by M C Beaton
‘I had to wrestle with my conscience. I even thought of entering the Catholic Church.’
‘And taking a vow of celibacy?’
‘The Vatican is proposing making provisions for people like myself.’
‘Don’t you talk to your wife?’
‘I prefer to wrestle with spiritual matters on my own.’
Agatha saw a way out of her predicament. She threw him a cunning look out of her small, bearlike eyes. ‘I could fix it for you.’
‘You! Do me a favour.’
‘I will, if you’ll shut up and listen. The bishop will not go against the wishes of the parishioners. The whole village will sign a petition to keep things as they are and send it to the bishop. Easy. I’ll fix it for you if you promise not to tell Mrs Bloxby I had anything to do with it. I’ll fix it up with the local shop. Everyone shops there in the bad weather. I’ll get Mrs Tutchell, the new owner, to say it’s her idea. You start talking about it now, all round the village, starting with your wife. Of course, if I find you have breathed a word about my involvement in this, you’re on your own, mate. Of all the silly vicars . . .’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Mrs Bloxby plaintively half an hour later, after having heard her husband’s explanation.
‘At first, I wanted to wrestle with the problem on my own, but I called in at the village store and happened to mention it on my way home. The villagers have been very supportive and are sending a petition to the bishop.’
‘Did Mrs Raisin have anything to do with this?’
‘Of course not,’ said the vicar, addressing the sitting-room fire. Just a white lie, God, he assured his Maker. ‘Can you imagine me asking her for help?’
Agatha busied herself for most of the rest of the day by going door-to-door in the village, raising support for the vicar and urging everyone to sign the petition at the village store. A good proportion of the villagers were incomers who only went to church at Easter and Christmas but were anxious to do the right ‘village thingie’, as one overweight matron put it. Agatha headed to the office in the late afternoon to find Toni just leaving on the arm of a tall, tweedy man who sported a beard.
‘This is Paul Finlay,’ said Toni.
‘Ah, the great detective,’ said Paul. He was in his late thirties, Agatha guessed, with an infuriatingly patronizing air. He had a craggy face and the sort of twinkling humorous eyes that belie the fact that the owner has no sense of humour whatsoever.
‘We’re off out for the evening,’ said Toni quickly. ‘Bye.’
‘Wait a bit,’ said Agatha. ‘Roy’s coming on Friday night, and on Saturday we’re going to a pig roast in Winter Parva. Why don’t you and Paul come along? Come to my cottage and I’ll take you over because the parking’s going to be awful.’
‘A pig roast?’ cackled Paul. ‘How quaint. Of course we’ll come.’
‘Good. The pig roast starts at six, but I’d like to get there a bit earlier,’ said Agatha. ‘See you around four o’clock for drinks and then we’ll all go.’
Agatha stood and watched them as they walked away. Toni’s slim young figure looked dwarfed and vulnerable beside the tall figure of Paul.
‘Not suitable at all. What a prick,’ said Agatha, and a passing woman gave her a nervous look.
Agatha checked business in the office before heading home again. She was just approaching Lilac Lane when a police car swung in front of her, blocking her.
Agatha jammed on the brakes and looked in her rearview mirror. She saw the lumbering figure of the policeman who had ticketed her for blowing her nose. She rolled down the window as he approached. ‘Now what?’ she demanded.
‘I had a speed camera in me ’and up in that there road,’ he said, ‘and you was doing thirty-two miles an hour. So that’s three points off your licence and a speeding fine.’
Agatha opened her mouth to blast him but quickly realized he would probably fine her for abusing a police officer. He proceeded to give her a lecture on the dangers of speeding, and Agatha knew he was trying to get her to lose her temper, so she listened quietly until he gave up.
When he had finally gone, she swung the car round and went into the village store, where she informed an interested audience about the iniquities of the police in general and one policeman in particular. ‘I’d like to kill him,’ she shouted. ‘May he roast slowly over a spit in hell.’
