gave a slight grin, then his eyes closed, his mouth fell slackly open and he snored, his breath steaming in the cold air of Embankment Gardens.
“God,” murmured Mrs Pargeter. “Isn’t there anything we can do to help him?”
Truffler Mason shrugged miserably. “Only if he wants to help himself.”
“Mm.”
“And from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t say he does want to help himself. I’d say he wants to destroy himself – and as quickly as possible.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Pargeter, suddenly overwhelmed by the bleakness of this undoubted truth. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re right.”
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Thirty
They picked up the car again in Northumberland Avenue. Gary had been given instructions to circle round until they were ready. Mrs Pargeter and Truffler got into the back of the limousine in silence. The customary cheerfulness was gone from her face, and his looked even more lugubrious than usual.
Mrs Pargeter gave terse instructions to the chauffeur, who took them on a tour of the London hospitals. At each one, Mrs Pargeter stayed in the car, while Truffler, the professional investigator, went into the Casualty Department with his Polaroid photograph.
He struck lucky at the third hospital. The sister he encountered had been on duty when Rod Cotton had been brought in with his broken arm. She recognised the face in the photograph instantly.
Yes, it had been a fall. He had been brought in with advanced DTs, and they’d had to dry him out a bit before they could set the arm. As a result, he had spent three days in the hospital, before discharging himself. No, he had given no name, and appeared to have no address.
She was gloomy about his prospects. They had plenty in like that, and most of them would come in more than once. Falls, walking into lamp-posts, stepping in front of cars. The hospital patched them up, tried to counsel them to change their habits, and, with little optimism, sent them out again into the world they hated, to repeat their accidents. Until one day there was a more serious accident and what arrived in Casualty was a body.
She answered all of Truffler’s questions as economically as she could, and then went off to deal with that day’s catalogue of human disasters.
He got back into the car, and Mrs Pargeter told the chauffeur to drive her back to Smithy’s Loam. They would drop Mr Mason off at a Tube station on the way.
“Well?” she said, when the limousine was in motion.
Truffler gave her all the details that he had elicited from the sister.
“And when was this?” asked Mrs Pargeter.
He gave her the dates. She smiled with grim satisfaction. Rod Cotton’s accident had happened on a Sunday evening, nineteen days before. Dead drunk, he had fallen down a flight of steps on Hungerford Bridge and broken his arm. He had been admitted to the hospital at half-past ten that night.
And, since he was kept in there for three days, there was no way that he could have been at Smithy’s Loam the day after the accident, murdering his wife.
¦
Just as Mrs Pargeter was tipping her chauffeur back at Smithy’s Loam, Sue Curle’s car screeched to a halt opposite, and its owner scrambled out in high fury. She was met at the door by Kirsten and, after a muttered consultation, the two children were hurried out of the house into the back of the car and all four drove off at speed.
Mrs Pargeter wondered mildly what all that was about, but she had more pressing thoughts on her mind. There was the small matter of the police that required a decision.
Now, Mrs Pargeter did not believe in being deliberately obstructive to the police, except of course when it was absolutely necessary to do so. And in this instance, she couldn’t really pretend that it was absolutely necessary. Could she?
With a twinge of regret, she admitted to herself that no, she really couldn’t.
So, once again, she rang the police informer from the late Mr Pargeter’s address book and gave him the information to pass on.
As a result of his call, by that evening, the official investigators of Theresa Cotton’s murder knew where to find the dead woman’s husband.
They did not, however, know of his alibi for the time of his wife’s murder. Mrs Pargeter didn’t want to make it too easy for them. If they didn’t have to work some of the details out for themselves, it took the fun away, didn’t it?
Once again, Mrs Pargeter felt that she was playing fair by the police. She did not want to solve the case by taking unfair advantage of them, so each time she found an important new gobbet of information, she behaved very correctly, and passed it on.
Unfortunately, this was not a reciprocal arrangement.
The police could not be blamed for that state of affairs. Apart from anything else, even if they had wished to repay information with information, they were unaware of the identity of their benefactor, so would not know where to direct it.
And, being the realistic woman she was, Mrs Pargeter recognised that, even if they knew of her interest in the case, the police might be disinclined to be as generous as she in keeping her abreast of developments in their investigation.
The result of this, however, was that it was some days before Mrs Pargeter heard of the circumstances in which the police did find Rod Cotton.
As intended, the anonymous tip-off led them to the Embankment, but their quarry was not there when they arrived, and rigorous enquiries amongst his fellow-dossers produced no clue to his whereabouts.
It was three days later, when a body was washed up at Woolwich, that the police identified it as that of Rod Cotton.
And it was not until Tuesday, four days after her encounter with the dead man, that Mrs Pargeter read this news in her daily paper.
In the report of the discovery, reference was made to Theresa’s murder. In the inimitably British way that newspapers have of tiptoeing around the Law, the report implied, without of course saying as much, that the two deaths were not unconnected.
And also implied, though with what basis of truth could not be assessed, that the police might be looking no further for the murderer of Theresa Cotton.
? Mrs, Presumed Dead ?
Thirty-One
In all her deliberations about the case, Mrs Pargeter kept coming back to the same question. How much could the murderer have predicted?
The murderer could not have predicted, for example, that Theresa’s body would have been found as soon as it was. On the other hand, he or she could have predicted that it would have been found at some point. So that risk must have been taken into account.
The murderer could also have predicted that, once the murder was discovered, the first person the police were likely to look for was Rod Cotton. Now, if Rod, as the accepted wisdom of Smithy’s Loam had it, was working in the North, the police would have had no difficulty at all in tracking him down. And, once they had tracked him down, they would question him about his movements at the time of his wife’s murder. That time was in fact a very specific and relatively short period. Theresa Cotton had been seen, alive and well, at about seven-thirty on the Monday evening, by Sid Runcorn the car dealer. And she had been safely strangled and stowed away in her freezer by nine o’clock the following morning when Littlehaven’s removal men arrived.
