Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Agnes Sharp
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
As winter begins to bite at Sunset Hall, Agnes Sharp is grudgingly pleased to discover that one of her fellow OAP housemates has won a luxury holiday to a secluded Cornish hotel called the Eden. The incredible menu, spa treatments and an unexpected boa constrictor aside, Agnes and her geriatric companions will soon discover that the hotel is a long way from paradise. They have barely checked in when Agnes sees a disturbing incident on the clifftop: could she have witnessed a murder? A storm cuts the hotel off from the outside world and the body count starts to rise. There is a cold-blooded killer on the loose and it is up to the senior-citizen sleuths to get to the bottom of it. Unlike them, the day is still young, and there is a lot to do.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 471
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
1
2
3
AGNES SHARP AND The TRIP OF A LIFETIME
LEONIE SWANN
Translated from the German by Amy Bojang
CONTENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE RESIDENTS OF SUNSET HALL
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
AT THE HOTEL
SERPENT
I’ve never been in a club like this before. Clubs like this aren’t meant for people like me. Nevertheless, it was ridiculously easy to get in.
Private function? Not if you know the world of hotels, bars, back streets and staff entrances like I do. A smelly alleyway. A steel door, a narrow corridor, past champagne crates, then a velvet curtain.
Peeling back the layers of an onion to enter the rotting heart.
As expected, the heart is dark, and I slip into the shadows. Points of light flit across the floor, but they don’t get me. I look out for a hiding place, but it’s hardly necessary. Nobody here sees me. Nobody wants to see me. I might just as well be invisible.
All eyes are on the little stage at the other end of the room.
They’re dancing on it.
Eve.
And the serpent.
Long legs, topless, a sparkly little thing round her hips, the reptile draped over her shoulders.
It should look obscene, but on her it seems strangely 8innocent. Childlike even. A scene from paradise.
Obviously, I don’t buy the whole innocent act. She ought to know better. I’m not quite sure of all the things a bride has to do before her wedding, but definitely not this. Not this shameless making-a-show-of-yourself. She feels so safe. She’s mistaken. Oh, she’ll soon realise just how mistaken she is!
A champagne cork pops and Eve cheers. She hops off the stage and jumps into the lap of the man who opened the champagne. He passes her a glass and she laughs, throwing her head back, curls like a waterfall.
Everyone laughs.
If you think about it, they’re laughing at me.
Eve shakes her hair, and it’s like snow. She’s so blonde. Pale as a piece of wood that’s been left in the sun. Suddenly I wish she weren’t so blonde. Does she think she’s beautiful? Do other people think she’s beautiful? I can’t gauge it anymore. At home she wears flowing silk dresses in misty hues, and she moves gracefully, but now there is something akin to shattered glass in her voice.
Suddenly I’m struggling to suppress a laugh too.
Now I’ve got her, trapped forever more as if she were in a glittering snow globe. There is no escape for her, no matter how loud she laughs, no matter how much champagne she drinks. I raise my phone and quickly take two, three photos, almost surprised at how easy everything is all of a sudden.
How clear.
How cold.
As I’m taking photos, the pale snake frees itself from 9Eve’s shoulders, lunges forward, with a swinging motion and flicks its rosy tongue at me.
A grin steals across my face.
I have to admit I’m looking forward to the honeymoon.10
1
BELLS
Agnes Sharp opened the village quack’s door and poked her nose outside. A cold wind blew in her face, tugged at her scarf and instantly seeped into her limbs. Ugh, yuck!
For a moment she toyed with the idea of calling a taxi. Then she cast another glance back to the waiting room, where a crowd of people seemed to be damn happy to finally see the back of her. At least as happy as she was to be able to give her back to those petty-minded fuddy-duddies. There had been some unpleasant scenes and even a bit of a tussle over a dog-eared magazine, and when the receptionist noticed Agnes looking, her brow furrowed with concern.
Back to the waiting room? No way!
Onwards!
Agnes fished her walking stick out of the umbrella stand and stepped pluckily onto the pavement. At least the air out there was fresh, not as stale as in the surgery, and a bit of exercise had never hurt anyone.
Except her hip maybe.
Leaning heavily on her walking stick, off she strode.
Clack-clack-clack. 12
Like a strange three-legged animal.
It only occurred to Agnes two houses down the road how dark it was already.
Not even five o’clock and dark already. Pitch-black, in fact.
It was enough to give her the heebie-jeebies …
Her village had only ventured into the modern day ten or twenty years ago and installed a couple of streetlamps, islands of light in the night. There weren’t many of them. Agnes spotted the bus stop at the other end of the road, in a pool of light. Full of promise.
That’s where she was heading.
But first she had to struggle past the church, which, shrouded by the graveyard, lay in thick, soupy darkness.
Agnes clutched her walking stick. Her biggest fear was not noticing some kind of obstacle in the darkness, having a fall, not being able to get back on her feet and then being found and rescued by the waiting room clowns, let alone by the snooty receptionist who had taken the magazine from her before.
The scandal. The shame. The snide remarks.
It didn’t bear thinking about!
So, she proceeded even more slowly and used her stick to feel in front of her for trip hazards in the dark. Nothing. To top it all, the church bells suddenly started up, all at once, as if they were poking fun at her. Agnes winced. Up until very recently, she wouldn’t really have noticed the ringing, a muffled background noise like so many others, but now, with the hearing aid, each chime of the bell went through her like a little shock. Pretty stressful things, these hearing aids! 13
Agnes limped stubbornly on.
But once she had almost made it to the beam of light at the bus stop, something made her stop. It took a while for her to realise what it was exactly.
The bells.
Or to be precise, the bell.
