Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate (9 page)

‘Yes,’ said Agatha. ‘May we come in? We want to talk about Tristan Delon.’

‘Oh dear. I was just making jam . . . and . . . I suppose you’d better.’ She turned and walked indoors and they followed her into a huge sitting-room with long French windows. The furnishings were a comfortable mixture of old and new. The air was redolent with the smell of plum jam.

‘Do sit down,’ said Mrs Tremp. ‘I hope you don’t mind, I keep the windows closed when I am making jam or I get plagued by wasps. What do you want to know about Mr Delon?’

‘We heard you were friendly with him,’ said Agatha.

‘Yes, I was, and I was most distressed to hear of his death. And now this other terrible murder. There was never anything like this before you arrived in our village, Mrs Raisin.’

‘Nothing to do with me. I don’t go around murdering people. But I’d like to know who is for Mr Bloxby’s sake.’

‘He has only himself to blame for being a suspect,’ said Mrs Tremp. ‘He was so jealous of Mr Delon.’

‘I suppose Tristan told you that.’

‘He did let slip that he was having a difficult time with the vicar, yes.’

‘Did you know that he was gay?’ asked John. ‘And that he tried to get women to give him money?’

She raised a gnarled and veined hand up to her suddenly trembling mouth. ‘I don’t believe it. That’s a wicked thing to say.’

‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ said Agatha. ‘Did he try to get you to give him money?’

‘He did tell me he had this project to start a club for the youth of the village. He said he would need help. I did offer to support him. In fact, I had a cheque ready for him. But he was killed, so he could not collect it. But I am sure he really did want to start this club. You must be mistaken. He was a real Christian.’

‘Mrs Tremp,’ said Agatha firmly, ‘you are very lucky that he never collected that cheque. He would have pocketed the money. How much was the cheque for?’

‘Five thousand pounds.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’

‘I can afford it. My dear George left me very comfortably off. He did not like me spending money. I made all our jam and cakes and bread. He insisted on it. And he would go over my housekeeping books every week, and goodness me, he would get so angry if he thought I had spent a penny too much. We lived in that poky little cottage on the Ancombe road for years. So full of junk I could hardly move! He never threw anything away. I craved space and light. The cottage was so dark. When he died, I rented a skip and threw everything out and then I bought this place.’

She gave a little smile. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

‘How did your husband die?’ asked John.

‘In a fit of temper. I was always saying, do watch your blood pressure. I’m afraid it was the cigarettes that did it.’

‘He smoked too much?’ Agatha thought guiltily of the packet of cigarettes in her handbag.

‘No. What happened was I suddenly craved cigarettes. He wouldn’t let me smoke. There was a new cut-price grocery shop in Evesham. I realized if I shopped there instead of the village shop, I could enter the village-shop prices in the housekeeping book, but save enough for a packet of cigarettes. He had said he was going for a round of golf. I had just lit one up when he came crashing in. He had forgotten something. He started to rant and rave about my smoking and then he made some strange gargling sounds and dropped dead.’

She gave another little smile. ‘I sat down and watched him for quite a while before I phoned the ambulance. He was quiet for the first time.’

‘To get back to Tristan,’ said Agatha, ‘how did he first get in touch with you?’

‘He called on me. He said he was doing the rounds for the vicar. He was so charming. He loved this house. He said he could live here forever. He said Alf Bloxby was a bully. I said I knew all about bullying and told him about my life with George.’

‘Alf Bloxby is not a bully,’ said Agatha firmly. ‘You have known him a long time. Can you see Mrs Bloxby putting up with a bully?’

‘Mr Delon said she was very long-suffering. I think you have been listening to malicious gossip, Mrs Raisin. Even if he were gay, where’s the shame in that?’

‘None whatsoever, except it was a fact he kept from the women he was tricking out of their money.’

A mulish looked firmed Mrs Tremp’s normally weak features. ‘I think you had both better go. I am not going to listen to any more slander and lies.’

She rose and went and held open the front door. ‘And don’t come round here again.’

‘I think she deliberately smoked that cigarette to make her husband have an apoplexy,’ said Agatha waspishly. ‘Terrifying woman.’

‘There’s one thing that came out of it,’ said John.

‘What?’

‘She said she had a cheque ready for him. If he was prepared to take cheques rather than cash, then our Tristan planned to get as much as he could and then disappear.’

