have taken the rest home.' He leaned forward. 'Who hates you enough?' Agatha thought uneasily of Mrs. Barr and then shrugged. 'This is ridiculous. Do you read Agatha Christie?'
'All the time,' said Steve.
'Well, so do I, but delightful as those detective stories are, believe me, murders are usually sudden and violent and take place in cities, some drunken lout of a husband bashing his wife to death. Don't you see, I would like it to be murder!' 'Yes, I can see that,' said Steve, ' you have been exposed as a cheat!'
'Here, wait a minute'
'But it all looks very odd.'
Agatha fell silent. If only she had never tried to win that stupid competition.
Again a feeling of loneliness assailed her as she paid the bill and ushered her guests out into the night. She had a whole weekend in front of her entertaining this precious pair, and yet their very presence emphasized her loneliness. Roy had no real affection for her of any kind. His friend had wanted to see rural England and so he was using her.
Roy pranced around the cottage, looking at everything. 'Very cute, Aggie,' was his verdict. 'Fake horse brasses! 'Yeh! Yeh! And all that farm machinery.'
'Well, what would you have?' said Agatha crossly.
'I dunno, sweetie. Looks like a stage set. Nothing of Aggie here.'
'Perhaps that's understandable,' said Steve. 'There are people who do not have personalities that transfer to interior decorating. You need to be a homebody.'
'You can go off people, you know,' commented Agatha waspishly. 'Off to bed with both of you. I'm tired. The village festivities don't begin until noon, so you can have a long lie-in.'
The next morning Roy took over the cooking when he found Agatha was about to microwave the sausages for breakfast. He whistled happily as he went about the preparations and Agatha told him he would make someone a good wife. 'More than you would, Aggie,' he said cheerfully.
'It's a wonder your health hasn't crumbled under a weight of microwaved curries.'
Steve came down wrapped in a dressing-gown, gold and blue stripes and with the badge of a cricket club on the pocket. 'He got it at a stall in one of the markets,' said Roy. 'Don't bother talking to him, Aggie.
He doesn't really wake up until he's had a jug of coffee.'
Agatha read through the morning papers, turning the pages rapidly to see if there was anything further about the quiche poisoning, but there wasn't a word.
The morning passed amicably if silently and then they went out to the main street, Roy doing cartwheels down the lane past Mrs. Barr's cottage. Agatha saw the lace curtains twitch.
Steve took out a large notebook and began to write down all about the festivities, which started off with the crowning of the May Queen, a small pretty schoolgirl with a slimly old-fashioned figure. In fact all the schoolchildren looked like illustrations in some long-forgotten book with their innocent faces and underdeveloped figures. Agatha was used to seeing schoolgirls with busts and backsides. The Queen was drawn by the morris men in their flowered top hats, the bells at their knees jingling. Roy was disappointed in the morris dancers, possibly because, despite the flowered hats, they looked like a boozy rugby team and were led by a white-haired man who struck various members of the audience with a pig's bladder. 'Supposed to make you fertile,' said Steve ponderously and Roy shrieked with laughter and Agatha felt thoroughly ashamed of him.
They wandered around the stalls set up in the main street. Every one seemed to be selling wares in support of some charity or other. Agatha winced away from the home-baking stand. Roy won a tin of sardines at the tom bola and got so carried away, he bought ticket after ticket until he managed to win a bottle of Scotch. There was a game of skittles which they all tried, a rendering of numbers from musicals by the village band, and then the morris dancers again, leaping up into the sunny air, accompanied by fiddle and accordion. 'Don't you know you are living in an anachronism?' said Steve ponderously, scribbling away in his notebook.
Roy wanted to try his luck at the tom bola again and he and Steve went off. Agatha flicked through a pile of second-hand books on a stall and then looked sharply at the woman behind the stall. Mrs. Cartwright!
She was, as Agatha had already noticed, a gypsy-looking woman, swarthy-skinned among all the pink-and- white complexions of the villagers. Her rough hair hung down her back and her strong arms were folded across her generous bosom.
