by M C Beaton
“Right,” said James, putting an arm around Agatha’s shoulders. They walked around Mr. Adder.
Agatha looked back as they gained the stairs. Mr. Adder was trying the office door to make sure it was locked.
“Phew,” she said, when they were back in their room. “Think he swallowed that?”
“No, but he probably thought we were looking for the kitchens but tried the office door just to be sure. Now I chose the names out of the register of the people who live near Mircester who were here at the same time as Jimmy.” He flipped open the notebook. “We have Sir Desmond Derring-ton and Lady Derrington, a Miss Janet Purvey, and a Mrs. Gloria Comfort. When we get out of here, however, the first thing we do is to go up to Charles Street in London and see if Mrs. Gore-Appleton is still at the same address. Then we’ll start on these names.”
“Have you paid for the whole week in advance?” asked Agatha.
“Yes.”
“So don’t you think we should stay the whole week and get our money’s worth?”
“I should die of boredom,” said James, turning away to pick up his pyjamas and so missing the look of naked hurt in Agatha’s eyes. “May as well both get our medical check-up, have a swim or a massage or something, and then get the hell out of here.”
Agatha found at her medical the following morning that her blood pressure and cholesterol levels were both a bit high. After a breakfast of muesli and fruit, she looked at her programme and went to the masseur to be pulled and pummelled, then a sauna and then to the gym for the morning’s aerobics.
James was already there. The class was led by a blonde with long, long legs and a staggeringly beautiful figure. Agatha panted and sweated, aware the whole time that James’s eyes were fastened on the vision leading the class. From wanting to stay on the whole week, she suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of the place. After the class was over, she fidgeted impatiently while James chatted to the blonde instructress.
Over a meagre salad lunch and fruit juice, James looked at his own programme. “Going easy on me for the first day,” he said. “Not much this afternoon. Like to go for a swim?”
Agatha had a sudden mental picture of her own body set against the glory of that of the instructress. She shook her head. “I thought we should be getting on with our investigations.”
“Right you are,” he said easily. “But I thought you wanted to stay.”
“Mr. Adder is over there and keeps darting little looks at us.”
“Agatha, I don’t believe you. I think the aerobics class was too much for you.”
“Not in the slightest. I got a little puffed, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Adder. It’s quite pleasant here.” He laughed at the baffled look on Agatha’s face. “It’s all right. We’ll go. What excuse shall we give?”
“I have these fads. I’m a temperamental lady. I’ve changed my mind.”
“That should do the trick. If you’ve finished, go and start packing and I’ll deal with Mr. Adder.”
Dealing with Mr. Adder proved trickier than James had expected. He listened in silence to James’s tale of a temperamental wife, and then said, “We don’t give refunds.”
“I didn’t suppose for a minute you did,” said James airily.
Mr. Adder leaned forward. “Have you heard of co-dependency therapy?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I think you could do with some counselling, Mr. Perth. We like to supply our customers with the best of service, and that includes looking after their mental welfare as well as their physical well-being. You appear to be in prime condition and yet you are married to a lady who gets you up in the middle of the night to run up and down the stairs. It strikes me that you have agreed to her whim to leave without protest. You have been taken hostage, Mr. Perth. ”
“Oh, Agatha and I get on all right.”
Mr. Adder leaned forward and tapped James on the knee. “Provided you always do exactly what she wants, hey?”
James put a shifty look on his face. “Well, it’s her money, you see.”
“And you go along with everything she wants because she holds the purse-strings?”
“Why not?” demanded James. “I’m not getting any younger. Don’t want to go out and look for work at my age.”
A look of distaste crossed Mr. Adder’s features. “If you choose to earn your money being at your wife’s beck and call, then there is nothing I can do for you. But I have never come across a man whose appearance was more deceptive. I would have judged you a strong character of high morals and firm convictions who could not be bullied by anyone.”
