Agatha finished her gin and took her leave. Somehow what Ella had said about the Cummings-Brownes' marriage made sense. There was no reason for any further investigation. Agatha realized that, deep in her heart, she must have thought Vera Cummings-Browne the murderess all along. This time she really would take Bill Wong's advice.
But as she walked back to her own cottage, she saw to her surprise that there was a large FOR SALE notice outside Mrs. Barr's cottage. Mrs. Barr saw her coming and stood at her garden gate waiting for her.
'You have driven me away,' said Mrs. Barr. 'I cannot continue to live next door to a murderess.'
'Fat chance you'll have of selling it,' said Agatha. 'No body's buying these days, and who the hell is going to want a twee cottage called New Delhi anyway?'
She marched to her own cottage and went in and slammed the door.
But Agatha felt bleak. She had poked a stick into the village ponds and stirred up a lot of mucky feelings.
That evening, before the Carsely Ladies' Society meeting, she went to the Red Lion for dinner. The landlord, Joe Fletcher, gave her a cheerful good evening and then asked her what all this business about John Cartwright trying to kill her had been. Immediately several of the villagers crowded around to hear the story. Agatha told them everything about the wire across the road and how Bill Wong had come to her rescue and how the police had found the money from the robbery in Cartwright's house while they all pressed closer, occasionally making sure her glass was refilled. 'I gather his last crime was in Essex,' said Agatha. 'Does that mean he wasn't from here?'
'Born and brought up here,' said a large farmer called Jimmy Page.
'Decent people, his folks were. Lived down the council houses. Died a whiles back. Couldn't do a thing with him, not since he was so high.
Got Ella in the family way and her father came after him with a shotgun and that's how they got married. Kept going off to make his fortune, he said, and sometimes he'd come back flush and sometimes he wouldn't.
Bad lot.'
Agatha realized dimly that she had not eaten but she did not want to leave the bar and the company. She knew also that she was sinking an unusually large amount of gin.
'I see Mrs. Barr has put her house up for sale,' she remarked.
'Oh, aye, her's been left a bigger cottage over Ancombe way,' said the farmer. 'Aunt of hers died.'
'What!' Agatha stared. 'She let me believe it was to get away from me.' 'Wouldn't pay no heed to her,' said Farmer Page comfortably. A small man popped his head over Mr. Page's beefy shoulder. 'Her hasn't been the same since that play.' His voice rose to a falsetto. ''Oh, Reg, Reg, kiss me.'
That be enough now, Billy!' admonished another man. 'We all makes a fool o' ourself sometime or tother. No cause to throw stones. Turning into a scorcher of a summer, ain't it?'
In vain did Agatha try to find out about Mrs. Barr. Gossip was over for the night. Farming and the weather were the subjects allowed. The old grandfather clock in the corner of the pub gave a small apologetic cough and then chimed out the hour.
'Goodness!' Agatha scrambled down from the bar stool. 'I'm late.'
She felt very tipsy as she hurried to the vicarage. 'You're not terribly late,' whispered Mrs. Bloxby after she had opened the door to her. 'Miss. Simms has just finished reading the minutes.'
Agatha accepted a cup of tea and two dainty sandwiches and sat down as near to the rest of the eats as she could get.
'Now,' said Mrs. Mason, ' guest of the evening, Mr. Jones.'
Polite applause while Mr. Jones set up a screen and a slide projector.
He was a small spry man with white hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
'For my first slide,' he said, ' is Bailey's grocery store in the 1920s.' A picture, at first fuzzy, came into focus: a store with striped awnings, and grinning villagers standing in front of it.
Delighted cries from the older members. 'Reckon that's Mrs. Bloggs; you see that liddle girl standing to the right?'
Agatha stifled a yawn and slowly reached out in the gloom for a hefty slice of plum cake. She felt sleepy and bored. All the frights of the past few weeks which had kept her adrenalin flowing had faded away. The attacks on her had been made by a burglar who was now on the run. Maria Borrow was a crazy old fright. Barbara James was a pain in the neck. Something nasty had happened in the wood-shed of Mrs. Barr's past. Who gave a damn? And what was she, the high-powered Agatha Raisin, doing sitting in a vicarage eating plum cake and being bored to death?
Slide followed slide. Even when photos of ' village prize-winners' jerked on to the screen, Agatha remained in a stupor of boredom. There was Ella Cartwright being presented with a ten-pound note by Reg Cummings-Browne, looking as long dead as the old photos of villagers she had already seen. Then Vera Cummings-Browne getting a prize for flower arranging, then Mrs. Bloxby getting a prize for jam. Mrs. Bloxby? Agatha looked at the photo of the vicar's wife standing with Reg Cummings-Browne and then relapsed back into her torpor. Mrs. Bloxby? Not in a hundred years!
And then she fell asleep and in her dreams she cycled down into Carsely in the fading light and standing in the middle of the road waiting for her and brandishing a double-barrelled shotgun was Mrs. Barr. Agatha awoke with a shriek of fear and found the slide show was over and everyone was looking at her.
'Sorry,' she mumbled.
'Don't worry,' said Miss. Simms, who was next to her. 'It was that nasty fright you had.'
When Agatha made her way homeward, she decided to get some sort of alarm system installed the very next day and then wondered why.
Somewhere at the back of her mind, she had decided to leave the village.
The next day, she phoned a security firm and placed an order for their best of everything in the way of burglar-proofing and then went around opening the doors and the windows to try to get a breath of cool air.
The heat was building up. Before, when it had been fine, the days had been sunny and the nights cool, but now the sky burnt blue, deep blue above the twisted cottage chimneys and the sun beat down. By lunch-time, the heat was fierce. She took a small thermometer outside and watched as it shot up over the 100 degrees Fahrenheit mark and disappeared. Mrs. Simpson was vacuuming busily upstairs, having changed her cleaning day to fit in a dentist's appointment. Agatha remembered the talk about Mrs. Barr and climbed the stairs. 'Can I have a word with you?' she shouted over the noise of the vacuum. Mrs. Simpson reluctantly turned the machine off. She was proud of doing a good job and felt she had already wasted too much time earlier hearing Agatha's adventures.
'I was asking in the pub last night why Mrs. Barr was selling up and I heard an aunt had died and left her a larger cottage over Ancombe way'
'Yes, that's right.' Doris Simpson's hand hovered longingly over the vacuum switch.
'Why don't you come down to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee, Doris?'
'Got too much to do, Agatha.'
'Skip for once. I'm still getting over my fright and I want to talk,' said Agatha firmly.
'I meant to clean the windows.'
'It's too hot. I'll hire a window cleaner. Doris!'
'Oh, all right,' said Doris ungraciously.
Would anyone in this day and age believe you had to beg a cleaner to leave her work? marvelled Agatha.
Once in the kitchen and with coffee poured, Agatha said, 'Now tell me about Mrs. Barr.'
'What's to tell?'
'Someone in the pub said something about her having disgraced herself and then said in a high voice as if imitating her, 'Reg, Reg, kiss me.'
'
'Oh, that!'
'Oh, what, Doris? I'm dying of curiosity.' 'Curiosity killed the cat,' said Doris sententiously. 'Well, there was this young chap over at Campden and he wrote a play, sort of old-fashioned type thing it were, you know, where they has long cigarette holders and talks like them old British war films. He was a protege of Vera Cummings- Browne. Anyway, Mrs. Cummings-Browne said she would get the dramatic society to put it on. Two of the parts were about a middle-aged couple remembering the passion of their youth, or that's how the programme put it. This was played by Mrs. Barr and Mr. Cummings-Browne. Dead boring that whole play was. Anyway, they were
