Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble

two Christmas parties.”
    “You’ll need a real tree.”
    “Never again,” said Agatha. “The cats will sabotage it. I’m getting a nice fake one. Besides, it’s rather miserable after Christmas to have a dying tree looking at you accusingly.”
    “You’ll get caterers to do the cooking.”
    “I would like to do something myself,” said Agatha. “I know. I’ll make the Christmas pudding. It can’t be that hard if one treats it like a scientific experiment.”
    “We’ll make it this weekend and let it mature,” said Roy.
    “I’ve got a Sarah Smith cookbook,” said Agatha. “Her recipes are supposed to be easy.”
    She took out the cookery book and found a recipe for Christmas pudding. “It looks awfuly complicated,” said Roy, reading over her shoulder.
    “Oh, we’ll go out and buy all the stuff and then take it bit by bit,” said Agatha.

    Late that afternoon, they returned carrying cartons of shopping. “Let’s leave it until tomorrow,” pleaded Roy.
    “No, I want to get started now,” said Agatha. “Unpack all the stuff and put it on the kitchen table and then you read out Sarah’s instructions.”
    “Okay. But I’m going to have a stiff drink first,” said Roy. “Have one yourself. You might need it.”
    “Get yourself a drink and start reading.” Agatha wrapped herself in an apron she had never used before. Most of her cooking was done by putting readymade meals in the micro wave.
    When Roy was finally seated at the table with a large vodka and tonic, he began to read out Sarah’s instructions. “ ‘Take your largest, roomiest mixing bowl and start putting in the suet, sifted flour and breadcrumbs, spices and sugar.’ I don’t think those are the right breadcrumbs, Aggie. They’re those orange ones people put on fish. And the almonds are supposed to be skinned and chopped, not put in whole. And you didn’t peel the apple.”
    “Nobody’ll notice,” said Agatha. “Read on.”
    What a lot of ingredients, thought Agatha. Part of the advice was to tick everything off, but Agatha couldn’t be bothered. For example, she was supposed to put the barley wine, rum and stout into a smaller basin and beat it up with the eggs, but she cut corners by just pouring it all into the mix in the big bowl.
    Roy took a turn stirring. “It’s supposed to be sloppy,” he complained.
    “Easily solved,” said Agatha, tipping a generous amount of rum into the bowl and then taking a swig out of the bottle to fortify herself.
    “Now what?” she asked.
    “You’re supposed to cover it with a clean tea towel and leave to soak overnight.”
    “And what do we have to do tomorrow?”
    “Steam it for eight hours. I didn’t see you sift the flour,” said Roy anxiously. “You just dumped it in.”
    “So I did,” said Agatha, stifling a yawn. “We’ll steam the beastly thing in the morning.”

    But the next day, after they had put the pudding on to steam, it seemed too boring to wait indoors and so they went to the pub for lunch and forgot about it, only remembering as they were strolling back down the road. Both broke into a run. The windows of the cottage were covered in steam. Agatha ran through billowing clouds of steam in time to put more water into the pot which was about to boil dry.
    They opened the doors and windows to let the steam out and then Agatha had to field phone calls from various villagers asking if her house was on fire.
    “It’s been on four hours.” Agatha peered at the pudding anxiously. “That should be enough. What do I do with it now?”
    “You’re supposed to put it in a cool place like an un-heated bedroom.”
    “Everything’s heated in this house,” said Agatha. “I’ll put it down in the shed.”
    “Maybe you should buy one from a supermarket just in case,” suggested Roy.
    “What! After all my work!”
    “And mine,” pointed out Roy. “Nonetheless . . .”
    “Nonetheless nothing,” said Agatha. “Sarah is supposed to be infallible.”
    “Only if you follow the recipe,” muttered Roy.

    ****

    Agatha’s friend, Sir Charles Fraith, who had the keys to her cottage, strolled in one evening shortly before Christmas, to find Agatha trying to fend off her cats, Hodge and Boswell, as she decorated a large fake-green Christmas tree.
    “Thought you’d be off soon to somewhere sunny,” said Charles. “Why all the decorations?”
    Agatha told him.
    “For a hard-nosed detective, occasionally you’re a bit of a dreamer, Agatha. Do you