Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

showing that, far above, the sun was trying to struggle through.
    Miss Purvey had a sudden longing for the lights and shops of Mircester. She had one close friend, Belinda Humphries, who ran a small dress shop in a shopping arcade in Mircester. Miss Purvey decided to go and see her, relishing the joys of describing James Lacey and the way he had looked at her. Of course, he had had Mrs Raisin with him, but she had asked him in the kitchen if they were going to be married after all and he had said quietly, ‘Not now,’ and she, Miss Purvey, was only a teensy bit older than Mrs Raisin.
    She put on her coat and that sort of felt hat beloved by middle-class Englishwomen and damned as ‘sensible’, and made her way out to her Ford Escort, which was parked on the road outside the cottage.
    Driving slowly and carefully, she joined the dual carriageway road some miles outside the village, and moving into the fast lane, drove at a steady thirty miles per hour, seemingly deaf to the furious horns and flashing lights of the drivers behind her.
    To her dismay, the fog began to thicken as she approached Mircester. She found a parking place in the central square, got out, locked her car and went to the shopping arcade. A neat sign hanging on the glass door said CLOSED. She gave a little cluck of dismay. She had forgotten it was half-day in Mircester.
    She felt too strung up to go home. Of course she could have gone to Belinda’s cottage, but that lay in a village twenty miles in the opposite direction out of Mircester from where she herself lived.
    Miss Purvey decided to treat herself to a visit to the cinema. A Bruce Willis Die Hard movie was showing and Miss Purvey found Bruce Willis exciting. She had seen it before but knew she would enjoy seeing it again.
    She bought a ticket at the kiosk and took a seat in the still-lit cinema. The programme was due to start in a few minutes.
    Miss Purvey settled down and took a packet of strong peppermints out of her handbag, extracted one and popped it in her mouth. There were not many people in the cinema. She twisted round to see if there was anyone she knew and then her gaze fastened on the person in the row behind her, a little to her left. She turned away and then stiffened in her seat. Surely she had seen that face before.
    She twisted round again and said in her loud, plummy voice, ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?’
    Rose, the usherette, was fifty-something, with bad feet. The days when usherettes were pert young things with trays of ices had long gone. The ices and popcorn were bought at a kiosk in the foyer, and inside, tired middle-aged women showed people to their seats and then searched while the cinema was empty to make sure no one had left anything valuable.
    Rose saw the solitary figure sitting in the middle of one of the rows in the centre and thought, here’s another old-age pensioner fallen asleep. It was hard to be patient with these old people. Some of them didn’t even know where they were or who they were when they woke up. The Cotswolds were turning into geriatric country.
    She edged along the row behind the still figure and, leaning forward, shook one shoulder. It was like a Hitchcock movie, thought Rose, her heart leaping into her mouth. The figure slowly keeled sideways. Rose gasped, leaned over and shone her torch into the figure’s face, for although the lights were on in the cinema, they were still quite dim.
    The bulging eyes of Miss Purvey stared glassily back at her. A scarf was twisted savagely around the old scrawny neck.
    Shock takes people in strange ways. Rose walked quickly to the foyer and told her fellow usherette to call the manager, and then she phoned the police. She told the man in the ticket office to come out and close the cinema doors and not let anyone else in. Then she lit a cigarette and waited. The police and an ambulance arrived, the CID arrived, the pathologist, and then the forensic team.
    Rose told her story several times, was taken to the police station, where she repeated everything again, and then signed a statement.
    She accepted a lift home in a police car and told the pretty young policewoman that she would be perfectly all right after she had had a cup of tea.
    When she let herself into her house, her husband shambled out of the living-room. He was wearing his favourite old moth-eaten cardigan and he had bits of boiled egg stuck to his moustache.
    ‘I hate you!’ screamed Rose, and then she began to