She was getting quite used to nocturnal expeditions, and rather welcomed them. She found they brought back some of the excitements of the life she had shared with the late Mr Pargeter.
In the course of her marriage she had had to train herself to wake at a given hour in the night, do whatever was necessary, then return to bed and go straight back to sleep. It was a useful skill.
That night she woke obediently at three, and lay still for a few moments, thinking what she had to do. Eulalie had given her the clue by thinking it was morning when she awoke. Had Mrs Pargeter been longer at the Devereux, she too would have become aware of the regularity with which Newth raked out the boiler every morning, and she too would have got into the habit of waking to that distant scraping sound.
It followed that for Newth to be cleaning out the boiler in the middle of the afternoon was unusual, and in an institution as bound by routine as the Devereux, there must be a reason for anything unusual.
The police would not have looked in the boiler for the jewels. Only in a moment of panic would a conventional thief have put them there, and between the announcement of the theft and the end of the search there had been no opportunity for the thief, however panicked, to attempt to destroy the evidence.
But, as Mrs Pargeter had recognised, she was not dealing with a conventional thief or a conventional theft.
She knew she could not go down the main staircase. The pressure pads in the Hall would activate the alarms. But in her investigation of the hotel’s security system she had observed that there were no pressure pads at the back of the ground floor. There, presumably so that there was no danger of Newth’s triggering the system when he started his early morning routine, the burglar alarms were linked just to contact breakers on the exterior doors. This meant that Mrs Pargeter could go safely down the back stairs towards the kitchen, and, although she had not been down to check, she was assuming that she would be equally safe on the next flight down to the basement.
She put her dressing gown on over her nightdress and donned soft sheepskin slippers. She had contemplated more suitable clothes for investigation of the boiler room, but decided that their advantages were outweighed by the problems of explanation that might be caused if she were interrupted in her mission. An old lady wandering around at three a.m. in her night clothes could be put down to the aberrations of age; an old lady in a dark sweater and trousers might raise more searching questions.
She put the late Mr Pargeter’s skeleton keys and pencil torch in her dressing-gown pocket and left her bedroom. On the landing the night safety light glowed weakly. Mrs Pargeter moved along the corridor past the bathrooms to the back stairs. She stepped, as the late Mr Pargeter had taught her, on the balls of her feet, allowing her full weight to descend slowly with each footfall, alert to the beginnings of any creak in the floorboards.
She wafted in ghost-like silence to the ground floor. There was no light there, but she could see to locate the door down to the basement. No point in taking unnecessary risks by switching on a light.
On the stairs to the basement, because of their unfamiliarity, she used the pencil torch, directing its beam, as the late Mr Pargeter had instructed her, exactly where she was about to place each foot. She heard the subdued roar of the boiler as she drew closer to it.
At the foot of the stairs was a small area off which two doors opened. One would be Newth’s bedsitter and the other the boiler room. She listened for a moment at Newth’s door, and heard only reassuringly heavy breathing. Then, pulling the handle firmly towards her to stop any telltale rattling (as the late Mr Pargeter had also instructed her), she opened the door to the boiler room.
A predictable blast of hot air greeted her, and her slippered foot scrunched on coke dust. Though she ran the risk of slowing her exit, she closed the door behind her to minimise noise.
She beamed the pencil torch round the room, quickly taking in its dimensions. The old iron boiler, through a small grille of which a sullen red light glowed, dominated the space. To one side of it was a boarded-off area half- filled with a high slope of coke; above this a trap door through which the fuel was dropped. A shovel and some blackened buckets stood in front of the pile. A small heavily bolted door, which also showed the signs of a contact- breaking burglar alarm, led off the room, presumably to the yard outside.
Mrs Pargeter was a little disappointed. She had hoped to see a pile of clinker, a sort of half-way house where the boiler’s debris would rest before being taken outside, but Newth was too organised for that. No, when he cleared out the ash-tray beneath the boiler, he took the clinker straight out to the bins or wherever else it was that he disposed of it.
So, if, as she had planned, Mrs Pargeter was to examine what had been raked out that afternoon, she would have to wait till the exposure of daylight or risk the burglar alarms.
She stood for a moment, undecided, then moved across towards the buckets. The crunching underfoot sounded hideously loud, but she rationalised that it was unlikely to be heard above the steady, regular roar of the boiler.
She directed her torch down to the buckets. Again she was disappointed. Maybe she had hoped to find them still loaded with the afternoon’s clinker, but she was out of luck. The buckets were empty; only dust and ash clung to their battered sides.
She checked her watch. Probably time to go back. Minimise risks. Try another tack, in the morning.
She gave a final sweep with her torch to the inside of the buckets and was stopped by a dull flash from inside one of them. She brought the torch down nearer and saw the satisfying gleam of a droplet of metal clinging to the side.
It must have spattered there while still molten, and clung to the side when the hot ash was cleared. Mrs Pargeter leant down and prised the little sliver of metal loose with her finger-nail. She popped it into her dressing- gown pocket and left the boiler room as quietly as she had arrived.
Inside a minute she was back in her bedroom. She switched on the light and placed the scrap of metal on a tissue on her dressing table. She got out the late Mr Pargeter’s eye-glass and peered down at her trophy.
There was no doubt about it. During her not uneventful life with her late husband, Mrs Pargeter had seen enough melted-down pieces of metal like that to recognise it instantly.
It was a cheap alloy, silver-plated.
And on its surface was still the blurred outline of a tracery design.
Which she recognised as part of the setting of one of Mrs Selsby’s necklaces.
And it confirmed Mrs Pargeter’s conjecture that all of the old lady’s jewellery had been destroyed in the boiler of the Devereux Hotel.
? A Nice Class of Corpse ?
27
It had been a long five days at the Devereux, with more excitement than was normally rationed out to the hotel over as many years. The arrival of one new resident would usually have provided enough gossip-fodder for five months, and yet as well as that there had been the deaths of two other residents, visitation by the police and – more shocking than all of these – a robbery. It was sincerely hoped that they would all have a quiet weekend.
Saturday, Mrs Pargeter had discovered, was Newth’s day off. While for most hotels the weekend was the busiest period, this was not the case at the Devereux, because all of its guests stayed on a semi-permanent basis. Indeed, often the weekends were less busy than the weekdays, as some of the residents might go off to stay with friends or surviving relatives.
So Newth was free from the moment he had finished his breakfast routine on the Saturday (usually about nine) until twelve o’clock the next day, when he was expected to be back to help with Sunday lunch. In theory he could go anywhere he liked during that period, though in practice he always came back to the hotel to sleep on the Saturday night.
That morning Mrs Pargeter breakfasted quickly and was out of the Admiral’s Dining Room even before Colonel Wicksteed had had time to make his remark about time and tide. She put on her mink and left the hotel. She walked briskly some fifty metres along the front, then turned up a road leading into the town. In her tour of Littlehampton on the Tuesday, amongst other essential services, she had located a garage that operated a car rental service.
This garage, she had observed, opened for business at eight-thirty. By ten to nine she was parked on the sea front a little way away from the Devereux at the wheel of a brand-new Vauxhall Cavalier.
