AGATHA whistled happily the following morning as she prepared a breakfast of toast and marmalade and black coffee. The sun streamed in through the open kitchen door and all was right with her world. She and Paul had enjoyed a pleasant dinner. Once more they were at ease in each other’s company. They had even begun to joke about their amateur mistakes. She had told him about her visit to Robin Barley and had even done an imitation of her that had made Paul laugh.
He was to call for her that afternoon and then they were going to go to Towdey to see if they could find out more about Peter Frampton.
Once more her head was beginning to fill with rosy dreams. She had not yet had time to visit the hairdressers, so after breakfast she went up to the bathroom and used a brunette rinse on her hair to soften the effect of red roots.
Wrapping a towel round her hair, she went downstairs again and sat in the garden to enjoy the sun.
A frantic ringing on the doorbell, followed by a hammering on the front door, made her spring to her feet.
She ran through the house and opened the door. Paul stood there. “Agatha, Agatha, did you say you had been to see someone called Robin Barley?”
“Yes, come in. What’s up?”
“I just heard it on the radio. I was driving back from Moreton when I heard she’d been found dead in her dressing-room.”
They walked through to the kitchen as Agatha said, “Maybe she had a heart attack.”
“The news report said the police are treating the death as suspicious.”
Agatha sank down on a kitchen chair and looked at him bleakly.
“Sooner or later the police are going to question the neighbours around her studio and they’ll give a description of me. But if she was killed in her dressing-room, that points again to Harry. Oh, dear. It’s all my fault. She was so keen to play detective.”
“Did you encourage her to play detective?”
“Not really. In fact, she was so bitchy I was just glad to get out of there.”
“So it’s not your fault. No point in trying to see Harry or Carol today, and it would be better to leave Peter Frampton until we find out more. It must have something to do with Harry.”
“If it isn’t Harry,” said Agatha, “and if he has an alibi, then her murder may not have anything to do with the Witherspoon one.”
“Perhaps we should try to see Bill Wong.”
“I should think every detective they’ve got will be out on this one and they’ll be under pressure from the media. This one’s more exotic than an old lady being murdered.”
“I feel there’s something we should be doing.”
The doorbell rang again. They looked at each other in dismay. “Must be the police,” said Agatha dismally.
But when she answered the door it was to find a distressed Mrs. Bloxby. “Come in,” said Agatha. “We’ve just heard.”
“I cannot believe it,” said Mrs. Bloxby. “I’ve known Mrs. Barley quite a long time. Did you see her?”
“Yes, I told her we were trying to find out if Harry could have had a chance to slip away and get over to Hebberdon. I know she was a friend of yours, but she was…difficult.”
“Poor Robin could be rather grandiose,” said the vicar’s wife, “but a heart of gold underneath it all. She did a lot of good work for the church. I phoned the rector of Saint Ethelburgh’s in Wormstone, the village where she lived. He had an arrangement to meet her in her dressing-room after the dress rehearsal. She was going to produce a play for the village church. It was he who found her.
“He said she was lying near the door. Her face was an awful colour and she had vomited. He called the ambulance and the police and the fire brigade, all three he was in such a state. The police arrived first. He was told to wait outside. Then he was driven to police headquarters and told to wait there. When two detectives finally arrived to interview him, he said it was a terrible ordeal. They kept asking him over and over again if he had brought her flowers. And he had to repeat over and over again that he had not brought her any flowers. He had an arrangement to meet her and when he knocked on the dressing-room door and did not get a reply, he had opened the door and found her. It came out at the end of the interview that poor Mrs. Barley had died of cyanide poisoning and the police think that hydrogen cyanide pellets were dropped into a vase of roses. The resultant cyanide gas released by the pellets killed her.”
“How on earth in this day and age in the quiet Cotswolds would someone get hold of cyanide?” asked Agatha.
“Farmers used to use hydrogen cyanide,” said Paul. “But it’s now banned, along with DDT. I suppose there must be some of the stuff still lying around.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Agatha.
“I think we wait,” said Paul.
“I wish we had the resources of the police,” mourned Agatha. “We can’t check phone bills and see who she’d been phoning.”
“There are detective agencies who can get you a three-month record of anyone’s phone bill,” said Mrs. Bloxby, surprising them. “It cost about four hundred pounds plus VAT.”
“Wow, how do you know this?” asked Agatha.
Mrs. Bloxby coloured slightly. “I’m afraid it’s confidential. A parishioner was very obsessed with some woman and he wanted to check on her phone calls to see if she had been phoning an old lover, although she swore she hadn’t.”
