Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon (20 page)

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. “I’ll call them down.”

The girls sidled into the living room. “Sit down,” snapped Agatha. “We’ve got a few more questions for you.”

“Got better things to do,” said Fairy.

Mrs. Sommers cracked. “Answer the woman’s questions, damn it!” she yelled.

The pair looked shocked and sat down and stared at Agatha, Patrick and Phil with mutinous expressions.

“Now,” said Agatha, “you both knew she was romantically involved with Burt. Were you jealous of her?”

“Naah,” drawled Fairy. “She was so wet—Burt this, Burt that. How they was going to get married. Carried her engagement ring on a chain round her neck.”

Agatha stiffened. She remembered Jessica’s body clearly. There had been no chain round her neck with any ring.

“It wasn’t on her body when she was found.”

“Then whoever killed her nicked it,” said Trixie. “Can we go?”

“No, stay where you are,” ordered Agatha. “If Burt loved her, how did he inveigle her into posing for that Web site?”

“Told her it was just a bit of fun, nothing really dirty, and we’d all make money. She’d have done anything for him.”

“Did Jessica know Burt had already done time for armed robbery?”

“None of us knew,” said Fairy. “Cool.”

“Did you know that Jessica had at least one evening out with your maths teacher?”

“Yeah,” said Trixie. “Like she told us. Said he was an awful old ponce, bitching about the wine and trying to get into her knickers.”

“And you didn’t think to tell the police?”

“Don’t tell the fuzz everything.”

“Look, if you know anything at all, you should tell us. We know Burt had an affair with Joyce Wilson, the secretary at Smedleys. Did Jessica know about that?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Did you ever see him with any other woman?”

“No, but he had a reputation around the factory as a lady-killer. We told Jessica to get him to have a test before she let him get his leg over,” said Trixie. “I mean, these days, you never know where they’ve been.”

Oh, the innocence of youth! Where has it gone? wondered Agatha.

“Is that the lot?” asked Trixie.

“I suppose so,” said Agatha, feeling defeated. Not only was she never going to solve Jessica’s murder, she thought wearily, but her investigations on the other two were going nowhere as well.

Harry was about to give up watching Joyce, but then, towards evening, she emerged from her house and got into a taxi. He ran to the end of the street where he had parked his motorbike and set out in pursuit. He followed the cab out along the Fosse until it turned off down a country lane. She’s going to Ancombe, thought Harry. Maybe a break at last.

The cab went straight to Mabel Smedley’s house—or what Harry assumed must be Mabel’s house. He thrust his bike into some bushes and waited until the cab had left and wondered how to get near the house without being seen. He shinned over the garden wall and crept through the shrubbery. There was a short tarmac drive up to the house, but it was bordered on either side with yew and laurel.

He eased closer to the house and parted the branches of a laurel bush. Both women were standing in the living room. There were no curtains at the window. He was to wonder later why the significance of that small detail didn’t mean more to him at the time. They were talking seriously. He wished he could hear what they were saying. Then they both rose and came out of the house and got into Mabel’s car. He hurried back to where he had left his motorbike. Agatha and Phil had told him how Mabel had spotted them following her to the cinema. He’d need to be careful.

He shrank into the bushes by his motorbike as Mabel’s car roared past. He got on his bike and followed after waiting impatiently. There were two roads out of the village. One led to Carsely and the other to the Fosse. He dared not get close enough to see which one they took and opted for the Fosse.

Sure enough, when he reached the top of the road and swung out onto the Fosse, he could see Mabel’s car ahead in front of two others. He followed at a careful distance. Mabel swung off before the place where Jessica’s body had been found. He realized she was taking Joyce home. Sure enough, she dropped Joyce at her house and then drove off again.

Phil phoned Mabel later that evening. “We didn’t make another arrangement,” he said. “I would like to see you again.”

“How nice,” said Mabel. “I’m pretty tied up this week. What about next Tuesday? We could have lunch.”

“Excellent,” said Phil. “I’ll pick you up at twelve-thirty and take you somewhere nice.”

Bill Wong called on Agatha that evening. She told him about the missing engagement ring. Bill gave an exclamation of annoyance. “You should have told me right away. Wait until I phone this information in.”

Agatha waited until he had finished. “I haven’t seen the pathology report,” said Bill. “We’ll need to ask the pathologist if there was any sign of a chain being ripped from her neck. We’ll also need to send men back out to the murder site to comb the area and look for that ring. Then we’ll need to check all the jewellers in case someone tried to sell it.”

“What did Mabel say when confronted about that diploma?”

“She insists that all she learned were the basic skills of computing and the college bears that out. She said that when we first asked her and she said that she knew nothing about computers, she thought they meant was she expert in computing.”

“Sounds like a load of cobblers,” said Agatha cynically. “There’s someone at the door. Wait a minute.”

She came back followed by Harry. “Bill, Harry’s been following Joyce. He says that earlier today she took a cab to Mabel’s, the two women talked and then Mabel ran Joyce home.”

“Interesting,” said Bill. “But maybe innocent. After all, Mabel would know Joyce from the business.”

“But why would she want to talk to the girl her husband had been having an affair with?”

“I’m sure she’ll have some perfectly innocent explanation.”

“That one always has some perfectly innocent explanation.”

“What I’m interested in,” said Harry, “is that milk bottle. The missing one. Say Joyce popped it in her handbag. I’m sure the police didn’t search it. Or maybe there was somewhere in her little office where she hid it.”

“The police searched everywhere.”

“If only I could get inside that office and have a look around,” said Harry.

“Don’t!” ordered Bill. “I’ve had enough of your unorthodox methods.”

“Jealousy,” said Agatha suddenly. “And blackmail. Have you found that teller who took the deposit yet?”