Free Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble by MC Beaton Page B

some more conservative clothes.”
    Roy trailed sulkily upstairs, to emerge later with clean hair and wearing a striped shirt and corduroy trousers. “Now you look more like a human being and less like a throwback to the seventies,” said Agatha. She told him about her Christmas party.
    “Am I invited?” asked Roy.
    “I suppose so,” said Agatha reluctantly. “Haven’t you anywhere else to go?”
    “No, and I’m your friend, right? I bet you’ve asked James and Charles.”
    James Lacey, Agatha’s next-door neighbor, was her ex-husband, and Sir Charles Fraith a friend who came and went in her life.
    “I don’t know where James is,” said Agatha. “He travels a lot. Charles has disappeared out of my life again and this is a party for the elderly. I’m concentrating on giving them a good Christmas.”
    “Are you going to give them all presents?”
    “I suppose so. Something small.”
    “What about decorations?” asked Roy.
    “I’ve got loads left over from the last two Christmas parties.”
    “You’ll need a real tree.”
    “Never again,” said Agatha. “The cats will sabotage it. I’m getting a nice fake one. Besides, it’s rather miserable after Christmas to have a dying tree looking at you accusingly.”
    “You’ll get caterers to do the cooking.”
    “I would like to do something myself,” said Agatha. “I know. I’ll make the Christmas pudding. It can’t be that hard if one treats it like a scientific experiment.”
    “We’ll make it this weekend and let it mature,” said Roy.
    “I’ve got a Sarah Smith cookbook,” said Agatha. “Her recipes are supposed to be easy.”
    She took out the cookery book and found a recipe for Christmas pudding. “It looks awfuly complicated,” said Roy, reading over her shoulder.
    “Oh, we’ll go out and buy all the stuff and then take it bit by bit,” said Agatha.

    Late that afternoon, they returned carrying cartons of shopping. “Let’s leave it until tomorrow,” pleaded Roy.
    “No, I want to get started now,” said Agatha. “Unpack all the stuff and put it on the kitchen table and then you read out Sarah’s instructions.”
    “Okay. But I’m going to have a stiff drink first,” said Roy. “Have one yourself. You might need it.”
    “Get yourself a drink and start reading.” Agatha wrapped herself in an apron she had never used before. Most of her cooking was done by putting readymade meals in the micro wave.
    When Roy was finally seated at the table with a large vodka and tonic, he began to read out Sarah’s instructions. “ ‘Take your largest, roomiest mixing bowl and start putting in the suet, sifted flour and breadcrumbs, spices and sugar.’ I don’t think those are the right breadcrumbs, Aggie. They’re those orange ones people put on fish. And the almonds are supposed to be skinned and chopped, not put in whole. And you didn’t peel the apple.”
    “Nobody’ll notice,” said Agatha. “Read on.”
    What a lot of ingredients, thought Agatha. Part of the advice was to tick everything off, but Agatha couldn’t be bothered. For example, she was supposed to put the barley wine, rum and stout into a smaller basin and beat it up with the eggs, but she cut corners by just pouring it all into the mix in the big bowl.
    Roy took a turn stirring. “It’s supposed to be sloppy,” he complained.
    “Easily solved,” said Agatha, tipping a generous amount of rum into the bowl and then taking a swig out of the bottle to fortify herself.
    “Now what?” she asked.
    “You’re supposed to cover it with a clean tea towel and leave to soak overnight.”
    “And what do we have to do tomorrow?”
    “Steam it for eight hours. I didn’t see you sift the flour,” said Roy anxiously. “You just dumped it in.”
    “So I did,” said Agatha, stifling a yawn. “We’ll steam the beastly thing in the morning.”

    But the next day, after they had put the pudding on to steam, it seemed too boring to wait indoors and so they went to