use for weekends. Give Philippa here some country air. And what about you? I see your name from time to time in the newspapers. Death does seem to follow you around.” She looked at the ring sparkling on Agatha’s finger. “Are you married?”
“I was. I’m divorced. I still wear my rings.” Agatha did not want to talk about John.
Bunty looked around. “It all looks so peaceful here. You wouldn’t think there had been any murders in such a quiet rural spot. Have the police any idea who did it?”
Agatha shook her head. Philippa squirmed on her mother’s knee. “I want to see the ducks,” she wailed.
“I’d better take her or I’ll get no peace.” Bunty rose to her feet. “Nice to see you again.”
Agatha saw Alice sitting a little way away on her own, drinking wine. She must have bought a whole bottle from John. There was no sign of Bill. He was probably off somewhere phoning to see if there was any news about that mobile phone. She finished her food and went back to where John was ladling out punch. “We’d better stop selling that wine,” he said when he saw her. “The Morris men won’t be able to dance if they have any more.”
“Are we selling much?”
“Yes, quite a lot. But people are mostly taking it home.”
“We’ll put the bottles on the table in the boxes and if the Morris men come back, tell them we’re sold out and we’ll keep on selling it when they go away.”
The afternoon wore on and a chill crept into the air. Mrs. Bloxby came up. “The Morris men are getting ready to perform and then it’s your speech, Agatha. You may as well close up here. You’ve done splendidly.”
Agatha thankfully put a closed sign on the table and she and John put the remaining plastic cups in a box.
They walked to where the crowd was gathering to watch the Morris men. Bill and Alice were standing just behind the crowd and Alice was red-faced and shouting at him. “You’re nothing but a mother’s boy.”
“Let’s go round the other side. I don’t want to listen to this,” said Agatha. She felt guilty. She should have warned Alice about the effects of the wine.
They found a space where they could watch the Morris men. Alf Bloxby’s voice sounded over the crowd. “We will now see a performance of the stick dance by the Mircester Morris Men. Morris dancing is one of the characteristic folk dances of England. We do not know its origins, although we know it was derived from agrarian traditions of fertility rites and celebrations at sowing and at harvest time.”
A Morris man fell over and lay on the grass.
“Though well-known during Shakespeare’s time,” continued the vicar, “it almost died away during the Industrial Revolution, but has now thankfully been revived. You will enjoy the colourful sight of the dancers with their bells and waving hankies dancing to tunes played on the fiddle, pipe and tabor and melodeon. Over to you, boys.”
The Morris man who had fallen over was dragged to his feet and he stood there, blinking in the fading sunlight. A tape was put into a player and the jingly, jaunty tune of Morris music sounded out. The dancers with flowers in their hats and silver bells at their knees clutched their sticks and faced each other. They were supposed to bang their crossed sticks as they met in the dance but two of them missed and hit their opposite number a thwack. “You did that o’ purpose, Fred,” yelled one, and seizing his stick brought it down on the unfortunate Fred’s head. Soon the dance had degenerated into a rumble.
Alf Bloxby tried to separate the warring dancers but was thrust aside with cries of “Get away, you murderer.”
The vicar, his face flaming, looked around for help, shouting to the crowd to stop laughing and do something.
“Police!” shouted Bill Wong. Alf switched off the music. The dancers stopped hitting each other and stood there sheepishly.
Bill shouted to the crowd. “All of you, go home. Show’s over.”
The crowd began to stream off towards the gate. “My speech,” wailed Agatha.
“Too late,” said John. “We’d better get back and start loading up the rest of the wine and stuff.” John had borrowed a trailer which was hitched to his car, parked at the edge of the field.
John stared at the ground behind the table. “Agatha, the wine’s gone. Someone’s nicked the rest of it.”
“I don’t care,” said Agatha. “I hope it poisons them.”
“But we’d better tell Bill!”
“Bill’s got his hands full. You didn’t leave the money behind?”
“No, I’ve got it here in a bag. We’ll count it out at home and then take it along to the vicarage. Are you sure you don’t want to report the missing wine?”
“I’m sure. Just let’s hope it wasn’t a married couple who took it. A few slugs of that wine and they’ll be in the divorce courts in no time at all. I don’t like Alice, but I should have never let her drink that wine.”
“Better Bill finds out what she’s really like now instead of later,” said John. “Hurry up and help me, Agatha. It’s getting cold.”
The sun had turned red and was low on the horizon. They loaded up the trailer with the remainder of the plastic cups, the glasses, the punch-bowl, and then the table itself. As they drove out of the field, Agatha said, “I should have told Bill as well about Brent and his wife.”
“I really don’t think they had anything to do with it, Agatha.”
“Someone had. Someone somewhere. Someone who could have been at this very fete.”
They drove to the church hall first and carried the table in. There was still plenty of wine, stacked in boxes. “Just as well we didn’t take the whole lot along,” said John. “Where did you get the punch-bowl from?”
“I bought it.”
“No one could call you mean, Agatha Raisin. It must have cost you a lot, what with the silver cups and all.”
“Just doing my bit,” said Agatha wearily.
“Will Bill book the Morris dancers?”
“No, I think he’ll give them a warning and tell them not to dare drive until they’ve sobered up.”
“That’s all right. They’d hired a minibus. As long as the bus driver didn’t have any of the wine, they’ll be all right.”
“We’ll leave the cups and glasses here,” said Agatha. “They can be used another time. I was too upset to notice. I hope the press had all gone by the time the dancers started fighting.”
“Sorry. There was at least one television camera in action and I saw two press photographers.”
“Damn.”
“Let’s go to my place and have a drink.”
“No, mine,” said Agatha. “I want to let my cats out.”
After they had finished their drinks, they counted out the money on the kitchen table. “Nearly one hundred and fifty pounds, and that for the wine alone,” said John. “Not bad. There must have been about only two boxes of wine left for them to steal.”
“Miss Jellop must have brought most of the wine down here with her when she moved. It must have taken years to make a cellar-full of the stuff,” said Agatha. “Let’s take this money along to Mrs. Bloxby. She could raise a lot of money for the church with the wine that’s left. But I think someone in the village who knows about home- made wine should figure out how to weaken it before any more is sold. At least that should be the end of Alice. I never could figure out what Bill saw in her.”
“Maybe she’s good in bed.”
Agatha shuddered. For some reason she did not want to imagine Bill Wong in bed with anyone, least of all Alice.
Mrs. Bloxby welcomed them at the vicarage and took the bag of money from John. “I’ll give this to Alf. He’s in his study counting out the takings. From the initial look of things, we’ve done very well. It is all thanks to you, Agatha, and Alf is going to say so in his sermon next Sunday. I saw you talking to old Mrs. Feathers. Did she have anything interesting to say?”
“I should have spoken to her before,” said Agatha. “She said she was sure Tristan had a mobile phone.”
“And how does that help?”
“Because Mrs. Feathers said he had no calls the night after I left. But if, say, he had a mobile in his bedroom, someone could have rung him up and threatened him. He could have decided to flee and decided at the same time
