Down the Hatch

by M C Beaton

  * * *

  “So you’ve made up with Charles again?” James was driving Agatha home to Carsely following a thoroughly enjoyable meal at Marco’s in Evesham, where they had shared a delicious dish of onglet steak with red-wine shallots and triple-cooked chips. Having tucked into a generous helping of smoked trout and wild garlic pâté to start with, and washed it all down with some excellent wine, Agatha was feeling more sleepy than chatty, especially if the chat was likely to be an awkward one.

  “Not in any sense other than that we are now on friendly terms rather than a war footing,” she said. “Let’s leave it there, James. I’d much rather hear more about that road trip through France you were talking about at dinner.”

  “Ah, France and les Français.” James enjoyed rolling his mouth around the pronunciation. “You mentioned they were there this afternoon. How did you leave it with them?”

  “They are actually very nice people.” Agatha resigned herself to having to explain a little more about that afternoon’s ambush. “I got it wrong about them being involved with the murder. It seemed to be obvious at the time, especially as there was information they had chosen not to share with me, but I don’t now believe they had anything to do with Charles’s wife’s death, and … Look! What’s going on there?”

  They were just about to turn off the A44 onto the road that would take them down into Carsely. In the field to their right was the blazing wreck of a car, flames leaping twenty feet in the air, lighting up the night.

  “We should stop,” Agatha suggested, transfixed.

  “There’s no need,” said James, flicking the turn signal to leave the main road. “Look at all those flashing blue lights. The fire brigade are there, and the police. This one’s nothing to do with you, my dear. Just joyriders, I expect.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I suppose you’re right. No need to get involved, and I have a fairly early start tomorrow morning anyway. Home, please, James. I’m knackered.”

  * * *

  The road out of Carsely, heading to the A44 at the top of the village, was almost a tunnel of trees, their branches reaching out to embrace those growing from the opposite side like fondly remembered friends separated by the long, cold, leafless months of winter. All that seemed to stop the summer foliage from swooping down to block the road completely was the regular bus service to Mircester. You could judge the height of the double-decker bus by the arch that the branches formed to allow it to pass underneath. Any fresh young limbs daring to dive down into the tunnel were savagely whisked away by its roof. The roof of Toni’s small car, in which she was driving Agatha to their Sunday-morning meeting, posed no such danger to the overhanging branches.

  Willow Way was a long, narrow road dipping down to the right towards a river where a cluster of willow trees dangled their branches over the water like creatures from a forgotten time gathered to drink together. The river was not as wide at this point as it was when it reached Carsely, but it still ran powerfully deep, with brown trout sheltering in the shade of its banks and bullheads hiding under its stones. There was neither pavement nor grass verge at the sides of the road, and when they encountered a van coming in the opposite direction, Toni slowed to a crawl, the two vehicles inching past each other, the leaves and twigs of the tall roadside hedgerows rustling and squeaking against their paintwork. She and the driver exchanged a cheery wave.

  Rounding the next bend, they came to Willow Cottages. The small terrace of farm cottages nestled shyly in a gap in the hedgerow, their neatly cut Cotswold stone walls set beneath tiled, rather than thatched, roofs. Each had a parking space, and Toni pulled into the one in front of Miss Palmer’s cottage at the end of the row. Agatha eased herself out of the little car, smoothed the sitting creases on her dress and loosened the straps on the red sandals she was trying to break in.

  “Looks like a nice place to live,” Toni commented.

  “A little isolated,” said Agatha, mentally comparing the cottages to her own, which was in the heart of Carsely, and deciding they didn’t quite come up to scratch, “and a bit on the small side, but quite pleasant.”

  The front door was painted black, as were all the others in the terrace, and boasted a splendid brass lion’s-paw knocker. Agatha rapped the knocker and they waited. There was no sound of any sort from inside the cottage. She knocked again. Still nothing.

  “That’s strange,” she said, checking her watch. “She should be home from church by now.”

