Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage by MC Beaton Page B

the key to the back door. All we need to do is to go out and over the fence of your garden and then over the fence and into mine – I mean hers.’
    ‘Okay. I’ll go outside and weed the front garden so I can see her leaving.’
    James, bent double over a flowerbed, thought after half an hour that Mrs Hardy might have changed her mind, but then, as he straightened up, he was rewarded by the sight of her truculent face behind the wheel of her car, heading off down Lilac Lane. He stood and craned his neck, hearing the sound of the car retreating through the village, and then seeing it climbing up the hill out of Carsely.
    He went back indoors. ‘Right, Agatha,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
    Agatha shinned over James’s garden fence, thinking that detective work might prove too energetic a business for a middle-aged woman. James had gone over lightly and had crossed the narrow alley between his garden and that of Mrs Hardy and was already climbing over her fence.
    That James should expect her to scramble after him without an offer of help riled Agatha. She felt she was being treated like a man. She suddenly wanted James to notice her again, really look at her as a man ought to look at a woman. She thought that when she reached the top of Mrs Hardy’s fence, she would call to him for help. He would stretch his arms up to her and she would drop down into them, her eyes closed, and she would whisper, ‘James, oh James.’
    ‘Help!’ she called softly. She dropped down the other side of the fence, stumbled and landed face-down in a flowerbed. She got to her feet and glared. James, totally oblivious to the romantic script she had written for him, was unlocking the kitchen door. Agatha gave herself a mental shaking. She did not love him any more, she told herself. It was just that she had become so used to being in love, to having her brain filled with bright dreams, that without them she was left with herself. Agatha did not find herself very good company.
    She looked around her garden as she headed for the back door. It had a weedy, neglected air.
    Inside the house, she looked around the kitchen. It was gleaming and sterile. She opened the fridge. Nothing but a bottle of milk and some butter. She was about to open the freezer compartment when James said angrily from behind her, ‘We’re not here to find out what she eats but who she is.’
    She followed him through to the living-room. Agatha had never credited herself with having much taste, but looking around what had once been her cosy, chintzy living-room, she felt her cottage had undergone a species of rape. There was a mushroom-coloured fitted carpet on the floor. A three-piece suite in mushroom velvet was ornamented with gold tassels on the arms and gold fringe above the squat legs. A low glass coffee table glittered coldly. No pictures or books. Her lovely open hearth had been blocked up and an electric fire with fake logs stood in front of it.
    ‘Absolutely nothing here,’ said James. ‘Let’s try upstairs. You’d best stay down here in case you hear her coming back.’ And Agatha was glad to agree, not wanting to see what Mrs Hardy had done to the rest of the cottage. She went to the window and peered out. Autumn had come. A thin mist was curling around the branches of the lilac bush at the gate. Water dripped from the thatch with a mournful sound.
    Agatha suddenly wondered what on earth she was doing living in the country a feeling that only assailed her during the autumn. It was the Cotswold fogs that were the problem. Last winter hadn’t been too bad, but the winter before had been awful, crawling into Moreton-in-Marsh or Evesham to do the shopping with the fog-lights on, sometimes not knowing whether she was still on the road or not, driving home at night when the fog seemed to rear up and take on tall, pillared, shifting shapes, eyes aching, longing for the wind to blow and lift it.
    In London there were shops, brightly lit, and tubes and buses,