Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

By M C Beaton.

For Patrick Heininger and his wife, Caroline,

and children, Benjamin and Olivia, of

Bourton-on-the-Water, with love.

Chapter One.

Mrs. Agatha Raisin sat behind her newly cleared desk in her office in South Molton Street in Mayfair. From the outer office came the hum of voices and the clink of glasses as the staff prepared to say farewell to her.

For Agatha was taking early retirement. She had built up the public relations firm over long hard years of work. She had come a long way from her working-class background in Birmingham. She had survived an unfortunate marriage and had come out of it, separated and battered in spirit, but determined to succeed in life. All her business efforts were to one end, the realization of a dream a cottage in the Cotswolds.

The Cotswolds are surely one of the few man-made beauties in the world: quaint villages of golden stone houses, pretty gardens, winding green lanes and ancient churches. Agatha had been taken to the Cotswolds as a child for one brief magical holiday. Her parents had hated it and had said that they should have gone to Butlin's Holiday Camp as usual, but to Agatha the Cotswolds represented everything she wanted in life: beauty, tranquillity and security. So even as a child, she had become determined that one day she would live in one of those pretty cottages in a quiet peaceful village, far from the noise and smells of the city.

During all her time in London, she had, until just recently, never gone back to the Cotswolds, preferring to keep the dream intact. Now she had purchased that dream cottage in the village of Carsely. It was a pity, thought Agatha, that the village was called plain Carsely and not Chipping Campden or Aston Magna or Lower Slaughter or one of those intriguing Cotswold names, but the cottage was perfect and the village not on the tourist route, which meant freedom from craft shops, tea-rooms and daily bus parties.

Agatha was aged fifty-three, with plain brown hair and a plain square face and a stocky figure. Her accent was as Mayfair as could be except in moments of distress or excitement, when the old nasal Birmingham voice of her youth crept through. It helps in public relations to have a certain amount of charm and Agatha had none. She got results by being a sort of one-woman soft-cop hard-cop combination; alternately bullying and wheedling on behalf of her clients. Journalists often gave space to her clients just to get rid of her. She was also an expert at emotional blackmail and anyone unwise enough to accept a present or a free lunch from Agatha was pursued shamelessly until they paid back in kind.

She was popular with her staff because they were a rather weak, frivolous lot, the kind of people who build up legends about anyone of whom they are frightened. Agatha was described as ' real character', and like all real characters who speak their mind, she did not have any real friends. Her work had been her social life as well.

As she rose to go through and join the party, a small cloud crossed the horizon of Agatha's usually uncomplicated mind. Before her lay days of nothing: no work from morning till night, no bustle or noise. How would she cope?

She shrugged the thought away and crossed the Rubicon into the outer office to say her farewells.

"Here she comes!" screeched Roy, one of her assistants. "Made some special champagne punch, Aggie. Real knicker-rotter."

Agatha accepted a glass of punch. Her secretary, Lulu, approached and handed her a gift-wrapped parcel and then the others crowded around with their offerings. Agatha felt a lump rising in her throat. A little insistent voice was chattering in her head, "What have you done?

What have you done?" There was a bottle of scent from Lulu and, predictably, a pair of crotchless panties from Roy; there was a book on gardening from one, a vase from another, and so it went on. "Speech!"

cried Roy.

"Thank you all," said Agatha gruffly. "I'm not going to China, you know. You'll all be able to come and see me. Your new bosses, Pedmans, have promised not to change anything, so I suppose life will go on for all of you much the same. Thank you for my presents. I will treasure them, except for yours, Roy. I doubt if at my age I'll find any use for them."

"You never know your luck," said Roy. "Some horny farmer Tl probably be chasing you through the shrubbery."

Agatha drank more punch and ate smoked-salmon sandwiches and then, with her presents packed by Lulu into two carrier bags, she made her way down the stairs of Raisin Promotions for the last time.

In Bond Street, she elbowed aside a thin, nervous businessman who had just flagged down a cab, said unrepentantly, "I saw it first," and ordered the driver to take her to Paddington station.

She caught the 15:20 train to Oxford and sank back into the corner seat of a first-class carriage. Everything was ready and waiting for her in the Cotswolds. An interior decorator had ' over' the cottage, her car was waiting for her at Moreton-in-Marsh station for the short drive to Carsely, a removal firm had taken all her belongings from her London flat, now sold. She was free. She could relax. No temperamental pop stars to handle, no prima-donnaish couture firms to launch. All she had to do from now on was to please herself.

Agatha drifted off to sleep and awoke with a start at the guard's cry of

"Oxford. This is Oxford. The train terminates here."

Not for the first time, Agatha wondered about British Rail's use of the word ''. One expected the train to blow apart. Why not just say ' here'? She looked up at the screen, like a dingy television set, which hung over

Platform 2. It informed her that the train to Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton-in-Marsh and all further points to Hereford was on Platform 3, and lugging her carrier bags, she walked over the bridge. The day was cold and grey. The euphoria produced by freedom from work and Roy's punch was slowly beginning to evaporate.

The train moved slowly out of the station. Glimpses of barges on one side and straggly allotments on the other and then flat fields flooded from the recent rain lay gloomily in front of her increasingly jaundiced view.

This is ridiculous, thought Agatha. I've got what I always wanted. I'm tired, that's all.

The train stopped somewhere outside Charlbury, gliding to a stop and sitting there placidly in the inexplicable way that railway trains often do. The passengers sat stoically, listening to the rising wind whining over the bleak fields. Why are we like sheep that have gone astray? wondered Agatha. Why are the British so cowed and placid? Why does no one shout for the guard and demand to know the reason? Other, more voluble, races would not stand for it. She debated whether to go and see the guard herself. Then she remembered she was no longer in a hurry to get anywhere. She took out a copy of the Evening Standard, which she had bought at the station, and settled down to read it.

After twenty minutes the train creaked slowly into life. Another twenty minutes after Charlbury and it slid into the little station of Moreton-in-Marsh. Agatha climbed out. Her car was still where she had left it. During the last few minutes of the journey she had begun to worry that it might have been stolen.

It was market day in Moreton-in-Marsh and Agatha's spirits began to revive as she drove slowly past stalls selling everything from fish to underwear. Tuesday. Market day was Tuesday. She must remember that.

Her new Saab purred out of Moreton and then up through Bourton-on-the-Hill. Nearly home. Home! Home at last.

She turned off the A44 and then began the slow descent to the village of Carsely, which nestled in a fold of the Cotswold Hills.

It was a very pretty village, even by Cotswold standards. There were two long lines of houses interspersed with shops, some low and thatched, some warm gold brick with slate roofs. There was a pub called the Red Lion at one end and a church at the other. A few straggling streets ran off this one main road where cottages leaned together as if for support in their old age. The gardens were bright with cherry blossom, forsythia and daffodils. There was an old-fashioned haberdasher's, a post office and general store, and a butcher's, and a shop that seemed to sell nothing other than dried flowers and to be hardly ever open. Outside the village and tucked away from view by a rise was a council estate and between the council estate and the village proper was the police station, a primary school, and a library.

Agatha's cottage stood alone at the end of one of the straggling side streets. It looked like a cottage in one of the calendars she used to treasure as a girl. It was low and thatched, new thatch, Norfolk reed, and with casement windows and built of the golden Cotswold stone. There was a small garden at the front and a long narrow one at the back. Unlike practically everyone else in the Cots-wolds, the previous owner had not been a gardener. There was little else but grass and depressing bushes of the hard-wearing kind found in public parks.

Inside there was a small dark cubby-hole of a hall. To the right was the living-room; to the left, the dining-room, and the kitchen at the back was part of a recent extension and was large and square. Upstairs were two low-ceilinged bedrooms and a bathroom. All the ceilings were beamed.

Agatha had given the interior decorator a free hand. It was all as it should be and yet ... Agatha paused at the door of the living-room.

Three-piece suite covered in Sanderson's linen, lamps, coffee-table with glass top, fake medieval fire-basket in the hearth, horse brasses nailed to the fireplace, pewter tankards and toby jugs hanging from the beams and bits of polished farm machinery decorating the walls, and yet it looked like a stage set. She went into the kitchen and switched on the central heating. The super-duper removal company had even put her clothes in the bedroom and her books on the shelves, so there was not much for her to do. She went through to the dining-room. Long table, shining under its heat-resistant surface, Victorian dining chairs, Edwardian painting of a small child in a frock in a bright garden, Welsh dresser with blue-and-white plates, another fireplace with a fake-log electric fire, and a drinks trolley. Upstairs, the bedrooms were pure Laura Ashley. It felt like someone else's house, the home of some characterless stranger, or an expensive holiday cottage.

Well, she had nothing for dinner and after a life of restaurants and take-aways, Agatha had planned to learn how to cook, and there were all her new cookery books in a gleaming row on a shelf in the kitchen.

She collected her handbag and made her way out. Time to investigate what few village shops there were. Many of the shops, the estate agent had told her, had closed down and had been transformed into ' reses'. The villagers blamed the in comers but it was the motor car which had caused the damage, the villagers themselves preferring to go to the supermarkets of Stratford or Evesham for their goods rather than buy them at a higher price in the village. Most people in the village owned some sort of car.

As Agatha approached the main street, an old man was coming the other way. He touched his cap and gave her a cheerful

"Afternoon." Then in the main street, everyone she passed greeted her with a few words, a casual "Afternoon' or

"Nasty weather." Agatha brightened. After London, where she had not even known her neighbours, all this friendliness was a refreshing change.

She studied the butcher's window and then decided that cookery could wait for a few days and so passed on to the general store and bought a 'very hot' Vindaloo curry to microwave and a packet of rice. Again, in the store, she was met with friendliness all round. At the door of the shop was a box of second-hand books. Agatha had always read 'improving' books, mostly non-fiction. There was a battered copy of Gone With the Wind and she bought it on impulse.

Back in her cottage, she found a basket of pseudo-logs by the fire, little round things made out of pressed sawdust. She piled some up in the grate and set fire to them and soon had a blaze roaring up the chimney. She removed the lace antimacassar which the decorator had cutely draped over the television screen and switched it on. There was some war going on, as there usually was, and it was getting the usual coverage; that is, the presenter and the reporter were having a cosy talk. "Over to you, John. What is the situation now? Well, Peter ..

." By the time they moved on to the inevitable '' in the studio, Agatha wondered why they bothered to send any reporter out to the war at all. It was like the Gulf War all over again, where most of the coverage seemed to consist of a reporter standing in front of a palm tree outside some hotel in Riyadh. What a waste of money. He never had much information and it would surely have been cheaper to place him in front of a palm tree in a studio in London.

She switched it off and picked up Gone With the Wind. She had been looking forward to a piece of intellectual slumming to celebrate her release from work, but she was amazed at how very good it was, almost indecently readable, thought Agatha, who had only read before the sort of books you read to impress people. The fire crackled and Agatha read until her rumbling stomach prompted her to put the curry in the microwave. Life was good.

But a week passed, a week in which Agatha, in her usual headlong style, had set out to see the sights. She had been to Warwick Castle, Shakespeare's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, and had toured through the villages of the Cotswolds while the wind blew and the rain fell steadily from grey skies, returning every evening to her silent cottage with only a new-found discovery of Agatha Christie to help her through the evenings. She had tried visiting the pub, the Red Lion, a jolly low-raftered chintzy sort of place with a cheerful landlord. And the locals had talked to her as they always did with a peculiar sort of open friendliness that never went any further. Agatha could have coped with a suspicious animosity but not this cheerful welcome which somehow still held her at bay. Not that Agatha had ever known how to make friends, but there was something about the villagers, she discovered, which repelled in comers They did not reject them. On the surface they welcomed them. But Agatha knew that her presence made not a ripple on the calm pond of village life. No one asked her to tea. No one showed any curiosity about her whatsoever. The vicar did not even call. In an Agatha Christie book the vicar would have called, not to mention some retired colonel and his wife. All conversation seemed limited to "Mawnin'," "Afternoon," or talk about the weather.

For the first time in her life, she knew loneliness, and it frightened her.

From the kitchen windows at the back of the house was a view of the Cotswold Hills, rising up to block out the world of bustle and commerce, trapping Agatha like some baffled alien creature under the thatch of her cottage, cut off from life. The little voice that had cried, "What have I done?" became a roar.

And then she suddenly laughed. London was only an hour and a half away on the train, not thousands of miles. She would take herself up the following day, see her former staff, have lunch at the Caprice, and then perhaps raid the book shops for some more readable material. She had missed market day in Moreton, but there was always another week.

As if to share her mood, the sun shone down on a perfect spring day.

The cherry tree at the end of her back garden, the one concession to beauty that the previous owner had seen fit to make, raised heavy branches of flowers to a clear blue sky as Agatha had her usual breakfast of one cup of black coffee, instant, and two filter tipped cigarettes.

With a feeling of holiday, she drove up the winding hill that led out of the village and then down through Bourton-on-the-Hill to Moreton-in-Marsh.

She arrived at Paddington station and drew in great lungfuls of polluted air and felt herself come alive again. In the taxi to South Molton Street she realized she did not really have any amusing stories with which to regale her former staff. "Our Aggie will be queen of that village in no time at all," Roy had said. How could she explain that the formidable Agatha Raisin did not really exist as far as Carsely was concerned?

She got out of the taxi in Oxford Street and walked down South Molton Street, wondering what it would be like to see Tedmans' written up where her own name used to be.

Agatha stopped at the foot of the stairs which led up to her former office over the Paris dress shop. There was no sign at all, only a clean square on the paintwork where "Raisin Promotions' had once been.

She walked up the stairs. All was silent as the grave. She tried the door. It was locked. Baffled, she retreated to the street and looked up. And there across one of the windows was a large board with FOR SALE in huge red letters and the name of a prestigious estate agent.

Her face grim, she took a cab over to the City, to Cheapside, to the headquarters of Pedmans, and demanded to see Mr. Wilson, the managing director. A bored receptionist with quite the longest nails Agatha had ever seen languidly picked up the phone and spoke into it. "Mr. Wilson is busy," she enunciated, picked up the women's magazine she had been reading when Agatha had arrived and studied her horoscope.

Agatha plucked the magazine from the receptionist's hands. She leaned over the desk. "Get off your lazy arse and tell that crook he's seeing me."

The receptionist looked up into Agatha's glaring eyes, gave a squeak, and scampered off upstairs. After some moments during which Agatha read her own horoscope" Today could be the most important day of your life. But watch your temper' the receptionist came tottering back on her very high heels and whispered, "Mr. Wilson will see you now. If you will come this way ... "

"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.

She was an angular woman who, despite the chill of the evening, was wearing a print dress of the type beloved by civil servants' wives abroad. She had a receding chin and rather bulbous eyes and her hair was dressed in a forties style, pinned back in rolls from her face. All this Agatha was able to see as the woman straightened up.

"Evening," called Agatha.

The woman turned on her heel and walked into her house and closed the door.

Agatha found this rudeness a welcome change after all the friendliness of Carsely. It was more what she was used to. She walked back through her own cottage, out the front door, up to the cottage next door, which was called New Delhi, and rapped on the brass knocker.

A curtain at a window near the door twitched but that was the only sign of life. Agatha gleefully knocked again, louder this time.

The door opened a crack and one bulbous eye stared out at her.

"Good evening," said Agatha, holding out her hand. "I'm your new neighbour."

The door slowly opened. The woman in the print dress reluctantly picked up Agatha's hand, as if it were a dead fish, and shook it. "I am Agatha Raisin," said Agatha, ' you are ...?" "Mrs. Sheila Barr," said the woman. "You must forgive me, Mrs ... er ... Raisin, but I am very busy at the moment." "I won't take up much of your time," said Agatha. "I need a cleaning woman."

Mrs. Barr gave that infuriating kind of laugh often described as 'superior'. "You won't get anyone in the village. It's almost impossible to get anyone to clean. I have my Mrs. Simpson, so I'm very lucky."

"Perhaps she might do a few hours for me," suggested Agatha. The door began to close. "Oh, no," said Mrs. Barr, "I am sure she wouldn't."

And then the door was closed completely.

We'll see about that, thought Agatha.

She collected her handbag and went down to the Red Lion and hitched her bottom on to a bar stool. "Evening, Mrs. Raisin," said the landlord, Joe Fletcher. Turned nice, hasn't it? Maybe we'll be getting some good weather after all." Sod the weather, thought Agatha, who was tired of talking about it.

Aloud she said, "Do you know where Mrs. Simpson lives?"

"Council estate, I think. Would that be Bert Simpson's missus?"

"Don't know. She cleans."

"Oh, ah, that'll be Doris Simpson all right. Don't recall the number, but it's Wakefield Terrace, second along, the one with the gnomes."

Agatha drank a gin and tonic and then set out for the council estate.

She soon found Wakefield Terrace and the Simpsons because their garden was covered in plastic gnomes, not grouped round a pool, or placed artistically, but just spread about at random.

Mrs. Simpson answered the door herself. She looked more like an old-fashioned schoolteacher than a char woman. She had snow-white hair scraped back in a bun, and pale-grey eyes behind spectacles.

Agatha explained her mission. Mrs. Simpson shook her head. "Don't see as how I can manage any more, and that's a fact. Do Mrs. Barr next to you on Tuesdays, then there's Mrs. Chomley on Wednesdays and Mrs. Cummings-Browne on Thursdays, and then the weekends I work in a supermarket at Evesham."

"How much does Mrs. Barr pay you?" asked Agatha.

"Five pounds an hour."

"If you work for me instead, I'll give you six pounds an hour."

"You'd best come in. Bert! Bert, turn that telly off. This here is Mrs. Raisin what's taken Budgen's cottage down Lilac Lane."

