Studio, reflected Agatha, was a real estate agent’s name for one room with a kitchen and a minuscule shower tacked on.
“Would you like tea or coffee?” asked Mary.
“No,” said Agatha. “What I would really like to know is if Joyce ever talked about a place abroad or somewhere where she would really like to live.”
She frowned. “I’m trying to think. I can’t really believe Joyce would murder anyone. We had such laughs. I phoned her yesterday. I told her, ‘You’ll never guess the excitement. They’ve found a milk bottle in that cheese plant.’ I saw no harm in telling her. We were such friends. I couldn’t believe for a moment she had done anything wrong,”
“Did you know she was having an affair with Robert Smedley?”
“No! Surely not. In fact, I used to tease her about not having any boyfriends.”
“Did you never wonder how she was able to rent a whole house?”
“She said she had rich parents. Oh dear. She must have been lying to me all along.”
“Did she ever go abroad on holiday?”
“Just the once and only for a weekend. Let me think. She said Daddy was taking her to Marbella.”
“Daddy was probably Robert Smedley.”
“Joyce went on about how beautiful it was and how she’d like to live there.”
Agatha was suddenly anxious to be off. They thanked Mary and made their way out.
“Let’s go home and pack,” said Agatha. “I’ll tell Phil and Harry to hold the fort.”
TWELVE
MABEL drove steadily and competently down through Spain. She was feeling tired and depressed. She had meant to get clean away on her own. She had put all the furniture in storage and had transferred her money to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.
And then Joyce had come round to say that the milk bottle had been found and unless Mabel helped her escape, she would tell the police everything. She began to call the shots, saying she wanted to go to Marbella. Mabel pointed out that Spain no longer harboured British criminals, and if found, they could be extradited, but Joyce was adamant. Mabel felt it was all a dreadful mistake. If she hadn’t been so flustered and frightened and on her own, she would have hidden out in London under an assumed name and tried to find out how to get a forged passport. Mabel planned to stay in Marbella for one night to shut Joyce up and then move on.
Mabel had abandoned her car in the south of England and had paid cash for a new Land Rover.
Once in Marbella, she would find some way to get rid of Joyce. Mabel loathed Joyce, but she had joined forces with her, motivated by one great hate: Mabel was desperate to rid herself of the husband she had once loved so much. It had not crossed her mind until much later that he had married her only for her money. At first she had admired the way he had set up the electronics business, and saw him as a captain of industry. But gradually he had turned surly, possessive and bullying. Mabel soon discovered that he was possessive, not through love, but because he feared she would take her money away from him if she found someone else. When she met Burt, it was as if all her old girlhood dreams had come true. She had been so sure that Burt was in love with her, but when she began to talk of divorcing Robert, Burt had told her about Jessica. Jealous Joyce had been watching Burt’s flat and had known of the affair. She had called on Mabel and Mabel was at first delighted to share her pain with another betrayed woman. At first she had decided to divorce Robert. He had given her a beating and said he would kill her.
And then she had found those videos. Her jealousy of Jessica had become corrosive. She began to stalk her. That was how she knew when the girl went to the nightclub. Girls were always getting murdered on the road home from nightclubs, or so she told herself. She waited until she saw Jessica leave the club. If the girl had been with friends, Mabel would have abandoned the idea. But she raced ahead and waited a little along the bypass until she saw Jessica appear, and drove quickly up. She introduced herself and said, “What is a young girl like you doing out at this time of night?” Jessica had said she was going home from the club. “Where’s home?” Mabel asked, just as if she didn’t know. When Jessica told her, Mabel said, “Hop in. I’ll drive you there.” And the misting Jessica did.
It was when Jessica started saying, “This isn’t the road home,” that Mabel had pulled the car over to the verge, taken a knife out of her handbag, and stabbed her in the chest. She waited patiently until the girl died and then, when the road was clear, pulled her out of the car and rolled her body down from the verge and dragged it up into the woods.
She ripped Jessica’s knickers off, hoping the police might think it a sex crime. Then she saw the ring on the chain round Jessica’s neck, an engagement ring, and tore it off the girl’s dead body in a fury.
Two days later, she took the dagger out of its hiding place in her kitchen and decided to bury it in the garden. Robert appeared behind her. He looked down at the knife and said, “You killed Jessica.”
She had stared at him in terror. Then he had said if she did not sign the firm and all the money and the house over to him, he would go to the police. She promised. What else could she do?
That was when she decided to enlist Joyce’s help, saying that when the fuss died down she would pay her a quarter of a million pounds. She had been alarmed when she had found Robert had hired a detective agency and told him he’d better call them off or she would not sign anything.
Joyce, beside her in the passenger seat, remembered how she had said she wouldn’t do it. That was until that weekend in Bath, when Robert had calmly told her he had no intention of divorcing his wife.
At first, after the murder, she couldn’t believe her luck. She was sure the police would search the plant and cursed herself for not having got the milk bottle out of the office somehow. But when she had got back into the office, she somehow couldn’t bear to dig up that milk bottle. The police hadn’t found it. Better to leave it where it was, that’s what she had thought. What a fool she’d been!
And then, just when things looked as if they were settling down, Burt had called on Mabel and blackmailed her, saying he would tell the police about his affairs with her and with Joyce. He said he was sure one of them had killed Jessica.
In a panic, they had gone together to his flat and murdered him.
Joyce turned plans over in her head. Why shouldn’t she have all Mabel’s money herself? Mabel was carrying a great deal in cash just in case the police somehow managed to freeze that account in the Cayman Islands. Maybe it would be better to get rid of Mabel, some sort of accident, or something that looked like food poisoning.
Agatha and Patrick left on an Iberian Airline flight to Marbella the next morning. Patrick volunteered he had never been abroad before. Agatha wondered, as she had done before, what the flirtatious Miss Simms had ever seen in the retired detective with his lugubrious face and thinning hair. He was wearing a dark suit, striped tie, and highly polished black shoes. Agatha thought that, however retired, Patrick’s whole appearance screamed copper.
“I hope you brought some light clothes,” said Agatha. “It’s going to be hot down there. I’m going to study this guidebook and try to figure out where they might be. I think Joyce would want a beach, but there are so many—Casa Blanca beach, La Fontanilla beach, El Faro beach—oh, here’s something. Nagueles beach. It says here it’s situated on the Golden Mile of Marbella. There’s the Hotel Puente Romano and the Hotel Marbella Club. Sounds just like the sort of places Joyce would like unless Mabel has persuaded her to hide in a pension in the backstreets.”
“I’m worrying about this,” said Patrick. “Surely Mabel won’t just go where Joyce wants her to go.”
“Maybe she has to. Maybe Joyce is threatening to go to the police. I mean, Mabel may be guilty of all the murders, with Joyce just being an accessory.”
“Let me see that guidebook,” said Patrick.
He flicked through it. “It’s such a big place,” he mourned.
“We’ve got to try,” said Agatha.
“If you say so. But they’ll have Interpol on to it by now.”
“But they don’t know about Spain, and we do.”
Joyce stepped out on the balcony of their hotel and took a deep breath of sunny air. A golden beach stretched out in front of a green-blue sea. A young man was strolling along the promenade. He looked up and saw Joyce on the second-floor balcony and blew her a kiss.
Joyce’s spirits soared. This was the life! She went back into the suite and said excitedly, “It is so beautiful here. We can go out clubbing tonight.”