It was a frosty Friday evening when Agatha met Roy Silver at Moreton-in-Marsh station. He was dressed in black trousers and a black sweater, over which he was wearing a scarlet jacket with little flecks of gold in the weave. He had shaved his head bald, and Agatha thought dismally that her friend looked like a cross between a plucked chicken and someone auditioning for a job as a Red Coat entertainer at a Butlin’s holiday camp.
‘Turn on the heater,’ said Roy as he got in the car. ‘I’m freezing.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Agatha. ‘What’s with the bald head?’
‘It’s fashionable,’ said Roy petulantly, ‘and it strengthens the hair. It’s only temporary.’
‘I’ll lend you some warm clothes,’ said Agatha.
‘Your clothes on me, babes?’ said Roy waspishly. ‘I’d look as if I were wearing a tent. I mean, you could put two of me inside one of you.’
‘I’m not fat,’ snarled Agatha. ‘You’re unhealthily thin. Charles has left some of his clothes in the spare room.’ Sir Charles Fraith, a friend of Agatha’s, often used her cottage as a hotel.
Roy said mutinously that his clothes were perfectly adequate, but when they got to Agatha’s cottage, they found there had been another power cut and the house was cold.
While Agatha lit the fire in her living room, Roy hung away his precious jacket in the wardrobe in the spare room, wondering how anyone could not love such a creation. He found one of Charles’s cashmere sweaters and put it on.
When he joined Agatha, the fire was blazing. ‘How long do these power cuts last?’ he asked.
‘Not long, usually,’ said Agatha. ‘There’s something up with the power station that serves this end of the village.’
‘Anything planned for the weekend?’
‘We’re going to a pig roast at Winter Parva tomorrow.’
‘No use. I’m vegetarian.’
‘Since when?’
Roy looked shifty. ‘A month ago.’
‘You haven’t been dieting. You’ve been starving yourself,’ accused Agatha. ‘I got steaks for dinner.’
‘Couldn’t touch one,’ said Roy. ‘A pig roast? Do you mean turned on a spit like in those historical films?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yuck, and double yucky, yucky yuck, Aggie. It’ll be disgusting.’
But the next day after Toni and Paul had arrived, and the erratic electricity had come on again, Roy decided that anything would be better than being left behind. Bill Wong had phoned to say he could not make it.
Just as they were having drinks, Charles Fraith arrived. He was as expensively dressed as usual in smart casual clothes. He had small, neat features and well-barbered hair. Agatha never really knew what he thought of her. He helped himself to a whisky and then proceeded to put his foot in it. He asked Roy sympathetically if he had cancer. When Roy denied it, Charles said, ‘I was about to forgive you for wearing one of my sweaters, but as you aren’t suffering, I do feel you might have asked me first.’
‘I told him he could borrow something,’ said Agatha. ‘I haven’t introduced you to Paul Finlay.’
‘Toni’s uncle?’
‘No, just a friend,’ said Agatha.
Paul bristled. Charles’s upper-class accent brought out the worst in him. His light Birmingham accent grew stronger as he suddenly treated them all to a rant about the unfairness of the British class system and about an aristocracy who lived on the backs of the poor.
Thank goodness for Charles, thought Agatha. Toni must see what a horror this man is.
But Toni was listening to Paul with shining eyes.
&n
bsp; Charles waited until Paul had dried up, said calmly, ‘What a lot of old-fashioned bollocks. When are we going?’
‘Finish your drinks,’ said Agatha. ‘I want to be sure of getting a parking place. It’ll be a bit of a crush in my car.’
‘I’ll take Roy,’ said Charles.
‘You’ll need a coat,’ said Agatha to Roy. ‘You’ll find my Barbour hanging in the hall. Use that.’
‘I could wear my jacket,’ said Roy.
‘You’ll freeze. Come along, everyone.’
Thin trails of fog wound their way through the trees as they drove to Winter Parva. They had to park outside the village because all the parking places in the village had been taken. Paul, anxious to get Toni to himself, said they would look at the shops and meet the others on the village green in time for the pig roast.
Agatha, Charles and Roy walked to the nearest pub and into the grateful warmth of the bar.
‘Something will need to be done about Paul,’ said Charles. ‘I think Toni’s still a virgin, and the thought of her losing it under the hairy thighs of that bore is horrible.’