All the other church bells had fallen silent, but one was still chiming, getting quicker and quicker, and quicker again. In her long life, Agnes had spent a lot of time near these bells, but she’d never heard them ringing like that. So erratic, panicked almost. Something wasn’t right.
She looked back at the church, which still lay in deep darkness, then over at the bus stop, where a bus could appear at any moment.
Curiosity finally got the better of her.
While the bell began a hectic finale, Agnes turned around with a sigh and groped her way back towards the church using her tried-and-tested three-legged technique.
By the time she had reached the graveyard and was following the dully shimmering strip of gravel path, the bell had long since stilled.
She got to the church door, felt for the knob with her free hand, turned and pushed. The door opened with a bloodcurdling creak, a scream almost.
Inside it felt even colder than outside, if that was possible. She looked around. A light was flickering on the altar, but she wasn’t interested in that. Another light caught her attention, a narrow strip peeking out from beneath the door to the belfry.
In there, then.
Before Agnes set off again, she took a moment to listen. 14
Outside, the wind was howling at the top of its lungs. It had been a long time since she had last really heard the wind.
But in here, nothing.
Or almost nothing.
Thanks to the hearing aid, she could hear something like a gentle dragging, like something soft against stone or wood. Agnes wasn’t sure. She didn’t quite trust the new hearing aid as far as she could throw it, and she obviously didn’t trust her own ears in the slightest.
There was only one way to clear it up, Agnes dragged herself towards the chink of light. She tried the door, discovered it was open, and she was suddenly bathed in yellow light. Awaiting her was a medium-sized room with an unimaginatively carpeted floor and a row of narrow benches and stools along the walls. One of the stools had tipped over. A sign on the wall pointed out the importance of washing your hands, exactly like one she’d seen before at the doctor’s.
The unusual thing was the ropes.
The space at the foot of the bell tower was dominated by six thick ropes, which disappeared into the ceiling and presumably led up to the bells, tonnes and tonnes of singing bronze, centuries old.
Five of the thick ropes were each neatly knotted in loose loops at the end and were swinging gently back and forth.
The verger was hanging from the sixth.
He wasn’t completely dead yet. His fingertips were still twitching. But the strange angle of his head and neck told Agnes that he was beyond help.
Broken neck. 15
Nothing could be done.
The body was hanging in an unusual, half-kneeling position, his head in a loop at the end of the rope. Not just hanged then, the rope wasn’t hanging high enough for that. The verger would only have had to stretch out his legs to free himself from the rope. Curious.
Agnes stepped closer and carefully prodded the body with her stick. The verger swung gently back and forth, an expression of infinite surprise in his fixed eyes.
‘You probably imagined your Friday evening a bit differently, didn’t you?’ she murmured. ‘Me too!’
Agnes had always had a somewhat relaxed relationship with the dead – after all, they didn’t make any stupid comments, they were discreet and polite, albeit not always hygienic. Panting, she sat down on one of the stools – to think, but also because her hip really was fed up now.
She knew that bell ringing wasn’t an altogether risk-free endeavour. Once the huge bronze bells up there were in motion, nothing and nobody could stop them. She had heard of cases where a distracted bell-ringer got his foot caught in one of the loops and was then yanked several feet up in the air by the corresponding bell, only to land back on the ground again with broken bones and back injuries.
If a neck were to get caught in the loop instead of a foot …
Agnes looked at the dead verger, whose fingertips had now stopped twitching, and noticed that one of his legs was also sticking out at an unhealthy angle.
Aha! That’s what must have happened! But how did you manage to get your head caught in a loop, especially 16after the ringing, when all of the other ropes were already neatly rolled up? An accident was out of the question, unless the verger was crawling through the room on all fours, drunk as a lord.
She sniffed but couldn’t smell any alcohol.
Suicide?
She hadn’t known the verger personally, but from afar he had made a rather reserved impression. Not the sort to dramatically break his neck with several tonnes of bronze. Aside from that, the man looked far too surprised for that to be the case.
Still murder then.
Murder in Duck End.
Again!
Agnes sighed and clambered to her feet. The murderer must have set the bell in motion and then quickly put the loop around his neck. The verger had been dragged upwards, and the bell had broken his neck instantly. That explained the surprised look on his face.
Then the bell had jingled itself out, getting quicker and quicker, while the murderer – that’s a point, where had he got to?
Agnes wasn’t the fastest on her feet. It was quite possible that the killer had slipped outside before she arrived. Maybe he was outside crouching behind one of the pitch-black headstones, waiting for her to leave. Or he was hiding in the church.
Or …
Agnes suddenly felt overwhelmed by the situation. For years, she had fought against getting a hearing aid, and now that she had one in her ear, everything seemed loud to her. 17
Even the silence.
And then there was the body … It was too much aggravation for one day. She was an old woman with a bit of plastic in her ear. Who was interested in what she thought, anyway? What was she doing there? And what was she hoping to achieve?
She realised she had no desire to do her civic duty and call the police. They would take her to the station and scream in her ear – and the rest of the day was sure to be a write-off. Apart from that, the local police were good for nothing. Complete waste of time. She decided to make her way back to the bus stop. Life was hard enough; there was no sense in letting the dead verger spoil her evening. Maybe she could call the police from home, anonymously of course, then they could deal with the dead body and the corresponding criminal. It was nothing to do with her and she was too old for this squit. She was looking forward to a cosy evening by the fire – maybe a nice cup of tea and some music on the radio.
Or just an early night, with a bulging hot water bottle and a good book, but definitely not a murder mystery.
Agnes Sharp hobbled back to the inviting glow of the bus stop, by some kind of miracle caught her bus, and was soon on her way home.
To Sunset Hall.