“And had she?” asked Agatha, fascinated.
“Oh, yes.”
“And that cured his obsession?”
“No, it got worse. He finally moved to Australia. Such a waste of money.”
Agatha racked her brains to think of any parishioner who had moved to Australia. Mrs. Bloxby smiled slightly. “Before your time, Mrs. Raisin.”
“You know,” said Agatha, “I think I should phone Bill and tell him about my visit to Robin. I’ve a feeling they’re going to find out anyway.”
“You’ll get an awful grilling from Runcorn,” Paul pointed out. “I’ll get less of a grilling if I volunteer the information,” said Agatha.
She went into the other room to phone.
Agatha came back after a few minutes. “I got Bill. He’s on the case at last. I’ve to go in right away to headquarters.”
Paul drove Agatha to police headquarters. They were told to wait and then Agatha was taken away to an interviewing room. She sat for almost a quarter of an hour looking down at the scarred table, at the institution-green walls, and at the small frosted glass window until the door opened and Bill walked in, followed by Evans.
He went through the ritual of switching on the tape before sitting down with Evans and facing Agatha.
“Now, Mrs. Raisin,” he said formally, “you phoned me to say that you had seen the deceased, Mrs. Robin Barley, yesterday.”
“That is correct.”
“At what time?”
“I think it was just before lunch-time. I can’t be sure. Say about twelve o’clock.”
“Had you known Mrs. Barley before?”
“No.”
“How did you happen to be visiting her?”
“I wondered if it might have been possible for Harry Witherspoon to leave the performance and go to Hebberdon on the night of his mother’s murder. Mrs. Bloxby-” “That is the wife of the vicar of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Carsely?”
“You know that, Bill.”
“For the tape,” snapped Evans.
“Yes. Anyway, I wanted to get in touch with a member of the cast of The Mikado. Mrs. Bloxby said she had a friend, Mrs. Robin Barley, who might be able to help me. She phoned her and gave me her address. So I went to her studio.”
“And did she have any information?”
“No, I found her a rather silly woman. She said she would phone around other members of the cast to find out if Harry could have slipped away. I was fed up with her because she had been rude to me. I was only there a very short time. I gave her my card and told her to phone me if she found out anything, and then I left.”
“And after that?” asked Evans.
“I treated myself to lunch at Pam’s Kitchen in the main street. Then I walked around the shops. I got back home and was interviewed by you detectives. After you had left, Paul-Mr. Chatterton-and I went out for dinner.”
“Where?”
“The Churchill over at Paxford.”
“And how long did that take?”
“Let me think. We booked the table for eight o’clock. We didn’t leave until ten-thirty. We went to my cottage and had a nightcap and then Mr. Chatterton went to his cottage at around midnight.”
Evans spoke. “You have got to stop interfering, Mrs. Raisin. You will not leave the country. You will be prepared for further questioning.”
“Okay.”
Bill stood up. “That will be all for the moment.”
“Bill…?” Agatha started.
He shook his head briefly and Evans escorted Agatha out.
“So how did it go?” asked Paul as they walked away from police headquarters.
“Not as awful as I expected, because Bill himself interviewed me. But, oh Paul, he looked so hard-faced and disapproving.”
“Having a friend like you must be a serious embarrassment for a police detective at times.”
“I hope he hasn’t gone off me,” fretted Agatha. “He was my first friend-since I moved down here,” she added hurriedly, not wanting Paul to know that the prickly Agatha Raisin hadn’t had any friends before that.
“He’d come around if we could do anything to solve this case,” said Paul.
“Fat chance of that.” Agatha’s mobile phone began to ring. She pulled it out of her handbag.
She listened intently and then said excitedly, “Keep him there. We’ll be as fast as we can.”
Agatha rang off and said to Paul, “That was Mrs. Bloxby. She’s got that rector with her, the one that found the body.”
Together, they sprinted to the car.
Mrs. Bloxby ushered them through the vicarage and into the garden, where a thin white-haired man was drinking tea.
“Mrs. Raisin, may I introduce Mr. Potter, rector of Saint Ethelburgh’s? Mr. Potter, Mrs. Raisin and Mr. Chatterton.”
They all sat down. Agatha studied the rector. He had a thin, gentle face and mild eyes. His shoulders were stooped and his fingers deformed with arthritis.