“I am beginning to find you a trifle impertinent, Mr. Adder.”
“Forgive me. I was only trying to help.”
James rose and escaped upstairs, where he told Agatha, with a certain amount of relish, that he was now regarded as a sponger of the first order who was bullied by his wife.
To Agatha’s high irritation, the blonde beauty who led the aerobics class came out to say goodbye to James. Agatha waited angrily in the car, wondering what they were talking about. She saw James take out his notebook and write something down. Her phone number? Agatha’s jealousy flared up. James was no longer hers and therefore prey to every blonde harpy who wanted to get her painted claws into him. By the time James finished his conversation, Agatha was feeling quite weepy.
At last James climbed into the driving seat. “What was that all about?” asked Agatha, trying to keep her voice light.
“Oh, chit-chat,” he said. “I think we should head straight for London to that address in Charles Street.”
The journey was completed in almost total silence, Agatha wrestling with a jumble of unwanted emotions and James immersed in his own thoughts.
At Charles Street, off Berkeley Square, they drew a blank. No Mrs. Gore-Appleton had ever lived there.
“Didn’t she pay by cheque or credit card?” asked Agatha.
“No, cash. It was on the records.”
“Damn. Now what?”
“Back to Carsely for the night. Then we’ll try Sir Desmond Derrington tomorrow.”
Agatha could not sleep that night. She was determined to find out what James had written down in that notebook while he had been talking to the aerobics woman.
She waited until she was sure that James was asleep and then crept along to his room. It was brightly lit by moonlight and she could see his trousers hanging over the back of a chair, with the edge of that notebook sticking out of the back pocket.
Keeping a cautious eye on the sleeping figure on the bed, Agatha gently eased the notebook out and carried it back through to her room. She flicked it open and turned to the last entry. In James’s cramped handwriting, which the eyes of love had taught her to decipher, “Co-Dependency Anonymous,” Agatha read with amazement. There followed a London address and a ‘contact’ number.
The bitch, thought Agatha, forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be a fickle and domineering woman whose husband was dependent on her cash.
“So now you’ve satisfied your curiosity, madam, do you think I could have my notebook back?” James’s voice rang from the doorway.
Agatha flushed guiltily. “I was only looking at those names you found in the office.”
“Wrong page,” he said. “You’re supposed to be a bullying rich woman and I’m supposed to be a wimp of a leech, remember? Hence the therapy suggestion.”
“I thought you were asleep,” was all Agatha could think of saying.
“I wake easily, as you should know.”
“Sorry, James,” mumbled Agatha. “Go back to bed.”
FOUR
SIR Desmond Derrington lived in a pleasant Cotswold mansion a few miles outside Mircester on the Oxford road. As they approached it, Agatha saw a poster stuck on a tree-trunk beside the road which advertised the fact that Sir Desmond’s gardens were open that day to the public.
“I hope he’s there,” said James when it was pointed out to
him. “I hope he hasn’t gone off and left the local village ladies to show people around.”
Agatha, desperate for anyone who looked like a murderer, felt disappointed when she first saw Sir Desmond. He was bending over an ornamental shrub and explaining its history and planting to a fat woman who was shifting her bulk uneasily and looking as if she wished she had never asked about it. Sir Desmond looked like a pillar of the community, middle-aged, greying, long-nosed, and married to a rangy loud-voiced wife who was holding forth in another part of the garden. Lady Derrington was wearing a short-sleeved cotton print dress despite the chill of the day and had a hard fiat bottom and a hard flat chest. Her brown hair was rigidly permed and her patrician nose looked down at each flower and plant with a faintly patronizing air, as if all had sprung from the earth without her permission.
The fat woman waddled away from Sir Desmond and James approached him. “I was admiring that fine wisteria you’ve got on the wall over there,” he said.
“Oh, that.” Sir Desmond blinked myopically in the direction of the house wall. “Very fine in the spring. Masses of blossom.”
