M Beaton: A Spoonful of Poison

The farm turned out to be nearly at the top of a very steep hill leading out of the village. “I bet he looks like one of his pigs,” said Agatha. “All that jam. He’s probably round and pink like a porker.”

“It does pong something awful,” said Toni when she drove into the farmyard.

“I hope he’s at home after all this.” Agatha put on a pair of flat sandals and flexed her toes with relief.

“It was a funny time of year for a jam tasting,” said Toni. “I mean, you would think maybe after the strawberries came out.”

“In this backward dump, they probably make jam out of weeds,” said Agatha. “The farm door’s open. Hullo! Anybody at home?”

A thin, commanding-looking woman dressed in jeans and a washed-up cotton blouse appeared in the doorway. She had thick grey hair, grey eyes and a thin mouth.

She looked Agatha up and down and sighed. “You Jehovahs,” she said in an upper-class accent. “Dragging your poor children from door to door.”

“I am not a Jehovah,” snapped Agatha. “My name is Agatha Raisin and this is one of my detectives, Miss Toni Gilmour.”

“Oh, so you’re the female responsible for the deaths yesterday.”

“Look,” said Agatha, “I would like to speak to Mr. Bassett.”

“I am Mrs. Bassett.” Her eyes raked Agatha from head to foot. You could leave the Birmingham slum, thought Agatha, but it was always there, deep inside, waiting to make you feel inferior.

“It’s Mr. Bassett I want to speak to.” Agatha’s small eyes bored truculently into Mrs. Bassett’s face.

“Come in,” she said abruptly.

They followed her into a kitchen which was like something out of the pages of Cotswold Life magazine. It shone and gleamed in the sunlight, from the latest utensils to the copper pots hanging on hooks above a granite counter.

“Wait there,” commanded Mrs. Bassett, pointing towards a kitchen table surrounded by Windsor chairs.

She strode out the back door and called in stentorian tones, “Hal!”

There was a faint answering cry.

“He’s coming,” said Mrs. Bassett, striding back into the kitchen.

As usual, Agatha’s eyes ranged around the room looking for an ashtray, but she could not see a single one.

Mrs. Bassett began to grind coffee beans. She had her back to them and seemed unaware of their very existence.

Hal Bassett came into the kitchen. Mrs. Bassett swung round. “Boots!” she said.

Hal retreated to the doorway, sat down on a small stool at the entrance and tugged off his green wellies.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“It’s that Agatha Raisin woman and her sidekick,” said Mrs. Bassett.

Hal walked up to the kitchen table, twisted a chair round and straddled it. I hate men who do that, thought Agatha.

He was a tall brown-haired man dressed in a checked shirt and cords. He smelt strongly of pig. “So you’re the female responsible for the mayhem yesterday,” he remarked. His voice was light and pleasant. He had a square regular face. He did not look at all like the kind of person to haunt a jam-tasting exhibition.

“I’m not responsible for the LSD in the jam-if that is what the drug was,” said Agatha.

“What did you expect, encouraging a load of riff-raff to come here?” said Hal.

“It seems as if it had nothing to do with the visitors,” said Agatha. “The exhibition was set up in the marquee early in the morning by the organizers, Mrs. Glarely and Mrs. Cranton. The only people to visit the tent before the opening were yourself, Miss Triast-Perkins, the vicar and his wife and Mr. Selby. Did you taste any of the jam?”

“No,” said Hal. “I tried to buy a pot of plum jam from the ones on sale, but I was told I’d have to wait. Mrs. Cranton wouldn’t let me try any of the samples until the place was open to the public. Fair carried away with all this pop-singer nonsense.”

“Did you go back?”

“Couldn’t. Got a sow in farrow. I had to get back here.”

Toni smiled at him. “We aren’t suggesting you had anything to do with it. Of course not. But we wondered whether you might have seen anything when you were in the marquee.”

Hal smiled back. “What’s a pretty thing like you doing being a detective? No, I didn’t see anything out of the way. But if I remember something, I’ll phone you. Got a card?”

Toni took out one of her business cards, but before he could take it, it was snatched by Mrs. Bassett, who said icily, “Hal has work to do. If you’ve finished, we’d like to get on.”

They were just getting into the car in the farmyard when Hal came hurrying out. He thrust a packet of sausages at Toni. “Here you are,” he said. “Prime pork. My own pigs.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Toni. “Does it always pong like this round here?”

He laughed. “I’ve got a load of pig muck stacked up to sell to the farmers for fertilizer. It’ll be cleared out tomorrow. My pigs don’t smell. Come back sometime and I’ll give you a tour.”

“Hal!” called Mrs. Bassett from the doorway.

“Coming.”

“You’ve made a conquest there,” said Agatha, feeling low. How great it would be to be young and pretty like Toni. George would surely pay attention to her.

“George was in the tent as well,” said Toni. “I forgot about that. Do you know anything about him?”

“No, only that his wife died.”

“Maybe he poisoned her.”

“Just drive,” said Agatha sourly. “And find the manor house. We’d better have a word with Miss Triast-Perkins.”

Toni drove back down into the village. “Aren’t we supposed to be reporting to the police?”

“Later.”

People were returning from the church service. Toni lowered the window and asked for directions to the manor, and was told it was at the other end of the village, just beyond the church. “Did you see the way they were all looking at us?” asked Toni. “They’re all in their Sunday best, but if you put them in, say, medieval dress, their faces would fit. They looked as if they would really like to lynch us. I bet there’s a lot of nasty things go on behind closed doors here-wife beating, incest and drunkenness.

“Or maybe they’re too God-fearing to get up to anything nasty,” said Agatha. “Anyway, I could imagine one of them poisoning the jam with some nasty poisonous plant. But LSD? I don’t think any of them would even know where to get it.”

“Oh, oh.” Toni braked suddenly.

“What is it?”

“Bill’s waving us over to the mobile police unit.”

Another hour and a half of rigorous questioning by Collins and Wilkes left Agatha beginning to feel as if she had put the LSD in the jam herself.

When she and Toni were finally allowed to go, Agatha looked around, hoping to see a sign of George, but he was nowhere to be seen.

They got in the car and drove to the manor house. The large iron gates were propped open. Beside the gates was a lodge house, fallen into disrepair. “I wonder why the lodge was left like that,” said Agatha. “With the clamour for housing these days, you’d think she’d have sold it off.”

The manor house was a square Georgian building, the front of which was covered by the twisting branches of an old wisteria just coming into flower. Like the village, it had a blank, secretive air. Several of the windows had been blocked up from the days when owners tried to avoid the window tax.

They got out of the car and Agatha rang the bell. They waited patiently. Turning round, Toni noticed that the garden was unkempt-just a weedy lawn and several bushes planted around it.

The door opened. “Are you Miss Triast-Perkins?” asked Agatha.

She was a small thin woman with grey hair worn straight from a centre parting. Her face was thin and her large eyes were pale blue. She was wearing a faded print summer dress.