Chapter One
He was naked.
Some people are easily shocked. Agatha Raisin would never count herself as one of those people. She was a private detective, after all—no wilting flower, no timid swooner, no feeble faint-heart. She was made of sterner stuff. Yet even she was a little taken aback. She blinked hard, but when she opened her eyes, he was still there, still naked, in the altogether, not a stitch on, in his birthday suit, in the buff—totally nude. It’s not the sort of thing Agatha would normally have expected to see as her assistant was driving her along a quiet country lane and, while not admitting, even to herself, that she was shocked, she was certainly … perplexed.
“Agatha…” Toni said, slowing the car to a halt, “are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
“If you’re seeing a naked young man running down the middle of the road towards us,” Agatha replied, unable to tear her eyes away from the spectacle, “then, yes—I’m seeing everything.”
The man ran to the driver’s side of the car and squatted low, presenting his face, rather than anything else, at the window while knocking urgently on the glass.
“What should I do?” Toni asked, turning to Agatha with a look of panic on her face. “I mean, he could be a carjacker or something. There might be more of them.”
“A naked carjacking gang?” Agatha raised her eyebrows. “I think that would be a first. Wind down the window, Toni. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
“I know it looks a bit strange…” said the young man as the window slid down.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” said Agatha. “It all looked perfectly fine to me.”
“I mean me not having any clothes on,” the young man said quickly, still catching his breath from his dash down the road.
“Let me guess,” said Agatha. “A bigger boy stole them and ran away?”
“Please let me explain,” he said. “I need your help. I just found a dead body up in those woods!”
Agatha stared at him. His clear blue eyes were sharp with fear and the tremble in his voice came from more than just running.
“Get him something to cover himself up with, Toni,” said Agatha. “We need to find out what this is all about.”
“Really?” said Toni. “What if he’s lying?”
“I’ve been lied to by many men,” Agatha said slowly, “and I pride myself on having learned to tell precisely when a man is lying—especially the naked ones.”
“If you say so,” Toni said with a sigh, casting around the car for something the young man could use as a cover-up. Her eyes settled on Agatha’s hat in the back seat. They were on their way to a wedding—their friends Bill Wong and Alice Peters were tying the knot—and Agatha had agonised over her choice of hat, eventually settling on a deep blue silk skullcap adorned with delicate blue-and-silver silk flowers and surrounded by orbiting swirls of feather-like silk fronds. Toni had gone against Agatha’s advice and chosen not to wear a hat.
“No,” Agatha said firmly when she saw where Toni was looking. “He’s not using my fascinator as some kind of codpiece.”
Toni reached under her seat to produce an old, over-sized T-shirt that she used for wiping the windscreen.
“Here,” she said, passing it out of the window. “Maybe you can put your legs through the arms and … no … everything would drop out of the neck…”
“Just cover yourself up,” Agatha said, a sharp note of impatience in her voice, “and get in. I want to see where you found the body. You can tell us how you ended up in this state on the way.”
The young man wrapped, tied and held the T-shirt in place as a makeshift loincloth, then sat nervously in the back of the car. Toni drove on.
“Start from the beginning,” said Agatha. “Tell us who you are and what’s happened.”
“My name is Edward Carstairs,” the young man began. “I’m the social convenor of the Mircester Naturist Society. Take the next turning on the right and you’ll come to our clubhouse pavilion.”
Toni swung the car across the road and through a gate onto a gravel track that snaked through the dappled shade of tall oak and beech trees, opening out into an area that appeared to be a car park. A red hatchback was parked in front of a single-storey wooden building, which, apart from the red-tiled roof, looked like a giant log cabin.
“I came here earlier today to start preparing for our annual barbecue and put our emergency contingency plan in motion,” Edward explained.
“Your emergency what?” Toni asked. “What were you all planning?”
“Today’s going to be sunny,” said Edward. “Tomorrow it’s going to rain. I started a phone chain to let people know the barbecue’s being brought forward from tomorrow afternoon to this afternoon. I phone two people, they phone two people and so on—all of our members then know within minutes.”
“Sounds very efficient,” Toni said, “but why not just send an email or text?”
“It’s Saturday, so not all of our members will look at an email, and not all of them are comfortable with messaging, but emails and texts were also sent.”
“Yes, yes, that all makes perfect sense,” Agatha said, turning to face Edward but finding the sight of him clutching a T-shirt around his groin so awkward that she immediately faced forwards again, “but where does a dead body fit in? And where are your clothes?”
