“Input?” Inspector Wilkinson enunciated the word with distaste. “When I want your input, Hughes, I will ask for it. Anyway, that hasn’t really answered my question about how much you need to know.”
“To put it at its most basic,” said the Sergeant with a note of exasperation in his voice, “if I don’t know what we’re looking for in this surveillance, then I’m not going to recognize it when I see it, am I?”
“A good answer.” Wilkinson nodded. “Yes, a good answer – were it not for one small detail. A good copper, you’ll find, will always notice that one significant detail in any scenario. Any idea what the detail might be in this case?”
“No,” said the Sergeant, who didn’t want to get caught up in elaborate guessing games.
“The detail is that you’re not looking for anything.” The Inspector tapped his binoculars. “I am looking for things and telling you what I see. You are simply writing down what I tell you.”
“Yes,” Sergeant Hughes agreed listlessly. He hadn’t got the energy to point out that Wilkinson had so far missed the most important detail to have come up during their surveillance. They still had no idea what Veronica Chastaigne’s first visitor looked like.
“But I will give you one piece of information relevant to the case…” the Inspector went on with new magnanimity.
“What?” There was now a spark of animation in the Sergeant’s eye.
“It concerns criminals.”
“Oh.” The spark was extinguished. “Thank you very much, Inspector.”
♦
Back in the big house, Toby Chastaigne was himself involved in surveillance. All the way through their supper he kept a watchful eye on his mother, his anxious scrutiny masked by a veil of solicitude.
“You should eat more,” he said, as he watched her peck at a flake of salmon.
“Why?” