“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 wheel in minutes.”
By the time they parked at Motorways, the wheel 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 stock-broker 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
“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 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
