by M C Beaton
James said wearily, “I know you did. But until this murder, or murders, is cleared up, Agatha and I feel we will always be suspects.”
“I’ll talk to you about that later. Now, who else did you see?”
“No one else yesterday.”
“The day before?”
James hesitated. Then he shrugged and said, “Mrs. Comfort had gone off to Spain with her lover, a Basil Morton who lives in Mircester. We went to see what we could find out about him. He’s married and his wife hadn’t a clue what he was up to, so we left. Then we went to see Mrs. Comfort’s ex-husband in Ashton-Le-Walls. He threatened to set the dog on us. End of story.”
“And how did you find out about Mr. Comfort? His address? Come to think of it, how did you get the addresses of those other people who were at the health farm?”
Agatha said, “Roy Silver employed a detective to find out about Jimmy. She dug up the addresses for us.”
“Name?”
“Can’t remember,” mumbled Agatha.
“We’ll ask Silver.”
Agatha looked helplessly at James.
“There’s no need to lie, Agatha,” said James. “We had a short stay at the health farm, Bill, and while we were there, I had a chance to look at the records. Do you think the rest of the questioning could be left until we’ve had some sleep? We’re both rather shaky.”
“All right. But I expect you both at police headquarters as soon as you can manage it.”
As Bill Wong drove off with the others, his first thought was, I’ve a lot to tell Maddie – followed hard by another thought, I’m damned if I will. It was strange they couldn’t find the Gore-Appleton woman. And yet there was something nagging at the back of his mind, something someone had said, something very obvious he hadn’t thought of doing.
The village carpenter effected temporary repairs, putting up chipboard and a makeshift door the next day while James phoned the insurance company. Mrs. Hardy phoned Agatha and asked if she would ‘step next door’ for a chat. “I’ll see what she wants, James,” said Agatha, “and then we’d better get off to Mircester.”
Agatha went reluctantly next door. She had taken such a dislike to Mrs. Hardy, and yet the woman had done everything she could to help put out the fire. Not only that, she had saved their lives, thought Agatha. That was a wild exaggeration, when they could both have escaped out of the back door.
But it was a changed Mrs. Hardy who answered the door to her. “Come in, you poor thing,” she said. “What a nightmare!”
“Thank you for all your efforts on our behalf.” Agatha followed her into the kitchen.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
Mrs. Hardy poured two cups of coffee. They both sat down at the kitchen table.
“I’ll come straight to the point.” Mrs. Hardy twisted her coffee-cup nervously in her ringed hands. “I decided to settle in the country for peace and quiet. I was finding it all too quiet, but what happened to you last night was frightening, not my idea of excitement. There’s a maniac on the loose and I want out of here. I am prepared to take your offer of one hundred and ten thousand pounds.”
Agatha had a sudden impulse to say she would make it one hundred and thirty, the sum she had originally offered, but bit it back in time.
“When do you want to settle at the lawyers’?”
“Today, if possible,” said Mrs. Hardy.
“Let me see, we’re just about to go into Mircester to make our statements. We could go on from there to Cheltenham. What about four o’clock?”
“I’ll fix it.”
“Tell me,” said Agatha curiously, “what is it about Carsely that you don’t like, apart from murder and mayhem?”
She gave a little sigh. “I’ve been very lonely since my husband died. I thought a small village would be a friendly place.”
“But it is!” protested Agatha. “Everyone’s prepared to be friendly if you just give them a chance.”
“But it means going to church and talking to the yokels in the pub and joining some dreadful ladies’ society.”
“I find them delightful.”
“Well, I don’t. I like cities. I’ll rent in London. I’ll put my stuff in storage and take a service flat for a few weeks and look around.”
But that remark of Mrs. Hardy’s about not being able to make friends had gone straight to Agatha’s heart as she remembered her own lonely days before coming to Carsely.
She said, “Why don’t you stay? We could be friends.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Mrs. Hardy gave a wry smile. “Don’t you want your cottage back?”
