Mrs Pargeter 06; Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

talked about in awestruck voices round the Met for years to come.

The memory of how it had all gone wrong could still bring a cold shiver to Wilkinson’s spine. Even he sometimes felt a bit of a fool about it.

He tried never to think about the incident. He’d certainly drive miles out of his way to avoid passing through the place where it had happened. And if he heard the town mentioned on the radio or television news, it still gave him an unpleasant little frisson.

Yes, it would be a long time before Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson forgot the name of Chelmsford.

? Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ?

Thirty-Four

The red Transit was still inside the fortified breaker’s yard, but it didn’t look as if it would be there for much longer. Rod D’Acosta and two of his heavies emerged from their hut and crossed towards the van. They had received orders to move out that morning. But just as Rod’s hand reached to open the passenger- side door, his attention was attracted by something happening in the street outside, and he moved closer to the gates to get a better look.

Apparently a television programme was being made. A man with a portable BBC-TV camera was filming another man with an oleaginous smile and odious leisurewear. As always, the scene had attracted its little knot of gawping viewers, fascinated by being close to the manufacture of the country’s favourite medium.

The man in the odious leisurewear seemed to be recording some direct-to-camera links. He stood in front of the wall of a house, on which a huge poster had been plastered, and fixed his unctuous smile on the camera lens. The links evidently recorded to his satisfaction, he redirected the beam of his unctuousness to the growing crowd.

“Now listen, everybody,” he smarmed, “we’ve set up a stunt here for Saturday night’s programme.” At this news his audience giggled in witless anticipation. “We’re going to get some unsuspecting member of the public to look a right idiot and we’re going to film them so that everyone at home can have a good laugh.” His audience roared at the prospect of such hilarity. “Just like we do every Saturday. Isn’t that right, Kevin?”

The cameraman, chuckling to demonstrate what a good sport and how much part of the joke he was, agreed, “Yes, that’s right, Des.”

Rod D’Acosta, inside the gates of his yard, chuckled too, and waved two of his henchmen across. “Hey, Ray, Phil! They’re doing one of those daft telly stunts over there.”

The two heavies who’d suffered such a rude awakening in their car a few nights before, lumbered across to check out what their boss was talking about.

“Oh yeah?” said the heavy called Ray.

“Who’s the geezer fronting it?” asked the heavy called Phil.

The correct answer to this question was Hedgeclipper Clinton, but Rod D’Acosta couldn’t have been expected to know that. “Looks familiar,” he said. “Can’t remember his name, though. I get all those blokes on the telly mixed up.”

The heavy called Phil pushed open the gates of the yard. “Lets go and have a butcher’s then, eh?”

All three men moved forward to join the periphery of the crowd, amongst whose number they did not recognize Truffler Mason or Gary the chauffeur. And, like their boss, Ray and Phil didn’t know that the presenter with a permanent nudge in his voice was Hedgeclipper Clinton, as he went on, “… and, though it looks as if the wall’s perfectly solid, in fact behind the poster there’s nothing there and somebody would be able, to walk straight through it!”

The crowd, including Rod D’Acosta and his two heavies, oohed and tittered at the daring wit of this concept. Inside the yard, the remaining heavy, whose name was Sid, was drawn by the noise and moved slowly towards the open gates. Sid was the heaviest of all the heavies, and big with it.

“But,” Hedgeclipper went on mischievously, “who’ll be caught in the stunt? That’s what we want to know, isn’t it? I’m going to offer fifty pounds to someone to walk straight into that wall.”

Rod D’Acosta, always quick to recognize that fifty pounds was indeed fifty pounds, immediately volunteered. “Can I have a go?”

“No, of course you can’t,” the presenter replied in exasperation, “because you know what’s going to happen. We’ve got to find someone who doesn’t realize it’s a set-up. We’ll try the trick out on the next unsuspecting passer-by who comes along.”

The crowd giggled delightedly at the prospect of a fellow human being’s imminent humiliation. But, as they looked up and down the street, their giggles died away. There was no one in sight. Why was it, they mused with irritation, that just when you need a patsy, there’s never one around?

A tall, mournful-looking man in the crowd turned to Rod D’Acosta and his two heavies. He indicated the one called Sid, still lingering, fascinated but out of earshot, by the yard gates. “Why not ask your mate over there? He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, does he?”

Rod caught on straight away. “True.” He shouted across, “Here, Sid. You want to make fifty quid and be on the telly?”

Sid lumbered across to join them willingly enough, but a look of suspicion had overspread his Neanderthal features. “What you say, Rod? What’s the catch?”

His answer came from the presenter. With a smile that plumbed new depths of unctuousness, Hedgeclipper Clinton said, “There is no catch, sir.” He gestured to his cameraman. “OK, roll, Kevin.” The presenter pointed up to the poster-covered wall and fixed his expression of professional bonhomie in place. “This, as you see, is a perfectly ordinary wall.” He focused the rictus of his grin on the heavy called Sid. “Now, sir, are you the kind of gentleman who normally walks into walls?”

“Course not.”

The audience tittered at this Wildean exchange.

“But, sir, would you walk into a wall for fifty pounds…?”

This exchange between presenter and patsy, and the delicious prospect of someone shortly being made to look a fool, exercised their customary magnetism on the British public. Every eye was focused on the two men standing in front of the poster-covered wall. So nobody noticed when the tall, lugubrious man and another, shorter one detached themselves from the fringes of the crowd and sauntered unobtrusively across towards the gates of the breaker’s yard.

“Might think about it,” said Sid, responding to the presenter’s appeal to his greed.

“Particularly if I guaranteed that you wouldn’t hurt yourself…?”

“Well…”

“Go on,” Hedgeclipper Clinton urged seductively, and then he brought up the clinching argument that would have persuaded almost anyone in the country to do anything. “You have a chance to appear on television. Don’t you want to show the people at home what a good sport you are?”

Urged on by shouts from the crowd and his own instinct that, given an opening, he could show some of those professional TV smoothies a thing or two, Sid put on his best smile and ran a comb of fingers through his thinning hair. “Yeah, go on,” he said in his ‘good sport’ voice. “I’m game for anything.”

“Great!” the ecstatic presenter cried. “What a lovely person you are!” He pulled five ten-pound notes out of his pocket, and the crowd who, like all television audiences, will always applaud money and consumer durables, cheered and stamped their feet in the excitement of the occasion.

“See, there it is,” Hedgeclipper went on, “fifty pounds if you’ll trust me, take my word for it when I say you won’t get hurt and… walk into that wall!”

“OK,” said Sid who, in his imagination, had just collected the Most Popular TV Personality Award for the fifth year running.

With a cheery grin into Kevin the doorman’s camera, Sid gathered his energies and made as if to sprint towards the false wall.

“Ooh,” the presenter cried, with an unfailing instinct for what makes good television. “Is he actually going to run into it for us?”

“You bet!” replied Sid, whose imagined television career had just started to take off in the States.