Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (8 page)

‘I had a spot on my nose,’ mumbled Agatha.

‘Speak up. I can’t hear you.’

‘
I had a spot on my nose
,’ roared Agatha. Everyone looked at her and James Lacey desperately wished himself elsewhere.

‘And how did that make you tear the hand basin out of the wall?’ asked Bill.

‘I bought make-up at the chemist’s.’ Agatha’s voice was now reduced to a flat even tone. ‘I wanted to cover up the spot, but the light in the Ladies’ wasn’t working and I thought it probably needed a new bulb. I remembered I had a packet of light bulbs in the car and went to get one. But the only way I could get to the light was by standing on the basin. It came away from the wall. I was so shocked I decided to say nothing about it.’

‘I am afraid you are going to have to come with me,’ said Bill severely.

The fact that James Lacey did not offer to accompany her, that he muttered something awkwardly about staying put and reading the newspapers, plunged him low in Agatha’s estimation despite her distress. So much for the knight errant of her dreams. He was going to sit safely while she dealt with a no doubt enraged landlord.

James went out a few moments after they had left. He bought two newspapers and then returned to the pub. But he could not concentrate on the stories. Damn Agatha. What a woman. What a stupid thing to do! And then the ridiculous side of it all struck him and he began to laugh and, once started, couldn’t seem to stop, although people edged away from his table nervously. He finally mopped his eyes and, tucking the unread papers under his arm, strode over to the George.

Agatha was holding out a cheque which the landlord of the George was refusing. ‘Ho, no, you don’t get off that easily,’ he said. He was an unpleasant-looking man with a face like a slab of Cheddar cheese, the skin yellow and slightly sweating with rage. ‘You charge this woman, officer,’ he said to Bill, ‘and I’ll see her in court. You charge her with wilful vandalism.’

James twitched the cheque out of Agatha’s fingers and blinked slightly at the large sum. ‘You can’t afford this,’ he said to Agatha. ‘A lady like yourself, existing on a widow’s pension, cannot afford a sum like this. Declare yourself bankrupt and then, even if he takes you to court, he won’t get a penny. I know a good solicitor just around the corner.’

‘Good idea,’ said Bill. ‘You need a solicitor anyway. He’ll want to know why there was no

light bulb in the Ladies’ in the first place, why the basin fell away from the wall so easily. The wiring in this pub had better be checked, too.’

‘I’ll take the cheque,’ growled the landlord desperately.

‘You’ll take another cheque,’ said James firmly. ‘Agatha, get your cheque-book and write out one for half this sum.’

The Cheddar cheese looked ready to explode again, but a steely look from James silenced him.

Agatha wrote out the new cheque while James tore up the old one.

When they were all outside in the square, Bill said, ‘If that had been a nice, respectable landlord, I might have charged you, Agatha. Anyway, thanks to Mr Lacey, it’s all sorted out. What about dinner tonight?’

Agatha hesitated. She had originally thought her day with James might end in an intimate dinner. On the other hand, better to continue to play it cool. ‘Yes, that would be nice. Where do you live? I know your phone number but not your address.’

‘It’s number 24, The Beeches. You go out of town on the Fosse and take the first left along Camden Way until you come to a set of traffic lights, turn right, then take the first left, and that’s The Beeches. It’s a cul-de-sac.’

Agatha scribbled the information down on the back of a gas bill. ‘What time?’

‘Six o’clock. We eat early.’

‘We?’

‘My parents. You forget, I live at home. You come, too, Mr Lacey.’

Please, please,
please
, God, prayed Agatha.

James looked surprised but then said, ‘I’d like that. I’d more or less decided to have the day off. Is it all right if I come dressed like this?’

Bill looked amused. ‘We’re not formal,’ he said. ‘See you then.’

He moved off, with the tall and still silent policewoman walking beside him.

‘I think we need something to eat now,’ said James. ‘What about a beer and a sandwich, and then we’ll decide who we ask about the sister. We should have asked Bill Wong. Still, we can always do that this evening.’

He did not mention the ruined toilet and Agatha was grateful for that. But she felt obliged to say gruffly, ‘I’m hardly penniless.’

‘I know,’ he said amiably, ‘but the minute that landlord thought you were broke, then he was glad to take any money.’