A small, spare man with thinning hair turned off the giant television set which commanded the small neat living-room.

"I didn't know it was called Lilac Lane," said Agatha. "They don't seem to believe in putting up names for the roads in the village."

"Reckon that's because there's so few of them, m'dear," said Bert.

"I'll get you a cup of tea, Mrs. Raisin."

"Agatha. Do call me Agatha," said Agatha with the smile that any journalist she had dealt with would recognize. Agatha Raisin was going in for the kill.

While Doris Simpson retreated to the kitchen, Agatha said, "I am trying to persuade your wife to stop working for Mrs. Barr and work for me instead. I am offering six pounds an hour, a whole day's work, and, of course, lunch supplied."

"Sounds handsome to me, but you'll have to ask Doris," said Bert. "Not but what she would be glad to see the back of that Barr woman's house."

"Hard work?"

"It's not the work," said Bert, ''s the way that woman do go on. She follows Doris around, checking everything, like."

"Is she from Carsely?"

"Naw, her's an in comer. Husband died a whiles back. Something in the Foreign Office he was. Came here about twenty year ago."

Agatha was just registering that twenty years in Carsely did not qualify one for citizenship, so to speak, when Mrs. Simpson came in with the tea-tray.

"The reason I am trying to get you away from Mrs. Barr is this," said Agatha. "I am very bad at housework. Been a career woman all my life.

I think people like you, Doris, are worth their weight in gold. I pay good wages because I think cleaning is a very important job. I will also pay your wages when you are sick or on holiday."

"Now that's more than fair," cried Bert. "Member when you had your appendix out, Doris? Her never even came nigh the no spital let alone gave you a penny." True," said Doris. "But it's steady money. What if you was to leave, Agatha?"

"Oh, I'm here to stay," said Agatha.

"I'll do it," said Doris suddenly. "In fact, I'll phone her now and get it over with."

She went out to the kitchen to phone. Bert tilted his head on one side and looked at Agatha, his little eyes shrewd. "You know you'll have made an enemy there," he said.

"Pooh," said Agatha Raisin, ''ll just need to get over it."

As Agatha was fumbling for her door key half an hour later, Mrs. Barr came out of her cottage and stood silently, glaring across at Agatha.

Agatha gave a huge smile. "Lovely evening," she called.

She felt quite like her old self.

Chapter Two.

Plumtrees Cottage, where the Cummings-Brownes lived, was opposite the church and vicarage in a row of four ancient stone houses fronting on to a cobbled diamond-shaped area. There were no gardens at the front of these houses, only narrow strips of earth which held a few flowers.

The door was answered late the next morning to Agatha's knock by a woman whom Agatha's beady eyes summed up as being the same sort of species of expatriate as Mrs. Barr. Despite the chilliness of the spring day, Mrs. Cummings-Browne was wearing a print sun-dress which showed tanned middle-aged skin. She had a high autocratic voice and pale-blue eyes and a sort of ''s lady' manner. "Yes, what can I do for you?"

Agatha introduced herself and said she was interested in entering the quiche competition but as she was new to the village, she did not know how to go about it. "I am Mrs. Cummings-Browne," said the woman, ' really all you have to do is read one of the posters. They're all over the village, you know." She gave a patronizing laugh which made Agatha want to strike her. Instead Agatha said mildly, "As I say, I am new in the village and I would like to get to know some people. Perhaps you and your husband might care to join me for dinner this evening. Do they do meals at the Red Lion?"

Mrs. Cummings-Browne gave that laugh again. "I wouldn't be seen dead in the Red Lion. But they do good food at the Feathers in Ancombe." "Where on earth is Ancombe?" asked Agatha.

"Only about two miles away. You really don't know your way about very well, do you? We'll drive. Be here at seven thirty."

The door closed. Well, well, thought Agatha. That was easy. Must be a pair of free-loaders, which means my quiche stands a good chance.

She strolled back through the village, mechanically smiling and answering the greetings of

"Mawning' from the passers-by. So there were worms in this charming polished apple, mused Agatha. The majority of the villagers were working and lower-middle class and extremely civil and friendly. If Mrs. Barr and Mrs. Cummings-Browne were anything to go by, it was the no doubt self-styled upper class of in comers who were rude. A drift of cherry blossom blew down at Agatha's feet. The golden houses glowed in the sunlight. Prettiness did not necessarily invite pretty people. The in comers had probably bought their dinky cottages when prices were low and had descended to be big fish in this small pool. But there was no impressing the villagers or scoring off them in any way that Agatha could see. The in comers must have a jolly time being restricted to trying to put each other down. Still, she was sure that, if she won the competition, the village would sit up and take notice.

That evening, Agatha sat in the low-raftered dining-room of the Feathers at Ancombe and covertly studied her guests. Mr. Cummings-Browne "Well, it's Major for my sins but I don't use my title, haw, haw, haw' was as tanned as his wife, a sort of orangy tan that led Agatha to think it probably came out of a bottle. He had a balding pointed head with sparse grey hairs carefully combed over the top and odd jug like ears. Mr. Cummings-Browne had been in the British Army in Aden, he volunteered. That, Agatha reflected, must have been quite some time ago. Then it transpired he had done a Tittle chicken farming', but he preferred to talk about his army days, a barely comprehensible saga of servants he had had, and chap pies in the regiment. He was wearing a sports jacket with leather patches at the elbow over an olive-green shirt with a cravat at the neck. His wife was wearing a Laura Ashley gown that reminded Agatha of the bedspreads in her cottage.

Agatha thought grimly that her quiche had better win, for she knew when she was being ripped off and the Feathers was doing just that. A landlord who stood on the wrong side of the bar which ran along the end of the dining-room drinking with his cronies, a pretentious and dreadfully expensive menu, and sullen waitresses roused Agatha's anger.

The Cummings-Brownes had, predictably, chosen the second-most-expensive wine on the menu, two bottles of it. Agatha let them do most of the talking until the coffee arrived and then she got down to business. She asked what kind of quiche usually won the prize. Mr. Cummings-Browne said it was usually quiche lorraine or mushroom quiche.

Agatha said firmly that she would contribute her favourite spinach quiche.

Mrs. Cummings-Browne laughed. If she laughs like that again, I really will slap her, thought Agatha, particularly as Mrs. Cummings-Browne followed up the laugh by saying that Mrs. Cartwright always won.

Agatha was to remember later that there had been a certain stillness about Mr. Cummings-Browne when Mrs. Cartwright's name was mentioned, but for the present, she had the bit between her teeth. Her own quiche, said Agatha, was famous for its delicacy of taste and lightness of pastry. Besides, a spirit of competition was what was needed in the village. Very bad for morale to have the same woman winning year in and year out. Agatha was good at emanating emotional blackmail without precisely saying anything direct. She made jokes about how dreadfully expensive the meal was while all the time her bearlike brown eyes hammered home the message: "You owe me for this dinner."

But journalists as a rule belong to the kind of people who are born feeling guilty. Obviously the Cummings-Brownes were made of sterner stuff. As Agatha was preparing to pay the bill notes slowly counted out instead of credit card to emphasize the price her guests stayed her hand by ordering large brandies for themselves.

Despite all they had drunk, they remained as sober-looking as they had been when the meal started. Agatha asked about the villagers. Mrs. Cummings-Browne said they were pleasant enough and they did what they could for them, all delivered in a lady-of-the-manor tone. They asked Agatha about herself and she replied briefly. Agatha had never trained herself to make social chit-chat. She was only used to selling a product or asking people all about themselves to soften them up so that she could eventually sell that product.

They finally went out into the soft dark night. The wind had died and the air held a promise of summer to come. Mr. Cummings-Browne drove his Range Rover slowly through the green lanes leading back to Carsely.

A fox slid across the road in front of the lights, rabbits skittered for safety, and bird cherry, just beginning to blossom, starred the hedgerows. Loneliness again gripped Agatha. It was a night for friends, for pleasant company, not a night to be with such as the Cummings-Brownes. He parked outside his own front door and said to Agatha, "Find your way all right from here?"

"No," said Agatha crossly. The least you could do is to run me home."

"Lose the use of your legs if you go on like this," he said nastily, but after giving an impatient little sigh, he drove her to her cottage.

I must leave a light on in future, thought Agatha as she looked at her dark cottage. A light would be welcoming. Before getting out of the car, she asked him exactly how to go about entering the competition, and after he had told her she climbed down and, without saying good night, went into her lonely cottage.

The next day, as instructed, she entered her name in the quiche-competition book in the school hall. The voices of the schoolchildren were raised in song in some classroom: To my hey down-down, to my ho down-down." So they still sang

"Among the Leaves So Green-O', thought Agatha.

She looked around the barren hall. Trestle-tables were set against one wall and there was a rostrum at the far end. Hardly a setting for ambitious achievement.

She then got out her car and drove straight to London this time, much as she loathed and dreaded the perils of the motor ways She parked in the street at Chelsea's World's End where she had lived such a short time ago, glad that she had not surrendered her resident's parking card.

There had been a sharp shower of rain. How wonderful London smelled, of wet concrete, diesel fumes, petrol fumes, litter, hot coffee, fruit and fish, all the smells that meant home to Agatha.

She made her way to The Quicherie, a delicatessen that specialized in quiches. She bought a large spinach quiche, stowed it in the boot of her car, and then took herself off to the Caprice for lunch, where she ate their salmon fish cakes and relaxed among what she considered as 'my people', the rich and famous, without it ever crossing her mind that she did not know any of them. Then to Fenwick's in Bond Street to buy a new dress, not print (heaven forbid!) but a smart scarlet wool dress with a white collar.

Back to Carsely in the evening light and into the kitchen. She removed the quiche from its shop wrappings, put her own ready printed label, "Spinach Quiche, Mrs. Raisin', on it, and wrapped it with deliberate amateurishness in thin clear plastic. She surveyed it with satisfaction. It would be the best there. The Quicherie was famous for its quiches.

She carried it up to the school hall on Friday evening, following a straggling line of women bearing flowers, jam, cakes, quiches and biscuits. The competition entries had to be in the school hall the evening before the day of the competition, for some of the women worked at the weekends. As usual, a few of the women hailed her with "Evening. Bit warmer. Maybe get a bit o' sun." How would they cope with some horror like an earthquake or a hurricane? Agatha wondered.

Might shut them up in future as the mild vagaries of the Cotswolds weather rarely threw up anything dramatic or so Agatha believed.

She found she was quite nervous and excited when she went to bed that night. Ridiculous! It was only a village competition.

The next day dawned blustery and cold, with wind tearing down the last of the cherry blossom from the gardens and throwing the petals like bridal showers over the villagers as they crowded into the school hall.

A surprisingly good village band was playing selections from My Fair Lady, ages of the musicians ranging from eight to eighty. The air smelt sweetly from the flower arrangements and from single blooms set proudly in their thin vases for the flower competition: narcissi and daffodils. There was even a tea-room set up in a side-room with dainty sandwiches and home-made cakes.

"Of course Mrs. Cartwright will win the quiche competition," said a voice near Agatha.

Agatha swung round. "Why do you say that?"

"Because Mr. Cummings-Browne is the judge," said the woman and moved off to be lost in the crowd.

Lord Pendlebury, a thin elderly gentleman who looked like an Edwardian ghost, and who had estates on the hill above the village, was to announce the winner of the quiche competition, although Mr. Cummings-Browne was to be the judge.

Agatha's quiche had a thin slice cut out of it, as had the others. She looked at it smugly. Three cheers for The Quicherie. The spinach quiche was undoubtedly the best one there. The fact that she was expected to have cooked it herself did not trouble her conscience at all.

The band fell silent. Lord Pendlebury was helped up to the platform in front of the band.

The winner of the Great Quiche Competition is ... " quavered Lord Pendlebury. He fumbled with a sheaf of notes, picked them up, tidied them, took out a pair of pince-nez, looked again helplessly at the papers, until Mr. Cummings-Browne pointed to the right sheet of paper.

"Bless me. Yes, yes, yes," wittered Lord Pendlebury. "Harrumph! The winner is ... Mrs. Cartwright."

"Snakes and bastards," muttered Agatha.

Fuming, she watched as Mrs. Cartwright, a gypsy-looking woman, climbed up on to the stage to receive the award. It was a cheque. "How much?" Agatha asked the woman next to her.

Ten pounds."

Ten pounds!" exclaimed Agatha, who had not even asked before what the prize was to be but had naively assumed it would be in the form of a silver cup. She had imagined such a cup with her name engraved on it resting on her mantelpiece. "How's she supposed to celebrate by spending that? Dinner at Mcdonald's?"

"It's the thought that counts," said the woman vaguely. "You are Mrs. Raisin. You have just bought Budgen's cottage. I am Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar's wife. Can we hope to see you at church on Sunday?" "Why Budgen?" asked Agatha. "I bought the cottage from a Mr. Alder." "It has always been Budgen's cottage," said the vicar's wife. "He died fifteen years ago, of course, but to us in the village, it will always be Budgen's cottage. He was a great character. At least you do not have to worry about your dinner tonight, Mrs. Raisin. Your quiche looks delicious."

"Oh, throw it away!" snarled Agatha. "Mine was the best. This competition was rigged."

Mrs. Bloxby gave Agatha a look of sad reproach before moving away.

Agatha experienced a qualm of unease. She should not have been bitchy about the competition to the vicar's wife. Mrs. Bloxby seemed a nice sort of woman. But Agatha had only been used to three lines of conversation: either ordering her staff about, pressuring the media for publicity, or being oily to clients. A faint idea was stirring somewhere in her brain that Agatha Raisin was not a very lovable person.

That evening, she went down to the Red Lion. It was indeed a beautiful pub, she thought, looking about: low raftered, dark, smoky; with stone floors, bowls of spring flowers, log fire blazing, comfortable chairs and solid tables at proper drinking and eating height instead of those 'cocktail' knee-high tables which meant you had to crouch to get the food to your mouth. Some men were standing at the bar. They smiled and nodded to her and then went on talking. Agatha noticed a slate with meals written on it and ordered lasagne and chips from the landlord's pretty daughter before carrying her drink over to a corner table. She felt as she had done as a child, longing to be part of all this old English country tradition of beauty and safety and yet being on the outside, looking in. But had she, she wondered, ever really been part of anything except the ephemeral world of PR? If she dropped dead, right now, on this pub floor, was there anyone to mourn her? Her parents were dead. God alone knew where her husband was, and he would certainly not mourn her. Shit, this gin's depressing stuff, thought Agatha angrily, and ordered a glass of white wine instead to wash down her lasagne, which she noticed had been micro-waved so that it stuck firmly to the bottom of the dish.

But the chips were good. Life did have its small comforts after all.

Mrs. Cummings-Browne was preparing to go out to a rehearsal of Blithe Spirit at the church hall. She was producing it for the Carsely Dramatic Society and trying unsuccessfully to iron out their Gloucestershire accents. "Why can't any of them achieve a proper accent?" she mourned as she collected her handbag. They sound as if they're mucking out pigs or whatever one does with pigs. Speaking of pigs, I brought home that horrible Raisin woman's quiche. She flounced off in a huff and said we were to throw it away. I thought you might like a piece for supper. I've left a couple of slices on the kitchen counter. I've had a lot of cakes and tea this afternoon. That'll do me." T don't think I'll eat anything either," said Mr. Cummings-Browne.

"Well, if you change your mind, pop the quiche in the microwave."

Mr. Cummings-Browne drank a stiff whisky and watched television, regretting that the hour was before nine in the evening, which meant no hope of any full frontal nudity, the powers-that-be having naively thought all children to be in bed by nine o'clock, after which time pornography was permissible, although anyone who wrote in to describe it as such was a fuddy-duddy who did not appreciate true art. So he watched a nature programme instead and consoled himself with copulating animals. He had another whisky and felt hungry. He remembered the quiche. It had been fun watching Agatha Raisin's face at the competition. She really had wanted her dinner back, silly woman.

People like Agatha Raisin, that sort of middle-aged yuppie, lowered the tone decidedly. He went into the kitchen and put two slices of quiche in the microwave and opened a bottle of claret and poured himself a glass. Then, putting quiche and wine on a tray, he carried the lot through to the living-room and settled down again in front of the television.

It was two hours later and just before the promised gang rape in a movie called Deep in the Heart that his mouth began to burn as if it were on fire. He felt deathly ill. He fell out of his chair and writhed in convulsions on the floor and was dreadfully sick. He lost consciousness as he was fighting his way toward the phone, ending up stretched out behind the sofa.

Mrs. Cummings-Browne arrived home sometime after midnight. She did not see her husband because he was lying behind the sofa, nor did she notice any of the pools of vomit because only one dim lamp was burning.

She muttered in irritation to see the lamp still lit and the television still on. She switched both off.

Then she went up to her bedroom it had been some time since she had shared one with her husband -removed her make-up, undressed and soon was fast asleep.

Mrs. Simpson arrived early the next morning, grumbling under her breath. Her work schedule had been disrupted. First the change-over to cleaning Mrs. Raisin's place, and now Mrs. Cummings-Browne had asked her to clean on Sunday morning because the Cummings-Brownes were going off on holiday to Tuscany on the Monday and Vera Cummings-Browne had wanted the place cleaned before they left. But if she worked hard, she could still make it to her Sunday job in Evesham by ten.

She let herself in with the spare key which was kept under the doormat, made a cup of coffee for herself, drank it at the kitchen table and then got to work, starting with the kitchen. She would have liked to do the bedrooms first but she knew the Cummings-Brownes slept late. If they were not up by the time she had finished the living-room, then she would need to rouse them. She finished cleaning the kitchen in record time and then went into the living-room, wrinkling her nose at the sour smell. She went round behind the sofa to open the window and let some fresh air in and her foot struck the dead body of Mr. Cummings-Browne.

