Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham (13 page)

‘We’ll try the shop next door,’ said Charles.

They both entered a small dark shop which sold an assortment of cheap souvenirs.

There was an enormous woman behind the counter dressed in a man’s shirt and leggings. They could see the leggings because she was bending over to pick up something from the bottom shelves
behind the counter.

‘Excuse me,’ began Agatha. The woman straightened up and turned round.

She had a large, round, truculent face and thick glasses. ‘What d’ye want?’ she snapped.

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 I 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 murdered 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 yourselves.’

‘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 didn’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 postmortem on 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 had always had my own money. My parents died in a car crash and left me comfortably off. He exhilarated me. I saw for the first time
that it might be possible to find the courage to leave Pete. This is my house.’

She fell silent.

‘Then what happened?’ prompted Agatha.

‘He made love to me and I felt beautiful.’ Agatha felt a slight pang of regret that she hadn’t given the hairdresser a fling. ‘Then, after that, he was suddenly too busy
to see me or even to do my hair. I was obsessed, frantic. The school holidays were coming to an end and I knew I wouldn’t have much freedom. So I wrote to him, reminding him of our love, of
our afternoon of love.

‘When he said he wanted to see me again, I was overjoyed. We met at those tea gardens on the river. He told me he wanted money, five thousand pounds. If I didn’t give it to him, he
would send my letter to my husband. I hated him in that moment. I didn’t believe for a minute he would do it. So I told him to do his worst.

‘I felt guilty about the way I had cheated on Pete over this useless, evil man. The next day, the very next day, Pete was off work with a cold. The post hadn’t arrived when I went
out to work. So Pete got the letter. John must have posted it right after I left him the day before.

‘When I got home, Pete had packed up and left. My letter was on the table and Pete left me his own letter, calling me all sorts of names . . . slut, whore.’ Her voice broke.

‘I’m so lonely without him. I never thought I would be. I used to dream day and night of getting my freedom and now I’ve got it, and it sucks.’

She began to cry.

Agatha handed her a pile of tissues from a box on the dusty table. Maggie blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

‘Where is your husband now?’ asked Charles.

‘Over at his mother’s in Honeybourne.’

‘Did either you or your husband go to the police?’

‘Oh, no! I burnt my letter and Pete’s. And when I read about the murder I was frantic. I thought Pete had done it. But it was poisoning and Pete would have been more likely to club
him to death. My Pete has a violent temper.’

‘Perhaps we should have a word with your husband,’ suggested Charles, thinking of Agatha’s description of the bruised face.

Agatha expected Maggie to exclaim in horror, but she pressed her trembling hands together and said, ‘If you could. He won’t speak to me and his mother takes all the calls and refuses
to let me speak to him. Tell him I miss him. I mean, he wasn’t much company, but he was good at fixing things.’

‘Give us the address,’ said Charles, ‘and we’ll see what we can do.’

‘It’s ten, Parton Lane, Honeybourne. But you mustn’t tell the police about me! I’m falling apart as it is. All I want is Pete back. You never know what you’ve got
until you haven’t got it any more.’

If only James Lacey thought like that, mourned Agatha.

As Charles and Agatha got in the car again, Charles looked at his watch and said, ‘Can’t be too long on this next call. I’ve got to take Josie out for dinner.’

‘We’ve got time,’ said Agatha. ‘Honeybourne’s not far.’

They found the address quite easily. ‘Here goes,’ said Charles.

The door was answered by a small, bent woman who peered up at them from under a thatch of grey hair.

‘Mrs Henderson?’ said Agatha.

‘Yes, and I’m not interested in buying anything.’

‘We’re not selling anything.’

‘We’ve come to see your son,’ said Charles.

‘Who are you?’

‘Mrs Agatha Raisin and Sir Charles Fraith.’

She scowled at them suspiciously and then retreated into the house. There was the sound of some altercation from the nether regions and then a large burly man filled the doorway.
‘Yes?’ he demanded truculently.

How easy it would be to be a police detective, thought Agatha. Flash the identification and demand that they go indoors.

‘It’s about that hairdresser, John Shawpart,’ said Agatha.

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

‘We wondered why you had beaten him up,’ said Charles, edging in front of Agatha.

‘You the police?’

‘No, we became involved in the case.’

Pete Henderson roundly told Charles to go and perform an impossible anatomical act upon himself. The door began to close.

‘Maggie misses you,’ said Agatha desperately. ‘She really does.’

The door stopped closing.

‘It’s her own fault,’ said Pete. ‘Slut.’

‘It was only one mistake,’ cajoled Agatha.

‘Serves her right,’ he growled. ‘Did she think any man would be interested in her? She should have known he was a blackmailer.’

‘But she was tricked,’ said Agatha. ‘Now she misses you and she’s frantic with worry.’

A gleam of satisfaction replaced the anger in his eyes.

‘I hope she’s suffering,’ he said and slammed the door in their faces.

‘Well, what did we get from that?’ asked Agatha as they drove off.

‘I think we can be pretty sure he’s the one that beat John Shawpart up. Better run you home, Aggie. Got to meet Josie.’

‘I’ll wait up for you to hear your news.’

‘Well . . .’

‘You wouldn’t, Charles! A young girl like that!’

‘Don’t worry. She probably lives with her parents.’

After Charles had left, Agatha planned to have a peaceful evening but Worcester CID called and took her through her statement, demanding this time to know why she had lied
about driving past Shawpart’s house. Wearily Agatha said it was because murder made everyone feel guilty and she had not wanted to sound like one of those ghouls who haunt the scenes of
disasters. By the time they left, she felt almost as if she had committed the murder herself.

She had a hot bath and put on a night-dress and dressing-gown and sat in front of the television set, waiting for Charles to come home. She sometimes wondered if Charles regarded her as anything
more than a sort of amusement to enliven his days. He was as neat and self-contained as a cat. Although he had temporarily moved in with her, he did not seem to take up any space at all.

It was around midnight, when she was just falling asleep in the armchair, that she heard him driving up.

She struggled to her feet and opened the door.