“No starter? Oh well, I’ll have a ham salad.”

“They can’t have anything described simply as ham salad.”

“It’s described as South Sea Roast pig, sliced and on a bed of crunchy salad with Hard Tack croutons.”

“Oh. Wine?”

“Why not?”

Charles signalled to the waiter, ordered their meals and a carafe of house wine.

“No vintage for me?” asked Agatha.

“I wouldn’t bother in a place like this.”

“So why did you bring me to a place like this?”

“God, you’re sour this evening, Agatha. Am I to assume that James is not around?”

“No, he’s away somewhere.”

“And didn’t even say goodbye? Yes, I can see by the look on your face.”

“Men are so immature.”

“That’s what you women always throw at us.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“It’s a necessary part of the masculine make-up. It enables us to dream greater dreams and bring them about. Have you ever wondered why all the great inventors are men?”

“Because women never had a chance.”

“Wrong. Women are pragmatic. They have to be to bring up children. 1 shall illustrate what I mean with a story.” He rested his chin on his hands and gazed dreamily across at her.

“A chap goes to Cambridge University. The girls there terrify him and they’re only interested in rugger-buggers anyway and he’s the academic type. So he falls in love with a fluffy little barmaid, and gets her pregnant and marries her. He gets a first in physics but he has to support his new family, so he takes a job in an insurance office and there he is, up to his neck in a mortgage and car payments and the wife has twins. A few years pass and he begins to spend every weekend down in the garden shed. Wife begins to whine and complain. ‘We never see you. Sharon and Tracey are missing their dad. What are you doing?’ At last he tells her. He’s building a time machine. Then the shit hits the fan. Will this pay the bills? she rages at him. The Joneses next door have a new deep freeze. When are they going to get one? And so on. So he locks himself into his shed and hammers away while she screams outside.

“Well, he builds his time machine and becomes a billionaire and runs off with a little bit of fluff in the office who is the only woman who really understands him and has supported him, which of course she has, not knowing one word he’s been talking about, but likes the excitement of being involved with a married man. He divorces his wife and marries the office girl and the money goes to her head and she joins the Eurotrash and runs off with a racing driver and they all live unhappily ever after. And the moral of that is, men and women are different and should start to accept the differences.”

Agatha laughed. “Couldn’t he have escaped in his time machine?”

“Of course not. He got billions to destroy it. Can’t have people zipping around the centuries and messing up history.”

“I never know if you’re a male chauvinist oink or just being funny.”

“I’m never funny. Look at the wrinkles on my forehead, Aggie. Product of deep thought. So what about you? No nice, juicy murders?”

“Nothing at all. I am yesterday’s sleuth.”

“I should have thought your experiences in Cyprus would have given you enough death and mayhem for life.”

Cyprus. Where she had passed a night with Charles and James had found out about it and things had never been the same again. Agatha would not admit to herself that her relationship with James had been on the rocks for a long time before that.

Charles watched the shadow fall across her eyes and said gently. “It wouldn’t have worked, you know. James is a twenty-per-cent person.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“It’s like this. You are an eighty-five-per-cent person and James only gives twenty percent. It’s not a case of won’t, it’s a case of can’t. A lot of men are like that but women will never understand. They go on giving. And they think if they go to bed with the twenty-per-center, and they give that last fifteen per cent, they’ll miraculously wake up next to a hundred-per-center. Wrong. If they wake up next to him anyway, it’ll be a miracle. Probably find a note on the pillow saying, ‘Gone home to feed the dog,’ or something like that.”

Agatha remembered nights with James and mornings when he was always up first, when he never referred to the night before or hugged her or kissed her.

“Maybe I was just the wrong woman,” she conceded.

“Trust me, dearest. Any woman is the wrong woman for James.”

“Perhaps I would have been happy to settle for twenty per cent.”

“Liar. Here’s our food.”

To Agatha’s surprise, the ham was delicious and the salad fresh and crisp.

“So we’re never to go detecting again?” Charles asked, pouring ketchup on his chips.

“I can’t go around finding bodies to brighten up my life.”

“No more public relations work?”

“None. All my efforts are going towards providing tea and cakes for the ladies of Ancombe.”

“You’ll stir something up, Aggie. No new men on the horizon?”

“One very gorgeous man.”

“Who?”

“My hairdresser.”

“Ah, the one that’s responsible for the new elegance.”

“Him.”

“Hairdressers are fickle. I remember… Never mind.”

“What about your love life, Charles?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

They passed the meal reminiscing about their adventures in Cyprus and then he drove her home.

“Am I going to stay the night?” asked Charles as they stood together on Agatha’s doorstep.

“No, Charles, I’m not into casual sex.”

“Who says it would be casual?”

“Charles, you demonstrated in Cyprus that I am nothing more than a temporary amusement to you. Has it ever dawned on you that you might be a twenty-per-center yourself?”

“Ouch! But think on this, Aggie. Any eighty-five-percenter who hangs around with twenty-per-centers is just as afraid of commitment.”

He waved to her and went off to his car.

Agatha let herself in, feeling flat. No messages on the phone for her. And what had Bill Wong been thinking of not to phone her?

The sensible thing would be to phone him, and yet Agatha dreaded the idea of finding out she had lost the affection of her first friend.

Life went on. She had to keep moving. Perhaps she would accept Mr. John’s invitation after all.

THE heat mounted. Ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit was recorded at Pershore in Worcester. Incidents of road rage mounted, tar melted on the roads, and Agatha Raisin longed for her old shorter haircut.

She realized that the reason she had not the courage to ask for it to be cut was in case she was accused of having low self-worth. Having come to this conclusion, Agatha decided it was all too ridiculous and made another appointment with Mr. John. Back to Evesham, where the women had swapped their leggings for shorts. Acres of white, mottled flesh gleamed in the sunlight.

The hairdresser’s was as busy as ever. Mr. John had two male assistants, one female, and two juniors. Agatha asked if she could use the toilet. The window at the back of the toilet was open to a little weedy yard.

Then Agatha heard a woman whisper urgently, “I can’t go on. You’ve got to let me off the hook.”

There was the answering mumble of a man’s voice.

“I’ll kill you!” shouted the woman, suddenly and violently.

Agatha poked her head out of the window, but she could not make out where the voices had come from.

She went back into the salon, had her hair washed and then braced herself to tell Mr. John that she wanted her hair cut short. She found herself wrapped into that anxiety of writing scripts of “I’ll say and then he’ll say.” It was the lawn-mower syndrome.

Mr. Jones goes out to mow the lawn but finds his lawn-mower has broken down. “Why don’t you ask that nice Mr. Smith next door if you can borrow his?” suggests his wife.