His face was contorted and bluish. He was lying doubled up. Mrs. Simpson backed away, both hands to her mouth. She thought vaguely that Mrs. Cummings-Browne must be out. The phone was on the window-ledge.

Plucking up her courage, she leaned across the dead body and dialled 999 and asked for the police and an ambulance. She then shut herself in the kitchen to await their arrival. It never occurred to her to check if he was really dead or to go out and get immediate help. She sat at the kitchen table, hands tightly clasped as though in prayer, frozen with shock.

The local policeman was the first to arrive. Police Constable Fred Griggs was a fat, jolly man, unused to coping with much more than looking for stolen cars in the tourist season and charging the odd drunken driver.

He was bending over the body when the ambulance men arrived.

In the middle of all the commotion, Mrs. Cummings Browne descended the stairs, holding a quilted dressing-gown tightly about her.

When it was explained to her that her husband was dead, she clutched hold of the newel-post at the foot of the stairs and said in a stunned voice, "But he can't be. He wasn't even here when I got home. He had high blood pressure. It must have been a stroke."

But Fred Griggs had noticed the pools of dried vomit and the distorted bluish face of the corpse. "We can't touch anything," he said to the ambulance men. "I'm pretty damn sure it's poisoning."

Agatha Raisin went to church that Sunday morning. She could not remember having been inside a church before, but going to church, she believed, was one of those things one did in a village. The service was early, eight thirty, the vicar having to go on afterwards to preach at two other churches in the neighbourhood of Carsely.

She saw P.C. Griggs's car standing outside the Cummings-Brownes' and an ambulance. "I wonder what happened," said Mrs. Bloxby. "Mr. Griggs is not saying anything. I hope nothing has happened to poor Mr. Cummings-Browne." "I hope something has," said Agatha. "Couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow," and she marched on into the gloom of the church of St. Jude and left the vicar's wife staring after her. Agatha collected a prayer-book and a hymn-book and took a pew at the back of the church.

She was wearing her new red dress and on her head was a broad-brimmed black straw hat decorated with red poppies. As the congregation began to file in, Agatha realized she was overdressed. Everyone else was in casual clothes.

During the first hymn, Agatha could hear the wail of approaching police sirens. What on earth had happened? If one of the Cummings-Brownes had just dropped dead, surely it did not require more than an ambulance and the local policeman. The church was small, built in the fourteenth century, with fine stained-glass windows and beautiful flower arrangements. The old Book of Common Prayer was used. There were readings from the Old and New Testaments while Agatha fidgeted in the pew and wondered if she could escape outside to find out what was going on.

The vicar climbed into the pulpit to begin his sermon and all Agatha's thoughts of escape disappeared. The Reverend Alfred Bloxby was a small, thin, ascetic-looking man but he had a compelling presence. In a beautifully modulated voice he began to preach and his sermon was "Love Thy Neighbour'. To Agatha, it seemed as if the whole sermon was directed at her. We were too weak and powerless to alter world affairs, he said, but if each one behaved to his or her neighbours with charity and courtesy and kindness, then the ripples would spread outwards. Charity began at home. Agatha thought of bribing Mrs. Simpson away from Mrs. Barr and squirmed. When communion came round, she stayed where she was, not knowing what the ritual involved.

Finally, with a feeling of release, she joined in the last hymn, "My Country

"Tis of Thee', and impatiently shuffled out, giving the vicar's hand a perfunctory shake, not hearing his words of welcome to the village as her eyes fastened on the police cars filling the small space outside the Cummings-Brownes' house.

P.C. Griggs was on duty outside, warding off all questions with a placid

"Can't say anything now, I'm sure."

Agatha went slowly home. She ate some breakfast and picked up an Agatha Christie mystery and tried to read, but could not focus on the words. What did fictional mysteries matter when there was a real-live one in the village? Had Mrs. Cummings-Browne hit him on the top of his pointy head with the poker?

She threw down the book and went along to the Red Lion. It was buzzing with rumour and speculation. Agatha found herself in the centre of a group of villagers eagerly discussing the death. To her disappointment, she learned that Mr. Cummings-Browne had suffered from high blood pressure.

"But it can't be natural causes," protested Agatha. "All those police cars!"

"Oh, we likes to do things thoroughly in Gloucestershire," said a large beefy man. "Not like Lunnon, where there's people dropping dead like flies every minute. My shout. What you ', Mrs. Raisin?"

Agatha ordered a gin and tonic. It was all very pleasurable to be in the centre of this cosy group. When the pub finally closed its doors at two in the afternoon, Agatha felt quite tipsy as she walked home.

The heavy Cotswolds air, combined with the unusually large amount she had drunk, sent her to sleep. When she awoke, she thought that Cummings-Browne had probably had an accident and it was not worth finding out about anyway. Agatha Christie now seemed much more interesting than anything that could happen in Carsley, and Agatha read until bedtime.

In the morning, she decided to go for a walk. Walks in the Cotswolds are all neatly signposted. She chose one at the end of the village beyond the council houses, opening a gate that led into some woods.

Trees with new green leaves arched over her and primroses nestled among their roots. There was a sound of rushing water from a hidden stream over to her left. The night's frost was slowly melting in shafts of sunlight which struck down through the trees. High above, a blackbird sang a heart-breaking melody and the air was sweet and fresh. The path led her out of the trees and along the edge of a field of new corn, bright green and shiny, turning in the breeze like the fur of some huge green cat. A lark shot up to the heavens, reminding Agatha of her youth, in the days when even the wastelands of Birmingham were full of larks and butterflies, the days before chemical spraying. She strode out, feeling healthy and well and very much alive.

By following the signs, she walked through fields and more woods, finally emerging on to the road that led down into Carsely. As she walked down under the green tunnels formed by the branches of the high hedges which met overhead and she saw the village lying below her, all her euphoria caused by healthy walking and fresh air left, to be replaced by an inexplicable sense of dread. She felt she was walking down into a sort of grave where Agatha Raisin would lie buried alive.

Again she was plagued with restlessness and loneliness.

This could not go on. The dream of her life was not what she had expected. She could sell up, although the market was still not very good. Perhaps she could travel. She had never travelled extensively before, only venturing each year on one of the more expensive packaged holidays designed for single people who did not want to mix with the riffraff rambling holidays in France, painting holidays in Spain, that sort of thing.

In the village street, a local woman gave her a broad smile and Agatha wearily waited for that usual greeting of

"Mawning," wondering what the woman would do or say if she replied, "Get stuffed."

But to her surprise, the woman stopped, resting her shopping basket on one broad hip, and said, "Police be looking for you. Plain clothes."

"Don't know what they want with me," said Agatha uneasily.

"Better go and find out, m'dear."

Agatha hurried on, her mind in a turmoil. What could they want? Her driving licence was in order. Of course, there were those books she had never got around to returning to the Chelsea library ... As she approached her cottage, she saw Mrs. Barr standing in her front garden, staring avidly at a small group of three men who were waiting outside Agatha's cottage. When she saw Agatha, she scurried indoors and slammed the door but immediately took up a watching position at the window.

A thin, cadaverous man approached Agatha. "Mrs. Raisin? I am Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes. May we have a word with you?

Indoors."

Chapter Three.

Agatha led them indoors. Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes introduced a dark, silent man beside him as Detective Sergeant Friend, and a young tubby oriental who looked like a Buddha as Detective Constable Wong.

Agatha sat in an armchair by the fireplace and the three sat down on the sofa, side by side. "We are here to ask you about your quiche, Mrs. Raisin," said Wilkes. "I understand the Cummings-Brownes took it home. What was in it?"

"What's all this about?" demanded Agatha.

"Just answer my questions," said Wilkes stolidly.

What was in a quiche? wondered Agatha desperately. "Eggs, flour, milk and spinach," she volunteered hopefully.

Detective Constable Wong spoke up. He had a soft Gloucestershire accent. "Perhaps it would be best if Mrs. Raisin took us into her kitchen and showed us the ingredients."

The three detectives promptly stood up and towered over Agatha. Agatha got up, registering that her knees were trembling, and led the way into the kitchen while they crowded in after her.

Under their watching eyes, she opened the cupboards. "Strange," said Agatha. "I seem to have used everything up. I am very thrifty."

Wong, who had been watching her with amusement, said suddenly, "If you will write down the recipe, Mrs. Raisin, I'll run down to Harvey's and buy the ingredients and then you can show us how you baked it."

Agatha shot him a look of loathing. She took down a cookery book called French Provincial Cooking, opened it, wincing at the faint crack from its hitherto unopened spine, and looked up the index. She found the required recipe and wrote down a list of the ingredients. Wong took the list from her and went out.

"Now will you tell me what this is about?" asked Agatha.

"In a moment," said Wilkes stolidly.

Had Agatha not been so very frightened, she would have screamed at him that she had a right to know, but she weakly made a jug of instant coffee and suggested they sit in the living-room and drink it while she waited for Wong.

Having got rid of them, she studied the recipe. Provided she did exactly as instructed, she should be able to get it right. She had meant to take up baking and so she had scales and measures, thank God.

Wong returned with a brown paper bag full of groceries.

"Join the others in the living-room!" ordered Agatha, ' I'll let you know when it is ready."

Wong sat down in a kitchen chair. "I like kitchens," he said amiably.

"I'll watch you cook."

Agatha shot him a look of pure hatred from her little brown eyes as she heated the oven and got to work. There were old ladies being mugged all over the country, she thought savagely. Had this wretched man nothing better to do? But he seemed to have infinite patience. He watched her closely and then, when she finally put the quiche in the oven, he rose and went to join the others. Agatha stayed where she was, her mind in a turmoil. She could hear the murmur of voices from the other room.

It was like being back at school, she thought. She remembered the headmistress telling them that they all must open their lockers for inspection without explaining why. Oh, the dread of opening her own locker in case there was something in it that shouldn't have been there. A policewoman had silently gone through everything. No one explained what was wrong. No one said anything. Agatha could still remember the silent, frightened girls, the stern and silent teachers, the competent policewoman. And then one of the girls was led away.

They never saw her again. They assumed she had been expelled because of whatever had been found in her locker. But no one had called at the girl's home to ask her. Judgement had been passed on her by that mysterious world of adults and she had been spirited out of their lives as if by some divine retribution. They had gone on with their schooldays.

Now she felt like a child again, hemmed in by her own guilt and an accusing silence. She glanced at the clock. When had she put it in?

She opened the oven door. There it stood, raised and golden and perfect. She heaved a sigh of relief and took it out just as Wong came back into the kitchen.

"We'll leave it to cool for a little," he said. He opened his notebook. "Now about the Cummings-Brownes. You dined with them at the Feathers. What did you have? Mmmm. And then? What did they drink?"

And so it went on while out of the corner of her eye, Agatha saw her golden-brown quiche sink slowly down into its pastry shell.

Wong finally closed his notebook and called the others in. "We'll just cut a slice," he said. Agatha wielded a knife and spatula and drew out one small soggy slice.

"What did he die of?" asked Agatha desperately.

"Cowbane," said Friend.

"Cowbane?" Agatha stared at them. Ts that something like mad cow disease?" "No," said Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes heavily. "It's a poisonous plant, not all that common, but it's found in several parts of the British Isles, including the West Midlands, and we are in the West Midlands, Mrs. Raisin. On examining the contents of the deceased's stomach, it was shown he had eaten quiche and drunk wine just before his death. The green vegetable stuff was identified as cow-bane. The poisonous substance it contains is an unsaturated higher alcohol, cicutoxin."

"So you see, Mrs. Raisin," came the mild voice of Wong, "Mrs. Cummings-Browne thinks your quiche poisoned her husband ... that is, if you ever made that quiche."

Agatha glared out of the window, wishing they would all disappear.

"Mrs. Raisin!" She swung round. Detective Constable Wong's slanted brown eyes were on a level with her own. Wasn't he too small for the police force? she thought in consequently "Mrs. Raisin," said Bill Wong softly, ' is my humble opinion that you have never baked a quiche or a cake in your life. Your cookery books had obviously never been opened before. Some of your cooking utensils still had the prices stuck to them. So will you begin at the beginning? There is no need to lie so long as you are innocent." "Will this come out in court?" asked Agatha miserably, wondering if she could be sued by the village committee for having thrust a Quicherie quiche into their competition.

Wilkes's voice was heavy with threat. "Only if we think it necessary."

Again, Agatha's memory carried her back to her schooldays. She had bribed one of the girls to write an essay for her with two chocolate bars and a red scarf. Unfortunately, the girl, a leading light in the Young People in Christ movement, had confessed all to the headmistress and so Agatha had been summoned and told to tell the truth.

In a small, almost childish voice, quite unlike her usual robust tones, she confessed going up to Chelsea and buying the quiche. Wong was grinning happily and she could have wrung his neck. Wilkes demanded the bill for the quiche and Agatha found it at the bottom of the rubbish bin under several empty frozen food packets and gave it to him.

They said they would check her story out.

Agatha hid indoors for the rest of that day, feeling like a criminal.

She would have stayed in hiding the next day had not the cleaner, Mrs. Simpson, arrived, reminding Agatha that she had promised her lunch.

Agatha scuttled down to Harvey's and bought some cold meat and salad.

Nothing seemed to have changed. People talked about the weather. The death of Cummings-Browne might never have happened.

Agatha returned to find Mrs. Simpson down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor. A sign of her extreme low state was that Agatha's eyes filled with weak tears at the sight. When had she last seen a woman scrubbing a floor instead of slopping it around with a mop? She had hired a succession of cleaning girls through an agency in London, mostly foreign girls or out-of-work actresses who seemed expert at producing an effect of cleanliness without actually ever getting down to the nitty-gritty.

Mrs. Simpson looked up from her cleaning. "I found him, you know," she said. "I found the body."

"I don't want to talk about it," said Agatha hurriedly and Mrs. Simpson grinned as she wrung out the floor cloth.

"That's a mercy, for to tell the truth, I don't like talking about it.

Rather get on with the work."

Agatha retreated to the living-room and then, when Mrs. Simpson moved upstairs, she prepared her a cold lunch, put it on the kitchen table beside an envelope containing Mrs. Simpson's money, and called upstairs, "I'm going out. I have a spare key. Just lock up and put the key through the letter-box." She received a faint affirmative, shouted over the noise of the vacuum cleaner.

Agatha got in her car and drove up and out of the village. Where should she go? Market day in Moreton-in-Marsh. That would do. She battled in the busy town to find a parking place and then joined the throngs crowding the stalls. The Cotswolds appeared to be a very fecund place. There were young women with babies and toddlers everywhere, pushing them in push chairs which they thrust against the legs of the childless with aplomb. She had read an article once where a young mother had explained how she had suffered from acute agoraphobia when her child had grown out of the push chair It certainly seemed to give the mothers an aggressive edge as, like so many Boadiceas, they propelled their chariots through the market crowd.

Agatha bought a geranium for the kitchen window, fresh fish for dinner, potatoes and cauliflower. She was determined to cook everything herself. No more frozen food. After depositing her shopping in the car, she ate lunch in the Market House Restaurant, bought scent in the chemist's, a blouse at one of the stalls, and then, at four o'clock, as the market was closing down, she reluctantly returned to her car and took the road home.

Mrs. Simpson had left a jug of wild flowers on the middle of the kitchen table. Bless the woman. All Agatha's guilt about having lured her away from Mrs. Barr evaporated. The woman was a queen among cleaners.

The following morning there was a knock at the door and Agatha groaned inwardly. Anyone else, she thought bitterly, would not be depressed, would expect some friend to be standing on the doorstep. But not Agatha Raisin. She knew it could only be the police.

Detective Constable Wong stood there. "This is an informal call," he said. "May I come in?"

"I suppose so," said Agatha ungraciously. "I was just about to have a glass of sherry, but I won't ask you to join me."

"Why not?" he said with a grin. "I'm off duty."

Agatha poured two glasses of sherry, threw some imitation logs on the fire and lit them. "What now?" she asked. "And what do I call you?"

"My name is Bill Wong. You may call me Bill."

"An appropriate name. If you were older, I could call you the Old Bill. Now, what about the quiche?" "You're off the hook," said Bill. "We checked out your story. Mr. Economides, the owner of The Quicherie, remembers selling you that quiche. He cannot understand what happened. He buys his vegetables from the greengrocer's across the road. Greengrocer goes to the market at Nine Elms every morning to buy his stock. Stuff comes from all over the country and abroad. Cowbane must have got in with the spinach.

It's a tragic accident. Of course, we had to tell Mrs. Cummings-Browne where the quiche came from."

Agatha groaned.

"She might have accused you of murder otherwise."

"But look here," protested Agatha, ' could have killed her husband by putting cow bane in my quiche."

"Like most of the British population, I'd swear she couldn't tell a piece of cow bane from a palm tree," said Bill. "Also, it couldn't have been you. When you left that quiche, you had no idea it would be taken home and eaten by Cummings-Browne. So it couldn't have been you.

And it couldn't have been Mrs. Cummings-Browne. Poisoning like that would need to be a cold-blooded, premeditated act. No, it was a horrible accident. Cowbane was only in part of the quiche."

"I feel sorry for Mr. Economides," said Agatha. "Mrs. Cummings-Browne could sue him." "She has generously said she will not press charges. She is a very rich woman in her own right. She has the money. She had nothing to gain from his death."

