“No, you go and see if Truffler needs any help.” Mrs Pargeter leant through the open back window to kiss Tammy Jacket tenderly on the cheek. “You’ll be fine, love. Take care now.” Then she turned back to Gary. “And one of your drivers will get Tammy home safely?”
The woman in the back of the car looked at her with some alarm. “It’s all right, I promise,” Mrs Pargeter reassured her. “Those two won’t come troubling you again.”
“It’s not just that,” said Tammy. “It’s the thought of going back to all the horrible mess, and seeing all my lovely things smashed and –”
“No worries,” Mrs Pargeter laid a hand on her arm. “I’ve had the place tidied up for you. Looks just like new – well, nearly.”
“Oh, Mrs Pargeter…” was all that Tammy Jacket could say. She was almost weeping with gratitude.
“Who you get to do the clean-up?” asked Gary, in a whisper.
“Guy called Meredith the Mop. Found his name in my late husband’s address book. Apparently he’s very good at tidying up after things.”
“I’ll say! He did that mop-up operation after the Crouch End Pizza House incident. Lovely job he done. Got all the burn-marks off the bar counter, filled in the bullet-holes in the walls, and nobody could imagine how he managed to get all the blood out of the table cloths. I tell you, it was –”
The chauffeur caught the expression in the violet-blue eyes that were trained on his, and decided that he’d probably said enough.
“Gary,” Mrs Pargeter intoned glacially, “I have no idea what on earth you’re talking about.” Then she leant once again in through the car window. “Chin up, Tammy. You just go home and wait for Concrete. Won’t be long now till he’s home, I promise you that.”
? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?
Thirty-Three
Mrs Pargeter’s eyes sparkled as she rounded off her exposition of the case. There was something very satisfying about having all the details sorted out, all the loose ends neatly tied up. Opposite her sat Nigel Merriman, formal and impassive, giving no reaction to her revelations, but occasionally scribbling a note on the legal pad in front of him.
At the conclusion of her narrative, he asked, “And you say Mr Mason’ll be able to prove all this?”
She grinned confidently. “Oh yes, Truffler’s sorting out the evidence even as we speak. And he’s good at that sort of stuff. It’ll be rock solid, don’t you worry.”
“Hm. And you’re sure it was just the two of them…” he looked down at his pad, and fastidiously pronounced the unfamiliar names, “… Clickety Clark and Blunt… who organized the whole thing? You don’t think that someone else may have been organizing
“I don’t think there was anyone else, but Truffler’s checking that out, too. Don’t worry, Nigel. There’s easily enough to get Concrete Jacket off now, isn’t there?”
Nigel Merriman’s face took on the expression of professional caution that goes with the job, but he couldn’t help agreeing. “Oh, certainly. I don’t see how the authorities could possibly keep hold of my client if all this were to be made public. No, you’ve done extremely well, Mrs Pargeter.”
“Thank you,” she said modestly.
There was a knock at the door behind her. “Come in,” said the solicitor automatically and then continued addressing Mrs Pargeter. “You seem to have sorted out the whole thing with admirable efficiency. In fact, there’s really only one detail in the case you got wrong.”
“And what was that?” asked Mrs Pargeter combatively. She felt pretty certain she’d made sense of the whole scenario, and was confidently prepared to argue her case.
She heard the door behind her open, and saw Nigel Merriman’s eyeline move to his new visitors. His expression had changed. Now it contained something gleeful. Unpleasantly gleeful.
With sickening certainty of what she was about to see, Mrs Pargeter slowly turned round.
Framed in the doorway, their faces bruised and scarred, and looking meaner than she’d ever seen them look before, were Clickety Clark and Blunt.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?
Thirty-Four
There was no give in the rope that tied Mrs Pargeter’s arms behind the chair and her legs to the chair legs. Her captors had made it clear that the smallest sound from her would result in her mouth being taped over with equal tightness. The outer door of the office had been firmly locked by a large key So she could only watch helplessly what was going on.
The thick curtains had been drawn, presumably to avoid anything being seen from adjacent blocks, and the lights were on. The surface of Nigel Merriman’s desk was covered with wads of banknotes, which Clickety Clark and Blunt were transferring systematically into a series of briefcases.
While they did this, the solicitor watched them, swivelling idly in his chair and playing with the point of a paperknife. He seemed much more relaxed now. His professional formality had been replaced by an impudent, almost daredevil, cheerfulness, as he spelled out the revised situation to his captive.
“The only effect your meddling will have had on us, Mrs Pargeter, is to move our plans forward a little. We had intended to leave the country at the end of the year, but we’ve got the bulk of the money together, so…” he shrugged carelessly, “… to make our departure now will represent no problem.”
As she had before in similar situations, Mrs Pargeter tried the breezy, facetious approach. “Oh well, if I haven’t caused you any problem, then you can just set me free, can’t you?” she suggested.
Her flippancy raised a thin smile from Nigel Merriman, but that was the full extent of its reward. “Ah, Mrs Pargeter… if only life were that simple. You see, you do know rather a lot about us. In fact, I was impressed by how much you managed to work out… and of course I was grateful for the way you kept telling me all about it. But… I’m afraid you do know a little too much to be allowed back into circulation.”
As he spoke, he reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a stubby but businesslike automatic pistol. He gave a helpless shrug, as if he were at the mercy of forces beyond his control. “Sorry about this, Mrs Pargeter. Still, I suppose, in a way, it’ll be a kind of double for me.”
“What do you mean?”
He gave her a bland smile, as he rose from his seat and began to move expansively around the office. “Now – getting my own back on you. And before that – getting my own back on your husband…”
Suddenly Mrs Pargeter understood. Her late husband’s professional life had been conducted in a general atmosphere of goodwill and mutual cooperation, marred only by the occasional minor unpleasantness.
And one major unpleasantness. The occasion when the late Mr Pargeter’s natural bonhomie and trusting nature had been betrayed by one of his most trusted associates. The occasion when this evil man – Julian Embridge – had suborned others of the late Mr Pargeter’s entourage, men who had benefited hugely from their employer’s instinctive philanthropy, and persuaded them to join him in his perfidy. The ghastly incident had been known thereafter simply by the name of the place where it had been perpetrated. The name unfailingly sent a chill through Mrs Pargeter’s heart, and she felt that familiar uneasy
Nigel Merriman stopped his circuit of the room and nodded smugly. He was now standing between his quarry and the outer door. “Yes, I was one of the people involved in events in Streatham, Mrs Pargeter. Though – perhaps luckily for me – your husband was never made aware of my participation.”
He was impervious to the look of undiluted hatred that she trained on him. Nor was he aware of the tiny change that came into her expression as she noticed a slight movement behind him. Mrs Pargeter looked firmly into the solicitor’s eyes to absorb his concentration, but still her peripheral vision watched in fascination what was happening to the outer door.
A tiny hand, at the end of a tiny fur-covered arm, was reaching in through the door’s letter-box. Slowly, the
