To ever rising cheers from his audience – and ever rising career expectations in his imagination – Sid the heavy launched himself forward and sprinted towards the poster. Showing good professional instincts, he flashed a smile at Kevin the doorman’s camera just the moment before he hit the poster and, as he expected, burst through it into the void.
That wasn’t what happened, however. Behind the poster there was no void. There was nothing except for a solid brick wall, into which Sid smashed with all the velocity of his eighteen-stone body.
The cheers of the audience trickled to nothing as, clutching at his face, Sid the heavy tottered back from the wall. But suddenly the focus of attention shifted away from him. It was drawn by the sound of a vehicle’s engine starting.
The crowd turned as one to see the red Transit surge out through the yard’s open gates. While they gaped uncomprehendingly, the van’s back doors were opened by Truffler Mason. Hedgeclipper Clinton and Kevin the doorman, who’d been ready for this moment, jumped inside. The doors swung shut again, as Gary gunned the engine and the red Transit screeched off into the distance.
“Oi!” screamed Rod D’Acosta. “They got the stuff!”
“Come on!” shouted the heavy called Ray.
While he, Rod and the heavy called Phil fought their way through the confused crowd back to their yard, the heavy called Sid slipped quietly to the ground at the foot of the wall, where he lay with an extremely stupid grin on his face. “‘Ere!” he demanded in the moment before he lost consciousness. “Where’s my fifty quid?”
? Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ?
Thirty-Five
There’s only so much you can do at Heathrow Airport, as Sergeant Hughes was finding out, to his considerable annoyance. The flight on which pop sensation Boymeetzgirl were arriving from their tour of Poland had been delayed by two hours, and the Sergeant was bored stiff.
Also it looked as if the whole policing operation was going to be entirely unnecessary. Boymeetzgirl were evidently not quite as big a pop sensation as their record company’s publicity department had puffed them up to be. The promised hordes of uncontrollable teenyboppers which prompted the police presence had not materialized. Maybe a dozen smallish girls with braces on their teeth, headphones on their ears and incipient puberty on the other parts of their bodies, clustered round the Arrivals gate, bearing hand-scrawled Boymeetzgirl banners. Rioting and public affray did not look to be on the cards.
Sergeant Hughes felt very frustrated. Like Inspector Wilkinson, he had been told that, following the arrest of Reg Winthrop, the arts theft investigation was at an end. It had progressed as far as it could. Hughes didn’t believe this. To his mind they’d just lifted up a corner of the carpet on that one, and considerable riches lay yet to be discovered. They’d hardly started.
Hughes was also frustrated by the knowledge that Inspector Wilkinson had been scheduled for a much more appealing assignment. The raid on Rod D’Acosta’s breaker’s yard sounded real fun. It would undoubtedly involve bullet-proof vests, searchlights and lots of shouting through loudspeakers. It was exactly the sort of shooty-bang opportunity for which Sergeant Hercule Hughes had joined the Police Force.
Why a juicy job of that sort should go to a useless old dinosaur like Wilkinson, Hughes could not begin to imagine. It was the sort of assignment that should go to a young Turk, someone with a bit of style, someone with charisma. To him, in fact.
Yes, he wasn’t going to be Sergeant Hughes for long. Once he presented the Superintendent with the completed dossier he’d been building up on the laptop in his flat, fast-track promotion would be a certainty.
Hughes’d had a cup of coffee, he’d read all the newspaper headlines in the bookshop, he’d decided he didn’t want to buy any ties, smoked salmon or inflatable travel cushions, and his boredom was getting deeper by the minute. He looked at his watch. Still an hour and a half before the rescheduled flight from Warsaw was due to arrive. That was assuming there wasn’t another delay.
For something to do, he got out his mobile phone and dialled his home number. Check the answering machine, see if there were any messages. He wasn’t optimistic. There was no way the dumped long-standing girlfriend in Sheffield was going to ring him, and he had yet to develop much of a social life in London. (He did have plans in this direction, though. Once he’d got his career established, then he’d sort out his sex life. In his view, London’s lucky women didn’t know what was about to hit them.) But his current lack of a social life was another reason why he liked working on his days off. It was something to do.
To his surprise, the machine indicated there was a message for him. He played it back, casual interest quickly giving way to mounting excitement.
It was an educated voice, which spoke with little intonation. “Hello, Sergeant Hughes. This is another message from Posey Narker, who tipped you off about the Dover smuggling attempt. Congratulations on following up on that. I must say, after years of giving information to Inspector Wilkinson, it’s a relief to be dealing with someone who seems to have a bit of intelligence.
“I have more information for you about the Pargeter set-up. Mr Pargeter, as I’m sure you know, is dead, but some of his old accomplices are banding up again to perpetrate a major art theft. This morning they will be hijacking a lorry full of stolen paintings from a breaker’s yard owned by a villain called Rod D’Acosta. It is situated at…”
Sergeant Hughes continued listening to the address as he broke into a run towards the car park. Never mind about Boymeetzgirl. Their frenzied fans could tear the whole airport apart so far as he was concerned. Hercule Hughes had bigger fish to fry.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ?
Thirty-Six
The van which Mrs Pargeter had last seen in the body shop painted grey was now painted blue. She sat in the passenger seat, with Hamish Ramon Henriques at the wheel beside her. They were parked in the network of streets that Mrs Pargeter and Truffler had selected as ideal for their operation. HRH’s fingers drummed lightly on the steering wheel; Mrs Pargeter hummed softly. Both were tense, but tense with excitement rather than anxiety.
At the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle, HRH came to life. “Here we go,” he murmured.
As he and Mrs Pargeter got out of their van, the red Transit screeched to a halt behind them, then reversed up, so that the backs of the two vehicles faced each other, some five metres apart. At the moment Mrs Pargeter and HRH opened the back doors of their van, the Transit’s swung wide to reveal Truffler, Hedgeclipper Clinton and Kevin the doorman. As Gary appeared from the driver’s door, Truffler and Kevin jumped down into the space between the two vans. Truffler turned to receive the first painting from Hedgeclipper, passed it to Kevin, who passed it to Gary who handed it up to HRH, who in turn stowed it in the back of the blue van.
Mrs Pargeter looked on with quiet pride, as the complete transfer of goods was achieved within ninety seconds. The last to be safely packed away was a rather soulful Raphael Madonna.
At the moment Hamish Ramon Henriques slotted the painting into place, Mrs Pargeter turned towards the sound of approaching cars. “Just in time. Close both sets of doors and into the blue van!”
She and Gary bundled into the front seats, the rest climbed into the back, pulling the doors shut behind them.
Seconds later, two cars full of heavies screamed up. The heavy called Ray drove one. The other, with Rod D’Acosta in the passenger seat, was driven by the heavy called Phil. (The heavy called Sid was still blissfully unconscious at the foot of the wall he’d run into.) The cars passed the blue van and homed in on the red Transit. One slid into the space across which the paintings had been passed, and came to rest with its bumper touching the van’s back doors; the other backed up till it was parked in contact with the van’s front grille. There was no way the Transit could get out of that pincer movement.
Nonchalantly, confident their quarry was trapped, Rod D’Acosta and his two heavies got out of their vehicles. Carrying an array of baseball bats and pickaxe handles, they moved menacingly forward.