‘Maybe. But if he’d taken village people’s money and disappeared, he would need to leave the church, and it was his position as a churchman that made it easier for him to get money out of people.’

‘But if he had received some sort of threat on his life, he might have planned to leave the country.’

‘Humph,’ said Agatha, annoyed that she had not thought of any of that. ‘We’ve not got much. What do we do now?’

‘It’s early yet. We could go back up to London to try whatever church it was in Kensington that Tristan used to work at.’

‘Bill didn’t say what church it was.’

‘We could ask around.’

‘It might be in West Kensington. Might take us all day.’

‘I’m willing to bet it’s somewhere around South Ken,’ said John. ‘Our Tristan would want somewhere fashionable.’

‘What if the police call round again?’

‘Well, maybe we’ll leave it until tomorrow. Let’s find out how Mrs Bloxby is getting along.’

Mrs Bloxby led them through to the vicarage garden. ‘Alf is lying down,’ she said. ‘This has all been a nightmare.’

They sat down in the garden. ‘And no word of anyone seeing a stranger in the village?’ asked Agatha.

‘Nothing at all. It’s television, you see. So many people appear to have been indoors, glued to their sets. I often wonder what it was Miss Jellop wanted to talk to me about. Was it something important, or just one of her usual complaints?’ Mrs Bloxby sighed. ‘Well, I’ll never know now.’

‘What about the press?’ asked Agatha. ‘Some of them must have still been around. People might remember someone with a camera and think, oh it’s just another one of them and not bother saying anything to the police. By the way, Tristan started off at a church in Kensington. Any idea which one?’

‘It might be in the letter that Mr Lancing wrote to Alf to introduce Tristan. Wait here and I’ll look.’

When Mrs Bloxby went inside, John said, ‘We’ve been neglecting our local pub. That must be a hotbed of gossip at the moment. We’d better try there after we’ve finished with Mrs Bloxby and get some lunch at the same time.’

Mrs Bloxby came back holding a letter. She held it out to John, much to Agatha’s irritation. Agatha pushed her chair up next to John and they both read it at the same time. It described Tristan’s need to move to the country for his mental health. It then said in the last paragraph that he had previously worked at St David’s in South Kensington before moving to New Cross.

‘We’ll go there tomorrow,’ said John. ‘It’s probably someone from Tristan’s past.’

‘I think poor Miss Jellop was very much from Tristan’s present,’ pointed out Mrs Bloxby.

‘But she might have found out something,’ John persisted.

‘Has that sister arrived?’ asked Agatha. ‘Miss Jellop’s sister? The one from Stoke-on-Trent?’

‘I haven’t heard anything,’ said Mrs Bloxby. ‘If I do, I’ll let you know.’

‘We’re going to the pub for lunch,’ said Agatha. ‘Care to join us?’

‘No, Alf will be up and about soon.’

John and Agatha left her and drove the short distance to the pub. ‘We’re getting lazy,’ commented Agatha. ‘I used to walk everywhere.’ This was not true, but Agatha only remembered her rare bursts of exercise. She even had a bicycle rusting in the shed at the bottom of her garden that she had not taken out for over a year. She remembered cycling with Roy Silver, her onetime assistant in the days when she had her own company. Strange, she thought, that he hasn’t phoned. He must have read about the murders in the newspapers. And what of Sir Charles Fraith, her one-time friend and ‘Watson’? She gave a little shiver. Her friends were deserting her. Even Bill Wong looked at her with a policeman’s eyes these days rather than with the eyes of a friend.

The pub was noisy and full of smoke, not from cigarettes but from the open fire. The landlord, John Fletcher, was bending over it, coughing and spluttering. ‘It’s that last load of wood,’ he said when he saw them. ‘Green.’ He lit a fire-lighter and threw it in among the logs. Reluctant flames started to lick up round the wood. ‘That should do it.’ He straightened up, wiping his hands on his trousers. ‘Now, what can I get you?’

They both ordered beer and sandwiches and retreated to a table in the corner by a window, propped open to let out the smoke. The fire crackled, a comforting sound. Outside the open window and beyond the small car park, golden fields of stubble stretched out under a pale sun. The air coming in through the window held the chill of autumn. If only these murders hadn’t happened, thought Agatha, forgetting how bored she had been recently, it would be nice to sit here and eat sandwiches and drink beer and then go home and play with the cats.

