Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

jacket. ‘I took this bottle of Scotch out of the desk before I came here.’
    This was nothing but the truth, but deep in the dim recesses of their brains they accepted him as a fellow liar. The Scotch was passed round. Since they were all, with the exception of Agatha and Roy, topping up from the last binge, it had the effect of knocking them into almost immediate drunkenness.
    Agatha found the avid-faced woman was called Clara and sidled over to her. ‘Tell you a secret,’ she whispered.
    Clara looked at her, her glittering eyes slightly unfocused. ‘I was married to Jimmy,’ said Agatha.
    ‘Go on!’
    ‘Fact. So that bag this Lizzie took belongs to me. Where is she?’
    ‘She’ll be along.’
    So Agatha and Roy settled themselves to wait. More joined them. More cheap drink. A man built a bonfire in an old oil drum. Clara began to sing drunkenly.
    It was an almost seductive way of life, thought Agatha, provided the weather wasn’t too cold. Just chuck up reality, goodbye to work, to family, to responsibility, beg during the day and get stoned out of your mind at night. No conventions to bind you, no getting or spending, no hassle.
    ‘I wash not allush like thish,’ slurred Charles at one point. ‘I wash a profeshor at Oxford.’
    Perhaps he was, thought Agatha with a sudden stab of pity. But whatever Charles had been at one time in his life, it had obviously been something better than sitting under the arches at Waterloo scrambling what was left of his brains.
    The night wore on. Fights broke out. Women cried, long maudlin wails for lost men and lost children. It’s not a seductive way of life, thought Agatha. It’s a foretaste of hell. There was a brief scramble of activity when the Silver Lady came round, a van with sandwiches and hot coffee, some of them trying to trade their sandwiches and coffee for another swig of drink.
    Gradually, like animals, they crept off into their packing-cases. Still this Lizzie had not come.
    Dawn was rising over grimy London. A blackbird perched up on a rooftop sent down a chorus of glorious sound, highlighting the degradation and misery and wasted lives of those in the packing-cases beneath.
    Agatha got stiffly to her feet. ‘I’ve had it, Roy. Give your detective lady the job of finding Lizzie and double her pay to do it. I’m going home.’
    ‘Haven’t we even got enough between us for the tube?’ asked Roy.
    Agatha scraped in her pockets and finally found a pound. ‘That’s for me to take the tube,’ she said firmly.
    ‘You’ll have to stick with me, sweetie, if you want to get into the office to get your bag and car keys. I have the keys to the office.’
    ‘Let me have them.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Do you mean you’re going to make me walk back all that way?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Not speaking to each other, each stiff and sore and exhausted from their long night and with queasy stomachs from the awful mixture they had drunk, they headed in the direction of Waterloo station.
    A well-dressed man in evening dress approached them. He stood in front of them, stopping their progress, his face a mixture of pity and disgust. He fished in his pocket, took out his wallet and extracted a ten-pound note. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said to Roy, ‘get your mother a decent breakfast and don’t spend this on booze.’
    ‘Oh, thank you, thank you.’ Roy seized the note.
    ‘Taxi!’ he yelled, and, miracle of miracles, a taxi came to a stop. Roy shoved Agatha inside, shouted ‘Cheapside,’ and the cab drove off.
    The man in evening dress gazed after them in a fury. That’s the last time I waste money on people like that, he thought.
    James had suffered a sleepless night as well. At first he had thought Agatha was staying away to get revenge, but then he began to think something might have happened to her. At last he settled down in an armchair in front of the cottage window, jumping to his feet every time he heard the sound of a car, but there was only, first, the milkman, and then Mrs Hardy going off early somewhere.
    His eyes grew heavier and heavier. Why hadn’t she even phoned?
    He fell asleep at last and in his dream he was marrying Helen Warwick. He only knew he did not want to marry Helen but that somehow she had blackmailed him into it. He was standing at the altar, hoping that Agatha Raisin would come and rescue him, when the sound of a key in the lock made his eyes jerk open.
    He jumped to his feet, shouting, ‘Agatha! Where the hell have you