The Quiche of Death (13 page)

"Don't the snow-ploughs come around?"

"Not from the council, they don't, Mrs. Raisin m'dear. Us relies on the farmers with their tractors to try to keep the roads
clear."

Agatha was about to protest that considering what they paid in poll-tax, they ought to have proper gritting and salting lorries,
not to mention council snowploughs, and was about to say she would get up a petition to hand into the council when she remembered
she would probably be living in London by the winter.

One by one, the locals began to drift into the pub. The landlord told them all he had put out tables in the garden and so
they moved out there and Agatha was asked to join them. One man had brought along an accordion and he began to play and soon
more villagers came in, drawn by the sound of the music, and then all began to sing along. Agatha was surprised, when the
last orders were called, to realize she had been out in the pub garden all evening.

As she walked home, she felt muddled. That very afternoon, the burning ambition she had lived with so long had returned in
full force and she had felt her old self again. Now she began to wonder whether she wanted to be her old self again. Her old
self didn't sit singing in pubs or, she thought, as she saw Mrs. Bloxby outside her cottage door under the glare of the new
security lights, get visits from the vicar's wife.

"I heard you were leaving for London tomorrow," said Mrs. Bloxby, "and came to say goodbye."

"Who told you?" asked Agatha, unlocking her front door.

"That nice young detective constable, Bill Wong."

"He always seems to be about. Doesn't he have any work to do in Mircester?"

"Oh, he often calls round the villages," said Mrs. Bloxby vaguely. "He also said something very distressing—about you leaving
us for good."

"Yes, I plan to go back into business. I should never have retired so early."

"Well, that's a great pity for Carsely. We planned to make more use of your organizing skills. You will be back by next Saturday
afternoon?"

"I doubt it," said Agatha, when they were both seated in the living-room. "Why next Saturday after­noon?"

"That's the day of the village band concert. Mrs. Mason is doing the cream teas. Quite an event."

Agatha gave her a rather pitying smile, thinking that it was a sad life if all you had to look forward to was a concert by
the village band.

The talked for a little longer and then Mrs. Bloxby left. Agatha packed a suitcase, carefully putting the pot of strawberry
jam in one corner. She lay awake for a long time with die bedroom windows wide open, hoping for a breath of air, but buoyed
up by the thought of London and a return from the grave that was Carsely.

TEN

The man at the table behind her began to cough and choke and flap his newspaper angrily. Agatha looked at her burning cigarette
and sighed. Then she raised a hand and summoned the waiter. "Remove that man from the table behind me," she said, "and find
him somewhere else. He's annoying me."

The waiter looked from the man's angry face to Agatha's pugnacious one and then bent over the man and said soothingly that
there was a nice table in the corner away from the smoke. The man protested loudly. Agatha continued to smoke, ignoring the
whole scene, until the angry man capitulated and was led away.

Imagine living in London and complaining about cigarette smoke, marvelled Agatha. One had only to walk down the streets to
inhale the equivalent of four packs of cigarettes.

She finished her coffee and cigarette and went up to her room, already suffocatingly hot, and phoned Pedmans and asked for
Roy.

At last she was put through to him. "Aggie," he cried. "How are things in the Cotswolds?"

"Hellish," said Agatha. "I need to talk to you. What about lunch?"

"Lunch is booked. Dinner?"

"Fine. I'm at Haynes. See you at seven-thirty in the bar."

She put down the phone and looked around. Muslin curtains fluttered at the window, effectively cutting off what oxygen was
left in the air. She should have gone to the Hilton or somewhere American, where they had air-conditioning. Haynes was small
and old-fashioned, like a country house trapped in the middle of Mayfair. The service was excellent. But it was a very English
hotel and very English hotels never planned on a hot summer.

She decided, for want of anything better to do, to go over to The Quicherie and see Mr. Economides. The traffic was congested
as usual and there wasn't a taxi in sight, so she walked from Mayfair along through Knightsbridge to Sloane Street, down Sloane
Street to Sloane Square, and so along the Kings Road to the World's End.

Mr. Economides gave her a guarded greeting, but Agatha had come to expect friendship and set herself to please in a way that
was formerly foreign to her. The shop was quiet and relatively cool. It was the slack part of the day. Soon the lunch-time
rush of customers would build up, buying coffee and sandwiches to take back to their offices. Agatha asked about Mr. Economides's
wife and family and he began to relax perceptibly and then asked her to take a seat at one of the little marble-topped tables
while he brought her a coffee.

"I really should apologize for having brought all that trouble down on your head," said Agatha. "If I hadn't decided to cheat
at that village competition by passing one of your delicious quiches off as one of my own, this would never have happened."

Suddenly, for some reason, the full shock of the attack on her by John Cartwright suddenly hit her and her eyes shone with
tears.

