Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell (12 page)

‘I don’t know much about psychopaths. I thought they were people like Hannibal Lecter.’

‘When you’ve finished eating, we’ll go home and look it up in the encyclopaedia.’

After looking it up in the encyclopaedia and running reams of information off the Internet, Agatha groaned, ‘Why can’t they use simple language?’

‘It seems to me,’ said Charles, ‘as if psychopath was a sort of blanket diagnosis until fairly recently. It seems as if our Melissa, sectioned at a later date, would have been diagnosed as having ASPD, antisocial personality disorder. Here are some of the features, apart from not having a conscience: lack of empathy, inflated and arrogant self-appraisal, and glib, superficial charm. Tendency to be hooked on drink or drugs or both and . . . um . . .’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘What are you keeping from me?’

‘Deviant sexual practices.’

‘I don’t love James any more,’ said Agatha in a shaky voice.

‘Not one bit. How could he even spend a minute with such a creature?’

‘Never mind. Here we are knowing lots and lots about ASPD and not a bit nearer finding out who did it or where James is.’

James Lacey was feeling strong and well. His headaches had gone. He now attended prayers and worked in the extensive vegetable gardens of the monastery. He felt a miracle had happened and that somehow his brain tumour had gone. But his counsellor, Brother Michael, knew nothing of this. He only heard of James’s desire for a quiet religious life. He knew James had spent most of his years in the army. But James mentioned nothing of his marriage or what had made him flee. If any thoughts of Agatha entered his mind, he banished them quickly. He blamed the brain tumour on the mess of his old life. In the monastery, with its rigid discipline, it was rather like being in the army again. He intended to serve a period of probation and then join the order. Somehow, sometime in the future, he would tell Brother Michael the truth about his life. But not yet.

The following day, Agatha said, ‘We’ve got to try Mr Dewey again.’

‘We’ve only got to show our faces near his house and that damned woman will start shouting for the police.’

‘I don’t think so. She’s already made a fool of herself.’

‘Oh, really? I thought it was you who had made a fool of yourself, saying you had a gun.’

‘Never mind that. I paid Dewey a generous amount to repair his window. Let’s try. I can’t just sit here and worry about James.’

‘I thought you didn’t love James any more.’

‘I just want to get my hands on him and give him a piece of my mind. Come on, Charles.’

As they drove towards Worcester, Agatha said, ‘Now there’s this new bypass, I miss seeing Broadway. I keep thinking I must turn off one day and see what the old place looks like.’

‘Tell you what. If we ever find out who did this murder, I’ll treat you to dinner at the Lygon Arms.’ The Lygon Arms was Broadway’s famous and expensive hotel.

‘I wish you hadn’t said that,’ remarked Agatha. ‘You promising me an expensive dinner makes me think you don’t believe we’ll find anyone.’

‘Oh, I’m sure we’ll just blunder about in our usual way and unearth something.’

They were approaching Evesham when Charles muttered something and pulled over by the side of the road and got out. ‘What’s up?’ asked Agatha when he got back in the car.

‘Slow puncture. Anywhere around here can fix it?’

‘Don’t you have a spare?’

‘No, I used that last year and forgot to get a new one.’

‘Well, if you go round that next roundabout and into the Four Pools Estate, there’s a place called Motorways. They’ll fix a new tyre in minutes.’

By the time they parked at Motorways, the tyre was nearly flat. They sat down in the office and waited. A mechanic came in and said, ‘Your other tyres are nearly bald.’

Agatha fixed Charles with a steely glare. ‘Do get all your tyres fixed. What if one blew out when we were speeding along some motorway?’

Charles said he would like all new tyres and one spare. ‘I like seeing you spending money,’ said Agatha with a grin.

The man behind the counter said, ‘The coffee in the machine over there is free, if you’d like some.’

Charles brightened visibly, as if the thought of something free had allayed some of the dismay he had felt at having to shell out for new tyres.

Agatha sat nursing a cup of coffee and staring dreamily about her. It was funny, she thought, not for the first time, how one never got the city out of one’s bones and how even industrial waste had a certain sort of comforting beauty. The rain had started to fall outside and she breathed in that old familiar smell of rain on hot dusty concrete. In the village, she was surrounded by flowers: lavender and hollyhocks, impatiens, roses, delphiniums, gladioli and pansies, and yet she could still see beauty in willow-herb thrusting up out of the cracks in an industrial estate.

