The Deadly Dance - M. C. Beaton [3]
Agatha’s two cats, Hodge and Boswell, came to meet her when she opened the door. Her cleaner, Doris Simpson, came round every day while Agatha was away to feed the cats and let them in and out of the garden.
Agatha dumped her suitcase in the hall and went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. Rain poured down from the thatch overhead, but the air was cool and sweet. Anxious not to lose her determination to set up her own detective agency, Agatha decided to visit her friend, Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife.
Ten minutes later, Agatha rang the bell of the vicarage with a guilty feeling that she should have phoned first.
But Mrs. Bloxby answered the door, her gentle featureslighting up in a smile of welcome. “Mrs. Raisin! How nice. Come in. Why are you back early?”
“I got mugged,” said Agatha. She recounted her adventure.
“Well, you got pickpocketed,” corrected Mrs. Bloxby mildly. “Unlike you to let something like that put you off Paris. I thought you loved Paris.”
“I do, most of the time,” fretted Agatha. “It was mainly the heat and the lack of sleep. And being dismissed by the police, just like that! The trouble is they spend all their time policing demonstrations, they haven’t got time for the public.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Anyway, it gave me the jolt I needed to start my own agency. You do think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” agreed Mrs. Bloxby. Although she thought the work would be dreary and sordid, it would occupy her friend’s restless mind and keep her from falling in love again and getting hurt. Agatha was addicted to falling in love.
“I’ve been thinking about starting a detective agency for a time,” said Agatha. “I feel I need some official status. I’m a good businesswoman and I feel sure I could make it work. The police are so busy these days and the countryside police stations have been closed one after the other. The police haven’t got time for small burglaries, missing teenagers, or errant wives and husbands.”
“And if it doesn’t work out?” asked the vicar’s wife.
Agatha grinned. “I’ll take it off my taxes. Anyone taken James’s cottage?”
It had not been Agatha’s ex-husband James Lacey’s cottage for some time, but Agatha always dreamt that one day he would come back to the village. She could never think of that cottage next to her own as belonging to anyone else. Agatha had fallen in love with two of the previous owners.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. A Mrs. Emma Comfrey, retired civil servant. You should call on her.”
“Maybe. But Eve got a lot to do. I’ll go to the estate agent’s in Mircester tomorrow and see what’s on offer in the way of an office.”
Mrs. Bloxby reflected ruefully that Agatha’s interest in her new neighbour had died as soon as she found out it was a woman, and a retired one at that.
It took much more money to set up a detective agency than Agatha ever dreamt it would. Brought up on Raymond Chandler-type movies, she had assumed that one sat in an office and waited for the beautiful dame with the shoulder pads to come swaying in—or something like that.
She quickly found out by surfing the net that detective agencies were supposed to offer a wide range of services, including all sorts of modern technology such as bugging and de-bugging, photographic or video evidence and covert and electronic surveillance.
Then someone would be needed to man the phones while she was out of the office. Agatha was shrewd enough to know now that one-woman operations were for novels. She would need to invest heavily in employing experts if she expected to get any return.
Once she had found an office in the centre of Mircester, she put advertisements in the local newspapers. For the photographic and video evidence, she hired a retired provincial newspaper photographer, Sammy Allen, arranging to pay him on a free-lancebasis; and she secured the services of a retired police technician, Douglas Ballantine, under the same terms to cope with the electronic stuff.
But for a secretary, Agatha wanted someone intelligent who would be able to detect as