Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam (4 page)

‘There’s PC Framp, but I wouldn’t bother –’

‘I will bother. Where is he? I didn’t see a police station.’

‘It’s out a bit on the road to the manor house.’

‘Which is where?’

‘North of the village green. The road that goes out of the village the opposite way to the one you arrived on.’

‘Right. When will you be arriving with the heaters?’

‘I’ve got a spare key. I’ll leave them in the hall if you aren’t in.’

‘Don’t upset my cats.’

‘I didn’t know you had pets, Mrs Raisin. You didn’t say anything about cats.’

Agatha rose to her feet and looked at him truculently. ‘And you didn’t say anything about not having them. No cats, no rental.’

She turned and marched out. She ignored Amy. She was fed up with the whole bunch of them. And she had only just arrived!

She decided to drive. She returned home to get in her car and saw a square envelope lying inside the door. She opened it up. There was a note on stiff parchment. ‘We would like to welcome you to the village. Please come for tea this afternoon at four o’clock. Lucy Trumpington-James.’

Summoned to the manor house, thought Agatha. Well, God knows, I’ve got nothing better to do.

She phoned Mrs Bloxby in Carsely. ‘Haven’t heard from James,’ said the vicar’s wife promptly.

‘I wasn’t phoning about that,’ lied Agatha. ‘Just wondered how everyone was getting on.’

‘Same as ever,’ said Mrs Bloxby cheerfully. ‘What’s that place in Norfolk like?’

‘Weird,’ said Agatha. ‘It’s a small village and I gather a large proportion of the population only use their houses in summer, which is enough to turn anyone Communist when you think of the housing shortage.’

‘Well, your house is going to be empty for the winter. Would you like me to find a homeless family?’

‘No, don’t,’ said Agatha, repressing a shudder.

‘I thought not.’ Was the saintly Mrs Bloxby being
catty
? Perish the thought.

‘It’s about these strange lights.’ Agatha told her all about them and about the locals’ reluctance to even discuss them.

‘You’ve a mystery to solve,’ said Mrs Bloxby.

‘I’m supposed to be meeting my destiny here, according to that fortune-teller.’

‘It’s early days. You’ve only just arrived. I’m sure you’ll stir something up. Oh, Charles phoned. Wanted to know where you were.’

Agatha thought briefly of Sir Charles Fraith, lightweight, tightwad, fickle. ‘No, if my destiny is to meet some fellow, I don’t want him hanging around.’

‘So, any eligible men around?’

‘Apart from some gnarled old codger who put his hand on my knee and a sweaty estate agent, I haven’t met any. And this cottage has no central heating, nothing but log fires.’

‘The weather can get grim over there. Are you sure you don’t want to come back? You could use the lack of central heating as an excuse.’

‘Not yet, but you’re right. I can leave this place any time I want. I meant to tell that estate agent I was leaving, but I’ll hang on a bit longer.’

After she had rung off, Agatha felt much cheered. Of course, she could simply pack up and go. But first, see what the local copper had to say.

She drove out of the village a little way and soon saw the police station. She parked outside and went and rang the bell. There was a police car on the short drive at the side, so she was sure PC Framp was at home.

After some minutes, the door was opened. PC Framp was a tall, thin man with receding hair above a lugubrious face. He had an apron on and was holding a frying pan.

‘It’s my day off,’ he said defensively.

Agatha ignored that. ‘My name is Agatha Raisin and I have just rented Lavender Cottage. There have been peculiar lights at the bottom of my garden and a vase is missing.’

‘Come in,’ he said wearily. ‘But don’t mind if I cook my lunch.’

Agatha followed him through the police office, and then along a corridor to a stone-flagged kitchen. It was amazingly dirty and smelt of sour milk. It was also very hot. The policeman put the frying pan on top of an Aga cooker, poured in oil, cracked in two eggs, then added two rashers of bacon and two slices of bread. A fine mist of fat rose from the pan and covered the already greasy black top of the cooker.

She sat down at a crumby plastic-topped kitchen table. She leaned her elbows on it and then realized she had put one elbow in a smear of marmalade. At last Framp shovelled the mess out of the frying pan on to a chipped and cracked plate and sat down opposite her.

‘So,’ began Agatha impatiently, ‘what about these lights?’

‘Some kids playing pranks.’

‘So you know that for a fact?’

