Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death (8 page)

‘Why?’

‘Be a good bit of publicity if you found out who did it. I mean, haven’t you got one teensy-weensy suspect?’

‘There’s one I would like it to be.’

‘Give.’

‘Some old bat called Jane Cutler. She’s a walking monument to the plastic surgeon and the beautician. In her sixties, but all face-lifted. She’s poison. The things that go on
in villages. She seems to specialize in marrying men on their last legs with cancer and then benefiting in their wills. She’s a parish councillor. One of the others, Angela Buckley, fortyish,
strapping, was keen on the late Percy Cutler, but the older Jane Cutler snatched him out of her grasp. Actually, Angela warned me off.’

‘So you think it might have nothing to do with the water?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anyone else warn you off? Any trouble?’

‘Andy Stiggs, another councillor, one of the ones who are against the water company. He warned me off when there was that ruckus from Save Our Foxes.’

‘Who the hell are they?’

‘Some environment group who have transferred their attention from the plight of foxes to the sacrilege of taking water out of the spring. Usual lot. Nice people really interested in a
batty way in protecting village life followed by the usual trouble-making skinheads. There was a bit of a dust-up. James nearly got hurt protecting me.’

‘So is he doing anything about finding out about anything?’

‘I don’t think he’s interested in anything other than insulting me.’

‘Shows he’s still interested, Aggie. Wouldn’t insult you otherwise. Why don’t you ask me down for the weekend? We could ferret around together.’

Agatha opened her mouth to refuse and then closed it again. She did not know if Guy meant to have an affair with her, or whether it was to be regarded as a one-night stand. Suddenly the idea of
going back on her own made her feel vulnerable. Roy could be tiresome and malicious, but they had known each other since he had started work for her as an office boy.

‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose it might be interesting to trot around and ask a few questions.’

‘You’d better eat that stodgy pudding. It’s getting cold.’

Agatha regretted her invitation when she met Roy at Paddington Station on Saturday morning. He was dressed in skin-tight jeans and a black leather jacket and talking into a
mobile phone, looking around all the while to see if people noticed he was talking on a mobile phone, just as if millions of people hadn’t got the damn things, which Agatha thought had been
expressly designed to irritate the travelling public.

‘If you use that on the train,’ snarled Agatha when he had rung off, ‘I’ll throw it out of the window. And you’re only in your twenties. I thought men only went in
for jeans and black leather when they hit the male menopause.’

‘And I thought middle-aged women only took to eating roast beef and fattening pudding when they thought they were past attracting
anyone
.’

‘Oh, stop bitching,’ snapped Agatha.

She passed the journey to Moreton-in-Marsh by ignoring Roy and reading a novel set in the Cotswolds about middle-class, middle-aged infidelity, marvelling as she did so at her own attitude that
the well-off middle classes should not have any passions and remembering the days of her youth when it was the lower classes who were supposed to be immune to the sensitivities of soul suffered by
their betters. At one point in the journey, Roy’s phone rang but he retreated with it down the carriage before Agatha’s basilisk glare.

Bright yellow fields of oil seed rape slid past the carriage windows, and lilac trees heavy with blossom leaned down over railway embankments. With that now familiar feeling of coming home,
Agatha gathered up her belongings as the train finally slid into Moreton-in-Marsh Station.

With Roy carrying his own weekend bag and Agatha’s suitcase, they made their way to Agatha’s car. The sky was blue and birds sang in the trees bordering the station car park. Flower
baskets moved in the light breeze.

‘When I’m as old as you,’ said Roy, ‘I’ll move down here.’

Feeling ancient, Agatha drove off, negotiating the heavy traffic in Moreton and then swinging out along the A44 and up the long steep slope through Bourton-on-the-Hill and so down the winding
road under tunnels of arched trees to Carsely.

James’s cottage had an empty look, she noticed, and Roy suddenly said, ‘Going to call on Lacey?’

‘No. If you get the cases, I’ll open the door.’

While Roy carried the bags in, Agatha petted her cats, who had been looked after in her absence by her cleaner, fed them and then let them out into the garden.

After they had unpacked, they settled down over coffee in the kitchen and Roy said, ‘Well, let’s begin. Who have we on this council?’