Once they had eaten, he drew out a notebook and pen and said, ‘Why don’t we pretend it’s murder and start by writing down all the names of the people we should speak to.’

‘I think the ex-wife would be a good idea,’ said Agatha, ‘although she wasn’t very friendly. I know, we can call at the vet’s here, his partner, Peter Rice. He’ll know whether Bladen had a sister, and that would be a start.’

Mr Peter Rice was a pugnacious man with a large bulbous nose, small eyes and a small mouth. The ugly nose, which dominated his face, was disconcerting, rather like a face pressed too close to a camera lens. His thatch of thick red curly hair looked as if someone had dropped a small wig casually on the top of his rather pointed head. His neck was thick and strong, as were his shoulders. In fact, his body seemed too strong and broad for his small head, as if he had thrust his head through a Strong Man cardboard cutout on a fairground.

He was not pleased to learn that they had queued up in his surgery, not to consult him about some animal, but to ask him questions about his dead partner.

‘Sister?’ he said in answer to their questions. ‘No, he didn’t have a sister. Got a brother somewhere in London. Fell out a time ago. Brother didn’t bother turning up for the funeral.’ His hands covered in thick red hair like fur moved restlessly over a shelf of small bottles, as if looking for a label that said ‘Vanish’. ‘Now if that’s all . . .’

‘Was he a wealthy man?’ asked James.

‘No.’

‘Oh. How do you know?’

‘I know because he left everything to me.’

‘How much was that?’ asked Agatha eagerly.

‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘Get out of here and leave me to deal with my customers.’

‘So he inherits and not the brother. Now there’s a motive,’ crowed Agatha when they were outside. ‘Who would know how much money was involved?’

‘The lawyer. But I doubt if he would tell us. Let’s try the local newspaper editor,’ said James. ‘They pick up all sorts of gossip.’

The offices of the
Mircester Journal
came as a disappointment to Agatha, even though the newspaper consisted of little more than three pages. She had naïvely expected something like the newspaper offices she had occasionally seen on news programmes, great enormous rooms with lines of computers and busy reporters. Time and printing changes had passed the
Mircester Journal
by. The offices consisted of several dark rooms at the top of a rickety staircase. A pale young woman with straight lank hair was pounding an old-fashioned typewriter and a young man with his hands in his pockets was standing by a window, whistling tunelessly and looking down into the street.

‘May we see the editor?’ asked James.

The pale girl stopped typing. ‘If it’s births, deaths, or marriages, I do that,’ she said.

‘None of those.’

‘Complaints? Wrong name under the photo?’

‘No complaint.’

‘That makes a change.’ She got to her feet. She was wearing a long patchwork skirt and baseball boots and a T-shirt which said ‘Naff Off’. ‘Names?’

‘Mrs Raisin and Mr Lacey.’

‘Right.’

She pushed open a scarred door and vanished inside. There was a murmur of voices and then she popped out again. ‘You’re to go in. Mr Heyford will see you now.’

Mr Heyford rose to meet them. After the vision in the T-shirt and baseball boots he came as a conservative surprise, being a small, neat man with a smooth olive face, black eyes and thin strips of oiled black hair combed straight back from his forehead. He was dressed in a dark suit, collar and tie.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you? I recognize your name, Mrs Raisin. That was quite a lot of money you raised for charity last year.’ Agatha preened.

‘We both knew the vet, Paul Bladen,’ said James. ‘We’re having a sort of a bet. Mrs Raisin here said he was worth a lot of money, but I got the impression he didn’t have that much. Do you know how much he left?’

‘I can’t tell you exactly how much because I can’t quite remember,’ said Mr Heyford. ‘About eighty-five thousand, I think. Would have been a fortune once, but that sort of money won’t even buy you a decent house now. He left a house, of course, but he had taken a double mortgage out on that, and with house prices being what they are, Mr Rice, who inherited, will barely get enough to cover the mortgages. I never thought the day would come in this country when we would consider eighty-five thousand not very much money, so it looks as if you’ve won the bet, Mr Lacey.’

‘So he couldn’t have been killed for his money,’ said Agatha mournfully when they had said goodbye to the editor. ‘And yet . . .’

‘And yet what?’