  “Excuse me.” A woman’s voice came from the front door of the adjacent cottage. A middle-aged couple were standing on the doorstep. “Are you looking for Miss Palmer?”

  “Yes,” Agatha said. “She asked us to meet her here after church.”

  “We didn’t see her set off for church this morning,” said the woman. “She walks, you know. She’s a great one for her walking. She walks for an hour down beyond the willows at the bridge every evening, and walks into Carsely most days.”

  “We didn’t see her on the way here,” said Toni.

  “No,” Agatha agreed. She made a quick phone call to Mrs. Bloxby, who confirmed that Miss Palmer hadn’t been at church that morning.

  “This is weird.” Agatha frowned, then turned to the neighbours. “It’s all a bit worrying. You clearly know Miss Palmer quite well. Do you have keys to her house? I think we should check inside.”

  “George,” said the woman to her husband. “Fetch the spare keys.”

  The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Leeds before accompanying Agatha and Toni into Miss Palmer’s house, clearly concerned about her neighbour but also unwilling to give two complete strangers unfettered access to the property.

  “You’ll understand that I can’t be leaving you alone in here,” she said. “You hear such shocking stories nowadays, don’t you? Con merchants and scammers and suchlike.”

  “Quite right,” said Agatha, “but we must check that nothing’s happened to Miss Palmer. Why don’t you lead the way?”

  There was a tidy sitting room off the main entrance hall at the front of the house and a small kitchen leading out onto a garden at the rear. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom, but no sign at all of Miss Palmer. They made their way back down to the sitting room, where a small desk nestled snugly beneath the front window. Agatha stroked a hand gently across the keys of the typewriter sitting on the desk.

  “My goodness,” she said. “A Remington Monarch. I haven’t seen one of these for years.”

  “I didn’t know you were an expert on typewriters,” said Toni.

  “I trained as a shorthand typist before I went into PR,” Agatha explained. “I think this confirms where our typed note came from.”

  “So Miss Palmer normally walked in that direction every evening, Mrs. Leeds?” Toni asked, looking out of the front window down the lane as far as the hedgerows would allow.

  “She did,” said Mrs. Leeds. “Sometimes quite late. Liked a walk before bed to help her sleep sound. Always took a torch when the light was failing. You don’t think anything’s happened to her, do you?”

  “I’m sure everything’s fine,” Agatha reassured her. “She must have been delayed somewhere. We’ll take a look around outside. Come on, Toni.”

  They walked out past Toni’s car and turned right to head downhill towards the river. There was a slight bend in the road before a long straight stretch opened out ahead of them.

  “What are those?” Toni pointed into the sky, where a handful of large birds were circling. “They’re huge. They look like vultures.”

  “Not quite,” said Agatha, recognising the birds’ splayed wingtip feathers and distinctive forked tails. “They’re red kites, but they’re prone to scavenging like vultures. Look at the hedge here. The top is even and level up to this point, then lower and broken, as though it’s had something heavy land on it. We need to take a look in the field on the other side.”

  “There’s a small gap in the hedge just there.” Toni walked towards a split in the hedge and hauled aside
a branch or two. “I think we could make it through.”

  With a little effort, and some language more at home in a barrack room than on a country ramble, they forced their way through the hedge into a field of bare earth, its crop of rapeseed having recently been harvested. Toni was picking twigs and bugs out of her hair when Agatha’s red sandals landed on the bare earth in front of her.

  “Snakes and bastards!” Having flung off her shoes, Agatha was running as fast as she could across the ploughed field. Ahead of her lay the body of a woman dressed in a tweed skirt, yellow rain jacket and walking shoes.

  Agatha was bent over the body when Toni caught up.

  “It’s Miss Palmer,” Agatha said, staring at the congealed blood matted in the woman’s grey hair. “She’s dead. Stone cold. She must have been here all night.”