"But why did Cummings-Browne not drop dead at the tasting when he had a slice of it? Perhaps someone substituted another quiche. Or ... let me think ... wouldn't there have been some cow bane in that wedge, the juice, for instance?" "Yes, we wondered about that," said Bill. "Mrs. Cummings-Browne said her husband did feel a bit queasy after the tasting but she put that down to the amount of pre competition drinks he had been knocking back." Agatha asked all about the case, all the details she had not asked before. He had been found dead in the morning. Then why, asked Agatha, had Mrs. Cummings-Browne gone straight up to bed?

"Oh, that was because her husband was usually late, drinking at the Red Lion."

"But that precious pair or rather, it was Mrs. Cummings-Browne told me they wouldn't be seen dead in the Red Lion. Mind you, that was before they socked me for a disgracefully expensive load of rubbish at the Feathers."

"He drinks at the Red Lion, all right, but Mrs. Cummings-Browne owns twenty-five percent of the Feathers."

The cow! I'll be damned. Anyway, how did you guess I never cooked that quiche? For you did, you know, even before I baked one."

"The minute I saw there wasn't a single baking ingredient in the kitchen I was sure." He laughed. "I asked you to make one to be absolutely sure. You should have seen your face!"

"Oh, very funny."

He looked at her curiously. What an odd woman she was, he thought. Her shiny brown, well-groomed hair was not per med but cut in a sort of Dutch bob that somehow suited her square, rather truculent face. Her body was square and stocky and her legs surprisingly good. "What," asked Bill, ' so special to a recently ex-high-powered businesswoman like yourself about winning a village competition?"

"I felt out of place," said Agatha bleakly. "I wanted to make my mark on the village."

He laughed happily, his eyes closing into slits. "You've done just that. Mrs. Cummings-Browne knows now you cheated and so does Fred Griggs, the local bobby, and he's a prize gossip."

Agatha felt too humiliated to speak. So much for her dream home. She would need to sell up. How could she face anyone in the village?

He looked at her sympathetically. "If you want to make your mark on the village, Mrs. Raisin, you could try becoming popular."

Agatha looked at him in amazement. Fame, money and power were surely the only things needed to make one's mark on the world.

"It comes slowly," he said. "All you have to do is start to like people. If they like you back, regard it as a bonus."

Really, what odd types they had in the police force these days, thought Agatha, surprised. Did she dislike people? Of course she didn't.

Well, so far the only people she had taken a dislike to in Yokel Country, she thought savagely, were old fart-face next door and Mrs. Cummings-Browne and the dear deceased.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Twenty-three," said Bill.

"Chinese?"

"Half. Father is Hong Kong Chinese and Mother is from Evesham. I was brought up in Gloucestershire." He rose to go but for some reason Agatha wanted him to stay.

"Are you married?" she asked.

"No, Mrs. Raisin." "Well, sit down for a moment," said Agatha urgently, ' tell me about yourself."

Again a flicker of sympathy appeared in his eyes. He sat down and began to talk about his short career in the police force and Agatha listened, soothed by his air of certainty and calm. Unknown to her, it was the start of an odd friendship. "So," he said at last, "I really must go. Case finished. Case solved. Nasty accident. Life goes on."

The next day, to escape from the eyes of the villagers, eyes that would accuse her of being a cheat, Agatha drove to London. She was anxious about Mr. Economides. Agatha, a regular take-away eater, had frequented Mr. Economides's shop over the years. Perhaps some of Bill Wong's remarks had struck home, but Agatha had realized Mr. Economides, although their relationship had been that of customer and salesman, was as near a friend as she had got. The shop contained two small tables and chairs for customers who liked to have coffee, and when the shop was quiet, Mr. Economides had often treated Agatha to a coffee and told her tales of his numerous family.

But when she arrived, the shop was busy and Mr. Economides was guarded in his answers as his competent hairy hands packed quiche and cold cuts for the customers. Yes, Mrs. Cummings-Browne had called in person to assure him that she would not be suing him. Yes, it had been a tragic accident. And now, if Mrs. Raisin would excuse him ... Agatha left, feeling rather flat. London, which had so recently enclosed her like a many-coloured coat, now stretched out in lonely streets full of strangers all about her. She went to Foyle's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road and looked up a book on poisonous plants. She studied a picture of cow bane It was an innocuous-looking plant with a ridged stem and flower heads composed of groups of small white flowers.

She was about to buy the book when she suddenly thought, why bother?

It had been an accident, a sad accident.

She pottered around a few other shops before returning to her car and joining the long line of traffic that was belching its way out of London. Reluctant to return to the village before dark, she cut off the motorway and headed for Oxford, where she parked her car in St. Giles and made her way to the Randolph Hotel for tea. She was the only customer, odd in that most popular of hotels. She settled back in a huge sofa and drank tea and ate crumpets served to her by a young maiden with a Pre-Raphaelite face. Faintly from outside came the roar of traffic ploughing up Beaumont Street past the Ashmolean Museum. The hotel had a dim ecclesiastical air, as if haunted by the damp souls of dead deans. She pushed the last crumpet around on her plate. She did not feel like eating it. She needed a purpose in life, she thought, an aim. Would it not be marvelous if Cummings-Browne turned out to have been murdered after all? And she, Agatha Raisin, solved the case? She would become known throughout the Cots-wolds. People would come to her. She would be respected. Had it been an accident? What sort of marriage had the Cummings-Brownes really had where she could come home and trot off to bed while her husband lay dead behind the sofa? Why separate bedrooms? Bill Wong had told her that. Why should Mr. Economides's excellent and famous quiche suddenly contain cow bane when over the years he had not had one complaint? Perhaps she could ask around. Just a few questions. No harm in that.

Feeling more cheerful than she had for a long time, she paid the bill and tipped the gentle waitress lavishly. The sun was sinking low behind the trees as she motored through the village and turned off at Lilac Lane. She fished out the spare door key and then she heard her phone ringing, sharp and insistent.

She swore under her breath as she fumbled with the key.

It was the first time her phone had rung. She tumbled in the door and felt her way towards it in the gloom.

"Roy here," came the familiar mincing voice of her ex-assistant.

"How lovely to hear from you!" cried Agatha in tones she had never used before to the young man.

"Fact is, Aggie, I was hoping I could come down and see you this weekend."

"Of course. You're welcome."

"I've got this Australian friend, Steve, wants to see the countryside.

Do you mind if he comes too?"

"More the merrier. Are you driving here?"

Thought we'd take the train and come down Friday night." "Wait a bit," said Agatha, "I've got a timetable here." She fumbled in her bag. "Yes, there's a through train leaves Paddington at six twenty in the evening. Don't need to change anywhere. Gets in at Moreton-in-Marsh'

"Where?"

"Moreton-in-Marsh."

"Too Agatha Christie for words, darling."

"And I'll meet you at the station."

"It's the May Day celebrations at the weekend, Aggie, and Steve wants to look at maypoles and morris dancers and all that sort of thing."

"I haven't had time to look at any posters, Roy. I've been involved in a death."

"Did one of the clodhoppers try to mumble with you with his gruttock, luv?"

"Nothing like that. I'll tell you all about it when I see you."

Agatha whistled to herself as she cracked open one of her cookery books and began to prepare the fish she had bought the day before. There seemed to be so many exotic recipes. Surely one just fried the stuff.

So she did and by the time it was ready, realized she had not put the potatoes on to boil or cooked the cauliflower. She threw a packet of microwave able chips in the micro and opened a can of bright-green peas. It all tasted delicious to Agatha's undemanding palate when she finally sat down to eat.

The next day, she called in at Harvey's and studied the posters at the door. Yes, there was to be morris dancing, maypole dancing, and a fair in the village on the Saturday. People nodded and smiled to her. No one said '' or anything dreadful like that. Cheerfully Agatha trotted home but was waylaid by Mrs. Barr before she could get to her own garden gate.

"I thought you would have been at the inquest yesterday at Mircester," said Mrs. Barr, her eyes cold and watchful.

"No one asked me," said Agatha. "It was an accident. I suppose the police evidence was enough."

"Not enough for me," said Mrs. Barr coolly. "Nothing came out about the way you cheated at that competition."

Curiosity overcame rancour in Agatha's bosom. "Why not? Surely it was mentioned that it had been bought in a shop in Chelsea?"

"Oh, yes, that came out but not a word of condemnation for you being a cheat and a liar. Poor Mrs. Cummings-Browne broke down completely. We don't need your sort in this village."

"And what was the verdict?"

"Accidental death, but you killed him, Agatha Raisin. You killed him with your nasty foreign quiche, just as much as if you had knifed him."

Agatha's eyes blazed. "I'll kill you, you malicious harridan, if you don't bugger off."

She marched to her own cottage, blinking tears from her eyes, appalled at her own shock and dismay and weakness.

Thank God Roy was coming. Dear Roy, thought Agatha sentimentally, forgetting she had always considered him a tiresomely effeminate young man whom she would have sacked had he not had a magic touch with the peculiar world of pop music.

There came a knock at the door and Agatha cringed, wondering if some other nasty local was about to berate her. But when she opened it, it was Bill Wong who stood on the step.

"Came to tell you about the inquest," he said. "I called yesterday but you were out." "I was seeing friends," said Agatha loftily. "In fact, two of them are coming to stay with me for the weekend. But come in."

"What was the Barr female on about?" he asked curiously as he followed Agatha into her kitchen.

"Accusing me of murder," mumbled Agatha, putting groceries away in the cupboards. "Like a coffee?"

"Yes, please. So the inquest is over and Mr. Cummings-Browne is to be cremated and his ashes cast to the four winds on Salisbury Plain in memory of his army days."

"I believe Mrs. Cummings-Browne collapsed at the inquest," said Agatha.

"Yes, yes, she did. Two sugars please and just a dash of milk. Most affecting."

Agatha turned and looked at him, her interest suddenly quickening. "You think she was acting?"

"Maybe. But I was surprised he was so generally mourned. There were quite a lot of ladies there sobbing into their handkerchiefs."

"With their husbands? Or on their own?"

"On their own."

Agatha put a mug of coffee down in front of him, poured one for herself and sat down at the kitchen table opposite him.

"Something's bothering you," said Agatha.

"Oh, the case is closed and I have a lot of work to do. There's an epidemic of joy-riders in Mircester."

"What time did Mrs. Cummings-Browne go to bed, the night her husband died?" asked Agatha.

"Just after midnight or thereabouts."

"But the Red Lion closes sharp at eleven and it's only a few minutes' walk away." "She said he often stayed out late, drinking with friends."

Agatha's eyes were shrewd. "Oho! And weeping women at the inquest.

Don't tell me old jug ears was a philanderer."

"There's no evidence of that."

"And yet Mrs. Cartwright always won the competition. Why?"

"Perhaps her baking was the best." "No one bakes a better quiche than Mr. Economides," said Agatha firmly.

"But you are the in comer. More natural to give a prize to one of the locals."

"Still "I can see from the look in your eye, Mrs. Raisin, that you would like it to be murder after all and so clear your conscience."

"Why did you call to tell me about the inquest?" "I thought you would be interested. There's a paragraph about it in today's Gloucestershire Telegraph." "Have you got it?" demanded Agatha. "Let me see."

He fished in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled newspaper. "Page three."

Agatha turned to page three.

At the coroner's court in Mircester yesterday [she read], a verdict of accidental death by eating poisoned quiche was pronounced. The victim was Mr. Reginald Cummings-Browne, fifty-eight, of Plumtrees Cottage, Carsely. Giving evidence, Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes said that cow bane had been introduced into a spinach quiche by accident. The quiche had been bought by a newcomer to the village, Mrs. Agatha Raisin. She had bought the quiche from a London delicatessen and had entered it in a village competition as her own baking, a competition at which the late Mr. Cummings-Browne was the judge.

The owner of the delicatessen, Mr. Economides, had stated to the police that the cow bane must have become mixed with the spinach by accident. It was stressed that no blame fell on the unfortunate Mr. Economides, a Greek immigrant, aged forty-five, who owns The Quicherie at the World's End, Chelsea.

Mrs. Vera Cummings-Browne, fifty-two, collapsed in court.

Mr. Cummings-Browne was a well-known figure in the Cotswolds ... "And blah, blah, blah," said Agatha, putting the paper down. "Hardly a paragraph." "You're lucky," said Bill Wong. "If there hadn't been riots on that estate in Mircester and two deaths, I am sure some enterprising reporter would have been around to find out about the cheating in comer of Carsley. You got off lucky." Agatha sighed. "I'll never live it down, unless I can prove it was murder."

"Don't go looking for more trouble. That's why there's a police force.

Best let everyone forget about your part in the death. Economides is lucky as well. With all this going on in the Middle East, not one London paper has bothered to pick up the story."

"I still wonder why you came?"

He drained the last of his coffee and stood up.

"Perhaps I like you, Agatha Raisin."

Agatha blushed for about the first time in her life. He gave her an amused look and let himself out.

Chapter Four.

Agatha felt quite nervous as she waited for the Cotswold Express to pull in at Moreton-in-Marsh station. What would this friend of Roy's be like? Would she like him? Agatha's main worry was that the friend might not like her, but she wasn't even going to admit to that thought.

The weather was calm but still cold. The train, oh, miracle of miracles, was actually on time. Roy descended and rushed to embrace her. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt which bore the legend I HAVE BEEN USED. Following him came a slight young man. He had thick black hair and a heavy moustache and wore a light-blue denim jacket, jeans, and high-heeled cowboy boots. Butch Cassidy comes to Moreton-in-Marsh.

This then was Steve. He gave her a limp handshake and stood looking at her with doggy eyes.

"Welcome to the Cotswolds," said Agatha. "Roy tells me you're Australian. On holiday?" "No, I am a systems analyst," said Steve in the careful English accents of an Eliza Doolittle who hadn't yet quite got it. "I work in the City."

"Come along, then," said Agatha. "The car's parked outside. I thought I would take you both out for dinner tonight. I'm not much of a cook."

"And neither you are, ducks," said Roy. He turned to Steve. "We used to call her the queen of the microwave. She ate most of her meals in the office and kept a microwave oven there, awful stuff like the Rajah's Spicy Curry and things like that. Where are we going to eat, Aggie?" "I thought maybe the Red Lion in the village."

She unlocked the car door but Roy stood his ground. "Pub grub?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Steak and kidney pie and chips, sausage and chips, fish and chips and lasagne and chips?"

"Yes, so what?"

"So what? My delicate little stomach cringes at the thought, that's what. My friend Jeremy said there was ever such a good restaurant in the Red Huntsman at Bourton-on-the Hill. Don't you just love these place names, Steve? See, he's drooling already." Steve looked impassive. "They're Basque and do all those sort of fishy dishes. I say, Aggie, have you heard the one about the fire at the Basque football game? They all rushed to get out of the stadium and all got crushed in the exit and do you know what the moral of that is, my loves? Don't put all your Basques in one exit. Get it?"

"Stop wittering," said Agatha. "All right. We'll try the place, although if it's that good they may not have a table left."

But it turned out the Red Huntsman had just received a cancellation before they arrived. The dining-room was elegant and comfortable and the food was excellent. Agatha asked Steve to tell her about his work and then regretted it bitterly as he began a long and boring description of his job in particular and computers in general.

Even Roy grew weary of his friend's monologue and cut across it, saying, "What's all this about you being involved in a death, Aggie?" "It was an awful mistake," said Agatha. "I entered a spinach quiche in a village competition. One of the judges ate it and died of poisoning."

Roy's eyes filled with laughter. "You never could cook, Aggie dear."

"It wasn't my cooking," protested Agatha. "I bought a quiche from The Quicherie in Chelsea and entered that."

Steve looked at her solemnly. "But surely in these sort of home-baking competitions you're supposed to cook the thing yourself?"

"Yes, but'

"But she was trying to pull a fast one as usual," crowed Roy. "Who was the judge and what did he die of?"

"Mr. Cummings-Browne. Cowbane poisoning."

"Struck down by a bane of cows? What is it? One of those peculiar agricultural diseases like swine fever or violet-root rot?"

"No, cow bane is a plant. It must have got mixed up in the spinach that Mr. Economides of the deli used."

Steve put down his fork and looked gravely at Agatha. "So you murdered him."

Roy screeched with laughter. He kicked his heels in the air, fell off the chair and rolled around the dining-room carpet, holding his stomach. The other diners studied him with the polite frozen smiles the English use for threatening behaviour.

"Oh, Aggie," wheezed Roy when his friend had picked up his chair and thrust him back into it, ' are a one!"

Patiently Agatha explained the whole sorry business. It had been a sad accident.

"What do they think about you in the village?" asked Roy, mopping his streaming eyes. "Are they calling you the Borgia of the Cotswolds?"

"It's hard to know what they think," said Agatha. "But I had better sell up. The whole move to Carsely was a terrible mistake." "Wait a minute," said Steve. He carefully extracted a piece of lobster and popped it in his mouth. "Where does this cow bane grow?"

"In the West Midlands, and this, as the police pointed out, is the West Midlands."

Steve frowned. "Does it grow in farms among the regular vegetables?"

Agatha searched her memory for what she had read about cow bane in the book in Foyle's. "It grows in marshy places."

"I've heard the Cotswolds are famous for asparagus and strawberries ..

. oh, and plums and things like that," said Steve. "I read up on it. But not spinach. And how could a marshy plant get in among a field of spinach?" "I don't know," said Agatha, ' as I recall, it grows in other parts of the British Isles as well. I mean, the stuff at Nine Elms comes from abroad and all over the place in Britain."

Steve shook his head slowly, his mouth open as he contemplated another piece of lobster. "Are you wondering if there's an R in the month?" demanded Roy. "You look like one of those faces at the fairground where you've to try and toss a ball into the mouth."

