So she sat beside her while the cats climbed on her lap, feeling the peace that Mrs. Bloxby seemed able to exude even when asleep.
Jealousy, mused Agatha. Now there was a thought. She remembered when she had come across her ex- husband, James Lacey, entertaining a blonde in the pub, and how she had thrown a terrible scene. She remembered also how corrosive her jealousy had been, how it had taken her over completely. One murder fuelled by jealousy, she could understand. But three! And what did poor Jessica have to do with Smedley? If there had been any record of him visiting that Web site, then Mabel might have done it in a rage. But Patrick had checked carefully and Smedley had never been one of the subscribers. She wondered what Mabel had said to the police about her computer diploma.
The sun sank lower in the sky and Agatha’s stomach rumbled. Mrs. Bloxby let out a snore and Agatha smiled. Nice to know the saintly vicar’s wife could make vulgar human sounds.
Mrs. Bloxby snored again, choked and came suddenly awake and looked around startled. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Mrs. Raisin, you should have awakened me. You’ve missed your train.”
“It’s all right. You needed the rest. I’d changed my mind about going to London anyway.”
Mrs. Bloxby struggled up. “No, you didn’t. You let me sleep out of the kindness of your heart. I feel so much better. I’d better get back. My husband will wonder what’s become of me.”
Agatha looked at her curiously. “Have you ever been jealous?”
“Oh, many times. It’s an ordinary human feeling. But it’s when ordinary human feelings run riot that the danger starts. Thank you so much.”
When she had gone, Agatha was rummaging in her deep freeze looking for something to microwave when the doorbell rang.
She went to answer it and found Roy Silver standing on the step. “Oh, Aggie,” he moaned and burst into tears.
“Come in. What’s up?” asked Agatha, shepherding him into the sitting room and pressing him down onto the sofa. She handed him a box of Kleenex and waited patiently and anxiously. Roy at last blew his nose and gulped and said, “I’ve been fired.”
“You! Not possible. What happened?”
“It was all because of that pop group I was representing. I decided to get Gloria Smith of the Bugle to do a piece.”
“Roy! She’s poison!”
“But she took me out for dinner and said she’d always admired me, the way I could cope with some dreadful clients. I thought we were getting friendly.”
“Oh dear.”
“I told her that the pop group were the worst clients I’d ever had to cope with, about them sniffing coke up their noses, wrecking hotel rooms, seducing teenagers, you name it.”
“God!”
“She wrote the lot. Two pages. I denied the whole thing, but she’d taped everything. I’m mined. You see, despite their weird appearance, I’d sold the story that underneath they were all just regular home boys.”
Agatha sat back beside him and thought hard. Eventually, she said, “So they’re mined as well.”
“That’s it.”
“Where are they now?”
“Holed up in the Hilton.”
“All right. Let’s go and sort this out.”
“How?”
“Don’t ask.”
Two hours later Agatha was facing the Busy Snakes in their suite at the Hilton. To Agatha’s relief, the lead singer was relatively sober.
“I am here to save your career,” she said. “Are you prepared to listen?”
“Do anythink,” he said, scratching his crotch nervously.
“Then this is how we’ll play it. I will get the Daily Mail to run an exclusive about how you really are all the decent boys you were supposed to be. You will tell a pathetic story about how fame and late nights and tours ruined you, but that you are all going into rehab to show young people how they can come about as well. It’s the only way you’ll get back in public favour. You must say you owe it all to Roy Silver. How he’d tried so hard to help you.”
“We don’t want to go in no rehab,” said the drummer.
“So what do you do?” snarled Agatha. “Sit on your scrawny bums and watch your fame disappear? No one wants you now.”
They stared at her. Then the lead singer said, “Wait outside.”
Agatha went out into the corridor and waited, aware the whole time of Roy fretting in the lounge downstairs. At last the door opened.
“Come in,” said the lead singer. “Okay, we’ll do it.”
Agatha worked like a fury most of that night and all the following day, with a bewildered but grateful Roy helping her as best he could.
She drove back to Carsely on the Tuesday morning after having read with pleasure the huge article in the Daily Mail. Roy was hailed by the band as “our saviour” and all about how he had tried time after time to straighten them out, until he had unfortunately given that interview to a newspaper. Roy said he had sacrificed his career and done it deliberately because he could not bear to see such fine young men killing themselves. There was a good photo of Roy and one of the band at the gates of a fashionable rehab.
She felt weary when she let herself in. Doris Simpson, her cleaner, had already fed her cats.
Agatha switched off her phone and went to bed. Murder could wait.
ELEVEN
HARRY Beam had diligently followed Joyce without finding her doing anything sinister or, for that matter, anything interesting. She went to the shops, she went to rent videos, she went to the library and then she spent her evenings indoors.
His disguise consisted simply of glasses and a baseball cap pulled down over his face. Joyce certainly showed no signs of being frightened she was being followed or observed by anyone.
One day, he broke off from following her to drive to Smedleys Electronics, which was now called Jensens Electronics. Like Smedleys, Jensens did not appear to want to use an apostrophe. He saw Berry at the gate. He knew it was Berry by the name tag on his overalls and remembered Agatha describing meeting him. Obviously some of the old staff had got their jobs back. Why had Joyce not applied?
Then it dawned on him that the business had been sold very quickly. Didn’t wills take longer to process?
He telephoned Agatha. She said that they had just recently been asking themselves the same question, and Patrick had found out through old police contacts that everything had been in Mabel Smedley’s name.
He stood looking at the factory, wondering if Joyce had killed Smedley and if she had done so, what she had done with that milk bottle. Joyce carried a capacious handbag. Maybe she had slipped it in there. She said she had scalded it out and put it in the rubbish, but the police had not been able to find it in the bin in her office or in any of the outside garbage bins.
So, thought Harry, if she had it and took it home, would she keep it? Hardly. All she had to do was drop it in a bin in the city centre. Police would have searched the office thoroughly.
He decided to get back to following Joyce for another couple of days.
Meanwhile, Agatha, Patrick and Phil went over and over their notes. At last Agatha said wearily, “We’ll need to go back to the beginning and take it one case at a time. I think I’ve confused the issue by trying to connect them all up. I think we should talk to Trixie and Fairy again. It’s half-term. Let’s see if we can find them.”
They found them both at Trixie Sommers’s home. “They’re up in Trixie’s room,” said Mrs. Sommers nervously.
