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“I think you’re a Nosy Parker when you don’t have to be and touchingly naïve when you do have to be,” said Bill.
“Doesn’t matter if I mind, does it?” said Lord Pendlebury. “A landowner no longer has any privacy. If it’s not busybodies like you, it’s those damn environmentalists, walking over my land with their rucksacks, eating health-food nut bars and farting. Do you know what causes the damage to the ozone layer? It’s health fanatics, eating ghastly bran and nut bars and farting about the landscape. Sending out poisonous gases and wind. Ought to be put down.”
Course you haven’t been as long in these parts as Mr. Lacey here, or you’d know that criticism of his lordship is not welcome; no, that it’s not.”
She drove James back to the village, feeling hurt and gauche and inadequate.
James Lacey watched her go with some surprise. And he had thought she was pursuing him!
A doggedness to find out something about the vet’s death had prompted this visit. So long as she was worrying about the vet’s death, Agatha did not need to worry about James Lacey.
“We’ll stop somewhere for a drink and a sandwich.” He said this almost absent-mindedly, as if to an old friend, taking her acceptance for granted, and Agatha felt so ridiculously happy, she thought she might cry.
“Any murderer is usually desperate or deranged,” said Bill. “It would amaze you how little they think.
“He was going to found a veterinary hospital. He had such dreams. He said he could only talk to me. I was the only one with enough imagination to share his vision.”
“Romantic idea. But I think young Jerry phoned his friends and told him that there was some rich berk in the pub with a fistful of tenners for the taking. I just can’t wait to see him again.”
Agatha sat down suddenly and watched them while they fed. She felt weak and shaky and on the point of crying. She had had a bad fright in the pub. Bill Wong was right. She should leave this sort of business to the police. But if she dropped the investigations, then James would drop her and go back to his writing.
People in villages have become mobile and so they’re less curious about their fellows. And television. And yet it’s funny how people go on and on about the good old days when they had to make their own entertainment.
Miss Webster was sitting talking to Peter Rice, ugly red-haired Peter Rice, Bladen’s partner.
Greta Bladen had said something about Peter Rice being an old friend.
“I thought Peter would be delighted that I had found happiness at last, but he threw a very ugly scene. He said he had been going to ask me to marry him. I was so much in love with Paul that somehow that made me callous. It was only old Peter behaving in a most odd way. The next time I saw him he apologized for his behaviour and said he was moving to Mircester.”
He said something about that when I met him one day in the square. He said, ‘I’m finding that ex of yours something useful to do. I think it’s better we work apart. I’ve told him to start up a surgery in Carsely. Keep him out of my hair. I said, ‘Why Carsely?’ and he said that some friend of his who had a shop there said it was a good place for business.”
James went back and got his car and told Bill he thought Agatha might be in Mircester. He suddenly knew where Agatha had gone and prayed he would not be too late.
I sacked the girl but not Paul. Oh, no. He was going to have to pay me back. But I wanted him out of my hair.
I saw him with the syringe, I knew what was in it, what the operation was and something took over and the next thing I knew he was dead. I slipped off without anyone seeing me. I thought I was safe. I was furious when I realized he had taken a double mortgage out on that house, so instead of gaining by his death, I lost.
She said she was going to the police after talking to you. I jabbed the Adrenalin into her. The minute she was dead, I went into a blind panic.
“Bill Wong will be calling on us,” he said. “Is he grateful to us for having solved two murders for him? Not a bit of it.”
“I only thought of the cats,” said Agatha. “Funny, isn’t it? I thought my heart would break when they were taken, but here they are, purring away, two animals to be cared for and fed, and now they just seem like an everyday nuisance.”
One always thinks of murderers as planning everything scientifically, but in Rice’s case it was all panic and then luck. All he had to do was sit tight and let Mrs. Josephs make her accusations to the police.
“You wouldn’t think when you drive through one of these pretty Cotswold villages how much terror and passion and anger can lurk beneath the beams of these old cottages.
It was all the fault of that bloody captain’s wife in Cyprus. He should never have had an affair with her. What a scandal that had been. She had pursued him, flirted with him, but when the scandal had broken, he was the guilty party, the beast that had seduced her and tried to take her away from her noble and gallant husband.