“Well, I do, but…”
“Then you shall have it. I’ll see you at the lawyers’ this afternoon.”
“And that was that,” said Agatha to James a few minutes later. “So I’ll soon be home again. She said as I was leaving that provided all the papers were signed, I can move in in a fortnight.”
James felt slightly irritated. A moment before it had seemed that all he wanted out of life was to have his cottage to himself, without Agatha Raisin dribbling cigarette ash over everything. He decided that she ought to look less delighted at the prospect of leaving his home.
“Well, if you’re ready,” he said, “let’s get to police headquarters.”
Leaves fluttered down in front of them as they drove off, autumn leaves, dancing and whirling, blown down by a great gusty wind from a sky full of tumbling black, ragged clouds.
The whole countryside was in motion. Showers of nuts pattered on the roof of the car. A woman getting out of a car at the Quarry Garage clutched at her skirts to hold them down. An old newspaper spiralled up and then performed a tumbling hectic dance through the furrows of a brown ploughed field. And somewhere, thought Agatha, crawling around out there is a murderer.
“It must be something to do with that Helen Warwick,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped James. “Do you mean! she travelled down from London to pour petrol through our 1 letter-box? Why?”
“Because I swear she knows something.”
“Oh, really. Then I had better go back and see her.”
“Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Very much. I found her a charming woman.”
“Men are so blind. She was sly and devious. And mercenary.”
“In your jealous opinion, Agatha.”
“I’m not jealous of that plump frump. We could have been killed last night.”
“Not with a back door to the garden.”
“What if we had both been asleep?”
There was no answer to that.
They completed the drive to Mircester in silence.
There were many questions to answer at police headquarters. Detective Inspector Wilkes was in charge of the question- I ing this time, flanked by Bill Wong. Agatha found herself beginning to sweat. She was terrified either she or James would let something slip and Wilkes would know about their bur-glaring.
When it was at last all over and they had signed their statements, Wilkes said severely, “I should charge both of you with obstructing police business. But I’m warning you for the last time. We may seem to you very slow, but we are thor- j ough.”
They left feeling chastened. From an upstairs window, Maddie Hurd watched them go. She bit her thumb nail and stared down at them. She had not been invited to join in the interrogation. She had not been asked to do anything further on the case at all. She had been given a series of burglaries to investigate instead. She blamed Bill Wong for turning her superiors against her.
Although Bill had not opened his mouth, her jilting of him had a lot to do with it. Bill Wong was very popular, Maddie was not. Women, even in the police force, were expected to be womanly. Women in the police force were not expected to jilt fellow officers. So, although Chief Inspector Wilkes did not sit down and say, “We don’t want Maddie Hurd on the case because of the way she has treated Bill Wong,” he had, without even thinki
ng about it, decided she was not the right officer for the job.
Agatha completed the business of buying her cottage back, although conscience prompted her finally to offer £120,000. She felt she had misjudged Mrs. Hardy, that here was a fellow spirit.
When they were leaving the lawyers’, Agatha said impulsively, “Look, there’s a dance at the village hall on Saturday evening. Why don’t you come with me and James? No, don’t refuse right away. I thought I would hate things like that, but they’re really rather fun. And it’s in a good cause. We’re raising money for Cancer Relief.”
Mrs. Hardy gave a weak smile. All her aggression seemed k to have left her. “Well, maybe…” she said hesitantly. “That’s the thing. Think about it.” Agatha waved goodbye and headed off to the car, where James was waiting for her.
“Well, that’s that,” she said cheerfully. “Do you know, she’s not that bad? I’ve asked her to come to the dance with us on Saturday.”
James groaned. “I didn’t know we were going’. ‘Of course we are. What would a village dance be without us?”
Agatha put on a chiffon evening blouse and black velvet skirt for the dance on Saturday, wishing the days of proper evening gowns even for a village hop were not gone forever. Full evening dress was glamorous. She was regretting her decision to ‘mother’ Mrs. Hardy at the dance. And yet surely the: was no one in the village to catch James’s wandering eye. An he did have a wandering eye, witness his interest in Helen Warwick.
