(15/30) The Deadly Dance (20 page)

Agatha then tried the sandwich shop on the ground floor, but the Greeks who ran it said they were too busy to notice anyone other than their customers.

She wanted to see Jeremy. She realized she wanted him to smile at her and tell her he had said nothing of the kind and it was all Catherine’s idea. Agatha had fallen a little in love with Jeremy. She went to a doorway across the street and waited and waited to see if he would arrive. At last, she glanced at her watch and realized that if she caught the five-o’clock commuter train, he might be on it.

She went to Paddington. But once she had boarded the train, one of the very long ones run by the Great Western Railway, she could see no sign of him.

Charles drifted in and out of sleep, and by evening decided he was feeling well enough to get up for a little.

Gustav tenderly helped him into his armchair in the study and poured him a brandy.

“I’ve prepared a light supper of roast quail for you,” said Gustav. “You should try to eat something. Are you sure you don’t want me to call a doctor?”

“No, it’s just a bad cold. Didn’t Agatha call?”

“There’s been no call from Mrs. Raisin.”

Selfish, thought Charles sulkily. She might have sent me flowers.

Agatha arrived home to find Bill Wong waiting outside for her. “Don’t be alarmed,” said Bill. “It’s a social call.”

“Come in,” urged Agatha, “We haven’t had a chance of a proper talk in ages.”

Bill followed her through to the kitchen. “You never use that dining room of yours.”

“If this case ever gets solved, I’ll give a dinner party. You can come and bring a girl.”

“I don’t have a girl at the moment. The work gets more and more, and if I set up a date I usually have to break it.”

“Coffee?”

“I suppose it’s safe now that Emma’s inside, but she won’t stand trial. She’s really flipped. They tried their best to get sense out of her. At one point she even tried to claim she’d hired Mulligan to bump you off, but then she relapsed into rambling incoherently. But of course, the powers that be want to believe her and get the case closed. Which leaves us with the shooting at the manor.”

“I went up to Jeremy Laggat-Brown’s office today,” said Agatha, plugging in the kettle. “Oh, Eve got some biscuits.” And seeing the look of apprehension on Bill’s face, she added, “No, not mine. Doris baked them.”

“PC Darren Boyd, the good-looking one who was on duty at your cottage during the day, was quite upset to be called off. He said he’d never been so pampered in all his life. You wouldn’t find anything at that office?”

“Why?”

“He’s closed down the business. Taken early retirement.” “Can he afford to do that?”

“Well, his ex is loaded and they’re getting married again.”

“I thought he was a charming man. Now I’m beginning to think he’s a rat.”

“Yes, but a rat who is devoted to his daughter.”

“And nothing bad in his background?”

“No. We checked out all his import/export business and interviewed his clients. He’s exactly what he says he is.”

“Catherine Laggat-Brown’s taken me off the case. Yet, I had dinner with Jeremy the night before and he said nothing about it.”

“Oho, have you been dating him?”

“No, Roy was there. He was interested in what we’d found out but I couldn’t tell him anything about Mulligan because I was told not to. Nothing in Harrison Peterson’s background?”

“We’re still digging, finding out who he made friends with in prison, that sort of thing.”

“Let me know when you find anything.” Agatha set two cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits on the table.

“I’m not supposed to.” Hodge climbed up Bill’s trouser leg and settled on his lap.

“Funny how much these cats love you. How are your parents?”

“Mother’s got bad arthritis in her hip. She had this pain for ages but she wouldn’t get the hip x-rayed and now she’s got to queue up for a hip operation.”

Agatha’s hip gave a sharp twinge and she thought, I can’t have arthritis. Surely only old people get it.

Bill finished his coffee, ate two biscuits and left, saying “Look after yourself. In fact, Agatha, stick to divorces and missing dogs and cats. You’re off the Laggat-Brown case. So leave it that way.”

