That’s it. Wilkinson seized on the idea with delight. Poetry doesn’t have to rhyme! He looked down again at the notebook for a moment, but his glee was short-lived. The second line still didn’t leap out at him. He couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted to say.
God, he thought, this poetry lark’s bloody difficult. There must be easier ways in which I can make my mark. Maybe I should have a go at exotic sandwich-making or serial adultery instead…?
“What’s that then?” Wilkinson was so abstracted by his thoughts that a curious Sergeant Hughes was in the driver’s seat beside him before he’d noticed.
“Oh, nothing. I was just, er, pulling together some of the threads of the case.” The Inspector hastened to shove the notebook back in his pocket.
But he hadn’t been quick enough. Hughes had caught sight of a word. “What’s ‘curvaceous’ got to do with the case then, sir?”
“Mind your own business, Sergeant. A good copper frequently takes an oblique approach to a subject. It rarely pays to go for the obvious. Lateral thinking is what you need in our line of work.” Then, in a tone of professional grumpiness, he asked, “Anyway, what kept you? You were due here half an hour ago.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“You haven’t answered my question. I asked what kept you. What have you been doing, Hughes? Where have you been?”
“I was just doing a bit more research, sir.”
“Research, eh? Into what?”
“Into this case, sir. The case we’re working on.”
Wilkinson’s eyes narrowed with distaste. “I thought I’d warned you about going out on a limb, Hughes. Never forget who’s in charge of this case. I am.”
“I’m well aware of that, sir, but I just thought, you know, two heads are better than one.”
“A very dangerous supposition, Hughes. And one that certainly does not always prove to be correct. It depends entirely on the quality of the heads involved.”
“Listen, sir. I’ve just been going through the old files again.”
“Looking for what?”
“Connections, sir.”
“What kind of connections?”
“Connections between some of the names involved in the case. You know, seeing who reports to who, who’s worked with who, looking for links, piecing together the network. Do you understand the kind of thing I mean, sir?”
Wilkinson let out a long, weary sigh. He had spent most of his professional career going through exactly the process Sergeant Hughes had just described. “And have you reached any conclusions?” he asked in a pained voice.
“Well, assuming we’re right about the stolen paintings having been at Chastaigne Varleigh, then that immediately means that Bennie Logan has to have been involved. Now, amongst people he’d worked with in the past was an art thief called Fritzi the Finger, who works out of Salzburg.”
“And?” asked Wilkinson, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. It had taken him three years to work out the connection between Bennie Logan and Fritzi the Finger; Hughes appeared to have done it in as many days.
“And, sir, both of them had occasional connections with a certain criminal mastermind.”
“Who was that?” The Inspector’s voice shrivelled under its own sarcasm. “Professor Moriarty?”
“No, sir, it was a man who’s now dead, but who in his time was behind some of the biggest criminal operations in London. His name was Mr Pargeter.”
“Really?” Wilkinson tried to keep his voice as casual and uninterested as possible, but the name still brought him an unwelcome frisson.
“Yes, sir. I’m building up a dossier on his activities. The late Mr Pargeter, so far as I can tell, was a great coordinator. He knew all kinds of specialists in the underworld and his skill was in getting them together. He was the brains behind everything, but his influence reached out to a whole army of minor villains.”
“Why’re you telling me all this, Hughes?”
“Because if you entrap someone like Mr Pargeter, sir, you don’t just get one villain, you get a whole pack of them. Apparently, I read in the files, at one stage there was a police initiative to get him, but it was conducted so incompetently that –”
“Yes, yes,” Inspector Wilkinson interrupted testily. “There’s one thing you seem to be ignoring in all this extremely fascinating conversation, and that is that you’re talking about someone who is dead. I’m sure it would be entirely possible to set up a very clever operation to entrap Mr Pargeter, but you’d be ten years too late.”
“Mr Pargeter may be dead, sir,” the Sergeant said slowly, “but his influence didn’t die with him.”
“What’re you saying, Hughes?”
“I’m saying that Mr Pargeter’s network still exists.”
“I see.” The Inspector smiled sceptically. “And who, may I ask, runs this mythical organization?”
“His widow.”
“Who?”
“His widow. Mrs Pargeter.” Wilkinson gaped, and Hughes pressed home his advantage. “What is more, I have now established that, on the third day we worked together doing surveillance at Chastaigne Varleigh, she was the woman who arrived at the house by limousine.”
“What!”
“I’ve checked it out.” The Sergeant was now having difficulty keeping a note of smugness out of his voice. He’d really got the old dinosaur on the run now. “That woman’s name was Mrs Pargeter.”
There was a silence, then inspector Wilkinson broke it with a patronizing chuckle. “Hughes, Hughes, Hughes,” he said pityingly, “what it must be still to have the boundless enthusiasm of youth.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean that you have no basis for assuming that the woman who entered Chastaigne Varleigh has anything to do with the late Mr Pargeter.”
“But of course I have. For heaven’s sake, she’s got the same surname!”
“Yes, and so the obvious thing to do would be to assume that they’re related.”
“Seems reasonable to me, sir.”
“Yes, it probably does to you, Hughes, but what distinguishes an exceptional copper from a run-of-the-mill copper is the ability to see beyond the obvious. Sometimes, you know, we can learn from the world of crime fiction. Have you read any of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Hughes?”
“No. I’m more interested in real-life crime than that kind of hokum.”
“Oh, don’t be hasty, Hughes. You’d be very unwise to dismiss Sherlock Holmes as hokum. The important lesson he offers to every real-life copper is that one shouldn’t look for the obvious. Are you familiar with The curious incident of the dog in the night-time?”
“No,” the Sergeant replied sullenly.
“Well, you should be. I mean, what would you expect a dog to do in the night-time?”
“Sleep?”
“Yes. Or bark.”
“It’d only bark if something disturbed it.”
“Exactly, Hughes, exactly! You know, you might have the makings of a half-decent cop yet,” Wilkinson conceded generously. “In the relevant Sherlock Holmes story, it’s what the dog doesn’t do that’s important. The reader’s expectations are reversed – therein lies Conan Doyle’s cunning. And it’s just the same in this case. Mrs Pargeter has the same surname as the late Mr Pargeter – and that is the very reason why they’re not related.”
“So are you going to leave it like that, sir? Assume they’re not related without even checking?”
“No, no, Hughes,” the Inspector replied patiently as if to an over-excited five-year-old. “Of course I’ll check it out. A good copper always checks things out. But I’ll be very surprised if my instinct isn’t proved right once again. You’ll see, Hughes – and hopefully you’ll learn too, eh?”