Mrs. Freedman, Agatha’s secretary, who handled most of the company admin, stepped forward to offer her a blue plastic document wallet. A middle-aged woman with a kindly expression, Helen Freedman was hard-working and efficient, and appeared to know by instinct precisely when Agatha wanted either a cup of coffee in the morning, a cup of tea in the afternoon, or a gin and tonic whenever.
“Some invoices for you to approve,” she said, “a couple of letters to sign, and can I remind you that you need to submit your expenses?”
“Thank you, Helen,” said Agatha. “I’ll sort that out later today. All right, everyone! Case conference catch-up in my office in ten minutes.”
She crossed the open area to her own separate office, pushing open the door. The small room was dominated by a huge wooden desk that had aspirations to being Georgian but, sadly, had been made three hundred years too late. She dropped the blue wallet on the desk beside her large cut-glass ashtray. It had been several months since she had last smoked a cigarette and at one time she had banished all ashtrays to drawers and cupboards, keeping the smoking accoutrements out of sight and out of mind. This one, however, she retained as a kind of trophy, now used only as a paperweight, the glass sparkling clean, a reminder of her triumph over tobacco.
Settling into her chair, she took a copy of the local newspaper from her bag and unfolded it. “Society Wedding of the Year,” announced the headline. “Sir Charles Fraith to marry in lavish ceremony at Barfield House.” Agatha sighed. So much fuss. Charles’s vile fiancée, Mary Darlinda Brown-Field, was making sure that her wedding was being splashed across the pages of every rag whose editor she could charm, coax, buy or bully. The article was accompanied by a photograph of them together. Charles had a vague, haunted expression, while Mary—well, the giant chin she had inherited from her father and the eyes that were set just a little too far apart meant that she would never win the Mircester Maids beauty contest. Yet the way she was holding on to Charles’s arm demonstrated her determination to make this the biggest wedding ever covered by the Mircester Telegraph.
It wasn’t even as if Charles hadn’t previously had a lavish ceremony at Barfield House. Agatha had scuppered that one by turning up with the Spanish waiter who was the rightful father of the pregnant bride’s unborn child. This time, however, there seemed no way of stopping Charles from plunging himself into a life of misery. This was a marriage of convenience, a financial transaction that he saw as a way of propping up his ailing estate. Yet the bride’s family’s money could never buy them that which they craved—the social status denied them by their lowly pedigree. The marriage was a sham, and Agatha worried that Charles risked losing control of the house and estate that had been in his family for generations. Yet she had made little effort to extricate him from this latest predicament, and now there was no time. The wedding was on Saturday—only forty-eight hours away.
Her staff filed into her office carrying cups of coffee and dragging chairs close to her desk. Mrs. Freedman provided Agatha with a coffee, then returned to the outer office.
Toni sat closest to Agatha. She glanced at the newspaper lying on the desk and reached out to turn it towards her in order to read the smaller print. Agatha placed the blue document wallet on top of it and Toni looked up to see her boss staring impassively at her. She glanced away and sipped her coffee. Clearly the wedding was not a topic for open discussion.
“Right,” said Agatha. “Let’s start with the Chadwick divorce case. You’ve been keeping tabs on Mrs. Sheraton Chadwick, Simon. What sort of woman are we dealing with?”
“She has the look of someone who likes a bit of rumpy-pumpy, if you know what I mean,” said Simon, grinning and cocking an eyebrow.
“I’m not sure that I do know what you mean,” said Agatha innocently. “Have you any ideas, Toni?”
“Rumpy-pumpy? I can’t be certain,” said Toni, taking her cue from Agatha and adopting a naïvely perplexed expression, “but it sounds like one of those phrases they used in old British black-and-white movies.”
“Ah, yes,” Agatha agreed. “Like ‘slap and tickle’ or ‘hanky-panky.’ Simon, do you mean that she seemed to you like the sort of woman who might enjoy an enthusiastic illicit sex life?”
“Yes,” said Simon, squirming slightly. Patrick Mulligan raised a hand to his mouth to cover one of his rare smiles. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Agatha placed the palms of her hands on her desk and leaned forward slightly, fixing Simon with her dark bear-like eyes. “Let’s keep the language we use at meetings a bit more formal, shall we? If we get sloppy when discussing cases, there’s every chance one of us might slip up when talking to a client and say something out of turn. We can’t have people thinking that we treat our work like some kind of joke. That would definitely be bad for business.”
“Sorry,” Simon apologised, sitting up straight, a slight flush colouring his cheeks. “I will watch how I … um … phrase things in the future.”
“Good,” said Agatha. “How has the surveillance been going?”
“I haven’t had much luck yet. Mrs. Chadwick has been visited by a bloke at a rented house in Oxford.”
“And do you have photographs of this … bloke?”
“I’ve seen him, but I could never get a shot of his face that could be used to identify him,” Simon admitted. “I did get the number of the car that dropped him off and picked him up, but he’s out of the vehicle and into the house like a flash.”
“Okay, let’s move on,” said Agatha. “Patrick, where are we with the Philpott Electronics case?”
“The company chairman, Sidney Philpott, has concerns about his new managing director, Harold Cheeseman,” said Patrick, sliding a manila folder across the desk. “He has asked us to carry out a discreet background check. So far Cheeseman’s CV and references all appear to be genuine. He left his last job to take up a post in Australia, but told Mr. Philpott that he came back because Australia was not to his wife’s liking. He’s definitely lying about that.”
“What makes you say that?” Agatha asked, flicking through the report.
“His wife is dead,” Patrick explained. “She died long before he left for Australia. That was one of his reasons for going—to make a fresh start.”
“It’s a weird thing to lie about,” said Agatha.
“He may have his reasons,” Patrick conceded, “but I’m not at all sure about him. From the way the staff say he has been acting at work, there’s something odd going on. I’ve sent a couple of emails to Australia to find out what he got up to there, and I’m tracking down some of his old friends here.”
“Okay,” said Agatha. “Stay on it.”
There was a handful of other ongoing cases to discuss, mainly divorces and missing pets, before Agatha turned to Toni.
“So, Toni,” she said. “Any potential new cases that I haven’t yet heard about?”
“We have been contacted by a Mr. Gutteridge, who runs a biscuit and cake factory near Evesham,” said Toni. “He wants us to install listening devices in the workers’ canteen because he thinks the staff are saying nasty things about him and his secretary.”