Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist

is where I think he is, he’ll be nowhere near the centre. I’ll park my car up on the main street, just outside the newspaper shop, and you can drive me from there.’
    ‘What’s the time? It’s only seven. I’ll pick you up there at eight.’
    But Agatha suddenly did not want to wait in the villa longer than she had to. ‘It’ll take me ten minutes to change and about ten minutes to get there,’ she said. ‘Make it seven thirty.’
    She rang off and ran up the stairs and chose the little black dress she had shunned the night before. After a hasty wash-down, she dressed, reapplied her make-up, grabbed her handbag and fled the villa.
    Glad to be out and free of what she felt was the sinister silence of the villa, she headed for Kyrenia along the now familiar road with the mountains towering up on one side and the sea stretched out on the other. Remembering Kyrenia’s irritating one-way system, she went along the ring road to the lights and turned left down past the Grapevine, wondering if Olivia and the others were there, past the roundabout and the town hall, and found to her delight that a car was just moving out from a parking place outside the newspaper shop, and slid neatly into the empty space. Charles appeared promptly. She climbed into his rented car.
    To avoid going back all around the town, he executed a neat turn under the blaring horn and flashing lights of a Turkish truck and headed back round the roundabout and out towards Nicosia, along past the Onar Village Hotel and up over the mountains until the twinkling lights of Nicosia appeared below them on the plain.
    ‘So how are you feeling?’ he asked.
    ‘A bit shaken. Sort of unreal. As if it had all never happened and I’ll wake up in my bed in Carsely.’
    ‘What sort of place have you got?’
    ‘A thatched cottage, like the kind you see on calendars or biscuit boxes. Little garden at the front and a bigger one at the back. Two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, dining-room and living-room. God, I wish I were there.’
    ‘I don’t think Pamir can keep you here for much longer. Why don’t you go and see him tomorrow and tell him you want to go home?’
    ‘There’s James.’
    ‘Is he still talking to you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Amazing. I wouldn’t.’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about James,’ said Agatha firmly.
    He drove competently into the centre of Nicosia and managed to find a parking place near the Saray.
    ‘What I can’t understand about this hotel,’ said Agatha as they ascended in the lift to the restaurant, ‘is how they get away with only having two loos next to the restaurant. Only two public toilets for a hotel this size. How do they cope when they have, say, a wedding reception?’
    ‘Don’t know. Maybe they piss off the terrace,’ said Charles indifferently. ‘Here we are. Do you want a drink at the bar or will we go straight into the restaurant?’
    ‘The restaurant, I think. I’ve been drinking too much.’
    ‘The trouble is booze here is so cheap.’
    ‘And cigarettes,’ said Agatha. ‘It’s a smoker’s dream. Everyone smokes, ashtrays everywhere, even in the butcher’s.’
    They ordered their meal and looked out at the lights of Nicosia.
    The hors-d’oeuvre was a light flaky pastry filled with cheese, and the main course was lamb on the bone with salad and rice. Charles had ordered a bottle of wine and Agatha forgot her resolution not to drink. It was so easy to talk to Charles. But then she wasn’t in love with Charles.
    ‘So who do you think tried to murder you?’ Charles asked over coffee and brandy.
    ‘Trevor,’ said Agatha. ‘I’m sure it must have been Trevor.’
    ‘I would have thought by three in the morning our Trevor would have been deep in an alcoholic stupor. Was there a strong smell of booze?’
    ‘I was too frightened to smell anything. Besides, I had been drinking a lot myself. It’s like smoking. If you smoke, then you don’t much notice the smell of other people’s cigarette smoke.’
    ‘Let me think. There’s friend Harry Tembleton, old but still quite powerful from a lifetime of shifting bales of hay or whatever. Now he said Rose was a slut. He’s devoted to Olivia. Could he have thought that George was about to stray and, loyal friend that he is, decided to eliminate the temptress?’
    ‘Far-fetched.’
    ‘The whole thing’s far-fetched. Apart from various flare-ups at the border between the Greeks and the Turks, this place is the safest in the Mediterranean. There