'To see Mrs. Jackson. I need someone to clean. I don't suppose she'll be resuming her duties up at the manor for a few days yet.'
'I don't think she'll be resuming them at all,' said Carrie. 'Lucy hated her.'
'She didn't give me that impression,' said Agatha.
'Well, she did. She once told Harriet that Mrs. Jackson was always poking her nose into things and reading letters. Are you sure you want Mrs. Jackson?'
'I'll see. Is there anyone else?' asked Agatha, but more as a matter of form because she didn't want anyone else. Mrs. Jackson would surely be the best source of gossip.
'No one who's free. Mrs. Crite does for the vicar and she always says that's enough for her. The summer people usually fend for themselves,' said Polly. 'Now I do all my own housework. I don't hold a woman paying someone to do what they ought to be doing themselves.'
'Good for you,' commented Agatha sweetly. 'But it's so important not to inflict one's prejudices on anyone else, don't you think? I must be going. Charles, let's ... Charles?'
She swung round. Charles had moved a little away and was whispering to Carrie, who was blushing and giggling.
'What were you up to?' asked Agatha angrily as she and Charles walked on.
'Just chatting. Jealous, Aggie?'
'Of course not. Don't be silly.'
Carrie had been wearing tight jeans and high-heeled boots. She had good legs. And so have I, thought Agatha, when I'm not wearing these clumpy flat shoes. They turned into the other lane and so to the garage. A man in overalls was peering at the engine of a car.
'Mrs. Jackson live near here?' asked Charles.
The man straightened up. 'Take that little path at the side there. You can see the chimbleys behind the trees.'
They followed his directions and arrived at a seedy-looking cottage thatched in Norfolk reed. It needed rethatching, the thatch being dusty and broken. The front garden was a mess of weeds with various discarded children's toys scattered around.
Agatha rang the bell. 'I didn't hear it ring,' said Charles. 'Probably broken.' He knocked at the door. The door was opened by Barry Jones, the gardener.
'What are you doing here?' asked Agatha.
'Came home to Mum's for a bite to eat.'
'Mum? But you're a Jones.'
'Mum's first husband was a Jones.'
'Can we talk to her?' asked Charles.
'Okay, but she's a bit tired. Police here all morning.'
They walked into a stone-flagged kitchen, which outmessed Framp's. Dishes were piled in the sink, the old fuelburning stove was thick with grease and piled with dirty pots.
Betty Jackson was sitting at the kitchen table, mopping up egg with a slice of bread. It seems to be all-day breakfast around here, thought Agatha, thinking of Framp.
'What is it?' she asked dully.
'I'm looking for a cleaner,' said Agatha brightly. 'What a picturesque cottage you have. I do love these old cottages.'
'All right for folks like you,' said Mrs. Jackson sourly. 'I would like one of them new council ones they'd got over at Purlett End Village. But would they give me one? Naw!'
Charles slid into the chair next to her. 'Police been giving you a bad time?'
'Yerse. Them and their tomfool questions. I told them, I left at five and that's that.'
'Who would do such a thing?' Charles took one of Mrs. Jackson's red and swollen hands and gave it a squeeze.
'I don't know,' said the cleaner, but in a much softer voice. Agatha, seeing that no one was going to ask her to sit down, jerked out a chair.
'Weren't relations between Tolly and Lucy a bit strained?' Charles's voice was soft and coaxing.
'Oh, no.' She shook her head. 'Devoted couple, they was.'
'You see, Lucy Trumpington-James did tell Mrs. Raisin here that she thought her husband was being unfaithful to her.'
Mrs. Jackson's heavy face registered shock and she gave her dentures an angry click. 'That's rubbish. I tell you what it was; Lucy got fits of jealousy, she was that mad about him, but they always made up. Fact is, she was laughing about it with him before she left for London. She says to him, she says, `I told that old trout who thinks she's a detective that you was having it off with Rosie.' And they both had a laugh about that.'
Agatha coloured angrily. Then she heard Charles say, 'About the cleaning?'
'It's seven pounds an hour.'
Agatha was about to yell that she was not going to pay London rates to a bad-tempered slut when Charles surprised her by leaping to his feet and putting his arms round her. 'Shut up,' he whispered. Then he turned to Mrs. Jackson. 'Why not start tomorrow? At ten, say. Nothing like work to keep your mind off things.'
'Right you are, sir.'
Charles smiled and propelled the raging Agatha out of the cottage. Agatha held her temper until they were out of earshot and then she confronted him with 'How could you? I don't want that old bitch around my cottage.'
'Calm down. Be nice to her and you might get the truth out of her. You only came here to employ her to get gossip.' He took her shoulders and gave her a little shake. 'Just think, woman! Did Lucy give you the impression of a wildly jealous wife?'
'Well, no,' said Agatha. 'Not in the slightest. She looks like some bimbo who married for money and despises her husband.'
'So, isn't that interesting? And why would the horrible Mrs. Jackson lie about it? She doesn't strike me as the staunch and loyal servant type.'
Agatha's anger ebbed away as she considered this. 'No,' she said slowly. 'So why would she say such a thing? Of course she could simply have been out to humiliate me out of sheer nastiness.'
'Could be. Let's go and get a car and drive somewhere for a drink. Rosie's pub will be full of reporters.'
As they approached the village green, the pub door opened and several pressmen came out dragging one of their fellows. Their faces were boozy and flushed. Their intention appeared to be to dump a weedy colleague in the duck pond. Rosie appeared in the pub doorway and called to them to stop. They all crowded back into the pub except the weedy one, who set off away from the pub at a jogtrot, occasionally looking back over his shoulder like some weak animal rejected by the herd.
'I thought they would all have been out at the manor,' said Charles.
'No,' replied Agatha, wise in the ways of the press. 'They'll have been out there already. Hand will have told them that he will say nothing until a press conference at, say, about four o'clock.'
'But you would think they'd all be knocking on doors in the village for background.'
'They'll get around to it. As long as there's a pub, they'll move in a bunch. They feel they're safe just so long as they all keep together. That way they can drink as much as they want and not run the fear of being scooped.'
'So what about the one that's run off?'
'They obviously don't rate him highly. It's not always like this. But if one of them's a bully, he becomes the leader of the pack and they all stick together, swearing to share any morsels of information, and yet each one is privately determined to scoop the others at the first opportunity.'
'Excuse me.'
A voice behind them made them jump. They swung round. The weedy reporter had come back. 'I'm Gerry Philpot of The Radical Voice,' he said. The paper he represented claimed to have unbiased views, the sort of paper which reported on the 'warring factions' in Bosnia to avoid pointing out the obvious truth, that the Serbs were murdering everyone. It was a sittingon-the-fence and pontificating sort of newspaper which paid the lowest wages, hence Gerry Philpot, a youngish man with weak eyes, receding hair, a pea-green jacket, checked shirt, shabby
