Agatha Raisin and The Murderous Marriage

without them she was left with herself. Agatha did not find herself very good company.

She looked around her garden as she headed for the back door. It had a weedy, neglected air.

Inside the house, she looked around the kitchen. It was gleaming and sterile. She opened the fridge. Nothing but a bottle of milk and some butter. She was about to open the freezer compartment when James said angrily from behind her, 'We're not here to find out what she eats but who she is.'

She followed him through to the living-room. Agatha had never credited herself with having much taste, but looking around what had once been her cosy, chintzy living-room, she felt her cottage had undergone a species of rape. There was a mushroom-coloured fitted carpet on the floor. A three-piece suite in mushroom velvet was ornamented with gold tassels on the arms and gold fringe above the squat legs. A low glass coffee-table glittered coldly. No pictures or books. Her lovely open hearth had been blocked up and an electric fire with fake legs stood in front of it.

'Absolutely nothing here,' said James. 'Let's try upstairs. You'd best stay down here in case you hear her coming back.' And Agatha was glad to agree, not wanting to see what Mrs. Hardy had done to the rest of the cottage. She went to the window and peered out. Autumn had come. A thin mist was curling around the branches of the lilac bush at the gate. Water dripped from the thatch with a mournful sound.

Agatha suddenly wondered what on earth she was doing living in the country, a feeling that only assailed her during the autumn. It was the Cotswold fogs that were the problem. Last winter hadn't been too bad, but the winter before had been awful, crawling into Moreton-in-Marsh or Evesham to do the shopping with the fog-lights on, sometimes not knowing whether she was still on the road or not, driving home at night where the fog seemed to rear up and take on tall pillared, shifting shapes, eyes aching, longing for the wind to blow and lift it.

In London there were shops, brightly lit, and tubes and buses, theatres and cinemas. Of course, she could get all that in Oxford, but Oxford was thirty miles away, thirty miles of fog-filled road.

She heard James call softly, 'You'd better come up here.'

She ran up the stairs. 'In here,' he called. 'The main bedroom.'

The room was dominated with a large four-poster bed, a modern four-poster bed. 'How did she get that up the stairs?' marvelled Agatha.

'Never mind. Look at this. Don't touch anything. I'm going to put it all back the way I found it.' There were papers spread out on the floor. Agatha knelt down and studied them. Any hope Agatha might have had that the mysterious Mrs. Hardy might turn out to be the missing Mrs. Gore-Appleton quickly fled.

There was a birth certificate: Mary Bexley, born in Sheffield in 1941. Then marriage lines. Mary Bexley had married one John Hardy in 1965. Death certificate for John Hardy. Died in car crash 1972.

Bank-books and statements in the name of Mary Hardy. There were photographs, dull and boring. It appeared that the late Mr. Hardy had been the company director of an electronics firm. Photos of Mr. Hardy at firm functions. No children.

'So that's very much that,' commented Agatha gloomily as she straightened up. James carefully replaced everything.

'We'll try Miss Janet Purvey tomorrow,' he said.

Miss Janet Purvey lived in Ashton-Le-Walls, quite near the health farm. It was a sleepy village wreathed in the thick mist which still persisted to haunt the countryside. Late roses drooped over cottage walls, blackened busy Lizzies, suffering from the first frost of the autumn, drooped along the edge of flower-beds. The trees were turning russet and birds piped dismally, seemingly the only sounds in the village of Ashton-Le-Walls, where nothing and no one but Agatha and James seemed to be alive in the fog.

The year was dying and Agatha felt lost and strange and loveless. The only thing that seemed to be keeping herself and James locked together was this detective investigation. She felt that once it was all over, they would drift apart, farther than they had ever been before, as if they had never lain in each other's arms.

A poem she had learned at school suddenly ran through Agatha's brain:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow? The small rain down can rain, -

Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

She felt if only the wind would blow away the mist and fog, her spirits would lighten. Autumn seemed to be inside her very brain, darkness and falling leaves and the haunting spectre of decay and old age.

Miss Purvey lived in a cottage called The Pear Tree in the middle of the village. It was in a terrace of other small cottages, dark, secret, and lightless in the fog.

Agatha had not asked James whether he knew how old this Miss Purvey was and dreaded finding out she was a sophisticated blonde who might capture James's affections.

Her first feeling on seeing Miss Purvey when she answered the door was one of relief, the second, contempt accompanied by the thought, what a frumpy old bag.

The middle-aged, like Agatha, can be extremely cruel about the old, possibly because they are looking at their immediate future. Miss Purvey was, in fact, only about seventy, with a mouth like Popeye, a small nose, twinkling watery eyes, and rigidly permed white hair. Her face was wrinkled and sallow. Only in Britain, thought Agatha, looking at the sunken line of the jaw and the thin, drooping mouth, could you still come across women of means who went in for having their teeth removed. It was still George Orwell's country of people with bad teeth or no teeth at all.

'No reporters,' said Miss Purvey in a plummy voice.

'We are not reporters,' said James. 'Have you had the press here?'

'No, but the police have been asking me impertinent questions. Are you Jehovahs?'

'No, we're - '

'Selling something?'

'No,' said James patiently.

'Then what?' The door began to inch closed.

'I am Mrs. Agatha Raisin,' said Agatha, stepping in front of James.

'The widow of that man who was murdered?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I'm very sorry for you, but I can't help you.'

James took over. 'I feel perhaps you can, Miss Purvey. You look like a charming and intelligent woman to me.' He smiled and Miss Purvey suddenly smiled back. 'We are concerned to find out what Mrs. Raisin's husband was doing at the health farm. We need a lady with good powers of observation rather than some dry police report.'

'Well...' She hesitated. 'Mother always used to say I noticed what the average person missed. Do come in.'

Agatha followed James into the cottage quickly, feeling that Miss Purvey would have been quite happy to shut the door in her face.

The cottage was as dark as the day outside. A small fire burnt in the living-room grate. There were photographs everywhere, on the many side-tables, on the upright piano in the corner, and on the mantelpiece, old photographs taken on forgotten sunny days.

'So,' began James when they were seated, 'did you speak to Mr. Raisin?'

'Only a little,' said Miss Purvey. 'And to be quite frank, I was amazed that such a type of person should be at such an expensive health farm.'

'But you saw him,' said James. 'What was your impression of him?'

She put her finger to her forehead, rather like the Dodo in Alice, and frowned. 'He was very friendly to everyone, chatting here and there and table-hopping at meals. He had a very loud laugh. His clothes were good, but they didn't seem to belong to him. Not a gentleman.'

'And Mrs. Gore-Appleton?'

'She seemed quite all right. But too old to have her hair dyed that improbable shade of gold and her exercise clothes were much too flashy.'

'Was she in love with Mr. Raisin?' asked James.

'They were very much a couple and I saw her coming out of his room in the middle of the night.' Miss