Down the Hatch

by M C Beaton

  “Do you think it’s to do with her getting the money from the Admiral’s pensions and inheriting that flat?” Toni asked. “She made out that she wouldn’t have wanted him dead, yet by her own admission, she’s ended up with everything.”

  “I doubt she realised that would be the way things would work out.” Agatha was trying to put herself in Cathy Nelson’s position. It wasn’t difficult. She had been there. She’d been all alone when she first moved to London, and she’d drifted into a marriage with Jimmy Raisin that had turned very nasty. The difference was, she was smart enough, determined enough and ambitious enough to make something of her life. Cathy Nelson did not have those advantages. “Before he died, I bet she had no idea she would get anything. I think she believed she needed him to provide for her.”

  “I guess that fits with the reason she gave for marrying him,” Toni agreed. “So what do you think she’s hiding?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s got a secret, that’s for certain.” Agatha pressed the button on her key fob to unlock the car. “She covered up some documents so that we wouldn’t see them.”

  “That’s a bit careless.” Toni frowned, fastening her seat belt. “She saw us arriving. She had plenty of time to hide anything she didn’t want us to see. I’d have tucked those papers out of sight if I’d been her.”

  “But you’re not her.” Agatha gave a little shake of her head, annoyed at having pointed out something so glaringly obvious. “I mean, she’s not as clever as you. She doesn’t think like you, so she made a mistake. That’s how we catch murderers. We track them down and wait for them to make a mistake.”

  “So you’re counting her as a suspect?”

  “Absolutely. She was right about that. She’s our prime suspect. She may not have inherited a fortune from the old man, but it sounds like she’ll have enough to get by, so she stood to gain from his death and she’s not telling us the whole truth. Now, where can I drop you off? I want to head home and change before my meeting at Barfield House.”

  “I can come with you if you like.”

  “Thank you, Toni, but this is one I need to handle on my own. Tomorrow, however, is different. The meeting with Miss Palmer is to do with the Admiral. I know it’s a Sunday, but are you free tomorrow morning?”

  “Sure,” said Toni. “I’ve nothing else planned.”

  “Really?” Agatha was surprised. “No new young man you want to spend time with?”

  “No.” Toni sighed and dropped her head slightly, using her long hair as a screen to avoid eye contact. “I’m footloose and fancy free at the moment.”

  “Cheer up!” Agatha laughed, starting the engine. “That’s the best way to be—ready to take advantage of any opportunity that might come your way. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  * * *

  The winding side road that snaked its way into the heart of the countryside off the main road between Mircester and Carsely led, after a few twists and turns, to the gates of Barfield House. Agatha slowed her car to a halt before driving through. There was something different about the old gateway. The stone gateposts, once leaning painfully under their own weight, like pensioners queuing at a bus stop, now stood as straight and tall as guardsmen on parade. The open cast-iron gates, which used to hang like rusty limp flags threatening to collapse into the ground and turn to dust, now displayed themselves like proud banners in shining black and gold. Clearly, things had changed since her previous visit.

  Driving through the gateway, Agatha plunged into the shade of the ancient oak and beech trees that lined the drive leading up to the house. Beyond the avenue of trees was an open area of neatly manicured lawn that had, until recently, been so neglected that it had tended to resemble a meadow. The many windows of the reception rooms at the front of the rambling Victorian monstrosity that was Barfield House looked south over the terrace and the largest expanse of lawn, while the imposing main entrance, with its heavy black-studded oak door, was to the side.

  Standing on the steps outside the entrance was Gustav, Charles’s loyal manservant. He had always openly disapproved of Agatha when she and Charles were close. Having proved her loyalty to Charles in extreme circumstances so many times over the years, she now believed that she had an understanding with Gustav. It was not a friendship. He would never be her friend. One look from his black eyes told her that, and he spoke to her not as a servant might, not even as an equal, but as someone whose presence he merely tolerated. He had that well-practised unwelcoming look on his face as she stepped out of the car. Gustav’s every expression was calculated and deliberate. He had the features of a character actor and the wiry physique of a dancer, now held in rigid denial of any form of welcome.

