if you don’t mind.”
“Sorry, love.” She could see his point. It had been a bit tactless. A man who’d earned his nickname from the skill with which he wound back milometers would hardly want it shouted around the West End office where he sold Bentleys to Bahrain.
“Don’t mention it. Perfectly natural. Instinctive reaction.” Rewind Wilson boomed. “Oh, it’s such a pleasure to hear you, Mrs Pargeter. You know, I keep thinking about your husband and the things we got up to.”
“So do I,” she admitted, indulging in a little moment of melancholy.
“He was the best. Absolutely the best. No one to touch him in the field.”
“It’s nice of you to say so.”
“True, dear lady. Absolutely true. Wouldn’t say it if it weren’t. Anyway, to what do I owe the great pleasure of your call after all these years?” But before she could reply, he went on, “Your late husband, incidentally, did ask me to give you any help that you might ever require. I would have done, anyway, out of loyalty – I only mention it so’s you know how much he cared for you.”
That was the one thing Mrs Pargeter had never doubted. “Thank you, Re…Mr Wilson,” she hastily corrected herself. “In fact, there was a small favour I was going to ask you.”
“Anything, dear lady, anything.”
“Do you still have all your contacts in the motoring world…I mean, even though you’ve gone str – um, changed your line of business?”
“I think you’ll find my contacts are as good as anyone’s in the trade.”
“And you still have, um…access to the computers?”
“You name it, Mrs Pargeter, I’ll track it down.”
“Well, I am actually trying to find a specific vehicle.”
“This would not be for purchase, dear lady, would it?”
“No, I’m trying to trace someone. I thought finding them through their car might be a good approach. And I remembered that there was an occasion when you gave my late husband some assistance in a somewhat similar situation…”
“Shall we just mention the words ‘Welwyn Garden City’…?” asked Rewind Wilson, with a conspiratorial wink in his voice.
“Exactly.”
“Right. No problem. Fill me in on all the information you have, and I give you my word that I’ll track the vehicle in question down for you.”
“Thank you. Well, the car’s a Fiat Uno. Only a year old. And the owner’s name’s Cotton. Might be in the wife’s name, Theresa, or the husband’s, which is Rodney.”
“Fine. Do you have their address?”
“The last recorded address I have for them is…” And she gave her own.
“Splendid. Give me a number where I can get back to you and I’ll be on to it straight away.”
“Thank you so much.” She gave him her telephone number.
“Incidentally, Mrs Pargeter,” he asked, once again conspiratorial, “is this in connection with a ‘job’?”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, suddenly glacial. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.”
Rewind Wilson was covered with confusion. “No, I do apologise. Silly of me. Don’t know what came over me. Forget I said it. Please.”
She accorded him a magnanimous, “Very well.”
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, dear lady. Can’t say how long it’ll be, I’m afraid – depends on the circumstances – but rest assured that I will set things in motion as quickly as possible.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, once again may I say what a pleasure it has been to hear from you again. And…erm…” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “…terribly sorry about what I said just then. Didn’t want to imply…Hope you didn’t get the idea I –”
“Think nothing of it, Mr Wilson,” said Mrs Pargeter sweetly. “And thank you so much for your help. Goodbye.”
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Fourteen
Through the net curtains, whose advantages she was coming to appreciate increasingly the longer she spent in Smithy’s Loam, Mrs Pargeter saw her next-door neighbour emerge from the front door of ‘Cromarty’ with a bucket, sponge and cloths. Not content with the daily drubbing she gave to the inside of her windows, Carole Temple was now set to punish the outside.
Mrs Pargeter decided it was time she should do a little gentle gardening. A little gentle
She went to the shed at the back and selected a hoe, an edging tool, a trowel and a trug. Those ought to cover most eventualities, she thought. The trug in particular seemed to say ‘gardening’ to her. She remembered walking with the late Mr Pargeter through the garden of the big house in Chigwell, carrying a trugful of flowers on many a Sunday afternoon. She had loved that garden; it was always so beautifully cared for.
Not of course that she actually had to do any of the caring herself. The late Mr Pargeter had always ensured that her gardening efforts were restricted to cutting flowers and putting them in a trug. He organised the men who were their frequent guests to do the real work. It was surprising how happy those men had always been to do a little gardening in exchange for a few days of unobserved calm in Chigwell.
Mrs Pargeter went round the side of the house to the front garden, and when she saw Carole Temple she called out a cheery, “Good morning.”
Her neighbour froze in mid-wipe, and nodded a perfunctory ‘Good morning’ back. Then she returned determinedly to her window-cleaning, the set of her shoulders a fierce deterrent to further conversation.
But Mrs Pargeter was not daunted by that sort of thing. After a little tentative scrabbling with her hoe in one of the front beds, she said, “Do you do your garden yourself, Carole?”
This prompted another affronted freeze, before a reply was conceded. “Yes. My husband does most of it.”
“Handy things, husbands,” Mrs Pargeter commented breezily. “I miss a good few of the things my husband used to do.”
The innuendo was deliberate and, Mrs Pargeter knew, a bit childish. But Carole Temple’s stuffiness had that effect on her. She was determined to get some reaction, any reaction, out of her neighbour.
But that was apparently not the way to get it. Carole continued rubbing the glass as if she hoped to come through on the other side.
“I think I might have to get a little man in to help out.” Mrs Pargeter went on and then, realising that she was keeping the innuendo going, chuckled throatily. “Oh dear, aren’t I dreadful?” she said, still trying to get a rise out of Carole.
The rubbing became even more vigorous.
“Did the Cottons do this garden themselves?”
Faced with a direct question, Carole could not stay silent without overt rudeness, so she had to reply. “Yes. Well, of course, for the last few months Theresa did it all.”
She couldn’t have set up a better cue for Mrs Pargeter if she had tried. “Yes. I gather Mr Cotton hadn’t been around for some time…?”
“No.”
Mrs Pargeter was not going to be deterred by monosyllables. “Got a job up North, did I hear?”
“Yes.”
“Where was that exactly?”
Carole looked with slight annoyance away from her cleaning, and what she saw brought an expression of shock to her face. Mrs Pargeter had now moved forward and was actually leaning against the dividing wall between their properties, for all the world like a gossip from a northern soap opera.
