interested.”
“And you’re afraid this may make them speed up their plans and start selling off the goods?”
“It’s a possibility.”
As he spoke, Truffler Mason nodded gloomily. So did Hamish Ramon Henriques. To her annoyance, Mrs Pargeter found herself giving a gloomy nod too.
Truffler shook his huge head to jolt himself out of the communal despondency. “I think I’d better go and check it out,” he said.
¦
The Alsatian lying by the padlocked gates of the breaker’s yard snored evenly. From the corner of his slack mouth dripped bloody juices from the drugged meat he had so eagerly wolfed down.
In the car parked inside the yard facing the gates, two men, heavies called Ray and Phil, also snored in rhythmic counterpoint. On the dashboard in front of them stood the open thermos flask which had contained their drugged coffee, and the two plastic cups they had drunk it from. In sleep, the craggy lines of the men’s battered faces had been ironed out to give them a baby-like, almost cherubic, innocence. Between them were propped up a shotgun and a baseball bat, and against these they leant in touching tranquillity. In the mouth of one of the villains was lodged an infantile thumb.
Truffler Mason’s picklocks sorted out the red Transit van’s keyhole as easily as they had the padlocks on the back gate of the yard. With a quick look around the floodlit tangle of dead cars to check he was unobserved, Truffler slipped his tall body into the back of the Transit.
Once inside, he produced a pencil torch from his pocket and ran it quickly over the van’s contents. The frames were wrapped in rugs for protection, but he could easily move these aside to check which paintings were there. It didn’t take long to match the inventory on Palings Price’s list. So far none of the art works taken from Chastaigne Varleigh had been moved on. The hoard was intact.
There was a clattering of the main gate outside. Truffler froze, switched off his pencil torch and eased forward over the partition into the driver’s cab to see what was going on. Outlined in the open gateway of the yard, backlit by spotlights, stood two burly figures. He had no difficulty in recognizing Rod D’Acosta and the other heavy who had taken the paintings from Chastaigne Varleigh. One carried a baseball bat, the other a pickaxe handle.
Rod dropped to one knee to check on the Alsatian, and rose in fury when he saw the dog’s condition. He then pointed angrily to the parked car, and the two men moved towards it.
Seeing the state of the two guards, Rod and his henchman immediately started banging on the car roof with baseball bat and pickaxe handle. The cherubic peace of the heavies called Ray and Phil was rudely shattered.
But by the time the four villains had reached the red Transit van, its doors were once again firmly locked. Truffler Mason had slipped away through the jumbled wreckage of old cars, and melted into the night.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ?
Thirty-One
“We need to talk to Veronica Chastaigne,” Sergeant Hughes announced.
“Now just a minute, just a minute,” said his boss. “I’m the one who decides who we need to talk to.”
“All right, you make the decision, but the fact remains that we need to speak to Veronica Chastaigne.”
“On what grounds? She hasn’t done anything wrong. We can’t charge her with anything.”
“We don’t need to talk to her as a suspect. We need to talk to her as a witness. Come on, she’s lived all those years at Chastaigne Varleigh. There’s no way that she was unaware of what there was up in the Long Gallery.”
“We have no proof that there was anything there shouldn’t have been up in the Long Gallery.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
Inspector Wilkinson’s moustache (which he had, incidentally, decided to let grow) bristled with affront. “What did you say, Hughes?”
The Sergeant looked subdued. “Sorry, sir.”
“I should think so.”
The Sergeant looked less subdued. “What I meant to say was: ‘Oh, for God’s sake,
Wilkinson stared narrowly at his colleague. “There’s a very disrespectful tone creeping into your voice, Hughes, and I don’t like it. Never forget that I am your senior officer.”
“I don’t get much chance to forget it, do I… sir?” The worm, which had always shown a propensity for at least looking over its shoulder, was certainly turning now. “I thought, when I joined the Police Force, that it was an organization in which people worked together.”
The Inspector removed his habitual cigarette to draw in a sharp breath through pursed lips. “I don’t know where you got that idea from.”
“Listen, I was the one who got on to Posey Narker. I was the one who followed Reginald Winthrop. I suspected that he was carrying the stolen paintings and had him detained at Dover. And then what did I do? I shared my findings with you. And I just wish you’d occasionally repay the compliment.”
Wilkinson shook his head knowingly. “A good copper, Hughes, is not in the business of repaying compliments. He’s in the business of frustrating criminals, and he does that by relying on his experience.”
“But, sir –”
“You don’t have any experience, Hughes, so I’m afraid it’ll be some time yet before you can be regarded as a good copper.”
Sergeant Hughes slumped in his chair, deflated by the hopelessness of his frustration. Inspector Wilkinson sat at his desk, smiling complacently, puffing on his cigarette and occasionally stroking his slowly burgeoning moustache.
“You know,” he announced after a long silence, “we need to talk to Veronica Chastaigne.”
¦
Gary’s limousine insinuated itself smoothly through the anonymous suburban streets of North London. In the back, between the brown suits of Truffler Mason and Hamish Ramon Henriques, Mrs Pargeter, resplendent in silk print, sat like the filling of a particularly exotic sandwich.
She reached out and gave Truffler’s huge hand a maternal pat. “I hope you weren’t taking unnecessary risks.”
“Nah.” A rueful laugh shook his massive frame and he rubbed his chin. “I was all right, but there was four of them. Rod and three heavies. It’s not going to be that easy to get the stuff out.”
“The simplest thing would be just to give the police a tip-off, you know,” HRH suggested.
But Mrs Pargeter quickly quashed that idea. “No. I gave Veronica Chastaigne my word I’d get those paintings back to their rightful owners.”
The travel agent instantly accepted the logic of her words. “Yes, of course. I understand completely, Mrs Pargeter.”
Gary’s voice filtered through from the front of the car. “It’s a tricky one. We could really do with Mr Pargeter around right now. He’d see the way through this, no problem. One of the great planning brains of all time, he’d got.”
“Exactly, Gary,” said Mrs Pargeter, as the limousine slowed to a halt in front of the anonymous terraced house. “Which is the very reason why we’re going to see Jukebox. We can still take advantage of my husband’s planning brain, you know…”
¦
With his spaghetti junction of computer equipment and his four guests, there was very little space in Jukebox Jarvis’s front room, but by the odd click of the mouse and the odd tap at the keyboard he steered himself deftly through the data on his screen. He fed in the complex demands of the current problem, and rattled through the proffered options until he found exactly what he wanted.
“Chelmsford!” Jukebox Jarvis pronounced triumphantly. His eyes sparkled through the thick glasses.
A communal smile of fulfilled recollection settled on the faces of the three men who watched him. “Yeah.” An impressed Truffler Mason nodded. “Chelmsford, of course.”
