Agatha Raisin
The third book in the Agatha Raisin series
1994
One
A mild, damp winter was edging towards spring when Agatha Raisin motored slowly homeward to the village of Carsely after a long holiday. She persuaded herself that she had had a wonderful time far away from this grave of a village. She had gone to New York, then to Bermuda, then to Montreal, and then straight to Paris, and so on to Italy, Greece and Turkey. Although she was a wealthy woman, she was not used to spending all that amount of money on herself and felt obscurely guilty. Before, she had nearly always gone on the more expensive arranged package holidays where she was with a group. This time she had been on her own. Carsely had given her the confidence, or so she had thought, to make friends, but she seemed to have spent a blur of weeks either in hotel rooms or in dogged solitary forays around the tourist sights.
But she would not admit she had had a lonely time any more than she would admit her prolonged absence had anything to do with her neighbour, James Lacey.
At the end of what she fondly thought of as 'my last case', she had drunk too much in the local pub with one of the women from the village and on returning home had made a rude gesture to James, who had been standing outside his cottage.
Sober and remorseful the next day, she had humbly apologized to this attractive bachelor neighbour and the apology had been quietly accepted. But the friendship had sunk to a tepid acquaintanceship. He talked to her briefly if he met her in the pub or in the village shop, but he no longer came round for coffee, and if he was working in his front garden and saw her coming along the lane, he dived indoors. So Agatha had taken her sore heart abroad. Somehow, away from the gentle influence of Carsely, her old character had reasserted itself, that is, prickly, aggressive and judgemental. Her cats were in a basket on the back seat. She had stopped at the cattery to pick them up on the road home. Despite the fact that she was still married, although she had not seen her husband for years, did not want to, and had practically forgotten his existence, she felt exactly like the spinster of the village, cats and all.
The village of Carsely lay quietly in the watery sunlight. Smoke rose from chimneys. She turned the car along the straggling main street, which was practically all there was of Carsely, except for a few lanes winding off it and a council estate on the outskirts, and turned sharply into Lilac Lane, where her thatched cottage stood. James Lacey lived next door. Smoke was rising from his chimney. Her heart lifted. How she longed to stop the car at his door and cry out, 'I'm home,' but she knew he would come out on the step and survey her gravely and say something polite like 'Good to have you back,' and then he would retreat indoors.
Carrying her cats, Boswell and Hodge, in their basket, she let herself into her cottage. It smelt strongly of cleaning fluid and disinfectant, her dedicated cleaning woman, Doris Simpson, having had free run of the place while Agatha had been away. She fed the cats and let them out, carried her suitcases out of the car and put her clothes in the laundry basket, and then took out a series of small parcels, presents for the ladies of Carsely.
She had bought the vicar's wife, Mrs Bloxby, a very pretty silk scarf from Istanbul. Longing for some human company, Agatha decided to walk along to the vicarage and give it to her.
The sun had gone down and the vicarage looked dark and quiet. Agatha suddenly felt a pang of apprehension. Despite her hard thoughts about Carsely, she could not imagine the village without the gentle vicar's wife. What if the vicar had been transferred to another parish while she, Agatha, had been away?
Agatha was a stocky middle-aged woman with a round, rather pugnacious face, and small, bearlike eyes. Her hair, brown and healthy, was cut in a short square style, established in the heyday of Mary Quant and not much changed since. Her legs were good and her clothes expensive, and no one, seeing her standing hopefully on the vicarage doorstep, could realize the timid longing for a friendly face that lay underneath the laminated layers of protection from the world which Agatha had built up over the years.
She knocked at the door and with a glad feeling heard the sound of approaching footsteps from within. The door opened and Mrs Bloxby stood smiling at Agatha. The vicar's wife was a gentle-faced woman. Her brown hair, worn in an old-fashioned knot at the nape of her neck, was streaked with grey.
'Come in, Mrs Raisin,' she said with that special smile of hers that illumined her whole face. 'I was just about to have tea.'
Having temporarily forgotten what it was to be liked, Agatha thrust the wrapped parcel at her and said gruffly, 'This is for you.'
'Why, how kind! But come in.' The vicar's wife led the way into the sitting-room and switched on a couple of lamps. With a feeling of coming home, Agatha sank down in the feather cushions of the sofa while Mrs Bloxby threw a log on the smouldering fire and stirred it into a blaze with the poker.
Mrs Bloxby unwrapped the parcel and exclaimed in delight at the silk scarf, shimmering with gold and red and blue. 'How exotic! I shall wear it at church on Sunday and be the envy of the parish. Tea and scones, I think.' She went but Agatha could hear her voice calling to the vicar, 'Darling, Mrs Raisin's back.' Agatha heard a mumbled reply.
After about ten minutes, Mrs Bloxby returned with a tray of tea and scones. 'Alf can't join us. He's working on a sermon.'
Agatha reflected sourly that the vicar always managed to be busy on something when she called.
'So,' said Mrs Bloxby, 'tell me about your travels.'
Agatha bragged about the places she had been, conjuring up, she hoped, the picture of a sophisticated world traveller. And then, waving a buttered scone, she said grandly, 'I don't suppose much has been going on here.'
'Oh, we have our little excitements,' said the vicar's wife. 'We have a newcomer, a real asset to the village, Mrs Mary Fortune. She bought poor Mrs Josephs's house and has made vast improvements to it. She is a great gardener.'
'Mrs Josephs didn't have much of a garden,' said Agatha.
'There's quite a bit of space at the front, and Mrs Fortune has already landscaped it and she has had a conservatory built at the back of the house on to the kitchen. She grows tropical plants there. She is also a superb baker. I fear her scones put mine to shame.'
'And what does Mr Fortune do?'
'There isn't a Mr Fortune. She is divorced.'
'How old?'
'It is hard to say. She is a remarkably good-looking lady and a great help at our horticultural society meetings. She and Mr Lacey are both such keen gardeners.'
Agatha's heart sank. She had nursed a hope that James might have missed her. But now it seemed he was being well entertained by some attractive divorcee with a passion for gardening.
Mrs Bloxby's gentle voice went on with other news of the parish, but Agatha's mind was too busy now to take in much of what she was saying. Agatha's interest in James Lacey was as much competitive as it was romantic. Since she had a great deal of common sense, she might even have accepted the fact that James Lacey was not interested in her at all, but the very mention of this newcomer roused all her battling instincts.
The vicar's voice sounded from the back of the house. 'Are we going to get any dinner tonight?'
'Soon,' shouted Mrs Bloxby. 'Would you care to join us, Mrs Raisin?'
'I didn't realize it was so late.' Agatha got to her feet. 'No, but thank you all the same.'