“I’m experiencing a bit of difficulty with mine,” said James. “I planted it two years ago but it hasn’t grown very much and has very few blossoms.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“Brakeham’s Nurseries.”
“Them!” Sir Demond gave a contemptuous snort. “Wouldn’t get anything from there. Hetty, my wife, got given a present of a hydrangea from there. Died after a week. And do you know why?” Sir Desmond poked James in the chest with a long finger. “Wo roots.”
“How awful. I’ll give them a clear berth in future.”
Agatha was approaching to join them. Then she heard Sir Desmond say, “Lot of charlatans about. Where are you from?”
“Carsely.”
“Do you know I went to see the gardens there when they were open to the public and some woman had bought everything fully grown from a nursery and tried to pretend she had planted the lot from seed. Didn’t even know the names of anything.”
Recognizing a description of herself, Agatha veered off, leaving the conversation to James.
She approached Lady Derrington instead. “Nice garden,” said Agatha.
“Thank you,” said Lady Derrington. “We have some plants for sale on tables over by the house. Very reasonable prices. And there are tea and cakes. Our housekeeper makes very good cakes. Just follow the crowd. Why, Angela, darling, how wonderful to see you!”
She turned away. Agatha looked back at James. He was now deep in conversation with Sir Desmond. Judging they had moved from the subject of that dreadful woman in Carsely, Agatha went to join them. They were swapping army stories. Agatha fidgeted and stifled a yawn.
“I was just about to take a break and have some tea,” said Sir Desmond finally. “Do join us. The women from the village are quite capable of coping with this crowd.”
James introduced Agatha as his wife, Mrs. Perth. Agatha was surprised that he should maintain that bit of deception, but James did not want Sir Desmond to remember Agatha as the gardening cheat of Carsely.
Sir Desmond walked them over to his wife and introduced them. Lady Derrington seemed slightly displeased that two strangers should have been invited for tea. Agatha suspected that she would have been better pleased if they had paid for it.
They found themselves in a pleasant drawing-room. The green leaves of the wisteria fluttered and moved outside the windows, dappling the room in a mixture of sunlight and shadow. Two sleepy dogs rose at their entrance and yawned and stretched before curling down and going to sleep again. Lady Derrington threw a log on the fire and then poured tea. No cakes, noticed Agatha with a beady eye. Only some rather hard biscuits. She wanted a cigarette but there was no ashtray in sight.
They answered questions about Carsely and then James leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs, and said with seeming casualness, “My wife and I have just returned from a short stay at Hunters Fields.”
Sir Desmond was lifting a cup of tea to his lips. His hand holding the cup paused in mid-air. “What’s that?” he demanded sharply.
“It’s that health farm,” said his wife. “Horribly pricey. The Pomfrets went there but they’ve got money to burn.”
“But you were there yourself,” said James. “You were both there at the same time as two people we know, Mrs. Gore-Appleton and Jimmy Raisin.”
“We have never been there and I have never heard of them,” said Sir Desmond evenly. “Now if you will forgive me…”
He stood up and walked to the door and held it open. His wife looked surprised but did not say anything.
He strode out angrily back into the gardens followed by Agatha and James and then turned to face them. “I’m tired of scum like you. You are not getting a penny.”
He rushed off, cannoned off a pair of surprised visitors, and disappeared around a corner of the house.
Agatha made to go after him but James held her back. “He must have been there with someone else, someone who wasn’t his wife. Leave it, Agatha. Someone was blackmailing him, probably Jimmy. It’s time to tell Bill Wong what we know.”
They left a message for Bill Wong when they returned home, but it was the following day before they saw him again.
He arrived in the afternoon. When she opened the door, Agatha could see the dreadful Maddie sitting beside him in the car. Bill followed Agatha into the living-room. “Coffee?” said James.
“No, thank you. I haven’t much time. What did you want to see me about?”
They told him about their investigations, ending up with the visit to Sir Desmond Derrington.