But eager anticipation turned to unease as the bus ambled its way through the village, and Agnes stared out of the window, only able to see her own reflection, complete with cold-reddened nose. A few years ago, she had turned her home into a house share for senior citizens, and living together had lots of advantages – if you were in a bad mood, 18there was usually someone there you could take it out on, but there were also disadvantages. Not much got past the residents of Sunset Hall. Today they would be waiting for her full of curiosity – with some sort of warmed-up dinner and a whole host of awkward questions. They were dying to test out Agnes’s new hearing aid.
Charlie, Bernadette, Winston, Brexit, Marshall and, of course, Edwina. Individually they were each good eggs, but when something as exciting as a doctor’s appointment took place, they transformed into a mob and wanted to know exactly how it went.
It had gone badly, and Agnes had no desire to let her housemates in on the embarrassing details. The bad thing about a hearing aid was that you heard things that you could really do without. The words ‘hippies’ and ‘antisocial,’ for example. And if a hefty magazine happened to be at hand … At least she would be able to distract her housemates with the story of the dead verger. With a bit of luck, it would keep them busy for long enough to facilitate her escape up to bed.
With a bit of luck – because just lately a murder in Duck End was no great shakes anymore.
The bus stopped at the village square, where they’d recently fished the pharmacist out of the pond. It passed where the chairman of the pigeon fanciers’ club had been found dead in a bush – not a mark on him, but there was definitely something fishy about it – and hurtled purposefully along the road towards Sunset Hall.
As a heater blew warm air up her skirt, Agnes’s face flushed hot and red, and her mood got darker and darker.
What was going on in Duck End, her home village? 19
Things like this didn’t used to happen there.
Any conflict in the village had traditionally always been solved in a civil fashion. People had spread nasty rumours, shaved cats, hammered copper nails into neighbouring apple trees or, at a pinch, written poisonous anonymous letters in to the village rag, but as a rule, murder was frowned upon.
Until now, that is.
Now it looked as if the residents of Duck End were suddenly making up for all of the murders that they had suppressed over the last twenty years.
And of course, the trend had started back in the autumn with Agnes’s friends Lillith and Mildred. Thanks to Agnes, those cases had been solved, but that didn’t seem to stop the villagers from merrily murdering away.
Agnes did not approve.
Was she expected to somehow clear up all the mess in the village? They’d be waiting a long time. After all, she’d been retired for so long, she could hardly remember exactly what she used to do in the police. There had been lots of files, and every now and then someone had brought scones into the office, that much she was certain of. The rest was a bit hazy.
She stared gloomily at her reflection, which was getting more and more red in the face, until the bus finally spat her out in front of Sunset Hall.
Agnes hobbled up the garden path, her house in front of her managing to look cosy even in the inhospitable winter months. Rose hips flashed on bare branches, ivy snuggled up to the walls like a green blanket, warm light illuminated the windows and the welcoming, and recently 20painted, coral red front door. Like a picture-postcard. Then Agnes spotted her housemates through one of the illuminated windows. As expected, they had assembled in the lounge, even Brexit the wolfhound was there, and they were lying in wait, ready to pump Agnes for information about her doctor’s appointment.
She took a deep breath, opened the door, hung her stick on the hall stand and wriggled out of her coat.
Then she entered the lounge, ready to do battle, the story of the dead verger on the tip of her tongue.
‘You’ll never believe what happened to me tod—’
She fell silent because it dawned on her that nobody was interested in what had happened to her in the village, today, yesterday, the day after tomorrow or any other time for that matter. Brexit briefly but politely wagged his tail, but the others’ attention was focused on a letter resting on the coffee table, harmless, white and rectangular.
‘What’s that?’ Agnes asked, suddenly offended by the general disinterest. After all, she had got a hearing aid at the behest of her housemates – and now nobody gave two hoots about it!
‘A letter,’ Charlie murmured. She was their new arrival and far too glamorous for Agnes’s tastes, but she did make outstanding pancakes.
‘I can see that!’ Agnes hissed. It was a mystery to her how a letter could be more interesting than her story about the verger.
‘It’s for Edwina!’ Bernadette added gravely. Bernadette was blind and fat and cynical. Behind her dark glasses, she could be gloomy like no other.
Oh! 21
Agnes had to sit down. A letter for Edwina really was something to write home about!
Edwina was what some people would refer to as ‘not all there.’ Such people didn’t understand how unbelievably ‘there’ Edwina could be when you lived with her. Yoga, dancing, games, antics with Hettie the tortoise. Apart from that, she baked the hardest biscuits for miles around. Superb missiles. Practically indestructible, like Edwina herself.
Only, she was by no means a likely correspondent. In all their years of living together, Agnes couldn’t remember ever having seen a letter addressed to Edwina – not even junk mail. But today was the day.
She looked more closely. The letter seemed official, with a little plastic window you could see the address through. Agnes put on her reading glasses and gingerly fished the missive off the table. Edwina’s name was clearly written on it. And, Sunset Hall.
She sighed.
‘We thought we’d wait for you to open it,’ Marshall explained. He used to be in the military, and as a general rule waited for Agnes in crisis situations, whether she liked it or not.
By the look of it, they had already formed factions. The first, anti-letter faction consisted of Bernadette, Winston, Marshall and Charlie. The other faction was Edwina, who had adopted the warrior yoga pose. Not a good sign.
Winston manoeuvred himself next to Agnes in his wheelchair. ‘We even wondered if we should just burn it,’ he whispered to her. Winston was responsible for peace and logic in the house. A controversial suggestion like that wasn’t like him at all. 22
‘It’s my letter! No way!’ screeched Edwina, who still had good ears. Good ears, good eyes, good bones, a good figure. It was only soft and woolly inside her head. Edwina snatched the letter out of Agnes’s hand and made to open it.
