Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam (9 page)

He sat down wearily at the table. ‘You ask who did it? It’s the wife, for sure.’

‘But I gather she was in London,’ said Agatha.

‘So she says, and anyway, her alibi hasn’t been checked out yet and even if it is, her friends could lie for her.’

‘Why her?’ asked Charles.

‘She hated it here. Wanted to go to London. So she pinches the painting first, bumps him off, knowing she’ll inherit everything along with the insurance money. She can’t sell the painting, everyone will be on the look-out for it. Anyway, it was insured for a mint, so it’s worth more to her lost.’

‘I didn’t like Hand,’ said Agatha. ‘Unpleasant sort of man.’

‘Nobody likes him,’ said Framp gloomily. He stifled a yawn. ‘I’d better get some sleep.’

‘Where’s Lucy Trumpington-James at the moment?’ asked Agatha.

‘Arriving by police car from London any time now.’

‘Mrs Jackson knows how to operate the burglar alarm, doesn’t she?’

‘Yes, but come on. She’s a villager and lived here all her life.’

‘Is there a Mr Jackson?’ asked Charles.

‘Yes, but he’s doing time in the Scrubs.’

‘Wormwood Scrubs? Prison?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘What for?’ asked Agatha.

‘Robbery with violence. Beat a guard at a warehouse nearly to death. Got fifteen years. Not so much for beating the guard. This is Britain, after all. For stealing eighteen thousand pounds.’

‘When was this?’ asked Agatha.

‘Two years ago.’

‘So that lets him out. Did they find the money?’

‘Yes; he wasn’t living with his wife at the time. They found the lot in a flat in Clapham in London.’

‘And was this his first crime?’

‘First major one. Before that, lots of petty stuff, car hijacking, that sort of thing.’

‘Where does Mrs Jackson live?’

‘Why?’ demanded Framp sharply.

‘I need a cleaner,’ said Agatha patiently, ‘and she’ll have spare time at the moment, with the police being all over the manor. By the way, does the manor house have a name?’

‘Reckon folks have always just called it the manor.’

Charles took another sip of bitter black tea and repressed a shudder. ‘We’d better get on our way, Aggie.’

‘That what they call you?’ asked Framp with a momentary flash of humour. ‘You don’t look like an Aggie to me.’

‘It’s Agatha, actually.’ She threw a baleful look at Charles and then turned back to Framp. ‘So where does Mrs Jackson live?’

‘You know Short’s garage?’

‘We saw it yesterday.’

‘Well, her cottage is tucked in the back of that.’

‘Let’s get the car,’ pleaded Agatha once they were out on the road again.

‘Why not just go home and put on a pair of flat walking shoes? People might stop and talk to us on our way there. You can’t pick up gossip if you’re flashing past in a car.’

‘Oh, okay,’ said Agatha, although she felt that wearing flats made her look dumpy.

When they set out again, Agatha began to wonder what villagers they were supposed to meet. The village green was deserted.

They walked across it and down the street past the estate agent’s, where Amy could be seen crouched over a computer. Then Agatha saw Carrie Smiley and Polly Dart approaching and greeted them with ‘Isn’t it terrible about Tolly?’

‘Terrible,’ echoed Carrie. ‘Have the police been to see you?’

‘Yes,’ said Agatha. ‘They have, as a matter of fact. Did you expect them to?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Carrie. ‘It’s all round the village that you were probably the last person to see him alive.’

‘Then it’s just as well his throat was cut in the middle of the night,’ said Agatha. ‘I say, it
was
the middle of the night?’

‘Nobody knows,’ barked Polly. ‘But the police didn’t leave until late last night, leaving only Framp on duty. The press have arrived. Such excitement!’

‘Where are they?’

‘In the pub. Rosie opened up especially early the minute she heard about the murder. She says the press always drink a lot. Where are you off to?’

‘To see Mrs Jackson. I need someone to clean. I don’t suppose she’ll be resuming her duties up at the manor for a few days yet.’

‘I don’t think she’ll be resuming them at all,’ said Carrie. ‘Lucy hated her.’

‘She didn’t give me that impression,’ said Agatha.

‘Well, she did. She once told Harriet that Mrs Jackson was always poking her nose into things and reading letters. Are you sure you want Mrs Jackson?’

‘I’ll see. Is there anyone else?’ asked Agatha, but more as a matter of form because she didn’t want anyone else. Mrs Jackson would surely be the best source of gossip.

