Mrs Pargeter 06; Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

process Sergeant Hughes had just described. “And have you reached any conclusions?” he asked in a pained voice.

“Well, assuming we’re right about the stolen paintings having been at Chastaigne Varleigh, then that immediately means that Bennie Logan has to have been involved. Now, amongst people he’d worked with in the past was an art thief called Fritzi the Finger, who works out of Salzburg.”

“And?” asked Wilkinson, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. It had taken him three years to work out the connection between Bennie Logan and Fritzi the Finger; Hughes appeared to have done it in as many days.

“And, sir, both of them had occasional connections with a certain criminal mastermind.”

“Who was that?” The Inspector’s voice shrivelled under its own sarcasm. “Professor Moriarty?”

“No, sir, it was a man who’s now dead, but who in his time was behind some of the biggest criminal operations in London. His name was Mr Pargeter.”

“Really?” Wilkinson tried to keep his voice as casual and uninterested as possible, but the name still brought him an unwelcome frisson.

“Yes, sir. I’m building up a dossier on his activities. The late Mr Pargeter, so far as I can tell, was a great coordinator. He knew all kinds of specialists in the underworld and his skill was in getting them together. He was the brains behind everything, but his influence reached out to a whole army of minor villains.”

“Why’re you telling me all this, Hughes?”

“Because if you entrap someone like Mr Pargeter, sir, you don’t just get one villain, you get a whole pack of them. Apparently, I read in the files, at one stage there was a police initiative to get him, but it was conducted so incompetently that –”

“Yes, yes,” Inspector Wilkinson interrupted testily. “There’s one thing you seem to be ignoring in all this extremely fascinating conversation, and that is that you’re talking about someone who is dead. I’m sure it would be entirely possible to set up a very clever operation to entrap Mr Pargeter, but you’d be ten years too late.”

“Mr Pargeter may be dead, sir,” the Sergeant said slowly, “but his influence didn’t die with him.”

“What’re you saying, Hughes?”

“I’m saying that Mr Pargeter’s network still exists.”

“I see.” The Inspector smiled sceptically. “And who, may I ask, runs this mythical organization?”

“His widow.”

“Who?”

“His widow. Mrs Pargeter.” Wilkinson gaped, and Hughes pressed home his advantage. “What is more, I have now established that, on the third day we worked together doing surveillance at Chastaigne Varleigh, she was the woman who arrived at the house by limousine.”

“What!”

“I’ve checked it out.” The Sergeant was now having difficulty keeping a note of smugness out of his voice. He’d really got the old dinosaur on the run now. “That woman’s name was Mrs Pargeter.”

There was a silence, then inspector Wilkinson broke it with a patronizing chuckle. “Hughes, Hughes, Hughes,” he said pityingly, “what it must be still to have the boundless enthusiasm of youth.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean that you have no basis for assuming that the woman who entered Chastaigne Varleigh has anything to do with the late Mr Pargeter.”

“But of course I have. For heaven’s sake, she’s got the same surname!”

“Yes, and so the obvious thing to do would be to assume that they’re related.”

“Seems reasonable to me, sir.”

“Yes, it probably does to you, Hughes, but what distinguishes an exceptional copper from a run-of-the-mill copper is the ability to see beyond the obvious. Sometimes, you know, we can learn from the world of crime fiction. Have you read any of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Hughes?”

“No. I’m more interested in real-life crime than that kind of hokum.”

“Oh, don’t be hasty, Hughes. You’d be very unwise to dismiss Sherlock Holmes as hokum. The important lesson he offers to every real-life copper is that one shouldn’t look for the obvious. Are you familiar with The curious incident of the dog in the night-time?”

“No,” the Sergeant replied sullenly.

“Well, you should be. I mean, what would you expect a dog to do in the night-time?”

“Sleep?”

“Yes. Or bark.”

“It’d only bark if something disturbed it.”

“Exactly, Hughes, exactly! You know, you might have the makings of a half-decent cop yet,” Wilkinson conceded generously. “In the relevant Sherlock Holmes story, it’s what the dog doesn’t do that’s important. The reader’s expectations are reversed – therein lies Conan Doyle’s cunning. And it’s just the same in this case. Mrs Pargeter has the same surname as the late Mr Pargeter – and that is the very reason why they’re not related.”

“So are you going to leave it like that, sir? Assume they’re not related without even checking?”

“No, no, Hughes,” the Inspector replied patiently as if to an over-excited five-year-old. “Of course I’ll check it out. A good copper always checks things out. But I’ll be very surprised if my instinct isn’t proved right once again. You’ll see, Hughes – and hopefully you’ll learn too, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” Hughes replied sullenly.

“Remember what I said. It rarely pays to go for the obvious. Lateral thinking is what you need in our line of work.”

Inspector Wilkinson grinned complacently. Sergeant Hughes seethed.

? Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ?

Twenty-Two

Gary’s limousine sighed to a halt outside an ordinary-looking terrace in a North London suburb. Even though this was not a commercial booking and his passenger was only Truffler Mason, force of habit made the chauffeur get out and open the back door. Everyone who travelled in one of Gary’s cars got the same first-class treatment.

“Thanks, mate,” said Truffler, and looked up at the house. “He’ll be good on this stuff, Gary. He’s great on computers, but anything to do with motors, I always go to Jukebox Jarvis too. You know him?”

Gary opened the gate and they walked up the short path to the front door. It only took one and a quarter of Truffler’s huge strides. “I’ve heard of him, obviously,” said the chauffeur, “not met him. One thing I’ve always wanted to know, though, was why he was called ‘Jukebox’.”

Truffler Mason lifted the Lincoln Imp doorknocker and let it fall. “Because he was Mr Pargeter’s archivist.”

“Archivist? But I still don’t get –”

Patiently, Truffler spelled it out. “Because he kept the records.”

“Oh,” said Gary. “Right.”

The door opened to reveal a small, balding, inoffensive man in a homely cardigan. Behind thick glasses, his eyes sparkled as he recognized one of his visitors.

“Truffler!” he cried, seizing the tall man’s hand. “How you doing, me old kipper?”

¦

Jukebox Jarvis’s office was in his front room, a tangled maze of computers, monitors, printers, modems and scanners, all interconnected in a lunatic cat’s cradle of cables. So extensive was the array of hardware that it was impossible to see the tables and filing cabinets on which the equipment rested.

The only objects in the room which weren’t computer-related hung on the walls. They were sentimental animal pictures of quite mesmerizing awfulness. The level of winsomeness among their fluffy chicks and simpering Scotties made VVO’s daubs look like models of classical restraint.