“I agreed to see you,” he said in a beautiful voice, the old Oxford English rarely heard these days. “I would normally shrink from the idea of any amateur detection, but that man Runcorn annoyed me. He is brutal and stupid. Mrs. Bloxby speaks highly of your powers of detection.”
“Tell us what happened,” urged Agatha.
“I should not speak ill of the dead, but I did find Mrs. Barley a rather exhausting and overpowering woman. But, as Mrs. Bloxby will agree, she was a first-class fund-raiser for the church. She was going to put on a play in the church hall in Wormstone.” He gave a little smile. “She was, of course, going to play the lead.”
“What was the play going to be?” asked Agatha with a sudden feeling of foreboding.
“The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“In Edwardian costume?”
“Yes, indeed.” Agatha shot a miserable glance at Paul. So they had muddied the waters of the investigation even further. The police would assume that Robin had been the woman in the tea-gown.
“In any case,” the vicar went on, “I had agreed to see her in her dressing-room. There was absolutely no reason why we could not have met the following morning, but Mrs. Barley liked receiving visitors in her dressing-room. As I told Mrs. Bloxby, I knocked at the dressing-room door, and getting no reply, I walked in.” He went on to describe what he had told Mrs. Bloxby earlier.
“The police say it was cyanide poisoning. Someone took her a bouquet of flowers, put them in a vase of water and slipped the pellets of hydrogen cyanide into the water.”
“I wonder whether her death has anything to do with Mrs. Witherspoon’s murder,” said Agatha.
“Why not?” asked Paul.
“Just suppose it isn’t Harry who’s guilty,” said Agatha. “Then what possible reason could anyone have for murdering Robin? Did she have any enemies, Mr. Potter?”
“Not that I know of. But amateur theatrical companies can be amateur in everything but temperament. There are as many feuds and jealousies as there are in the real theatre. You see, poor Mrs. Barley could not act.”
“Good heavens,” said Agatha. “Then why did she have a major part in Macbeth?”
“She was a very rich woman. Most of the funding for the Mircester Players came from her. In return, she demanded lead roles. I remember once there was a dreadful scene when they were rehearsing a Christmas production of Oklahoma. As usual, Mrs. Barley insisted on playing the lead.”
“You mean the young girl in the surrey with the fringe on top?”
“The same. The female members of the cast confronted her. Mrs. Barley had a dreadful singing voice. They told her she was too old for the part and could not sing. She would not back down until one of them played a recording of her singing. Even Mrs. Barley had to admit it was awful.”
“Who led the protest?” asked Agatha.
“A Miss Emery. Miss Maisie Emery. She got the part and was very good in it, too.”
“But Robin told me Robin was playing Katisha in The Mikado!”
“Mrs. Barley got away with that because Katisha is meant to be ugly and her voice threatening.”
“Dear me. Do you know where we could find Miss Emery?”
“I don’t think she could have had anything to do with it,” said Mr. Potter.
“But she might know someone or something,” Paul pointed out.
“I do not know her address, but I know she works at the Midlands and Cotswolds Bank in Mircester.”
“Back to Mircester,” groaned Paul, as they set out again. “We’re clutching at straws.”
“It’s better than sitting around doing nothing,” said Agatha. She looked out of the car window as they cruised down Fish Hill. Black clouds were covering the Malvern Hills. “Rats! I think it’s going to rain.”
“Never mind,” said Paul, who was driving. “I’ve got a couple of umbrellas in the back.”
“Quite the Boy Scout, aren’t you? Prepared for everything. It’s getting late. Think she’ll still be at the bank?”
“They close at four-thirty, but they stay at work until around five-thirty to do the books or whatever bank people do.”
They arrived outside the bank just before five-thirty. “There are lights on inside,” said Agatha. “Wait and see who comes out.”
They waited by the door. Exactly at five-thirty, several women came out. “Miss Emery?” Agatha asked them.
“Maisie’ll be out in a moment,” said one.
A thin girl with a rabbity face appeared a few minutes later. “Miss Emery?” asked Agatha.
“Yes, what do you want? The bank’s closed.”
“It’s nothing to do with banking,” said Agatha. “It’s about the murder of Mrs. Robin Barley.”
Her mouth dropped farther open, exposing long irregular teeth. “Robin! Murdered!”
“Yes, last night. In her dressing-room. Didn’t you know? Weren’t you at the theatre?”
“No, there wasn’t a part for me. They wanted to put me in a gas mask to play one of the soldiers, but I knew Robin had suggested that to humiliate me, so I told them to stuff it.”
“But surely one of the customers said something. It must be all over the town.”
