“Charles!”
“Snap out of it, sweetie. Martyrdom is ruining your looks.”
Agatha glared at him. “My husband is missing, maybe dead, and all you can do is insult me?”
“That’s what friends are for.”
Agatha proceeded to tell him between bites of sandwich exactly what she thought of him.
Charles listened amiably and, seeing she had finished eating, called for the bill. “We’d better get back,” he said. “There may be more news.”
¦
James Lacey stumbled in a daze along the waterfront at Bridport in Dorset. Night was falling. His head throbbed and he had no idea how he had got there, only that he seemed to have been wandering for days.
Suddenly a squat little woman wearing a yachting cap appeared in front of him. “Why, it’s James, James Lacey! You look a mess.”
Somehow his dazed mind registered her identity. “Harriet,” he said.
“We’re about to set sail for France. Tubby’s on the yacht. Look at your head. There’s dried blood in your hair. What have you been up to?”
“Bar fight,” said James, fighting away a memory of a swinging hammer and crashing furniture. “I’ll be all right.”
He knew some awful memories of what had so recently happened to him were about to come flooding back. And in that moment he remembered a monastery he had visited once in Agde, in the south of France. He remembered the cloistered peace, the sun slanting through the cloisters. He suddenly felt if he could get there, he would be safe.
“Can you take me to France?”
“I think you should go to a doctor and get that head examined.”
“It’s just a bit of blood. Worse than it looks. I’d really like to get away, Harriet.”
“Got your passport?”
James searched in the inside pocket of his jacket. “Yes, I have,” he said with something like surprise. He tried to remember why he had his passport but could not.
“Luggage?”
“No luggage. I sent it on ahead,” said James, improvising.
“You look as if you’ve been sleeping in those clothes. It’s a good thing I know you to be a respectable gentleman or I would start to think you were on the run from the police.”
“Not from them,” said James. Harriet looked up at him curiously and then gave a little shrug.
“Come along, then. We’re nearly ready to set sail.”
? The Love from Hell ?
3
THREE weeks had passed since the disappearance of James. Agatha had railed at the police. In these days of modern communications, someone must have seen him somewhere. He had not packed any clothes, although his passport was missing. He would have to buy clothes somewhere, draw money. There must be a trace of him.
But there was nothing.
It had been established that the blood in the cottage and in the car belonged to James. Bill told her they were still waiting for the results of further tests on hairs and threads and other bits and pieces carefully scooped up by the forensic team, but these days, he said, the lab was overloaded.
It is not only the police who suspect the nearest and dearest of murder. When Agatha went to the local pub or shopped in the village store, she could sense an atmosphere when she walked in.
She sank even deeper every day into depression. She had barely the energy to get out of bed, and when she did, she wandered around in a shapeless house-dress. From time to time, she would feel with a stab of deeper pain that she should be out roaming the countryside, looking for James. Then she would remember that the police were looking for him with all their resources, and sink back down into helpless misery again.
James’s relatives had given up phoning. His sister and his aunts all seemed to imply that such a worrying, disgraceful thing would not have happened if he had refrained from marrying Agatha. She had finally unplugged the phone from the wall.
At the end of the third week, Agatha reluctantly answered the summons of her doorbell. “I’ve been trying to ring you,” said the vicar’s wife, pushing a strand of grey hair away from her mild face. “No reply. I thought you’d gone away.”
“Come in. Like coffee?”
“Tea, please.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Bloxby looked anxiously at Agatha. “I just wondered if you had had time to clean up James’s cottage.”
“I haven’t had the heart,” said Agatha dully.
She placed a mug of tea in front of Mrs. Bloxby, who picked it up, and then put it down, untasted, and said, “I really think, my dear Mrs. Raisin, that you should take some sort of action or you are going to make yourself really ill.”
“What can I do that the police can’t?”
“You’ve never let that stop you before. You see, I could help you tidy up the cottage next door. You could go through James’s papers – oh, I know the police have been through them – but there might be something there that they have missed.”
“Still can’t see much point in it,” said Agatha, lighting a cigarette.
“I cannot see much point in you letting yourself go to seed. One would think James was dead.”
“How do you mean, go to seed?” demanded Agatha.
“I shall put it bluntly. There are bags under your eyes, you have a moustache and hairy legs.”
A small spark of humour gleamed in Agatha’s bearlike eyes. “It’s women’s lib,” she said. “We only shave ourselves because of men.”
“I shave my legs because they get scratchy and itchy when the hair grows,” said Mrs. Bloxby. “I thought your friend, Charles, would have been round to help you.”
“He tried, but I didn’t feel like seeing him.”
“Mrs. Raisin, are we going next door, or what? I haven’t got all day. There are other people in this parish in need of my help!”
Agatha blinked at her in surprise. She had hardly ever heard her friend speak to her sharply before.
“Okay. I’ll get the keys.”
“Clean yourself up first, there’s a dear.”
Agatha trudged upstairs. For the first time, it seemed, in ages, she took a good look at herself in the long mirror in her bedroom. She was appalled at the ageing mess that looked wearily back at her.
¦
Downstairs, Mrs. Bloxby waited patiently. If Mrs. Raisin was taking a long time, then it meant she was tidying herself up, and Mrs. Bloxby was still shocked by the deterioration in Agatha’s appearance.
At last, Agatha appeared, neat and tidy in a shirt blouse and skirt, her smooth legs in tights and her smooth face under a light mask of make-up. “Thanks for waiting,” she said gruffly. “Let’s go.”
“Haven’t you been to James’s cottage before?”
“Just on and off,” said Agatha, remembering nights she had cried into his pillow and days where she had sat with her face buried in his favourite old sweater. “I just couldn’t get round to straightening things, although the police did quite a good job after they had finished.”
They walked out into the sunshine. How odd that the world should look so normal, thought Agatha. Fluffy clouds, like clouds in a child’s painting, hung in a deep-blue Cotswold sky. The first roses were tumbling over hedges and the air was sweet and fresh.
Agatha unlocked the door of James’s cottage. Mrs. Bloxby stood back and looked at the roof. “The thatch
