Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

Jones.’
    Polite applause while Mr Jones set up a screen and a slide projector. He was a small spry man with white hair and horn-rimmed glasses.
    ‘For my first slide,’ he said, ‘here is Bailey’s grocery store in the 1920s.’ A picture, at first fuzzy, came into focus: a store with striped awnings, and grinning villagers standing in front of it. Delighted cries from the older members. ‘Reckon that’s Mrs Bloggs; you see that liddle girl standing to the right?’
    Agatha stifled a yawn and slowly reached out in the gloom for a hefty slice of plum cake. She felt sleepy and bored. All the frights of the past few weeks which had kept her adrenalin flowing had faded away. The attacks on her had been made by a burglar who was now on the run. Maria Borrow was a crazy old fright. Barbara James was a pain in the neck. Something nasty had happened in the wood-shed of Mrs Barr’s past. Who gave a damn? And what was she, the high-powered Agatha Raisin, doing sitting in a vicarage eating plum cake and being bored to death?
    Slide followed slide. Even when photos of ‘our village prize-winners’ jerked on to the screen, Agatha remained in a stupor of boredom. There was Ella Cartwright being presented with a ten-pound note by Reg Cummings-Browne, looking as long dead as the old photos of villagers she had already seen. Then Vera Cummings-Browne getting a prize for flower arranging, then Mrs Bloxby getting a prize for jam. Mrs Bloxby? Agatha looked at the photo of the vicar’s wife standing with Reg Cummings-Browne and then relapsed back into her torpor. Mrs Bloxby? Not in a hundred years!
    And then she fell asleep and in her dreams she cycled down into Carsely in the fading light and standing in the middle of the road waiting for her and brandishing a double-barrelled shotgun was Mrs Barr. Agatha awoke with a shriek of fear and found the slide show was over and everyone was looking at her.
    ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said Miss Simms, who was next to her. ‘It was that nasty fright you had.’
    When Agatha made her way homeward, she decided to get some sort of alarm system installed the very next day and then wondered why. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she had decided to leave the village.
    The next day, she phoned a security firm and placed an order for their best of everything in the way of burglar-proofing and then went around opening the doors and the windows to try to get a breath of cool air. The heat was building up. Before, when it had been fine, the days had been sunny and the nights cool, but now the sky burnt blue, deep blue above the twisted cottage chimneys and the sun beat down. By lunch-time, the heat was fierce. She took a small thermometer outside and watched as it shot up over the 100 degrees Fahrenheit mark and disappeared. Mrs Simpson was vacuuming busily upstairs, having changed her cleaning day to fit in a dentist’s appointment. Agatha remembered the talk about Mrs Barr and climbed the stairs. ‘Can I have a word with you?’ she shouted over the noise of the vacuum. Mrs Simpson reluctantly turned the machine off. She was proud of doing a good job and felt she had already wasted too much time earlier hearing Agatha’s adventures.
    ‘I was asking in the pub last night why Mrs Barr was selling up and I heard an aunt had died and left her a larger cottage over Ancombe way.’
    ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Doris Simpson’s hand hovered longingly over the vacuum switch.
    ‘Why don’t you come down to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee, Doris?’
    ‘Got too much to do, Agatha.’
    ‘Skip for once. I’m still getting over my fright and I want to talk,’ said Agatha firmly.
    ‘I meant to clean the windows.’
    ‘It’s too hot. I’ll hire a window cleaner. Doris!’
    ‘Oh, all right,’ said Doris ungraciously.
    Would anyone in this day and age believe you had to beg a cleaner to leave her work? marvelled Agatha.
    Once in the kitchen and with coffee poured, Agatha said, ‘Now tell me about Mrs Barr.’
    ‘What’s to tell?’
    ‘Someone in the pub said something about her having disgraced herself and then said in a high voice as if imitating her, “Reg, Reg, kiss me.” ’
    ‘Oh, that!’
    ‘Oh, what, Doris? I’m dying of curiosity.’
    ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ said Doris sententiously. ‘Well, there was this young chap over at Campden and he wrote a play, sort of old-fashioned type thing it were, you know, where they has long cigarette holders