She was almost sorry when the car was pronounced ready. ‘Seriously, Charles,’ she said as he drove off, ‘how did you get to be so mean? It’s not as if you’re short of a bob.’

‘I suppose it all started with death duties,’ said Charles. ‘And my father had let the land go to rack and ruin. The farms weren’t paying. It was a hard fight to turn things around; getting a good stockbroker so that money could make money. I couldn’t bear to lose the house and land. I got used to economizing on everything I could and the habit’s stuck, I’m afraid. I even took a diploma in agriculture and a course in bookkeeping so I could do the accounts and save the expense of an accountant. For a while I even opened the house to the public.’

‘Don’t want to run down your home,’ said Agatha. ‘But it’s a great Victorian pile, hardly an architectural gem.’

‘I invented a ghost,’ said Charles. ‘I engineered an occasion for dry ice to leak out through the walls of the library. Gave the visitors no end of a thrill. They used to come in coach-loads. But the minute I got solvent, I stopped the house tours. That stockbroker is a whiz. He made me a fortune.’

‘Mine’s pretty good, too,’ said Agatha, and so they talked comfortably about stocks and shares until they reached the outskirts of Worcester.

‘We may not be lucky enough to find him at home this time,’ said Agatha.

And this proved to be the case. No answer to the doorbell, but at least the Neighbourhood Watch woman was nowhere in sight.

‘Let’s try next door,’ said Charles. ‘I saw a curtain twitch.’

‘No, let’s not,’ said Agatha hurriedly. ‘The neighbour probably last saw us being carted off by the police. I saw a newspaper shop just outside the housing estate. They might know where he is. We forgot to ask him if he worked at anything.’

The Pakistani shopkeeper volunteered the information that Mr Dewey kept an antique shop in The Shambles opposite the back of Marks & Spencer in the centre of Worcester, and so they drove into the main car park by the river, where swans sailed majestically up and down. The rain was quite heavy now. Charles produced a large golf umbrella from the boot of the car and under its shelter they walked up and across the main street and through to The Shambles.

It turned out to be a very small shop selling nothing but antique dolls. They stood for a moment looking in the window. ‘There’s something scary about old dolls, I always think,’ said Charles. ‘All those watching eyes. I sometimes think a bit of the personality of each child who loved them is still there inside them.’

They entered the dark shop and walked in. Mr John Dewey was sitting at a small table at the back of the shop. He rose to meet them. ‘Oh, it’s you again,’ he said.

‘I hope you got my cheque,’ said Agatha.

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Our conversation was interrupted.’

‘I can’t think of anything else to tell you. Do you mind if I go on working?’

He sat down at the table and picked up a large Edwardian doll with only one blue eye. ‘Just getting a new eye for her,’ he said. He had a tray of glass eyes in front of him. ‘It’s a matter of getting just the right colour and the right size,’ he said.

‘Ah, perhaps this.’ He picked out an eye and carried it to the window. ‘Mmm, I think this will do.’ He returned and sat down and held the doll on his lap. ‘Soon have you seeing the world again,’ he said. With one deft movement he removed the head. ‘I fix it from the inside,’ he said, looking up at them.

He looked so small and neat and absorbed in his work that Agatha blurted out, ‘How could you marry someone like Melissa?’

‘I sometimes ask myself that,’ he said. ‘I’d never bothered much about the ladies before. But then she seemed to have such a knowledge of antique dolls. Wait, I’ll show you something.’ He put down the doll he was working on and went into the back shop.

‘He’s
weird
,’ muttered Agatha. ‘If he comes back swinging a hammer, run for it.’

‘What made you think of a hammer?’ asked Charles. ‘They never found a weapon.’

‘I always thought of a hammer, I don’t know why.’

Mr Dewey came back carrying a doll. ‘This is my favourite. Eighteenth-century. Do you notice these old dolls often have human faces?’

The doll had a leather face and green eyes. The hair was powdered and the dress was panniered silk. Agatha looked at it uneasily. She thought the doll had a mocking, knowing look. ‘What’s this doll got to do with Melissa?’

‘Everything. We had been talking in the shop for a few weeks and then we occasionally had lunch, always talking about dolls. Then she said she had two tickets to a fancy dress ball in the town hall and would I come? I was very shy and said I didn’t dance, but she said it would be fun to dress up and watch the costumes.’

