Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (2 page)

Along one side of the waiting-room was a desk with a nurse-cum-receptionist behind it. She was a plain girl with lank brown hair and the adenoidal accents of Birmingham. Her name was Miss Mabbs.

Doris Simpson was the first to go in and was only out of sight for five minutes. Agatha surreptitiously rubbed her cold feet and ankles. This would not take long.

But Miss Simms was next and she was in there for half an hour, emerging at last with her eyes shining and her cheeks pink. Mrs Josephs had her turn. After a very long time she came out, murmuring, ‘Such a firm hand Mr Bladen does have,’ while her ancient cat lay supine in its basket as one dead.

Agatha went to the counter after Mrs Huntingdon was ushered in and said to Miss Mabbs, ‘Mr Bladen told me to call at two. I have been waiting a considerable time.’

‘Surgery starts at two. That’s probably what he meant,’ said Miss Mabbs. ‘You’ll need to wait your turn.’

Determined not to have got all dressed up for nothing, Agatha sulkily picked up a copy of
Vogue
, June 1997, and retreated to her hard plastic chair.

She waited and waited for the merry widow plus dog to reappear, but the minutes ticked past and Agatha could hear a ripple of laughter from the surgery and wondered what was going on in there.

Three quarters of an hour went by while Agatha finished the copy of
Vogue
and a well-preserved 1990 copy of
Good Housekeeping
and was absorbed in a story in an old
Scotch Home
annual about the handsome laird of the Scottish highlands who forsook his ‘ain true love’ Morag of the glens for Cynthia, some painted harlot from London. At last Mrs Huntingdon came out, holding her dog. She smiled vaguely all around before leaving and Agatha glowered back.

There were only the two farmers and Agatha left. ‘Reckon I won’t be coming here again,’ said Jack Page. ‘Waste a whole day, this would.’

But he was dealt with very quickly, having come to collect a prescription for antibiotics, which he handed over to Miss Mabbs. The other farmer also wanted drugs and Agatha brightened as he reappeared after only a few moments. She had meant to berate the vet for having kept her waiting so long but there was that sweet smile again, that firm clasp of the hand, those searching, intimate eyes.

Feeling quite fluttery and at the same time guilty, for there was nothing up with Hodge, Agatha smiled back in a dazed way.

‘Ah, Mrs Raisin,’ said the vet, ‘let’s have the cat out. What’s his name?’

‘Hodge.’

‘Same as Dr Johnson’s cat.’

‘Who’s he? Your partner at Mircester?’

‘Dr
Samuel
Johnson, Mrs Raisin.’

‘Well, how was I to know?’ demanded Agatha crossly, her private opinion being that Dr Johnson was one of those old farts like Sir Thomas Beecham that people always seemed to be quoting loftily at dinner parties. James Lacey had suggested the name.

To hide her irritation, she raised Hodge’s basket on to the examining table and undid the latch and opened the front. ‘Come on now, out you come,’ cooed Agatha to a baleful Hodge who crouched at the back of the basket.

‘Let me,’ said the vet, edging Agatha aside. He thrust a hand in and brutally dragged Hodge out into the light and then held the squirming, yowling animal by the scruff up in the air.

‘Oh, don’t do that! You’re scaring him,’ protested Agatha. ‘Let me hold him.’

‘Very well. He looks remarkably healthy. What’s up with him?’

Hodge buried his head in the opening of Agatha’s coat. ‘Er, he’s off his food,’ said Agatha.

‘Any sickness, diarrhoea?’

‘No.’

‘Well, we’d best take his temperature. Miss Mabbs!’

Miss Mabbs came in and stood with head lowered. ‘Hold the cat,’ ordered the vet.

Miss Mabbs detached the cat from Agatha and pinned him down with one strong hand on the examining table.

The vet advanced on Hodge with a rectal thermometer. Could it be, wondered Agatha, that the thermometer was thrust up poor Hodge’s backside with unnecessary force? The cat yowled, struggled free, sprang from the table and crouched in a corner of the room.

‘I’ve made a mistake,’ said Agatha, now desperate to get her pet away. ‘Perhaps if he shows any severe signs I’ll bring him back.’

Miss Mabbs was dismissed. Agatha tenderly put Hodge back in the basket.

‘Mrs Raisin.’

‘Yes?’ Agatha surveyed him with bearlike eyes from which the love-light had totally fled.