Agatha made herself a supper of lasagne in the microwave. She overdid it and it was stuck to the sides of the plastic tray, but she scraped off what she could. She decided to cook up some fish for the cats, and after the fish was cooked switched off the gas and went upstairs.

She had a long hot bath, opened her bedroom window, and went to bed.

Agatha awoke with a start. There was a scratching and yowling from the thatch above her head. She leaped out of bed and opened the bedroom window wide and leaned out. Her cats were up on the roof. She could not see them but she recognized their cries.

Agatha pulled her head in and was just about to switch on her bedside light when she smelt gas. North Sea gas does not have the same strong smell as the old coal gas, but she knew it was gas all the same. She hurried down to the kitchen, trying to breathe as little as possible.

The gas under the fish pot was switched full on. She switched it off and opened the kitchen door and breathed in great lungfuls of fresh air.

It was then she realized that when she opened the kitchen door the burglar alarm had not gone off.

But her overriding thought was to rescue her cats.

She got an extension ladder out of the shed at the bottom of the garden, and carrying it up the path, placed it against the thatch and climbed up.

Agatha called to her cats, who approached her cautiously. She managed to get hold of Hodge, and Boswell leaped onto her shoulder. Agatha eased down the ladder with the cats and collapsed on the grass, holding her head in her hands and feeling sick.

Then she went indoors and opened the front door and all the windows before she phoned the police.

PC Boyd, accompanied by PC Betty Howse, arrived. At first they were sure that Agatha had simply forgotten to light the gas.

“It doesn’t light automatically,” said Agatha. “You have to push that button there to ignite it. And why didn’t the burglar alarm go off?”

Boyd put on a pair of thin gloves and lifted the cover off the main burglar alarm box.

“It’s switched off,” he said over his shoulder. “Are you sure you didn’t do it?”

“Absolutely not!”

“But when you came in this evening, it must have sounded before you punched in the code.”

“Come to think of it, it didn’t. Bill Wong was with me and I was talking to him and didn’t notice.”

“That would be Detective Sergeant Bill Wong?”

“Yes, we’re friends.”

“Who else has keys to your house?”

“Just Doris Simpson.”

“I’ll need her phone number.”

Agatha gave it to him and he picked up the phone and called Doris. Agatha’s heart sank as she heard Boyd’s end of the conversation. “What repair-man? What did he look like? Did he show you any identification? Did you leave your keys lying around? Did you leave him alone at any time?”

Meanwhile Betty Howse reached up and took down the instruction manual from the control box. “What’s this?” she demanded sharply, pointing to the numbers “5936” written on top of the instruction manual.

“It’s the code,” mumbled Agatha. “I kept forgetting it, so I wrote it down.”

Meanwhile, Boyd ended his interrogation of Doris. “A man saying he was from the security company who installed the burglar alarm called round when Mrs. Simpson was here. He flashed some sort of card at her and she let him in. Then she said she had to get down to the shops to get some more cleaning stuff and she left the keys on the table. Time enough for him to get an impression of them. He makes sure the alarm is switched off He then comes back when you’re asleep, lets himself in. But what puzzles me is that he couldn’t guarantee you wouldn’t notice the alarm had been switched off. He wouldn’t know that a short burst of alarm as he let himself in wouldn’t wake you. He didn’t have the code to switch it off quickly.”

“Oh, yes, he did,” said Betty and held out the instruction book with the code written on it.

“Amateurs. You, I mean,” said Boyd bitterly. “So it was planned to look like an accident. The house fills with gas. You switch on a light, and, boom, you’re history. Now I must ask you to leave the kitchen alone until a forensic team arrives. In fact, it would be better if you could stay with someone.”

Agatha thought desperately. “I could phone Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife, but it’s the middle of the night and her husband would be furious. I would check into an hotel, but they probably wouldn’t let me bring my cats and I don’t want to leave them here. I know, I’ll get Doris to drop in and look after the cats and then I’ll book into some hotel.”

“We need to know which one.”

“There’s a big one outside Bourton-on-the-Water called The Cotswold.”

