Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon (24 page)

“So what is she saying? Who killed who and why?”

“Burt Haviland had been laying both of them. They were both insane with jealousy of Jessica. Robert Smedley found his wife trying to bury the dagger with which she had killed Jessica in their garden. He told her unless she signed all her money and the business over to him, he would turn her in. So she gave Joyce the weedkiller and told her to get on with it. They killed Burt because he knew something and was threatening to go to the police. They both did that one.”

“But that neighbour only heard one set of footsteps leaving Burt’s flat.”

“That would be Joyce. Mabel’s flat shoes probably didn’t make a sound.”

“Agatha Raisin,” said Bill, “often gets results we can’t because she doesn’t go by the book.”

“Then it’s time she did,” said Wilkes. “It’s going to be all over the newspapers tomorrow about how she tracked them down. She’ll see to that.”

Agatha put down the phone. “Well, that’s that, Patrick. Every last British national newspaper. We’re to wait here. Their local stringers and photographers are coming here to interview us and take our pictures. We’d better get dressed up.”

“I am suitably dressed,” said Patrick.

He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt in a pattern of red and yellow, droopy khaki shorts, black ankle socks and open-toed leather sandals.

“It’s just that you look so much more the detective in your suit, Patrick, and I’ve got the air conditioning on. The rest should be here any moment.”

“What rest?”

“I told Phil, Harry and Mrs. Freedman to fly out and join us. Don’t you see what a good photograph it’ll make? The whole of the detective agency.”

Patrick sighed and went to change. He wondered where Agatha got all her energy from.

Sir Charles Fraith picked up his copy of the Daily Telegraph the following day. He found himself looking at a photograph of Agatha. “Full story pages six and seven,” he read. He opened to the relevant pages.

There they all were—Agatha, Patrick, Harry, Phil and even Mrs. Freedman. There were long quotes from Agatha praising the detective abilities of her staff in solving three murders.

Charles felt left out. After all, he had done a lot of unpaid work. But he had to admit that he had left Agatha in the lurch when he went chasing after Laura. And where was Laura? Gone back to her fiance, that’s where. “You didn’t even tell me you had a fiance,” he had raged.

“He was abroad,” Laura had said. “Don’t make a fuss, Charles. We had a nice little fling.”

The night before their departure for England, Agatha and her staff celebrated with a lavish dinner in the hotel restaurant. Agatha did not mind the money she was spending. All that publicity would pay dividends. She had carefully told the British press which flight they would all be on when their plane landed at Heathrow. With luck, there would be even more publicity. Of course, now that there was a trial in the offing once the pair were extradited, she hadn’t been able to go into all the details.

“Here’s to us,” said Agatha, raising her glass. “Many more cases, I hope.”

“But no more murders,” said Mrs. Freedman with a shudder.

“Amen to that,” said Phil.

But at first it looked as if there was to be no triumphal homecoming. They were taken from the plane before the other passengers got off and herded into a side room where an angry Wilkes was waiting.

“How did you know they were in Marbella?” he asked Agatha.

“I interviewed a friend of Joyce’s who said Joyce had once been in Marbella. It was a long shot.”

“You should have phoned me! I could have alerted the police in Marbella and both of them might have been picked up earlier.”

“I don’t think you would have listened to me,” said Agatha. “You would have said something like, ‘Run along. We’ve alerted Interpol.’” Agatha was suddenly very tired. A tear ran down her cheek.

Wilkes was alarmed. If Agatha collapsed on him, the police would be accused of bullying a heroine.

“That’s not the case. Run along. We’ll contact you later.”

He regretted his burst of sympathy when Agatha Raisin produced a large hand mirror from her capacious handbag and began to repair her make-up, ready for any photographers who might be waiting.

EPILOGUE

BACK in Carsely two weeks later on a rainy weekend. Agatha felt very flat. Business was pouring into the agency, but it seemed to be nothing more than the usual lost cats, dogs and teenagers and divorce cases. No kidnapped heiresses and aristocrats wanting their jewels found. Nothing, she thought bitterly, but plod, plod, plod.