"It just doesn't happen," said Steve.

"What?"

"Well, look here. A field of spinach is harvested. For some reason a marshy plant gets caught up with the spinach. Right? So how come no one else dropped dead? How come it all got into one spinach quiche?

Just the one. Surely a bit of it would have got into another quiche.

Surely another one of this Economides's customers would bite the dust."

"Oh, the police will have looked into all that," said Roy a trifle testily. He felt Steve was taking up too much of the conversation.

Steve shook his head slowly from side to side.

"Look," said Agatha. "Be sensible. Who was to know I would walk off in a huff and leave that quiche? Who would even know that the Cummings-Brownes would take it home? The vicar could have taken it and given it to some old-age pensioner. Lord Pendlebury could have taken it."

"When did you take your quiche to the competition?" asked Steve.

The night before," said Agatha.

"So it was just lying there all night, unattended, in this hall?

Someone could have baked another quiche with cow-bane in it and substituted it for Agatha's quiche."

"We're back to motive," said Agatha. "So say someone substituted a poisoned quiche for mine. Who was to know Cummings-Browne would take it? I didn't even know I was going to walk off and leave it until the last minute." "But it could have been meant for you," said Steve. "Don't you see?

Even if you had won that competition, only a little slice was taken out for the judging, and then you would have taken the rest home." He leaned forward. "Who hates you enough?" Agatha thought uneasily of Mrs. Barr and then shrugged. "This is ridiculous. Do you read Agatha Christie?"

"All the time," said Steve.

"Well, so do I, but delightful as those detective stories are, believe me, murders are usually sudden and violent and take place in cities, some drunken lout of a husband bashing his wife to death. Don't you see, I would like it to be murder!" "Yes, I can see that," said Steve, ' you have been exposed as a cheat!"

"Here, wait a minute'

"But it all looks very odd."

Agatha fell silent. If only she had never tried to win that stupid competition.

Again a feeling of loneliness assailed her as she paid the bill and ushered her guests out into the night. She had a whole weekend in front of her entertaining this precious pair, and yet their very presence emphasized her loneliness. Roy had no real affection for her of any kind. His friend had wanted to see rural England and so he was using her.

Roy pranced around the cottage, looking at everything. "Very cute, Aggie," was his verdict. "Fake horse brasses! "Yeh! Yeh! And all that farm machinery."

"Well, what would you have?" said Agatha crossly.

"I dunno, sweetie. Looks like a stage set. Nothing of Aggie here."

"Perhaps that's understandable," said Steve. "There are people who do not have personalities that transfer to interior decorating. You need to be a homebody."

"You can go off people, you know," commented Agatha waspishly. "Off to bed with both of you. I'm tired. The village festivities don't begin until noon, so you can have a long lie-in."

The next morning Roy took over the cooking when he found Agatha was about to microwave the sausages for breakfast. He whistled happily as he went about the preparations and Agatha told him he would make someone a good wife. "More than you would, Aggie," he said cheerfully.

"It's a wonder your health hasn't crumbled under a weight of microwaved curries."

Steve came down wrapped in a dressing-gown, gold and blue stripes and with the badge of a cricket club on the pocket. "He got it at a stall in one of the markets," said Roy. "Don't bother talking to him, Aggie.

He doesn't really wake up until he's had a jug of coffee."

Agatha read through the morning papers, turning the pages rapidly to see if there was anything further about the quiche poisoning, but there wasn't a word.

The morning passed amicably if silently and then they went out to the main street, Roy doing cartwheels down the lane past Mrs. Barr's cottage. Agatha saw the lace curtains twitch.

Steve took out a large notebook and began to write down all about the festivities, which started off with the crowning of the May Queen, a small pretty schoolgirl with a slimly old-fashioned figure. In fact all the schoolchildren looked like illustrations in some long-forgotten book with their innocent faces and underdeveloped figures. Agatha was used to seeing schoolgirls with busts and backsides. The Queen was drawn by the morris men in their flowered top hats, the bells at their knees jingling. Roy was disappointed in the morris dancers, possibly because, despite the flowered hats, they looked like a boozy rugby team and were led by a white-haired man who struck various members of the audience with a pig's bladder. "Supposed to make you fertile," said Steve ponderously and Roy shrieked with laughter and Agatha felt thoroughly ashamed of him.

They wandered around the stalls set up in the main street. Every one seemed to be selling wares in support of some charity or other. Agatha winced away from the home-baking stand. Roy won a tin of sardines at the tom bola and got so carried away, he bought ticket after ticket until he managed to win a bottle of Scotch. There was a game of skittles which they all tried, a rendering of numbers from musicals by the village band, and then the morris dancers again, leaping up into the sunny air, accompanied by fiddle and accordion. "Don't you know you are living in an anachronism?" said Steve ponderously, scribbling away in his notebook.

Roy wanted to try his luck at the tom bola again and he and Steve went off. Agatha flicked through a pile of second-hand books on a stall and then looked sharply at the woman behind the stall. Mrs. Cartwright!

She was, as Agatha had already noticed, a gypsy-looking woman, swarthy-skinned among all the pink-and-white complexions of the villagers. Her rough hair hung down her back and her strong arms were folded across her generous bosom.

"Mrs. Cartwright?" said Agatha tentatively.

The woman's dark eyes focused on her. "Oh, you be Mrs. Raisin," she said. "Bad business about the quiche."

"I can't understand it," said Agatha. "I shouldn't have bought it, but on the other hand, how on earth would cow bane get into a London quiche?" "London is full of bad things," said Mrs. Cartwright, straightening a few paperbacks that had tumbled over.

"Well, the result is that I will have to sell up," said Agatha. "I can't stay here after what happened."

"Twas an accident," said Mrs. Cartwright placidly. "Reckon you can't go running off after an accident. Besides, I was ever so pleased a London lady should think she had to buy one to compete with me."

Agatha gave her an oily smile. "I did hear you were the best baker in the Cotswolds. Look, I would really like to talk about it. May I call on you?" "Any time you like," said Mrs. Cartwright lazily. "Judd's cottage, beyond the Red Lion on the old Station Road."

Roy came prancing up and Agatha moved on quickly, afraid that Roy's chattering and posturing might put Mrs. Cartwright off. Agatha began to feel better. Mrs. Cartwright hadn't accused her of cheating, nor had she been nasty.

But then, after Steve and Roy had rejoined her and as they were leaving the May Day Fair, they came face to face with Mrs. Barr. She stopped in front of Agatha, her eyes blazing. "I am surprised you have the nerve to show your face in the daylight," she said.

"What's got your knickers in a twist, sweetie?" asked Roy.

"This woman' Mrs. Barr bobbed her head in Agatha's direction ' the death of one of our most respected villagers by poisoning him." "It was an accident," said Roy, before Agatha could speak. "Bugger off, you old fright. Come on, Aggie."

Mrs. Barr stood opening and shutting her mouth in silent outrage as Roy propelled Agatha past her.

"Miserable old cow," said Roy as they turned into Lilac Lane. "What got up her nose?"

T lured her cleaning woman away."

"Oh, that's a capital crime. Murder has been committed for less. Take us to Bourton-on-the-Water, Aggie. Steve wants to see it and we don't need to eat yet after that enormous breakfast."

Agatha, although she still felt shaken by Mrs. Barr, patiently got out the car. "Stow-on-the-Wold!" screamed Roy a quarter of an hour later as Agatha was about to bypass that village. "We must see it." So Agatha turned round and went into the main square, thrusting her car head first into the one remaining parking place, which a family car had been just about to reverse into.

She had never seen so many morris dancers. They seemed to be all over the place and of a more energetic type than the ones in Carsely as they waved their handkerchiefs and leaped in the air like so many Nijinskys.

T think," said Roy, ' if you've seen one lot of morris dancers, you've seen the lot. Put away your notebook, Steve, for God's sake."

"It is all very interesting," said Steve. "Some say that morris dancing was originally Moorish dancing. What do you think?"

"I think ... yawn, yawn, yawn," said Roy pettishly. "Let's go and sample the cosmopolitan delights of Bourton-on-the-Water."

Bourton-on-the-Water is certainly one of the prettiest villages in the Cotswolds, with a glassy stream running through the centre under stone bridges. The trouble is that it is a famous beauty spot and always full of tourists. That May Day they were out in force and Agatha thought longingly of the peaceful streets of London. There were tourists everywhere: large family parties, sticky crying children, busloads of pensioners from Wales, muscle-bound men with tattoos from Birmingham, young Lolitas in white slit skirts and white high-heeled shoes, tottering along, eating ice cream and giggling at everything in sight. Steve wanted to see all that was on offer, from the art galleries to the museums, which depressed Agatha, because a lot of the village museum displays were items from her youth and she felt only really old things should go into museums. Then there was the motor museum, also jammed with tourists, and then, unfortunately, someone had told Steve about Birdland at the end of the village and so they had to go there, and stare at the birds and admire the penguins. Agatha had often wondered what it would be like to live in Hong Kong or Tokyo. Now she knew. People everywhere. People eating everywhere: ice cream, chocolate bars, hamburgers, chips, munch, munch, munch went all those jaws. They seemed to enjoy being in such a crowd, except the many small children who were getting tired and bawled lustily, dragged along by indifferent parents.

The air was turning chilly when Steve with a sigh of pleasure at last closed his notebook. He looked at his watch. "It's only half-past three," he said. "We can make it to Stratford-on-Avon. I must see Shakespeare's birthplace."

Agatha groaned inwardly. Not so long ago Agatha Raisin would have told him to forget it, that she was bored and tired, but the thought of Carsely and Mrs. Barr made her meekly walk with them to the car-park and set out for Stratford.

She parked in the multi-storey Birthplace Car-Park and plunged into the crowds of Stratford with Roy and Steve. So many, many people, all nationalities this time. They shuffled along with the crowds through Shakespeare's home, a strangely soulless place, thought Agatha again.

It had been so restored, so sanitized that she could not help feeling that some of the old pubs in the Cotswolds had more of an air of antiquity.

Then down to look at the River Avon. Then a search by Steve for tickets to the evening's showing of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company which, to Agatha's dismay, he managed to get.

In the darkness of the theatre with her stomach rumbling, for she had had nothing to eat since breakfast, Agatha's mind turned back to the ..

. murder? It would surely do no harm to find out a little more about Mr. Cummings-Browne. Then Mrs. Simpson had found the body. How had Mrs. Cummings-Browne reacted? The first act passed unheeded before Agatha's eyes. Two large gins at the interval made her feel quite tipsy. Once more, she imagined solving the case and earning the respect of the villagers. By the last act, she was fast asleep and all the glory of Shakespeare fell on her deaf ears.

It was only as they were walking out crowds, more crowds that Agatha realized she had nothing at home for them to eat and it was too late to find a restaurant. But Steve, who had, at one point of the day, been lugging a carrier bag, said he planned to cook them dinner and had bought fresh trout at Birdland.

"You really ought to dig in your heels and stay here," said Roy, as he got out of the car in front of Agatha's cottage. "No people. Quiet.

Calm. You're lucky you don't live in a tourist village. Do any tourists come at all?"

"The Red Lion's got rooms, I believe," said Agatha. "A few let out their cottages. But not many come."

"Let's have a drink while Steve does the cooking," said Roy. He looked around Agatha's living-room. "If I were you, I would junk all those cutesy mugs and fake horse brasses and farm machinery, and get some paintings and bowls of flowers. It's not the thing to have a fire-basket, particularly a fake medieval one. You're supposed to burn the logs on the stone hearth." "I dig my heels in over the fire-basket," said Agatha, ' I might get rid of the other stuff." She thought, They collect a lot for charity in this village. I could load up the car with the stuff on Tuesday and take it along to the vicarage. Ingratiate myself a bit there.

Dinner was excellent. I must learn to cook, thought Agatha. I've got little else to do. Steve opened his notebook. Tomorrow, if you do not think it too much, Agatha, I would like to visit Warwick Castle."

Agatha groaned. "Warwick Castle's like Bourton-on-the Water, wall-to-wall tourists from one year's end to the other." "But it says here," said Steve, fishing out a guidebook, ' it is one of the finest medieval castles in England."

"Well, I suppose that's true but'

"I would very much like to go."

"All right! But be prepared for an early start. See if we can get in there before the crowds."

Warwick Castle is a tourist's dream. It has everything from battlements and towers to a torture chamber and dungeon. It has rooms peopled by Madame Tussaud's waxworks depicting a Victorian house party.

It has signs in the drive saying: DRIVE SLOWLY, PEACOCKS CROSSING. It has a rose garden and a peacock garden. It takes a considerable amount of time to see everything and Steve wanted to see everything. With unflagging energy and interest, he climbed up the towers and along the battlements and down to the dungeons. Oblivious to the tourists crowding behind, he lingered in the state rooms, writing busily in his notebook. "Are you going to write about all this?" asked Agatha impatiently.

Steve said only in letters. He wrote a long letter home each week to his mother in Sydney. Agatha hoped they could finally escape, but the tyranny of the notebook was replaced by the tyranny of the video camera. Steve insisted they all climb back up to the top of one of the towers and he filmed Agatha and Roy standing at the edge leaning against the crenellated parapet.

Agatha's feet were aching by the time she climbed back in her car. They had lunch at a pub in Warwick and Agatha, numb with fatigue, found herself agreeing to take them round the Cotswold villages they had not seen, the ones whose names intrigued Steve, like Upper and Lower Slaughter, Aston Magna, Chipping Campden, and so on. Steve found shops open in Chipping Campden and bought groceries, saying he would cook them dinner that evening.

She was so tired when dinner was over that all Agatha wanted to do was go to bed, but it turned out that Steve's camera was the type you could plug in to the TV and show the film taken.

Agatha leaned back and half-closed her eyes. She hated seeing herself on film anyway. Then she heard Roy exclaim, "Wait a minute. At Warwick Castle. On top of the tower. That woman. Look, Aggie. Run it again, Steve."

The film flickered back and then began to roll again. There she was with Roy on top of the tower. Roy was giggling and clowning. The camera then slowly panned over the surrounding countryside, inch, it seemed, by inch, Steve obviously trying to avoid the amateur's failing of camera swing. And then suddenly it focused on a woman, standing a little way from Agatha and Roy. She was a spinsterish creature in a tweed jacket, drooping tweed skirt and sensible shoes. But she was glaring at Agatha with naked venom in her eyes and her fingers were curled like claws. The film moved back to Agatha and Roy.

"Enter First Murderer," said Roy. "Anyone you know, Aggie?"

Agatha shook her head. "I've never seen her before, not in the village anyway. Run it again."

Again those hate-filled eyes loomed up. "Perhaps it wasn't me she was glaring at," said Agatha. "Perhaps her husband had just come up the stairs."

Steve shook his head. There was no one else there. I remember seeing just that woman when I was filming. Then, just as I'd finished, a whole lot of tourists appeared."

"How odd." Roy stared blankly at the television screen. "How could she know you enough to hate you? What were we saying?"

"Roy was clowning," said Agatha slowly. "It's a pity you haven't any sound on that film, Steve."

"I forgot. There is. Usually I don't bother about it and tape some music to go with the English travelogue and then send it home to my mother."

Turn the sound up," said Roy eagerly.

Into the room came the sound of the wind on the top of the battlements.

Then Roy's voice. "Do you want Aggie to throw herself off the battlements like Tosca?" And Agatha saying, "Oh, do give over, Roy.

Gosh, it's cold here." And then, in sepulchral tones, Roy said, "As cold as the grave into which you drove Mr. Cummings-Browne with your quiche, Agatha."

Agatha's voice was replying testily, "He's not in a grave. He's scattered to the four winds on Salisbury Plain. Are you finished yet, Steve?"

Then Steve's voice saying, "Just a bit longer," and then the shot of the glaring woman.

"And you said nobody hated you!" mocked Roy. That one looked as if she wanted to kill you. Wonder who she is?"

"I'll photograph her from the screen," said Steve, ' send you a print. Might be an idea to find out. She must have known about the death of Cummings-Browne."

Agatha sat silent for a few moments. She thought she would never forget that spinsterish face and those glaring eyes.

"Beddy-byes," said Roy. "Which train should we catch tomorrow?"

Agatha roused herself. Trains might not be very good on a holiday Monday. I'll run you to Oxford and take you both for lunch and you can get the train from there."

She had thought she would be glad to see the last of the pair of them, but when she finally stood with them on Oxford station to say goodbye, she suddenly wished they weren't going.

"Come again," she said. "Any time."

Roy planted a wet kiss on her cheek. "We'll be back, Aggie. Super weekend."

The guard blew his whistle, Roy jumped aboard to join Steve, and the train moved out of the station.

Agatha stood forlornly for several minutes, watching the train disappearing round the curve, before trailing out to the car-park. She felt slightly frightened and wished she had been able to go to London with them. Why had she ever left her job?

But home was waiting for her in Carsely, down in a fold of the Cotswold Hills, Carsely where she had disgraced herself, where she did not belong and never would.

Chapter Five.

Agatha loaded up the car with the toby jugs, pewter mugs, fake horse brasses and bits of farm machinery the next day and drove the short distance to the vicarage.

Mrs. Simpson was busy cleaning the cottage. Agatha planned to talk to her over lunch. Perhaps it was because of the poisoning, but Mrs. Simpson called Agatha Mrs. Raisin and Agatha felt compelled to call her Mrs. Simpson, not Doris. The cleaner was efficient and correct but exuded a certain atmosphere of wariness. At least she had not brought her own lunch.

Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar's wife, answered the door herself. Frightened of a rebuff, Agatha gabbled out that she had brought some items she hoped the church might be able to sell to benefit some charity.

