our room.”
Agatha nodded. It was one of the few times in her life when she felt speechless.
That morning, Emma watched at her window. At last, she saw Doris walking past. She waited for a scream, but all was silent. And then in the distance, she heard police sirens.
Emma jumped to her feet. She would rush next door and get into the house before they arrived. Then, if she had left any footprint unvacuumed, it wouldn’t matter.
The front door was standing open. Emma went in. Doris emerged from the kitchen, her face ashen. “Don’t go in there. There’s a dead body.”
“Who is it?”
“Some man I’ve never seen before.”
“Let me have a look,” said Emma, “I might recognize him.”
She walked into the kitchen. She had not taken a close look at him before. He was a stocky man with thick black hair. His face was so contorted that Emma could not judge what he had looked like normally.
Bill Wong was the first to arrive.
“Both of you get out of here immediately,” he snapped. “Where’s Agatha?”
“In Paris,” said Emma.
“Do you know where she is staying?”
“Miss Simms will know.”
“Mrs. Comfrey, you are walking all over the crime scene. I must ask you to leave.”
“Certainly. Oh, what a shock.” Emma burst into tears, her nerves stretched to the limit.
Doris led her away. Emma dabbed at her eyes, wondering desperately if she had covered everything. She had buried the coffee jar under the compost heap where she had put the rat poison. But if Doris told them that she had had the keys, they might come and search her cottage and garden.
“Eve got to get back and make a statement,” said Doris. “Will you be all right?”
Emma rallied. “I won’t go to the office today. I’ll do some gardening to take my mind off things.”
Agatha and Charles waited all morning in a room in the commissariat. Their passports and airline tickets had been taken away from them.
“They’ll ask us what we were doing in Paris,” whispered Charles. “We’d better say we tried to call on Felicity because George is an old friend of mine. We’ll say we just needed a break.”
“By staying at the same hotel as Laggat-Brown stayed?”
“Well, Mrs. Laggat-Brown has employed you, so you can say you were double-checking his alibi.”
“Okay. I wonder how long we’ve got to wait here.”
The door opened and a French police inspector who spoke English came in. He handed them their passports and two airline tickets. “The English police say you must leave on the one o’clock flight for Heathrow. They have decided that it is important that you return to England. A police car will be waiting for you at Heathrow.”
Charles looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving.”
“A police car will take you to Charles de Gaulle.”
On the road to the airport, Charles said uneasily, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Which is?”
“The revolver and the black Balaclava. Agatha, do you think someone might have taken a hit out on you?”
“In the Cotswolds?”
“Think about it. Whoever fired at Cassandra had a first-class sniper rifle. That wasn’t amateur stuff.”
“This is getting scary. Let’s hope he turns out to be a well-known burglar. But why didn’t the burglar alarm work?”
Emma unearthed the rat poison and the coffee jar, put them in a bag, and took them out to her car. She had made a statement to the police, saying that she had slept soundly and had not heard a thing. She breathed a sigh of relief when she drove off. Doris would surely tell the police about her having had the keys to Agatha’s cottage. She drove out onto the old Worcester Road and up to where she knew the council tip was. She put the bag containing therat poison and the coffee jar into a container of general rubbish and heaved a sigh of relief.
Then she thought, there was really nothing to worry about now. They would think the man had broken in. It would be assumed that the burglar alarm was faulty. She suddenly felt ill as she remembered the dead body on the kitchen floor, and stopped the car, got out and was violently sick.
EIGHT
AGATHA and Charles were taken straight to Mircester Police Headquarters and put in an interviewing room.
Then Detective Inspector Wilkes appeared with another man whom he introduced as Detective Inspector William Fother of the Special Branch. Another man followed them into the room and leaned against a wall, his arms folded.
“What have the Special Branch got to do with this?” asked Agatha.
“We’ll ask the questions,” said Fother.
He was a dark-skinned man with thinning brown hair and large ugly hands which he folded on the table in front of him. His first question surprised Agatha.
“Mrs. Raisin, when did you last visit the Republic of Ireland?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Please just answer the question,” he rapped out.
Despite his unremarkable appearance, there was something menacing about Fother.
“I haven’t,” said Agatha. “I mean, I never got around to going there. On holidays, you know, I think of sun.”
“And Northern Ireland?”
“Never been there either.”
“We can check.”
“Oh, please do,” said Agatha, her temper beginning to rise. “Have you heard of a man called Johnny Mulligan?” “No. Who is he?”
“He is the dead gentleman on your kitchen floor. He was a foot soldier with the Provisional IRA. He was in the Maze Prison for murder but released under Tony Blair’s famous amnesty.”
“Could he have got the wrong house?” asked Charles. “I mean, Agatha’s got nothing to do with anywhere in Ireland or politics.”
“We’ll get to you later, Sir Charles. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you would remain silent.”
Fother fastened his gaze on Agatha again. “Mulligan was killed by some sort of poison. There was an empty coffee-cup on the table. The contents are being analysed, as is the jar of coffee. So far, we know the jar of coffee did not have any prints on it, which looks as if someone doctored it with poison. Perhaps someone who expected a visit from him?”
“I used the coffee I left in the kitchen before I left for Paris. I had a cup of it. Are you feeling well, Charles? You’ve gone rather white.”
“What if,” said Charles, “someone not connected at all decided to try to poison Agatha and whoever this Mulligan was drank it instead?”
“Who, for instance?”
Should I tell them about Emma? wondered Charles desperately. It would be awful if she turned out to be completely innocent. He rallied, “Maybe someone from one of Agatha’s cases.”
“Police are going through her files at the moment. You look upset. Are you sure you have no idea who put the poison there?”
“No idea,” said Charles.
Fother turned back to Agatha. “Why did you go to Paris?”
“I felt like a break,” said Agatha, “and Charles wanted to look up a friend’s daughter who works at the couture house Thierry Duval. Her name is Felicity Felliet. We were told she was on holiday but due back the next
