bar was off Piccadilly Circus, and not, as Agatha had guessed, in some dreary suburb. Certainly it was a hot summer which always gave the city a tired, exhausted air. Charles managed to find a space in an underground car-park a short walk from the bar.
Agatha was wearing a silk trouser-suit which had looked very sophisticated and smart in her bedroom mirror at home. But as they walked through the crowds, she noticed women wearing floaty summer dresses, or very short skirts and brief tops, and began to feel like a frump. She was wearing flat gold leather shoes and wished now she had worn heels. Miss Simms teetered along in very high heels and a skirt that verged on the indecent as she was showing her usual glimpses of stocking tops. Charles was dressed in a soft blue cotton shirt, chinos, and moccasins. Agatha felt she was the only one who didn’t fit in with the cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Miss Simms’ singles’ bar turned out to be a disco called Stompers. “Are you sure this is the place?” asked Agatha. The young people trooping in ahead of them all looked trendily dressed.
“Yeah, this is it,” said Miss Simms, clutching Charles’s arm. “Not my sort of place.”
Agatha paid the entrance fee and they went downstairs to a large room where couples gyrated under darting strobe lights. The music was loud, horrendously so. It beat upon their ear-drums and made conversation impossible.
They made their way to the bar and in a brief moment when the music ceased, Agatha said, “Do you see them?”
“Not yet,” said Miss Simms. She hitched herself up on the bar-stool and the resultant display of lace stocking tops and frilly knickers meant that she was immediately asked to dance.
Agatha put her mouth to Charles’s ear and shouted, “Waste of time.”
As dance number followed dance number – hadn’t they moved on from The Village People? – Agatha began to get angry. Miss Simms hadn’t returned. This was not a singles’ bar. It was a disco for young people. She was feeling hot and tired and deafened.
She was just about to shout to Charles to go and collect Miss Simms and get them out of the noise and into the fresh air when Miss Simms suddenly appeared in front of them accompanied by a burly young man.
“Ere’s one of them,” she roared.
Charles took the young man aside and shouted something. Then he jerked his head at Agatha and they all made their way out of the club.
“Thank God for that,” said Agatha, taking in great gulps of polluted air. “This here is Jake,” said Miss Simms. “He was one of them that was with Melissa.”
Jake did not look like a bit of rough stuff to Agatha. He was wearing a black T-shirt, black trousers and enormous boots, but; he had a pleasant-enough face.
“What’s all this about?” asked Jake when they had managed to get a table at a nearby pub. “I read she’d got topped. Nothing to do with me.”
“The thing is,” said Agatha, “my husband’s missing and he’s suspected of having committed the murder. I don’t know what Melissa was really like. I mean, what did you make of her; what really happened?”
“Well, for a start, you can’t tell with the lights in there and she was heavy made up, you see. When we got back to our flat, and I got a good look at her, I thought; blimey, I thought, I ain’t reduced to screwing someone as old as my mum. Besides, she was as pissed as a newt. Must have been drinking a lot in the club.”
“She was,” interjected Miss Simms.
“So me and the others had a confab in the kitchen and my mates, that’s Jerry and Wayne, they says, get rid of the old bird. So I go back in and tells her, “You’ll need to go, we’ve got a date later with our girl-friends.” She says she could teach us a few tricks, like we didn’t know. Disgusting, it was.” He grinned cheekily at Agatha. “Don’t know what the older generation’s coming to.” Miss Simms giggled and sipped at a blue drink which seemed to be full of fruit and decorated with small paper umbrellas.
“Told her she wasn’t on. No way. ‘Get the hell out,’ I said. She asks for a drink for the road, so I gives her one and goes into the kitchen to tell my mates I’ll soon have her out and I go back and the old bird’s passed out on the sofa. So we all carry her downstairs and sit her on the pavement with her back to the railings and then we all went back to the club. When we got back – oh, ‘bout two in the morning – she’d gone.”
Charles looked at Jake thoughtfully. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “I can understand you mistaking her age and going off with her, but why bring your mates along? Did you all mean to have her?”
“What sort of blokes do you think we are?” demanded Jake truculently.
“We’re not the police,” said Agatha, “and we’re not interested in your motives. Can I tell you what I think? There’s one thing I do know about Melissa and that is she was a fantasist. So what would get you all to go along? And I don’t think any of you made a mistake about her age. Drugs! The silly cow probably told you she knew where to score.”
“Do I look like a junkie?” demanded Jake.
“Come on, tell us,” pleaded Agatha. “We won’t go to the police. I just have to know how far she would go with lying.”
“It’s worth fifty pounds,” said Charles suddenly.
Jake sat with his head down. Then he said, “How can I trust you?”
“Simply because we’re not the police,” said Charles. “You don’t look like a junkie. So what was it? Pot?”
He shrugged and then said, “Yeah, that was it. Told us her lover was a dealer and she could get us the best Colombian. She said she would phone him from our place. When we gets there, she starts to come on to us, and I mean all of us. It was right disgusting. “Phone your friend,” we says. She keeps saying, “Later, let’s have some fun.” So we leave her with the whisky bottle and have that confab in the kitchen and we decide she’s lying and when we go back in, she’s passed out, like I said, and so we leave her on the pavement, like I said. Silly old trout.” He focused on Agatha. “I saw your picture in the newspapers. She was knocking off your old man, wasn’t she?”
Agatha averted her eyes.
“Forget about that,” said Charles. He turned to Miss Simms. “You didn’t know anything about this?”
“No. You can’t hear a thing in that club.”
“What about my fifty pounds?” demanded Jake.
“Could you pay, Aggie?” said Charles. “I’m a bit short.”
“I paid the entrance fees to that disco.”
“I’ve got me cheque-book with me,” said Miss Simms with all the misplaced generosity of the poor.
“No, that’s all right.” Charles stood up and took out his wallet. He peeled off notes and handed them to Jake. “Give him your card, Aggie. Ring us if you think of anything else, Jake.”
“Right. I’m off then.” Jake stood up and then looked down at Miss Simms. “I’m going back to the disco. You coming?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Simms primly. “I’m going home with my friends.”
Miss Simms looked disapprovingly after Jake’s retreating back. “Cheek!” she said. “I like my gentlemen to be more mature. In fact, Eddie’s back again.”
“Who’s Eddie?” asked Agatha.
“He’s the one before last,” said Miss Simms. “Ever so nice. In bathroom fittings in Cheltenham. His wife’s left him. Not for me. They never find out about me. I’m not a tart, like some I could mention. No, she left him for a man in surgical goods.”
¦
After they had deposited Miss Simms at her home, Agatha and Charles sat in the kitchen of Agatha’s cottage and mulled over the little information they had. “You know what hurts?” said Agatha. “It’s just that the more we find out about Melissa, the more horrible it seems that James had anything to do with her.”
“I think men under sentence of death will do things they might not otherwise have contemplated. Then James was always a violently jealous man.”
“James!”
“Yes, James.”
“I never really thought of him as being jealous,” said Agatha. “I was always so violently jealous myself.”
“Agatha admits to a fault! Goodness me.”
“Never mind that. What about this business of Melissa saying she had a lover who was a drug dealer?”
“That was sharp of you to guess about drugs. What put you on to that?”
“Just a wild guess. And all this nonsense of Miss Simms about rough trade. I mean, she’s very genteel. I
