Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

are looking for Mrs Gore-Appleton, and someone is bound to come forward.’
    ‘I wish the whole mess were over with,’ said Agatha wearily. ‘Perhaps we should leave the whole thing to the police.’
    ‘Well, we’ve only got one more name,’ pointed out James. ‘There’s a Mrs Gloria Comfort and she lives right in Mircester, near the abbey. And even if The Bugle doesn’t run the story, some other newspaper will want to talk to you. It would take a world catastrophe to knock this out of the papers.’
    The next morning James rose early and went out and bought all the newspapers. Black headlines screamed at him. Yeltsin had been overthrown. The generals in Moscow had made a coup. The Cold War was on again. The papers were full of reports on the front pages, and on the inside were endless articles by pundits. The murder of one elderly spinster in Mircester rated only a small paragraph in each. The rump of Serbia was supporting the generals. Russia was beginning to be torn apart by civil war.
    He took the newspapers back to Agatha, who was playing with her cats on his kitchen floor. She rose to her feet and studied them in silence.
    ‘At least,’ said Agatha at last, ‘we can go on detecting. If we had been the focus of press attention, it would have been hard to do.’
    They talked about the world situation and then decided they might as well go into Mircester and make their statements, go somewhere for lunch, and then call on Mrs Gloria Comfort.
    Maddie and Bill Wong were having a cup of tea in the canteen later that day. It was the first time since interviewing Agatha and James that they had been able to have a private conversation.
    ‘So what do you think of your precious Agatha Raisin now?’ demanded Maddie. ‘That woman’s like a vulture. Dead bodies wherever she goes.’
    ‘That’s a bit hard,’ protested Bill. ‘Their visit to Derrington may have touched off his suicide, but they were only a bit ahead of us and if the old boy was going to top himself, he would have done it sooner or later. And they had nothing to do with the murder of Miss Purvey. Agatha’s alibi checks out. Look, Maddie, I must make one thing clear. Agatha’s a friend of mine and I wish you’d stop bitching about her. I don’t know if she exactly solved those last crimes, but she made things happen by poking her nose in; otherwise we’d never have got to the murderers.’
    ‘I’m entitled to my own opinion,’ said Maddie. ‘Look at her odd relationship with Lacey. Their engagement breaks up because she’s lied to him and yet they’re living together.’
    ‘I think they’re very well suited,’ mumbled Bill. He had invited Maggie home to meet his parents for dinner that very evening and he did not want anything to go wrong. ‘Can’t we just agree to disagree?’
    ‘Have it your way. Haven’t got the hots for old Agatha, have you?’
    ‘She’s old enough to be my mother!’
    ‘Just wondered.’
    Bill had been looking forward to showing off Maddie to his parents. Now a worm of uneasiness was beginning to wriggle in his brain. Could it be that his darling was, well, just a tiny bit abrasive?
    Agatha and James drove in the direction of Mircester. The fog had lifted and it was a beautiful autumn day. The hedgerows were bright with hawthorn berries, and red-and-gold trees lined the edges of brown ploughed fields.
    ‘The country doesn’t seem beautiful at first,’ said Agatha. ‘I used to long for London. Then I got used to it. I started noticing the changing seasons, and then it began to look beautiful, like watching a series of landscape paintings, one after another. Except for those clouds. Someone ought to do something about those clouds, James. They’re like those neat and regular watercolour ones painted by the Cotswold amateurs. The light is different, too. It sort of slants in the autumn.’ Shafts of golden sunlight cut through the trees on to the winding road ahead. James braked sharply as a clumsy pheasant dithered about in front of his wheels which crunched on a carpet of beech nuts.
    ‘I don’t often want to put the clock back,’ said Agatha in a small voice. ‘But on days like this, I wish I had never got into this mess, and I know I won’t be free until it’s over. I can’t even grieve for Jimmy. I think he’d turned into a right bad lot and if he hadn’t been so bad, he would be alive and kicking. I could deal with a live Jimmy and get him out of my hair forever, but I can’t fight a