‘What did you go as?’ asked Agatha.

‘I went as Blackbeard, the pirate,’ he said. Agatha tried not to laugh, he looked so neat and prim, cradling the doll in his arms. ‘I said I would meet her there. It’s only a short walk from here to the town hall. I must say, I felt quite different in my costume. I even swaggered a bit. When I got there, I looked around for her and what I saw first was not Melissa but this doll, my precious. She had copied this gown and had her hair powdered. I fell in love on the spot. I was dazed. I asked her to marry me before the evening was over.’ He sighed.

‘And how did the marriage break down?’

‘As soon as we were wed, she stopped talking about dolls, showed no interest in them. And she wouldn’t ever wear the dress again. I asked her to wear it in the house, just for me, but she wouldn’t. She seemed to have become a different person, hard and brittle. I immersed myself in my work. But I wanted to save our marriage. It had been dragging on in a terrible way for over three years. I pleaded with her one more time to wear the dress and she said, “That’s it!” and she got a pair of kitchen scissors and she said she was going to cut my favourite doll to ribbons.

‘My heart was beating fit to burst but I forced myself to speak in a calm and reasonable voice. I told her she didn’t have a key to the shop, that the metal shutters were down over the window and door and the burglar alarm set. I told her I would never ask her to wear the dress again. I told her to sit and I would fix her a drink. She drank a lot. I said I would mix her a special cocktail. I did. I opened up several of my sleeping pills and mixed up some concoction from the cocktail cabinet. I remember her eyes were hard and glittering as she drank it down. When she passed out, I tied her arms and legs very firmly. With wire.’

Agatha moved close to Charles.

‘When she recovered, I said I was going to take her eyes out and replace them with doll’s eyes. Did I say I had gagged her as well? No? Well, I did. I told her I wanted a divorce, I wanted her to leave immediately. I told her to nod her head if she agreed. She nodded. I wanted to frighten her so much, you see, that not only would she leave me and divorce me, but that she would not attack me when I released her. As soon as she was free, she packed and left.’

Agatha looked at him, her eyes gleaming. ‘But you must have still loved her.’

‘Why?’

‘You learned somehow that she was having an affair with my husband, so you attacked him first, but he escaped, and you then killed Melissa.’

He gave a gentle little laugh. He did not seem at all upset by Agatha’s accusations. ‘I am not a violent man. Oh, if you could have felt the relief I felt when she had gone. Did I say I could not dance? I meant, I was too shy to dance. But when she had gone, I waltzed around the house.’ He took the doll’s tiny hand in his and waltzed round the shop.

Just then a customer walked in and he stopped dancing. ‘I will be with you in a minute,’ he said. He retreated to the back shop with his doll.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ muttered Agatha.

They walked outside. The rain had stopped and patches of pale-blue sky were appearing among the ragged grey clouds far above them.

‘We should tell Bill about this,’ said Charles.

‘Phew!’ Agatha clutched his arm. ‘I could use a drink.’

They went into a pub. Agatha asked for gin and tonic and Charles had an orange juice. ‘Didn’t Bill say he had an alibi?’ asked Agatha.

‘No, he said Sheppard had an alibi. He didn’t say anything about Dewey and we didn’t ask. I think we should tell him this. The man’s mad.’

Agatha took out her mobile phone. But she was told when she dialled police headquarters in Mircester that Bill had gone home.

‘I hate seeing him at home,’ mourned Agatha. ‘Those parents of his!’

‘We’d better try anyway. Drink up!’

The Wongs lived in a builder’s estate much like the one inhabited by Mr Dewey. Bill’s father was Hong Kong Chinese, and his mother, from Gloucestershire. Mrs Wong opened the door. She stared at them and then shouted over her shoulder, ‘Father, it’s that woman again!’

She was joined by Mr Wong, who shuffled forward in a pair of carpet slippers. ‘May we speak to Bill?’ asked Agatha. ‘It’s very important.’

‘You should’ve phoned first to make an appointment.’ He stood in the doorway with his wife at his side and neither of them showed any signs of moving. How could Bill ever hope to get married, thought Agatha, living as he did with these possessive parents?

She suddenly shouted, ‘Bill!’ at the top of her voice, and was relieved to hear his answering voice, ‘Agatha?’