‘No one who’s free. Mrs Crite does for the vicar and she always says that’s enough for her. The summer people usually fend for themselves,’ said Polly. ‘Now I do all my own housework. I don’t hold with women paying someone to do what they ought to be doing themselves.’

‘Good for you,’ commented Agatha sweetly. ‘But it’s so important not to inflict one’s prejudices on anyone else, don’t you think? I must be going. Charles, let’s . . . Charles?’

She swung round. Charles had moved a little away and was whispering to Carrie, who was blushing and giggling.

‘What were you up to?’ asked Agatha angrily as she and Charles walked on.

‘Just chatting. Jealous, Aggie?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be silly.’

Carrie had been wearing tight jeans and high-heeled boots. She had good legs. And so have I, thought Agatha, when I’m not wearing these clumpy flat shoes. They turned into the other lane and so to the garage. A man in overalls was peering at the engine of a car.

‘Mrs Jackson live near here?’ asked Charles.

The man straightened up. ‘Take that little path at the side there. You can see the chimbleys behind the trees.’

They followed his directions and arrived at a seedy-looking cottage thatched in Norfolk reed. It needed rethatching, the thatch being dusty and broken. The front garden was a mess of weeds with various discarded children’s toys scattered around.

Agatha rang the bell. ‘I didn’t hear it ring,’ said Charles. ‘Probably broken.’ He knocked at the door. The door was opened by Barry Jones, the gardener.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Agatha.

‘Came home to Mum’s for a bite to eat.’

‘Mum? But you’re a Jones.’

‘Mum’s first husband was a Jones.’

‘Can we talk to her?’ asked Charles.

‘Okay, but she’s a bit tired. Police here all morning.’

They walked into a stone-flagged kitchen, which outmessed Framp’s. Dishes were piled in the sink, the old fuel-burning stove was thick with grease and piled with dirty pots.

Betty Jackson was sitting at the kitchen table, mopping up egg with a slice of bread. It seems to be all-day breakfast around here, thought Agatha, remembering Framp.

‘What is it?’ she asked dully.

‘I’m looking for a cleaner,’ said Agatha brightly. ‘What a picturesque cottage you have. I do love these old cottages.’

‘All right for folks like you,’ said Mrs Jackson sourly. ‘I would like one of them new council ones they’ve got over at Purlett End village. But would they give me one? Naw!’

Charles slid into the chair next to her. ‘Police been giving you a bad time?’

‘Yerse. Them and their tomfool questions. I told them, I left at five and that’s that.’

‘Who would do such a thing?’ Charles took one of Mrs Jackson’s red and swollen hands and gave it a squeeze.

‘I don’t know,’ said the cleaner, but in a much softer voice. Agatha, seeing that no one was going to ask her to sit down, jerked out a chair.

‘Weren’t relations between Tolly and Lucy a bit strained?’ Charles’s voice was soft and coaxing.

‘Oh, no.’ She shook her head. ‘Devoted couple, they was.’

‘You see, Lucy Trumpington-James did tell Mrs Raisin here that she thought her husband was being unfaithful to her.’

Mrs Jackson’s heavy face registered shock and she gave her dentures an angry click. ‘That’s rubbish. I tell you what it was; Lucy got fits of jealousy, she was that mad about him, but they always made up. Fact is, she was laughing about it with him before she left for London. She says to him, she says, “I told that old trout who thinks she’s a detective that you was having it off with Rosie.” And they both had a laugh about that.’

Agatha coloured angrily. Then she heard Charles say, ‘About the cleaning?’

‘It’s seven pounds an hour.’

Agatha was about to yell that she was not going to pay London rates to a bad-tempered slut when Charles surprised her by leaping to his feet and putting his arms round her. ‘Shut up,’ he whispered. Then he turned to Mrs Jackson. ‘Why not start tomorrow? At ten, say. Nothing like work to keep your mind off things.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

Charles smiled and propelled the raging Agatha out of the cottage. Agatha held her temper until they were out of earshot and then she confronted him with ‘How could you? I don’t want that old bitch around my cottage.’

‘Calm down. Be nice to her and you might get the truth out of her. You only came here to employ her to get gossip.’ He took her shoulders and gave her a little shake. ‘Just
think
, woman! Did Lucy give you the impression of a wildly jealous wife?’

‘Well, no,’ said Agatha. ‘Not in the slightest. She looks like some bimbo who married for money and despises her husband.’

