M Beaton - Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham

She opened the door. Detective Sergeant Bill Wong stood there, his round face stern. He was flanked by a policewoman. “Mind if we come in, Mrs. Raisin?”

Mrs. Raisin. Not Agatha.

Agatha stepped back and let them in. “How nice to see you, Bill,” she chattered. “I’ll just make us some coffee.”

“No coffee. This is business.”

She led them into the living-room. They sat down on a sofa, side by side. Agatha quickly put a fire-guard in front of the blackened mess in the grate, which she had forgotten to clear out.

She sat down nervously on a chair facing them.

“You knew Mr. John Shawpart?” began Bill.

“Yes, he was my hairdresser.”

“Anything closer?”

“Yes, we were friends. We had a couple of meals.”

His eyes were hard. “Let’s begin at the beginning. I see from the list of customers that you were present when he fell sick.”

“Yes.”

“And a woman answering to your description called at the intensive ward at Mircester Hospital, claiming to be his sister.”

Agatha briefly considered lying and then decided against it.

“Well, yes. I wanted to find out what had happened. Why are you handling this case, Bill? Surely Worcester CID is in charge.”

“They’ve asked for our help, and as you live in Gloucestershire, I have the job of interviewing you. You could be in bad trouble for claiming to be a family member.”

“What is this?” demanded Agatha, her face becoming flushed with anger. “What happened to him? I thought it was food poisoning.”

“Ricin.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a poison made from castor-oil beans. John Shaw-part was murdered. And if we hadn’t got a damned clever pathologist who had made a study of ricin poisoning, we’d still be looking. So settle down and tell us everything you know.”

Agatha decided to tell most of the truth but to omit that she had been in his house when it was set on fire.

“It’s like this,” she said. “I heard a rumour that he was a blackmailer and decided to get to know him better and find out.”

“And what made you think he was a blackmailer?”

“Just a feeling. Women talked a lot to him at the salon about their private lives and I saw him with a couple of women and they both looked distressed and frightened.”

“Names?”

Agatha thought furiously. She could not betray Mrs. Friendly after having gone to such lengths to try to protect her.

“I recognized one of them from the salon. I think her first name is Maggie. It’s all first names there.”

“Description?”

“Well, brown hair, sort of ordinary, rather protuberant eyes. She was there the first time I went. She was complaining that her husband didn’t understand her or something and then I went for a trip on the river with a friend and I saw her sitting in that tea garden before the bridge with John and she looked unhappy.”

“This still does not explain why you thought he was a blackmailer, or, if you thought he was, why then were you prepared to go into business with him?”

Agatha turned red. “How did you hear that?”

“He told his assistant Garry about it.”

“I was stringing him along. I wanted to see if he would betray himself.”

“This still does not explain why you leaped to the conclusion he was a blackmailer.”

“It was just an intuition,” said Agatha desperately. “Look, I was having dinner with him one night in a restaurant, and when we were leaving, this woman was staring at him and her face was a mask of fear.”

“What woman?”

“I didn’t recognize her,” lied Agatha.

“Description.”

“A small sort of weasel woman, black hair, glasses,” said Agatha desperately.

“Hum. And who was this male friend who accompanied you to the hospital?”

“Charles, Sir Charles Fraith.”

Bill took out a mobile phone. “Phone number?”

“I can’t remember off hand.”

“Then go and get me the phone book.”

Agatha wanted to speak to Charles before Bill got to him. She went into the hall and picked up the phone book. The door was standing open. She threw the phone book out over the hedge.

She went back in. “Can’t find it.”

He gave her a cynical look, dialled directory inquiries, got Charles’s number, dialled it while Agatha prayed that Charles would not be at home. But with a sinking heart she heard Bill say, “Sir Charles, we are with Mrs. Raisin. I wonder whether you could join us. There are some questions we would like to ask you. Good. See you soon.”

There was a scrabbling of paws and Mrs. Dairy entered the room. In one hand she clutched a phone book. “Really, Mrs. Raisin,” she said, “if you want rid of your phone book, you should put it in the bin.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Agatha.

“You nearly hit my little poochie with it. You threw it over your hedge.”

Agatha snatched the phone book from her. “Would you mind leaving? I’m busy.”

Mrs. Dairy’s eyes gleamed with curiosity.

Bill rose and said, “Yes, this is private business, so if you don’t mind.

Mrs. Dairy left, her thin shoulders seeming to radiate frustrated curiosity.

“So let’s go back to the day John Shawpart was murdered,” said Bill. “Tell us about it.”

Relieved for the moment to get away from the blackmailing question, Agatha described how he had looked ill, had gone to the toilet, how she and everyone else in the salon had heard the terrible retching, how she had got the tool-box and broken the lock of the toilet door and had found the hairdresser collapsed on the floor.

“I thought it was food poisoning,” she said. “How could I think anything else? We had eaten a Chinese meal at his house the evening before…”

“So you were with him the evening before he died. Do you know how he got the bruising on his face?”

“Oh, that. I was at his house before that. I was told at the salon that he was ill and I found his address and went there. I was shocked at the state of his face. He said he’d been in a car accident but hadn’t bothered to report it. He said he hadn’t been wearing his seat-belt and had hit the windscreen, but when I left I noticed his car was at the side of the house and that it was unmarked, so I thought maybe some jealous husband might have socked him.”

“And why should you think that?”

“Well, it was seeing him with that customer, Maggie, and then he did come on to me. I supposed he made a habit of chatting up women.”

“Do you know his house was set on fire on the day of the murder?”

“Yes, someone told me,” lied Agatha. “I forget who.”

“It was arson. Someone poured petrol over the place and set it alight.”

“Was anyone seen?”

“The people in the surrounding villas all unfortunately work and the few exceptions that don’t were not looking.”

Agatha stifled the sigh of relief that had risen to her lips.

He looked at her directly. “Did you have anything to do with that or know anything about it?”

So many lies, thought Agatha wearily. “No,” she said.

“We’ll leave that for the moment. Go over what happened at the salon again.”

Agatha described again in detail what had happened. Then she heard a car drawing up outside. Charles! What on earth was he going to say?

Charles breezed it. “Hallo, Bill. What’s this? The third degree?”

“Sit down, Sir Charles.”

“Formal, hey? Okay, it must be about that damned hairdresser. Murdered, was he?”

“Yes.”

“How?

“Ricin poisoning.”

“Ricin? Pretty exotic. That’s the stuff that killed that Bulgarian defector when he was working with the BBC in London in the seventies. Markov. That was his name. Stuff of spy fiction, Aggie. He got stabbed in the leg with an umbrella and the ricin was injected into him that way. They found a metal pellet had been injected into his leg. Hey, I remember them saying that ricin is almost impossible to detect and has no antidote. So how did they get on to it?”