“No. One of them, mind, said she’d heard there been an accident at the theatre, that’s all.”
Paul said, “Would you like to come for a drink with us? We’d like to ask you about Robin.”
She looked at them suspiciously. In that moment, Agatha felt the loss of her one-time friend, Sir Charles Fraith. She had only to mention his title and people always talked to them.
“Let me introduce ourselves,” said Agatha. “I am Mrs. Agatha Raisin and this is Mr. Paul Chatterton. We are helping the police with their inquiries.” And that was true enough, thought Agatha.
Paul smiled charmingly at Maisie and she visibly thawed. “All right, then,” she said. “But I don’t like going into common pubs. There’s a cocktail bar in the George Hotel.”
The cocktail bar in the George was more like a fusty little over-furnished ante-room with a small bar manned by an ancient barman. Maisie said she would like a vodka and Red Bull and showed a tendency to sulk when the barman informed them with a gleam of surly pleasure that he did not stock Red Bull. Paul quickly suggested she try something more exotic and ordered a cocktail for her called a Sunrise Special. Maisie looked pleased with the choice when she was served a tall blue drink with dusty little paper umbrellas sticking out of the top. Agatha privately thought those umbrellas had done the rounds more than once.
“So what can you tell us about Robin?” asked Paul.
“How did she die?”
“Cyanide poisoning. Someone gave her a bouquet of flowers and slipped cyanide pellets into a vase of water. The gas that came off killed her.”
Maisie’s eyes gleamed with excitement. “Well, I never! Where was this? At that studio of hers?”
“No, in her dressing-room after the dress rehearsal. Did she have any enemies?”
Agatha was happy for once to let Paul take over the questioning. Maisie was already casting flirtatious little looks at him.
“She had loads of people who hated her. The audience was mostly made up of friends and relatives. She was turning us into a joke. Some of the gay boys in this town would turn up, mind you, just for a laugh. I tried to tell the producer that we wouldn’t need her money if we could put on decent shows, but she paid an awful lot for costumes and scenery and she owned the theatre.”
“Where did she get her money from?” asked Paul.
“The late Mr. Barley owned a chain of supermarkets. When he died, she sold them all for millions.”
“Did anyone dislike her more than the others?”
“Reckon we were all pretty much the same. But I mean, none of us would have poisoned her. We wouldn’t know how.”
“Was Harry Witherspoon at the dress rehearsal?” asked Agatha.
“I dunno. I don’t see why he should have been. He’d just have been one of the clansmen or soldiers, you see.”
“Wasn’t he usually in a small part anyway?” asked Agatha.
“Well, it was his asthma and hay fever, you see. First, he didn’t want to wear a gas mask. He said he couldn’t breathe properly. Then this idiot of a producer, well, when Birnam wood’s supposed to come to Dunsinane, instead of carrying tree branches, the soldiers were to carry bouquets of flowers. Someone asked him why. He said it was to highlight the atrocities of war. Prick!” she added with venom. “Any chance of another of these?” She held up her empty glass.
“I’ll get it,” said Agatha.
The barman was sitting reading a newspaper and showed no signs of paying any attention to Agatha Raisin until she thumped her fist on the bar and shouted, “Service!”
“And this producer, what’s his name?”
“Brian Welch.”
“And what’s his history?” Paul asked as Agatha returned, triumphant, having made the barman decorate Maisie’s cocktail with fresh paper umbrellas.
“Who are we talking about?” asked Agatha.
“The producer, Brian Welch. I was just asking what his background was.”
“He said he used to produce for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” said Maisie, “but someone said he was only the producer for some amateur production in Stratford. He loathed Robin.”
“You don’t know where he’s living, do you?” asked Paul.
“No, but when he’s not in the theatre, he spends his time in the Crown.”
“And what does he look like?”
“Small and fat. Wears tacky clothes. Got a lot of fair hair.”
They asked her more questions but without gaining much of importance, and then said good night to her and set out for the Crown, which Agatha remembered was one of Mircester’s seedier hostelries.
The first person they saw in the nearly deserted pub was a man answering Maisie’s description.
They went up to him and Paul asked, “Mr. Welch?”
“Yes. Who wants to know?”
Paul performed the introductions and explained what they were doing.
“Can’t you leave that sort of thing to the police?” he demanded, glaring at his empty glass.
“What are you drinking?” asked Agatha quickly.
“Whisky.”
“A double?”