Bill Wong’s chubby face was severe. “I’ve been there all night,” he said sternly. “Sir Desmond is dead. It appears to have been a shooting accident. His shotgun went off when he was cleaning it. But he was cleaning it in the middle of the night, you see, and it now seems to me he thought you were taking over where Jimmy Raisin left off. We roused the health farm at two in the morning. Sir Desmond stayed there at the same time as Jimmy Raisin with a woman who gave her name as Lady Derrington. The real Lady Derrington is the one with all the money. Had she divorced Sir Desmond, he would have been virtually penniless. He had been paying out the sum of five hundred pounds a month for a year, probably the year Jimmy Raisin was sober, and then the payments stopped. He was proud of his position in the community – local magistrate, all that sort of thing. Does it dawn on you interfering pair that you might have killed him?”
“Oh, no,” said James, horrified. “Surely it was an accident?”
“Why decide to clean a gun in the middle of the night, and the night after your visit?” said Bill wearily. “It’s dangerous to interfere with police work.”
James glanced sideways at Agatha’s stricken face. “Look,” he said, “we were about to give you all this information anyway. So what would happen? You would start with the health farm and then you would call on Sir Desmond. Would you think of asking them to describe the woman who said she was Lady Derrington? No, you would not. So you would have approached him and he would know his wife was going to find out all about it and the result would have been the same.”
“We thought of that. But Maddie pointed out that a visit from the police might not have tipped the balance of his mind the way the appearance on the scene of what appeared to be a couple of blackmailers would do.”
“Maddie says, Maddie says,” jeered Agatha tearfully. “You think the sun shines out of her arse!”
There was a shocked silence. Agatha turned red.
“Go upstairs and put some make-up on or something,” said James quietly. When Agatha had left the room, he said to Bill, “Agatha heard an unfortunate conversation between you and Maddie in the pub in Mircester. The toilets are behind where you were both talking. Maddie was manipulating you into calling on us to find out if we knew anything. I gather her remarks about Agatha were pretty insulting. Had Agatha not been so badly hurt and had I n
ot sympathized with her, we might have told you all this earlier. Friendship,” said James sententiously, “is a valuable thing. All you had to say to Maddie was that you would be calling on us anyway as part of your investigations. Do you not feel she is using you to find out extra facts which might help her to solve the case?”
“No,” said Bill hotly. “Not a bit of it. She is a hardworking and conscientious detective.”
“Oh, really? Well, let’s return to the question of Sir Desmond’s death. His wife held the purse-strings. So how did he manage to pay out this five hundred a month, if that was blackmail money and not some money to a young mistress, without his wife finding out?”
“He had a monthly income from Lady Derrington’s family trust. It was generous, but Sir Desmond had quite an extravagant life-style in a quiet way. Hunting, for example, takes a bit of money, not to mention the shirts from Jermyn Street and the suits from Savile Row. Lady Derrington never checked his bank account. It was overdrawn each month. That came as a surprise to her.”
“So I gather you insensitive cops put her wise to the mistress. How did Lady Derrington take it?”
“Coldly. She said, ‘Silly old goat’.”
“And who was this charmer who seduced Sir Desmond?”
“A secretary from the House of Commons, secretary to an MP friend of Sir Desmond’s. We’re trying to get her. She’s on holiday in Barbados at the moment. Called Helen Warwick. Not young. Blonde, yes, but in her forties.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“So no blackmail there?”
“We’ll need to wait and see. She is a respectable lady and might not want to feature in a divorce case. Look, I’d better talk to Agatha. Things overheard are always worse than things said direct.”
“Leave it for the moment,” said James curtly. “I’ll speak to her.”
“Well, don’t do any more detecting without telling me. In fact, don’t do any detecting at all.”
Bill left and climbed into the car beside Maddie. “Well, did you tell that interfering pair what you thought of them?” she asked.
