Mrs Pargeter 05; Mrs Pargeter’s Plot

melted. “Certainly suits him,” she observed, before turning back to the notes. “Seems he’s used a good few blunt instruments in his time, and all.”

Truffler screwed up his face. “Oh yes. Nasty bit of work. Not of the subtlest either, when it comes to covering his tracks. Spends his whole life in and out the nick. You never met him, did you?”

Mrs Pargeter looked ingenuously at the detective. “Why on earth should I have done?”

“Well, in the early days he worked quite a bit for Mr Pargeter… you know, back round the Basildon era.”

“Really?” said Mrs Pargeter, glacially innocent. “My husband never talked to me about his work, and introduced me to very few of his colleagues.”

“No, of course not,” Truffler said hastily.

“It is only since his death,” she continued demurely, “that I have used the address book he left me to make some… very useful contacts.”

“I understand completely.”

Truffler relaxed a little at the sight of a smile on Mrs Pargeter’s lips, as she went on, “‘You don’t want to worry your head about my business, Melita,’ he used to say to me…”

“Too right.”

“‘Besides, what you don’t know…’” she smiled sweetly, “‘… you can’t tell anyone else about, can you?’”

“He was a very shrewd man, Mr Pargeter,” Truffler asserted, then continued with diffidence: “Incidentally, Mrs Pargeter, you remember… Streatham?”

Her face clouded. “Streatham? I believe it’s a South London suburb between Brixton and Mitcham.”

“No, you know what I mean. Streatham. Julian Embridge Streatham.”

The mention of the name sent darkened clouds over Mrs Pargeter’s habitually sunny face. “I thought we had dealt with that problem. Julian Embridge is currently serving a very long jail sentence – which is an inadequate revenge for what he did in Streatham, but better than nothing.”

She referred to an unhappy incident in her husband’s generally successful career, when betrayal by a trusted lieutenant – the same Julian Embridge – had caused him a longer absence from the marital nest than either of them would have wished for. Though, as Mrs Pargeter mentioned, she had since exacted her revenge, the memory of Embridge’s perfidy could still cause her anguish.

Truffler elaborated. “Reason I mentioned Streatham is –”

He was interrupted by a sudden scream of Welsh anger from the outer office, and shrugged apologetically. “Sounds like Bronwen’s husband – ex-husband I should say – is back from Mauritius and has just phoned her up.”

Their ensuing dialogue was punctuated by further vituperation from the valleys. Through the wall they could not distinguish the words, but when a tone of voice is that expressive, who needs words?

“What were you saying about Streatham?” Mrs Pargeter prompted.

Truffler sighed ruefully. “Just that there’s little doubt that he…” a large finger prodded the photograph of Blunt, “… was in it right up to his neck.”

Mrs Pargeter looked grim. “Right. So I have the odd score to settle with Blunt, don’t I?” An even louder scream of Welsh fury thundered through the partition. Mrs Pargeter raised an eyebrow to Truffler, then asked, “What about the other name Concrete mentioned?”

“Yes. Clickety Clark…” His hands instinctively found the relevant dossier and passed it across the desk. As he did so, Truffler shook his head in puzzlement. “Odd. I mean, Clickety was in a totally different part of the business.”

“Still worked for my husband, though?”

“Oh yes, but he didn’t do no heavy stuff.” Mrs Pargeter gazed at the detective with charming incomprehension. What on earth could he mean by ‘heavy stuff’?

“He done photography,” Truffler explained. “Passport photographs, that kind of number, anything photographic where sort of… specialized work was needed. We used to call him ‘Wandering Hands’.” Mrs Pargeter looked at him for elucidation. “Because he was always touching everything up.”

“Ah.”

“What old Clickety’s doing now, though, I’ve no idea. I think we should – ” He was interrupted by the sound of a heavy object being hurled with some force at the dividing wall between the two offices. “Excuse me a moment, Mrs Pargeter.”

With the long-suffering weariness of someone who has gone through these motions many times before, Truffler Mason rose to his full length and crossed to a dusty cupboard. He unlocked it to reveal shelves piled high with brand-new plastic-wrapped telephones. He took one out and turned to face the door.

As he did so, a diffident tap was heard, and the door opened. Bronwen stood there, flushed and apologetic. In her hands were the tangled remains of a smashed telephone.

Wordlessly, Truffler took the debris and handed her the new one. Bronwen smiled embarrassed gratitude and went back to her desk, closing the door behind her. Truffler chucked the shattered telephone into the bin.

With no reference to the incident, he then said, “Right, Mrs Pargeter. I think we need to get some up-to-date info on Blunt and Clickety Clark.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“We are going,” said Truffler with a foxy grin, “to visit the offices of Inside Out.”

? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?

Fourteen

The offices of Inside Out were housed in Swordfish Wharf, a gleaming new tower block in Docklands. “Not a million miles from Wapping,” Truffler Mason observed, as Gary’s limousine deposited them outside the entrance. “They say that’s the new Fleet Street, don’t they?”

“The only people who say it are people who haven’t been here,” said Mrs Pargeter, looking up with distaste at the glass box that loomed above them. “The only journalists I’ve met recently say nothing will replace the old Fleet Street.”

“Ah, but where did you meet them, Mrs P.?” asked Truffler, as they crossed a foyer, whose copious vegetation was apparently trying to reproduce an air-conditioned rainforest. The steel sculpture of a swordfish rising out of the green looked confused by its alien environment.

“Boozing in pubs round Fleet Street,” she replied. While they waited by the over-designed slate-grey counter for one of the uniformed security men to get off the telephone or stop staring portentously at his monitor screen, Mrs Pargeter indulged in a moment of nostalgia. “No, these days they’re trying to get rid of all the old stereotypes. Proper, heavy-drinking journalists are being replaced by Perrier-swilling suits who never leave their keyboards. Television producers now sit around earnestly thinking of minority interests and sipping nothing stronger than a large espresso. Do you know,” she concluded on a note of awe, “nowadays apparently there are even teetotal publishers?”

Truffler Mason shook his head and grinned. “Still, you’ll never go that way, will you, Mrs P.?”

“I should think not!” she replied indignantly. “I’m not a religious person, but clearly whoever devised this world we live in filled it full of delightful treats – food and drink being high on the list. And not to take advantage of that divine generosity – whatever creed you may happen to believe in – amounts to downright blasphemy, so far as I’m concerned.”

“Too right,” Truffler nodded. “Too right.”

One of the security men had disengaged himself from the telephone. He looked up at them balefully. “Can I help you?” he asked unhelpfully.

“The names are Mason and Pargeter.”

“Oh yes?” His tone was heavy with disbelief.

“We’ve come to see Ricky Van Hoeg,” Truffler continued. “He is expecting us.”

“Really?” This appeared to the security man an even less likely assertion. He punched some numbers vindictively into his telephone. After a brief conversation, he was forced grudgingly to concede that they were expected.