M.C. Beaton - The Love from Hell

She prepared herself carefully for the evening at the Carsely Ladies’ Society, putting on a pretty summer dress with slits up each side to reveal what Agatha considered her last good feature, her legs.

When she sat in the vicarage garden, balancing a cup of tea and a plate with a wedge of cake, she listened with only half an ear to Carsely’s unmarried mother, Miss Simms, read the minutes of the last meeting. Unmarried mothers in villages were hardly unusual, but Agatha always found it amusing that Miss Simms should have been elected secretary by this bunch of very conventional, middle-aged and middle-class ladies.

Mrs. Bloxby, who was now chairwoman – no PC rubbish about chairpersons in Carsely – rose to put forward the arrangements for the forthcoming village fête. For once, Agatha did not volunteer to do anything. She was tired of village affairs and felt she had done enough in the past.

The other women there did not cut her dead once the business part of the evening was over. But they would ask her if she had any word of her husband and then move quickly away. Only Miss Simms pulled up a chair next to Agatha and said, “Wouldn’t you feel better doing something at the fête, dearie? I mean, we need someone for the tombola. Take your mind off things.”

“The way I feel at the moment,” said Agatha, “a village fête would be incapable of taking my mind off things.”

Miss Simms tugged ineffectively at her short skirt, which was riding up over her lace-topped stockings. “Anything I can do to help?”

“I keep trying to find out what sort of person Melissa Sheppard really was.”

“Bit of a tart, if you ask me.”

“How come?”

“Went up to London with her a couple of months ago. I don’t have a gentleman friend at the moment, and she says there’s this singles’ bar with good talent and why don’t I come along. So I did. Well, it was really rough stuff, if you get me. I like my gents in suits and with their own car. We get tied up with three bikers, all leather and medallions, and Melissa, she says, “We’re all going back to Jake’s place,” Jake being one of the blokes. I take her aside and say, “What you on about, Liss? They’re a bit common and there’s three of them.” She’d drunk a bucketful, pretty quick, and she says, says she, “The more the merrier.” So I got the hell out of there and had to find me way to Paddington and pay for me fare home, ‘cos we’d come up in her car. I asked her later how she’d got on, and she says, “Okay, and I didn’t take you to be a Miss Prim,” so I never spoke to her again.”

At last I’m getting somewhere, thought Agatha. “I’d like to speak to those bikers,” she said. “Would you like to go to London with me and spot them for me? Did they seem like regulars?”

Miss Simms looked at her doubtfully from under a pair of improbably false eyelashes. “They did seem to be regulars, but…”

“Don’t worry,” said Agatha. “I’ll pay for everything, even for your baby-sitter, and I’m not looking for a fellow.”

“Right. You’re on.”

“What time did you turn up there before?”

“Bout nine in the evening.”

“Right. We leave about seven. Should make it in good time. The rush-hour traffic should be thinning out by then.”

Shortly after Agatha got home, the phone rang. It was Charles. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Agatha, glad that he had not abandoned her after all, felt relieved and told him about the singles’ bar.

“I’ll come with you.”

“Okay,” said Agatha after a little hesitation. “It’s a bit rough, so don’t look too posh.”

He laughed. “As if I could.”

And he really believes that, thought Agatha. How odd.

∨ The Love from Hell ∧

5

HAD London always been so dirty and shabby? wondered Agatha. Surely not. The singles’ bar was off Piccadilly Circus, and not, as Agatha had guessed, in some dreary suburb. Certainly it was a hot summer which always gave the city a tired, exhausted air. Charles managed to find a space in an underground car-park a short walk from the bar.

Agatha was wearing a silk trouser-suit which had looked very sophisticated and smart in her bedroom mirror at home. But as they walked through the crowds, she noticed women wearing floaty summer dresses, or very short skirts and brief tops, and began to feel like a frump. She was wearing flat gold leather shoes and wished now she had worn heels. Miss Simms teetered along in very high heels and a skirt that verged on the indecent as she was showing her usual glimpses of stocking tops. Charles was dressed in a soft blue cotton shirt, chinos, and moccasins. Agatha felt she was the only one who didn’t fit in with the cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Miss Simms’ singles’ bar turned out to be a disco called Stompers. “Are you sure this is the place?” asked Agatha. The young people trooping in ahead of them all looked trendily dressed.

“Yeah, this is it,” said Miss Simms, clutching Charles’s arm. “Not my sort of place.”

Agatha paid the entrance fee and they went downstairs to a large room where couples gyrated under darting strobe lights. The music was loud, horrendously so. It beat upon their ear-drums and made conversation impossible.

They made their way to the bar and in a brief moment when the music ceased, Agatha said, “Do you see them?”

“Not yet,” said Miss Simms. She hitched herself up on the bar-stool and the resultant display of lace stocking tops and frilly knickers meant that she was immediately asked to dance.

Agatha put her mouth to Charles’s ear and shouted, “Waste of time.”

As dance number followed dance number – hadn’t they moved on from The Village People? – Agatha began to get angry. Miss Simms hadn’t returned. This was not a singles’ bar. It was a disco for young people. She was feeling hot and tired and deafened.

She was just about to shout to Charles to go and collect Miss Simms and get them out of the noise and into the fresh air when Miss Simms suddenly appeared in front of them accompanied by a burly young man.

“Ere’s one of them,” she roared.

Charles took the young man aside and shouted something. Then he jerked his head at Agatha and they all made their way out of the club.

“Thank God for that,” said Agatha, taking in great gulps of polluted air. “This here is Jake,” said Miss Simms. “He was one of them that was with Melissa.”

Jake did not look like a bit of rough stuff to Agatha. He was wearing a black T-shirt, black trousers and enormous boots, but; he had a pleasant-enough face.

“What’s all this about?” asked Jake when they had managed to get a table at a nearby pub. “I read she’d got topped. Nothing to do with me.”

“The thing is,” said Agatha, “my husband’s missing and he’s suspected of having committed the murder. I don’t know what Melissa was really like. I mean, what did you make of her; what really happened?”

“Well, for a start, you can’t tell with the lights in there and she was heavy made up, you see. When we got back to our flat, and I got a good look at her, I thought; blimey, I thought, I ain’t reduced to screwing someone as old as my mum. Besides, she was as pissed as a newt. Must have been drinking a lot in the club.”

“She was,” interjected Miss Simms.

“So me and the others had a confab in the kitchen and my mates, that’s Jerry and Wayne, they says, get rid of the old bird. So I go back in and tells her, “You’ll need to go, we’ve got a date later with our girl-friends.” She says she could teach us a few tricks, like we didn’t know. Disgusting, it was.” He grinned cheekily at Agatha. “Don’t know what the older generation’s coming to.” Miss Simms giggled and sipped at a blue drink which seemed to be full of fruit and decorated with small paper umbrellas.