Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet Read Online Free PDF Page A

long are you in London? I gather you are in London. Want to meet up?’
    ‘Maybe later,’ said Agatha. ‘Did you get married?’
    ‘No, why?’
    ‘What about that girl, what’s-her-name, you brought down to meet me?’
    ‘Ran off and left me for a lager lout.’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘I’m not,’ said Roy waspishly. ‘I can do better than that.’
    ‘Look, I’ll call you. I’ve got something to deal with first.’ Agatha said goodbye and put the phone down. Why hadn’t Jack said he was living just round the corner?
    She walked along to the end of Kynance Mews to 121 and pressed the bell.
    A thin, tweedy woman answered the door, the kind Agatha didn’t like, the kind who wore cultured pearls and green wellies in London.
    ‘Mr Pomfret?’ asked Agatha.
    ‘Mr Pomfret no longer lives here,’ said the woman acidly. ‘I bought the house from him. But I am not his secretary and I refuse to send any more letters on to him. All he needs to do is to pay a small amount of money to the post office in order to get his mail redirected.’
    ‘If you give me his address, I can take any letters to him,’ said Agatha.
    ‘Very well. Wait there and I’ll write it down.’
    Agatha stood in the freezing cold on the frost-covered cobbles of the mews. A skein of geese flew overhead on their way from the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens to St James’s Park. Her breath came out in a little cloud of steam in front of her face. Two dog lovers stood at the entrance to the mews and unleashed their animals, which peed their way down from door to door and then both squatted down and defecated, before the satisfied owners called them to heel. There was no more selfish animal lover than a Kensington animal lover, thought Agatha.
    ‘Here you are,’ said the woman, ‘and here’s the address.’ She handed Agatha a slip of paper and a pile of letters. Agatha thanked her and put the letters in her briefcase and then looked down in surprise at the address as the woman firmly closed the door: 8A Ramillies Crescent, Archway. Well, there were some mansions in Archway and some rich people left in that declining suburb, but 8A suggested a basement flat.
    She headed off to the Gloucester Road tube, and not wanting to make a lot of changes took the District Line to Embankment and then the Northern Line to Archway. Once she was settled on the Northern Line, she took out the letters. They were mostly junk mail but there was one from the income tax.
    Agatha’s heart sank down to her cold feet. Law-abiding, financially secure people were the ones that kept in touch with the Inland Revenue.
    She then took out a pocket atlas of London and looked up Ramillies Crescent, which was in a network of streets behind the hospital.
    Everyone at the main road junction in Archway at the exit to the tube looked depressed. You could, thought Agatha bleakly, take the lot and dump them on the streets of Moscow and no one would notice they were foreigners. She ploughed up the steep hill from the tube and turned off towards Ramillies Crescent when she got to the hospital.
    It turned out to be a run-down crescent of Victorian houses. No one here was obviously feeling the recession, for no one had ever got to any point from which to recess to .
    The gardens were untended and most of them had been concreted over to make space for some rusting car. Agatha arrived at Number 8. Sure enough, 8A was the basement flat. Edging her way around a broken pram which looked as if it had been thrown there rather than left to rot, she rang the doorbell. Marcia Pomfret, she vaguely remembered, was a statuesque blonde.
    At first she did not recognize Marcia in the woman who opened the door to her, a woman with a faded, lined face and black roots, who looked at her without a spark of recognition.
    ‘What are you selling?’ asked Marcia in a weary, nasal voice.
    Agatha made up her mind to lie. ‘I’m not selling anything,’ she said brightly. ‘Your name was given to me because I