'Mrs. Cartwright?' said Agatha tentatively.
The woman's dark eyes focused on her. 'Oh, you be Mrs. Raisin,' she said. 'Bad business about the quiche.'
'I can't understand it,' said Agatha. 'I shouldn't have bought it, but on the other hand, how on earth would cow bane get into a London quiche?' 'London is full of bad things,' said Mrs. Cartwright, straightening a few paperbacks that had tumbled over.
'Well, the result is that I will have to sell up,' said Agatha. 'I can't stay here after what happened.'
'Twas an accident,' said Mrs. Cartwright placidly. 'Reckon you can't go running off after an accident. Besides, I was ever so pleased a London lady should think she had to buy one to compete with me.'
Agatha gave her an oily smile. 'I did hear you were the best baker in the Cotswolds. Look, I would really like to talk about it. May I call on you?' 'Any time you like,' said Mrs. Cartwright lazily. 'Judd's cottage, beyond the Red Lion on the old Station Road.'
Roy came prancing up and Agatha moved on quickly, afraid that Roy's chattering and posturing might put Mrs. Cartwright off. Agatha began to feel better. Mrs. Cartwright hadn't accused her of cheating, nor had she been nasty.
But then, after Steve and Roy had rejoined her and as they were leaving the May Day Fair, they came face to face with Mrs. Barr. She stopped in front of Agatha, her eyes blazing. 'I am surprised you have the nerve to show your face in the daylight,' she said.
'What's got your knickers in a twist, sweetie?' asked Roy.
'This woman' Mrs. Barr bobbed her head in Agatha's direction ' the death of one of our most respected villagers by poisoning him.' 'It was an accident,' said Roy, before Agatha could speak. 'Bugger off, you old fright. Come on, Aggie.'
Mrs. Barr stood opening and shutting her mouth in silent outrage as Roy propelled Agatha past her.
'Miserable old cow,' said Roy as they turned into Lilac Lane. 'What got up her nose?'
T lured her cleaning woman away.'
'Oh, that's a capital crime. Murder has been committed for less. Take us to Bourton-on-the-Water, Aggie. Steve wants to see it and we don't need to eat yet after that enormous breakfast.'
Agatha, although she still felt shaken by Mrs. Barr, patiently got out the car. 'Stow-on-the-Wold!' screamed Roy a quarter of an hour later as Agatha was about to bypass that village. 'We must see it.' So Agatha turned round and went into the main square, thrusting her car head first into the one remaining parking place, which a family car had been just about to reverse into.
She had never seen so many morris dancers. They seemed to be all over the place and of a more energetic type than the ones in Carsely as they waved their handkerchiefs and leaped in the air like so many Nijinskys.
T think,' said Roy, ' if you've seen one lot of morris dancers, you've seen the lot. Put away your notebook, Steve, for God's sake.'
'It is all very interesting,' said Steve. 'Some say that morris dancing was originally Moorish dancing. What do you think?'
'I think ... yawn, yawn, yawn,' said Roy pettishly. 'Let's go and sample the cosmopolitan delights of Bourton- on-the-Water.'
Bourton-on-the-Water is certainly one of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds, with a glassy stream running through the centre under stone bridges. The trouble is that it is a famous beauty spot and always full of tourists. That May Day they were out in force and Agatha thought longingly of the peaceful streets of London. There were tourists everywhere: large family parties, sticky crying children, busloads of pensioners from Wales, muscle-bound men with tattoos from Birmingham, young Lolitas in white slit skirts and white high-heeled shoes, tottering along, eating ice cream and giggling at everything in sight. Steve wanted to see all that was on offer, from the art galleries to the museums, which depressed Agatha, because a lot of the village museum displays were items from her youth and she felt only really old things should go into museums. Then there was the motor museum, also jammed with tourists, and then, unfortunately, someone had told Steve about Birdland at the end of the village and so they had
