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“Still worked for my husband, though?”

“Oh yes, but he didn’t do no heavy stuff.” Mrs Pargeter gazed at the detective with charming incomprehension. What on earth could he mean by ‘heavy stuff’?

“He done photography,” Truffler explained. “Passport photographs, that kind of number, anything photographic where sort of… specialized work was needed. We used to call him ‘Wandering Hands’.” Mrs Pargeter looked at him for elucidation. “Because he was always touching everything up.”

“Ah.”

“What old Clickety’s doing now, though, I’ve no idea. I think we should – ” He was interrupted by the sound of a heavy object being hurled with some force at the dividing wall between the two offices. “Excuse me a moment, Mrs Pargeter.”

With the long-suffering weariness of someone who has gone through these motions many times before, Truffler Mason rose to his full length and crossed to a dusty cupboard. He unlocked it to reveal shelves piled high with brand-new plastic-wrapped telephones. He took one out and turned to face the door.

As he did so, a diffident tap was heard, and the door opened. Bronwen stood there, flushed and apologetic. In her hands were the tangled remains of a smashed telephone.

Wordlessly, Truffler took the debris and handed her the new one. Bronwen smiled embarrassed gratitude and went back to her desk, closing the door behind her. Truffler chucked the shattered telephone into the bin.

With no reference to the incident, he then said, “Right, Mrs Pargeter. I think we need to get some up-to-date info on Blunt and Clickety Clark.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“We are going,” said Truffler with a foxy grin, “to visit the offices of Inside Out.”

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧

Fourteen

The offices of Inside Out were housed in Swordfish Wharf, a gleaming new tower block in Docklands. “Not a million miles from Wapping,” Truffler Mason observed, as Gary’s limousine deposited them outside the entrance. “They say that’s the new Fleet Street, don’t they?”

“The only people who say it are people who haven’t been here,” said Mrs Pargeter, looking up with distaste at the glass box that loomed above them. “The only journalists I’ve met recently say nothing will replace the old Fleet Street.”

“Ah, but where did you meet them, Mrs P.?” asked Truffler, as they crossed a foyer, whose copious vegetation was apparently trying to reproduce an air-conditioned rainforest. The steel sculpture of a swordfish rising out of the green looked confused by its alien environment.

“Boozing in pubs round Fleet Street,” she replied. While they waited by the over-designed slate-grey counter for one of the uniformed security men to get off the telephone or stop staring portentously at his monitor screen, Mrs Pargeter indulged in a moment of nostalgia. “No, these days they’re trying to get rid of all the old stereotypes. Proper, heavy-drinking journalists are being replaced by Perrier-swilling suits who never leave their keyboards. Television producers now sit around earnestly thinking of minority interests and sipping nothing stronger than a large espresso. Do you know,” she concluded on a note of awe, “nowadays apparently there are even teetotal publishers?”

Truffler Mason shook his head and grinned. “Still, you’ll never go that way, will you, Mrs P.?”

“I should think not!” she replied indignantly. “I’m not a religious person, but clearly whoever devised this world we live in filled it full of delightful treats – food and drink being high on the list. And not to take advantage of that divine generosity – whatever creed you may happen to believe in – amounts to downright blasphemy, so far as I’m concerned.”

“Too right,” Truffler nodded. “Too right.”

One of the security men had disengaged himself from the telephone. He looked up at them balefully. “Can I help you?” he asked unhelpfully.

“The names are Mason and Pargeter.”

“Oh yes?” His tone was heavy with disbelief.

“We’ve come to see Ricky Van Hoeg,” Truffler continued. “He is expecting us.”

“Really?” This appeared to the security man an even less likely assertion. He punched some numbers vindictively into his telephone. After a brief conversation, he was forced grudgingly to concede that they were expected.

He thrust a clipboard towards them. “Fill in your names, companies represented, whom visiting, time of arrival, estimated time of departure, name of insurance company, telephone contact number for next of kin, and nature of business. Then the computer will issue you with a visiting number which you wear in this plastic badge. Do not remove your visiting badge at any time while you are within the building, and return it to the desk here on departure. Under no circumstances change your visiting badge with anyone else – it is not transferable.”

Mrs Pargeter fixed the security man in the beam of her violet-blue eyes. “I don’t really think we want to bother with any of that,” she murmured sweetly.

The security man shrugged. “Oh, well, please yourself,” he said, and, as they crossed to the lifts, he turned back to watch his security monitor, which was showing a mid-morning cookery programme. He made notes on a pad of the ingredients for mangetouts au gratin à la proveneale.

The lift doors opened and an infinitely tall, infinitely thin woman emerged. She had the contours of a stick insect, and was dressed in designer clothes that would be the envy of stick insects all over the world. She looked fabulous.

“Mrs Pargeter!” she exclaimed in hearty Cockney, and swept the shorter, fatter woman up into her arms.

“Ellie!” Ellie Fenchurch was the country’s most vitriolic celebrity interviewer. Her Sunday newspaper column made compulsory reading for anyone who enjoyed seeing the great and good humiliated (and that, of course, included just about everyone). Talentless and graceless minor royals, devious cabinet ministers, testosterone-choked sports heroes, oversexed rock stars, unfaithful newsreaders, and supermodels whose braincell count didn’t reach double figures – they had all had cause to smart from the interviewing technique of Ellie Fenchurch. Which made all the more remarkable the huge and continuing queue of celebrities desperate to be given the same treatment.

As they disengaged from the hug, Mrs Pargeter said, “You know Truffler, don’t you?”

“Course I do.” Ellie was exactly the same height as the detective. She enthusiastically kissed the air to either side of his cheeks.

“What you doing here then?” asked Mrs Pargeter.

“My office is here, isn’t it?”

“Is it? I thought you worked for one of the Sundays.”

“I do. And that’s based here.”

“Oh, I see, so there’re legitimate papers here, and all, are there?”

Ellie’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean – legitimate?”

Truffler clarified the situation. “We’re coming to see Ricky Van Hoeg at Inside Out. I think Mrs Pargeter may have somehow got the impression that it isn’t a legitimate publication.”

“What, you mean it is?” asked Mrs Pargeter innocently.

“Course it is. Everything here comes under the Swordfish umbrella,” said Ellie.

“But I thought it was called the Lag Mag for prisoners and –”

“It is. That doesn’t mean it’s not legit, though. There’s a market out there. Swordfish Communications are very shrewd operators. They’ll publish a magazine about anything, so long as they can make money out of it. Isn’t that right, Truffler?”