‘Maybe it’s a bomb!’ Charlie warned.
That gave them all food for thought. Edwina used to work in the Secret Service, and taking into account all of the facts, a letter bomb seemed a great deal more likely than a straight-forward letter.
‘It is not!’ Edwina objected, but stopped in her tracks regardless.
In a daring manoeuvre that almost cost Agnes her balance, she managed to bring the letter back under her control.
She thought for a moment.
‘Let’s open it,’ she decided finally. ‘We can still burn it afterwards.’
It took a while for Agnes to poke open the envelope with the help of a knitting needle – she didn’t really believe in the thing about the letter bomb, but better to be safe than sorry. The letter consisted of a single sheet of paper. Agnes unfolded it and adjusted her reading glasses.
‘Dear Edwina Singh,’ she read.
‘That’s me!’ Edwina beamed.
The rest of the household was hanging on Agnes’s every word, a rare occurrence.
‘I am delighted to inform you that you are the winner of our grand prize draw!’ Agnes read.
‘Hurrah!’ Edwina cheered. 23
Later on, it took them quite a while to ascertain how it had come about that Edwina was able to even take part in a prize draw, let alone win the thing. Normally they made a concerted effort to make sure Edwina had as little contact with the outside world as possible. It was better that way.
Above all, for the outside world’s sake.
Strictly speaking, Marshall was to blame. The mistake happened about a month ago, when, worn down by hours of pestering, he had let Edwina on the internet so she could look at tortoise videos.
Then he had gone to the loo and subsequently got a bit side-tracked.
In the fifteen minutes of internet time that she got out of it, Edwina had managed not only to watch videos of mating tortoises, order a heat lamp for reptiles and register Marshall for a dating agency, but she had obviously also taken part in a prize draw – and won!
Now they were getting their just deserts!
‘And what has she won?’ Charlie asked gingerly.
‘A …’ Agnes read on, speechless.
Then she read it a second time.
And a third time just to be sure.
It was all far worse than she had feared!
2
PANCAKES
Agnes was sitting in bed, wide awake and absolutely livid. She had got out the big guns, the hot water bottle was bulging, hot tea was steaming in her mug, music was tinkling from the radio, and a good book was lying open on her lap.
Not a murder mystery, obviously. Something with a bit of class.
Despite everything, the cosy atmosphere she had imagined in beautiful technicolour detail didn’t quite come to fruition. The heating had stopped working again and the hot water bottle was no match for the arctic room temperature. Her tea was cooling rapidly. ‘Jingle Bells’ was booming mercilessly from the radio, bringing back unpleasant memories of the verger.
And on top of that, there was the matter of the holiday too.
As ill luck would have it, Edwina really had gone and won a holiday on the internet. A romantic getaway, no less! For two. To the coast. To a high-end luxury eco-conscious hotel. Romantic! Edwina! And instead of trying to talk her out of it, as would be right and proper, her 25housemates were busy sucking up to Edwina to win the second guest’s place.
The whole thing was completely out of the question, of course. None of them was in any position to keep Edwina in check on their own. No way. And in a romantic hotel, even little mishaps could have dire consequences. Apart from that, Agnes found the ‘eco’ in the hotel’s name unsettling. Carrots could be eco-friendly, couldn’t they? And were then mostly a bit wrinkly. But a hotel? It didn’t make sense …
She realised she wasn’t remotely interested in her book, whether it had a bit of class or not, and threw it out of bed in annoyance. Her tea was cold, the hot water bottle was gurgling mockingly, the radio switched to an untimely rendition of ‘The Little Drummer Boy.’
Parumpumpum-pum.
Agnes flicked the switch on the radio, then the reading light.
Then she lay in the dark and fretted herself to sleep.
When she entered the kitchen the next morning, wrapped in three cardigans and still stiff with cold, the rest of the household was already sitting down to breakfast. Highly unusual, normally Agnes was the first to the table. Winston was swaddled in a garish wool blanket and with his bald head, he looked alarmingly like a giant baby; Marshall was wearing a scarf and military hat to keep out the cold; Bernadette had just brought her duvet to the table; Edwina was wearing a down jacket, and a tea cosy as a head covering; and a fabulous fur hat sat atop Charlie’s head. 26
Brexit’s breath was steaming.
Agnes sniffed. It smelt good. Of coffee and …
Charlie had made her famous pancakes, and Edwina had already stacked four of them on her plate. Eyes bigger than her stomach, again, but nobody said a word. Of course they didn’t.
‘Good morning,’ Agnes murmured.
Marshall leapt up and pulled up a chair for her. Then he poured her some lukewarm coffee. At least that was still working.
Other than that, her housemates were good for nothing this morning. Becapped and bundled up, they sat there watching as Edwina stuffed one pancake after another into her mouth.
At least nobody had uttered the stupid ‘holiday’ word.
But once Edwina was finished – she left one partially eaten pancake, just as Agnes had feared – Winston plucked up the courage.
‘So, Edwina,’ he said gently. ‘Have you had any thoughts?’
Agnes resolutely swallowed down a bit of pancake and attempted a distraction tactic.
‘We need a plumber!’ she said loudly. ‘I’ve had a look at the boiler. It’s not just on the blink. It’s completely broken! Again!’
This news would normally have prompted widespread consternation, but today they all did their best to ignore Agnes. It was outrageous!
‘Thoughts about what?’ Edwina asked after a while, poking around with her fork at the spurned pancake.
‘Well,’ Charlie murmured. ‘Who you’d like to take …’ 27
‘On the holiday,’ Bernadette added, as if there could be any doubt.