“Phone them now.”

So Agatha phoned and was assured of a room. She went upstairs and got dressed and packed a bag. Then she put her cats into the large cat box and drove round to Doris Simpson. Doris was still awake and full of apologies. “Honestly, he was such a meek-looking little man. I didn’t think for a moment there was anything wrong. Of course I’ll look after the cats.”

Agatha drove off in the direction of Bourton-on-the Water, feeling numb. Why was she considered such a danger? She didn’t know much, and what she knew was surely considerably less than what the police knew. In the hotel room, she unpacked her few belongings, undressed and climbed into bed. She lay shivering despite the central heating. She felt they, whoever they were, were not going to give up. The only solution, surely, was to leave the country for an extended holiday and let everyone know she had left so that the murderer or murderers would no longer think her a threat.

She fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up in the morning remembering her dreams and feeling she had spent the night in some sort of Shakespearian play, with first murderer and second murderer waiting in the wings.

Agatha craved the soothing presence of Mrs. Bloxby, but first she drove to her cottage. A forensic team was working outside like so many figures from science fiction in their white hooded suits, gloves and white bags tied over their boots.

One of Agatha’s favourite programmes on television was
CSI
—Crime Investigators. Now she wondered if that was really how American forensic teams went on, treading all over crime sites in their normal clothes and shaking their own hair and DNA all over the place.

She left her car and walked up to the vicarage.

Mrs. Bloxby let her in and said that as the day was fine, they could sit in the garden where Agatha could have a cigarette, mindful of her husband’s complaint, “Keep that bloody woman and her cigarettes out of the house.”

“I hear a forensic team are back at your cottage. What happened?”

So Agatha told her, and when she had finished, Mrs. Bloxby said, “I would have thought Bill Wong might have noticed the burglar alarm wasn’t on.”

“No reason to,” sighed Agatha. “I never think about other people’s alarm systems, so why should he?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. 1 can’t think. But I’ve a feeling that whoever is behind this won’t stop now. I keep going over and over it. Maybe I do know something that’s frightened whoever. If only I could think what. My neck’s rigid with tension and I feel like shit. Sorry. I know you don’t like bad language.”

“Because I’m a vicar’s wife? Nonsense. I hear much worse every day. Besides, have you noticed it’s a must in every American action film—two men, one black, one white, leap in front of an exploding building, shouting, ’Oh, sh-i-t!’ I think you should go for a massage. There’s marvellous man in Stow called Richard Rasdall. He could give you a relaxing massage. I’ll phone him if you like.”

“Might be a good idea. I’m not doing anything else and I’ve a pain in the neck, which is exactly what the police think I am. Oh, Lord, they’re probably phoning the hotel asking me to go to police headquarters and make a statement.”

“Go to Richard first and then you’ll feel more up to it.”

Mrs. Bloxby went into the vicarage to phone. Agatha suddenly wished she could stay in this pleasant garden among the late roses forever. The world outside was an ugly, threatening place.

The vicar’s wife returned and said, “He can take you in half an hour. If you leave now, you’ll make it easily provided you can find a parking place.”

“Where do I go?”

“If you get a place in the parking spot at the market cross,you walk up past Lloyd’s bank as if you’re going to the church. There’s sweetie shop called The Honey Pot. It’s in there.”

“In a sweetie shop!”

“He works upstairs. You’ll meet his wife, Lyn. Such a nice pretty woman. Lovely family.”

As Agatha drove to Stow-on-the Wold, she noticed the sun had gone in and the day was becoming as dark as her mood. At the back car-park by the market cross, cars were circling around like so many prowling metal animals searching for places. Agatha saw that a woman was about to reverse into a place and quickly drove straight into it.

She sat there with the windows up and switched on the radio for a few moments to drown out the yells of frustration from the woman driver. Then she got out, feeling suddenly stiff and old and beaten.

Agatha trudged up to The Honey Pot and went inside.

ELEVEN