M Beaton: There Goes The Bride

Toni looked up and down the quiet mews. No one was about. She saw a brick lying some distance away. She went and picked it up and smashed the pane of glass on the door, reached inside and turned the handle. There was nothing in the small downstairs living room. She ran upstairs. There was a kitchen on the landing area with a corridor leading off it.

Toni thrust open the door of a bedroom. Handcuffed to the bed lay a woman with a gag over her mouth. Toni ripped off the gag and felt for a pulse on the woman’s neck. The pulse was faint but she was alive.

Toni called the police and asked for an ambulance. Then she phoned Agatha. There was no reply, not even from an operator to say the phone was switched off. Charles lived in Warwickshire. Toni phoned him and got past his manservant by screaming it was a matter of life and death. Charles listened and said, ‘Warwick Castle? I’m on my way. I’ll phone the police on the way there.’

Agatha had been to Warwick Castle before. Charlotte exclaimed over the beauty of the medieval building. They visited the battlements, the towers and the torture chamber, Madame Tussaud’s waxworks inside, and then Charlotte said, ‘I’m exhausted. I could do with a cup of tea.’

‘And I could do with going to the loo,’ said Agatha. ‘I’ll join you in the tea room.’

‘Want any cakes or buns?’

‘No, just tea,’ said Agatha.

In the toilet, Agatha fought down a feeling of uneasiness about Charlotte. In the castle drawing room, when she had been looking at a picture, she had seen a reflection of Charlotte’s face in the dark glass-framed portrait. Charlotte’s face seemed to be distorted by a look of malice. I’m imagining things, thought Agatha. But no one knows where I am. I’ll just make a few phone calls. Agatha had left her BlackBerry at home and was carrying her old mobile phone with her. Sometimes she felt more at ease with a simple phone and took it on local trips in case her car broke down.

In the toilet, she checked her phone for messages and found it was totally dead. She scowled down at it. She had charged it up the night before.

Agatha suddenly had a memory of walking down the garden with her cats before she left and when she had walked back up, Charlotte was bent over the kitchen table and Agatha’s open bag. Agatha could now not remember leaving her bag open.

She opened up the back of her phone and searched for the SIM card. It had been taken out.

Agatha found her hands were beginning to shake. She used the toilet and washed her hands, wondering what to do. Why should Charlotte disable her phone? So that you can’t call for help, you gullible idiot, sneered a voice in her brain.

Why Warwick Castle? Maybe Charlotte planned to take her on a walk round the rose garden, say, plunge a hypodermic into her in a quiet corner and leave her to rot.

Sylvan, thought Agatha bitterly. His long arm had reached out from the prison. She pinned a smile on her face and returned to the table.

‘I nearly came to look for you,’ said Charlotte. ‘You were ages.’

Agatha noticed Charlotte had a small clutch handbag whereas her own was a large leather one.

‘Goodness, look at that!’ shrieked Agatha suddenly. ‘Over there!’

‘What? Where?’

‘Stand up and have a look out of the window.’

When Charlotte got to her feet, Agatha deftly slid Charlotte’s little handbag across the table and dropped it into her own. Then she emptied her cup of tea back into the pot in case Charlotte had put something into it.

‘I can’t see anything,’ said Charlotte, coming back to the table. ‘What was it?’

‘A peacock.’

‘Agatha, the place is full of peacocks.’

‘I still get excited when I see one,’ said Agatha.

‘Where’s my bag?’ said Charlotte.

‘I don’t know. Did you have it when we came into the restaurant?’

‘I’m sure I did.’

‘Charles!’ cried Agatha, feeling she could have wept with relief as his familiar figure walked into the tea room.

‘Hi, Agatha,’ said Charles. ‘Do you know the place is swarming with police? I wonder what’s going on.’

Charlotte rose unsteadily to her feet. ‘Just going to get some air,’ she said.

Agatha made a grab for her but she twisted away and ran for the door. Agatha followed, shouting to the nearest policeman, ‘That’s her!’

‘Hold back, Agatha,’ said Charles quietly. ‘It’s up to the police now.’

Charlotte zigzagged across the lawn and then dived into the entrance to the battlements. Charles and Agatha walked outside the tea room and watched the chase.

Charlotte appeared, a tiny figure up on the battlements, rushing this way and that, but her escape was now blocked by the police.

Her last cry was faintly borne to their ears as she threw herself off.

People rushed forward and then were herded away by the police. ‘Let’s not look,’ said Charles. ‘Let’s just go and sit down in the tea room.’

‘How did you know?’ asked Agatha.

Charles told her about the phone call from Toni and about how Toni had found the real Mrs Rother.

‘I knew there was something up when my phone didn’t work,’ said Agatha. ‘She’d disabled it. I pinched her handbag in case she had something nasty in there for me.’

‘Let’s have a look.’

The tea room was empty, everyone having rushed outside to see what was happening.

Agatha took out the small clutch handbag and opened it. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Charles. ‘Just look.’

‘There’s a syringe in here,’ said Agatha. ‘Why didn’t she just bump me off at home? Why Warwick Castle?’

‘She must have wanted you really off guard and surrounded by crowds of tourists.’

Two plain-clothes detectives came in. ‘Mrs Raisin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you come with us? We have a lot of questions to ask you.’

Agatha was interviewed at police headquarters in Leamington Spa for a long time. Then she was taken to Mircester headquarters, where the questioning started all over again.

Wilkes asked her at one point why she had not suspected Charlotte earlier. Agatha said she had no reason to. She had thought that there might be a remote chance that Sylvan would send someone after her, but she had thought that person would be a man. And all the time during the questioning, Agatha’s spirits sank lower and lower. Had it not been for discovering her phone had been tampered with, had it not been for Toni’s and Roy’s suspicions, then she might have been killed.

The police obviously thought she was a bumbling amateur, and by the time she was released and returned wearily to her cottage, that is exactly how she felt.

There were only two local reporters waiting on her doorstep to interview her. Agatha rallied enough to give them a few brief quotes but wondered where the national press and television were. She was to find out next day that they had decided to go with the better story.

Toni’s face was all over the front pages. The real Charlotte Rother, photographed in hospital, was hailing her as the heroine who had saved her life. She said that the woman who had stolen her identity had drugged her and tied her to the bed. Her real name turned out to be Clarice Delavalle, one of Sylvan’s former mistresses, who bore a remarkable resemblance to Charlotte. Clarice had returned from time to time to feed her and then had not come back and Charlotte was suddenly sure she meant to leave her to starve to death. Also, Clarice had taken her fur coat and jewellery.

Roy Silver had also been interviewed, saying he had seen and heard Clarice in the Ivy talking in French, and had urged Toni to check up on her. The Warwick Castle adventure was reported on the inside pages. There was a head and shoulders photograph of Agatha taken some time ago, scowling at the camera. Reports of the fake Charlotte’s suicide had been taken from eyewitnesses amongst the tourists.