"How very good of you," said Mrs. Bloxby. "Alf," she called over her shoulder, "Mrs. Raisin has brought us some items for charity. Come and lend a hand." Agatha was startled. Vicars should not be called plain Alf but something like Peregrine, Hilary, or Aloysius. The vicar appeared wearing an old gardening shirt and corduroy trousers.

All three carried the boxes into the vicarage living-room. Agatha took out a few of the items. "My dear Mrs. Raisin," exclaimed Mrs. Bloxby, 'are you sure? You could sell this stuff yourself for quite a bit of money. I don't mean the horse brasses, but the jugs are good and the farm-machinery pieces are genuine. This' she held up a shiny instrument of torture ' a genuine mole trap. You don't see many of those around today."

"No, I'll be happy if you get some money. But try to choose some charity which won't spend it all on cocktail parties or politics."

"Yes, of course. We're very keen on supporting Cancer Research and Save the Children," said the vicar. "Perhaps you would like a cup of coffee, Mrs. Raisin?"

"That would be nice."

"I'll leave my wife to look after you. I have Sunday's sermons to prepare."

"Sermons?"

"I preach in three churches."

"Why not use the same sermon for all?"

"Tempting, but it would hardly show a sign of caring for the parishioners."

The vicar retreated to the nether regions and his wife went off to the kitchen to make coffee. Agatha looked about her. The vicarage must be very old indeed, she thought. The window-frames sloped and the floor sloped. Here was no fitted carpet such as she had in her own cottage but old floor-boards polished like black glass and covered in the centre by a brightly coloured Persian rug. Logs smouldered in the cavernous fireplace. There was a bowl of potpourri on one small table.

A vase of flowers stood on another, and there was a bowl of hyacinths at the low window. The chairs were worn, with Agatha shifted her bottom experimentally feather cushions. In front of her was a new coffee-table of the kind you buy in Do-It-Yourself stores and put together, and yet, covered as it was with newspapers and magazines, and the beginnings of a tapestry cushion-cover, it blended in with the rest of the room. Above her head were low beams black with age and centuries of smoke. There was a faint smell of lavender and wood-smoke mixed with the smells of hyacinths and potpourri.

Also, there was an air of comfort and goodness about the place. Agatha decided that the Reverend Bloxby was a rare bird in the much-maligned aviary of the Church of England a man who believed what he preached.

For the first time since she had arrived in Carsely, she felt un threatened and, as the door opened, and the vicar's wife appeared, filled with a desire to please.

"I've toasted some tea cakes as well," said Mrs. Bloxby. "It's still so cold. I do get tired of keeping the fires burning. But of course you have central heating, so you don't have that problem." "You have a beautiful home," said Agatha.

"Thank you. Milk and sugar?" Mrs. Bloxby had a small, delicate, lined face and brown hair threaded with grey. She was slim and fragile with long, delicate hands, the sort of hands that portrait painters used to love to give their subjects.

"And how are you settling in, Mrs. Raisin?" "Not very well," said Agatha. "I may have to settle outt'

"Oh, because of your quiche," said Mrs. Bloxby tranquilly. "Do try a tea cake I make them myself and it is one of the few things I do well.

Yes, a horrible affair. Poor Mr. Cummings-Browne "People must think I am a dreadful person," said Agatha.

"Well, it was unfortunate that wretched quiche should have cow bane in it. But a lot of cheating goes on in these village affairs. You're not the first."

Agatha sat with a tea cake dripping butter and stared at the vicar's wife. "I'm not?"

"No, no. Let me see, there was Miss. Tenby five years ago. An in comer Set her heart on winning the flower-arranging competition. She ordered a basket of flowers from the florist over at St. Anne's. Quite blatant about it. It was a very pretty display but the neighbours had seen the florist's van arriving and so she was found out. Then there was old Mrs. Carter. She bought her strawberry jam and put her own label on it and won. No one would ever have known if she had not got drunk in the Red Lion and bragged about it. Yes, your deception would have occasioned quite a lot of comment in the village, Mrs. Raisin, had it not all happened before, or, for that matter, if the judging had been fair."

"Do you mean Mr. Cummings-Browne cheated?" Mrs. Bloxby smiled. "Let us say he was apt to give prizes to favourites."

"But if this was generally known, why do the villagers bother to enter anything at all?"

"Because they are proud of what they make and like to show it off to their friends. Besides, Mr. Cummings-Browne judged competitions in neighbouring villages and it is estimated he had only one favourite in each. Also, there is no disgrace in losing. Alf often wanted to change the judge, but the Cummings-Brownes did give quite a lot to charity and the one year Alf was successful and got someone else to judge, the judge gave the prize to his sister, who did not even live in the village."

Agatha let out a long slow breath. "You make me feel less of a villain."

"It was all very sad. You must have had a frightful time."

To Agatha's horror, her eyes filled with tears and she dabbed at them fiercely while the vicar's wife looked tactfully away.

"But be assured' the vicar's wife addressed the coffeepot ' your deception did not occasion all that much comment. Besides, Mr. Cummings-Browne was not popular."

"Why?"

The vicar's wife looked evasive. "Some people are not, you know."

Agatha leaned forward. "Do you think it was an accident?"

"Oh, yes, for if it were not, then one would naturally suspect the wife, but Vera Cummings-Browne was a most devoted wife, in her way. She has a great deal of money and he had very little. They have no children. She could have walked off and left him any time at all. I had to help comfort her on the day of her husband's death. I have never seen a woman more grief-stricken. It is best to put the whole matter behind you, Mrs. Raisin. The Carsely Ladies' Society meets tonight here at the vicarage at eight o'clock. Do come along."

"Thank you," said Agatha humbly.

"Have you got rid of that dreadful woman?" asked the vicar ten minutes later when his wife walked into his study.

"Yes. I don't think she's really so bad and she is genuinely suffering about the quiche business. I've invited her to the women's get-together tonight."

Then thank goodness I won't be here," said the vicar and bent over his sermon.

Agatha felt cleansed of sin as she drove back to her cottage. She would go to church on Sunday and she would try to be a good person. She put a Healthy Fun Shepherd's Pie in the microwave for Mrs. Simpson's lunch.

Mrs. Simpson picked at the hot mess tentatively with her fork and all Agatha's saintliness evaporated. "It's not poisoned!" she snapped.

"It's just I don't much care for frozen stuff," said Mrs. Simpson.

"Well, I'll get you something better next time. Was Mrs. Cummings-Browne very upset about the death of her husband?"

"Oh, dreadful it was," said Doris Simpson. "Real shook, her were. Numb with shock at first and then crying and crying. Had to fetch the vicar's wife to help."

Guilt once more settled on Agatha's soul. She felt she had to get out.

She walked to the Red Lion and ordered a glass of red wine and sausage and chips.

Then she remembered her intention of calling on Mrs. Cartwright. It all seemed a bit pointless now but it was something to do.

Judd's cottage where the Cartwrights lived was a broken-down sort of place. The garden gate was hanging on its hinges and in the weedy front garden was parked a rusting car. Agatha looked this way and that, wondering how the car had got in, but could see no way it could have been achieved short of lifting it bodily over the fence.

The glass pane on the front door was cracked and stuck in place with brown paper tape. She rang the bell and nothing happened. She rapped at the side of the door. Mrs. Cartwright's blurred figure loomed up on the other side of the glass.

"Oh, it's you," she said when she opened the door. "Come in."

Agatha followed her into a sour-smelling cluttered living-room. The furniture was soiled and shiny with wear. There was a two-bar electric fire in the grate with imitation plastic coals on the top. A bunch of plastic daffodils hung over a chipped vase on the window. There was a cocktail cabinet in one corner ornamented with pink glass and strips of pink fluorescent lighting.

"Drink?" asked Mrs. Cartwright. Her coarse hair was wound up in pink foam rollers and she was wearing a pink wrap-over dress which gaped when she moved to reveal a dirty petticoat.

Thank you," said Agatha, wishing she had not come.

Mrs. Cartwright poured two large glasses of gin and then tinged them pink with Angostura. Agatha looked nervously at her own glass, which was smeared with lipstick at the rim.

Mrs. Cartwright sat down and crossed her legs. Her feet were encased in dirty pink slippers. All this pink, thought Agatha nervously. She looks like some sort of debauched Barbara Cartland.

"Did you know Mr. Cummings-Browne well?" asked Agatha.

Mrs. Cartwright lit a cigarette and studied Agatha through the smoke.

"A bit," she said.

"Did you like him?"

"Some. Can't think straight at the moment."

"Because of the death?"

"Because of the bingo over at Evesham. John, that's my husband, he's cut off my money on account he doesn't want me to go there. Men are right bastards. I brought up four kids and now they've left home and I want a bit o' fun, all he does is grumble. Yes, give me a bit o' money for the bingo and I can ' most things."

Agatha fished in her handbag. "Would twenty pounds help?"

"Would it ever!"

Agatha passed the money over. Then there came the sound of the front door being opened. Mrs. Cartwright thrust the note down into her bosom, grabbed Agatha's glass and ran with that and her own to the kitchen.

"Ella?" called a man's voice.

The door opened and a strongly built apelike man walked in just as his wife came back from the kitchen. "Who's she?" he demanded, jerking a thumb at Agatha. "I told you not to let them Jehovahs in."

This is Mrs. Raisin from down Lilac Lane, called social-like."

"What do you want?" he snarled.

Agatha stood up. Mrs. Cartwright's large dark eyes flashed a warning.

"I am collecting for charity," said Agatha.

Then you can bugger off. Haven't got a penny to spare. She's seen to that."

"Sit down, John, and shut up. I'll see Mrs. Raisin out."

Agatha nervously edged past John Cartwright. Mrs. Cartwright opened the front door. "Come tomorrow," she whispered. Three in the afternoon."

Was there some sinister mystery or had she just been conned out of twenty pounds? Agatha walked thoughtfully down the road.

When she got back to her cottage, Mrs. Simpson was hard at work in the bedrooms. Agatha washed a load of clothes and carried them out to the back garden where there was one of those whirligig devices for hanging clothes. Feeling more relaxed than she had for some time and quite domesticated, Agatha pegged out the clothes. As she moved around to the other side of the whirligig, she saw Mrs. Barr. She was leaning on her garden fence, staring straight at Agatha with a look of cold dislike on her face. Agatha finished pegging the clothes, raised two fingers at Mrs. Barr and went indoors.

Tost came shouted Mrs. Simpson from upstairs. "I put it on the kitchen table."

Agatha noticed a flat brown envelope for the first time. She tore it open. There was a large print of the woman on the tower at Warwick Castle. Agatha shuddered. Those staring eyes, that hatred reminded her of Mrs. Barr. Pinned to the enlargement was a note: Thank you for a splendid weekend, Steve."

She put the photograph away in the kitchen drawer, feeling even after she had closed the drawer that those eyes were still staring at her.

Overcome by the need for some escapist literature, she drove down to Moreton-in-Marsh, swearing under her breath as she remembered it was market day. By driving round and round the car-park, she was able to secure a place when some shopper drove off.

Walking through the Old Market Place, as the new mini shopping arcade was called, she crossed the road and walked between the crowded stalls to the row of shops on the far side where she knew there was a second-hand bookshop. In the back room were rows and rows of paperbacks. She bought three detective stories one Ruth Rendell, one Colin Dexter, and one Colin Watson and then returned to her car. She flipped open the Colin Watson one and was caught by the first page. Oh, the joys of detective fiction. Time rolled past as Agatha sat in the car-park and read steadily. Finally it dawned on her that it was ridiculous to sit reading in a car-park when she had the comfort of her own home and so she drove back to Carsely just in time to meet Bill Wong, who was standing on her doorstep.

"Now what?" demanded Agatha uneasily.

Bill smiled. "Just called to see how you were."

At first Agatha felt gratified as she unlocked the door and let herself in, picking up the other key from the hall floor where it had fallen when Mrs. Simpson had popped it 74

through the letter-box. Then she felt a twinge of unease. Could Bill Wong be checking up on her for any reason?

"Coffee?" she asked.

"Tea will do." In the sitting-room, Bill looked slowly around. "Where did all the bits and pieces go?" "I didn't think they were me," said Agatha, ' I gave them to the church to sell for charity."

"What is you if toby jugs and farm machinery are not?"

"Don't know," mumbled Agatha. "Something a bit more horny."

The lighting's wrong," said Bill, looking at the spotlights on the beams. "Spots are out."

"You sound like someone talking about acne," snapped Agatha. "And why is everyone suddenly so arty-farty about interior decoration these days?"

"Ah, your friends who came at the weekend, the prancing one and the one with the cowboy boots?"

"You've been spying on me!"

"Not I. I was off duty and took a girlfriend to Bourton-on-the-Water. A great mistake. I'd forgotten about the holiday crowds."

"I can't imagine you having a girlfriend."

"Oh! Why?"

"I don't know. I always imagine you as never being off duty." "In any case said Bill, "I hope you haven't decided to become the Miss. Marple of Carsely and are still trying to prove accident as murder."

Agatha opened her mouth to tell him about Mrs. Cartwright and then decided against it. He would criticize her for interfering and he would point out, probably correctly, that Mrs. Cartwright had nothing to tell and was simply out for money.

Instead she said, "An odd thing happened at Warwick Castle. Steve, the young man with the cowboy boots, took a video film of me and Roy, that's the other young man, on the top of one of the towers. He showed the video on television in the evening and there on the tower was this woman glaring at me with hatred."

"Interesting. But you could have jostled her on the stairs or trodden on her foot."

"He took a photograph from the television set and it's quite clear, and we were talking about the death when he filmed. Would you like to see it?"

"Yes, might be someone I know."

Agatha brought in the print and handed it to him. He studied it carefully. "No one I've seen before," he said, ' if you took that nasty look off her face, she would look like hundreds of other women in the Cotswold villages: thin, spinsterish, wispy hair, indeterminate features, false teeth "How do you know about the false teeth, Sherlock?"

"You can always tell by the drooping corners of the mouth and by the way the jaw sags. Mind if I keep this?" "Why?" demanded Agatha.

"Because I might find out who it is and do you a favour by revealing to you that Miss. Prim here was merely offended by your friends or perhaps you reminded her of someone she hated in her past, and then you can be easy." That is kind of you," said Agatha gruffly. "I'm beginning to get edgy what with her next door glaring at me over the garden fence because I took her char away."

"I wouldn't worry about her. Taking someone's cleaning woman away is like mugging them. The trouble with businesswomen like yourself, Mrs. Raisin, is that your normally very active brain has nothing left to feed on but trivia. After a few months, believe me, you will settle down and get involved in good works."

"Heaven forbid," said Agatha with a shudder.

"Why? Had I suggested bad works, would you have been pleased?"

T'm going to a meeting of the Carsely Ladies' Society at the vicarage tonight," said Agatha.

That should be fun," said Bill with his eyes twinkling. "And now I'd better go. I'm on late duty."

After a meal at the Red Lion giant sausage and chips liberally doused with ketchup Agatha walked to the vicarage and rang the bell. From inside came the hum of voices. She felt suddenly nervous and yes, a little timid.

Mrs. Bloxby answered the door. "Come in, Mrs. Raisin. Most people have arrived." She led Agatha into the sitting-room, where about fifteen women were seated. They stopped talking and looked curiously at Agatha. "I'll introduce you," said Mrs. Bloxby. Agatha tried to remember the names but they kept sliding out of her mind as soon as each was announced. Mrs. Bloxby offered Agatha tea, cakes and sandwiches. Agatha helped herself to a cucumber sandwich.

"Now, if we are all ready," said Mrs. Bloxby, ' chairwoman, Mrs. Mason, will begin. The floor is yours, Mrs. Mason."

Mrs. Mason, a large woman in a purple nylon dress and big white shoes like canoes, surveyed the room. "As you know, ladies, our old people in the village do not get out much. I am appealing to any of you with cars to step in and volunteer to take some of them on an outing when you can manage it. I will read out the names of the old people and volunteer if you can manage some free time."

There seemed to be no shortage of volunteers as Mrs. Mason went through a list in her hand. Agatha looked around at the other women.

There was something strangely old-fashioned about them with their earnest desire to help. All were middle-aged apart from a thin, pale-looking girl in her twenties who was seated next to Agatha. "Ain't got no car," she whispered to Agatha. "Can hardly take them on me bike." "And now," said Mrs. Mason, ' but not least, we have old Mr. and Mrs. Boggle at Culloden."

There was a long silence. The fire behind Mrs. Mason's ample figure crackled cheerfully, spoons clinked against tea cups, jaws munched. No volunteers.

"Come now, ladies. Mr. and Mrs. Boggle would love a trip somewhere.

Needn't be too far. Even just into Evesham and around the shops." Agatha thought she felt the vicar's wife's eyes resting on her. Her voice sounded odd in her own ears as she heard herself saying, "I'll take them. Would Thursday be all right?"

Did she sense a feeling of relief in the room? "Why, thank you, Mrs. Raisin. How very good of you. Perhaps you do not know the village very well, but Culloden is number 28, Moreton Road, on the council estate. Shall we say nine o'clock on Thursday, and I shall take it on myself to tell Mr. and Mrs. Boggle?"

Agatha nodded.

"Good. They will be so pleased. Now, as you know, next week we are to be hosted by the Mircester Ladies' Society and they have promised us an exciting time. I will pass around a book and sign your names in it if you wish to go. Retford Bus Company is giving us a bus for the day."

The book was passed round. After some hesitation, Agatha signed her name. It would be something to do.

"Right," said Mrs. Mason. "The coach will leave from outside here at eleven in the morning. I am sure we will all be awake by that time."

