“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?”
“The pathologist, by coincidence, had been fascinated with the Markov case and had read all the medical notes on it. The tiny platinum sphere, just 1.77 millimetres in diameter and drilled through with two tiny 0.35 millimetre holes to carry the ricin, is now in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard.”
“Was the same thing done to this hairdresser?”
“No, he appears to have swallowed the ricin. There were traces of gelatin. We believe it might have been put into pills of some sort.”
“Lifex,” said Agatha suddenly.
“What’s that?” demanded Bill.
“Vitamin pills. He showed me a bottle of them. Said they were multi-vitamins and that he kept a bottle in the salon as well. They were large and gelatin-covered.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Bill eagerly. “I’ll just phone that through.”
He went into the hall with his mobile phone. Agatha longed to warn Charles not to say too much, but the policewoman, a large and stolid female, sat studying them closely as if they were both some rare species of animal.
Bill came back and sat down.
“In view of your knowledge, Detective Inspector John Brudge of Worcester CID will be over to see you as well.”
Agatha groaned. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
Bill ignored her and turned his attention to Charles.
“Now, Sir Charles, where do you come into this? Were you under the impression that John Shawpart was a blackmailer?”
“I got that idea first from Aggie here. I decided it would be fun to find out and egged her on. I persuaded her to go out with him for dinner and tell him that James Lacey was coming back and she was terrified he would find out about us and so she was to tape the whole thing and see if he demanded money for her silence, but it all went wrong.”
“What happened?”
“To reinforce Aggie’s fiction, I turned up here to wait until they arrived back from the restaurant to play the part of the jealous lover. Unfortunately I did it a bit too well. I grabbed Aggie’s arm and her handbag went spinning and the tape recorder fell out and he saw it.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Let me see, he said something like, ‘Yours, I think.’ He looked amused in a nasty way, but as I explained to Aggie afterwards, lots of people carry these little machines around with them.”
“But he asked Mrs. Raisin to go into business with him, so he cannot think you suspected him of
