Agatha Raisin: As The Pig Turns (2 page)

She remembered the pub, the Red Lion, had a generator. Agatha changed into trousers, boots and a hooded parka and set out in the hunt for dinner.

The pub was crowded with locals. Agatha went to the bar and ordered lasagne and chips and a half of lager and looked around for a vacant table. Then, to her amazement, she saw her friend the
vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby, sitting by herself in a corner, looking down dismally at a small glass of sherry.

Agatha hurried to join her, wondering what could be wrong, because Mrs Bloxby never went to the pub unless it was some special fundraising occasion. The vicar’s wife had grey hair escaping
from an old-fashioned bun. Her normally kind face looked tired. She was wearing a shabby tweed coat over a washed-out sweater, cardigan and tweed skirt. It didn’t matter what she wore,
thought Agatha, not for the first time. Mrs Bloxby always had ‘lady’ stamped on her. Agatha and Mrs Bloxby always called each other by their second names, a tradition in the local
Ladies’ Society, of which both were members.

‘How odd to see you here,’ said Agatha. ‘Where’s your husband?’

‘I neither know nor care,’ said Mrs Bloxby. ‘Do sit down, Mrs Raisin.’

Agatha sat down opposite her. ‘What is the matter?’

Mrs Bloxby seemed to rally. She gave a weak smile. ‘It’s nothing, really. Do you really mean to eat that?’

The waitress had placed a dish of lasagne and chips in front of Agatha. ‘Sure. What’s up with it?’ Agatha dug her fork in and took a mouthful.

Mrs Bloxby reflected that her friend had the taste buds of a vulture.

Yet Agatha sometimes managed to make her feel diminished. Although in her early fifties, Agatha glowed with health, and her glossy brown hair, although expertly dyed, gleamed like silk.

‘It can’t be nothing,’ said Agatha, reaching for the ketchup bottle, opening it and dousing her chips.

‘Probably my imagination,’ said Mrs Bloxby wearily.

‘You always did have good instincts. Out with it,’ commanded Agatha.

Mrs Bloxby gave a heart-wrenching dry sob, the kind a child gives after crying for a long time. ‘It’s just that I think Alf is having an affair. You’re dribbling
ketchup.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Agatha put a chip, overloaded with ketchup, back on her plate. ‘Your husband is having an affair? Rubbish!’

‘You’re right. I’m just being silly.’

‘No, no, I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, who would want him?’ remarked Agatha with her usual lack of tact.

Her friend bristled. ‘I will have you know that as vicar of this parish, Alf has often been the target of predatory ladies.’

‘So what makes you think he’s having an affair? Lipstick on his dog collar?’

‘Nothing like that. It’s just that he’s taken to sneaking off without his dog collar on and he won’t tell me where he’s going.’

‘Been buying any new underwear recently?’

‘No, I buy his underwear.’

‘Look, I’ll find out for you and put your mind at rest. On the house.’

‘Oh, don’t do that. If he saw you tailing him, he would be furious.’

‘He won’t see me. I happen to be a very good detective.’

‘You are to do nothing about it,’ said Mrs Bloxby seriously. ‘Promise?’

‘Promise,’ agreed Agatha, and surreptitiously and childishly crossed her fingers behind her back.

A warm wind from the west during the night melted the snow to slush, and then, when the wind changed round to the north, it froze the roads into skating rinks. Agatha awoke the
next day in a bad temper. How on earth was she going to get out of the village? It seemed small consolation that the power was back on.

But as she was having her usual breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes, she faintly heard a sound from the end of the lane, a sound she had not heard for some time. She put on her boots and
coat and ran to the end of the lane. A gritter was making its lumbering way down through the village, spraying the road with grit and salt.

Agatha hurried back to put on her make-up and get dressed for the office.

She was just driving out of Lilac Lane when she recognized the vicar’s car on the road ahead of her. ‘Just a little look wouldn’t hurt,’ she assured herself. She let the
car behind her pass her and then followed, keeping the vicar’s car in view. He drove to the nearby village of Ancombe and parked in the courtyard of St Mary’s, a large Catholic church.
The village of Ancombe had remained loyal to Charles I when, all about, the Puritans supported Cromwell.

Driven by curiosity, Agatha parked out on the road and went up the drive past the gravestones and into the church.

In the dimness of the church, she could just make out the thin figure of Mr Bloxby going into a confessional box and closing the door. She ducked down in a pew as a priest appeared and went into
the confessional.

I must know what he is saying, fretted Agatha. She took off her shoes and tiptoed towards the confessional box into which the vicar had disappeared, put her ear against it and listened hard.

‘What do you think you are doing?’
roared a stentorian voice.

Agatha caught a frightened glimpse of a man who had just entered the church. She quickly closed her eyes and slumped to the floor. The confessional opened and Mr Bloxby and the priest came
out.

‘What is going on?’ demanded the reedy voice of the priest.

Agatha opened her eyes. ‘What happened?’ she demanded weakly. ‘I felt dizzy and saw Mr Bloxby coming in here and wanted to ask him for help.’

‘She was listening!’ said a thin, acidulous man.

‘I know this woman,’ said Mr Bloxby. ‘Mrs Raisin, step outside the church with me.’

Agatha got to her feet. No one helped her. She put on her shoes. Mr Bloxby marched ahead, and Agatha trailed after him, miserably.

Outside the church, Mr Bloxby snapped, ‘Get in my car, Mrs Raisin. You have some explaining to do.’

Agatha got into the passenger seat of the vicar’s car. It had begun to rain: soft, weeping rain.

‘Now,’ said Mr Bloxby, ‘explain yourself, you horrible woman.’ The vicar had never liked Agatha and could not understand his wife’s affection for her.

She’ll never speak to me again, thought Agatha sadly as she realized she would have to tell the truth.

‘It’s like this, Alf . . . may I call you Alf?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, what happened, I met your wife in the pub last night and she had been crying. She thinks you’re having an affair.’

‘How ridiculous . . . although come to think of it, I have had to ward off a few amorous parishioners over the years.’

‘I promised not to snoop,’ said Agatha.

‘Which in your case is like promising not to breathe.’

‘Right! I’m fed up feeling guilty,’ said Agatha. ‘What the hell were you doing in the confessional box of a Catholic church?’

‘I needed spiritual guidance.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve lost your faith?’ demanded Agatha.

‘Nothing like that. You know that we use the old Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible?’

Agatha hadn’t noticed, but she said, ‘Yes.’

‘It is the most beautiful writing, on a par with Shakespeare. The bishop has ordered me to change to modern translations of both. I can’t, I just can’t. I felt I had to
unburden myself to a priest of a different faith.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell your wife?’

‘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.’