Her hip was aching more and more. She phoned up her masseur, Richard Rasdall, and made an appointment for that Saturday afternoon. She felt lonely and deflated after all the excitement. The newspaper interviews and television interviews had dried up.

She looked at the clock and realized she’d forgotten she was supposed to pick Roy Silver up from the train. He had phoned the evening before, asking if he could come on a visit.

She drove down to Moreton-in-Marsh station to find him waiting impatiently in the car park.

“I was just about to phone you,” he said.

“Sorry, Roy. I’ll leave the car and we’ll walk round the corner for a pub lunch. The boss treating you well?”

“With kid gloves, especially considering I am a friend of the famous Agatha Raisin.”

“I’m yesterday’s news now. I want comfort food. Steak and kidney pie would go down a treat.”

Over lunch, she told Roy in detail about solving the murder cases, but she seemed to have told the story so many times that she felt she was beginning to bore herself.

“Did this Mabel Smedley ever say why she employed you to find out who murdered her husband?”

Agatha scowled. “Evidently she told the police I was such an amateur I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of finding out anything and employing me would make her look innocent.”

“I was surprised not to see Charles in any of the photos.”

“Oh, he cleared off well before the end to chase after some floozy. I’ve got to go to the masseur in Stow. I’ll leave you at the cottage. Won’t be long.”

“I told you before, it does seem to me like a bit of arthritis,” said Richard. “I’m not a doctor. Take my advice and get that hip x-rayed.”

“It can’t be arthritis,” raged Agatha. “What do you know?”

“Enough,” he said calmly. “But suit yourself.”

Once the massage was over, Agatha felt much better. The masseur’s treatment room was situated above his chocolate shop, The Honey Pot. Agatha had a sudden sharp longing to reward herself with a big box of handmade chocolates, but marched determinedly out into the square. She stood in the square, irresolute. She felt fine. But why not prove Richard wrong? Agatha had a private doctor, but it was Saturday. Nonetheless, she had his home phone number.

She phoned him and he said he could see her. Hoping for reassurance, her face fell when he said she’d better get the hip x-rayed. Agatha said she wanted to go private, no longer in her worry prepared to wait for the slow-grinding machinery of the National Health Service. He phoned the Cheltenham and Nuffield Hospital and booked her for an appointment with a specialist for Monday evening.

“Where on earth have you been, sweetie?” demanded Roy.

“I had a massage and looked around the shops,” lied Agatha.

“Well, you’ve missed all the excitement. It’s on the news. Mabel Smedley’s escaped.”

“What? From a Spanish jail? How did she do that?”

“She seemed to be having a heart attack and then fell unconscious. They took her to a hospital. The ambulance had to stop for some horrendous crash in front of them on the road there. The ambulance driver and guard got out because to all intents and purposes Mabel was unconscious. She removed all the straps from the stretcher and simply got out and walked away.”

“What if she comes after me?” said Agatha, her eyes glowing.

“Aggie, you almost look as if you wish she could.”

“Don’t be silly.”

But for one moment Agatha had envisaged herself catching Mabel and all the circus of publicity coming back to surround her in a warm starry coat that kept the realities of pedestrian life and possible arthritis at bay.

“Put the television on again,” she said.

Roy switched on the television set to a twenty-four-hour news channel.

They sat patiently watching trouble in Iraq, an earthquake in Japan, the latest iniquities of the National Health Service, and then there was a news flash. “Mabel Smedley, the British woman wanted for three murders, has just been rearrested by Spanish police. A Spanish police spokesman said she had ordered a drink in a bar and when she walked out without paying for it, the bartender chased her down the street, shouting and yelling. A traffic policeman on duty arrested her. More later.”