  For a moment they both fell silent, looking down at the broken body on the ground.

  “Awful,” Agatha said faintly. “Always the same. It looks like a person but there’s really nothing of that person left. She’s gone. So not a person—a body.”

  “Look at the tracks in the soil,” Toni said, indicating drag marks in the soft earth. “It looks like she crawled here.”

  “Those tracks lead back to the hedge, where the top’s damaged,” Agatha said, sitting back on her heels and studying the scene, allowing her imagination to run through the probable events of the night before. “I’d say she crawled here to get away from the road, or maybe because she was confused. The dent in the top of the hedge could be from where a body landed on it—a body flung into the air when it was hit by a vehicle out on the road.”

  “The poor woman,” said Toni. “She must have been in dreadful pain, and she died out here in a cold field, all alone.”

  “And before she had the chance to talk to us.”

  “You mean someone did this deliberately to stop her from talking? You think she was murdered?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. She walked on that road every night. It’s narrow, but it’s quiet, and she must have known it well. She would have known how to stay safe. She would have been able to hear a car coming and give it plenty of room. Look, there’s her torch—still in her hand.”

  “It’s switched on,” Toni said, examining it without touching it, “but there’s no light. The battery must have died.”

  “We need to call this in,” Agatha sighed, reaching for her phone.

  Having reported their discovery, they were told to stay exactly where they were and wait for the police to arrive. Agatha had just ended the call when a large, heavy raindrop splotted on her phone’s screen. She and Toni shared a look of pained resignation. Soon the rain was battering down like a tropical deluge. They slipped and slithered across the mud, the field having turned into an instant quagmire, and stopped where Agatha had abandoned her sandals. Toni squeezed through the sodden hedge while Agatha put on her shoes. Agatha chose to try minimising the vicious scratches the hedge could inflict by backing through it. She got halfway, then became so snagged on twigs and branches that she could barely move.

  “Toni!” she yelled above the rain slashing through the foliage and beating down on the road. “A little help here, please?”

  Toni, her hair soaked flat on her head and clinging to her face, reached out to grab Agatha’s hips and pulled. They both stumbled into the road, drenched and muddied, make-up smearing their faces and bits of hedge entwined in their clothes.

  “You know that phrase about looking like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards?” Agatha asked.

  Toni nodded. Agatha pointed to herself.

  “What about looking like a drowned rat?” Toni asked.

  Agatha nodded. Toni pointed to herself.

  A moment later, a police car arrived, bringing two officers Agatha vaguely recognised. The first moved quickly to check the body while the other blocked the road with cones and blue and white tape. The next car arrived hot on its heels, and Agatha was relieved to see Bill Wong step out, accompanied by a young constable she didn’t know.

  “Agatha!” he called, rushing over to her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Agatha assured him. “I can’t say the same for poor Miss Palmer, though.”

  She explained how they had found the body, and Bill went to talk to the officer who had gone into the field. Agatha glanced at Toni, whose thin cotton top was wet through.

  “Toni!” she hissed, nodding at the younger woman’s chest. “A bra might have been a good idea. This is a murder investigation, not a wet T-shirt contest!”

  Toni looked down at herself, appalled, and folded her arms. The young constable handed Agatha a blanket and draped a bright green high-vis police rain jacket over Toni’s shoulders. Bill returned to talk to Agatha, peering out from beneath the hood of his own waterproof jacket and steering her to a relatively sheltered spot close to Miss Palmer’s cottage.

  “I have to get things organised here,” he said, struggling to make himself heard above the torrential rain. “Toni will have to leave her car for the time being. If you can both go to your house, I will join you there later. Paul will drive you.” He nodded towards the young constable, now chatting to Toni beneath the shelter of a nearby tree.

  “So, Paul,” said Agatha, sitting alongside Toni in the back seat of the police car. “Would it be ‘Paul Easeman,’ by any chance?”

