Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

it,’ said Agatha, when they were both seated in the living-room. ‘Why next Saturday afternoon?’
    ‘That’s the day of the village band concert. Mrs Mason is doing the cream teas. Quite an event.’
    Agatha gave her a rather pitying smile, thinking that it was a sad life if all you had to look forward to was a concert by the village band.
    They talked for a little longer and then Mrs Bloxby left. Agatha packed a suitcase, carefully putting the pot of strawberry jam in one corner. She lay awake for a long time with the bedroom windows wide open, hoping for a breath of air, but buoyed up by the thought of London and a return from the grave that was Carsely.

 
Chapter Ten
     
    London! And how it smelt! Awful, thought Agatha, sitting in the dining-room of Haynes Hotel. She lit a cigarette and stared bleakly out at the traffic grinding past through Mayfair.
    The man at the table behind her began to cough and choke and flap his newspaper angrily. Agatha looked at her burning cigarette and sighed. Then she raised a hand and summoned the waiter. ‘Remove that man from the table behind me,’ she said, ‘and find him somewhere else. He’s annoying me.’
    The waiter looked from the man’s angry face to Agatha’s pugnacious one and then bent over the man and said soothingly that there was a nice table in the corner away from the smoke. The man protested loudly. Agatha continued to smoke, ignoring the whole scene, until the angry man capitulated and was led away.
    Imagine living in London and complaining about cigarette smoke, marvelled Agatha. One had only to walk down the streets to inhale the equivalent of four packs of cigarettes.
    She finished her coffee and cigarette and went up to her room, already suffocatingly hot, and phoned Pedmans and asked for Roy.
    At last she was put through to him. ‘Aggie,’ he cried. ‘How are things in the Cotswolds?’
    ‘Hellish,’ said Agatha. ‘I need to talk to you. What about lunch?’
    ‘Lunch is booked. Dinner?’
    ‘Fine. I’m at Haynes. See you at seven thirty in the bar.’
    She put down the phone and looked around. Muslin curtains fluttered at the window, effectively cutting off what oxygen was left in the air. She should have gone to the Hilton or somewhere American, where they had air-conditioning. Haynes was small and old-fashioned, like a country house trapped in the middle of Mayfair. The service was excellent. But it was a very English hotel and very English hotels never planned on a hot summer.
    She decided, for want of anything better to do, to go over to The Quicherie and see Mr Economides. The traffic was congested as usual and there wasn’t a taxi in sight, so she walked from Mayfair along through Knightsbridge to Sloane Street, down Sloane Street to Sloane Square, and so along the King’s Road to the World’s End.
    Mr Economides gave her a guarded greeting, but Agatha had come to expect friendship and set herself to please in a way that was formerly foreign to her. The shop was quiet and relatively cool. It was the slack part of the day. Soon the lunch-time rush of customers would build up, buying coffee and sandwiches to take back to their offices. Agatha asked about Mr Economides’s wife and family and he began to relax perceptibly and then asked her to take a seat at one of the little marble-topped tables while he brought her a coffee.
    ‘I really should apologize for having brought all that trouble down on your head,’ said Agatha. ‘If I hadn’t decided to cheat at that village competition by passing one of your delicious quiches off as my own, this would never have happened.’
    At that moment, for some reason, the full shock of the attack on her by John Cartwright suddenly hit her and her eyes shone with tears.
    ‘Now, then, Mrs Raisin,’ said Mr Economides. ‘I’ll tell you a little secret. I cheat, too.’
    Agatha dabbed at her eyes. ‘You? How?’
    ‘You see, I have a sign up there saying “Baked on the Premises”, but I often visit my cousin in Devon at the weekends. He has a delicatessen just like mine. Well, you see, sometimes if I’m going to be back late on a Sunday night after visiting him and I don’t want to start baking early on Monday, I bring a big box of my cousin’s quiches back with me if he has any left over. He does the same if he’s visiting me, for his trade, unlike mine, is at the weekends with the tourists, while mine is during the week with the office people. So it was one of my cousin’s