Agatha, accustomed to the usual friendly manners of the Evesham shopkeeper, blinked and said, “We wondered whether you knew that man next door who was murdered?”
“And what’s it to do with you? You’re not the police. Who are you? More of those ghouls who want to gossip about the murder and not buy anything?”
Agatha took the plunge. “I heard you threatening to kill Mr. John.”
Her large face was a study in surprise. “I never did! When’s this supposed to have happened?”
“I was in the toilet at the hairdresser’s a few weeks ago. I asked John Shawpart about it and he said you and your husband were always quarrelling.”
The woman held up a large, pudgy, ringless hand. “Ain’t got a husband. Come with me.” She lifted the flap of the counter. They walked through. She led them through to a grimy kitchen in the back shop. She opened the kitchen door. “Look!”
There was only a narrow little strip of yard. On the hairdresser’s side was a high wall. “On the other side of that wall is the hairdresser’s yard,” she said. “Whoever you heard, it couldn’t have been me. You heard someone out in the yard of the hairdresser’s.”
The bell tinkled in the shop. “Got a customer,” she said. “Get out of here.”
“What do you think?” asked Charles when they were back out in the High Street.
“I think Mr. John lied, that’s what 1 think,” said Agatha. “I say, that’s a new hairdresser’s across the road. Eve’s, it says. And look through the window.”
“What?”
“At the desk. It’s that receptionist, Josie.”
“Then take yourself off somewhere, Aggie, and let me go and get my hair cut and chat her up.”
“How long will you be?”
“Give me an hour. Here’s the car keys. I’ll meet you back at the car-park.”
“I tell you what. You go in and after a few moments, I’ll go in myself and make an appointment. Maybe all the old staff are there.”
Agatha waited impatiently while Charles crossed the road and went in. He spent some time talking to Josie, who was giggling and laughing. Then he disappeared into the nether regions.
Agatha crossed the road. Josie was still smiling, but the smile left her face when she saw Agatha. “So this is where you are,” said Agatha brightly. Within the salon she saw Garry and two other of Mr. John’s former assistants.
“Yes, we was lucky. Eve opened up and she took us all on.”
“Who’s Eve?”
Josie gave an impertinent sigh and bent over the appointments book. “Do you want to make an appointment, Mrs. Raisin? We’re very busy.”
Agatha opened her mouth to blast her and then thought better of it. “Put me down for the day after tomorrow. Three o’clock.”
“Do you want Garry?”
“No, I’ll try Eve herself.”
“It’ll need to be four o’clock.”
“Okay, that’ll do.”
Agatha walked out again into the High Street. She wandered about Evesham, down Bridge Street to the Abbey Gardens, sat and smoked and then made her way to Charles’s car to find him standing outside, waiting for her.
“How did you get on?”
He took the keys from her and unlocked the car.
“I’ll tell you on the road to Badsey.”
When they drove off, he started, “I’m taking Josie out for dinner tonight. I gather that this new hairdresser came along and employed them all. Hard-looking woman. But fast. She has them all working-snipping and perming and tinting as if they’re all on an assembly line. Josie is going to tell me all.”
“Do you think this new hairdresser might have bumped off Mr. John to get his trade?”
“What a fertile imagination you have, Aggie. This isn’t Sunday night viewing on telly. This is real life. We have a dead blackmailer. So it is perfectly logical to assume that someone blackmailed him to get him out of their threatened life.”
“Well, we’ll see what Maggie has to say,” said Agatha gloomily. “She’s probably another woman with a truculent husband.”
“Her car’s outside, anyway,” said Charles as they drove up. “If it is her car and not her husband’s.”
They got out and walked up an ankle-spraining front path made of pieces of brick. The garden was neglected and weedy and the net curtains at the windows were dingy.
Agatha pressed the doorbell. “No ring,” said Charles. “Knock.”
Agatha rapped on the glass panes of the door. I wonder why anyone ever becomes a newspaper reporter, she thought. They condemn themselves to days of rejection.
The door opened on a chain and one of Maggie’s protuberant eyes stared at them.
Agatha smiled brightly. “Do you remember me, Mrs. Henderson? We met in the hairdressing salon, Mr. John’s, in Evesham.”
“What do you want?”
“We wanted to talk to you about Mr. John.”
“I’ve nothing to say.”
“We know he was blackmailing you,” said Charles.
The door slammed. Agatha and Charles looked at each other.
Then they heard the sound of the chain being dropped and the door opened.
Maggie Henderson looked at them triumphantly. “You can’t do anything to me now. I suppose you got hold of the letters that bastard had. Well, the damage is done. My husband’s left me, so go screw.”
“We’re not blackmailers,” said Agatha. “Can we come in? All the evidence is destroyed.”
“In the fire?”
Agatha nodded. “The reason I want to find out who killed him and who set the house on fire is that I was in the house when it was set alight. I went there to try to destroy any evidence. But don’t tell the police that. They don’t know.”
Maggie’s face softened. “So you were a victim as well. Come in.”
“Not really…” began Agatha, but Charles pressed her arm warningly as they followed Maggie into the house, as if to say, let her think you’re a fellow sufferer.
The living-room was untidy and dusty. “I had a call from a policewoman,” said Maggie. “Sit down. She was only checking her way through the list of customers and when I read that his house had burned down, I prayed my letters had gone up with it. I thought, you see, with all the rain that day that they might not, but the policewoman told me that he had used Calor gas and kept spare cylinders in the basement. The gas exploded. She said even the stuff in the filing cabinet had been destroyed.”
I did’t even see the filing cabinet, thought Agatha.
“So what happened between you and Mr. John?” she asked. “I am Agatha Raisin and this is Sir Charles Fraith.”
“Well, Mrs. Raisin… ”
“Call me Agatha.”
“That’s a name you don’t hear much these days,” said Maggie. “I had a friend called Agatha but she changed her name to Helen. Said she couldn’t bear people calling her Aggie.”
“I know how she feels,” said Agatha, casting a fulminating glance at Charles.
“I was so glad when I heard he was dead,” said Maggie. “I could’ve murdered him. But I’m such a rabbit. Things weren’t going too well in my marriage. Pete was a good husband, I suppose, but always a dab hand at nasty little putting-down remarks. Any time we went out to the pub with friends, I knew there would be a post-mortem in the road home. “Why did you say that, you made a fool of yourself, you looked like a tart,” that sort of thing. But that’s marriage for you. Then Mr. John started to ask me out, meetings on the sly. Pete was out at work and I was enjoying the school holidays. He made me feel like a princess. I began to complain about Pete to him. He was very sympathetic. He said a lot of women were stuck in lousy marriages because they hadn’t the funds to leave. I said I