  “Ah.” The young officer glanced back from the driver’s seat, giving her a sheepish grin. “Paul Hastings, actually. Um … sorry about the prank the other day.”

  Agatha’s bear-like eyes stared coldly from behind a smeared palette of smudged mascara and rain-streaked make-up.

  “Just drive, PC Hastings.”

  Chapter Eight

  Agatha stared quizzically at Roy, pouring him a coffee and sitting down to help herself to the toasted bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese that he had prepared.

  “Roy,” she asked eventually, “what exactly are you wearing?”

  Roy plucked at one of the multitude of pockets in the one-piece orange overalls he had appeared in that morning.

  “Working overalls, darling,” he said. “There are showers forecast all day, so there will be no play at the club, but I’ve been drafted onto the renovation committee. We’re tarting up the little kitchen and repainting the main room in the clubhouse.”

  “That sounds a bit like manual labour to me,” said Agatha. “I wouldn’t have thought it was your thing.”

  “I can do my bit when it’s needed,” Roy defended himself with a voice deliberately overloaded with insulted drama. “These bagels are fabulous, aren’t they? Got them from a little baker in Mircester yesterday. Who’d have thought you could get bagels this good outside of London?”

  “They’re fantastic,” Agatha agreed, taking another mouthful. “You’re spoiling me.”

  “Well, you didn’t have a proper dinner last night, did you? Bill Wong was here for an absolute age questioning you about the body in the field.”

  “He needs as much ammunition as he can get in order to link this to the death of the Admiral. Wilkes is adamant they are unrelated. The Admiral was an accident and this was a hit-and-run by joyriders who then torched the car they’d stolen.”

  “He’s such an idiot. Anyway, I’m hoping to pick up a bit more gossip today—people love to chat while they’re working. I couldn’t update you last night, but I can tell you now that the bowling club is a hotbed of intrigue.”

  “I know the Admiral was someone the members either loved or hated.”

  “Not just him, but the current president too. Mrs. Swinburn has made the club more family friendly. She’s allowed children into the clubhouse to make it easier for parents or grandparents to use the place, but there are plenty who see it as somewhere to get away from their kids. They were right behind the Admiral when he was president and banned kids from the club. Seems he hated children even more than he hated Mrs. Swinburn and her husband. He was against absolutely everything they tried to do to
improve the place. That’s a dreadful shame really, because they devote all their time to it and they’re such awfully nice people.”

  “Morning, Mrs. Raisin!” Doris Simpson’s voice echoed through from the hall. She had let herself in as usual with keys provided by Agatha. Monday was her cleaning day. “Oh, and Mr. Silver, too,” she added, poking her head round the kitchen door. “Shall I start upstairs? I saw the bin men were on their way. I’ll tidy up outside once they’re gone if you like. They’re a messy lot, that crew. Lots of my regulars have been complaining about them leaving a trail of rubbish and tampering with the bins. I mean, why on earth would anyone tamper with a bin?”

  “Why indeed?” Agatha mused, taking a final sip of coffee. “Roy, if you see James, will you tell him that I’m meeting Claudette for lunch at The Feathers in Ancombe? He’s welcome to join us if he’s around. I’d love him to meet her.”

  She grabbed her handbag and was making her way down the front path to her car when she heard a cheery “Mornin’, missus!” Outside her front gate, Simon was leaning on her wheelie bin, wearing a bin man’s work clothes and a cheeky grin. As she drew nearer, he lowered his head and his voice.

  “I’m on to something with this crew,” he mumbled. “They’re different from the others. They’re up to no good all right.”

  “Cut the chat! We don’t have all day!” The refuse truck driver was leaning out of the cab window. His shaven head had a crop of dark stubble that matched the shadow on his fleshy face. Agatha felt there was something vaguely familiar about him, but dismissed the notion given that his general appearance was so similar to that of many other workmen and labourers. Then he spoke again. “Get a move on, you useless pillocks!”