M Beaton - A Spoonful of Poison

“And you don’t want me along because at one point in the dinner, he will reach across the table and take your hand and say he thought he could never find anyone to replace his wife, but now-”

“Oh, do shut up!”

Agatha really wanted to go home and spend a leisurely time getting ready for the evening, but Charles might hang around making sarcastic comments up until she left. The only reason she had said she was going to the office was to get rid of him.

She dropped him off at her cottage, turned the car around and sped back to Mircester.

Agatha was determined to buy something dazzling to wear. But the weather was a problem. It was actually cold. If the lowering sky sent down any more torrents, it might be better not to wear anything too filmy and seductive.

She settled on buying a black wool trouser suit, black court shoes with a modest heel, and a scarlet silk blouse.

With a flutter of anticipation she had not felt in ages, Agatha began to dream about the evening to come.

THE RESTAURANT was called the Moulmein Pagoda. Agatha wondered whether the owner was a Kipling fan. She remembered how she and her school friends had found an old wind-up gramophone in a skip. It had one record on the turntable, “The Road to Mandalay.” They had wound it up and played the record. Agatha had thought it romantic, but as soon as the record had finished, her companions had gleefully set about stomping on the record and gramophone until nothing was left but little pieces. She remembered the line, “By the old Moulmein Pagoda/Looking lazy at the sea,” because in later years, she had looked up the poem in the library and had memorized it. But the pagoda had been in Burma and the sailor had been looking to China across the bay.

George was late. She ordered herself a mineral water and lit up a cigarette. Soon the smoking ban would be in force. The police were setting up a hotline where you could report anyone smoking on a free phone line. Of course, if you wanted to report a real crime, it would cost you fifty pee a minute. The powers that be were also going to send out undercover agents to restaurants and pubs. Soon it will be the obesity police, thought Agatha, snatching cream cakes from the jaws of ladies in tea shops.

After half an hour, Agatha decided to leave. She was just getting to her feet when George hurried in.

“Sorry I’m a bit late,” he said.

“Half an hour, to be exact,” Agatha pointed out.

“Sorry, sorry. Busy, busy.”

He called the waiter over and said, “We’ll have the number-two menu please. Would you like some wine, Agatha?”

“Do you think I might be allowed to choose it?” asked Agatha sarcastically.

“Of course. They do a very nice house white here.”

“Where is the wine list?”

“On the back of the menu.”

“I always think white wine goes better with Chinese food,” said George.

“I like red,” said Agatha firmly. “I’ll have a half bottle of Merlot. What do you want?”

“I’ll have a small carafe of the house white.”

He shouldn’t have ordered the meal for me, thought Agatha angrily. Why do I always get to know cheapskates? Probably frightened I would start choosing from the a la carte.

Aloud, she said, “I was wondering if the owner was a fan of Kipling.”

“Why?”

“The restaurant’s called the Moulmein Pagoda. That’s from ‘The Road to Mandalay’.”

“Don’t know it.”

“It goes like this…”

To George’s horror, Agatha began to sing in a loud alto soprano. A group at the other end of the restaurant joined in. There was a round of applause when Agatha finished and she stood up and bowed.

“Oh, do sit down and stop making a spectacle of yourself,” snapped George.

But Agatha didn’t care what he thought. He had left her waiting for half an hour and then had chosen her dinner.

“Do not… ever … speak to me like that again,” said Agatha in a level voice. “You are neither my husband nor my father. Would you like me to leave?”

“No. Look-let’s start again. I’m still upset at Arnold’s death. Have the police any idea who broke into your cottage? It must be the same person who killed Arnold and stole the money.”

Agatha sighed. “If it were a television programme, some forensics scientist would hold up one bit of hair and say, ‘Aha! This matches the DNA of Arthur Chance or whoever.’ But the police are probably sitting on their hands because it’s me and it’s only a burglary where nothing was stolen. Have you any idea at all who could have killed Arnold? You said you’d fill me in.”

Suddenly in Agatha’s mind that last sentence seemed to have a sexual connotation. She flushed and studied her glass of Merlot.

“I know that Arthur phoned Arnold on the day he was murdered and said they should both go to the bank that afternoon. Then he got a phone call from a Mrs. Wilmington, who was once a parishioner, pleading for his spiritual help and saying that she was close to death. So Arthur phoned Arnold and put the appointment off until the following day, because Mrs. Wilmington had given him an address in Warwick.

“When he got to the address in Warwick, he found it was a betting shop and no one in the flats above had ever heard of Mrs. Wilmington. He returned to the vicarage and looked up her last address, which was in Ancombe. He phoned. Mrs. Wilmington answered the phone, claimed she was fit and well and had never phoned him.”

“Didn’t he immediately call the police?”

“No, he thought it was someone playing a tiresome joke.”

“So there’s now a woman in the case. Probably a woman working in partnership with some man.” Agatha silently cursed the police. They had held back all this from her.

“Let’s talk about something else. Ah, here’s our food. Tell me how you came to start a detective agency?”

In between eating and drinking, Agatha gave him a highly embroidered version of the cases she had solved and how she had at last decided to turn professional.

Then she realized that George had ordered another bottle of wine for her. “I’ll need to take a taxi,” said Agatha. “Oh, well, tell me about yourself. I’ve done all the talking.”

George began. He was an architect and had settled in the Cotswolds because there were so many demands for house extensions and garage conversions. He was kept very busy. Of course, in a couple of cases, his clients had declared bankruptcy and he had not received any money for months of work. “I hadn’t realized until I moved to the Cotswolds that bankruptcy had become a sort of growth industry. I mean, I knew there were a lot around, but I thought it was from people who had used too many shop credit cards charging high interest.”

“You must miss your wife very much,” said Agatha, mellowed with wine.

He heaved a sigh. “Sarah was such a homebody. She made all the curtains herself when we moved in, and loose covers for the chairs. Her cooking was plain but delicious. She never had any ambition. When we were in financial difficulties, I suggested she might like to get a job to help out. But she cried and said our home was her job.”

“What about Fred Corrie?” asked Agatha, thinking that perhaps George was attracted to the useless clinging type.

“What about her?”

“Does she work?”

“She paints. Watercolours. Don’t sell very well, but she’s got an income from a family trust. Did anyone ever tell you that you are a very sexy woman”?

Agatha blinked. Then she said, “Maybe.”

He laughed and called for the bill. “I’ll take you home in a taxi. We can pick up our cars tomorrow.”

In the darkness of the taxi, he reached out and took her hand. He said softly, “I think our evening is not over yet.”