  “Good afternoon, Gustav,” Agatha called, giving him a huge smile and a cheerful wave to make sure he knew that his posturing was having no effect.

  “Mrs. Raisin,” he grunted. His accent was unplaceable, certainly giving no hint whatsoever of his Hungarian ancestry. “I saw you arrive.”

  “That’s the second time today someone’s seen me coming.” Agatha’s smile was unwavering. “You’d think a private investigator would be a bit harder to spot, wouldn’t you? What’s that under your arm?”

  “It’s a hard hat, Mrs. Raisin,” said Gustav, taking the hat in his left hand. “We have various building renovations under way and I must check on their progress shortly.”

  “So Charles is splashing out and tarting up the old place.” Agatha looked up at the scaffolding on the roof. “He must be crashing his way through the pile of cash that came to him after that tragic marriage.”

  “Not all of us view the death of Sir Charles’s wife as a tragedy.”

  “I meant that it was a tragedy he ever married her in the first place.”

  “Quite. And to avoid the mayhem that has accompanied some of your previous visits to Barfield House, I decided to intercept you here with a warning. Sir Charles has a surprise in store for you that may not be to your liking. I would rather not have to spend hours clearing up broken china teacups or smashed crystal champagne flutes. We’re running a little low on both.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, Gustav,” Agatha said, climbing the steps to the entrance. “I’ll try not to wreck everything.” She stopped, turned to face him and nodded her head towards the closed door. He sighed, stepped up to the door, turned the large black iron ring to open it, then marched in ahead of her towards the library, announcing her arrival. She brushed past him to receive an effusive greeting from Charles.

  “Aggie, I’m so pleased you could come!” He stepped towards her with his arms out ready to embrace her. She took a step back and shot him a warning look. He lowered his arms.

  “Don’t call me—” she began.

  “Yes, of course.” Charles smiled. He was looking fit and slightly tanned, and was as immaculately dressed as ever in a cream shirt and blue chinos. Agatha was glad she had changed into a blue trouser suit to emphasise that she wanted to keep the meeting strictly business. “Let me introduce you to an old friend. Rupert Ferrington-Slade, this is Mrs. Agatha Raisin.”

  “Delighted to meet you.” Ferrington-Slade was younger than Charles and very casually dressed in a polo shirt and jeans. He was also taller than Charles and had rather too much forehead and rather too little chin, which combined to make him look like he was permanently nodding. “Charles has told me so much about…”

  He froze and his mouth opened wide, mainly to the side as there was so little chin to drop. His eyes narrowed, his nose wrinkled and he retracted the hand he had extended towards Agatha. There then followed an explosive sneeze, most of which he caught in a tissue plucked from a box on a side table.

  “Do excuse,” he snuffled. “Infernal summer cold. Quite ghastly.” Flopping into an armchair, he crumpled the tissue and dropped it in the direction of a waste bin at the side. It missed and joined a cluster of others on the floor.

  The two men launched into a conversation about summer colds, hay fever, winter colds and
flu. As they talked, Gustav entered with tea and shortbread. Catching a snatch of their conversation, he raised his eyes heavenwards and quickly departed. Agatha sipped her tea and let them talk themselves out, fully aware that both were trying to skirt round the reason for the meeting.

  “So what is it you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked when they paused for breath. “I have to tell you that I am not an expert on sniffles and snot.”

  “Well, yes, um … perhaps you could explain, Rupert,” said Charles.

  “Of course.” Rupert snorted to clear his nose. “There’s this young filly … er … young woman lives over in Herris Cum Magna who’s just had a sprog … a baby … and claims the damned thing’s mine. I mean, I hardly know the girl. Only met her a few times.”

  “Where did you meet her?” Agatha asked.

  “At a couple of house parties.” Ferrington-Slade froze again, then blasted out another sneeze. “First met her at Binky’s place.” He blew his nose like a hunting horn and dropped another tissue very nearly in the waste bin. “You know Binky, don’t you, Charles? He was in the year below you at school. Anyway, what we need you to do, Mrs. Raisin, is find who the real father is and get me off the hook, because this girl is asking for a lot of money to raise the sprog.”

