Agatha fell abruptly asleep, he put away the bottle and glasses, used her shower and towels and, naked, got into the beside her, cuddled up and fell asleep.

  Simon walked into the room later and decided it was all too embarrassing and retreated to a chair in the corridor. A nurse came along and stopped short at the sight of him. She had been briefed on the subject of Agatha’s guard.

  “You don’t need to sit out here,” she said after checking Simon’s identity. “You can go in.”

  “Mrs. Raisin is otherwise engaged.”

  “Oh, that must be Mr. Butler, the neurosurgeon. I will just take a look.” And before Simon could stop her, she had opened the door and walked in.

  She rapidly came out again, her colour high. “Well, really! I never did!” she exclaimed.

  “Maybe it’s time you did,” said Simon to her retreating outraged back.

  As Simon expected, she was soon back with the neurosurgeon. Mr. Butler shook Charles awake and hissed, “Could you not have waited? This woman is in no condition to have sex.”

&n
bsp; Simon half-listened to the argument going on inside before picking up the paperback he had been reading.

  The surgeon and nurse emerged. “You must understand, those sort of people have no morals,” said Mr. Butler.

  Patrick turned up at that moment. “Anything happening?” he asked.

  “Charles scandalising everyone by getting off his kit and climbing into bed with Agatha. I gather he just fell asleep but the hospital thought otherwise. Don’t go in yet. Sounds like an argy-bargy in there.”

  Charles had started it by saying, “You must stop this business about intuition and try to do some detective work.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The day before you got buried, Toni had found out that Mavis Dupin had spent some months in a psychiatric ward fifteen years ago for torturing the two family dogs to death. It was a private nursing home and she was registered under a false name. But by plodding detective work, Toni found this out and was going to slip you that information before you made a prat of yourself at the village hall.”

  “Oh, shut up!” yelled Agatha.

  At that moment, Helen Toms walked into the room, carrying a bunch of flowers. “Now, now,” she admonished them. “Birds in their little nests agree.”

  “Oh, piss off,” said Agatha.

  “Must you be so rude?” raged Charles. “Come along, Helen. Let’s leave this silly bitch and go and have a drink.”

  “How kind of you, Sir Charles.”

  What is up with everyone, thought Agatha tearfully. It is a miracle I am alive and yet no one is being kind to me and Charles hates me.

  “I heard you,” said Patrick from the doorway. “You were really nasty to that woman. Can I get you anything?”

  “I feel I could murder a hamburger and fries.”

  “There’s a place across from the hospital. Back in a tick.”

  Patrick soon returned with hamburgers and fries for himself and Agatha and a bottle of red wine. “Never, ever drink white wine with hamburgers,” said Patrick in a mincing voice, making Agatha laugh. “Mind if I watch your telly? Lewis is on.”