'I know the way!' snarled Agatha. Her stocky figure marched up the stairs, her sensible low-heeled shoes thumping on the treads.
Mr. Wilson rose to meet her. He was a small, very clean man with thinning hair, gold-rimmed glasses, soft hands and an unctuous smile, more like a Harley Street doctor than the head of a public relations firm.
'Why have you put my office up for sale?' demanded Agatha.
He smoothed the top of his head. 'Mrs. Raisin, not your office; you sold the business to us.'
'But you gave me your word you would keep on my staff.'
'And so we did. Most of them preferred the redundancy pay. We do not need an extra office. All the business can be done from here.'
'Let me tell you, you can't do this.'
'And let me tell you, Mrs. Raisin, I can do what I like. You sold us the concern, lock, stock and barrel. Now, if you don't mind, I am very busy.'
Then he shrank back in his chair as Agatha Raisin told him at the top of her voice exactly what he could do to himself in graphic detail before slamming out.
Agatha stood in Cheapside, tears starting to her eyes. 'Mrs. Raisin ... Aggie?'
She swung round. Roy was standing there. Instead of his usual jeans and psychedelic shirt and gold earrings, he was wearing a sober business suit.
I'll kill that bastard Wilson,' said Agatha. 'I've just told him what he can do to himself.'
Roy squeaked and backed off. 'I shouldn't be seen talking to you, sweetie, if you're not the flavour of the month. Besides, you sold him the outfit.'
'Where's Lulu?'
'She took the redundancy money and is sunning her little body on the Costa Brava.'
'And Jane?'
'Working as PR for Friends Scotch. Can you imagine? Giving an alcoholic like her a job in a whisky company? She'll sink their profits down her gullet in a year.'
Agatha inquired after the rest. Only Roy had been employed by Pedmans.
'It's because of the Trendies,' he explained, naming a pop group, one of Agatha's former clients. 'Josh, the leader, has always been ever so fond of me, as you know. So Pedmans had to take me on to keep the group. Like my new image?' He pirouetted round.
'No,' said Agatha gruffly. 'Doesn't suit you. Anyway, why don't you come down and visit me this weekend?'
Roy looked shifty. 'Love to, darling, but got lots and lots to do.
Wilson is a slave-driver. Must go.'
He darted off into the building, leaving Agatha standing alone on the pavement.
She tried to hail a cab but they were all full. She walked along to Bank station but the Tube wasn't running and someone told her there was a strike. 'How am I going to get across town?' grumbled Agatha.
'You could try a river boat,' he suggested. 'Pier at London Bridge.'
Agatha stumped along to London Bridge, her anger fading away to be replaced with a miserable feeling of loss. At the pier at London Bridge, she came across a sort of yuppies' Dunkirk. The pier was crammed with anxious young men and women clutching briefcases while a small flotilla of pleasure boats took them off.
She joined the end of the queue, inching forward on the floating pier, feeling slightly seasick by the time she was able to board a large old pleasure steamer that had been pressed into action for the day. The bar was open. She clutched a large gin and tonic and took it up to the stern and sat down in the sunshine on one of those little gold-and-red plush ballroom chairs one finds on Thames pleasure boats.
The boat moved out and slid down the river in the sunshine, seeming to Agatha to be moving past all she had thrown away life and London. Under the bridges cruised the boat, along past the traffic jams on the Embankment and then to Charing Cross Pier, where Agatha got off. She no longer felt like lunch or shopping or anything else but just wanted to get back to her cottage and lick her wounds and think of what to do.
She walked up to Trafalgar Square and then along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, up Constitution Hill, down the underpass and up into Hyde Park by Decimus Burton's Gate and the Duke of Wellington's house.
She cut across the Park in the direction of Bayswater and Paddington.
Before this one day, she thought, she had always forged ahead, always known what she had wanted. Although she was bright at school, her parents made her leave at fifteen, for there were good jobs to he had in the local biscuit factory. At that time, Agatha had been a thin, white-faced, sensitive girl. The crudity of the women she worked with in the factory grated on her nerves, the drunkenness of her mother and father at home disgusted her, and so she began to work overtime, squirrel ling away the extra money in a savings account so that her parents might not get their hands on it, until one day she decided she had enough and simply took off for London without even saying goodbye, slipping out one night with her suitcase when her mother and father had fallen into a drunken stupor.
In London, she had worked as a waitress seven days a week so that she could afford shorthand and typing lessons. As soon as she was qualified, she got a job as a secretary in a public relations firm. But just when she was beginning to learn the business, Agatha had fallen in love with Jimmy Raisin, a charming young man with blue eyes and a mop of black hair. He did not seem to have any steady employment but Agatha thought that marriage was all he needed to make him settle down.
After a month of married life, it was finally borne in on her that she had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Her husband was a drunk. Yet she had stuck by him for two whole years, being the breadwinner, putting up with his increasing bouts of drunken violence until, one morning, she had looked down at him lying snoring on the bed, dirty and unshaven, and had pinned a pile of Alcoholics Anonymous literature to his chest, packed her things and moved out.
He knew where she worked. She thought he would come in search of her if only for money, but he never did. She once went back to the squalid room in Kilburn which they had shared, but he had disappeared. Agatha had never filed for divorce. She assumed he was dead. She had never wanted to marry again. She had become harder and harder and more competent, more aggressive, until the thin shy girl that she had been slowly disappeared under layers of ambition. Her job became her life, her clothes expensive, her tastes in general those that were expected of a rising public relations star. As long as people noticed you, as long as they envied you, that was enough for Agatha.
By the time she reached Paddington station, she had walked herself into a more optimistic frame of mind. She had chosen her new life and she would make it work. That village was going to sit up and take notice of Agatha Raisin.
When she arrived home, it was late afternoon and she realized she had had nothing to eat. She went to Harvey's, the general store-cum-post-office, and was ferreting around in the deep freeze wondering if she could face curry again when her eye was caught by a poster pinned up on the wall. 'Great Quiche Competition' it announced in curly letters. It was to be held on Saturday in the school hall.
There were other competitions listed in smaller letters: fruit cake, flower arrangements, and so on. The quiche competition was to be judged by a Mr. Cummings-Browne. Agatha scooped a Chicken Korma out of the deep freeze and headed for the counter. 'Where does Mr. Cummings-Browne live?' she asked.
That'll be Plumtrees Cottage, m'dear,' said the woman. 'Down by the church.'
Agatha's mind was racing as she trotted home and shoved the Chicken Korma in the microwave. Wasn't that what mattered in these villages?
Being the best at something domestic? Now if she, Agatha Raisin, won that quiche competition, they would sit up and take notice. Maybe ask her to give lectures on her art at Women's Institute meetings and things like that.
She carried the revolting mess that was her microwaved dinner into the dining-room and sat down. She frowned at the table-top. It was covered with a thin film of dust. Agatha loathed housework.
After her scrappy meal, she went into the garden at the back. The sun had set and a pale-greenish sky stretched over the hills above Carsely.
There was a sound of movement from nearby and Agatha looked over the hedge. A narrow path divided her garden from the garden next door.
Her neighbour was bent over a flower-bed, weeding it in the failing light.