‘For the water company, we’ve got Mrs Jane Cutler, Angela Buckley and Fred Shaw. Against, we’ve got Mr Bill Allen, Andy Stiggs, and the most vehement protester, Mary Owen. The
woman whose garden the spring rises in is Robina Toynbee. We might try her first. She might have had threats. She might even know which way the late Mr Struthers was going to vote.’

‘Aren’t we going to eat first?’

‘I’ll take you to the pub.’

‘None of your microwave specials?’

‘I can cook now,’ said Agatha defensively. ‘I didn’t know you were coming, so I didn’t get anything in.’

When they entered the Red Lion, her eyes flew around the pub looking for James, but he was not there. ‘Our Mr Lacey’s taken off again,’ said the landlord as he served their
drinks and took their order for lunch.

‘Oh,’ said Agatha bleakly and then asked as casually as she could, ‘Any idea where he’s gone?’

‘No, Mrs Darry saw him driving off.’

‘How long will he be gone?’

‘Nobody knows. He stopped at the shop to buy the newspapers and then he went to the police station and left his key with Fred Griggs and said he planned to be away for a bit.’

Agatha felt very low. Life had suddenly lost colour and meaning. Her fling with Guy Freemont began to seem to her distinctly sordid.

She had again lost interest in any investigation. When they had finished their – typically English – pub meal of lasagne and chips, Agatha said, ‘I’d like to go to
Gerry’s in Evesham first. It’s that new supermarket.’

‘Why?’ asked Roy. ‘One of the councillors work there? I thought they were all pretty well-heeled.’

‘No, it’s just I have no food in the house and need you to carry the bags.’

‘If you must. Do you know there is a circle in hell where I will probably end up which is one huge supermarket? The shopping trolleys always go sideways, the children always scream, I
always have at least one item of shopping which doesn’t have the bar code on it and so I wait and wait until someone goes and finds one with the bar code and the people in the lengthening
crowd behind me hate me. Or when I get to the check-out at the Express Lane, Nine Items Only, three people in front of me have at least twenty items and I haven’t the courage to protest. Or
the woman at the till who knows everyone in the line except me indulges in long and happy chit-chat and when it gets to me she decides to change the roll of paper in the till. Or the woman in front
of me watches all her groceries sliding along and stares at them without packing them, and then she slowly takes out her cheque-book and
slowly
proceeds to write a cheque and then insists on
carefully packing her plastic shopping bags according to type of grocery. And then, when it’s all over and I get to the revolving doors and see daylight outside, I suddenly find myself back
at the beginning of the whole process.’

‘Let’s go anyway,’ said Agatha, who had not been listening to him.

Gerry’s was jammed with shoppers. Roy suddenly decided that he would do the cooking and so proceeded to look for esoteric herbs and spices. ‘Keep away from the frozen food,
Aggie,’ he warned. ‘I can see from the gleam in your eye that you’re just dying to microwave something.’

‘You, for a start,’ said Agatha. ‘Are we ever going to get out of here?’

When they eventually got to the check-out, the trolley which, yes, slewed to one side, was piled high. The line moved forward and soon the end was in sight, only one thin woman in front of
them.

‘Hazel!’ cried this woman to the check-out assistant. ‘I didn’t know you did Saturdays.’

‘Need the money, Gladys,’ said Hazel, one fat red hand hovering over the first item.

‘Isn’t that a fact,’ said Gladys. ‘I put in for my hip operation.’

‘You’ll need to wait awhile.’

‘It’ll be worth it. My Bert said, he said, no creature should have to endure the pain I’ve had. But you know what the National Health Service is like. My turn’ll come
round when I’m in me grave.’

‘Maybe this new government . . .’ began Hazel, that hand still hovering.

‘Oh, get on with it!’ shouted Agatha loudly.

There was a sudden silence. Agatha turned to Roy for back-up but he had disappeared. The people in the line behind her avoided eye contact.

‘Well,
really
,’ said Gladys. But Hazel began to slide her groceries over the scanner at great speed while Gladys began to pack, darting angry little looks at Agatha.

Gladys was at last packed and served. She threw a fulminating look at Agatha and said in a high shrill voice, ‘I’m sorry for you, Hazel. If I had to deal with
some people
I
would go mad.’