“My clothes are inside,” said Edward, “in the male changing room. I’ll go grab my shorts and my phone. I need to call the police.”
“I think you should let us have a look…” Agatha began, but Edward was already out of the car, bounding bare-buttocked up the pavilion steps, having left Toni’s T-shirt on the back seat.
“I take it that’s not what you wanted us to have a look at,” said Toni, watching Edward’s naked form disappearing into the building.
“No, I thought it would be a good idea to make sure that someone wasn’t playing some kind of practical joke on him before we called the boys in blue.”
“Still, he’s not difficult to look at, is he?” Toni commented, stepping out of the car, her eyes still on the front door of the building. “I mean—he’s fit, good muscle tone, nice tan. Funny little birthmark on his left hip.”
“You had a good look, didn’t you?” Agatha commented, walking towards the pavilion with Toni.
“We’re detectives,” Toni said in her defence. “I was using my observational skills.”
“So what colour were his eyes?”
“Um…”
“Maybe you should have looked at his face, Toni. Then you’d recognise him with his clothes on.”
Agatha pushed open one of the large, glass-panelled oak doors and they entered a spacious, square vestibule. To their right was a door marked “Witches” and to their left one marked “Wizards.” Toni studied the signs with a puzzled expression but Agatha was more interested in the full-length mirror that took up all of the wall beyond the “Wizards” door. She smoothed her bob of glossy brown hair, checked her lipstick and admired the way that her dress was hanging wrinkle-free, even after sitting in the car.
She was extremely proud of the way her dress fitted, having dieted mercilessly and exercised furiously leading up to the wedding in order to achieve the flattest stomach she’d had in years, when she remembered to suck it in a bit. She did so, turning sideways to watch how the open frill that ran from the calf-length hem up to her hip tousled, then settled. Agatha was of the opinion that only women with a good, shapely figure could wear a dress like this. It was off the shoulder but not cut too low, with a tight bodice and a skirt that flared out from the waist.
She glanced at Toni, who was peeking through the door marked “Witches.” She could never get away with this dress. She was beautiful, of course, in that blonde-haired, blue-eyed sort of way, but she was too straight-up-and-down—too skinny. This dress was definitely for the more chic, slightly more mature woman.
“It’s off West Carsely Lane,” came Edward’s voice as he appeared from the “Wizards” door with his phone clamped to his ear and a pair of shorts now covering his magic wand. “Yes, a dead body. I know what I saw! Please hurry!”
“I was hoping you would let us confirm what you’d found before you called the police,” Agatha said as Edward rang off. “We have a great deal of experience in these matters and we’re on good terms with the local officers. We’re actually on our way to the wedding of Detective Sergeant Bill Wong and Detective Constable Alice Peters. I’m Agatha Raisin, private detective and proprietor of Raisin Investigations. This my colleague, Toni Gilmour.”
“Agatha Raisin—yes, of course!” Edward said, recognition dawning on his face. “I’ve seen you in the Mircester Telegraph. You’re the one who caught the gang that was selling endangered animals.”
“If you know who I am,” Agatha said, “then you know that it would be a good idea to let us take a look at the body. Lead on.”
They followed Edward through an archway opposite the main doors that led into a bar and function area, where there was a dance floor around which were arranged tables and chairs. French windows then opened onto a patio extending out to a well-tended lawn bordered by flowerbeds bursting with the varied, vibrant summer colours of roses, dahlias and geraniums. To one side of the lawn was a swimming pool and to the other a tennis court.
“I had some time to spare,” Edward explained, motioning them to follow him down onto the lawn. Agatha slipped off her high-heeled sandals. She was not fond of walking barefoot, but she knew how easily heels could dig into a lawn. The heels were elegant, but elegance evaporated along with dignity should a heel snap and send you sprawling on your face. “I decided to take a closer look at the Lone Warrior.”
“What’s the Lone Warrior?” asked Toni.
“It’s a huge, ancient stone slab in a clearing in the woods at the far end of our grounds,” said Edward. “They say it was once used for human sacrifices. That’s where I saw the body. It was sitting on the stone.”
“Just sitting there?” said Agatha, wincing slightly when she stepped off the grass onto a vague path at the edge of the woods where pebbles, twigs, spiky leaves and other forest-floor debris alien to the tender soles of a city girl’s feet lay in ambush. Toni was wearing flat shoes and a look of sympathy. Agatha gritted her teeth and marched on, sandals in one hand, clutch bag in the other.