Marshall looked as if he wanted to throw his hat in the ring too, but he noticed the look on Agnes’s face and loyally kept his mouth shut.
Edwina nodded. ‘I have. Of course I have.’
She rolled the partially eaten pancake up and held it up to her eye like a telescope. Then she looked from one of them to the other.
Charlie, Marshall, Brexit, Bernadette, Winston, Agnes. Agnes, Winston, Bernadette, Brexit, Marshall, Charlie. Charlie …
Was Agnes seeing things, or did her housemates really sit up straighter when Edwina turned her pancake telescope on them?
‘So?’ Bernadette asked finally. ‘Who are you taking?’
‘Lillith!’ Edwina beamed.
Bernadette groaned, Charlie rolled her eyes, Marshall put his hand to his forehead, and Winston slumped down a bit beneath his garish blanket. Agnes felt a hysterical laugh rising in her throat but managed to pull herself together.
Edwina, seeming to sense the general resistance, plopped her pancake back on her plate. ‘Lillith is my best friend,’ she explained. ‘And she doesn’t get out much.’
‘No way!’ Agnes belligerently sipped her coffee. ‘You can’t go to a hotel like that on your own. Someone has to take care of you!’
‘And someone has to take care of the hotel,’ Bernadette muttered.
‘Lillith can look after me!’ Edwina wasn’t giving in without a fight. 28
Agnes finally exploded. ‘Lillith is dead and in a tin!’ she hissed.
Unfortunately, their friend Lillith had fallen prey to a bullet a few months ago and had resided in a coffee tin in the flower window ever since. Did Edwina really prefer the company of a tin of human ashes to theirs? That really did speak volumes!
Edwina did finally look a bit guilty. ‘Obviously, I would prefer to take Hettie, but Charlie said we shouldn’t break the cold chain,’ she explained sensibly.
Hettie was Sunset Hall’s pet tortoise; she spent the cold months hibernating reptile-style in the fridge.
‘What about Brexit?’ Agnes asked sarcastically.
The wolfhound heard his name and optimistically turned his attention to the last pancake.
Edwina shook her head earnestly. It was obvious that she had already considered it. ‘Brexit’s too big. He can’t come!’ With that, she apologetically pushed her pancake towards the dog, and Brexit chowed down.
Agnes noticed she was holding her breath. Now Edwina had run out of non-human companions, and things were heating up again. To her great consternation, Agnes realised that even she was beginning to find the thought of a holiday quite attractive. Sure, whoever the chosen one was would have Edwina on their hands – not exactly fun – but a well-heated hotel room alone seemed like a luxury at the moment, and there would probably be lots of good food and maybe even an entertainment programme.
Apart from that, she wouldn’t have to grapple with the dead verger. She had this vague feeling that sooner or later 29the thing would be pinned on her, incompetent as the local police generally were.
But if she were to just pack her case …
She wrestled with an excitement of sorts and stood up.
‘I’m going to call the plumber!’ she announced and stalked out of the kitchen. Suck up to Edwina?
As if!
When Agnes returned with crushing news, the mood had shifted. Before, they had all been trying to curry favour with Edwina, now all eyes turned optimistically to Agnes.
Odd.
‘The plumber has vanished,’ she declared gloomily. Presumably also murdered, as was the current trend in Duck End. Or fled. Maybe he was the killer? Or he’d just run away with his mistress? Agnes didn’t really care. What was for certain was that he would not be repairing their boiler, and the plumber from the next small town along had, by his own admission, a waiting list as long as his arm.
‘Won’t get to you for another three weeks at least!’ Three weeks without hot water. Three weeks huddled together in the lounge, the only room with a functioning fireplace. If only she hadn’t let herself be persuaded to convert to central heating in the eighties! Why had she thrown the baby out with the bathwater? Although there could, of course, be no real talk of baths for the foreseeable future. Short cold showers – and then shivering into an even colder bed. Maybe it would be better just to lapse into hibernation like Hettie – the temperature was ripe for it after all!
Agnes looked from one of them to the other, but 30somehow her news didn’t seem to be getting through to them.
‘Oh,’ Marshall said sympathetically, but Agnes could tell he wasn’t quite with it.
She crossed her arms. What was going on here? They should at least stick together when it came to the boiler!
Winston cleared his throat. ‘Charlie’s had an idea,’ he said gingerly.
Beneath her fur hat, Charlie looked a bit like Catherine the Great, but also a bit mischievous at the same time. She smiled cautiously, then she spread her arms wide, as elegant as it was dramatic. The tassels on her dressing gown jiggled.
‘Why don’t we just all go?’
Later on, Agnes was in the lounge brooding, sitting as close to the fire as was physically possible without singeing her cardigan.
Obviously, there were a hundred and one valid reasons why they couldn’t all go away at the same time.
Money, for example.
Or rather, lack of money.
She didn’t know exactly how much was currently in the household kitty, or how much a group holiday like that would cost, but she was certain that the two figures were not compatible.
Apart from that, Brexit had to be taken out.
And somebody had to be on the ground to call the plumber now responsible for fixing the boiler, and put the fear of God into him. If not, at this rate they’d be waiting until spring for warm water. 31
Apart from that …
‘Have you had any thoughts?’ Marshall asked sheepishly next to her.
‘There’s nothing to think about!’ Agnes snapped and tried to shift away from him with her armchair. But it didn’t work, because Bernadette was sitting on the other side of her, Charlie next to her, and then Winston, so tightly packed, that a sheet of paper barely would have fit between them, never mind an angry Agnes. Brexit was lying in front of her, snoring and reeking of wet dog, and from behind, the cold was clawing at her back with its long, greedy fingers. Agnes was trapped.
