Mrs Pargeter 05; Mrs Pargeter’s Plot

He thrust a clipboard towards them. “Fill in your names, companies represented, whom visiting, time of arrival, estimated time of departure, name of insurance company, telephone contact number for next of kin, and nature of business. Then the computer will issue you with a visiting number which you wear in this plastic badge. Do not remove your visiting badge at any time while you are within the building, and return it to the desk here on departure. Under no circumstances change your visiting badge with anyone else – it is not transferable.”

Mrs Pargeter fixed the security man in the beam of her violet-blue eyes. “I don’t really think we want to bother with any of that,” she murmured sweetly.

The security man shrugged. “Oh, well, please yourself,” he said, and, as they crossed to the lifts, he turned back to watch his security monitor, which was showing a mid-morning cookery programme. He made notes on a pad of the ingredients for mangetouts au gratin a la proveneale.

¦

The lift doors opened and an infinitely tall, infinitely thin woman emerged. She had the contours of a stick insect, and was dressed in designer clothes that would be the envy of stick insects all over the world. She looked fabulous.

“Mrs Pargeter!” she exclaimed in hearty Cockney, and swept the shorter, fatter woman up into her arms.

“Ellie!” Ellie Fenchurch was the country’s most vitriolic celebrity interviewer. Her Sunday newspaper column made compulsory reading for anyone who enjoyed seeing the great and good humiliated (and that, of course, included just about everyone). Talentless and graceless minor royals, devious cabinet ministers, testosterone- choked sports heroes, oversexed rock stars, unfaithful newsreaders, and supermodels whose braincell count didn’t reach double figures – they had all had cause to smart from the interviewing technique of Ellie Fenchurch. Which made all the more remarkable the huge and continuing queue of celebrities desperate to be given the same treatment.

As they disengaged from the hug, Mrs Pargeter said, “You know Truffler, don’t you?”

“Course I do.” Ellie was exactly the same height as the detective. She enthusiastically kissed the air to either side of his cheeks.

“What you doing here then?” asked Mrs Pargeter.

“My office is here, isn’t it?”

“Is it? I thought you worked for one of the Sundays.”

“I do. And that’s based here.”

“Oh, I see, so there’re legitimate papers here, and all, are there?”

Ellie’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean – legitimate?”

Truffler clarified the situation. “We’re coming to see Ricky Van Hoeg at Inside Out. I think Mrs Pargeter may have somehow got the impression that it isn’t a legitimate publication.”

“What, you mean it is?” asked Mrs Pargeter innocently.

“Course it is. Everything here comes under the Swordfish umbrella,” said Ellie.

“But I thought it was called the Lag Mag for prisoners and –”

“It is. That doesn’t mean it’s not legit, though. There’s a market out there. Swordfish Communications are very shrewd operators. They’ll publish a magazine about anything, so long as they can make money out of it. Isn’t that right, Truffler?”

He nodded. “You bet. They do Knicker-Nickers’ World… and Morris Dancers’ Monthly…”

“The Ferret-Fanciers’ Gazette…”

“Which Depilatory?…”

“Matchstick Modelling Today…”

“The Cribbage Quarterly…”

“Oh yes,” Ellie Fenchurch concluded. “Swordfish magazines’ll explore any niche market there is. You see, the thing about ferret-fanciers or matchstick-modellers is: there may not be that many of them, but, by God, they’re loyal. Circulation guaranteed to stay steady. All the same articles get recycled – with slight editorial adjustments – every three or four months, production costs are pared down to the bone, but, in spite of all that, the punters just keep on buying.”

Mrs Pargeter looked bewildered. “I thought Swordfish was about the big newspaper titles – the daily and the Sunday one. That’s what they’re known for, surely?”

Ellie Fenchurch shook her head. “Don’t you believe it. Those’re the public profile, yes, but they both make a big loss. Swordfish’s profit comes from the advertising it sells for local papers and the specialist markets. I mean, if you’re trying to sell protective underpants for people who want to do ferret-down-trouser tricks in pubs, there’s not many places you can advertise, is there? Got to be The Ferret-Fanciers’ Gazette, hasn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Mrs Pargeter smiled. “What’re you up to at the moment, Ellie?”

“Right this minute, I’m just off to do a character assassination on an Australian soap opera star.”

“Oh, nice.”

“Well, I’ll enjoy it. But that won’t take long. Once he knows I know about his very close interest in sheep, I think the interview could come to an abrupt end. How’s about lunch? You not going to be with Ricky all day, are you?”

“Hour, maybe,” said Truffler.

Ellie Fenchurch looked at her watch. “Great. See you both at the Savoy Grill half past one. We’ll all get thoroughly rat-arsed.”

“But, Ellie,” said Mrs Pargeter ingenuously, “I didn’t think journalists drank these days.”

“No, of course they don’t.” Ellie Fenchurch let out a snort of laughter. “And, what’s more, politicians don’t take backhanders!”

? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?

Fifteen

These days, Mrs Pargeter thought regretfully as she and Truffler were ushered into the presence of Inside Out’s editor, even journalists’ offices don’t look any different from anyone else’s offices. The huge floor-space covering a whole storey of Swordfish House, the rows of open-plan low-walled cubicles, each centred on the winking coloured screen of a computer, could have belonged equally convincingly to a bank or a mail-order firm or an insurance company.

What she thought of as the hack’s natural environment-battered manual typewriters, overspilling wicker wastepaper baskets, encrusted coffee cups with cigarette butts floating in them, a half-bottle of whisky in the bottom desk drawer, and maybe even the odd green eye-shade – had vanished for ever. Journalism had followed the route of so many professions, hands-on human contact giving way to a life lived by remote control, its reality distanced from its operators through the medium of the microchip.

Dear oh dear, thought Mrs Pargeter, not like me to be so maudlin. She pulled herself together with the memory of some words the late Mr Pargeter had often spoken to her. “Everyone should home in on what they’re good at, Melita my love. You’re good at being positive. So be positive. There are quite enough people out there who’re good at being negative, but what you’ve got going for you is something much rarer.”

She smiled at the recollection as she leant forward to shake the hand of Ricky Van Hoeg, editor of Inside Out. His superior status over the other hacks at least gave him the right to a small cubicle in the corner of the office, but its glass walls and open door did not make it seem very separate from the hushed, open-plan keyboard-clacking environment outside.

Ricky Van Hoeg was in his thirties, earnestly bespectacled, with the look of someone whose life mission it is to sell you a mortgage. Mrs Pargeter wasn’t sure what she was expecting – or even wanting – but it wasn’t this. She would have hoped that the editor of a prisoners’ whereabouts magazine might have some minimal element of loucheness about him.

But Ricky Van Hoeg showed not a flicker of the unconventional. He had, she later discovered, started working