  “Why don’t you insist on a DNA test to prove you’re not the father?” asked Agatha.

  “Can’t be doing with those things.” Ferrington-Slade shook his head vigorously, then passed a soothing hand across his forehead. “I’ve known chaps stitched up with doctored results, and once they have you on record, you never know who might get hold of your DNA.”

  “We use a thoroughly reputable and reliable DNA testing service,” Agatha explained, “but if you would rather not go down that route for now, I can make some preliminary enquiries.”

  “Jolly good,” said Ferrington-Slade. “Charles, old boy, I think it might be a good idea if I had a little nap before dinner. Would you ask your man to run me a bath? Might clear my passages, you know. Charles will give you the details about the girl in Herris, Mrs. Raisin. I’ll take myself off upstairs.”

  He bade Agatha farewell, and the last she and Charles heard from him was a screeching sneeze from somewhere on the grand staircase.

  “He doesn’t seem to rate very highly as a philanderer,” Agatha commented.

  “You mean he’s not a devastatingly handsome heart-throb,” said Charles. “You’d be amazed how attractive a chap becomes when his family owns so much land and property that he can’t actually remember where all their country houses are. He also has a doctorate in history. How would you rate him now?”

  “On Snow White’s dwarf scale, I’d give him a five out of seven,” said Agatha. “He’s Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, Doc and Sneezy. What he most certainly is not is the reason you wanted me here today.”

  “There’s no fooling you, is there?” Charles nodded. He crossed the room to his desk and tinkled the brass handbell that always sat just to the right of his fountain pen. “Gustav!”

  “You howled, Sir Charles?” Gustav appeared an instant later.

  “Would you ask our other guests to join us as soon as they’re ready, please?”

  “Should I run the bath for Snottington-Slime first?”

  “Just do it, Gustav.” Charles waved him out of the room.

  “So your other guests are the real reason you—”

  “Hello, Agatha.” The woman’s voice that came from the doorway had a charming and unmistakable French lilt. Agatha recognised it straight away.

  “Claudette,” she said, turning to face the newcomer, a grim look on her face. “My, my, this is a surprise.”

  “Et moi aussi.” Pascal Duvivier, Claudette’s uncle, caught up with her as she entered the room. “Bonjour, Agatha.”

  Agatha had not seen either of them since an abortive trip to their vineyard in Bordeaux, when she had mistakenly concluded that these people, whom she had come to think of as close friends, had colluded with Charles to arrange the murder of his wife. She also believed they had used her to expose the actual perpetrators of the murder. That she might have been wrong was something that had rankled ever since, although the fact that they had kept important information about the murderers from her had been infuriating. The idea that Charles had also been involved with Claudette without either of them telling her had infuriated her even more.

  “I … I hope you are well.” Claudette sounded nervous, apprehensive. “I hope you do not feel—”

  “I feel like I’ve been ambushed, that’s how I feel!” Agatha turned to Charles with fire in her eyes. “How could you do this? You lured me here and then sprang a trap? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Please, Agatha, give us a chance to explain,” Charles pleaded with her. “You got it all a bit wrong.”

  “The only thing I got wrong was agreeing to come here!” Agatha snapped. She turned her back on Charles and marched past Claudette and Pascal, putting a huge effort into slamming the heavy library door on her way out. Striding across the enormous expanse of polished wood flooring in the hall, heading for the front door, she skidded to a halt. The slim figure of Mrs. Tassy loomed out of a shadowy corner, her cloud of white hair, pale features and high-necked long dark dress giving her the appearance of a spectre that had stepped out of one of the many ancient paintings scattered around the house.

  “Impetuous as always, I see,” said the old lady, a stern look in her eyes. “Don’t you think you’re being a little hasty?”

  “I don’t like being played,” Agatha snarled, “and I don’t like their game.”