"Now, then, Mrs. Raisin," said Mr. Economides. "I'll tell you a little secret. I cheat, too."

Agatha dabbed at her eyes. "You? How?"

"You see, I have a sign up there saying 'Baked on the Premises,' but I often visit my cousin in Devon at the weekends. He
has a delicatessen just like mine. Well, you see, sometimes if I'm going to be back late on a Sunday night after visiting
him and I don't want to start baking early on Monday, I bring a big box of my cousin's quiches back with me if he has any
left over. He does the same if he's visiting me, for his trade, unlike mine, is at the weekends with the tourists, while mine
is during the week with the office people. So it was one of my cousin's quiches you bought."

"Did you tell the police this?" asked Agatha. The Greek looked horrified. "I didn't want to put the police onto my cousin."
He looked at Agatha solemnly.

Agatha stared at him in bafflement and then the light dawned. "Is it the immigration police you're frightened of?"

He nodded. "My cousin's daughter's fiance came on a visitor's visa and they married in the Greek Orthodox Church but haven't
yet registered with the British authorities and he is working for his father-in-law without a work permit and so . . ." He
gave a massive shrug.

Agatha did not know anything about work permits but she did know from her dealings with foreign models in the past that they
were paranoid about being deported. "So it was just as well Mrs. Cummings-Browne didn't sue," she said.

A shutter came down over his eyes. Two customers walked into the shop and he said a hurried goodbye before scuttling back
behind the counter.

Agatha finished her coffee and took a stroll around her old haunts. She had a light lunch at the Stock Pot and then decided
an air-conditioned cinema would be the best way to pass the afternoon. A little voice in her head was telling her that if
she was determined to move back to London, she should start looking for a flat to live in and business premises to work from,
but she shrugged the voice away. There was time enough, and besides, it was too hot. She bought an
Evening
Standard
and discovered that a cinema off Leicester Square was showing a rerun of Disney's
Jungle
Book.
So she went there and enjoyed the film and came out with the pleasurable prospect of seeing Roy, feeling sure that he would
galvanize her into starting her new business.

It was hard, she thought, when she descended to the hotel bar at seven-thirty, to get used to the new Roy. There he was with
one of the latest flat-topped haircuts and a sober business suit and an imitation of a Guard's regimental tie.

He hailed her affectionately. Agatha bought him a double gin and asked him how his nursery project was going and he said it
was coming along nicely and that they had made him a junior executive and had given him a private office and a secretary because
they were so impressed by his getting his photo in the
Sunday Times.
"Have another gin," said Agatha, wishing that Roy were still unhappy at Pedmans.

He grinned. "You forget I've seen the old Aggie in action. Fill 'em up with booze and then go in for the kill over coffee.
Break the habit, Aggie. Hit me with whatever is on your mind before we get to dinner."

"All right," said Agatha. She looked around. The bar was getting crowded. "Let's take our drinks to that table over there."

Once they were both settled, she leaned forward and looked at him intently. "I'll come straight out with it, Roy. I'm coming
back to London. I'm going to set up in business again and I want you to be my partner."

"Why? You're through with the mess. You've got that lovely cottage and that lovely village . . ."

"And I'm dying of boredom."

"You haven't given it time, Aggie. You haven't settled in yet."

"Well, if you're not interested," said Agatha sulkily.

"Aggie, Pedmans is big, one of the biggest. You know that. I've got a great future in front of me. I'm taking it serious now
instead of camping about a few pop groups. I want to get out of pop groups. One of them hits the charts and then, two weeks
later, no one wants to know. And you know why? The pop business has become all hype and no substance. No tunes. All thump,
thump, thump for the discos. Sales are a fraction of what they used to be. And do you know why I want to stick with Pedmans?
I'm on my way up and fast. And I plan to get what you've got—a cottage in the Cotswolds.

"Look, Aggie, no one wants to live in cities anymore. The new generation is getting Americanized. Get up early enough in the
morning and you don't need to live in London. Besides, I'm thinking of getting married."

"Oh, pull the other one," said Agatha rudely. "I don't think you've ever taken a girl out in your life."

"That's all you know. The thing is that Mr. Wilson likes his execs to be married."

"And who's the lucky girl?"

"Haven't found her yet. But some nice quiet girl will do. There are lots around. Someone to cook the meals and iron the shirts."

Really, thought Agatha crossly, under the exterior of every effeminate man beats the heart of a real chauvinist pig. He would
find a young girl, meek, biddable, a bit common so as not to make him feel inferior. She would be expected to learn to host
little dinner parties and not complain when her husband only came home at weekends. They would learn to play golf. Roy would
gradually become plump and stuffy. She had seen it all happen before.

"But as my partner, you could earn more," she said.

"You've lost your clients to Pedmans. It would take ages to get them back. You know that, Aggie. You'd have to start small
again and build up. Is that what you really want? Let's go in for dinner and talk some more. I'm famished."

