Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham

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. ‘Hello, 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