M.C. Beaton - The Love from Hell

“Well, don’t try to cut me out again. That’s what you were doing. Oh, Lord!”

“What?”

“That open window in the office. What if she reports it to the police?”

“I shut it. When I got there and we’d been chatting for a bit, I asked her if I could use the loo, and when I was upstairs I shut it.”

“Clever you,” said Agatha, mollified.

“So am I forgiven?”

“I suppose. Don’t do it again. You know, all that stuff about Melissa being a psychopath makes it worse. There must be so many suspects and we haven’t got a clue who did it.”

“I don’t know much about psychopaths. I thought they were people like Hannibal Lecter.”

“When you’ve finished eating, we’ll go home and look it up in the encyclopaedia.”

♦

After looking it up in the encyclopaedia and running reams of information off the Internet, Agatha groaned, “Why can’t they use simple language?”

“It seems to me,” said Charles, “as if psychopath was a sort of blanket diagnosis until fairly recently. It seems as if our Melissa, sectioned at a later date, would have been diagnosed as having ASPD, antisocial personality disorder. Here are some of the features, apart from not having a conscience: lack of empathy, inflated and arrogant self-appraisal, and glib, superficial charm. Tendency to be hooked on drink or drugs or both and…um…”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you keeping from me?”

“Deviant sexual practices.”

“I don’t love James any more,” said Agatha in a shaky voice.

“Not one bit. How could he even spend a minute with such a creature?”

“Never mind. Here we are knowing lots and lots about ASPD and not a bit nearer finding out who did it or where James is.”

♦

James Lacey was feeling strong and well. His headaches had gone. He now attended prayers and worked in the extensive vegetable gardens of the monastery. He felt a miracle had happened and that somehow his brain tumour had gone. But his counsellor, Brother Michael, knew nothing of this. He only heard of James’s desire for a quiet religious life. He knew James had spent most of his years in the army. But James mentioned nothing of his marriage or what had made him flee. If any thoughts of Agatha entered his mind, he banished them quickly. He blamed the brain tumour on the mess of his old life. In the monastery, with its rigid discipline, it was rather like being in the army again. He intended to serve a period of probation and then join the order. Somehow, sometime in the future, he would tell Brother Michael the truth about his life. But not yet.

∨ The Love from Hell ∧

6

THE following day, Agatha said, “We’ve got to try Mr. Dewey again.”

“We’ve only got to show our faces near his house and that damned woman will start shouting for the police.”

“I don’t think so. She’s already made a fool of herself.”

“Oh, really? I thought it was you who had made a fool of yourself, saying you had a gun.”

“Never mind that. I paid Dewey a generous amount to repair his window. Let’s try. I can’t just sit here and worry about James.”

“I thought you didn’t love James any more.”

“I just want to get my hands on him and give him a piece of my mind. Come on, Charles.”

As they drove towards Worcester, Agatha said, “Now there’s this new bypass, I miss seeing Broadway. I keep thinking I must turn off one day and see what the old place looks like.”

“Tell you what. If we ever find out who did this murder, I’ll treat you to dinner at the Lygon Arms.” The Lygon Arms was Broadway’s famous and expensive hotel.

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” remarked Agatha. “You promising me an expensive dinner makes me think you don’t believe we’ll find anyone.”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll just blunder about in our usual way and unearth something.”

They were approaching Evesham when Charles muttered something and pulled over by the side of the road and got out. “What’s up?” asked Agatha when he got back in the car.

“Slow puncture. Anywhere around here can fix it?”

“Don’t you have a spare?”

“No, I used that last year and forgot to get a new one.”

“Well, if you go round that next roundabout and into the Four Pools Estate, there’s a place called Motorways. They’ll fix a new wheel in minutes.”

By the time they parked at Motorways, the wheel was nearly flat. They sat down in the office and waited. A mechanic came in and said, “Your other tyres are nearly bald.”

Agatha fixed Charles with a steely glare. “Do get all your tyres fixed. What if one blew out when we were speeding along some motorway?”

Charles said he would like all new tyres and one spare.

“I like seeing you spending money,” said Agatha with a grin.

The man behind the counter said, “The coffee in the machine over there is free, if you’d like some.”

Charles brightened visibly, as if the thought of something free had allayed some of the dismay he had felt at having to shell out for new tyres.

Agatha sat nursing a cup of coffee and staring dreamily about her. It was funny, she thought, not for the first time, how one never got the city out of one’s bones and how even industrial waste had a certain sort of comforting beauty. The rain had started to fall outside and she breathed in that old familiar smell of rain on hot dusty concrete. In the village, she was surrounded by flowers: lavender and hollyhocks, impatiens, roses, delphiniums, gladioli, and pansies, and yet she could still see beauty in willow-herb thrusting up out of the cracks in an industrial estate.

She was almost sorry when the car was pronounced ready. “Seriously, Charles,” she said as he drove off, “how did you get to be so mean? It’s not as if you’re short of a bob.”

“I suppose it all started with death duties,” said Charles. “And my father had let the land go to rack and ruin. The farms weren’t paying. It was a hard fight to turn things around, getting a good stockbroker so that money could make money. I couldn’t bear to lose the house and land. I got used to economizing on everything I could and the habit’s stuck, I’m afraid. I even took a diploma in agriculture and a course in bookkeeping so I could do the accounts and save the expense of an accountant. For a while I even opened the house to the public.”

“Don’t want to run down your home,” said Agatha. “But it’s a great Victorian pile, hardly an architectural gem.”

“I invented a ghost,” said Charles. “I engineered an occasion for dry ice to leak out through the walls of the library. Gave the visitors no end of a thrill. They used to come in coach-loads. But the minute I got solvent, I stopped the house tours. That stock-broker is a whiz. He made me a fortune.”

“Mine’s pretty good, too,” said Agatha, and so they talked comfortably about stocks and shares until they reached the outskirts of Worcester. “We may not be lucky enough to find him at home this time,” said Agatha.

And this proved to be the case. No answer to the doorbell, but at least the Neighbourhood Watch woman was nowhere in sight.

“Let’s try next door,” said Charles. “I saw a curtain twitch.”

“No, let’s not,” said Agatha hurriedly. “The neighbour probably last saw us being carted off by the police. I saw a newspaper shop just outside the housing estate. They might know where he is. We forgot to ask him if he worked at anything.”

The Pakistani shopkeeper volunteered the information that Mr. Dewey kept an antique shop in The Shambles opposite the back of Marks & Spencer in the centre of Worcester, and so they drove into the main car-park by the river, where swans sailed majestically up and down. The rain was quite heavy now. Charles produced a large golf umbrella from the boot of the car and under its shelter they walked up and across the main street and through to The Shambles.