He suddenly smiled. “Sure.” Agatha went to the bar thinking that at one time that pudgy face would not have been swollen and covered in broken veins and he might have been an attractive man.
She returned with his drink, and soft drinks for herself and Paul, in time to hear Paul saying, “But it couldn’t have been suicide.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her. Cheers! That bitch seemed out to wreck the show.” He viciously mimicked Robin’s voice. “‘You have no conception of history.’ Pah! Silly cow. I gave her a dressing-down in front of the cast to try to get some humility into her. She couldn’t act.”
“Wasn’t that dangerous?” asked Agatha. “She had the power to sack you, didn’t she? I mean, she was the money behind the whole thing. She hired you, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but I got a contract out of her, so she could do bugger all about it.”
“Why Bosnia?” asked Agatha.
“That’s what she kept asking. Don’t you see, that whole play was about the abuse of military might?”
Agatha decided to leave that one. “I gather Harry Witherspoon wasn’t in the cast.”
“Oh, that little shopkeeper who murdered his mother? No. He was beefing about his hay fever and asthma.”
Agatha sat up straight. “Blast! Why didn’t I think of it before?”
“What?” asked Paul.
“Gas masks, of course. Not only a disguise, but a protection against gas. Robin would just think it was one of the cast. But it needn’t have been. Could have been anyone from outside.”
“You’ll need to ask Freddy, who mans the stage door.”
“Where can we find him?”
“If the police aren’t grilling him, you’ll find him at his digs in Coventry Road. Little cottage at the end.”
“Where’s Coventry Road?” asked Paul.
“It’s nearly in the country on our road out. One of the roads leading off the Fosse. I’ll tell you when to turn off.”
“We never ask the right questions,” mourned Paul.
“Like what?”
“Simple ones. Like what’s Freddy’s second name? What kind of person is he?”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Agatha. “Turn off down here on the left, just past that garage.”
Paul swung round into Coventry Road and they cruised along slowly, past shops and council houses. “We’re nearly out into the country,” said Paul. “I don’t see any cottage.”
“Try round the next bend.”
“There it is,” said Paul.
A little white cottage stood on its own by the road. “And that’s another thing we should have asked,” said Paul. “What’s his phone number? He may be out for the evening.”
“Stop complaining. We’ll soon find out.”
A worried-looking woman with her hair in curlers answered the door. “We’re looking for Freddy, the stage-door keeper,” said Agatha.
“Dad’s at his allotment. Who’s asking?”
Patiently Agatha went through the whole thing again. “He’s a bit shaken up about things. You’d best leave him alone.” And with that, she slammed the door in their faces.
“Well, at least we know he’s at some allotments. Let’s ask along the road. Someone at that garage might know where the allotments are.”
At the garage, a man volunteered the information that the allotments were off Barney Lane. “Can’t miss them,” he said. “Go back to Haydon’s Close on your right, go along a few yards, make a left down Blackberry Road, then second right is Barney Lane.”
They made a few false turns, Agatha having forgotten the instructions and Paul unfairly saying that women never knew how to navigate to cover up the fact he had forgotten most of the instructions himself. At last they found the allotments, little strips of land where men were tending vegetables.
They asked the first man they came across for Freddy, and he jerked his thumb towards an old man who was bent over a vegetable bed.
They approached him and went through the usual preamble of who they were and why they wanted to speak to him. “Freddy Edmonds,” he said, holding out an earthy hand which they both shook.
“Come into my office,” he said, a grin creasing up the wrinkles on his face.
His “office” was a shed beside his strip of allotment where lines of lettuce, cabbage plants and potatoes and various other plants they did not recognize were stretched out in neat rows.
He sat on a box, removed a greasy cap from his head, and pulled a pipe out of his pocket. Paul sat on another box and Agatha on an old car seat.
“The police have been at me earlier,” he began, stuffing tobacco from a tin into his pipe. Agatha often wondered why anyone could be bothered smoking a pipe. There was always all that work of getting it filled, tamping the tobacco down, lighting it, then lighting it again frequently when it went out, and then scraping out the resultant mess from the bowl only to start the process again.
“They were asking me if anyone went in through the stage door while the performance was on. I told them, no one. First one was that reverend who came to see Mrs. Barley.”
“And what about people leaving? I mean, you would notice if someone walked past you still in costume? You see, it could have been someone not in the cast, but wearing a gas mask.”
“Well, you see,” he said, exhaling a cloud of foul-smelling smoke, “when the reverend raised the alarm, they were all still in their dressing-rooms, and the police, they arrived in minutes and two were left to guard the stage door.”
