Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death

that dinner?’
    ‘Next Wednesday? Seven o’clock, say?’
    ‘Fine. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you then.’
    ‘Am I in Moreton-in-Marsh?’
    ‘No, Mircester General Hospital.’
    After he had gone, Agatha fished in the locker beside her bed and found her handbag. The pills had been taken out of it, she noticed. She opened her compact and stared at her face in the mirror and let out a squawk of dismay. She looked a wreck.
    ‘’Ere!’ Agatha looked across at the next bed. It contained an elderly woman who looked remarkably like Mrs Boggle. ‘What you done?’ she asked avidly. ‘All them police in ’ere.’
    ‘I solved a case for them,’ said Agatha grandly.
    ‘Garn,’ said the old horror. ‘Last one in that bed thought she was Mary Queen of Scots.’
    ‘Shut up,’ snarled Agatha, looking in the mirror and wondering whether the sticking plaster did not look, in fact, well, heroic.
    The day wore on. The television set at the end of the beds flickered through soap opera after soap opera. No one else called. Not even Mrs Bloxby.
    Well, that’s that, thought Agatha bleakly. Why did they bother to send flowers? Probably thought I was dead.

 
Chapter Thirteen
     
    Agatha was told next day that an ambulance would be leaving the hospital at noon to take her home. She was rather pleased about that. Her home-coming in an ambulance should make the village sit up and take notice.
    She took the greetings cards off the bouquets of flowers around her bed to keep as a souvenir of her time in the Cotswolds. How odd that she had volunteered to help Bill with his cases, just as if she meant to stay. She asked a nurse to take the flowers to the children’s ward and then got dressed and went downstairs to wait for the ambulance. There was a shop in the entrance hall selling newspapers. She bought a pile of the local ones but there was no mention of Vera Cummings-Browne’s arrest. Perhaps it all leaked out too late for them to do anything about it.
    To her dismay, the ‘ambulance’ turned out to be a minibus which was taking various geriatric patients back to their local villages. Why does the sight of creaking old people make me feel so cruel and impatient? thought Agatha, watching them fumbling and stumbling on board. I’ll be old myself all too soon. She forced herself to get up to help an old man who was trying to get into the bus. He leered at her. ‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ he said. ‘I know your sort.’
    The rest of the passengers were all old women who shrieked with laughter and said, ‘You are a one, Arnie,’ and things like that, all of them evidently knowing each other very well.
    It was a calm, cool day with great fluffy clouds floating across a pale-blue sky. The old woman next to Agatha caught her attention by jabbing her painfully in the toes with her stick. ‘What happened to you then?’ she asked, peering at Agatha’s sticking-plaster-covered face. ‘Beat you up, did he?’
    ‘No,’ said Agatha frostily. ‘I was solving a murder case for the police.’
    ‘It’s the drink,’ said the old woman. ‘Mine used ter come home from the pub and lay into me something rotten. He’s dead now. It’s one thing you’ve got to say in favour of men, they die before we do.’
    ‘’Cept me,’ said Arnie. ‘I’m seventy-eight and still going strong.’
    More cackles. Agatha’s announcement about solving a murder case had bitten the dust. The minibus rolled lazily to a stop in a small hamlet and the woman next to Agatha was helped out. She looked at Agatha and said in farewell, ‘Don’t go making up stories to protect him. I did that. Different these days. If he’s bashing you, tell the police.’
    There was a murmur of approval from the other women.
    The bus moved off. It turned out to be a comprehensive tour of Cotswold villages as one geriatric after another was set down.
    Agatha was the last passenger. She felt dirty and weary as the bus rolled down into Carsely. ‘Where to?’ shouted the driver.
    ‘Left here,’ said Agatha. ‘Third cottage along on the left.’
    ‘Something going on,’ called the driver. ‘Big welcome. You been in the wars or something?’
    The ambulance stopped outside Agatha’s cottage. There was a big cheer. The band began to play ‘Hello Dolly.’ They were all there, all the village, and there was a banner hanging drunkenly over her doorway which said, WELCOME HOME.
    Mrs Bloxby was the first with a hug. Then the members of the Carsely Ladies’