‘He might propose marriage,’ said Roy.
‘I think I’ll do a bit of detective work,’ said Agatha. ‘I bet he’s either married or been married. Why can’t Toni see what a bore he is? How can she listen to that class nonsense?’
‘Maybe it strikes a chord,’ said Charles. ‘You forget, she was brought up rough. Maybe she doesn’t know where she belongs in the scheme of things. There can be something very seductive about that sort of propaganda. Where the hell did she meet him?’
‘At evening classes in French,’ said Agatha gloomily. ‘He’s the lecturer.’
Roy was looking round the bar at people dressed in mediaeval costume. ‘We could have dressed up, Aggie,’ he said plaintively.
Agatha looked at her watch. ‘I think we’d better make our way to the village green. I want to see how they prepare this pig.’
The fog had thickened. If it hadn’t been for the parked cars, you might have thought the village had reverted to the Middle Ages as the costumed villagers appeared and then disappeared in the fog.
Two men were bathing a huge pig in oil as it hung on a spit over a bed of blazing charcoal.
Some villagers were carrying flaming torches. As the fog lifted slightly, Agatha saw clearly on the haunch of the pig a tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it and the curly lettering ‘Amy’. Her eyes flew down the length of the carcass to the chubby legs cut off above the knees.
‘Stop!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs.
The two men stopped turning the spit and stared at her. ‘Pigs don’t have tattoos,’ said Agatha.
They peered at it. ‘Reckon someone’s been ’aving a bit o’ a joke,’ said one.
But Agatha had taken a powerful little torch out of her handbag and was examining the head.
‘The head’s been stitched on,’ she said. ‘Oh, God, I think this is the carcass of a man. Get the police.’
Chapter Two
Toni was cold and worried. She had wanted to join the others, but Paul had said he had something important to ask her. They had survived their first quarrel. They had argued because Toni refused to hear any criticism of Charles. Charles had been kind to her, she had protested. Paul fished in his pocket for the ring he had bought.
Then through the fog came the scream of police sirens. She heard a woman sob, ‘It’s awful. Sick. Murder!’
She jumped to her feet. ‘Something’s wrong. I’ve got to get to Agatha.’ Her slim figure in her bright red coat disappeared through the fog. Cursing under his breath, Paul got up and followed her.
Toni had to fight her way through a gathering crowd. Police were cordoning off the area around the pig roast. She elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. In the light of the fire and flaming torches held by some of the villagers, she saw Agatha, Charles and Roy being interviewed by Police Inspector Wilkes. Bill Wong stood beside him. Roy was standing behind them, busily telephoning.
Toni ducked under the tape. A policeman howled at her to get back, but Bill looked up and signalled it was all right to let her come through.
Paul tried to follow her, but a burly policeman barred his way. ‘I’ve got to get through,’ said Paul. ‘That’s my fiancée over there.’
‘On the spit?’ demanded the policeman.
‘No, you idiot. The blonde girl, there!’
‘Did you call me an idiot?’
‘No, no,’ said Paul weakly, backing off.
Agatha shivered as the questioning went on and on. She felt she was living in some Gothic horror movie. Her thoughts flew to her ex-husband. She hadn’t seen him since the night he thought he had found Charles proposing to her. Actually, Charles had proposed to her until Agatha persuaded him that it wouldn’t work, but Agatha, hearing James arriving, had quickly told Charles to get down on one knee and make it look real.
The macabre scene was suddenly lit up by white light. A television crew had arrived.
‘Get a tent up round the body,’ snarled Wilkes. ‘Mrs Raisin, I want you and your friends to go to police headquarters to make official statements. And that means you, too,’ he said, grabbing hold of Roy, who was about to duck under the tape and head for a television presenter.
Agatha said she would drive everybody there. She could just make out Paul shouting something from behind the tape but did not tell Toni.
After hours of further questioning at police headquarters, they all wearily signed their statements. Bill walked out with them to the reception.
Agatha drew him aside and whispered, ‘Do something for me. Toni’s got a new squeeze called Paul Finlay, a lecturer at Mircester College, gives evening classes in French. He’s too old for her. Could you look up the police files and see if there is anything on him?’
