“Now perhaps you’re satisfied,” she said viciously. “If you hadn’t—”
“I’m not satisfied by a long way,” Rollison told her softly. “Are you another of Donny’s daughters?”
“It doesn’t matter who I am, and I’ve talked to you quite long enough.” She twisted the turban back expertly, and became a normal woman again. “It’s happened to Leah and it’s happened to me. Don’t tell me you don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Because you came to question Donny,” the girl said with the same bitterness. She leaned forward and pointed a red-tipped finger at him. “Because someone thinks Donny could help you, and they’ve got to make sure he doesn’t. They cut Leah’s hair off and then they cut off mine, just to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. I’m his third daughter, if you really want to know: I’m Lila. I don’t know what else they told Donny, but they threatened him with a lot worse than this if he has anything more to do with you. So why don’t you go and buy yourself a long holiday?”
Two customers were coming out, and they stood listening. Another coming in, stopped to stare. The machines whirred busily. Someone was talking in one of the cubicles, traffic passed noisily outside.
Then Donny appeared.
He looked older even than he had yesterday, and much more lined. There was sadness in his fine amber eyes and sadness in his gentle voice, too. He gazed with that familiar compassion at his daughter Lila, then turned to Rollison and said gravely:
“You must forgive Lila, she is so upset that she doesn’t know what she is saying. I will gladly talk to you, but I cannot help you. I have no idea why such a thing as this should happen, no idea at all.”
He did not smile; he looked saint-like, the kind of man to whom a lie would be not simply abhorrent but almost impossible.
But was he lying?
His daughter said with tears in her eyes: “You’re crazy! You ought to kick him out.”
“I’ll go without being kicked when I know where you get the hair for your wigs and toupees,” Rollison said to Donny. “How about it?”
Donny’s expression did not change.
“Please come with me,” he said, and Rollison went, aware of the girl staring at him as if she hated him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Donny walked past the door of the room where Rollison had sat yesterday, and led the way through a doorway at the end of the passage, and then up a short flight of steps. The paintwork was a more ordinary cream colour here, but the place was spotless; Donny did not just put up a front. As Rollison followed him along a narrow landing, seeing the bowed shoulders beneath the snow-white barber’s coat, he found himself trying to reconcile two conflicting things.
Donny was rich. He owned dozens, perhaps hundreds of shops. He owned a great deal of valuable property. Yet he worked in one of his own shops, cutting hair for customers, actively managing the whole concern. He might have been expected to work from an office, and to leave all the donkey work to others.
What was the explanation?
Was he so rich as Grice had made out?
Or was he a miser?
He opened a door into a long, narrow room, with a north light, a room which might have served excellently for an artist’s studio; but instead of canvases round the wall and paintings dotted all about, and instead of easel and palette and brushes, there were wigs and tresses of hair.
One long bench beneath the north light had at least twenty model heads on it, some bald and shiny, looking strangely like Lila without her turban, some with complete wigs on them, some with partly finished wigs, some with hair hanging down, some with hair brushed upwards, Edwardian fashion. Hanging from racks along the wall were tresses of hair of a great variety of sizes and shades and colours—from the fairest to the darkest, like the hair which had been fastened round the bricks last night. There were some small pots of liquid which looked like a kind of glue, and in a corner were several ovens; Rollison could not even guess their purpose.
Donny saw the question in his eyes.
“They are for dyed hair,” he explained. “We subject all dyed hair to the severest tests, to try to make sure that it doesn’t change under the most intemperate climatic conditions. It isn’t always possible to be absolutely sure, of course.” He showed some screens, not unlike the one on which Ada Jepson had her tapestry but threaded with hair, as if this was going to be the silkiest tapestry of all. “That is our matching screen,” Donny explained. “We take samples of hair from the customer’s head, and match it up—that is, for people who want a little extra help, or are balding, or wear a toupee.”
“The question is, where do you get the hair from?”
“I buy it.”
“Can you satisfy the police that you don’t buy it from the men who’re cutting hair off girls who want to enter for your beautiful hair competition?”
“I cannot prove where it comes from in the first place,” Donny said. “Much hair, often the best for my purpose, comes from India and the Balkans, but supplies are difficult. I buy from agents in London.”
“Who?”
“A small agency, run by a Mr. Samuel King,” Donny said. “The police asked me all this earlier, and they know his address. I can give it to you, if you insist, but if King thinks I am accusing him, then he may cut off my supplies. Need you go and see him, too?”