Agatha decided to leave the subject for the moment and began to tell him about the attack on her by John Cartwright and how
he had turned out to be a burglar.

"Honestly, Aggie, don't you see—London would be
tame
by comparison. Besides, a friend tells me you're never alone in the country. The neighbours care what happens to you."

"Unless they're like Mrs. Barr," said Agatha drily. "She's selling up. The cow had the cheek to claim I had driven her off,
but in fact she was left a bigger cottage by an aunt in Ancombe."

"I thought she was an incomer," said Roy. "Now you tell me she's had at least one relative Living close by."

"If you haven't been born and brought up in Carsely itself, take it from me, you're an incomer," reported Agatha. "Oh, something
else about her."

She told Roy about the play and he shrieked with laughter. "Oh, it must be murder, Aggie," he gasped.

"No, I don't think it was any more, and I don't care now. I visited Economides today and the reason he's glad to let the whole
business blow over is that the quiche he sold me was actually baked on his cousin's premises down in Devon and the cousin
has a new son-in-law working for him who doesn't have a work permit."

"Ah, that explains that, and the burglaring John Cartwright explains his behavior, but what of the women that Cummings-Browne
was philandering with? What of the mad Maria?"

"I think she's just mad, and Barbara James is a toughie and Ella Cartwright is a slut and Mrs. Barr has a screw loose as well,
but I don't think any of them murdered Cummings-Browne. Here I go again. It wasn't murder, Roy. Bill Wong was right."

"Which leaves Vera Cummings-Browne."

"As for her, I was suddenly sure she had done it, that it was all very simple. She suddenly thought of the murder when I left
my quiche. She went home and dumped mine and baked another."

"Brilliant," said Roy. "And she wasn't found out because Economides was so frightened about work permits and things that he
didn't look at or examine the quiche that was supposed to be his!"

"That's a good theory. But the police exploded that. They checked everything in her kitchen, her pots and pans, her groceries
and even her drains. She hadn't been baking or cooking anything at all on the day of the murder. Let it go, Roy. You've got
me calling it murder and I had just put it all behind me. To get back to more interesting matters . . Are you determined to
stay with Pedmans?"

"I'm afraid so, Aggie. It's all your fault in a way. If you hadn't arranged that publicity for me, I wouldn't have risen so
fast. Tell you what I'll do, though. You get started and I'll drop a word in your ear when I know any client who's looking
for a change... not one of mine, of course. But that's all I can do."

Agatha felt flat. The ambition which had fueled her for so long seemed to be draining away. After she had said goodbye to
Roy, she went out and walked restlessly about the night-time streets of London, as if searching for her old self. In Piccadilly
Circus, a couple of white-faced drug addicts gazed at her with empty eyes and a beggar threatened her. Heat still seemed to
be pulsing up from the pavements and out from the buildings.

For the rest of the week, she took walks in the parks, a sail down the Thames, and went to theatres and cinemas, moving through
the stifling heat of London feeling like a ghost, or someone who had lost her cards of identity. For so long, her work had
been her character, her personality, her identity.

By Friday evening, the thought of the village band concert began to loom large in her mind. The women of the Carsely Ladies'
Society would be there, she could trot along to the Red Lion if she was lonely, and perhaps she could do something about her
garden. Not that she was giving up her idea! A pleasant-looking garden would add to the sale price of the house.

She arose early in the morning and settled her bill and made her way to Paddington Station. She had left her car at Oxford.
Once more she was on her way back. "Oxford. This is Oxford," intoned the guard. With a strange feeling of being on home ground,
she eased out of the car-park and drove up Worcester Street and then Beaumont Street and so along St. Giles and the Woodstock
Road to the Woodstock Roundabout, where she took the A-40 bypass to Bur-ford, up over the hills to Stowe-on-the-Wold, along
to the A-44 and so back down into Carsely.

As she drove along Lilac Lane to her cottage, she suddenly braked hard outside New Delhi, SOLD screamed a sticker across the
estate agent's board.

Wonder how much she got, mused Agatha, driving on to her own cottage. That was quick! But good riddance to bad rubbish anyway.
Hope someone pleasant moves in. Not that it matters for I'm leaving myself, she reminded herself fiercely.

Urged by a superstitious feeling that the village was settling around her and claiming her for its own, she left her suitcase
inside the door and drove off again to the estate agent's offices in Chipping Camp­den, the same estate agent who had sold
Mrs. Barr's house.

She introduced herself and said she was putting her house on the market. How much for? Well, the same amount as Mrs. Barr
got for hers would probably do. The estate agent said he was not allowed to reveal how much Mrs. Barr had got but added diplomatically
that she had been asking for £150,000 and was very pleased with the offer she had received.