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not have answered the door, but he had a desire to relieve his feelings on somebody, even if that somebody was Bill Wong.
    So he opened the door and found Roy Silver on the step.
    James took the hapless Roy by the throat and shook him hard. ‘Get the hell away from here, you little worm,’ he roared. James gave him a final shake and then a push and Roy staggered backwards and fell into the hedge.
    ‘I only came to help,’ said Roy shrilly. ‘Honest. I’ve got information about Jimmy Raisin. I’ve found out things which might explain why someone murdered him. I did it to help Aggie.’
    James, who had been about to slam the door, hesitated. ‘What are you talking about?’
    Roy extricated himself from the hedge and tittuped forward cautiously. ‘I hired a detective to find out about Jimmy Raisin. I’ve got her report.’ He held up the briefcase he had managed to hang on to during James’s assault on him.
    ‘Oh, very well,’ said James. ‘Come in and I’ll see if Agatha’s prepared to listen to you.’
    When Agatha came down the stairs, Roy backed nervously behind a chair. He had blonded his hair, which somehow made his face look weaker and whiter.
    But Agatha had had time to think. If Roy had any worthwhile information, then she and James might solve the case and that would leave Bill and his precious Maddie with egg all over their faces.
    ‘Sit down, Roy,’ she said. ‘If you’ve got anything of importance, I’d like to hear it, but don’t think I’m ever going to forgive you for what you did to me.’
    ‘He stopped you from committing bigamy,’ said James.
    Agatha glared at both of them.
    ‘Let’s hear what he has to say,’ said James mildly.
    Agatha nodded. Roy edged round the chair and sat down nervously, his briefcase on his lap. ‘I assume,’ said Agatha, ‘that you initially hired this detective out of spite to find out if I was still married, and hired the detective again because you couldn’t live with yourself, you creep!’
    Roy cleared his throat. ‘Always looking for the worst motives, aren’t we, Aggie? I thought your husband was dead and I thought you would thank me if I gave you conclusive proof of that death as a wedding present. And you can huff and puff but that’s the truth, or may God strike me dead!’
    Agatha looked at the beamed ceiling. ‘I’m waiting for the thunderbolt to fall on you, Roy.’
    ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said James sharply. ‘Let’s hear your report.’
    Roy opened the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers.
    ‘I wondered how it was that Jimmy had managed to live so long,’ he said. ‘But it seems that at one time a philanthropist, a Mrs Serena Gore-Appleton, had taken Jimmy up as a worthwhile cause and borne him off to an expensive health farm. Although the place was hardly the Betty Ford Clinic and more a place where rich boozers went to dry out to recover and drink another day, it seemed to have worked for Jimmy, who became clean and sober and subsequently worked as a counsellor for Mrs Gore-Appleton’s charity, Help Our Homeless. Now here’s the interesting bit.
    ‘Jimmy always seemed to have a lot of money to flash around. How my detective, a Ms Iris Harris, found that out was because Jimmy liked to queen it in front of his old down-and-out cronies. Then, after a year of sobriety, he suddenly went downhill amazingly quickly and soon reappeared among the beggars, junkies, and general drop-outs of the London streets.
    ‘One down-and-out who has recently sobered up offered the information that Jimmy delighted in finding out things about people, and even in his lowest stage was not above blackmailing someone for a bottle of meths with some threat such as reporting them to the social security if he found out they had work and were still drawing the dole, that kind of thing.’
    Roy beamed about him triumphantly. ‘So you see, sweeties, this agile brain of mine came to the conclusion that if Jimmy could blackmail the poor, why not