Dutiful laughter. "And so I will get our secretary, Miss. Simms, to read out the minutes of our last meeting in case any of you missed it."

To Agatha's surprise, the young girl next to her rose and went to face the company. In a droning nasal voice she read out the minutes. Agatha stifled a yawn. Then the treasurer gave a lengthy report of money raised at the last fete in aid of Cancer Research.

Agatha was nearly asleep when she heard her own name. The treasurer had been replaced by Mrs. Bloxby. "Yes," said the vicar's wife, ' our new member, Mrs. Raisin, came with boxes and boxes of stuff and gave them all away to be sold for charity, I thought I would show you some of the items. I think they warrant a special sale."

Agatha felt gratified as oohs and ahs greeted the toby-jugs and bits of burnished farm machinery. "Reckon I'd buy some o' that me self said one of the women.

"I am glad you share my enthusiasm," said Mrs. Bloxby. "I suggest we should take the school hall for the tenth of June, that's a Saturday, and put these items on display. The week before the sale, we will have a special pricing meeting. That will also give us time to find some extra items. Mrs. Mason, can I ask you to run the tea-room as usual?"

Mrs. Mason nodded.

"Mrs. Raisin, perhaps you might like to take command of the main stall?"

Tell you what," said Agatha. "I'll auction them. I'll be auctioneer.

People always pay more when they are bidding against each other."

"What a good idea. All in favour?" Hands were raised.

"Excellent. The money will go to Save the Children. Perhaps, if we are lucky, some of the local papers might put in an item." "I'll see to that," said Agatha, feeling better by the minute. This was like old times.

Her happiness was dimmed when the business was over; the women were gathering up their coats and handbags when Miss. Simms nudged her and said, "Better you than me."

"You mean the auction?"

"Naw, them Boggles. Grouchiest old miseries this side o' Gloucester."

But somehow Mrs. Bloxby was there and had heard the remark. She smiled into Agatha's eyes and said, "What a good deed to give the Boggles an outing. Old Mrs. Boggle has bad arthritis. It will mean so very much to them."

Agatha felt weak and childlike before the simple, uncomplicated goodness in Mrs. Bloxby's eyes and filled again with that desire to please.

And the women as they were leaving spoke to her of this and that and not one mentioned quiche.

With a feeling of belonging, Agatha walked home. Lilac Lane was beginning to live up to its name. Lilac trees, heavy with blossom, scented the evening air. Wisteria hung in purple profusion over cottage doors.

Must do something about my own garden, thought Agatha.

She unlocked and opened her front door and switched on the light. One sheet of paper lay on the doormat, the message scrawled on it staring up at her: "Stop nosey-parking, you innerfering old bich."

Picking it up with the tips of her fingers, Agatha stared at it in dismay. For the first time she realized how very quiet the village was in the evening. She was surrounded by silence, a silence that seemed ominous, full of threat.

She dropped the note into the rubbish bin and went up to bed, taking the brass poker with her, propping it up by the bedside where she could reach it easily.

Old houses creak and sigh as they settle down for the night. For a long time Agatha lay awake, starting at every sound, until she suddenly fell asleep, one hand resting on the knob of the poker.

Chapter Six.

The next morning, rough winds were shaking the darling buds of May.

Sunlight streamed in Agatha's windows. It was a day of movement and bright, sharp, glittering colour. She took the threatening note out of the rubbish. Why not show this to Bill Wong? What did it mean? She had not been doing any investigating to speak of. But he would ask a lot of questions and she might slip up and tell him of her visit to Mrs. Cartwright and that Mrs. Cartwright had told her to call again.

She smoothed out the note and tucked it in with the cookery books.

Perhaps she should keep it just in case.

After breakfast, there was a knock at her door. She had a little scared feeling it might be Mrs. Barr. Damn the woman! She was nothing but a warped middle-aged frump, and she should not cause a stalwart such as Agatha Raisin any trouble at all.

But it was Mrs. Bloxby who stood there, and behind her, to Agatha's dismay, Vera Cummings-Browne.

"May we come in?" asked Mrs. Bloxby.

Agatha led the way into the kitchen, bracing herself for tears and recriminations. Mrs. Bloxby refused Agatha's offer of coffee and said, "Mrs. Cummings-Browne has something to say to you."

Vera Cummings-Browne addressed the table-top rather than Agatha. "I have been most distressed, most upset about the death of my husband, Mrs. Raisin. But I am now in a calmer frame of mind. I do not blame you for anything. It was an accident, a strange and unfortunate accident." She raised her eyes. "You see, I have always believed that when one dies, it is meant. It could have been a car driven by a drunken driver which mounted the pavement. It could have been a piece of fallen masonry. The police pathologist felt that Reg could have survived the accidental poisoning had he been stronger. But he had high blood pressure and his heart was bad. So be it." "I am so very sorry," said Agatha weakly. "How very generous of you to call on me."

"It was my Christian duty," said Mrs. Cummings-Browne.

Behind the mask of her face, which Agatha hoped was registering sorrow, sympathy, and concern, her mind was rattling away at a great rate. "So be it ... Christian duty?" How very stagy. But then Mrs. Cummings-Browne buried her face in her hands and wept, gasping through her sobs, "Oh, Reg, I do miss you so. Oh, Reg!"

Mrs. Bloxby led the weeping Mrs. Cummings-Browne out. No, thought Agatha, the woman was genuinely broken up. Mrs. Cummings-Browne had forgiven her. All Agatha had to do was to get on with life and forget about the whole thing.

She set about phoning up the editors of local newspapers to raise publicity for the auction. Local editors were used to timid, pleading approaches from ladies of the parish. Never before had they experienced anything like Agatha Raisin on the other end of the phone.

Alternately bullying and wheedling, she left them with a feeling that something only a little short of the crown jewels was going to be auctioned. All promised to send reporters, knowing they would have to keep their word, for Agatha threatened each that she would phone on the morning of the auction to see if they had indeed dispatched someone.

That passed the morning happily. But by the afternoon and after a snack of Farmer Giles' Steak and Kidney Pie ("Suitable for Microwaves'), Agatha found her steps leading her in the direction of the Cartwrights'.

Mrs. Cartwright answered the door herself, her hair back in pink rollers, her body in a pink dressing-gown.

"Come in," she said. "Drink?"

Agatha nodded. Pink gin again. Where had Mrs. Cart-wright learned to drink pink gins? she wondered suddenly. Surely Bacardi Breezers, lager and lime, rum and Coke would have been more to her taste.

"How was bingo?" asked Agatha.

"Not a penny," said Mrs. Cartwright bitterly. "But tonight's my lucky night. I saw two magpies in the garden this morning."

Agatha reflected that as magpies were a protected species, one saw the wretched black-and-white things everywhere. Surely it would have been more of a surprise if Mrs. Cartwright had not seen any magpies at all.

"I wanted to know about Mr. Cummings-Browne," said Agatha.

"What, for example?" Mrs. Cartwright narrowed her eyes against the rising smoke from the cigarette she held in one brown hand.

From the living-room where they sat, Agatha could see through to the cluttered messy kitchen hardly the kitchen of a dedicated baker.

"Well, as you won the prize year after year, I thought you might have known him pretty well," she said.

"As much as I know anyone in the village." Mrs. Cartwright took a slug of her gin.

"Do you bake a lot?"

"Naw. Used to. Occasionally do some baking for Mrs. Bloxby. Terrible woman she is. Can't say no to her. Come in the kitchen and I'll show you."

Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. A tattered calendar showing a picture of a blonde in nothing but a wisp of gauze and sandals leered down from the wall. But on a cleared corner of the kitchen table beside the half-empty milk bottle, the pat of butter smeared with marmalade, lay a tray of delicate fairy cakes. They looked exquisite.

There was no doubt Mrs. Cartwright could bake.

"So I'd make a quiche and get a tenner for it," said Mrs. Cartwright.

"Silly waste of time if you ask me. My husband doesn't like quiche.

Used to make them for the Harveys and they'd sell them down at the shop for me. Went well, too. But I can't seem to find the time these days." She tottered back to the living-room in her pink high-heeled mules.

Agatha decided to get down to some hard business. "I paid you twenty pounds for information yesterday," she said bluntly, ' which I have not yet received."

"I spent it."

"Yes, but how you spent it or what you spent it on is not my affair," snapped Agatha.

Mrs. Cartwright put a finger to her brow. "Now what was it? Dammit, my bloody memory's gone wandering again."

Her eyes gleamed darkly as Agatha fished in her capacious handbag.

Agatha held up a twenty. "No, you don't," she said as Mrs. Cartwright reached for it. "Information first. Is your husband liable to come in?"

"No, he's up at Martin's farm. He works there."

"So what have you got to tell me?" "I was surprised," said Mrs. Cartwright, ' Mr. Cummings-Browne died."

"Oh, weren't we all," commented Agatha sarcastically.

"I mean, I thought he would've murdered her."

"What, why?"

"He spoke to me a bit. People are always telling me their troubles.

It's because I'm the maternal type." Mrs. Cartwright yawned, reached inside her dressing-gown and scratched one of her generous bosoms. A smell of sour sweat came to Agatha's nostrils and she thought inconse-quently how rare it was to meet a really dirty woman in these hygienic days. "Couldn't stand Vera, Reg couldn't. She held the purse-strings and he said she made him jump through hoops or sit up and beg just to get some drinking money. The only money he had of his own was his pension and that didn't go very far. He used to say to me, "Ella," he'd say, "one day I'm going to wring that woman's neck and be rid of her for once and for all."

Agatha looked bewildered. "But he died, not her!"

"Maybe she got there first. She hated him."

"But I had dinner with the pair of them and they seemed a devoted couple; in fact, quite alike."

"Naw, you could have a laugh with Reg, but Mrs. Snobby was always turning her nose up at me. That was no accident. That was murder."

"But how could she do it? I mean, it was my quiche."

"Dunno, but I feel it here." Mrs. Cartwright struck her bosom and another waft of sweat floated across to Agatha's nostrils.

"Mrs. Cummings-Browne called on me this morning," said Agatha firmly, 'and forgave me. But she was broken up about her husband's death, quite genuinely so."

"She acts in the Carsely Dramatic Society," said Mrs. Cartwright cynically, ' bloody good she is, too. Right little actress." "No," said Agatha stubbornly. "I know when people are being straight with me, and you are not one of those people, Mrs. Cartwright."

"Told you what I know." Mrs. Cartwright stared at the twenty-pound note, which Agatha still held in her hand.

The broken gate outside creaked and Agatha started nervously. She did not want another confrontation with John Cartwright. She thrust the note at Mrs. Cartwright. "Look," she said urgently, ' know where to find me. If there's anything at all you can tell me, let me know."

"I certainly will," said Mrs. Cartwright, looking happy now that she had the money in her possession.

Agatha was just leaving by stepping round the broken garden gate when she saw John Cartwright lumbering down the road. She hurried on, but he had seen her. He caught up with her and roughly seized her arm and swung her round. "You've been snooping around about Cummings-Browne!" he snarled. "Ella told me. I'm telling you for the last time, you go near her again and I'll break your neck. That fart Cummings-Browne got what was coming to him and so will you."

Agatha wrenched her arm free and hurried on, her face flaming. She went straight home and put the threatening note in an envelope along with a letter and addressed it to Detective Constable Wong at Mircester Police Station. She felt sure now that John Cartwright had written that note.

As she returned from posting it, she saw a couple arriving at New Delhi, Mrs. Barr's house. They turned and stared at her. They looked vaguely familiar. With a wrench of memory, Agatha realized they had been among the other diners in the Red Huntsman that evening when she had been discussing the '' with Roy and Steve.

She went into her own cottage and stood in her sitting-room, looking about her. She had never furnished anything in her life before, living as she had in a succession of furnished rooms until she made her first real money, and then renting a furnished flat and finally buying one, but that too had been furnished, for she had bought the contents as well.

She screwed up her eyes and tried to visualize what she would like but no ideas came except that the three-piece suite annoyed her. She wanted something more in the lines of the vicarage living-room. Well, antiques could be bought, and that was as good a reason as any to get out of Carsely for the remainder of the day.

She drove to Cheltenham Spa and after cruising about that town's irritating and baffling one-way system until she got her bearings, she stopped a passer-by and asked where she could buy antique furniture.

She was directed to a network of streets behind Montpelier Terrace. She drove there and managed to find a parking space in a private parking lot outside someone's house. Her first good find was in an old cinema now used as a furniture warehouse. She bought an old high-backed wing armchair in soft green leather and a chesterfield sofa with basketwork and soft dull-green cushions. Then, to the increasing delight of the salesman, who had feared it was going to be a slow day, she also bought a wide Victorian fruit wood chair, running her fingers appreciatively over the carving. She paid for the lot without a blink and said she would pick them up after the tenth of June. Agatha now planned to amaze the village by adding her living-room furniture to the sale. Two elegant lamps caught her eye as she was leaving and she purchased them as well. Agatha remembered when she was at school, she had vowed that when she had her first pay cheque, she would walk into a sweetshop and buy all the chocolate she wanted. But by the time that happened, her desires had focused on a pair of purple high-heeled shoes with bows. She enjoyed having enough money to enable her to buy what she wanted.

Then, before she left Cheltenham, she went to Marks and Spencer and bought giant prawns in garlic butter and a packet of lasagne, both of which she could cook in the microwave. It was still not her own cooking, but a cut above what she could get at the village shop.

Later, after a good meal, she settled down to read a detective story, wondering idly whether she should take the television set up to the bedroom. The vicarage living-room did not boast a television set.

It was only when she was preparing for bed that she remembered the Boggles with a sinking heart. With any luck, they would not expect her to drive them about all day.

In the morning, she presented herself at the Boggles' home. Why Culloden? Were they Scottish?

But Mr. Boggle was a small, spry, wrinkled man with a Gloucestershire accent and his wife, an old creaking harridan, was undoubtedly Welsh.

Agatha waited for either of the pair to say it was very kind of her, or to evince any sign of gratitude, but they both climbed into the back seat and Mr. Boggle said, "We're going to Bath."

Bath! Agatha had been hoping for somewhere nearer, like Evesham.

"It's quite a bit away," she protested.

Mrs. Boggle jabbed her in the shoulder with one horny forefinger. "You said you was takin' us out, so take us."

Agatha fished out her road atlas. The easiest would be to get on the Fosse Way to Cirencester and then on to Bath.

She heaved a sigh. It was a glorious day. Summer was edging its way into England. Hawthorn flowers were heavy with scent, pink and white along the winding road out of Carsely. On either side of the Fosse Way, obviously a Roman road, for it runs straight as an arrow up steep hills and down the other side, lay fields of oil seed rape, bright yellow, Van Gogh yellow, looking too vulgarly bright among the gentler colours of the English countryside. Queen Anne's lace frothed along the roadside. There was no sound from the passengers in the back.

Agatha began to feel more cheerful. Perhaps her ancient passengers would be content to go off on their own in Bath.

But in Bath, Agatha's troubles started. The Boggles pointed out that they had no intention of walking from any car-park to the Pump Room where, it appeared, they meant to ' the waters'. It was Agatha's duty to drive them there and then go and park the car herself. She sweated her way round the one-way system, congested with traffic, trying to turn a deaf ear to Mr. Boggle's comments of "Not a very good driver, are you?" "Well?" demanded Mrs. Boggle when they had reached the colonnaded entrance to the Pump Room. "Aren't you going to help a body out?"

Mrs. Boggle was small and round, dressed in a tweed coat and a long scarf that seemed to be inextricably wound around the seat-belt. She smelt very strongly of cheap scent. "Stop pushin' me. You're hurtin' me," she grumbled as Agatha tried to release her from bondage. Her husband elbowed Agatha aside, produced a pair of nail scissors and hacked through the scarf. "Now look what you've done," moaned Mrs. Boggle.

"Quit your frettin', woman," said Mr. Boggle. He jerked a thumb at Agatha. "Her'll buy you another one."

Like hell, thought Agatha when she finally parked near the bus station.

She deliberately took a long time returning to the Pump Room, an hour, in fact. She found the Boggles in the tea-room beside an empty coffee-pot and plates covered in cake crumbs.

"So you've finally decided to show up," said Mr. Boggle, handing her the bill. "You're a fine one."

The trouble is, no one don't care nothing about old folks these days.

All they want is discos and drugs," said Mrs. Boggle. They both stared fiercely at Agatha.

"Have you taken the waters yet?" asked Agatha.

"Going to now," said Mrs. Boggle. "Help me up."

Agatha raised her to her feet, gagging slightly at the wafts of cheap scent and old body. The Boggles drank cups of sulphurous water. "Do you want to see the Roman Baths?" asked Agatha, remembering Mrs. Bloxby and determined to please. "I haven't seen them."

"Well, we've seen them scores of times!" whined Mrs. Boggle. "We wants to go to Polly Perkins' Pantry."

"What's that?"

"That's where we's having dinner."

The Boggles belonged to that generation which still took dinner in the middle of the day.

"It's only ten to twelve," pointed out Agatha, ' you've just had coffee and cakes." "But you've got to go and get the car," said Mr. Boggle. "Pantry's up in Monmouth Road. Can't expect us to walk there. No consideration."

The idea of a short break from the Boggles while she got the car prompted Agatha to accept her orders docilely. Again she took her time, returning to pick up the Boggles at one o'clock and ignoring their cries and complaints that Mrs. Boggle's joints were stiffening with all the waiting.

No one could accuse Agatha Raisin of having a delicate or refined palate, but she had a sharp eye for a rip-off and as soon as she sat down with the horrible pair in Polly Perkins' Pantry, she wondered if they were soul mates of the Cummings-Brownes. Waitresses dressed in laced bodices and mob caps flitted about at great speed, therefore being able to ignore all the people trying to get served.

