Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

but grass and depressing bushes of the hard-wearing kind found in public parks.
    Inside there was a small dark cubby-hole of a hall. To the right was the living-room; to the left, the dining-room, and the kitchen at the back was part of a recent extension and was large and square. Upstairs were two low-ceilinged bedrooms and a bathroom. All the ceilings were beamed.
    Agatha had given the interior decorator a free hand. It was all as it should be and yet . . . Agatha paused at the door of the living-room. Three-piece suite covered in Sanderson’s linen, lamps, coffee-table with glass top, fake medieval fire-basket in the hearth, horse brasses nailed to the fireplace, pewter tankards and toby jugs hanging from the beams and bits of polished farm machinery decorating the walls, and yet it looked like a stage set. She went into the kitchen and switched on the central heating. The superduper removal company had even put her clothes in the bedroom and her books on the shelves, so there was not much for her to do. She went through to the dining-room. Long table, shining under its heat-resistant surface, Victorian dining chairs, Edwardian painting of a small child in a frock in a bright garden, Welsh dresser with blue-and-white plates, another fireplace with a fake-log electric fire, and a drinks trolley. Upstairs, the bedrooms were pure Laura Ashley. It felt like someone else’s house, the home of some characterless stranger, or an expensive holiday cottage.
    Well, she had nothing for dinner and after a life of restaurants and take-aways, Agatha had planned to learn how to cook, and there were all her new cookery books in a gleaming row on a shelf in the kitchen.
    She collected her handbag and made her way out. Time to investigate what few village shops there were. Many of the shops, the estate agent had told her, had closed down and had been transformed into ‘des reses’. The villagers blamed the incomers, but it was the motor car which had caused the damage, the villagers themselves preferring to go to the supermarkets of Stratford or Evesham for their goods rather than buy them at a higher price in the village. Most people in the village owned some sort of car.
    As Agatha approached the main street, an old man was coming the other way. He touched his cap and gave her a cheerful ‘Arternoon.’ Then in the main street, everyone she passed greeted her with a few words, a casual ‘Afternoon’ or ‘Nasty weather.’ Agatha brightened. After London, where she had not even known her neighbours, all this friendliness was a refreshing change.
    She studied the butcher’s window and then decided that cookery could wait for a few days and so passed on to the general store and bought a ‘very hot’ Vindaloo curry to microwave and a packet of rice. Again, in the store, she was met with friendliness all round. At the door of the shop was a box of second-hand books. Agatha had always read ‘improving’ books, mostly non-fiction. There was a battered copy of Gone With the Wind and she bought it on impulse.
    Back in her cottage, she found a basket of pseudo-logs by the fire, little round things made out of pressed sawdust. She piled some up in the grate and set fire to them and soon had a blaze roaring up the chimney. She removed the lace antimacassar which the decorator had cutely draped over the television screen and switched it on. There was some war going on, as there usually was, and it was getting the usual coverage; that is, the presenter and the reporter were having a cosy talk. ‘Over to you, John. What is the situation now?’ ‘Well, Peter . . .’ By the time they moved on to the inevitable ‘expert’ in the studio, Agatha wondered why they bothered to send any reporter out to the war at all. It was like the Gulf War all over again, where most of the coverage seemed to consist of a reporter standing in front of a palm tree outside some hotel in Riyadh. What a waste of money. He never had much information and it would surely have been cheaper to place him in front of a palm tree in a studio in London.
    She switched it off and picked up Gone With the Wind . She had been looking forward to a piece of intellectual slumming to celebrate her release from work, but she was amazed at how very good it was, almost indecently readable, thought Agatha, who had only read before the sort of books you read to impress people. The fire crackled and Agatha read until her rumbling stomach prompted her to put the curry in the