‘Bye, Glad. Love to Bert.’

And then Hazel proceeded to open the till and change the roll of paper.

Agatha was incandescent with rage by the time she had packed up the trolley and wheeled it out to the car park as it veered crazily to the left.

Roy was waiting at the car.

‘Where the hell were you?’ shouted Agatha.

‘I went to get cigarettes,’ said Roy shiftily.

‘You chickened out. Oh, help me get this stuff in the boot.’

They drove round Evesham’s new one-way system, so hated by the traders in Bridge Street, who felt they had been left high and dry ever since it had been turned into a shopping
precinct.

At last Roy said meekly, ‘Are we going to Ancombe?’

‘We’ll take this stuff home first,’ said Agatha grimly. Oh, where was James?

As they unpacked, Roy felt he could not bear the angry silence any longer and said, ‘It’s not my fault James has left.’

‘What?’

‘Well, that’s why you got so shirty with that woman in the supermarket.’

‘Let me tell you this. I would have got shirty with that woman in the supermarket at any time.’

‘Then why take it out on me?’

‘Because you’re a wimp!’

‘I think I may as well go back to London,’ said Roy in a small voice.

‘Do that!’

‘I’ll go and pack.’

Agatha sat down at the kitchen table and buried her face in her hands. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. Why on earth should she still get so upset over a man who showed signs of actual
dislike? Perhaps, she thought, brushing the tears away, it was because of her age, because after James there might be no one left out there to love.

She got to her feet and called up the stairs. ‘I’m sorry I got ratty. Want a drink?’

Roy came down the stairs, all smiles. He was an ambitious young man and did not want to offend this prickly woman whose PR skills were so admired by his boss.

‘Like a drink?’ repeated Agatha.

‘I’ve given up alcohol,’ said Roy, who had only drunk mineral water in the pub.

‘Why?’

Roy hesitated a moment. The real reason was that it seemed to be becoming awfully fashionable
not
to drink, and Roy did not want to be out of fashion.

‘Rots the brain cells, sweetie.’

‘I’m going to have a stiff brandy before I go out.’

‘I’d hate to see you drink alone . . .’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Just a teensy one, then.’

One brandy led to three and it was an amiable couple who set out for Ancombe. Agatha parked on the main road a little way along from the spring, where a group of tourists were standing staring
at it and pointing. The barrier of blue-and-white police tape which had guarded the spring had been taken away.

The entrance to Robina Toynbee’s cottage was by a gate in a lane which ran up the side of the cottage from the main road. ‘We should have phoned first,’ said Roy.

‘It’s all right, she’s at home. She’s watching us from the window.’

As Agatha raised her hand to knock at the door, Robina opened it. ‘I’m delighted to see you, Mrs Raisin,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of phoning you to thank you. Please
come in.’

The cottage was old, might even be seventeenth century, thought Agatha. The living-room was pleasant: large fireplace, low beams on the ceiling, vases of flowers, pictures and books and a cat
asleep on top of the television set.

Outside the small leaded windows, a long narrow garden led down to the road, an artistic jumble of pansies, begonias, wisteria, clematis, and lobelia. There was a green lawn with a sundial next
to where the spring bubbled up and then was channelled between rocks and flowers to where it disappeared through the old garden wall.

Above the fireplace was a dark oil painting of a grim old lady in an enormous cap.

‘Your ancestor?’ asked Agatha.

‘Yes, that is Miss Jakes,’ said Robina. She was wearing a soft-green velvet trouser suit. Agatha herself possessed several velvet trouser suits. She realized, looking at Robina, that
velvet trouser suits were something favoured particularly by middle-aged women and decided to pack hers up and give them away to some charity shop. Although it was only late afternoon,
Robina’s dress was more suitable for evening. With the trouser suit, she wore sparkling ear-rings and a paste diamond necklace, and on her feet, high-heeled black satin shoes.

In the same way that some lonely women will keep a Christmas tree still lit up long after Christmas, so will they favour evening clothes during the day, as if the very sparkle and glitter could
keep youth alive a little longer.

‘So,’ said Robina with a gentle smile, ‘what will we all drink?’

‘I don’t know . . .’ began Roy.

‘Come now. That is a brandy smell, is it not? I would like to join you in a brandy.’