(15/30) The Deadly Dance (15 page)

Emma went home, got undressed and went to bed. Her last waking thought was that dear Charles would never know how she had saved his life.

Agatha was shaken awake at nine the following morning by Charles. “Get up,” said Charles urgently. “The French police are downstairs and want to speak to you.”

“What’s the time?”

“Eleven o’clock. All that wine. We slept in. You didn’t even hear the phone. Get dressed and I’ll go down first and see what they want.”

Agatha scrambled into her clothes, wondering what on earth had happened. When she went down to the reception area, it was to find two policemen and what she judged to be two French detectives.

“Ed better explain,” said Charles, “because their English isn’t very good. A man has been found dead in your kitchen in. Carsely. He looks as if he’s been poisoned.”

“Who is it?”

“Blessed if I know. All they want at the moment is a timetable of when we arrived in Paris and where we were. I’ve told them everything and they can check it.”

Charles turned away from her and launched into rapid French. One of the detectives replied. Agatha waited impatiently.

“Seems to have been an intruder. The pane of glass in the kitchen door was smashed. There was a black Balaclava on the table and a revolver. Someone was out to get you, Aggie. We’re to wait at the commissariat.”

He turned again and spoke to the detectives.

“He says we’d better pack our bags and check out. It looks as if it’s going to be a long day.”

One of the detectives spoke again. Charles translated, “We’re to have breakfast if we want while they search our room.”

Agatha nodded. It was one of the few times in her life when she felt speechless.

That morning, Emma watched at her window. At last, she saw Doris walking past. She waited for a scream, but all was silent. And then in the distance, she heard police sirens.

Emma jumped to her feet. She would rush next door and get into the house before they arrived. Then, if she had left any footprint unvacuumed, it wouldn’t matter.

The front door was standing open. Emma went in. Doris emerged from the kitchen, her face ashen. “Don’t go in there. There’s a dead body.”

“Who is it?”

“Some man I’ve never seen before.”

“Let me have a look,” said Emma, “I might recognize him.”

She walked into the kitchen. She had not taken a close look at him before. He was a stocky man with thick black hair. His face was so contorted that Emma could not judge what he had looked like normally.

Bill Wong was the first to arrive.

“Both of you get out of here immediately,” he snapped. “Where’s Agatha?”

“In Paris,” said Emma.

“Do you know where she is staying?”

“Miss Simms will know.”

“Mrs. Comfrey, you are walking all over the crime scene. I must ask you to leave.”

“Certainly. Oh, what a shock.” Emma burst into tears, her nerves stretched to the limit.

Doris led her away. Emma dabbed at her eyes, wondering desperately if she had covered everything. She had buried the coffee jar under the compost heap where she had put the rat poison. But if Doris told them that she had had the keys, they might come and search her cottage and garden.

“Eve got to get back and make a statement,” said Doris. “Will you be all right?”

Emma rallied. “I won’t go to the office today. I’ll do some gardening to take my mind off things.”

Agatha and Charles waited all morning in a room in the commissariat. Their passports and airline tickets had been taken away from them.

“They’ll ask us what we were doing in Paris,” whispered Charles. “We’d better say we tried to call on Felicity because George is an old friend of mine. We’ll say we just needed a break.”

“By staying at the same hotel as Laggat-Brown stayed?”

“Well, Mrs. Laggat-Brown has employed you, so you can say you were double-checking his alibi.”

“Okay. I wonder how long we’ve got to wait here.”

The door opened and a French police inspector who spoke English came in. He handed them their passports and two airline tickets. “The English police say you must leave on the one o’clock flight for Heathrow. They have decided that it is important that you return to England. A police car will be waiting for you at Heathrow.”

Charles looked at his watch. “We’d better get moving.”

“A police car will take you to Charles de Gaulle.”

On the road to the airport, Charles said uneasily, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Which is?”

“The revolver and the black Balaclava. Agatha, do you think someone might have taken a hit out on you?”

“In the Cotswolds?”

“Think about it. Whoever fired at Cassandra had a first-class sniper rifle. That wasn’t amateur stuff.”

“This is getting scary. Let’s hope he turns out to be a well-known burglar. But why didn’t the burglar alarm work?”

Emma unearthed the rat poison and the coffee jar, put them in a bag, and took them out to her car. She had made a statement to the police, saying that she had slept soundly and had not heard a thing. She breathed a sigh of relief when she drove off. Doris would surely tell the police about her having had the keys to Agatha’s cottage. She drove out onto the old Worcester Road and up to where she knew the council tip was. She put the bag containing therat poison and the coffee jar into a container of general rubbish and heaved a sigh of relief.

Then she thought, there was really nothing to worry about now. They would think the man had broken in. It would be assumed that the burglar alarm was faulty. She suddenly felt ill as she remembered the dead body on the kitchen floor, and stopped the car, got out and was violently sick.

EIGHT

AGATHA and Charles were taken straight to Mircester Police Headquarters and put in an interviewing room.

Then Detective Inspector Wilkes appeared with another man whom he introduced as Detective Inspector William Fother of the Special Branch. Another man followed them into the room and leaned against a wall, his arms folded.

“What have the Special Branch got to do with this?” asked Agatha.

“We’ll ask the questions,” said Fother.

He was a dark-skinned man with thinning brown hair and large ugly hands which he folded on the table in front of him. His first question surprised Agatha.

“Mrs. Raisin, when did you last visit the Republic of Ireland?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Please just answer the question,” he rapped out.

Despite his unremarkable appearance, there was something menacing about Fother.

“I haven’t,” said Agatha. “I mean, I never got around to going there. On holidays, you know, I think of sun.”

“And Northern Ireland?”