She groaned and closed her eyes. Her housemates had ganged up against her and all wanted to go away together. And they actually had some pretty reasonable arguments!
What a nightmare!
In moments like these she would have preferred to sulk in her room, but things being as they were, it was simply too cold for lone sulking. She was trapped in the lounge, and if she showed even the slightest sign of weakness, sooner or later they would grind her down.
Edwina was the only one not sitting with them by the fire. Still wrapped up in her down jacket, she had already started packing.
Yoga mat.
Pocketknife.
Reptile heat lamp.
Lillith in her tin.
Remote control.
‘We won’t be needing a remote control at the hotel.’ Agnes snarled. 32
Then she was even more annoyed at what she had let slip. The triumphant looks that Charlie and Winston were giving each other did not escape her attention.
Now the matter was practically settled.
Generally speaking, Agnes was against changes she hadn’t suggested herself. As a matter of principle. And a trip like this was a huge change. On the other hand, it would solve the warmth issue – at least temporarily. Apart from that, unlike in Duck End there would be no murder and mayhem in a chic hotel, and the household kitty was also safe, because Charlie had offered to pay for them all. A generous gesture – Agnes had had no idea her housemate was so well-heeled.
Charlie had promised Brexit could stay at her grandson’s; Marshall had hired a house-sitter on the internet for the house plants and promised to bug the plumber via email. Winston had ordered a new, extra-compact, foldable travel wheelchair for the occasion; and Bernadette had started to plan all of the things she would eat while she was away, a lot, that was for sure.
Agnes realised that even she was humming away to herself, albeit discreetly. She was still against this crazy holiday, of course, but she had secretly also already started to look forward to the trip.
She would see the sea for the first time in a long while.
There was bound to be staff, central heating and food, and surely they were attuned to elderly guests.
What could go wrong?
She glanced at Edwina, who was trying to get Lillith’s big garden shears in her suitcase, and sighed. 33
At lunchtime they sat in the kitchen next to the oven, which was doing its level best to heat up a frozen pizza, and listened to Charlie on her mobile tearing strips off someone at the hotel until they had sorted out all of the rooms for her.
‘I don’t care how!’ Charlie shouted, rolling her eyes, although the person on the other end definitely couldn’t see. ‘The question is when!’
It seemed like they were trying to get a word in, but instantly being rebuffed by Charlie.
‘As soon as possible, of course!’ she shouted. ‘What’s that? Thursday? Newquay? No problem at all! We’re flying! Of course, we’ve all got passports! Fabulous!’
Thursday rolled round really quickly, mainly thanks to the frantic and time-consuming search for the passports. When they weren’t searching or packing or squabbling about the best route to the airport, they were glued to the fire, passing a thermos of hot tea around and planning their trip.
‘There will be canapés,’ Bernadette said happily. ‘Loads of canapés.’
‘And champagne!’ added Charlie. ‘Don’t forget the champagne!’
‘Cakes and scones and biscuits,’ Bernadette responded.
‘Gin and tonic.’ Charlie sighed.
‘And tortoises,’ Edwina said dreamily. ‘Exotic tortoises, who never hibernate! Not to eat, of course. For company!’
Nobody had the heart to tell her that the tortoise thing was rather unlikely, even at a luxury eco hotel.
‘There’s bound to be yoga,’ said Charlie, who was the 34most au fait with luxury because one of her many ex-husbands had had some success on the markets at some point. ‘And massages. A sauna. Maybe even a little boogie.’
Agnes swallowed a barbed remark and decided to join in with the general excitement. ‘The boiler there will work flawlessly,’ she said optimistically. ‘And it will be peaceful. So peaceful. No murder and mayhem!’ For a moment she thought about the dead verger, hanging in the ropes. What had happened, had she actually called the … ? Apparently, in all the excitement about Edwina’s letter, she’d forgotten to call them, but he was bound to have been found in the meantime, and ultimately it wasn’t her problem.
She felt a pang of guilt, then she pushed the image of the dangling verger out of her mind. Her case was packed, and with the finest clothes her wardrobe had to offer, to boot. On top of that, she was planning on investing in a new lipstick at the airport and maybe trying out a beauty treatment at the hotel. See how good the treatments really were …
‘We can finally all relax!’ Winston declared. That was, however, unlikely because they were very good at mutually preventing one another from relaxing. But maybe a harmony of sorts would materialise at the hotel, lubricated as they would be by canapés and champagne?
‘I want to look out to sea and feel the wind on my face,’ Marshall announced. Since it had become evident that the holiday was to a seaside hotel, he had started to play the sea dog a bit, and yet, as far as Agnes knew, during his time in the military he hadn’t been in the Marines, he’d been stationed in the desert.
‘We’ll meet new people.’ Winston beamed. ‘Like-minded people.’ 35
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Agnes tried to imagine like-minded people and shuddered.
‘It’ll be sunny!’ Bernadette said, as if Cornwall were somewhere in the Caribbean and not just a few hours away from Duck End.
‘Inspiring!’ shouted Charlie, so fervently that her fur hat slipped.
‘And elegant,’ said Edwina and pirouetted. ‘Exceedingly elegant!’
Once the others had gone to bed the night before they were due to depart, unusually early, in readiness for the threatened early start, Edwina got up again and padded downstairs into the lounge, barefoot, despite the cold.
The others mustn’t hear her.
She stood downstairs, motionless for a moment, felt the cold stone floor beneath her bare feet and listened. It was exceptionally still in Sunset Hall. Brexit had already been picked up by Charlie’s good-looking grandson yesterday, they hadn’t heard a peep from the boiler for days, and Hettie was sleeping in the fridge, so deeply that none of Edwina’s thoughts could ever reach her, so deeply that her heart only beat every now and then, subdued, incidentally.