“And is there no other way out?”
“Not a one. They go past me or not at all.”
There was a long silence and then Agatha said, “It must be a very boring job. Have you always done it?”
“No, I worked on the railway until I retired. Saw an ad in the local paper and got the job. I remember when it was the Gaiety Theatre in the old days. It was lying empty for quite a bit until Mrs. Barley bought it.”
“Yes, we’ve just learned she actually bought it.”
“I was hoping they’d call it the Gaiety like the old vaudeville days, but it’s just the Mircester Players, and amateurs at that. Still, it’s a job.”
Above Freddy’s head was a shelf crammed with gardening books and magazines.
“You read a lot about gardening,” said Paul.
“Everything I can get.”
Agatha had a sudden mental picture of Freddy, sitting in his cubicle at the stage door-bound to be a sort of cubicle, they all were-and avidly reading some book or magazine on gardening while some shadowy figure slipped past him.
“It was a warm evening,” she said. “Was the street door open?”
“Yes, I had to let some air in.”
“So you wouldn’t hear anyone come in?”
“I’d hear their footsteps and look up.”
“Could someone got past you at a crouch-under your line of vision?”
“I s’pose they could,” he said uneasily.
“Didn’t you have to go and pee?” asked Paul.
He puffed at his pipe for a long moment. “That I did. But I shut and locked the outside door while I went off.”
“And how often did you go?” asked Agatha.
“Three times. My bladder ain’t what it used to be. Age. You know what it’s like.”
“Not yet,” said Agatha frostily.
“And you shut the door each time you went?” asked Paul.
Another long silence while Freddy puffed energetically on his pipe. “Sure I did,” he said.
“Tell us about Robin Barley,” said Agatha. “Did anyone really hate her?”
“She got up the noses of a lot of people, that’s for sure. But they’re all a bunch of prima donnas. Sometimes I come across them in their day jobs, at the bank or in the shops, and they’re as quiet as mice. But the minute they get in their theatre, they all think they’re Alec Guinness and Edith Evans.”
“Did you know Robin very well?”
“As well as anyone, I suppose,” said Freddy. “Mind you, she did a lot of good work for the church, and let’s face it, without her money there wouldn’t be any Mircester Players and I wouldn’t have a job. She loved the theatre. When she interviewed me, I felt she saw me as a character part-good old Freddy, touching his forelock at the stage door as the star went by. So I acted the way she wanted me.”
“What did you do when you were working on the railways?” asked Agatha, suddenly feeling that Freddy in his way was as much an actor as the rest of them.
“I was an area manager.”
“I think you are a very clever man,” observed Agatha. “Why the allotment?”
“I love growing things. It’s peaceful here. No one to bother me.”
“I suppose the show is suspended?”
“It’ll open tomorrow. That producer, he thinks Robin’s murder should bring a good audience and he’s anxious to cash in on it. Maisie Emery’s playing Lady Macbeth.”
“Robin was a widow. Did she have any male friends? Was she going out with anyone?”
“Not that I heard. I did hear she was a great joiner of things, getting one enthusiasm after another and letting it drop-Pilates, transcendental meditation, salsa, you name it.”
Agatha produced her card and gave it to him. “If you do hear anything, let us know.”
“I don’t feel that was a waste of time,” said Agatha as they drove home. “He’s very sharp. When he first said he’d been working on the railway, what with his pipe and his greasy cap and his old gardening clothes, I thought he might have had something to do with repairing the tracks. But when I listened to him, I realized he was much brighter than I’d first thought.”
“Don’t be snobbish, Agatha. “I am sure there are bright labourers all over the place.”
“No, it’s you who’s being snobbish.”
The argument occupied them all the way home.
Outside Agatha’s cottage, Paul said, “Enough about the working-man. Where do we go from here? I’m stumped.”
“We’ll sleep on it,” said Agatha. Unusually for her, she wanted to be alone. There was something diminishing about spending so much time with a man who did not flirt. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She let herself into her cottage, petted her cats and turned them out into the garden. She was relieved for once to get a break from blundering around, asking people questions, trying to get a breakthrough.
Agatha ferreted in the freezer and took out a frost-encrusted package and deposited it in the microwave. She took it out when the bell pinged and noticed it was a Marks & Spencer’s lasagne. Could be worse, she thought, and turned the microwave on to full heat. After she had eaten, she cooked a couple of herring for her cats, not seeing the irony in a woman who would cook fresh food for her cats but not for herself.