‘If he did have eighty-five thousand pounds, why the two mortgages? I mean, the interest must have been crippling. Why not pay off some of the money owing?’

‘The trouble,’ said James, ‘is that we are making ourselves believe an accident to be murder.’

Agatha thought quickly. If he gave up the idea of investigating anything at all, then she would have little excuse to spend any time in his company. ‘We could try the wife,’ she suggested. ‘I mean, as we’re here and we’ve still got time to kill before we go to Bill’s.’

‘Oh, very well. Where do we find her?’

‘We’ll try the phone book and hope she is still using her married name,’ said Agatha.

They found a name, G. Bladen, listed. The address was given as Rose Cottage, Little Blomham. ‘Where’s Little Blomham?’ asked Agatha.

‘I saw a sign to it once. It’s off the Stroud road.’

A pale mist was shrouding the landscape, turning the countryside into a Chinese painting, as they drove down into Little Blomham. It was more of a hamlet than a village, a few ancient houses of golden Cotswold stone hunched beside a stream.

No one moved about, no smoke rose from the chimneys, no dog barked.

Agatha switched off the engine and both listened as the eerie silence settled about them.

James suddenly quoted:

Agatha looked at him crossly. She did not like people who suddenly quoted things at you, leaving you feeling unread and inadequate. In fact, she thought they only did it to show off.

She got out of the car and slammed the door shut with unnecessary force.

James got out of the passenger seat and wandered to a stone wall and looked down at the slowly moving stream. He seemed to have gone into some sort of dream, to have forgotten Agatha’s presence. ‘So very quiet,’ he said, half to himself. ‘So very English, the England they fought for in the First World War. So little of it left.’

‘Would you like to stand here and meditate while I find out which one of these picturesque hovels is Rose Cottage?’ asked Agatha.

He gave her a sudden smile. ‘No, I’ll come with you.’ They walked together down the road by the stream. ‘Let me see, this one has no name and the next one is called End Cottage, although it’s not at the end. Perhaps one of the ones further on.’

They nearly missed Rose Cottage. It was set well back from the road at the end of a thin, narrow, tangled and unkempt garden. It was small and thatched, with the walls covered in thick creeper. ‘Looks more like an animal’s burrow than a house,’ commented James. ‘Well, here we go. We can’t say we think he was murdered. We’ll offer our sympathy and see where that gets us.’

He knocked on the door. And waited. They stood wrapped in the silence of the dream countryside. Then, as if a spell had been broken, a bird suddenly flew up from a bush near the door, a dog barked somewhere, high and shrill in the road outside, and Mrs Bladen opened the door.

Why, I believe she’s older than I, thought Agatha, looking again at that grey hair and at the tell-tale lines on the thin neck.

Mrs Bladen looked past James to Agatha and her face settled in lines of dislike. ‘Oh, it’s you again.’

‘Mr Lacey wished to offer you his sympathy,’ said Agatha quickly.

‘Why?’ she demanded harshly. ‘Why should someone come all this way to offer sympathy for the death of a man I’ve been divorced from?’

‘We’re very neighbourly people in Carsely,’ said James, ‘and wondered if we could do anything to help.’

‘You can help by going away.’

James looked helplessly at Agatha. Agatha decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘Are you sure your husband died a natural death?’ she asked.

Mrs Bladen looked amused. ‘Meaning someone killed him? It’s more than likely. He was a thoroughly nasty man and I’m glad he’s dead. I hope that satisfies you.’

She slammed the door in their faces.

‘That’s that,’ said James, as they walked down the weedy path.

‘We got something,’ said Agatha eagerly. ‘She didn’t laugh in our faces when I suggested murder to her. Now did she?’

‘You know what I think?’ he said, holding the gate open for her. ‘I think we’re two retired people with not enough to do with our time.’

‘Just because you can’t get started writing,’ said Agatha shrewdly, ‘don’t take it out on me.’

‘This is a lovely little place,’ he said to change the subject. ‘So quiet and peaceful. I wonder if there’s anything for sale here.’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to live here,’ said Agatha, alarmed. ‘I mean, Carsely’s bad enough, but there’s
nothing
here, not even a shop or a pub.’

‘What’s wrong with that, in this age of the motor car? Oh, look. That sign there. The Manor House. I didn’t notice it before. Let’s go and have a look.’