M.C. Beaton - The Day the Floods Came

“Must I?”

“I said you would.”

“Rats!”

Agatha slouched off to join Mr. Parry. “Ah, Mrs. Raisin,” he cried. “Shall we start with this one? This is a view of Blockley High Street circa 1910, and this…”

Agatha’s mind drifted off in the heat. At last the tour was over. “Thank you very much,” said Agatha.

“I didn’t display them all,” he said. “Some I have in a folder were watermarked or cracked, but very interesting for all that.”

To Agatha’s horror he picked up a folder from a chair, opened it and spread the contents on a table. “I have an appointment,” she gabbled. “Must go.”

He looked at her in disappointment. “I’m sure they’re all as fascinating as the ones in the exhibition,” she said, “but…”

On the top of the open folder was a sepia photograph of a street which seemed familiar to her. In the next second, she realized it was the back lane where the disco was situated. But where the disco was now stood a butchers shop, with the butcher grinning outside and game hanging from hooks.

“A butchers,” said Agatha.

He gave her a peculiar look. “Yes, obviously. So few of the old butchers left now that people go to the supermarket. That was Gringe’s. Bless me, that’s an old photograph, but they were there until five years ago. They sold up. The man that bought it meant to turn it into two flats but he went bankrupt and it was sold to those disco people. Such a shame.”

Agatha walked off slowly, deaf to his cry of “But you haven’t seen the others!”

A butcher, thought Agatha. How far would the chap who bought it for the flats have got with the conversion? Say he hadn’t got anywhere, then it would be as it had been when it was a butchers shop. That would mean the walk-in deep freeze would still be there.

“Mrs. Raisin!”

Agatha turned round reluctantly. It was Mrs. Bloxby. “Mr. Parry thought you’d taken a funny turn.”

“I’m all right. It was one of those photographs, Mrs. Bloxby. A butchers used to be in Evesham where the disco is now and that means there still might be a deep freeze there.”

“But the police searched the disco!”

“They were looking for a freezer chest,” said Agatha excitedly. “What if the freezer room is still there, behind a curtain or a fake wall?”

“You must tell the police.”

“Gringe was the name of the butcher. I’m going to see if I can find the man who sold the shop and get him to draw me a plan of where that freezer room was. Then I’ll go to the disco tomorrow night and see if it’s still there.”

“Mrs. Raisin, it’s too dangerous.”

“You mustn’t tell the police. This is my case,” said Agatha fiercely. “Promise?”

“I promise,” said Mrs. Bloxby reluctantly.

♦

As soon as she got home, Agatha checked the phone-book. There were two Gringes, A. Gringe and M. Gringe.

She dialled the A. Gringe. No reply. She tried the M.

Gringe. A woman answered. Agatha said she wanted to speak to whoever had owned the butchers-shop which was now a disco. “Oh, that’s my husband’s father,” she said.

“Do you know when he’ll be at home?” asked Agatha. “I phoned him but there was no reply.”

“He doesn’t go out much. He’s probably out in his garden.”

“I see he lives in Badsey,” said Agatha.

“Yes, you’ll find his house is near the schoolhouse. Know where that is?”

Agatha said she did and rang off.

She had a quick shower and changed. Before she left for Badsey, she phoned Charles’s number to put him off. Agatha wanted all the glory for herself. Gustav answered the phone and said Sir Charles was out and so she left a message. Now for Mr. Gringe.

♦

His home in Badsey was a trim, end-terraced house. Agatha saw there was a path at the side leading to the garden at the back, and decided to try the garden first.

She walked along the path. The garden was a plantless miracle. A wooden deck stretched out from behind the back door covered in a canvas canopy, and the area in front of it, where an old man was stooped, pulling at a weed, was covered in small shiny pebbles.

“Mr. Gringe?”

He straightened up, his eyes roaming over the pebbles as if threatening any other bit of green to show its face. “Yes?”

“I’m Agatha Raisin. I want to ask you about your butchers shop, the one that’s now a disco.”

He turned slowly and looked at her. His face was seamed and lined and his shoulders were stooped. He wiped his hands on an old pair of flannels, held one out and solemnly shook Agatha’s hand.

“What do you want to know?”

“I wondered if you could draw me a plan of your shop as it once was, showing me where the freezer, the cold room, was situated.”

“Why?”

“I’m writing a book,” lied Agatha, “and I have this butchers shop in it. I needed a layout.”

“So why don’t you just go to the butchers in, say, Moreton, and ask them to show you around?”

“Because I’m setting it in the past,” said Agatha desperately. “I need an old-fashioned butchers shop.”

He indicated a gleaming white plastic table surrounded by hard plastic chairs on the deck. “Let’s sit down and I’ll get a piece of paper.”

Agatha sat down and he shuffled off into the house. He seemed to be gone a very long time. She waited impatiently.

At last he reappeared, holding a sheet of white A-4 paper and a ball-point pen. He sat down beside her with painstaking slowness and then said, “Let me see, the counter was here as you came in the door. Had to be a cold counter, you know, glassed in. Bloody European regulations!” He began to draw with neat, draughtsmanlike precision.

“Through this door behind the counter was a short corridor and then a big area at the back. Deliveries came in by the back door. We cut up the meat in this room. There was a toilet here, and then a kitchen.”

“The freezer?” prompted Agatha.

“The cold room was just here, at the end of the large room the back. Inconvenient place, but it would have cost too much to move it.” His pen moved on, neatly sketching everything in Agatha waited patiently while he drew a plan of the upstairs as well.

“Those disco people got it cheap,” he grumbled, “because of all the conversion they’d have to do. I wanted to sell it to a butcher, but what butchers are there nowadays? The supermarkets have killed most of us off. The last straw was the E. coli scare. And the beef-on-the-bone scare. Couldn’t sell a joint of meat on the bone anywhere, and that took extra butchering time. Damn government. You put that in your book. The government helped to kill us off, us and the farmers. I’d shoot the lot of them. Want a drink?”

Agatha decided, as she had not planned to go to the disco until the next evening, the least she could do would be to give him some more of her time. “That would be nice.” She was just about to say she would have a gin and tonic, when he added, “I make the best dandelion wine in the Cotswolds.” Agatha resigned herself.

He shuffled indoors again. Birds chirped sleepily in the neighbouring gardens but no bird sang in Mr. Gringe’s stark garden. The evening sky stretched overhead, a pale green deepening to dark blue at the horizon. Somewhere deep inside her, a voice was telling her she was being dangerously silly, that she should turn over everything she had to the police.

Mr. Gringe came shuffling back carrying a tray with a bottle and two glasses. He poured out two large glasses of dandelion wine. “Here’s to you,” he said. Agatha raised her glass. “Good health.”

“So what name do you write under?” he asked.

“Agatha Raisin.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Do you read much?”