The menu was expensive and written in that twee kind of prose which irritated Agatha immensely. The Boggles wanted Beau Nash cod fritters to start ' and golden, on a bed of fresh, crunchy lettuce' followed by Beau Brummell escalopes of veal ' and mouthwatering, with a white wine sauce and sizzling aubergine sticks, tender new carrots, and succulent green peas'. "And a bottle of champagne," said Mr. Boggle.

"I'm not made of money," protested Agatha hotly.

"Champagne's good for my arthuritis," quavered Mrs. Boggle. "Not often we gets a treat, but if you' going' to count every penny ... "

Agatha caved in. Get them sozzled and they might sleep on the way home.

The waitresses were now grouped in a corner by the till, chatting and laughing. Agatha rose and marched over to them. "I have no intention of waiting for service. Get a move on," she snarled. "I want cheerful and polite and fast service now. And don't give me those looks of dumb insolence. Jump to it!"

A now surly waitress followed Agatha over to her table and took the order. The champagne was warm when it arrived. Agatha cracked. She rose to her feet and glared at the pale, shy English faces of the other diners. "Why do you sit there and put up with this dreadful service?"

she howled. "You're paying for it, dammit."

"You're right," called a meek-looking little man. "I've been here for half an hour and no one's come near this table."

Cries of rage and frustration rose from the other diners. The manager was hurriedly summoned from his office. An ice bucket was produced like lightning. "On the house," muttered the manager, bending over Agatha. Waitresses flew backwards and forwards, serving the customers this time, long skirts swinging, outraged bosoms heaving under laced bodices, mob caps nodding.

"They'll be worn out by the time they get home," said Agatha with a grin. "Never moved so much in all their lives."

Mrs. Boggle speared a cod fritter and popped the whole thing in her mouth. "We've never ' trouble afore," she said through a spray of cod flakes "Have we, Benjamin?" "No, people respect us," said Mr. Boggle.

Agatha opened her mouth to blast the horrible pair when Mr. Boggle added, "Were you one o' his fancy women?"

She looked at him dumbfounded.

"Who?"

"Reg Cummings-Browne, him what you poisoned."

"I didn't poison him!" roared Agatha and then dropped her voice as the other diners stared. "It was an accident. And what the hell makes you think I was having an affair with Cummings-Browne?"

"You was seen up at Ella Cartwright's. Like to like, I all us say."

"You mean Mrs. Cartwright was having an affair with Cummings-Browne?"

"Course. Everybody knew that, ' her husband."

"How long had this been going on?"

"Dunno. Must have gone off her, though, for he was arter some bit in Ancombe, or so I heard."

"So Cummings-Browne was a philanderer," said Agatha.

Enlivened by champagne, Mr. Boggle suddenly giggled. "Got his leg over half the county, if you ask me."

Agatha's mind raced. She remembered having dinner with the Cummings-Brownes. She remembered Mrs. Cart-wright's name being mentioned and the sudden stillness between the pair. Then there were those sobbing women at the inquest.

"O' course," said Mrs. Boggle suddenly, ' all knew it was you that was meant to be poisoned, if anyone."

"Why would anyone want to poison me?" demanded Agatha.

"Look what you did to Mrs. Barr. Lured Mrs. Simpson away from her with promises of gold. Heard Mrs. Barr down in Harvey's talking about it."

"Don't try to tell me that Mrs. Barr would try to poison me because I took her cleaning woman away."

"Why not? Reckon her has a point. Said you brought down the tone of the village."

"Are you usually so rude to people who give up a day to take you out?" asked Agatha.

"I tell it like it is," said Mrs. Boggle proudly.

Agatha was about to retort angrily when she remembered herself saying exactly the same thing on several occasions. Instead she said, after they had demolished their main course, "Do you want any pudding?"

Silly question. Of course they wanted pudding. Prince Regent fudge cake with ice cream ' good'.

Agatha's mind returned to the problem of Cummings-Browne's death. Mr. Cummings-Browne had been a judge at competitions in other villages. He had had favourites. Had those favourites been his mistresses? And what of the burning animosity of Mrs. Barr? Was it all because of Mrs. Simpson? Or did Mrs. Barr enter home-baking, jam-making, or flower-arranging in the village competitions?

"Don't want coffee," Mrs. Boggle was saying. "Goes straight for me bowels."

Agatha paid the bill but did not leave a tip, free champagne or no free champagne.

"If you would both like to wait here," she said, "I'll get the car."

Freedom from this precious pair was close at hand. Agatha felt quite cheerful as she brought the car round.

As she was heading out of Bath, Mrs. Boggle poked her in the shoulder.

"Here! Where you going?"

"Home," said Agatha briefly.

"We wants to hear the band in the Parade Gardens," said Mr. Boggle.

"What sort of a day out is it if you can't hear the band?" Only the thought of Mrs. Bloxby's gentle face made Agatha turn the car round. The couple had to be deposited at the gardens while `=-81' Agatha wearily parked the car again, a long way away, and then walked back.

Deck chairs had to be found for the Boggles.

The sun shone, the band played its way through a seemingly endless repertoire as the afternoon wore on. Then the Boggles wanted afternoon tea at the Pump Room. Did they always eat so much? wondered Agatha.

Or were they storing up food inside for some long hibernation before the next outing?

At last they allowed her to take them home. All went well until she reached the Fosse Way and again that horny finger prodded her back. "I have ter pee," said Mrs. Boggle.

"Can't you wait until I reach Bourton-on-the-Water or Stow?" called Agatha over her shoulder. "Bound to be public toilets there."

"I gotta go now," wailed Mrs. Boggle.

Agatha pulled into the side of the road, bumping the car on to the grassy verge.

"You'd best help her," said Mr. Boggle.

Mrs. Boggle had to be led into a field and behind the shelter of some bushes. Mrs. Boggle produced toilet paper from her handbag. Mrs. Boggle needed help getting her knickers down, capacious pink cotton knickers with elastic at the knee.

It was all very stomach-churning for Agatha, who felt quite green when she finally shepherded her charge back to the car. It would be a cold day in hell, thought Agatha, before she ever let herself in for a day like this again.

She felt quite limp and weepy when she arrived outside Culloden. "Why Culloden?" she asked.

"When we bought our council house," said Mr. Boggle, ' went down to the nursery where they sell house signs. I wanted Rose Cottage, but she wanted Culloden."

Agatha got out and heaved Mrs. Boggle on to the pavement beside her husband. Then she fairly leaped back into the driving seat and drove off with a frantic crunching of gears.

Detective Constable Wong was waiting on Agatha's doorstep.

"Out enjoying yourself?" he asked as Agatha let him into the house.

"I've had a hellish time," said Agatha, ' I don't want to talk about it. What brings you here?"

He sat down at the kitchen table and spread out the anonymous letter.

"Have you any idea who sent this?"

Agatha plugged in the electric kettle. "I thought it might be John Cartwright. He's been threatening me."

"And why should John Cartwright threaten you?"

Agatha looked shifty. "I called on his wife. He didn't seem to like it." "And you were asking questions," said Bill.

"Well, do you know that Cummings-Browne was having an affair with Ella Cartwright?"

"Yes."

Agatha's eyes gleamed. "Well, there's a motive ... "

"In desperately trying to prove this a murder, you are going to land into trouble. No one likes anyone poking into their private life. This note, now. It interests me. No fingerprints."

"Everyone knows about fingerprints," scoffed Agatha.

"And everyone also knows that if you do not have a criminal record, there is no way the police can trace you through your fingerprints. The police are not going to fingerprint a whole village just because of one nasty letter. Then it was, I think, written by someone literate trying to sound semiliterate."

"How do you come by that?"

"Even in the broadest Gloucestershire dialect, interfering comes out sounding just that, not "innerfering". Might be interferin' with the dropped g, but that's all. Also, strangely enough, everyone appears to know how to spell bitch. Apart from the Cartwrights, who else have you been questioning?" "No one," said Agatha. "Except that I was discussing the murder in the Red Huntsman with my friends, and two friends of her next door were there."

"Not murder," he said patiently. "Accident. I'll keep this note. I haven't found anyone who recognizes the woman in your photograph. The reason I have called is to warn you, Agatha Raisin, not to go messing about in people's lives, or soon there might be a real-live murder, with you as the corpse!"

Chapter Seven.

Agatha's figure, though stocky, had hitherto carried very little surplus fat. As she tried to fasten her skirt in the morning, she realized she had put on about an extra inch and a half around the waistline. In London, she had walked a lot, walking being quicker than sitting in a bus crawling through the traffic. But since she had come to Carsely, she had been using the car to go everywhere apart from short trips along the village. Carsely was not going to make Agatha Raisin let herself go!

She drove to a bicycle shop in Evesham and purchased a light, collapsible bicycle of the kind she could carry around in the boot of her car. She did not want to experiment cycling near the village until she felt she had remastered the knack. She had not cycled since the age of six.

She parked off the road next to one of the country walks, took out the little bicycle, and pushed it to the beginning of the grassy path. She mounted and wobbled off very nervously, climbed a small rise, and then, with a feeling of exhilaration, cruised downhill through pretty woods dappled with sunlight. After a few miles, she realized she was approaching the village, and with a groan, she turned back. Her well-shaped legs, although fairly sturdy with London walking, were not up to cycling the whole way back up the hill and so she got off and pushed. Clouds covered the sun very quickly and it began to rain, fine, soft, drenching rain.

In London, she could have gone into a bar or cafe and waited for the rain to stop, but there was nothing here but fields and woods and the steady drip of water from the trees above.

She thankfully reached her car and stowed away the bicycle. She was just moving off when a car passed her. She stared at it in amazement.

Surely it was that rusting brown thing she had recently seen trapped in the Cartwrights' front garden. On impulse, she swung her own car round and set off in pursuit. Her quarry wound through narrow lanes, heading for Ancombe. Agatha tried to keep out of sight, but there were no other cars on the road. She could just make out that Mrs. Cartwright was driving the rusty car.

As Agatha approached Ancombe, she noticed large signs and arrows directing drivers to the AN COMBE ANNUAL FAIR. Mrs. Cartwright appeared to be heading for it. Now there were other cars and Agatha let a Mini get between her and Mrs. Cartwright.

Mrs. Cartwright parked her car in a large wet field. Agatha, ignoring a steward's waving arm, parked a good bit away. As abruptly as it had started, the rain stopped and the sun shone down. Feeling damp and creased, Agatha got out. There was no sign of Mrs. Cartwright. Her car, an old brown Ford, Agatha noted as she passed it, was empty.

Agatha walked towards the fair and paid the ten pence admission charge and an additional ten pence for a programme. She flicked through it until she found the Home Baking Competition tent on the map in the centre.

Just as she was about to enter the tent, Agatha came face to face with Mrs. Cartwright. "What you doin' here?" demanded Mrs. Cartwright suspiciously.

"How did you get your car out of the garden?" asked Agatha.

Tush the fence over, drive off, push the fence up again. Been like that for years, but will my John fix it? Nah. Why are you here?"

"I heard there was a fair on," said Agatha vaguely. "Are you entering anything?" "Quiche," said Mrs. Cartwright laconically. She suddenly grinned.

"Spinach quiche. Better prizes here than you get at Carsely."

Think you'll win?"

"Bound to. Haven't any competition really."

"Did Mr. Cummings-Browne judge the home-baking here as well?"

"Nah. Dogs. Best of breed and all that. Look ... " Mrs. Cartwright glanced furtively around. "Want a bit of info?"

"I've paid you forty pounds to date and I haven't yet got my money's worth!" snapped Agatha. "And you can tell that husband of yours to stop threatening me."

"He's always threatening people and he thinks you're a nosy old tart.

Still, if you don't want to know what went on at Ancombe ... "

She began to move away.

"Wait," said Agatha. "What can you tell me?"

Mrs. Cartwright's dark eyes rested greedily on Agatha's handbag.

Agatha clicked it open and took out her wallet. "Ten if I think it's worth it."

Mrs. Cartwright leaned forward. "The dog competition's always won by a Scottie."

"So?"

"And the woman who shows the Scotties is Barbara James from Combe Farm.

At the inquest her were, and crying fit to bust."

"Are you saying ... "

"Our Reg had to have a bit before he would favour someone year in and year out."

Agatha handed over ten pounds. She studied her programme. The dog judging was due to begin in an arena near the tent. When she looked up from her programme, Mrs. Cartwright had gone.

Agatha sat on a bench just outside the roped-off arena. She opened her programme again. The Best of Breed competition was to be judged by a Lady Waverton. She looked up. A stout woman in tweeds and a deerstalker was sitting on a shooting-stick, her large tweed-encased bottom hanging down on either side of it, studying the dogs as they were paraded past her. A fresh-faced woman of about thirty-five with curly brown hair and rosy cheeks was walking a Scottish terrier past Lady Waverton. Must be Barbara James, thought Agatha.

It was all so boring, Agatha felt quite glassy-eyed. How nervous and pleading the contestants looked, like parents at prize-giving. Lady Waverton wrote something down on a piece of paper and a messenger ran with it to a platform, where a man seated on a chair was holding a microphone. "Attention, please," said the man. The awards for Best of Breed are as follows. Third place, Mr. J.G. Feathers for his Sealyham, Pride of Moreton. Second, Mrs. Comley, for her otter hound, Jamesy Bright Eyes. And the first is ... "

Barbara James picked up her Scottie and cuddled it and looked expectantly towards the two local newspaper photographers. "The first prize goes to Miss. Sally Gentle for her poodle, Bubbles Daventry of the Fosse."

Miss. Sally Gentle looked remarkably like her dog, having curly white hair dressed in bows. Barbara James strode from the arena, her face dark with fury.

Agatha rose to her feet and followed her. Barbara went straight to the beer tent. Agatha hovered in the background until the disappointed competitor had got herself a pint of beer. Agatha detested beer but she gamely ordered a half pint and joined Barbara at one of the rickety tables that were set about the beer tent.

Agatha affected surprise. "Why, it's Miss. James," she cried. She leaned forward and patted the Scottie, who nipped her hand. "Playful, isn't he?" said Agatha, casting a look of loathing at the dog. "Such a good head. I was sure he would win."

"It's the first time in six years I've lost," said Barbara. She stretched her jodhpur red legs moodily out in front of her and stared at her toe-caps.

Agatha fetched up a sigh. "Poor Mr. Cummings-Browne."

"Reg knew a good dog when he saw one," said Barbara. "Here, go on.

Walkies." She put the dog down. It strolled over to the entrance to the tent and lifted its leg against a rubbish bin. "Did you know Reg?"

"Only slightly," said Agatha. "I had dinner with the Cummings-Brownes shortly before he died."

"It should never have happened," said Barbara. "That's the trouble with these Cotswold villages. Too many people from the cities coming to settle. Do you know how he died? Some bitch of a woman called Raisin bought a quiche and tried to pass it off at the competition as her own."

Agatha opened her mouth to admit she was that Mrs. Raisin when it started to rain again, suddenly, as if someone had switched on a tap.

It was a long walk to where she had parked her car. A chill wind blew into the tent.

"Terrible," said Agatha feebly. "Did you know Mr. Cummings-Browne well?"

"We were very good friends. Always good for a laugh, was Reg."

"Have you entered anything in the home-baking competition?" asked Agatha.

Barbara's blue eyes were suddenly suspicious. "Why should I?"

"Most of the ladies seem very talented at these shows."

"I can't bake, but I know a good dog. Dammit, I should have won. What qualifications does this Lady Muck have for judging a dog show? I'll tell you ... none. The organizers want a judge and so they ask any fool with a title. She couldn't even judge her own arse."

As Barbara picked up her beer tankard, Agatha noticed the woman's rippling muscles and decided to retreat.

But at that moment, Ella Cartwright looked into the beer tent, saw Agatha and called out, "Enjoying yourself, Mrs. Raisin?"

Barbara slowly put down her tankard. "You!" she hissed. She lunged across the table, her hands reaching for Agatha's throat.

Agatha leaped backwards, knocking her flimsy canvas-and-tubular-steel seat over. "Now, don't get excited," she said weakly.

But Barbara leaped on her and seized her by the throat. Agatha was dimly aware of the grinning faces of the drinkers in the tent. She got her knee into Barbara's stomach and pushed with all her strength.

Barbara staggered back but then came at her again. She was blocking the way out. Agatha fled behind the serving counter, screaming for help while the men laughed and cheered. She seized a large kitchen knife and held it in front of her. "Get away," she said breathlessly.

"Murderer!" shrieked Barbara but she backed off. Then there came a blinding flash and the click of a camera. One of the local photographers had just snapped Agatha brandishing the kitchen knife.

Still holding the knife, Agatha edged around to the exit. "Don't come near me again or I'll kill you!" shouted Barbara.

Agatha dropped the knife outside the tent and ran. Once in the safety of her car and with the doors locked, she sat panting. She thrust the key in the ignition and then paused, dismay flooding her. That photograph! She could already see it in her mind's eye on the front of some local paper. What if the London papers picked it up? Oh, God.

She was going to have to get that film.

She felt shaken and tired as she reluctantly climbed out again and trekked across the rain-sodden field.

Keeping a sharp eye out for Barbara James, she threaded her way through the booths selling old books, country clothes, dried flowers, local pottery, and, as usual, home-baking. In addition to the usual stands, there was one selling local country wines. The photographer was standing there with a reporter sampling elderberry wine. Agatha's heart beat hard. His camera case was on the ground at his feet, but the camera which had taken the photo of her was still around his neck.