Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

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, theatres and cinemas. Of course, she could get all that in Oxford, but Oxford was thirty miles away, thirty miles of fog-filled road.
    She heard James call softly, ‘You’d better come up here.’
    She ran up the stairs. ‘In here,’ he called. ‘The main bedroom.’
    The room was dominated with a large four-poster bed, a modern four-poster bed. ‘How did she get that up the stairs?’ marvelled Agatha.
    ‘Never mind. Look at this. Don’t touch anything. I’m going to put it all back the way I found it.’ There were papers spread out on the floor. Agatha knelt down and studied them. Any hope Agatha might have had that the mysterious Mrs Hardy might turn out to be the missing Mrs Gore-Appleton quickly fled.
    There was a birth certificate: Mary Bexley, born in Sheffield in 1941. Then marriage lines. Mary Bexley had married one John Hardy in 1965. Death certificate for John Hardy. Died in car crash 1985.
    Bank-books and statements in the name of Mary Hardy. There were photographs, dull and boring. It appeared that the late Mr Hardy had been the company director of an electronics firm. Photos of Mr Hardy at firm functions. No children.
    ‘So that’s very much that,’ commented Agatha gloomily as she straightened up. James carefully replaced everything.
    ‘We’ll try Miss Janet Purvey tomorrow,’ he said.
    Miss Janet Purvey lived in Ashton-le-Walls, quite near the health farm. It was a sleepy village wreathed in the thick mist which still persisted to haunt the countryside. Late roses drooped over cottage walls, blackened busy Lizzies, suffering from the first frost of the autumn, drooped along the edge of flowerbeds. The trees were turning russet and birds piped dismally, seemingly the only sounds in the village of Ashton-le-Walls, where nothing and no one but Agatha and James seemed to be alive in the fog.
    The year was dying and Agatha felt lost and strange and loveless. The only thing that seemed to be keeping herself and James locked together was this detective