‘Where are we going?’ asked Toni breathlessly as she got into the back seat of Agatha’s car.
‘The Mircester and General Bank,’ said Agatha. She explained rapidly about the key.
They all got out of the car and entered the bank, which stood between two shuttered shops. More failed businesses, thought Agatha. Town high streets are dying and all because we’ve become lazy and prefer to do our shopping in one go at one of the big supermarkets on the outskirts. It was also the fault of various councils who had a penchant for turning high streets into pedestrian areas and then charging high fees for parking at the nearest available car park. No one wanted to walk any more, carrying heavy bags of groceries and moving from little shop to little shop. Maybe in the end, high streets would be turned into museums with people in twentieth-century dress parading up and down.
Agatha asked to speak to the manager. They were told to wait.
Snow began to patter against the high windows. I should have bought snow tyres, mourned Agatha, but they’d take so long to arrive at the garage, and surely spring would come soon.
At last they were summoned to the manager’s office. He was small, balding and fussy.
After Amy had explained her visit, he examined the will, the passport and the key with maddening slowness, occasionally shaking his head and murmuring, ‘Dear, dear.’
Agatha, who had been painfully trying to practice tolerance, burst out with, ‘What? What’s taking you so long? How long are we supposed to sit here waiting while you procrastinate?’
‘I have tae be sure,’ he said crossly. ‘There are a lot o’ bad, bad people about. Oh, yes.’
‘You’re not from Auchtermuchty, or one of these godforsaken places?’
‘I am from Stornoway and proud o’ it. I will get Gladys to take ye to the safe-deposit box.’ He pressed a buzzer on his desk.
A blonde, so pale she looked as if she had been bleached all over, told them to follow her. They descended stairs to a cavernous basement. Gladys opened one of the doors with two keys.
‘What is the number of the box?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ wailed Amy.
Back up the stairs again to wait for the manager, Mr Macleod. Then much humming and hawing and form signing before the number was released. Gladys appeared again like a pale ghost leading them to the nether regions. ‘You just shut the outside door behind you when you leave,’ she said. ‘It will lock automatically.’ She pulled out the box and set it on a metal table in the middle of the room and then left them to it. Agatha drew out three pairs of latex gloves and said they’d better put them on.
‘Here, you do it.’ Amy handed Agatha the key.
Agatha unlocked the box and opened the lid.
The three women stared down at the contents in amazement. There were four passports, all in different names but all bearing the late Gary Beech’s photograph. A pair of underpants, which Agatha unwrapped, revealed a small pistol. All that was left in the box was a small leather bag with a drawstring top. Toni opened it and peered in and then shook some of the contents out on her hand.
‘Pebbles,’ said Amy bitterly. ‘What’s he doing putting nasty dirty stones in a safe-deposit box?’
‘Wait a bit,’ said Toni excitedly. ‘I think they’re uncut diamonds. I saw a programme on diamonds, and this is what they look like in the raw. We’d better take them to the police. They could be conflict diamonds.’
‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Agatha crossly, forgetting that she had resolved to be sweetness and light to Toni on every occasion.
‘Conflict diamonds or blood diamonds are used to fund rebel groups in places like Sierra Leone or Angola.’
‘But what on earth would a village copper be doing getting involved in anything at all going on in Africa?’ asked Agatha.
‘Probably nothing,’ said Toni. ‘Maybe just a criminal payoff for something. We’d better take this lot to the police.’
‘Must we?’ said Amy. ‘I mean, if they’re rough, they could be polished up by a jeweller friend of mine.’
‘No,’ said Agatha firmly. ‘They’ve got to be examined by the police.’
Amy’s eyes were suddenly as hard as the uncut diamonds. ‘First, it’s my property, see? I’m taking it and that’s that.’
‘We’ll have to report it nonetheless,’ said Toni.
‘Don’t rate your lives very high, do you?’ sneered Amy.
‘You knew what Gary was up to all along,’ said Agatha. ‘Out with it!’
‘Get stuffed. You’re fired.’ Amy swept everything into a capacious handbag and marched out.
‘Right,’ said Agatha as Amy flagged down a cab outside the bank. ‘We’d better get to police headquarters.’
‘I think we should follow her,’ said Toni.
‘Why? She’s got a cosy marriage with a rich husband.’
‘I think she only married him because he was rich, and it does appear he’s a bit of a bastard.’
Agatha wanted to argue but remembered in time that Toni’s value as a detective was often her clear and practical view of things. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what she’s going to do.’
But when they arrived at Amy’s house, her car had gone and the house had an empty air.
They waited an hour or so, and then Toni said, ‘I think, after all, we’d better go to the police. My bet is she’s not going near that husband of hers.’
Agatha was sick and tired of being interrogated by the time she left the police station and dropped Toni off at her flat. The gritters had been out, as a supply of salt had arrived from abroad, so she was able to make it back to her cottage without slipping. There was a note for her on the kitchen table from Charles: ‘Can’t stand this beastly weather. Gone to the South of France. Luv, Charles.’
Agatha, still worried about Toni, felt lonely. She called the vicarage but was told that Mrs Bloxby was visiting a relative in Bexhill in Sussex. She then phoned Roy Silver to see whether he would like to visit at the weekend, but he said he was going to a simply fabulous party and wouldn’t be free.
Her cats were sleeping peacefully. The house seemed unnaturally quiet.
She felt in the need of action. There was a bag of empty cans of various sorts on the kitchen floor, along with a crate of empty bottles. The council had supplied householders with black boxes for the tin cans and the bottles, but Agatha had lost both. She would take them down to Tesco’s supermarket in Stow-on-the-Wold and dump the lot in their special bins and then draw some money from the hole in the wall. The snow was light and looked as if it were about to slacken off. A thin disk of a moon was appearing behind the clouds. The village of Carsely was shrouded in snow, wrapped in snow and wrapped in silence. Agatha glanced at her watch. It was just after midnight.
She drove down to the back of the supermarket. The bottles went into the bins with the satisfying sound of breaking glass. Must be a hooligan inside all of us, thought Agatha.
Then she got rid of the tin cans. She drove carefully round to the cash machine, bumping over the ruts of frozen snow. Supermarket car parks were private property, and she had been told that if they cleared them themselves and someone slipped and fell, they would have to pay compensation. But if someone slipped and fell in the uncleared car park, it was their own bloody fault.
She parked in front of the cash machine. Beside the cash machine and beyond a stack of supermarket trolleys were two rides for small children. One periodically emitted bursts of supposedly childish laughter, but Agatha thought it sounded more like malicious elves watching someone come to grief.
She drew out a hundred pounds and was just tucking it away in her wallet when her eye caught what looked like a heap of clothes lying between the two small rides for children.