‘There is quite a good Chinese restaurant in Evesham. I’ve had a hard day and feel like treating myself. Would you care to join me for dinner?’

Agatha felt gratified warmth coursing through her middle-aged body. Bugger all cats in general and Hodge in particular. ‘I’d love to,’ she breathed.

‘Then I’ll meet you there at eight o’clock,’ he said, smiling into her eyes. ‘It’s called the Evesham Diner. It’s in an old house in the High Street, seventeenth century, can’t miss it.’

Agatha emerged grinning smugly into the now empty waiting-room. She wished she had been the first ‘patient’ so she could have told all those other women she had a date.

But she stopped at the store on the road home and bought Hodge a tin of the best salmon to ease her conscience.

By the time she had reached home and cosseted Hodge and settled him in front of a roaring fire, she had persuaded herself that the vet had been firm and efficient with the cat, not deliberately cruel.

The desire to brag about her date was strong, so she phoned the vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby.

‘Guess what?’ said Agatha.

‘Another murder?’ suggested the vicar’s wife.

‘Better than that. Our new vet is taking me out for dinner this evening.’

There was a long silence.

‘Are you there?’ demanded Agatha sharply.

‘Yes, I’m here. I was just thinking . . .’

‘What?’

‘Why is he taking you out?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ snarled Agatha. ‘He fancies me.’

‘Forgive me. Of
course
he does. It’s just that I feel there is something cold and calculating about him. Do be careful.’

‘I am not sweet sixteen,’ said Agatha huffily.

‘Exactly.’

That ‘exactly’ seemed to Agatha to be saying, ‘You are a middle-aged woman easily flattered by the attentions of a younger man.’

‘In any case,’ Mrs Bloxby went on, ‘do go very carefully on the roads. It’s starting to snow.’

Agatha rang off, feeling flat, and then she began to smile. Of course! Mrs Bloxby was jealous. All the women in the village were smitten by the vet. But what was that she had said about snow? Agatha twitched back the curtain and looked out. Wet snow was falling, but it was not lying on the ground.

At seven thirty she drove off in all the discomfort of a tight body stocking under a gold silk Armani dress embellished with a rope of pearls. Her heels were very high, so she kicked them off and drove up the hill from the village in her stockinged feet.

The snow was getting thicker and suddenly, near the top of the hill, she crossed over a sort of snow-line and found herself driving over thick snow. But ahead lay the tempting vision of dinner with the vet.

She pressed her foot on the brake to slow down as she neared the A44 and quite suddenly the car went into a skid. It was all so quick, so breathlessly fast. Her headlights whirled crazily round the winter landscape, and then there was a sickening crunch as she hit a stone wall on her left. She switched off the lights and the engine with a trembling hand and sat still.

A car going the other way, towards the village, stopped. A door opened and closed. Then a dark figure loomed up on Agatha’s side of the car. She opened the window. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Raisin?’ came James Lacey’s voice.

Before the vet, before the fiasco of the Bahamas, Agatha had often fantasized about James Lacey rescuing her from some accident. But all she could think about now was that precious date.

‘I think nothing’s broken,’ said Agatha and then struck the wheel in frustration. ‘Bloody, bloody snow. I say, can you run me into Evesham?’

‘You must be joking. It’s to get worse, or so the weather forecast said. Fish Hill will be closed.’

‘Oh, no,’ wailed Agatha. ‘Maybe we could go another way. Maybe through Chipping Campden.’

‘Don’t be silly. Does your engine still work?’

Agatha switched it on and it sprang into life.

‘What about the lights?’

Agatha switched them on, glaring out at a snow- covered wilderness.

James Lacey inspected the damage to the front of the car. ‘The glass in your headlamps is all shattered and you’ll need a new bumper, radiator, and number-plate. You’d best back out and follow me down to the village.’

‘If you won’t run me, then I’ll get a cab.’

‘You can try.’ He walked off to his own car and Agatha heard him starting up. She reversed and followed him. He parked outside his own house, waved to her, and strode indoors.

Agatha leaped out of her own car, forgetting she was in her stockinged feet, and ran into the house. She seized the phone and, looking at a list of taxi-cab companies pinned to the wall, she began to phone them one after the other, but no taxi driver was prepared to go to Evesham or anywhere else on such a night.

Dammit, thought Agatha furiously, my car still works. I’m going.

