Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

with anyone in quite a long time. What a fool she had been. Not once did she allow the thought to form in her head that the idea of love-making without love had become repugnant to her. That was too old-fashioned an idea to admit to, and Agatha Raisin was determinedly modern.
    The next day Paul Bladen went back to Lord Pendlebury’s racing stables. He was to perform Hobday’s operation on a racehorse to stop its roaring. This involved cutting the vocal cords. He filled a syringe with a drug called Immobilon to anaesthetize the animal. Beside him on a small rickety table which he had carried into the stable for the purpose, he placed a glass bottle of Revivon to inject the horse when the operation was over, and also a glass bottle of Narcon, a powerful antidote in case he got any of the Immobilon into his bloodstream by mistake.
    ‘There now, boy, easy,’ he said, patting the horse on the nose as it shuffled and whinnied. He felt irritated that Lord Pendlebury had not even bothered to supply him with a stable-boy to help. The sun was shining in through the open stable door, casting a huge gold rectangle on the cobbles at his feet. He raised the syringe to inject the horse in the jugular vein. The gold at his feet darkened as if a cloud had passed over the face of the sun. Then something struck him savagely on the back of the head and he fell sprawling. Winded but not unconscious, he twisted round on the cobbles. ‘What the hell are you . . .?’ he began.
    A hand twisted the syringe out of his grasp and the next thing he knew, the syringe had been plunged into his chest. He scrabbled desperately at the table where the antidote lay. Even Revivon, the drug to revive the horse, would work if he couldn’t reach the Narcon, but the table was kicked over and he died a few seconds later.
    Agatha heard about his death the following day from Bill Wong, and her first feeling was one of selfish relief that the vet was no longer around to gossip about the way she had fled from his house.
    Agatha had replaced the electric cooker in her kitchen with an Aga stove. The door of the stove was open and a wood fire was burning briskly. A jug of early daffodils from the Channel Islands stood on the window-ledge. The square plastic table was gone and now there was a solid wooden one with a scrubbed top.
    ‘It was a tragic accident,’ said Bill. ‘Some vets won’t work with Immobilon. It’s deadly. There was a case not long ago where the vet put the syringe full of the stuff in his breast pocket and approached the horse. The horse nudged him on the chest, the syringe pricked the vet and that was enough. He died almost instantly.’
    ‘You’d think they’d have some sort of antidote,’ said Agatha.
    ‘Oh, they do, but there’s not often time to reach it. In Paul Bladen’s case, it was on a little table, but either he kicked it over in his death agonies, or the horse kicked it over.’
    ‘You mean it’s like cyanide? You writhe about?’
    ‘Come to think of it, you don’t,’ said Bill. ‘Good way to commit suicide . . . quick and painless. There was one curious thing.’
    ‘Yes?’ Agatha’s eyes brightened.
    ‘No, not that curious. Not murder. There was a lump on the back of his head, but of course it was assumed he got that striking his head when he fell, although he was found lying on his side. His fingerprints were on the edge of the table, as if he’d made an attempt to get to the antidote.’
    ‘And he was all alone?’
    ‘Yes. The reason for that, reading between the lines of old Lord Pendlebury’s statement, is that he high-handedly demanded help. Lord Pendlebury said his stable staff were all too busy and then made sure they were. It was an operation to stop the horse roaring. A lot of racehorses make a roaring sound on the course.’
    ‘Seems brutal.’
    ‘Everything to do with animals is brutal.’
    James Lacey hovered outside Agatha’s door. She had baked him a pie two months ago and he knew he should have returned the pie dish. He had been putting it off. But the fact that Agatha had apparently ceased to pursue him had given him courage. He rang the bell, thinking that with any luck she might be out around the village, and then he could safely leave the pie dish on the doorstep.
    But Agatha answered the door. ‘Come in and have coffee,’ she said, taking the pie dish. ‘We’re in the kitchen.’
    That ‘we’ encouraged James Lacey to step inside. He was writing a military history, and like