'Oh, they both happened to be in town for some business meeting.'

"And what do you really know about this Jack Pomfret? You're not just going to hand over any money or anything like that?'

'I'm not stupid/ said Agatha, angry now, for she was beginning to think she was.

'A good way to find out about people/ said Bill, 'is to call at their home. You can usually get an idea of how flush they are from where they live and what the wife is like.'

'So you think I should spy on him? And you're always telling me I don't know how to mind my own business/ 'I think you're a Nosy Parker when you don't

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have to be and touchingly naive when you do have to be/ said Bill.

Took, copper, I ran a successful business for years/ 'Maybe Ca.r.s.ely's made you forget what an evil place the world can be/ 'What? After all that murder and mayhem?'

'Different sort of thing/ 'Well, I've finished with Ca.r.s.ely/ There was an amused chuckle from the other end of the phone. 'That's what you think/ Agatha settled down with a coffee and cigarette to go through the papers Jack had given her again. Did he really expect her just to hand over a cheque without seeing his equal contribution? The new cat and Hodge were chasing each other over the furniture, the stray seeming to have recovered amazingly.

Agatha opened her briefcase and found a clipboard and put the papers on it. She phoned Roy Silver, the young man who had once worked for her.

'Aggie, love/ his voice lilted down the line. 'I was thinking of coming down to see you. What are you up to?'

'I need some help. Do you remember Jack Pomfret?'

'Vaguely/ 'You wouldn't happen to have an address for him?'

'As a matter of fact I have, sweetie. I pinched

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your business address book when I left. Don't squawk! You'd probably have forgotten about it. Let me see ... aha, 121, Kynance Mews, Kensington. Do you want the phone number?'

'I've got that, but it doesn't seem like a Kensington one. Never mind. I'll walk round. It's only round the corner.'

'How 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

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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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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

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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 s.p.a.ce for some rusting car. Agatha arrived at Number 8. Sure enough, 8A was the bas.e.m.e.nt 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.

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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. Tm not selling anything/ she said brightly. 'Your name was given to me because I 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. 1 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 gla.s.s-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

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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-cla.s.s 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. 1 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.

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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 b.i.t.c.h, that was Agatha Raisin smelling out G.o.d 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

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impersonate businessmen! Perhaps he could still fc 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 Ca.r.s.ely.

She knew Jack would come looking for her and she did not relish the confrontation, for like all people who have been tricked, she felt ashamed of her own gullibility.

So when Jack Pomfret, sweating lightly despite the cold, called at her old flat, he did not find anyone there. The owners did not know she had left, for she had not returned her keys, and a.s.sumed she was out, and so Jack called and called desperately in the ensuing days until even he had to admit to himself that there was little hope of getting any money out of Agatha Raisin.

Apart from going to shows and restaurants, Agatha took the new cat to the Emergency Veterinary Clinic in Victoria, learned it was female, got it its shots, named it Boswell despite its gender, with some idea of keeping up the literary references, and decided that two cats were as easy to keep as one.

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One evening, walking home from the theatre through Leicester Square, she was just priding herself at how easily she fitted back into city life when a youth tried to seize her handbag. Agatha hung on like grim death, finally managing to land a hefty kick on her a.s.sailant's shins. He ran off. Pa.s.sers-by stared at her curiously but no one asked her if she was all right. When one lived in town, thought Agatha, one became street-wise, developed an instinct for danger. But in sleepy Ca.r.s.ely, where she often did not bother to lock her car at night, such instincts had gone. She walked on purposefully, striding out with a confident step which declared, don't mug me, I'm loaded for bear, the step of the street-wise.

At the end of a week, she headed back to Ca.r.s.ely, carrying two cat baskets this time.

For the first time, she had an odd feeling of coming home. It was a sunny day, with a faint hint of warmth in the air. Snowdrops were fluttering shyly at village doorsteps.