Edwina had no desire to think about Hettie’s sporadic heartbeat. As soon as she was certain she wouldn’t be surprised, she opened her case once more, to check her kit.
Pocketknife.
Garden shears.
Notebook and pen.
Lighter.
Corkscrew. 36
Remote control.
Heat lamp.
Wig.
Homemade biscuits.
Inflatable tortoise for the pool.
Lillith.
Somewhere, there was also a swimsuit, a comb, some underwear, one or two tracksuits and a blue dress that Agnes had practically forced her to take, but that didn’t matter.
Unlike the others, Edwina hadn’t let herself be fooled by the spurious story about the prize draw for a second. Of course she hadn’t. The holiday wasn’t just a holiday.
It was a mission.
She, Edwina, on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, had finally been called out of her own long, cold period of hibernation to complete an assignment. She could feel her heart beating, not sluggishly like Hettie’s, but expectantly, decisively.
The fact that she had no idea what her mission could entail didn’t worry Edwina. She would find out soon enough, via a mysterious phone call perhaps, a note secretly left in her coat pocket with a telephone number on it, or maybe via a card brought to her room hidden inside a box of chocolates. (She was secretly hoping for the method with the box of chocolates.)
Now, she just had to be ready. She eyed the contents of her suitcase critically. Did she need more underwear? Had she packed enough biscuits? Was Lillith stowed safely?
It worried her a bit that she couldn’t take any real weapons with her, not on a plane, but a pair of garden shears 37or a corkscrew could cause a fair bit of damage if necessary. Now, she just had to make sure nobody was onto her.
Edwina decided not to leave the inflatable tortoise in her suitcase, but to carry it in her hand luggage, a distraction tactic, as it were. She started to blow. As the rubber tortoise, which she’d already christened ‘Hettie II,’ slowly took shape, Lillith’s ashes seemed to be eyeing her critically.
Edwina briefly stopped puffing. ‘Don’t worry, Lillith,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll take good care of myself. And the others. And you, in any case.’
Lillith seemed reassured, and Edwina was happy to have her friend in her luggage. The others were good eggs, but they could sometimes be a bit unworldly. Lillith was the only one who you could have really good conversations with, forge plans, exchange ideas. Lillith never made stupid suggestions or tried to talk her out of things. Lillith always kept a lid on things. At least, she did if you screwed it on tightly enough. You could confide in her.
‘It’s an adventure,’ Edwina announced, and Lillith seemed to agree, as did the partially inflated Hettie II.
3
CLOUDS
However, when the residents of Sunset Hall peeled themselves out of the taxi the next morning, sleepy and rumpled, it didn’t feel very much like an adventure yet. More like an imposition. Agnes, for whom even a trip on a cross-country bus presented a challenge, was completely drained by the long car journey. She had never seen so many grotty suburbs and sopping-wet sheep in one go. Was that really the world – her world? It looked different to what she remembered, full of green fields, sedate towns and beautiful scenery.
Where had all the scenery gone?
She pressed her walking stick into the taxi driver’s hand and tried to steady herself on her bag. Charlie’s chic feather hat looked a bit mangled; Bernadette’s obligatory sunglasses were wonky; Marshall had a glazed, distant look on his face; and Winston, who wasn’t getting on very well with his new, super-portable wheelchair, was sweating.
Edwina had got hold of an inflatable tortoise from somewhere and was jumping up and down with it like a monkey on a stick. 39
The wind tore and tugged at them, as if to stop them in their tracks.
Stop! Wait! Stay here! Don’t go!
But the residents of Sunset Hall didn’t listen.
The taxi driver finally drove off and they were left standing in front of the airport with their luggage.
‘In there!’ Charlie had got a trolley for all of their luggage and was pushing it confidently towards the revolving door of the squat, ugly building.
It turned out that an airport consisted mainly of three things, grey floors as far as the eye could see, booming announcements that Agnes couldn’t even understand with her hearing aid in, and people. People everywhere. Agnes couldn’t remember ever having seen so many people at once. Many of them were dressed inappropriately, in sandals and shorts and sun hats. Agnes was secretly annoyed to find that Edwina fitted in seamlessly, with her tracksuit, slippers and rubber tortoise.
Charlie pressed a piece of paper into each of their hands.
‘Tickets! Over there!’
Agnes reluctantly trailed behind her housemates to the end of a queue and tried to make out that none of it was anything to do with her. Every now and then, something moved, and Edwina jumped a space forward on her tortoise. The others followed.
Agnes used the wait to discreetly inspect her fellow passengers.
They weren’t the oldest there at any rate. Not by a long shot. Three ancient ladies in black were standing just across from her, and the chap in the wheelchair the three of them were manoeuvring along the queue as best they 40could looked as if he were already dead. If those doddery souls managed to battle their way on board, Agnes didn’t have anything to worry about.
Eventually they had worked their way to the counter and had to produce their passports. It took a while because Edwina had rather unstrategically tucked hers into her bra. They got little coloured stickers stuck on their tickets, then they watched their luggage, complete with paper streamers, sail away from them on a conveyor belt. At that point, Agnes would have loved to send her suitcase off on the journey alone and quietly slip away.
She sighed.
Next, they had to squeeze their way through a kind of turnstile with lots of other hopeful passengers.
‘All aboard the Skylark!’ Edwina cheered, throwing the inflatable tortoise up into the air.
‘To security,’ Charlie corrected.
Agnes, who after many years in the police wasn’t completely green, had expected as much. Presumably her hand luggage and clothes would be searched for weapons, maybe even drugs. Drugs! Agnes sighed. The chance would be a fine thing!