John brought over their beer and sandwiches. ‘So what’s the gossip?’ asked Agatha.

‘Nothing much,’ said the landlord. ‘At first they all thought the vicar did it, but there’s been talk that our curate wasn’t really a very nice person, and so people think it was someone outside the village.’

A customer at the bar shouted that he wanted a drink and John left.

Agatha took a sip of her beer and made a face. She preferred gin and tonic but often ordered beer, knowing she wouldn’t finish her half pint or want another. Alcohol was just about the most ageing thing a middle-aged woman could take.

There was the brisk tap of high heels on the stone-flagged floor to herald the arrival of Miss Simms, secretary of the ladies’ society.

She was clutching a glass of rum and vodka. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘Please do,’ said John Armitage.

Miss Simms sat down on a chair next to Agatha. ‘Terrible about Miss Jellop, innit? But she had it coming to her.’

‘How’s that?’ asked Agatha.

‘Always complaining and poking her nose into things. Terrible gossip, she was. You should have heard the things she said about you, Mrs Raisin.’

‘I don’t want to know,’ snapped Agatha. ‘Do you still think Tristan was a saint?’

‘No, he did a nasty thing.’

‘What?’

‘I met him in the village on the day before he was murdered. He asked me out. Said he was tired of all those old women in the village. Now, that wasn’t a nice thing to say, but at the time, like, I was so flattered that he wanted my company because he asked me out for dinner.’

‘But that was for the evening I had dinner with him!’ exclaimed Agatha.

‘I know. I’m coming to that. I was to meet him in that new restaurant, Stavros, in Chipping Norton, at eight o’clock. By ten past eight, I’d ordered a drink. He still didn’t show. By eight-thirty, I decided to leave. Well, I’d had a look at the menu and I knew I couldn’t afford their prices, so I just paid for the drink, picked myself up some fish and chips in Sheep Street and went home. I phoned and Mrs Feathers said he was entertaining you and couldn’t be disturbed. When did he invite you?’

‘The day before he was murdered.’

‘But he asked me out for dinner in the afternoon of that day,’ wailed Miss Simms. ‘I just don’t understand it.’

‘Maybe he did it deliberately,’ said John. ‘He’d already made a dinner date with Agatha here. Maybe he enjoyed the thought of you sitting, waiting.’

‘But he seemed so nice, ever so nice, but now there’s some murmurs that he could be a bit, well, cruel, like.’

‘Got any examples?’ asked Agatha.

‘Well, Mrs Brown, her what comes with the mobile library, she said he was charming to her one week and then, the next, he announced in front of the other customers that the selection of books was for morons and some moron must have chosen them. Mrs Brown chooses most of the books herself, everyone knows that. There was a bit of a shocked silence, but he stood there, looking so gorgeous and smiling so sweetly, that everyone sort of decided they must have misheard. Then old Mr Crinsted near me at the council houses, Tristan used to call round and play chess with him. Mr Crinsted said he was so glad of the company that he let Tristan win the first couple of times, but on the third, he beat him and he said Tristan got very angry and accused him of cheating.’

‘There’s one good thing about stories like that going round the village,’ said Agatha, ‘people can’t be thinking Alf Bloxby murdered Tristan in a fit of jealousy.’

‘No, not any more. But then, people do say things like – but who else could have done it?’

‘What about Miss Jellop?’ asked John. ‘What’s being said about her?’

‘She wasn’t very popular. Always complaining. I mean, she irritated people. But I can’t see anyone wanting to murder her. Of course, people are saying she was being spiteful about the vicar, saying he murdered Tristan, things like that.’

And what that amounts to, thought Agatha wearily, is that people will still be thinking of Alf Bloxby as a murderer. I must do something. But what? Just keep on ferreting around and hope I find something out.

Miss Simms finished her drink and left. ‘What should we do now?’ asked Agatha.

‘I don’t know. We’ll try that church in London tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s go down to the library and look up the name “Jellop” in the Stoke-on-Trent directory. We might get the sister’s number and we could call her. Tristan obviously told Miss Jellop something that made her dangerous.’

‘Nothing here,’ said Agatha, half an hour later. ‘Not in the residential addresses.’

‘Jellop’s Jams and Jellies. Try under the business addresses,’ said John.

Agatha searched the book. ‘Got it,’ she said.