Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

passed them going the other way. James braked suddenly. ‘I think that was Helen Warwick! She must have been to see us.’
    ‘To see you, you mean,’ said Agatha.
    ‘I’d better catch up with her.’ James swung the wheel around.
    ‘What for?’ demanded Agatha as they began to race back up the way Helen Warwick had taken. ‘You said she had nothing more to tell us.’
    ‘But she must have had, for why did she come all this way to see us?’
    ‘To murder us in our beds,’ said Agatha gloomily.
    All the way down the hill and towards Moreton-in-Marsh, James looked ahead for Helen’s car. She had been driving a BMW. He saw one ahead at the first roundabout in Moreton. They managed to catch up with it on the Oxford road, only to find that the driver was an elderly man, not Helen Warwick.
    They drove on a few more miles before James said reluctantly, ‘That’s that. We’ve missed her.’
    ‘I’m not sorry,’ said Agatha. ‘She only came down here to chase after you.’
    ‘Probably right,’ agreed James, and Agatha scowled at him in the darkness. By the time they got home, she was coughing and wheezing and her head felt as if it were on fire.
    At James’s urging, she took two aspirins and went to bed and plunged down into a hell of noisy dreams, of raging fires, of gunshots, and of running and running along the Embankment in London with Roy at her heels, both of them fleeing from someone they did not know.
    The next day Agatha felt too ill to care about anything at all. She lay in bed all day, drifting in and out of sleep. James carried her in snacks on trays and bottles of mineral water. Agatha refused to let him call the doctor, saying that all she had was a bad cold, and if there were a cure for the common cold, it would have been front-page headlines by now.
    At seven in the evening, she heard the doorbell and then the sound of voices and James’s voice raised in sudden shock. ‘What!’
    She groaned and fumbled for her dressing-gown. Cold or no cold, red nose or no red nose, she simply had to find out what was going on.
    She made her way down the stairs and into the living-room. At first she thought the scene before her eyes was part of a fever-induced hallucination. There was Wilkes, flanked by Bill Wong and two constables.
    She blinked and realized they really were there and said, ‘Why are they here, James?’
    James’s face was set and grim.
    ‘Helen Warwick has been murdered.’
    Agatha sat down suddenly.
    ‘Oh, no. When?’
    ‘Today. Strangled with one of her scarves. And she tried to see us last night, Agatha. She was here, in Carsely, last night, and now she’s dead.’
    Wilkes said, ‘Unfortunately no one at the flats where she lives saw anything. We guess the murder took place somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. We are taking statements from everyone who knew her.’
    ‘As you can see,’ said James, pointing at Agatha, ‘Mrs Raisin was in no fit state to go anywhere, and I was acting nursemaid. I was down at the local store twice to get groceries. They will vouch for me.’
    ‘You went to see her,’ said Bill Wong suddenly. It was a statement, not a question. ‘Couldn’t you have left it to us?’
    James said wearily, ‘I honestly don’t see that our visit was any different to a visit from you, say.’
    They took James over and over again what Helen had said, and then why he had gone back. Agatha coughed and shivered. She was beginning to feel too ill to care.
    At last the police left.
    ‘Back to bed, Agatha,’ said James. ‘There’s nothing we can do tonight.’
    But Agatha tossed and turned for a long time. Somewhere out there was a murderer, a murderer who, having tried to burn them to death, might try again.
    James was just about to go upstairs to bed himself when the phone rang.
    Roy Silver was on the other end of the line, his voice sharp and excited. ‘Agatha there?’
    ‘Agatha’s very ill with a bad cold. Can I help?’
    ‘It’s that woman, Lizzie. Iris has found her. She’s got Jimmy’s things.’
    ‘Good. And what’s in them?’
    ‘I don’t know. The old bat is asking for a hundred pounds.’
    ‘Well, pay her, dammit.’
    ‘I don’t have any spare cash, James.’
    ‘What’s the arrangement for paying her?’
    ‘She’ll be at Temple tube station tomorrow at noon.’
    ‘I’ll be there, with the money.’
    ‘Iris’ll be there as well, with me. She’ll point the old bat out to us. Sure I can’t speak to Aggie?’
    ‘No, she’s