On the other side of the turnstile, they had to wait yet again. Like most of her fellow countrymen, Agnes didn’t approach queuing lightly. She chose the queue that seemed the shortest to her and lined up with a sense of purpose.
Only after a while did she realise that her housemates had been corralled into another queue by an airport heavy. Instead of them, a chap in a Hawaiian shirt was standing behind her grinning. Agnes squinted desperately 41at a feather hat, a garish hippie blanket and an inflatable tortoise as they slowly, but inexorably drifted away from her like flotsam on the high sea.
She grappled with a pang of panic. All she had to do was somehow get through security. Then the others would wait for her, wouldn’t they? Or, on the plane, at least! She would make it to the plane! After all, this wasn’t her first time flying. But before, everything had been different. More … service. Fewer queues.
Agnes clutched her plane ticket.
This was just the time she should be looking forward to the journey. Anticipation is half the pleasure, after all, and if she didn’t start straightaway, it would be too late. But Agnes felt her high spirits slump like a soufflé that had cooled too suddenly.
More quickly than expected, she had worked her way to the security area. She laid her handbag confidently in the little plastic tub and marched through the weird metal frame. It beeped. Agnes wanted to keep going but was stopped by a young woman in plastic gloves with some kind of hairdryer. She had to stand still and put her arms out while the woman with the hairdryer, which presumably wasn’t a hairdryer, swept it over her body. It beeped again. It beeped a lot. Her brassiere beeped, and her support corset, her shoes and even the press stud on her skirt.
Agnes looked at the woman pityingly. Did she seriously think she was going to strangle the captain with her brassiere? According to everything she knew about modern aviation, the captain hardly did anything anymore anyway 42and was almost completely redundant when it came down to it.
The security measures seemed excessive to her.
Finally, the woman with the hairdryer was satisfied, and Agnes staggered past her in a bit of a daze. She’d had enough of this charade. Where on earth was the blasted plane?
She almost forgot her handbag, but her arm remembered even if the rest of her was in a bit of a tizz. Her arm felt empty.
Handbag! Right!
She had put it in one of those plastic tubs before, and now …
Agnes looked up and spotted her bag a few yards away, still in the tub. A security officer was fumbling around with it.
It was a magnificent handbag that had provided Agnes with many years of loyal service. She knew from experience that you could house a majestic picnic in it, a cat complete with kittens, or a small tent, and even today Agnes had taken full advantage of the bag’s capacity. There was money and lipstick, a good book, her knitting, her reading glasses, all the equipment needed to keep false teeth in order, all the medicine she needed, and a whole load she hopefully wouldn’t need.
And there was a pair of knickers. Just because. Spares. Her mother had long since drummed it into her that a lady should never go away without spare knickers, and although Agnes had never needed them, and had spent a lifetime pointlessly carrying around spare knickers, she had always kept to the rule. She could hardly wait to tell 43her mother, somewhere on the other side, where she could stick her spare pair of knickers rule.
The aforementioned knickers were currently being unfolded by the security officer and examined like some kind of archaeological find. That was a step too far! Agnes snatched her walking stick, which through some kind of miracle had made it through security unscathed, and scurried over to the chap with the gloves.
‘Is this your bag?’ the man asked, eyeing her critically over the waistband of her knickers.
Agnes swallowed. She would have liked to deny having anything at all to do with those knickers, appearing excessively big as they did, and a bit frivolous with their hint of white lace. But she had to get her bag back.
So, she nodded, with dignity, she hoped.
‘Have you got any liquids in here?’ The man laid the knickers to one side and carried on rummaging around in the bag.
Agnes stopped nodding. Liquids? She must have misheard! Of course she had liquids with her – the denture cleaning set, shampoo for extra fine hair and a bottle of orange juice. Surely that wasn’t a crime!
She decided to ignore the man, and reached for her bag, but the security man was quicker. He held the handle with one hand, and used the other to dig deeper, and unearthed the orange juice, followed by the shampoo and denture set.
This could not be happening! Agnes took a deep breath. She could sacrifice the juice and the shampoo, if necessary, but she would give anything to keep the denture cleaner – well, apart from her eye teeth of course!
‘Unfortunately, you’re not permitted to carry more than 44one hundred millilitres of liquids,’ explained the madman in the gloves.
Agnes looked around for help. Someone would have to make him see reason! She spotted Marshall in another row, who was just being told that his trusty jackknife wasn’t allowed to go with him, while Edwina was having to let the air out of her tortoise. It looked as if the garden shears had already been confiscated. It was a big palaver, and Agnes wasn’t altogether unhappy about ending up in the other queue. So, no juice or shampoo. Fine. There wasn’t much going on with her hair anyway, with or without shampoo, and she’d be able to find a bit of orange juice on board, surely.
But the denture cleaner! She gesticulated wildly at the relevant bottle, as the man packed it into a transparent plastic bag.
‘I need that!’
‘You’ll get it back soon. I’m just going to put it through the scanner, okay?’ With that, the man dragged the denture cleaner away, back to the start of the queue.
Agnes groaned. It wasn’t okay, but what could she do? She wanted to finally get on the plane or just go somewhere where she could sit down. But not without her denture care!
She resolutely plopped herself down next to the plastic tub and waited. Her hip hurt. The air was bad. She felt a bit dizzy.
‘Hey, Grandma! Anytime today’ll do!’
Agnes gave a start and looked around. Grandma? Outrageous!
Somebody was standing next to her. He must have 45come through security after her and was trying to push past her and her bag.
‘Get back in your home,’ he muttered.
Agnes really did wonder if she had misheard – it wouldn’t have been the first time. Then she remembered her hearing aid. She hadn’t misheard then. The snide grin also told her that she had understood correctly.
A home! Unbelievable! Who did the blighter think he was?