“I think she wasn’t very cunning after all,” said Agatha. “I think all the murders were done on impulse, fuelled by sick jealousy, or maybe, in the case of her husband, pure rage. Let’s keep watching.”

An hour later, Roy said crossly, “Agatha, it’s the same thing over and over again. You’re not a very good hostess. Let’s go and see Mrs. Bloxby. Have you seen her since you got back?”

“No. How awful. Everything’s been so busy. Let’s go now.”

Mrs. Bloxby was delighted to see them and demanded to know all the details. “I can hardly believe Mrs. Smedley capable of such violence and evil,” said Mrs. Bloxby when Agatha had finished. “Jealousy really must have turned her mind. You will surely miss that young man, Harry Beam, when he goes to university.”

“I’m going to try to persuade him to stay. Patrick is already looking for another detective for me. We’re actually short-staffed.”

“Jessica’s parents must be relieved that the murderer has been caught. What about Joyce? Are her parents alive?”

“It turns out her father was a respectable accountant. Dead these past three years. Her mother is in care in Bath. She has Alzheimer’s. Joyce invented a rich father to explain why she was able to rent a whole house.”

“The thing that troubles me,” said the vicar’s wife, “is that I look around our ladies when we meet at the ladies’ society and I begin to wonder what strange passions are lurking behind those genteel breasts. I mean, Mrs. Smedley was so admired for her good works and for her gentle manner. Who could ever have guessed she would turn violent? Love is a strange thing and can twist people in so many ways.”

Agatha suddenly thought again of her ex-husband, James Lacey. Did he ever think of her? Would he ever come back into her life? And if he ever did, would he find she had turned into some old crock riddled with arthritis? She had been a far from perfect wife, but he had behaved badly towards her and probably never realized it. Most men were protected from admitting their mistakes by a sort of justified selfishness.

Agatha spent a pleasant weekend with Roy and plunged back into work on the Monday, but always thinking of her appointment at the hospital in the evening.

She decided that she would need to employ more than one extra detective. They could not all keep on working in the evenings as well as the days.

At last, she drove reluctantly to the Nuffield Hospital, feeling obscurely guilty at the courteous reception and thinking of all the unfortunate people who could not afford private medicine. She filled in the forms.

“Don’t you have health insurance?” asked the receptionist. Agatha shook her head. She had always believed herself to be immortal.

“Go through to X-ray, along there on the left,” said the receptionist. “The specialist will see you after he receives the X-rays.”

Agatha went along to the X-ray department, took off her clothes and put on the gown allocated to her. Then her hips and legs were x-rayed and she was told to get dressed and wait. After a short time, the folder of large X-rays was handed to her and she was told to go back out to the reception area and wait again.

Agatha slid the X-rays out and squinted at them, holding them up to the light, but she could not make out anything.

A nurse approached her and took the X-rays away from her. “Mr. McSporran will see you now. Follow me,” she said.

“Are you sure that’s his name? Sounds like a Scottish music hall joke.”

“McSporran is a good old Scottish name. Please don’t make any jokes about it. He does get tired of them.”

Mr. McSporran was a small, neat man. He put Agatha’s X-rays up on a screen.

“Uh-uh!” he murmured.

“What?” demanded Agatha nervously.

“You will see quite clearly that you have arthritis in your right hip. It is not terribly advanced, but I would advise you to make an appointment for a hip operation. The longer you leave it, the less successful the operation will be.”

“I’m too busy at the moment to take time off,” said Agatha.

“As I said, it is important you do not leave it too long. We can make arrangements to give you an injection in the hip as a temporary measure. If you are lucky, the injection will last six months.”

Agatha felt she had just received a stay of execution. “I’ll have it now.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You will need to make an appointment. You are put under a general anaesthetic. It only takes one day. I would suggest also that you have a bone scan.” He opened his diary. “We can do the hip injection for you on the twenty-fifth. That’s in two weeks’ time. You will need to be here at seven-thirty in the morning and do not eat or drink anything after ten o’clock the evening before.