Agatha Raisin Companion (13 page)

By the end of
Kissing Christmas Goodbye,
Agatha appears to be genuinely over her former paramour. When he kisses her passionately at her Christmas dinner, she feels nothing and her
indifference, as usual, fuels his own feelings for her. In a missive from Arles in France, he invites her join him and even signs off, ‘Miss you’, but Agatha is unmoved and ignores the
plea.

Although she appears to be free of her obsession, Agatha is horrified to receive an invitation to James’s engagement party, barely a month after his last letter.

On the day of the wedding, however, his bride is murdered, leaving Agatha, once more, to prove that they are both innocent.

Sir Charles Fraith

Despite the fact that he is only a minor baronet, Agatha’s lowly roots mean she is initially intimidated by the dapper aristocrat during the
Walkers of Dembley
case. Sir Charles lives in the vast Barfield House, ‘a large building in the fake medieval style, vaguely William Morris, with mullioned windows’ which is, in Charles’s own words,
‘hardly an architectural gem’. It stands in a thousand acres of ‘good arable land’ and, when they first meet, Charles is under suspicion of the murder of a rambler, killed
with a spade while crossing his rape field. Agatha is asked to investigate by Deborah, his latest conquest, and gets off on the wrong foot at an awkward lunch at the house. Rattled by the surly
manservant, Gustav, and put down by the elderly aunt, she insults the family and insinuates that it would suit them to accuse a farmhand. Later she tells James she thought Sir Charles ‘stupid
and silly’, and Charles dismisses her as a ‘rather odd woman with a massive chip on her shoulder’.

The relationship thaws through the intervention of James and they become closer after Agatha saves his life during an attack by the real murderer.

Sir Charles is ‘a small, neat man with fine, fair hair and a mild,
sensitive face’. Eternally well-dressed in perfectly tailored suits and beautifully
pressed shirts, he rarely has a hair out of place. ‘Even naked, he never looked vulnerable, but as if he were wearing a neat white suit.’
(Fairies of Fryfam)

Although he is a clever intellectual, with a First in History from Cambridge, he prefers to play the ‘bluff squire type, on the hearty side, given to rather obvious jokes and puns’,
but he also hides a shy character, afraid to let anyone get too close to him.

An incorrigible ladies’ man, Sir Charles adds Agatha to his list of conquests in
Terrible Tourist
and then becomes one of her closest friends and an occasional partner in crime
detection. By the end of the Cyprus case, the pattern for their relationship is set when he rings Agatha and says, ‘Bored. Let’s go for dinner.’ From that day forward, Charles
turns up whenever he has nothing to do. He flits in and out of Agatha’s life depending on his romantic situation and, as he possesses a key to the cottage, he often moves into her spare room
at short notice, disappearing again every time he meets a potential lover.

Despite Agatha’s usual obsessive nature, her original fling with Charles and the occasional lapses since lack passion, and she often wonders whether he cares for her at all. Whenever he is
in her company, Agatha also ponders how long he will stick around. ‘In the past, he had had a habit of suddenly deciding to leave her, either because he had a date or because he had become
bored. He led a self-contained, orderly bachelor life and maintained that lifestyle by doing exactly what he wanted and when he wanted to.’

A brief marriage to a French girl, in
Day the Floods Came,
leaves Charles uncharacteristically plump, with ‘thinning hair and a double chin’. After leaving his wife, however,
he is soon restored to the immaculate baronet he has always been and reveals that he has been getting over lung cancer, hence the thinning hair.

Paul Bladen

The new vet has the women of the village all a-flutter and, despite her crush on James, Agatha is quite taken with him herself. In his early forties, he has thick, fair
hair and light-brown eyes which ‘crinkled up as though against the desert sun’. Using her recently acquired cat as an excuse, Agatha dresses up to the nines to visit the surgery, only
to find all the women of Carsely in the waiting room. She is delighted when he invites her out for dinner, but flees the house when things begin to get steamy between them. As the Vicious
Vet’s true character emerges, it seems Agatha has had a lucky escape.

Guy Freemont

Owner of the Ancombe Water Company in
Wellspring of Death,
he charms her with champagne and dinner dates while she is nursing a broken heart following the aborted
wedding to James. The first
time she meets him, Agatha thinks Guy is ‘beautiful’. In his mid-thirties, tall and slim with black hair, blue eyes and ‘an
athlete’s body’, he flatters the middle-aged detective with his attentions and she sleeps with him, driving James mad with jealousy.

Mr John

Stunning hairdresser who fixes a colouring problem for Agatha before asking her out for dinner. Tall, blond and ‘very very handsome’, he has an easy manner and
‘very bright blue eyes, startlingly blue, as blue as a kingfisher’s wing’. Women adore him for his ability to transform them and his flattery, and often confide in him. After he
is murdered, it transpires that he used the information to blackmail them.

Jimmy Jessop

Kindly police inspector Jimmy meets Agatha while she is holed up in the seaside town of Wyckhadden. He has ‘a lugubrious face and large pale eyes under heavy
lids’, black hair ‘like patent leather’ and is ‘far from an Adonis’. But his generous nature, when met with Agatha’s loneliness, sparks a romance. A widower who
was devoted to his wife, he is an old-fashioned gentleman who takes Agatha dancing and finally proposes to her. But their first foray into the bedroom is a disaster and, when he finds her in bed
with Charles, the engagement is most definitely off. Jimmy
quickly finds a new bride and, when Agatha returns to Wyckhadden, is about to become a father.

John Armitage

A successful and very good-looking crime writer who moves into James’s old cottage, next to Agatha’s house, after her marriage breaks down. As a novelist, he is
interested in Agatha’s cases and helps her out in
Day the Floods Came
and
Curious Curate.
At the end of the first case, he makes a clumsy pass at her, assuming she is an easy
woman, and Agatha is outraged. In the aftermath, she is flattered by the attentions of the new curate, murdered on the night he has dinner with her, but later discovers he was only after money. In
order to save face, she gets John to pretend he is her fiancé for the duration of the case. But as soon as the murder is solved, he sells up and moves to London.

Paul Chatterton

A charming IT expert who takes over the house after John moves out. He has a shock of white hair, sparkling black eyes and a clever face, and is besieged by the village
ladies as soon as he moves in. Although Agatha avoids him at first, she succumbs when he suggests investigating the haunted house in Hebberden. While watching the house from a field, Paul kisses
Agatha and she, of course, falls for him. He is married to a temperamental Spanish beauty called Juanita, who chose to stay in her homeland
when he moved to Carsely. Paul
goes off in a jealous huff after Charles resurfaces and stays at Agatha’s house. Saved by Agatha after being locked in an Anderson shelter, he brings her flowers in the middle of the night
and is attacked by his volatile wife, eventually moving back to Spain with her.

George Shelby

Handsome widower and events organizer of the Comfrey Magna fête, where the jam is laced with LSD in
Spoonful of Poison,
George is ‘tall, with fair hair,
a lightly tanned, handsome face, and green eyes’. Agatha is clearly more taken with him than he is with her. When she is asked to help promote the fête, and then solve the case of the
drug-laced plum jam, she uses it as an excuse to spend more time with him. She soon discovers that she is competing with his late, perfect wife and that there are suspicious circumstances
surrounding her death as well. After a romantic tryst is ruined by Charles, Agatha learns that her green-eyed suitor may be more interested in her purse strings than her heart strings.