He must have meant something hopeful by that ‘Give me time’. Perhaps they could go away together to northern Cyprus just for a holiday. It wouldn’t need to be a honeymoon. She sat at her dressing-table, a lipstick half-way to her mouth, her eyes unfocused by dreams as she imagined them walking along the beach together, talking.
Then she gave a shrug and, leaning forward, applied the lipstick with a careful hand. The dream James always talked so well, always said all those delightful things she longed to hear. The real James would probably talk about books or the political situation. She stood up. Her skirt was loose at the waist. No thanks to that brief stay at the health farm. It was a result of living with James and eating James’s carefully prepared meals – no fries, no puddings. There was no incentive either to snack before meals because she still felt obliged to ask him for everything, and it was easier not to eat anything between meals than to request something and maybe be damned as a glutton. Her face was thinner and her skin clear. I could pass for forty – maybe, thought Agatha.
When they collected Mrs. Hardy and they began to walk towards the village hall, Agatha glanced sideways at her and thought she might at least have made some effort with her dress. Mrs. Hardy was wearing a rather baggy green tweed skirt and a black shirt blouse under a raincoat.
“I don’t think this is a very good idea,” said Mrs. Hardy. “I don’t like dancing.”
“Stay for a bit and have a drink,” urged Agatha, “and then, if you still don’t like it, you can go home.”
Light was streaming out of the village hall and they could hear the jolly umpty-tumpty sound of the village band. “It’ll be old-fashioned dancing tonight, not a disco,” said Agatha. “No heavy metal.”
“You mean ‘Pride of Erin’ and the military two-step, things like that?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I can do those,” said Mrs. Hardy. “I didn’t know anyone did those sort of dances these days. I thought they just took ecstasy pills and threw themselves about like dervishes.”
They left their coats in the temporary cloakroom manned, or ‘womanned’, by old Mrs. Boggle. “That’ll be fifty pee each,” said Mrs. Boggle, “and hang your own coats up.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever been charged for a cloakroom ticket at the village hall,” said Agatha suspiciously.
“You don’t think I’m going to do this for nothing,” grumbled Mrs. Boggle.
James paid the money and then led them both into the village hall. “The next dance is a Canadian barn dance,” announced the MC, vicar Alf Bloxby.
James turned to Mrs. Hardy. “Care to try?”
“I don’t know…”
“Oh, go on,” said Agatha, determined to be charitable and reminding herself that she would soon be moving back into her old home.
James and Mrs. Hardy took the floor. Agatha moved over to the bar, where the publican, John Fletcher, was working, having left his wife and son to manage the pub. “Gin and tonic, John,” said Agatha.
“Right you are. How’s that murder investigation going? They caught anyone?”
Agatha shook her head.
“It’s odd, isn’t it? And then the murder of that poor woman in the cinema. Mind you, the police don’t think nc that the two murders are related.”
“Since when?”
“I dunno. Fred Griggs was saying something like that the other day.”
He turned away to serve someone else.
Agatha found Mrs. Bloxby next to her. “Mrs. Hardy appears to have come out of her shell,” said the vicar’s wife.
Agatha turned round and surveyed the dance floor. Mrs Hardy was dancing with unexpected grace. She was laughing at something James was saying.
“And if I am not mistaken, that’s quite a flirtatious look in her eyes. Not,” added Mrs. Bloxby hurriedly, “that she is any competition. You are looking remarkably trim and well these days.”
“Must be James’s cooking,” said Agatha. “We brought along Mrs. Hardy to cheer her up. I only hope now she doesn’t cheer up too much or she will decide to stay.”
“But you have your cottage back?”
“Yes, everything’s signed and agreed on.”
“In that case, she can do nothing about it.”