“Never been there either.”

“We can check.”

“Oh, please do,” said Agatha, her temper beginning to rise. “Have you heard of a man called Johnny Mulligan?” “No. Who is he?”

“He is the dead gentleman on your kitchen floor. He was a foot soldier with the Provisional IRA. He was in the Maze Prison for murder but released under Tony Blair’s famous amnesty.”

“Could he have got the wrong house?” asked Charles. “I mean, Agatha’s got nothing to do with anywhere in Ireland or politics.”

“We’ll get to you later, Sir Charles. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you would remain silent.”

Fother fastened his gaze on Agatha again. “Mulligan was killed by some sort of poison. There was an empty coffee-cup on the table. The contents are being analysed, as is the jar of coffee. So far, we know the jar of coffee did not have any prints on it, which looks as if someone doctored it with poison. Perhaps someone who expected a visit from him?”

“I used the coffee I left in the kitchen before I left for Paris. I had a cup of it. Are you feeling well, Charles? You’ve gone rather white.”

“What if,” said Charles, “someone not connected at all decided to try to poison Agatha and whoever this Mulligan was drank it instead?”

“Who, for instance?”

Should I tell them about Emma? wondered Charles desperately. It would be awful if she turned out to be completely innocent. He rallied, “Maybe someone from one of Agatha’s cases.”

“Police are going through her files at the moment. You look upset. Are you sure you have no idea who put the poison there?”

“No idea,” said Charles.

Fother turned back to Agatha. “Why did you go to Paris?”

“I felt like a break,” said Agatha, “and Charles wanted to look up a friend’s daughter who works at the couture house Thierry Duval. Her name is Felicity Felliet. We were told she was on holiday but due back the next day.”

“And you decided to sacrifice the price of two plane tickets just to wait and see this girl?”

“Not really. As we were in Paris, we thought it might be a good idea to double-check Mr. Laggat-Brown’s alibi. Mrs. Laggat-Brown hired me to work on the attempted shooting of her daughter.”

“We’ll leave that for the moment.” Fother clasped his large hands together and leaned forward. “Before he turned terrorist, Mulligan was an expert burglar. It was said he could get in anywhere. Yet the pane of glass on the kitchen door was smashed by a rock. If you had been at home, you would have heard the noise, believe me.

“That makes me think again about Sir Charles’s idea. We may have two people here. One wants to poison you and the other to shoot you. Perhaps the poisoner came back to see if he had left anything incriminating and finds the dead body. Panics and wants it to look like a break-in. Takes the poisoned coffee away and replaces it with a new jar, wiping it for fingerprints first. Now, DorisSimpson had the keys to your house. The fact that the burglar alarm did not go off when Mulligan got in looks as if it was not on at all but was reset later.”

“Doris would never do anything to hurt me!” exclaimed Agatha.

“We'll see. She is making a statement at this moment.”

There was a tap at the door. Bill Wong's head appeared around it. “A word with you, sir.”

Wilkes, who was sitting next to Fother, made as if to rise, but Fother stood up and went out of the room.

“I wish, Mrs. Raisin,” said Wilkes, “that you would behave like the retired lady you're supposed to be.”

“The tape's still running,” said Charles.

Wilkes rose to switch it off but sat down again as Fother came back into the room.

“Doris Simpson says in her statement that a Mrs. Emma Comfrey, who works for you and lives next door to you, asked her for your keys, saying it would save Doris the trouble of coming and going to look after your cats. Then Mrs. Simpson changed her mind and demanded the keys back, saying that as you were paying her for the work, she would feel she was cheating you if she did not do it herself. What have you to say to that?”

But Fother turned his gaze on Charles, not Agatha.

“Sir Charles? I believe you think you know who might have tried to poison Mrs. Raisin.”

“I took Emma Comfrey out for lunch a couple of times,” said Charles in a flat voice. “I think she got a crush on me. She had started stalking me. I think she may have been jealous of my friendship with Agatha. And yet I find it hard to believe she would have gone to such lengths.”

“We'll see. We're bringing her in. I will question her myself. Now we will begin at the beginning again. Your exact movements, Mrs. Raisin, starting with your journey to Paris.”

Emma sat in the back of the police car, her mind going round and round. At times she felt her very brain was spinning with fear in her head.

She was sure they couldn't have found out anything. Then she realized that Doris must have told them about her having the keys. Well, she thought breathlessly, she would simply say that she had not gone in before Doris had claimed the keys back again. She must keep her nerve. She had worked long years for the Ministry of Defence. She was a respectable woman. No one could believe her capable of attempted murder.

The day had turned chilly and grey. The long Indian summer was over and the leaves were turning red, brown and gold.

She expected to be interviewed by Bill Wong, who had taken her initial statement.

Emma was led to an interviewing room. Courage, she told herself. You survived the Superglue investigation. You'll survive this one.

It was not Bill Wong who entered, but the men who had broken off interviewing Agatha and Charles to see what they could get out of her.

She paled slightly when Fother introduced himself. It must be serious. What was someone from the Special Branch doing in Mircester?

The tape was switched on and Fother began. “You are Mrs. Emma Comfrey. You live in Lilac Lane next door to Mrs. Agatha Raisin.”

“That is so,” said Emma, feeling a great calmness descending on her now that the interview had begun.

“Lilac Lane is a dead end and there are only the two cottages in it.”

“Yes.”

“Now, you went to Mrs. Raisin's cleaner and asked for the keys to Mrs. Raisin's cottage. Why?”

“I thought I would save her the time by looking after Agatha's cats myself.”

“You are employed by Mrs. Raisin's detective agency. Why weren't you at work?”

“I had been working very hard and decided to take a day off.”