stretcher and simply got out and walked away.”
“What if she comes after me?” said Agatha, her eyes glowing.
“Aggie, you almost look as if you wish she could.”
“Don’t be silly.”
But for one moment Agatha had envisaged herself catching Mabel and all the circus of publicity coming back to surround her in a warm starry coat that kept the realities of pedestrian life and possible arthritis at bay.
“Put the television on again,” she said.
Roy switched on the television set to a twenty-four-hour news channel.
They sat patiently watching trouble in Iraq, an earthquake in Japan, the latest iniquities of the National Health Service, and then there was a news flash. “Mabel Smedley, the British woman wanted for three murders, has just been rearrested by Spanish police. A Spanish police spokesman said she had ordered a drink in a bar and when she walked out without paying for it, the bartender chased her down the street, shouting and yelling. A traffic policeman on duty arrested her. More later.”
“I think she wasn’t very cunning after all,” said Agatha. “I think all the murders were done on impulse, fuelled by sick jealousy, or maybe, in the case of her husband, pure rage. Let’s keep watching.”
An hour later, Roy said crossly, “Agatha, it’s the same thing over and over again. You’re not a very good hostess. Let’s go and see Mrs. Bloxby. Have you seen her since you got back?”
“No. How awful. Everything’s been so busy. Let’s go now.”
Mrs. Bloxby was delighted to see them and demanded to know all the details. “I can hardly believe Mrs. Smedley capable of such violence and evil,” said Mrs. Bloxby when Agatha had finished. “Jealousy really must have turned her mind. You will surely miss that young man, Harry Beam, when he goes to university.”
“I’m going to try to persuade him to stay. Patrick is already looking for another detective for me. We’re actually short-staffed.”
“Jessica’s parents must be relieved that the murderer has been caught. What about Joyce? Are her parents alive?”
“It turns out her father was a respectable accountant. Dead these past three years. Her mother is in care in Bath. She has Alzheimer’s. Joyce invented a rich father to explain why she was able to rent a whole house.”
“The thing that troubles me,” said the vicar’s wife, “is that I look around our ladies when we meet at the ladies’ society and I begin to wonder what strange passions are lurking behind those genteel breasts. I mean, Mrs. Smedley was so admired for her good works and for her gentle manner. Who could ever have guessed she would turn violent? Love is a strange thing and can twist people in so many ways.”
Agatha suddenly thought again of her ex-husband, James Lacey. Did he ever think of her? Would he ever come back into her life? And if he ever did, would he find she had turned into some old crock riddled with arthritis? She had been a far from perfect wife, but he had behaved badly towards her and probably never realized it. Most men were protected from admitting their mistakes by a sort of justified selfishness.
Agatha spent a pleasant weekend with Roy and plunged back into work on the Monday, but always thinking of her appointment at the hospital in the evening.
She decided that she would need to employ more than one extra detective. They could not all keep on working in the evenings as well as the days.
At last, she drove reluctantly to the Nuffield Hospital, feeling obscurely guilty at the courteous reception and thinking of all the unfortunate people who could not afford private medicine. She filled in the forms.
“Don’t you have health insurance?” asked the receptionist. Agatha shook her head. She had always believed herself to be immortal.
“Go through to X-ray, along there on the left,” said the receptionist. “The specialist will see you after he receives the X-rays.”
Agatha went along to the X-ray department, took off her clothes and put on the gown allocated to her. Then her hips and legs were x-rayed and she was told to get dressed and wait. After a short time, the folder of large X- rays was handed to her and she was told to go back out to the reception area and wait again.
Agatha slid the X-rays out and squinted at them, holding them up to the light, but she could not make out anything.
A nurse approached her and took the X-rays away from her. “Mr. McSporran will see you now. Follow me,” she said.
“Are you sure that’s his name? Sounds like a Scottish music hall joke.”
“McSporran is a good old Scottish name. Please don’t make any jokes about it. He does get tired of them.”
Mr. McSporran was a small, neat man. He put Agatha’s X-rays up on a screen.
“Uh-uh!” he murmured.
“What?” demanded Agatha nervously.
“You will see quite clearly that you have arthritis in your right hip. It is not terribly advanced, but I would advise you to make an appointment for a hip operation. The longer you leave it, the less successful the operation will be.”
“I’m too busy at the moment to take time off,” said Agatha.
“As I said, it is important you do not leave it too long. We can make arrangements to give you an injection in the hip as a temporary measure. If you are lucky, the injection will last six months.”
Agatha felt she had just received a stay of execution. “I’ll have it now.”
“It doesn’t work like that. You will need to make an appointment. You are put under a general anaesthetic. It only takes one day. I would suggest also that you have a bone scan.” He opened his diary. “We can do the hip injection for you on the twenty-fifth. That’s in two weeks’ time. You will need to be here at seven-thirty in the morning and do not eat or drink anything after ten o’clock the evening before.
“All right,” said Agatha bleakly.
“Now lie down and let me examine you. Remove your trousers.”
Agatha suffered her leg being pulled this way and that.
“Right,” he said when he had finished. “Call at the X-ray desk on your road out and make an appointment for a bone scan.”
Agatha was just leaving the hospital when her mobile phone rang. It was Charles. “Have you eaten?”
“No, I’m in Cheltenham.”
“I’ll take you for dinner. I’ll meet you in the square in Mircester. How long will you be?”
“The traffic should have thinned out. About three quarters of an hour.”
“See you then.”
“Why were you in Cheltenham?” asked Charles when they were seated in an Italian restaurant.
“Working on a case,” said Agatha, who had no intention of telling Charles about her arthritis. So ageing.
“You’ve been having a lot of excitement.”
“You could have been in on it, Charles, if you hadn’t gone scuttling off. How’s it going?”
“Turns out she was engaged and was just using me for a bit of a fling.”
“Poor you.”
“Yes, poor me. Do you ever worry about getting old on your own, Agatha?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Sometimes I think it would be awful to sink into decrepitude on my own.”
“You’re hardly on your own, Charles. You’ve got your aunt and Gustav.”
“My aunt can’t last forever and Gustav is hardly the sort of sympathetic type to soothe the fevered brow. Still, there’s always hope. Lots of pretty girls out there.”
Agatha obscurely felt she was being dismissed because of her age. Charles was in his forties, but she was only in her fifties. And yet men in their forties could still hope to wed some young miss.
When the meal was over, she hoped Charles would volunteer to stay with her because she did not want to go back to an empty house, but he showed no signs of wanting to. Agatha felt too demoralized to ask him.
She went home alone and checked her phone for messages. There was one from Roy thanking her for the weekend, but the next one made her heart soar. It was Freddy.
“How’s my heroine?” he said. “I’ll call you at your office tomorrow.”
Agatha’s black mood lifted. Somebody loved her!
