Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

My delicate little stomach cringes at the thought, that’s what. My friend Jeremy said there was ever such a good restaurant in the Red Huntsman at Bourton-on-the Hill. Don’t you just love these place names, Steve? See, he’s drooling already.’ Steve looked impassive. ‘They’re Basque and do all those sort of fishy dishes. I say, Aggie, have you heard the one about the fire at the Basque football game? They all rushed to get out of the stadium and all got crushed in the exit and do you know what the moral of that is, my loves? Don’t put all your Basques in one exit. Get it?’
    ‘Stop wittering,’ said Agatha. ‘All right. We’ll try the place, although if it’s that good they may not have a table left.’
    But it turned out the Red Huntsman had just received a cancellation before they arrived. The dining-room was elegant and comfortable and the food was excellent. Agatha asked Steve to tell her about his work and then regretted it bitterly as he began a long and boring description of his job in particular and computers in general.
    Even Roy grew weary of his friend’s monologue and cut across it, saying, ‘What’s all this about you being involved in a death, Aggie?’
    ‘It was an awful mistake,’ said Agatha. ‘I entered a spinach quiche in a village competition. One of the judges ate it and died of poisoning.’
    Roy’s eyes filled with laughter. ‘You never could cook, Aggie dear.’
    ‘It wasn’t my cooking,’ protested Agatha. ‘I bought a quiche from The Quicherie in Chelsea and entered that.’
    Steve looked at her solemnly. ‘But surely in these sort of home-baking competitions you’re supposed to cook the thing yourself?’
    ‘Yes, but –’
    ‘But she was trying to pull a fast one as usual,’ crowed Roy. ‘Who was the judge and what did he die of?’
    ‘Mr Cummings-Browne. Cowbane poisoning.’
    ‘Struck down by a bane of cows? What is it? One of those peculiar agricultural diseases like swine fever or violet-root rot?’
    ‘No, cowbane is a plant. It must have got mixed up in the spinach that Mr Economides of the deli used.’
    Steve put down his fork and looked gravely at Agatha. ‘So you murdered him.’
    Roy screeched with laughter. He kicked his heels in the air, fell off the chair and rolled around the dining-room carpet, holding his stomach. The other diners studied him with the polite frozen smiles the English use for threatening behaviour.
    ‘Oh, Aggie,’ wheezed Roy when his friend had picked up his chair and thrust him back into it, ‘you are a one.’
    Patiently Agatha explained the whole sorry business. It had been a sad accident.
    ‘What do they think about you in the village?’ asked Roy, mopping his streaming eyes. ‘Are they calling you the Borgia of the Cotswolds?’
    ‘It’s hard to know what they think,’ said Agatha. ‘But I had better sell up. The whole move to Carsely was a terrible mistake.’
    ‘Wait a minute,’ said Steve. He carefully extracted a piece of lobster and popped it in his mouth. ‘Where does this cowbane grow?’
    ‘In the West Midlands, and this, as the police pointed out, is the West Midlands.’
    Steve frowned. ‘Does it grow in farms among the regular vegetables?’
    Agatha searched her memory for what she had read about cowbane in the book in Foyle’s. ‘It grows in marshy places.’
    ‘I’ve heard the Cotswolds are famous for asparagus and strawberries . . . oh, and plums and things like that,’ said Steve. ‘I read up on it. But not spinach. And how could a marshy plant get in among a field of spinach?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Agatha, ‘but as I recall, it grows in other parts of the British Isles as well. I mean, the stuff at Nine Elms comes from abroad and all over the place in Britain.’
    Steve shook his head slowly, his mouth open as he contemplated another piece of lobster. ‘Are you wondering if there’s an aargh in the month?’ demanded Roy. ‘You look like one of those faces at the fairground where you’ve to try and toss a ball into the mouth.’
    ‘It just doesn’t happen,’ said Steve.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, look here. A field of spinach is harvested. For some reason a marshy plant gets caught up with the spinach. Right? So how come no one else dropped dead? How come it all got into one spinach quiche? Just the one. Surely a bit of it would have got into another quiche. Surely another one of this Economides’s customers would bite the dust.’
    ‘Oh, the police will have