“Not actually sitting,” said Edward, “more sort of crouching, all hunched over with his face in his hands. It’s just through here and…”
They walked into a clearing, the sun streaming down between the treetops to create a brightly lit patch on the forest floor. In the middle of the pool of sunlight stood a weathered grey stone. It was three feet tall and six feet long with a flat top wide enough to lie on … but nothing lay there. There was no crouched, hunched body on the stone. It sat empty and still in the glade with only the chattering of chaffinch and blackcap in the treetops subverting the silence.
“It’s gone!” Edward gasped, looking around in desperation as he approached the stone. “I swear it was here! You have to believe me!”
“I believe you saw something here,” said Agatha, studying the stone, “but in my experience a dead body does not get up and walk away. What exactly did you see here? How close did you get?”
“I saw a man’s body, naked, crouching with his face in his hands,” Edward replied, continuing to look around as if the body might somehow appear at the base of a tree or in a stand of ferns. “I knew he was dead because the back of his head was all bashed in. There was matted blood in his hair and when I reached out to touch his shoulder, he was stone cold.”
“Yet this stone is not cold,” Agatha said, laying her hand on the Lone Warrior, “and there’s a damp patch in the middle—a little puddle of water.”
“Where did that come from?” Toni asked. “It hasn’t rained for days.”
“It’s difficult to make out any footprints among all the leaves and weeds,” Agatha noted, examining the area around the stone, “but that looks like it might be a tyre track.”
“A single tyre track?” Toni said with a frown. “Maybe a motorbike?”
“I didn’t hear any motorbike,” Edward said. “The thing that spooked me was when I heard a mobile phone ring just as I touched the body. Obviously it wasn’t my own phone…”
“No pockets,” said Toni.
“No trousers,” said Agatha.
“… and I thought that the killers might be lurking in the trees, so I ran,” Edward went on. “I ran in that direction.” He pointed. “Through the trees, over a fence and out onto the road.”
“Are there any other ways out of here?” Agatha asked.
“I suppose there must be,” Edward replied, “but I’m not really sure. I’ve only been down here a couple of times and I’ve always gone back to the pavilion from here.”
“There are various paths through the woods,” said Toni, studying her phone, on which she had called up an aerial view of the area. “They appear to lead to tracks that run down to the road we were on as well as a couple of other minor roads heading in the direction of Mircester.”
“So, anyone hiding in the woods watching you,” Agatha pondered, scanning the treeline all around the clearing, “could have made off without returning to the pavilion and without us seeing them.”
“But if someone had decided to dump a body here,” Toni said, frowning, “why would they then take it away again?”
“Maybe they didn’t want to dump it here,” said Agatha, still peering into the woods. “Maybe they were disturbed by nudie Eddie and hid until he was gone. Then they moved the body to somewhere like … over there, where there are thick shrubs under the trees.” Agatha pointed to the spot. “That looks like a—”
“Nice place to dump a body?” said Toni, then, returning Agatha and Edward’s bemused stares with a shrug, added, “She says it all the time.”
“I do not say it all the time,” argued Agatha.
“Yes, you do,” said Toni. “Every time we pass a—”
“Just go take a look.” Agatha cut Toni short, then lifted one foot to display immaculately painted toenails. “I had a pedicure yesterday. It’s survived this far, but I’m not ruining it scuffling around over there.”
Toni and Edward picked their way through the tangle of ferns and brambles to where a clutch of tall rhododendrons stood in the shade of the trees. Toni picked up a stick to prod around in the undergrowth, shining a light from her phone to illuminate the darkest recesses of the dense shrubbery.
“There’s nothing there, Agatha,” she called, looking back towards the Lone Warrior, on which Agatha had now parked her sandals, then pointing beyond her boss, through the trees towards the swimming pool, “but here comes trouble!”
Agatha turned, catching a glimpse of the unmistakable form of Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes marching down the lawn. He was wearing a suit that was somewhere between brown and grey, matching his greying hair and pallid complexion. It occurred to Agatha that, if he were to lie down on the forest floor, no one would ever notice him. He would merge right in to the decaying debris of sticks and fallen leaves and probably never be seen again. Unfortunately, however, she could see him quite clearly now. He was a tall, thin man and, even on this gloriously sunny day, appeared darkly miserable. His beady eyes glowered from beneath a furrowed brow when he spotted Agatha.
Copyright © 2022 by M. C. Beaton Ltd