‘Educated guess.’ He stabbed the corner of a piece of fried bread into the yolk of an egg and shoved it in his mouth.

‘So you don’t
really
know?’

He chomped steadily, filled a mug with tea, took a great swallow, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then said, ‘Nothing important’s ever taken. Just bits and pieces. A worthless picture, a cream jug, three forks, things like that.’

‘Why don’t you come round to my cottage and fingerprint the place?’

‘I don’t fingerprint things. CID does that and they ain’t going to come running over with their kit and the forensic boys over a load of junk.’

‘It doesn’t seem to bother you that someone is frightening the village with their antics. They won’t talk about it.’

‘Well, no, they wouldn’t. Not to you.’

‘Why?’

‘They think it’s fairies.’

Agatha stared at him and then said, ‘Oh, come on. Fairies at the bottom of the garden!’

‘Fact.’

‘Fairies are not fact! And you’ve got egg on your chin. Look, the women I’ve met are not inbred peasants. They wouldn’t believe in fairies.’

‘That they do. Some have been putting salt round their houses to keep the fairies away, others are leaving gifts like saucers of milk and things like that.’

Agatha looked at him, puzzled, and then her face cleared ‘Oh, I know what it is. You’re pulling my leg.’

‘No. I’m telling you, Mrs Raisin. This is a very old part of Britain and strange things do happen here.’

‘I don’t believe in fairies and I don’t think you do either.’ Agatha got to her feet. ‘I won’t waste any more of your time. I’ll solve the mystery myself. I am by way of being a detective.’

She turned at the kitchen door and looked back, but he was dunking the last of his fried bread in the remaining egg.

Agatha got in her car in a bad temper. She drove slowly along until she came to a lodge-gate. This then must be the manor. She checked her watch. Three-thirty. Too early. She lowered the windows. The village of Fryfam nestled in pine woods and the air was sweet with the scent. A lazy bee blundered into the car, as if bewildered by all this late sunshine and warmth. Agatha wondered whether to swat it, but then realized she could not. She shrank back in her seat until it blundered out again.

Fairies, indeed! She decided furiously that the lazy policeman was probably trying to take the mickey out of a tourist.

Her thoughts turned to the vicar’s wife, Mrs Bloxby. Agatha knew that Mrs Bloxby did not approve of her ongoing love for James Lacey and felt irritated. She should be sympathetic, understanding and supportive. Still, surely the whole reason for her flight to Norfolk, apart from the fortune-teller’s prophecy, was to get James out of her hair. Not for a moment would she admit to herself that the real reason was because she wanted him to return to Carsely, find her gone and miss her.

She tried to jerk her thoughts back to the mystery of the dancing lights, but they kept returning to the way she would behave when she saw him again and what she would say. So immersed was she in her thoughts that it was with a start of surprise she realized the clock on the dashboard was registering five minutes past four. She started the car and turned into the drive. The pine trees were thick on either side. She was just wondering if she would ever reach the house when she turned a bend in the drive, and there it was, a square eighteenth-century building like a hunting-box, with a Victorian servants’ wing stuck on one side. It had a small porticoed entrance with a very new coat of arms stuck on top. Two heraldic beasts supported a shield. Agatha squinted up as she got out of the car but could not make out the details. What had the Trumpington-Jameses put on their shield? Bathroom showers rampant?

She rang the bell at the side of the door. Lucy Trumpington-James answered the door wearing a gold silk Armani suit and a quantity of gold jewellery, chains round the neck and bracelets on her thin wrists.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Tolly’s in the drawing-room.’

Agatha followed her across a dark hall with console tables topped with Chinese vases of autumn leaves. Harriet’s work?

The drawing-room came as a shock to Agatha, who had been expecting something country-house with chintz, Persian rugs, and oil paintings. There were two large oatmeal sofas in front of the fire, the sort you made up of blocks of chairs. In front of them was an oblong black-lacquered table. The walls were painted blood-red and the fitted carpet was a gleaming expanse of white. The paintings were modern abstracts. The side tables were of white lacquer and covered with photo frames holding pictures of the Trumpington-Jameses out hunting, at parties, at Henley, at Ascot and various other fashionable places. A black-lacquered wall unit held a television set, a CD player and very new and unread-looking books. The fire was one of those electric fake-log ones. The room was bright, lit by a crystal chandelier overhead, and by angular brass standard lamps in the corners.

