Agatha had quite forgotten that, through snobbery, she had hidden her low beginnings from James, always implying without actually saying so that she had come from a middle-class background and had been to a private school.
"How did I meet Jimmy?" Agatha sighed and put down her knife and fork and looked back down the long years.
"Let me see. I'd just escaped from home."
"Home being Birmingham?"
"Yes, one of those blocks of flats in what they now call the inner city but what they used to call a slum." She was so intent on her memories that she did not notice the flicker of surprise in James's blue eyes.
"Ma and Dad always seemed to be drunk. They wouldn't let me stay at school after I was fifteen, even though the teachers begged them to let me complete my education. They put me to work in a biscuit factory. God, the women seemed coarse, brutal. I was a skinny, sensitive little wimp then.
"I saved as much as I could and took off for London one night when my parents were both drunk. I was determined to be a secretary. The secretaries I had seen up in the offices of the biscuit factory looked fabulous creatures to me, compared to what I was working with on the shop floor. So I got a job as a waitress and went to a secretarial college in the evenings to learn shorthand and typing. I worked seven days a week, and my ambition was so great, I don't think my feet ached once. It wasn't a very classy restaurant. Classy restaurants only employed waiters in those days. It was a bit like one of the Lyon's Corner Houses. Good food but not French, if you know what I mean."
Her eyes grew dreamy. "Jimmy came in one night. He was with a rather tarty blonde, a bit older than he was. They seemed to be quarrelling. Then he started to flirt with me and that made her even angrier. I didn't think he was interested in me. I thought he was only doing it to get back at his girl-friend for something or other.
"But when I left by the back door that night after work, he was waiting for me. He said he would see me home. I had been working the evening shifts as well as the day ones while the secretarial college was closed for the summer vacation. He was very...merry. Very light-hearted. I'd never met anyone quite like Jimmy before.
"We got to my place, which was a bed-sit in Kilburn. I asked him where he lived and he said he had nowhere, because he had just been thrown out of his digs. I asked him where his stuff was and he said it was in the left luggage in Victoria Station. All he had in the world was one suitcase.
"I said he could sleep on the sofa just for one night. He did that. But the next day was a rare day off and we went to the zoo. Funny. I never liked zoos and I still don't, but I had been so very lonely and here I was with a handsome fellow of my own and it all seemed marvelous. Somehow it was agreed, I don't remember how, that he would move in with me. Of course he wanted to sleep with me, but the pill hadn't really got going in those days, and I was terrified of getting pregnant. He just laughed and said we'd get married. And so we did. We went to Blackpool on our honeymoon."
Agatha suddenly looked at James and realized that she had finally betrayed all the truth of her background. Then she gave a little shrug and went on.
"He got a job loading newspapers down in Fleet Street. I was still working as a waitress and going to the college. It took me a month of marriage to realize I had jumped right out of the frying-pan into the fire, that is, I had jumped from a drunken home life into marriage to a drunken husband.
"To this day, I don't know why he ever married me. I mean, he was very attractive to women. He began to hit me. I hit back because I was still thin but pretty wiry. And then, I wasn't drunk, and he was.
"He lost his job and drifted from one to another after that, but mostly was out of work. I stuck it for two years. But I'd landed a job in a public relations firm as a secretary and I wanted money for good clothes and I wouldn't keep him in drink any more. I came back one evening and he was lying on the bed, snoring, with his mouth open. On the mat the post was lying unopened and in the post was a package of literature from Alcoholics Anonymous that I'd sent for. I pinned it on his chest, packed my things and left.
"He knew where I worked and I fully expected him to come after me, looking for money. But he never came. Gradually the years went by and I was really sure he was dead. I thought no one could drink that much and go on living. Ambition took over completely. So what did I know of Jimmy? He had great charm. Hard for you to believe now. When I first met him, he had a way of making me feel like the only woman in the world that mattered, and he was the only man in my life who ever made me feel pretty. He never said anything clever and his jokes were always feeble, but before it all went sour, he made me feel good, made me feel exhilarated, as if the world was a funny place where nothing much mattered." Agatha heaved a little sigh. "Will the real Jimmy Raisin stand up? I don't know. At first, after each drinking bout he would be genuinely contrite. Oh, I know. He always talked about making money and he was always sure he would make it. I suppose he lived on dreams."
"And I gather," said James harshly, "that he was a budding con artist when you met him. Too lazy to work. He got a taste through you of the benefits of being kept by a woman. You had got wise to him. So he probably sobered up just long enough to get some other female involved. What you have described, Agatha, is a greedy, selfish man. A natural blackmailer."
"I suppose I've told you nothing you didn't know already," said Agatha in a small voice.
"Not really. Except I did not know that you had such a hard life."
"Did I? Ambition is a great drug, you know. I just forged ahead the whole time. Never really looked back at yesterday. Anyway, to get back to this murder, or murders. It must be one of the people that Jimmy met at the health farm. I've come back to that idea. I wish that Comfort woman hadn't escaped us. I think she was lying to us."
"There was certainly something about our visit that sent her running off to Spain," said James. "Then there's her ex. He was very truculent."
"But he wasn't even at the health farm," protested Agatha. "How would he know what Jimmy and Miss Purvey looked like?"
"It could be the something that Gloria wasn't telling us. Perhaps Jimmy didn't write to Mr. Comfort. Perhaps he called on him."
"Fine. So what about Miss Purvey?"
"If Miss Purvey's murder was not connected to Jimmy's, it might make the field wider."
"I think our only hope is that Roy's detective might find something in that bag that the mysterious Lizzie took."
Agatha sneezed.
"Are you getting a cold?" asked James.
"I don't know. I might have a bit of a chill. That church hall was freezing today during the concert."
"Home and bed, then. We'll think some more about it tomorrow."
As they were driving down into Carsely, a car passed them going the other way. James braked suddenly. "I think that was Helen Warwick! She must have been to see us."
"To see you, you mean," said Agatha.
"I'd better catch up with her." James swung the wheel around.
"What for?" demanded Agatha as they began to race back up the way Helen Warwick had taken. "You said she had nothing more to tell us."
"But she must have had, for why did she come all this way to see us?"
"To murder us in our beds," said Agatha gloomily.
All the way down the hill and towards Moreton-in-Marsh, James looked ahead for Helen's car. She had been driving a BMW. He saw one ahead at the first roundabout in Moreton. They managed to catch up with it on the Oxford Road, only to find that the driver was an elderly man, not Helen Warwick.