Agatha Raisin and The Walkers of Dembley

M.C. Beaton

Agatha Raisin

The Walkers of Dembley

The fourth book in the Agatha Raisin series

1995

One

Agatha Raisin watched the sunlight on the wall of her office in the City of London.

It was shining through the slats of the Venetian blind, long arrows of light inching down the wall as the sun sank lower, the sundial of Agatha's working day.

Tomorrow it would all be over, her stint as a public relations officer, and then she could return to her home in the village of Carsely in the Cotswolds. She had not enjoyed her return to work. Her short time away from it, her short time in retirement, had seemed to divorce her from the energy required to drum up publicity for clients from journalists and television companies.

Although she had enough of her old truculence and energy left to make a success of it, she missed the village and her friends. She had gone back initially for a few weekends when she could get away, but the wrench of returning to London had been so great that for the past two months she had stayed where she was, working at the weekends as well.

She had thought that her new-found talent for making friends would have worked for her in the City, but most of the staff were young compared to her fifty-something and preferred to congregate together at lunchtime and after work. Roy Silver, her young friend who had inveigled her into working for Pedmans for six months, also had been steering clear of her of late, always claiming he was 'too busy' to meet her for a drink or even to talk to her.

She sighed and looked at the clock. She was taking a journalist from the Daily Bugle out for drinks and dinner to promote a new pop star, Jeff Loon, real name Trevor Biles, and she was not looking forward to it. It was hard to promote someone like Jeff Loon, a weedy, acne-pitted youth with a mouth like a sewer. But he had a voice which used to be described as Irish parlour tenor and had recently re- recorded some old romantic favourites, all great hits. It was necessary then to give him a new image as the darling of middle England, the kind that the mums and dads adored. The best way was to keep him away from the press as much as possible and send in Agatha Raisin.

She went to the Ladies and changed into a black dress and pearls, suitable to foster the staid image of the client she was representing. The journalist she was to meet was new to her.

She had checked up on him. His name was Ross Andrews. He had once been a major league reporter but had been demoted to the entertainments page in middle age. Ageing journalists often found themselves relegated to reporting on the social or entertainments page or, worse, to answering readers' letters.

They were to meet in the City, Fleet Street being no more, the newspaper companies having moved down to the East End.

She had agreed to meet Ross in the bar of the City Hotel and to eat there as well, for the restaurant was passable and its windows commanded a good view of the River Thames.

She twisted this way and that in front of the mirror. The dress, a recent purchase, looked suspiciously tight. Too many expense account dinners and lunches. As soon as she got back to Carsely, she would take the weight off.

As she walked down to the entrance hall, the doorman, Jock, sprang to open the door. 'Goodnight, Mrs Raisin,' he said with an oily smile, and muttered under his breath once Agatha was out of earshot, 'Rotten old bat!' For Agatha had once snapped at him, 'If you're a doorman, then open the bloody door every time you see me. Hop to it!' and the lazy Jock had never forgiven her.

Agatha walked along with the thinning home-going crowds, a stocky, pugnacious woman with a short hairstyle, bearlike eyes and good legs.

The hotel was only a few streets away. She left the evening sunlight and plunged into the gloom of the hotel bar. Although she had never met this Ross Andrews before, her experienced eye picked him out immediately. He was wearing a dark suit and a collar and tie, but he had that raffish seediness about him of a newspaper journalist. He had thinning hair of a suspicious black, a fat face with a smudge of a nose and watery blue eyes. He might have once been good-looking, thought Agatha as she walked towards him, but years of heavy boozing had taken their toll.

'Mr Andrews?'

'Mrs Raisin. Call me Ross. I ordered a drink and put it on your tab,' he said cheerfully. 'It's all on expenses anyway.'

Agatha reflected that quite a number of journalists were expert at putting in fake restaurant bills for clients they should have entertained and never did, pocketing the money themselves. But when it came to anyone else's expenses, it seemed to be a case of no holds barred.

She nodded and sat down opposite him, signalled to the waiter and ordered a gin and tonic for herself. 'Call me Agatha,' she said.

'How are things on the Daily Bugle?' she continued, knowing that it was pointless talking business until the journalist considered he had sunk enough booze to warrant a few lines.

'On the skids, if you ask me,' he said gloomily. 'The trouble is that these new journalists don't know their arses from their elbows. They come out of these damn schools of journalism and they're not a patch on the likes of us who had to learn to fly by the seat of our pants. Come back off a job and say, 'Oh, I couldn't ask him or her that. Husband just dead,' or some crap like that. I say to them, 'Laddie, in my day, we got it on the front page and the hell with anyone's feelings.' They want to be liked. A good reporter is never liked.'

'True,' agreed Agatha with some feeling.

He signalled the waiter and ordered himself another whisky and water without asking Agatha if she was ready for another drink.

'It all happened when they turned the running of the newspapers over to accountants, seedy jealous bods who cut your expenses and argue about every penny. Why, I remember...'

Agatha smiled and tuned him out. How many times had she been in similar circumstances, listening to similar complaints? Tomorrow she would be free and she would never go back to work again, not as a PR anyway. She had sold her own PR firm to take early retirement, to retire to the Cotswolds, to the village of Carsely, which had slowly enfolded her in its gentle warmth. She missed it. She missed the Carsely Ladies' Society, the chatter over the teacups in the vicarage, the placid life of the village. Keeping a practised look of admiration on her face as Ross wittered on, her thoughts moved to her neighbour, James Lacey. She had had a drink with him on her last visit to the village but their easy friendship seemed to have gone. She told herself that her silly obsession for him had fled, never to return. Still, they had had fun solving those murders.

As Ross raised his arm to order another drink, she forestalled him by suggesting firmly that they should eat.

They walked into the dining-room. 'Your usual table, Mrs Raisin,' said the maitre d', showing them to a table at the window.

There had been a time, reflected Agatha, when being known and recognized by maitre d's was gratifying, underlying how far she had come from the Birmingham slum in which she had grown up. No one said 'slum' these days, of course. It was Inner City, as if the euphemism could take away the grime, violence and despair. The do-