Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet Read Online Free PDF

believe you and your husband lived in Spain. I am doing research for the Spanish government. They would like to know why various British families did not settle in Spain but returned.’
    Agatha scooped the clipboard and papers out of her briefcase and stood waiting.
    ‘You may as well come in,’ said Marcia. ‘I usually stand talking to the walls here, and that’s a fact.’
    She led the way into a dark living-room. Agatha’s sharp eyes recognized what she called landlord’s furniture and she sat down on a worn sofa in front of a low glass-and-chrome coffee-table.
    ‘Now,’ she said brightly, ‘what took you to Spain?’
    ‘It was my husband, Jack,’ said Marcia. ‘He’d always wanted to run a bar. Thought he could do it. So he sold the business and the house and we bought this little bar on the Costa Del Sol. He called it Home from Home. Made it British-like. San Miguel beer and steak-and-kidney pud. We had a little flat above the bar. Slave labour, it was. While he was out chatting up the birds in the bar, I was in the kitchen, wasn’t I, turning out those hot English meals when it was cooking-hot outside.’
    ‘And were you successful?’ asked Agatha, pretending to take notes.
    ‘Naw. We was just another English bar among all them other English bars. Couldn’t get help. The Spanish’ll only work for top wages. Nearly died with the heat, I did. “Soon it’ll be all right,” Jack said. “Spend the days on the beach and let someone do the work for us.” But the place never really got off the ground. Once the tourist season was over, that was that. I said to Jack he’d have been better to make it Spanish, get the locals and the better-class tourists who don’t come all this way for English muck, but would he listen? So we sold up and came back to nothing.’
    Agatha asked a few more questions about Spain and the Spanish to keep up the pretence. Then she put the clipboard away and rose to go. ‘I hope you will soon be on your feet again.’
    Marcia shrugged wearily and Agatha suddenly remembered what she had looked like ten years ago at a party, blonde and beautiful. Jack’s latest bimbo, they had called her, but he had married her.
    ‘Have you any children?’ Agatha asked.
    Marcia shook her head. ‘Just as well,’ she said sadly. ‘Wouldn’t want to bring them up here.’
    And just as well, indeed, thought Agatha miserably as she trailed off down the street. For when he finds I haven’t been suckered, he’ll search around for a new wife, and one with money this time. She remembered his letters and stopped beside a pillar-box, readdressed the lot and popped them in.
    Jack Pomfret was standing on the up escalator at Archway tube when he saw the stocky figure of Agatha Raisin on the down escalator and opened his copy of The Independent and hid behind it. He ran all the way home once he was out in the street.
    ‘Was that Raisin woman here?’ he demanded.
    ‘What Raisin woman?’ demanded Marcia. ‘There was only some woman from the Spanish government asking questions about British who had left Spain.’
    ‘What did she look like?’
    ‘Straight brown hair, small brown eyes, bit of a tan.’
    ‘You silly bitch, that was Agatha Raisin smelling out God knows what kind of rats. What did you tell her?’
    ‘I told her how we couldn’t make that bar work. How was I to know . . .’
    Jack paced up and down. The money he’d spent feeding that old cow at the Savoy! The money he’d paid to those two actor friends to impersonate businessmen! Perhaps he could still save something.
    Agatha packed up her stuff and left the rented flat for a new one, sacrificing the money she’d paid in advance. She moved to another rented service flat in Knightsbridge, behind Harrods. She would see a few shows and eat a few good restaurant meals before returning to that grave called Carsely.
    She knew Jack would come looking for her and she did not relish the confrontation, for like all people who have been