‘So, isn’t that interesting? And why would the horrible Mrs Jackson lie about it? She doesn’t strike me as the staunch and loyal servant type.’

Agatha’s anger ebbed away as she considered this. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘So why would she say such a thing? Of course she could simply have been out to humiliate me out of sheer nastiness.’

‘Could be. Let’s go and get a car and drive somewhere for a drink. Rosie’s pub will be full of reporters.’

As they approached the village green, the pub door opened and several pressmen came out dragging one of their fellows. Their faces were boozy and flushed. Their intention appeared to be to dump a weedy colleague in the duck pond. Rosie appeared in the pub doorway and called to them to stop. They all crowded back into the pub except the weedy one, who set off away from the pub at a jogtrot, occasionally looking back over his shoulder like some weak animal rejected by the herd.

‘I thought they would all have been out at the manor,’ said Charles.

‘No,’ replied Agatha, wise in the ways of the press. ‘They’ll have been out there already. Hand will have told them that he will say nothing until a press conference at, say, about four o’clock.’

‘But you would think they’d all be knocking on doors in the village for background.’

‘They’ll get around to it. As long as there’s a pub, they’ll move in a bunch. They feel they’re safe just so long as they all keep together. That way they can drink as much as they want and not run the fear of being scooped.’

‘So what about the one that’s run off?’

‘They obviously don’t rate him highly. It’s not always like this. But if one of them’s a bully, he becomes the leader of the pack and they all stick together, swearing to share any morsels of information, and yet each one is privately determined to scoop the others at the first opportunity.’

‘Excuse me.’

A voice behind them made them jump. They swung round. The weedy reporter had come back. ‘I’m Gerry Philpot of
The Radical Voice
,’ he said. The paper he represented claimed to have unbiased views, the sort of paper which reported on the ‘warring factions’ in Bosnia to avoid pointing out the obvious truth, that the Serbs were murdering everyone. It was a sitting-on-the-fence and pontificating sort of newspaper which paid the lowest wages, hence Gerry Philpot, a youngish man with weak eyes, receding hair, a pea-green jacket, checked shirt, shabby corduroys and red tie. ‘Have you heard about the murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Agatha before Charles could say anything. ‘We were the last people to see Tolly Trumpington-James alive.’

‘Really!’ His eyes lit up. He pulled out a notebook. ‘If I can just get your name?’

‘Mrs Agatha Raisin.’

‘Age?’

‘Forty-five,’ lied Agatha, ignoring Charles’s snort of laughter.

‘And you, sir?’

‘This is Sir Charles Fraith,’ said Agatha quickly, knowing that Charles would not use his title – and Agatha was out to impress.

‘Age?’

‘Thirty-two,’ said Charles maliciously. He was, in fact, in his forties.

‘And you have lived here, how long?’

‘Only a few days,’ said Agatha. ‘Sir Charles is my house guest.’

‘What brought you to Fryfam?’

‘Just a whim. I’d never been to Norfolk before. I’ve only been here a short while. As a matter of fact, when it comes to crime –’

But the reporter interrupted her impatiently. ‘So tell me how Mr Trumpington-James seemed to you when you saw him.’

‘Bit fussed over the theft of his Stubbs. Police all over the place. I’d had tea with him and his wife two days before.’

‘And how did they seem? A happy couple?’

Agatha was not prepared to tell the press about Lucy’s suspicions and so she said, ‘I couldn’t really judge. Their cleaner, a Mrs Jackson, lives behind the garage. She could tell you more than I could.’

Gerry cast a longing look towards the pub. His faithless photographer was in there. He was wondering if he could winkle him out without alerting the others. But for the moment he persevered, asking Agatha what the manor looked like inside, had Tolly been very rich and so on. Then he said, ‘I’ll just go and see this Mrs Jackson. Where do you both live when you’re not in Fryfam?’

They gave their home addresses. As he was about to leave, Agatha said, ‘Oh, have you heard about the fairies?’

Gerry, who had been closing his notebook, opened it again and stared at her. ‘Fairies?’

Agatha could hear Polly’s voice asking her not to say anything, but her desire to shine was greater than any loyalty to the women of Fryfam. She told Gerry about the mysterious lights and the petty thefts, ending up in the grand theft of the Stubbs. When she had finally finished, Gerry’s face was red with excitement. ‘Where do you live? I mean, in Fryfam?’

‘Lavender Cottage, over there in Pucks Lane.’

‘I’ll call on you with a photographer if I may.’