“Good. Always valued Mr Pargeter’s good opinion.” He gave a little wave. “Cheers. See you around.”
“Bye-bye, Keyhole.”
He closed the door of the limousine and moved towards the main gate of the prison, reaching into a pocket for his picklock as nonchalantly as a commuter returning home after a day at the office.
“Good old Keyhole,” said Mrs Pargeter.
“One of the best,” Gary agreed. “Honest as the day is long.”
They both watched fondly as he turned the picklock, opened the prison gates and slipped inside. Gary switched on the ignition and the limousine sped off towards Greene’s Hotel.
“Wonder what’s eating Concrete…” the chauffeur mused. “Unlike him not to confide in his old mate Keyhole.”
“Yes, I’d hoped we’d get more. Still, at least we’ve got those two names.”
“The blokes Concrete thought might be involved?”
“Right. Did either of them mean anything to you?”
Gary shook his head.
“Never mind,” said Mrs Pargeter comfortably. “I bet Truffler’ll know who they are.”
♦
Keyhole Crabbe’s cell-mate still breathed evenly, enjoying the sleep of the innocent (well, the damned-nearly-innocent-if-he-hadn’t-been-stitched-up, in his case). Keyhole undressed quietly, and reached down to pull back the covers on his lower bunk.
There was a large paper-wrapped box on the bed.
He pulled the box out and looked at it in the pale light of the bluish overhead bulb that stayed on all night. The paper was blue- and silver-striped gift-wrapping. A card with a picture of a pink hippopotamus was attached.
Keyhole opened the card, and, his eyes straining in the half-light, saw stamped at the top a round smiley-face logo. Beneath it was printed:
WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN YOU ARE STOPPED BY A POLICEMAN?
I DON’T KNOW. WHAT DO YOU SAY WHEN YOU ARE STOPPED BY A POLICEMAN?
POLICE TO MEET YOU.
“Oh no…” Keyhole murmured.
With a sense of doom, he tore the paper off the box, and opened it.
Inside, neatly laid out, were a set of files in graded sizes, a selection of hacksaws, a hammer and a variety of cold-chisels, a crowbar, a packet of plastic explosive and an oxyacetylene lamp. Wrapped round the handle of the hammer was a note. Unhappily, Keyhole flattened it out, and read:
NOW YOU’LL NEVER HAVE THAT LOCKED-IN FEELING AGAIN. APOLOGIES – IT WAS ALL MY VAULT!
Keyhole groaned. Fossilface O’Donahue’s ‘restitooshun’ couldn’t have been less appropriate. And after all the care he’d taken to keep his own probes and picklocks hidden… If the warders found a single item of that lot, he could wave goodbye to any thoughts of his sentence being reduced for good behaviour Particularly if they found the plastic explosive. He’d be lucky to get away with only seven years added.
Wearily, he packed everything back into the box, and once again got out his metal probe to open the cell door.
The next morning, when the manager of the Bedford branch of the National Westminster Bank opened one of the vaults, he had no explanation for the gift-wrapped box of escaper’s tools he found there.
♦
Truffler Mason’s filing system was of a piece with the rest of his office – antiquated and furry with dust. Shoeboxes, their corners reinforced with brittle, orangey sellotape, weren’t up to the task of containing the profusion of photocopied sheets and fading photographs clinched together by rusty paper clips.
This archive was not catalogued on anything so mundane as an alphabetical system, but by an arcane method comprehensible only to its creator. No one but Truffler himself could have flipped through the desiccated pages with such speed and certainty to home in on the relevant dossier and hand it across the desk to Mrs Pargeter.
She stared down at the mugshot. The mug in question looked like a primary-school child’s first incompetent effort with modelling clay.
“Blunt,” said Truffler. “Called Blunt he is.”
Mrs Pargeter scanned the accompanying sheet. “There’s no first name down here.”
“Never had one. Only got the one name. Always just called ‘Blunt’.”
“Any reason why?”
“As in ‘instrument’.”
“Ah.” Mrs Pargeter looked more narrowly at a face which appeared to have been left too close to a fire and melted. “Certainly suits him,” she observed, before turning back to the notes. “Seems he’s used a good few blunt instruments in his time, and all.”
Truffler screwed up his face. “Oh yes. Nasty bit of work. Not of the subtlest either, when it comes to covering his tracks. Spends his whole life in and out the nick. You never met him, did you?”
Mrs Pargeter looked ingenuously at the detective. “Why on earth should I have done?”
“Well, in the early days he worked quite a bit for Mr Pargeter… you know, back round the Basildon era.”
“Really?” said Mrs Pargeter, glacially innocent. “My husband never talked to me about his work, and introduced me to very few of his colleagues.”
“No, of course not,” Truffler said hastily.
“It is only since his death,” she continued demurely, “that I have used the address book he left me to make some… very useful contacts.”
“I understand completely.”
Truffler relaxed a little at the sight of a smile on Mrs Pargeter’s lips, as she went on, “‘You don’t want to worry your head about my business, Melita,’ he used to say to me…”
“Too right.”
“‘Besides, what you don’t know…’” she smiled sweetly, “‘… you can’t tell anyone else about, can you?’”
“He was a very shrewd man, Mr Pargeter,” Truffler asserted, then continued with diffidence: “Incidentally, Mrs Pargeter, you remember… Streatham?”
Her face clouded. “Streatham? I believe it’s a South London suburb between Brixton and Mitcham.”
“No, you know what I mean. Streatham. Julian Embridge Streatham.”
The mention of the name sent darkened clouds over Mrs Pargeter’s habitually sunny face. “I thought we had dealt with that problem. Julian Embridge is currently serving a very long jail sentence – which is an inadequate revenge for what he did in Streatham, but better than nothing.”
She referred to an unhappy incident in her husband’s generally successful career, when betrayal by a trusted lieutenant – the same Julian Embridge – had caused him a longer absence from the marital nest than either of them would have wished for. Though, as Mrs Pargeter mentioned, she had since exacted her revenge, the memory of Embridge’s perfidy could still cause her anguish.
Truffler elaborated. “Reason I mentioned Streatham is –”
He was interrupted by a sudden scream of Welsh anger from the outer office, and shrugged apologetically. “Sounds like Bronwen’s husband – ex-husband I should say – is back from Mauritius and has just phoned her up.”
Their ensuing dialogue was punctuated by further vituperation from the valleys. Through the wall they could not distinguish the words, but when a tone of voice is that expressive, who needs words?
“What were you saying about Streatham?” Mrs Pargeter prompted.
Truffler sighed ruefully. “Just that there’s little doubt that he…” a large finger prodded the photograph of Blunt, “… was in it right up to his neck.”
Mrs Pargeter looked grim. “Right. So I have the odd score to settle with Blunt, don’t I?” An even louder scream of Welsh fury thundered through the partition. Mrs Pargeter raised an eyebrow to Truffler, then asked, “What about the other name Concrete mentioned?”
“Yes. Clickety Clark…” His hands instinctively found the relevant dossier and passed it across the desk. As he did so, Truffler shook his head in puzzlement. “Odd. I mean, Clickety was in a totally different part of the business.”