  “And you don’t like being wrong,” added Mrs. Tassy. “I know you may have thought that Charles and those French people had something to do with the death of that dreadful woman he married, but you are most definitely wrong. We can trace our family back more than six centuries, Mrs. Raisin, and in that time there has been an entire litany of rascals, rogues, scoundrels, reprobates and, yes, even murderers. Charles is not one of them, and you know it. This whole sorry business has been weighing heavy on his mind. His solution—this painful reunion—may be ill-judged and clumsy, but if you care for him, if you ever really cared for him, then go back in there and give him a chance to put things right.”

  “It’s not just Charles,” Agatha sighed. “I know he would have gone through hell with his wife and her family and never have considered killing her. It’s the Duviviers and the way Charles and Claudette—”

  “That’s not what you think either.” Gustav approached from the direction of his butler’s pantry. “You are many things, Mrs. Raisin, but you are not stupid. Blinded by jealousy, perhaps—unfounded jealousy in this case. Mademoiselle Duvivier is not remotely interested in Sir Charles. She prefers younger men and … likes to keep her options open, shall we say?”

  “No, we shall not.” Agatha frowned, beginning to feel that she had walked into another ambush. “What do you mean?”

  “He means she rather preferred your company to that of Charles,” said Mrs. Tassy.

  “Oh…” Agatha was taken aback. She was suddenly overwhelmed by a landslide of thoughts and emotions, flattered by Claudette’s attention and ashamed that she had spurned her friendship. “But Claudette … I mean, I don’t … I’m not…”

  “She understands that,” said Gustav, “but she had come to treasure you as a friend.”

  “How do you two know all this?” asked Agatha.

  “Dear Gustav,” said Mrs. Tassy, “has spent years turning listening at keyholes into an art form. I, on the other hand, am very much aware of everything that goes on in this house and have a finely tuned woman’s intuition that is one of the few advantages of having lived to such a great age. The question now is: do you have the fortitude to turn around, go back in there and resolve this business?”

  Agatha gave Mrs. Tassy a defiant sideways glance, acknowledging the challenge that had been laid down, letting the old lady know that she would not be manipulated, but showing a steely determination.
Agatha Raisin did not back down. Agatha Raisin did not give up. Agatha Raisin never ran away from a fight. She walked calmly back to the library and flung open the door.

  “Right,” she said, standing framed in the doorway. “Let’s talk.”

  The last thing she heard from the hall was a weedy voice on the grand staircase calling, “I say, Gustav old chap … what about my bath?”

  * * *

  The clouds that had rolled in over the Cotswolds that day brought no more than a few spots of rain, with the promise of more to come, but put an end to the recent long evenings under clear skies. With the cloud cover came an early dusk, which deepened the hedgerow shadows cast across the deserted country lane. Here and there at the base of the hedges grew tangles of yellow flowers, the common rock rose betraying the way that determined rays of summer sunshine had managed to penetrate the high barriers of hedge foliage. In the trees, blackbirds and starlings competed loudly to sing farewell to the day, almost drowning out the footsteps of an approaching walker.

  Dressed in a yellow rain jacket that rivalled the hue of the rock rose, a woman strode confidently down the lane. She paused for a moment and listened carefully. Above the birdsong she could faintly hear a car engine, the vehicle apparently approaching from further up the hill but still out of sight round a bend. She waited with her back to the hedge, giving the car plenty of room to pass by when it got to her, and switching on the torch she carried to make certain she could be seen. She tapped her foot impatiently, the car seeming to take forever to round the bend. When it did finally roll into view, it was travelling only at walking pace. Then, little more than ten yards away, it stopped.

  The woman tutted and frowned at the car, unable to make out the driver in the gathering gloom of the evening. Then its headlights illuminated on full beam, forcing her to squint and cover her eyes. The engine revved loudly and the car shot forward, straight towards her. She froze completely for an instant, then turned to run, but managed no more than three paces before the fiercely accelerating vehicle slammed into her. There was a sickening crack as the bumper hit her legs, throwing her feet into the air. Her head hit the bonnet and she cartwheeled crazily backwards, her hip smashing into the windscreen. Such was the force of the impact that she was flung over the roof, crashing down onto the tall hedge and dropping like a discarded rag doll into the field beyond as the car raced off down the lane. Once the sound of its engine had faded into the distance, a blanket of hush fell, even the starlings and blackbirds shocked into silence.