‘I’ll have my hands full with this case. Oh, don’t glare at me. If I get a spare moment, I’ll try.’
Through the glass doors, Toni could see Paul waiting. ‘Coming back to my cottage with us?’ asked Agatha.
Toni wanted to discuss the murder – if murder it should turn out to be. Maybe someone had stolen a body from a grave or from a mortuary – and suddenly she did not want to see any more of Paul that evening.
‘I’ll join you there,’ she said. ‘Tell Paul I’ve gone home.’
‘Great! I mean, all right,’ said Agatha hurriedly.
Toni, familiar with the layout of police headquarters, left by the back door. She made her way slowly around to the front of the police station. There was no sign of Paul. She had left her car at Agatha’s cottage, having driven Paul to Carsely. She assumed he had either got a lift in a police car or had taken a taxi to get to Mircester.
She saw a passing taxi and hailed it.
Agatha’s cottage was besieged by press and television, Roy having phoned every branch of the media he could think of. Roy stood, grinning, next to Agatha, occasionally forgetting he was bald and tossing his head like someone in a shampoo advertisement. When he later saw himself on television, he howled in dismay. He had a fatuous grin on his face, and his tossing head looked like a nervous twitch.
Agatha made a brief statement. Toni shoved her way through the reporters. ‘Toni, Toni!’ called several reporters, recognizing the girl. ‘Give us a statement.’ Swinging round, Agatha fixed Toni with a baleful stare. Her beautiful detective hadn’t even been there when the body was found, and she wasn’t going to let her steal the limelight.
Toni nipped into the cottage, Agatha followed her and slammed the door. Roy and Charles were already in the living room. Charles had switched on the television.
‘Turn that off!’ ordered Agatha.
‘But it’s a rerun of CSI Miami on Sky,’ protested Charles. ‘Oh, suit yourself.’
‘Right,’ said Agatha. ‘We’ve got to solve this one.’
‘Can’t do much until we know who the pig was,’ said Charles, stifling a yawn. ‘Bill interviewed you, Agatha. Did he tell you anything a
bout what happened before we arrived on the scene?’
‘No, but I overheard Wilkes interviewing the two men who operated the spit. They said two men dressed as knights carried the pig to the spit in a canvas sack. One of the spit operators, forget his name, he said the local butcher was supposed to bring it along in his van, but the knights said the butcher had thought if they dressed up and took the pig along, it would be more colourful. Police were ordered to search for these knights, but I don’t know if they found anything.’
‘Whoever it was on that spit,’ said Toni, ‘it must be someone really deeply hated. To go to such trouble and risk being found out! If you hadn’t recognized it wasn’t a pig, Agatha, there would have been a lot of cannibals at Winter Parva.’
‘I’m tired,’ said Roy. ‘I bet I’m going to have nightmares. I’m off to bed.’
‘I think I’ll go home,’ said Charles. ‘Toni can sleep on the sofa.’
Toni smiled at him gratefully. She had switched off her mobile phone. She had mixed feelings. She felt she was being disloyal to Paul, and yet detective work was her life, and uneasily she remembered the times when Paul had laughed indulgently about her job.
Agatha’s phone rang. She answered it. ‘Oh, Paul, it’s you,’ Toni heard her say. ‘No, not here. She said something about going down to Southampton to see her mother . . . What? . . . Yes, I’ll tell her.’ She rang off. ‘I didn’t think you wanted to see him tonight.’
‘Not tonight,’ agreed Toni. ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’
The next morning, after breakfast, they all waited eagerly for the news on television. The report was disappointingly short. Roy shrieked again with dismay over his appearance. ‘I’m starting growing my hair today,’ he said.
There came a ring at the doorbell. When Agatha answered it, she found Inspector Wilkes, Bill Wong, another detective she did not know and a policewoman standing on the doorstep.
‘Come in,’ said Agatha. ‘Toni, Charles and Roy are all in the living room. Do you want to interview us all together?’
‘We’ll start with you, Mrs Raisin,’ said Wilkes.
‘Then come through to the kitchen,’ said Agatha.
