forensic people traced that rope to you.'
'That's not possible,' he said. Then, as if realizing that by remark he had given himself away, he sat down suddenly on the grass.
'Why did you do it?' asked James.
'She humiliated me,' said Bernard, his head bowed. 'She flirted with me and when I made a pass at her, she laughed in my face and called me a silly old man. I was furious. I told her that she had deliberately led me on to make a fool of me and that I would tell everyone so. But of course I didn't. It would make me look too ridiculous, a man of my age.
'I heard a movement in the garden. The old do not sleep heavily. I looked out. There was bright moonlight. I saw her bending over the pond. I did not go out. I had become frightened of her, frightened she would laugh and jeer at me. But I found my goldfish dead in the morning, all my friends, my pets, my family. I used to sit by the pond and talk to them. I could think of nothing else but punishing her.
'It was surprisingly easy. The next time I saw her in the intervening weeks, she was easy and friendly with me, as if nothing had happened. She even called round, bringing me a cake. So I made my preparations. I called on her and asked her for a drink. I said I would like brandy, knowing that she often liked a glass of brandy. When she had poured two glasses, I said I thought I heard someone moving outside. When she went off to look out of the window, I put the poison in her glass.
'I had an agonizing time wondering whether she would drink it or not. At last I said when I was in the navy we used to drink our brandy down in one go, but I couldn't expect a lady to be able to do that. She laughed and said, 'Why not?' and tipped the contents of her glass down her throat.
'I watched her die. I felt nothing at all. Nothing. I hadn't yet touched my own drink. I poured it carefully into the bottle after I had pulled on a pair of gloves, and then put the top back on the bottle. I put my own glass in my pocket, along with the one she had drunk out of, to take away with me. I sponged the vomit from her mouth off the carpet. I knew traces of it would be found by the police, but I did not want to make matters easy for them.
'I lifted her up...and well, the rest you know. I wanted her to be found desecrated, the way she had desecrated those gardens and in revenge for killing my fish. I knew she was the one who had tried to destroy the other gardens. She was mad.'
'I'll see if the police have arrived,' said Agatha in a thin voice.
She ran from the garden, round the front and to the cottage next door, where she screamed at the startled lady, a Mrs Bain, to let her use the phone. She called Fred Griggs and then went back reluctantly to join James and Bernard.
But when she reached the back garden, James was alone.
'Poor mad old man,' said James. 'He's gone in to lock up a few things before the police take him away.'
At that moment, Bernard reappeared. 'I'll just feed my new family before I go,' he said. He crossed to the goldfish pond. With a sigh of relief, Agatha heard the wail of a police siren in the distance.
James suddenly put his arms around her and she gratefully leaned against him and buried her face in his chest. 'That's that,' came Bernard's now quavering voice. 'I'll just get something from the kitchen.'
Agatha raised her head. 'You should go with him. He might run away.'
'We'd better go in anyway. The police will be hammering at the front door.'
They went in by the kitchen door. Sure enough, there was banging on the door. Agatha opened it and Bill Wong and two detectives came in. 'We got your message on the police radio. Where is he?'
Agatha looked wildly around. 'I don't know. Somewhere.'
And then a drumming sound reverberated down from the ceiling overhead.
Bill and his colleagues raced for the stairs. James pulled Agatha back. 'Don't go,' he said. 'It won't be pretty.'
'What do you mean?'
'I think he poisoned his new fish - and then he poisoned himself. They may be able to pump him out in time, but I doubt it.'
Upstairs, radios crackled as they called for an ambulance. 'Let's go and sit in the garden, Agatha,' said James. 'There's nothing more we can do here.'
Epilogue
It was two days after the death of Bernard Spott. The rain, which had broken the long spell of good weather, had ceased and the sun once more shone down.
Agatha and James were sitting in Agatha's garden. James was enthusiastic about the flowers and bushes, so much so that Agatha was almost able to forget about her deception. They had been questioned separately and this was the first time they had got together since they had discovered that Bernard was the murderer.
'Why did you let him go off alone into the house?' asked Agatha. 'Did you guess he would take his own life?'
'I thought he might. He was a brave man during the war. As soon as I heard that awful drumming sound upstairs, I knew it was his heels drumming on the floor after a swig of poison. He poisoned his new fish as well. I should have kept an eye on him and let him stand trial. My only excuse is that I was so shocked and upset, I didn't really know what I was doing.'
'He may have been a brave man,' said Agatha sharply, 'but he committed a most dreadful crime and should have stood trial for it.'
Bill Wong appeared around the side of the house, Agatha having no reason to lock the gate any more.
He sat down and studied them for a few moments and then said, 'We were almost on to Bernard, you know.'
'You're just saying that,' said Agatha.
'No, we had been scouring the nurseries far and wide for someone who might have bought that particular brand of weedkiller around the time of the murder.'
'What brand?'
'Clean Garden. An innocuous name for some quite lethal stuff.'
'But lots of people buy it, surely?'
'We had photographs of people in this village, even you pair, which we had taken when you weren't looking. We showed them around the nurseries, and right over in darkest Oxfordshire they recognized Bernard Spott. That and his navy background and the fact that he was once a keen yachtsman made him look like our man. The knots on that rope had been done by an expert.' He looked at their outraged faces and laughed. 'Don't worry. I'm not taking the credit away from you. We had no real proof. What put you on to him? I mean, you said you had watched him helping the boy scouts, but surely that wasn't enough.'
'It was the graves in his garden,' said Agatha.
'Graves? What graves?'
'All those little graves for his poisoned fish, all with crosses and names.'
'We saw those,' said Bill. 'But we asked him and he explained it was part of his garden which he reserved as an animals' cemetery, and when anyone in the village had a dead cat or dog, they brought it to Bernard. But what I cannot understand is why you two gave him time to poison himself.'
James flashed a warning look at Agatha. 'We were in shock,' he said blandly. 'We did not think he would take his own life.'
Bill gave a little sigh and clasped his tubby hands over his chest. 'Mad. All mad. What exactly was up with Mary Fortune, I doubt we'll ever know. She was diagnosed in America as being depressed, which seems to cover a multitude of mental ailments.' He looked at James. 'Why it was you never suspected anything was wrong with her, considering the circumstances, is beyond me.'
'Even Agatha here did not know she was that deranged,' said James. 'Look, she seemed a flirtatious, easy- going woman out for a good time, with no strings attached. When she was quite foul to me when I broke it off, I felt so guilty about having misunderstood her - by that I mean that it had never crossed my mind before that she was