She pulled on a pair of boots over her wet feet and went out again. But she was half-way up the hill again when both her headlamps blew, leaving her crawling along in snowy darkness.

Wearily, she turned the car and headed back down to the village again. Back indoors, she phoned the Chinese restaurant. No, came a voice at the other end, Mr Bladen had not turned up. Yes, he had booked a table. No, he had definitely not arrived.

Feeling very flat, Agatha phoned Directory Enquiries and got a Mircester number for the vet. A woman answered the phone. ‘I am afraid Mr Bladen is busy at the moment.’ The voice was cool and amused.

‘This is Agatha Raisin,’ snapped Agatha. ‘He was to meet me in a restaurant in Evesham tonight.’

‘You could hardly have expected him to drive in such weather.’

‘Who is speaking, please?’ demanded Agatha.

‘This is his wife.’

‘Oh!’ Agatha dropped the receiver like a hot coal.

So he was still married after all! What was it all about? But if he were married, then he should not have asked her out. Agatha had very firm views about dating married men.

She felt somehow as if he had set out to deliberately make a fool of her. Men! And James Lacey! He had simply gone indoors without calling to see if she were indeed unharmed after her accident.

Agatha felt silly and now she had only a ruined car to show for her dreams of a date with a handsome man. She passed the rest of the evening filling in an accident claim form, the purring Hodge on her lap.

The next day dawned foggy as well as snowy. Once more Agatha felt that old trapped feeling. She waited and waited for the phone to ring, sure that Paul Bladen would call her to say
something
. But it sat there, squat in its silence.

At last she decided to pay a visit to her neighbour, James Lacey, if only to explain to him, subtly, that she had not been pursuing him. But although a thin column of smoke rose from his chimney, although his snow-covered car was parked outside, he did not answer the door.

Agatha felt well and truly snubbed. She was sure he was in there.

Hodge, in the selfish way of cats, played happily in the snow in the garden, stalking imaginary prey.

In the afternoon, the doorbell went. Agatha peered at herself in the hall mirror, grabbed a lipstick she always kept ready on the hall table and painted her mouth. Then, smoothing down her dress, she opened the door.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, looking down into the round oriental features of Detective Sergeant Bill Wong.

‘That’s not much of a greeting,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a cup of coffee?’

‘Come in,’ said Agatha, leaning over his shoulder and peering hopefully up and down the lane.

‘Who were you expecting?’ he asked, when they were seated in the kitchen.

‘I was expecting an apology. Our new vet, Paul Bladen, invited me out for dinner in Evesham last night, but I had a skid at the top of the road and couldn’t make it. But as it turned out, he didn’t even get to the restaurant. I phoned his home and a woman answered it. She said she was his wife.’

‘Couldn’t be,’ said Bill. ‘He was separated from his wife for about five years and the divorce came through last year.’

‘What’s he playing at?’ cried Agatha, exasperated.

‘You mean, who’s he playing with. Snowy night, no way of getting to Evesham, had a bit of fun at home instead.’

‘Well, he should have phoned anyway,’ said Agatha.

‘Talking about your love life, how did you get on in the Bahamas?’

‘Nice,’ said Agatha. ‘Got some sun.’

‘See anything of Mr Lacey?’

‘Didn’t expect to. He’d gone to Cairo.’

‘And you knew that before you left?’

‘What is this?’ exclaimed Agatha. ‘A police interrogation?’

‘Just friendly questions. Glad to see Hodge is happy. Looking very fit.’

‘Oh, Hodge is in the best of health.’

The almond-shaped eyes studying her so intently glittered slightly in the white light from the snow coming in the kitchen window.

‘Then why did poor Hodge have to go to this vet?’

‘Have you been spying on me?’

‘No, I just happened to be passing yesterday and I saw you carrying Hodge in a basket to the surgery. You should wear more sensible footwear in this weather.’

‘I just wanted to check the cat had all his shots,’ said Agatha, ‘and what I choose to wear on my feet is my business.’

He raised his hands and let them fall. ‘Sorry. Funny thing about Bladen, though.’

‘What?’

‘He went into partnership with Peter Rice, the vet in Mircester, some time ago. What a queue of women there were during the first weeks! Right out in the street. But then they stopped coming. Seems Bladen is no good with pets. He’s a whiz with farm animals and horses, but he loathes cats and small dogs.’

‘I don’t want to talk about the man,’ said Agatha hotly. ‘Haven’t you got anything else to talk about?’