Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

boot, unlocked it and took out two large suitcases. Then, as if he were aware of being watched, his shoulders stiffened. He put down the suitcases and turned around.
    A weary Agatha came towards him. The rash had gone from her face, leaving it unnaturally white, and there were purple bruises under her eyes.
    ‘Where did they find you?’ asked Agatha.
    ‘I hadn’t gone far,’ he said. ‘I stayed the night at the Wold Hotel in Mircester and had nearly reached Oxford when a police car flagged me down. They couldn’t hold me. Too many witnesses to the fact that I was far from Carsely at the time of the murder. How’s Mrs Bloxby?’
    ‘All right, I suppose.’ Agatha looked surprised. ‘Why?’
    ‘Well, she found the body.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘They didn’t tell you?’
    ‘They didn’t tell me a damn thing. They charged me with the murder and then asked me the same questions over and over again, but they didn’t tell me how he was killed or who had found him. The bastards let me go on thinking that it was all my fault, that I had pushed him and he had broken his neck or something. Then they said they were dropping the charges because Jimmy had been strangled with a man’s silk tie and that there were masculine footprints found near the body.’
    There was a silence and then James asked, ‘Have the press been bothering you?’
    ‘By some miracle, no.’
    ‘I suppose they’ll be all over the village by tomorrow.’
    ‘It won’t bother me,’ sighed Agatha. ‘I’ve got to leave. I sold my cottage to a Mrs Hardy and, like a fool, I thought I could cancel the sale. But she’s moving in tomorrow and I’m out. I went to the Red Lion to see if I could take a room there, but it seems I am still number-one suspect in the village. John Fletcher said he hadn’t a room, he wouldn’t even look me in the eye, and neither would anyone else.’
    ‘But, Agatha, you told me all about the Hardy woman and that you didn’t like her much but she had offered a good price. How on earth could you expect her to change her mind?’
    ‘I don’t find myself disgraced in a registry office every day and then accused of murder. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just want to get away, from you, from everyone.’
    He picked up his suitcases and then put them down again. ‘I really don’t think that’s the answer, Agatha.’
    ‘And what is?’
    ‘I assume we both still want to stay here?’
    Agatha shook her head.
    ‘You do what you like,’ said James, ‘but until I find out who killed your husband, despite every proof to the contrary, we are both going to be suspected of his murder.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Agatha wretchedly. ‘I’ve got to get all that stuff of mine moved out and into storage again and then I have to think where I will live.’
    ‘You can move into my spare room if you like.’
    ‘What? I thought you never wanted to see me again.’
    ‘The situation has somewhat changed. I think I will always be too sore at you, Agatha, to ever want to marry you. But the hard fact is that we have worked well together in the past and together we might clear this up.’
    Agatha looked at him in wonder. ‘I don’t think I ever really knew you.’ She thought that if he had entertained any feelings for her at all, he would not ask her now to move in on such a businesslike basis. It would have been more human to have been totally spurned and totally rejected.
    But she felt she no longer loved him and what he was offering was a very practical solution.
    ‘Okay. Thanks,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll call on Mrs Bloxby. She must be feeling awful.’
    ‘Good idea. Wait a minute until I put these bags inside and I’ll come with you.’
    When they walked along together in the twilight, Agatha thought that the women’s magazines who wrote all that crap about low self-esteem might have something after all. She was walking along beside a man with whom she had shared passion and listening to him complain about the potholes in the road and suggest that they both attend the next parish council meeting to protest about them. Women of low self-esteem, she had read recently, often loved men who were incapable of returning love and affection.
    ‘Do you think I suffer from low self-esteem?’ she asked James abruptly, interrupting his discourse on potholes.
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Feeling lower than whale shit.’
    ‘I think you’re miserable because you tried to commit bigamy and got found out and then found yourself