‘Do sit down, Mrs Raisin,’ said Tolly Trumpington-James, rising to meet her. He was wearing a hacking jacket and cavalry-twill trousers. His Tattersall shirt was open at the neck.

‘Call me Agatha,’ said Agatha, sitting down. She scanned the room for signs of an ashtray but could see none. She gave a little sigh, but at least it would keep her off fags for an hour.

Lucy rang a bell in the wall beside the fireplace. Its summons was answered, not by a neat maid, but by a fat, surly-looking woman in a stained gingham pinafore.

‘We’ll have tea now, Betty,’ said Lucy.

‘And then I’m off,’ said surly Betty. ‘You’ll need to clear up yourselves.’ She clumped off in a pair of battered boots.

‘Help these days,’ said Lucy, raising her eyes. ‘Do you have trouble with help, Agatha?’

Not so long ago, the old Agatha, intimidated at being in a manor house, would have invented colourful stories about a whole regiment of servants. Now she simply said, ‘I don’t have any trouble back home. I have an excellent cleaning woman who comes in twice a week.’

‘Lucky you,’ sighed Lucy. ‘I sometimes wish we had never come here.’

‘Why did you?’ asked Agatha curiously.

‘Made my pile,’ said Tolly. ‘Wanted a bit of country life. Get a bit of hunting.’

‘And because he wants to act the squire, we’re stuck here,’ said Lucy with a light laugh.

Her husband flashed her an angry look, but the door opened and Betty lumbered in with a large tray which she deposited on the low table in front of them. Besides tea, there was a plate with a few chocolate biscuits – no sandwiches, no fruit-cake.

‘That will be all, Betty,’ said Tolly imperiously.

‘Should think so, too,’ grumbled Betty and off she went.

‘Such a character,’ murmured Lucy, clanking her bangles.

People who would not pay good wages and put up with surly help were usually tight with money, thought Agatha.

‘We had such a nice place in London. Kensington,’ said Lucy, pouring tea. ‘Help yourself to milk and sugar, Agatha. Do you know Kensington?’

‘Yes, very well. I used to live in London. I had a public relations business. I took early retirement to move to the Cotswolds.’

‘Don’t you miss London?’

‘I did when I first moved to the country, but then a lot of exciting and scary things happened, and Carsely – that’s where I live – began to seem more interesting than London.’

There was a slight snore. Tolly had fallen asleep, his teacup resting on his paunch.

Lucy sighed, rose and took the cup from him.

‘If only we could get back to London,’ she mourned. ‘But he wants to be the country gentleman. Doesn’t work. None of the county invite us unless they want money for some charity or other. I tried to get that coat of arms taken down.’

‘Doesn’t it come from the College of Arms or something?’

‘No, he had an artist make it up for him. He got some poncey interior designer to do this room. Isn’t it foul?’

‘It’s a bit . . . modern.’

‘It’s vulgar.’

‘Could you rent in London for the winter?’

‘He won’t think of it. He likes to keep me trapped here. So tell me, what on earth could be exciting about living in the Cotswolds?’

Agatha chattered on happily about her amazing detective abilities until she realized she was boring Lucy, so she finished by saying, ‘You have an interesting mystery here in Fryfam.’

‘Like what?’ Lucy stifled a yawn.

‘The fairies. The dancing lights.’

‘Oh, those. I’m telling you, once the second-home people go back to London, you’re left with a lot of inbred peasants who’d believe anything.’

‘But I met the women’s group members. They seem intelligent.’

‘Yes, but they’re all from Fryfam, don’t you see? You’ve never spent a winter here, have you?’

Agatha shook her head.

‘It’s so black and bleak and grim, you’ll end up believing in fairies yourself.’

Lucy yawned again.

Agatha rose to her feet. ‘I must go.’

‘Must you? Can you find your own way out?’

‘Sure. Perhaps you would like to have tea with me?’

‘Too kind. I’ll let you know.’

Agatha hesitated in the hall, looking in her handbag for her car keys. ‘Wake up, Tolly,’ she heard Lucy say sharply. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Thank God for that. Another plain woman and not quite one of us.’

‘Not quite one of
who
?’ demanded Lucy shrilly. ‘It’s because of your snobbery that we’re stuck in this dump.’

Agatha walked quickly away, her face flaming. She had moved a long way away from the Birmingham slum of her upbringing, but at weak moments she thought that people could still sniff it out.