“I hope James is not going to get carried away by my good Samaritan act,” said Agatha. “If he asks her for the next dance, I’ll murder her…oh, dear, how easily one says things like that. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out who murdered Jimmy.”
“Let’s sit over there in the corner, away from the noise of the band, and you can tell me about it,” said Mrs. Bloxby.
Agatha hesitated. The dance had finished. But James was asking Miss Simms for the next dance.
“Okay,” she said. They carried their drinks over to a; couple of chairs in a corner of the hall.
“I think a lot of it you already know,” began Agatha. “Jimmy, and possibly this Mrs. Gore-Appleton, who ran a dicey charity, stayed at a health farm, found out what they could, and blackmailed some of the other guests. I believe one of them murdered him.” She went on to describe all their investigations.
Mrs. Bloxby listened carefully and then she said, “I would think the most likely suspect would be Mrs. Gore-Appleton herself.”
“But they were in it together!”
“Exactly. But Jimmy went back on the booze and down to the gutter. But he surfaced for long enough to get cleaned up for your wedding. So, say, before that he had some stage where he was relatively sober and needed money. Why should he not seek out his old protector? And think of this. Let’s say she wants nothing more to do with him – her miraculous cured alcoholic isn’t cured. So she tries to send him packing. But Jimmy has a taste for blackmail, and as he was close to her at one time, he must have known about the fraudulent charity. He knows the police are looking for her. So he says something like, ‘Pay up or I’ll tell them where you are’? Wait a bit. It could be just before he came down here. He says he’s going to be in Carsley. She follows him and waits for the right moment, and what better moment is there than when he is hopelessly drunk and has just had a row with his wife?”
Agatha looked at her open-mouthed and then said, “That’s all so very simple, it could well be what happened. But surely the police can find this woman, with all their resources and all.”
“She could have changed her name.”
“That might be an idea. I wonder if they’ve checked the Records Office to see if a Mrs. Gore-Appleton changed her name to anything else. Damn,
they’re bound to have done that.”
“She was and still is a criminal, Agatha. She could easily get false papers. Apart from her, have you come across anyone during your investigations who might be a murderer or murderess?”
“It could be any of them. Those men’s footprints near the body could be a blind. I have a gut feeling it’s some woman. That secretary, Helen Warwick, I don’t trust her at all.”
“It would take some strength to strangle a man.”
“Mrs. Comfort said something odd about Mrs. Gore-; Appleton. She said she looked like a man.”
“So she could be a he, pretending to be a woman?”
“I suppose anything’s possible.”
“There you are,” said James. “Dance, Agatha?”
“Sit down a moment,” said Agatha. “Mrs. Bloxby’s got some ideas.” By the time Mrs. Bloxby had finished outlining them, her husband was announcing a ladies’ choice, and to Agatha’s dismay, Mrs. Hardy came up and tapped James on the shoulder and marched him off rather like a military policeman arresting a deserter.
“I wish that woman would go back in her shell,” muttered Agatha. She was beginning to have that old feeling of being a wallflower, Then she remembered it was a ladies’ choice and asked one of the farmers for a dance.
Mrs. Bloxby watched her and reflected that Agatha was looking almost pretty. Her eyes were too small and her figure, however slimmed down, always appeared a bit stocky, but she had excellent legs and her brown hair shone with health.
Agatha began to forget about murder and enjoyed the evening. James asked her for the next dance and then they moved to the bar for some companionable drinks. Mrs. Hardy was on her feet for every dance, her face flushed, her eyes shining.
“Who would have thought that nasty old bat would turn out to be so nice, if you know what I mean,” said Agatha.
The village dance ended as usual at midnight. They said their good-nights, Agatha noticing that old Mrs. Boggle, having collected the money, had cleared off, leaving all the coats unguarded.
They walked home, Mrs. Hardy hanging on to James’s arm, much to Agatha’s irritation, and saying what a good evening it had been. They were just rounding the corner of Lilac Lane when a dark figure detached itself from the thicker blackness of the bushes.
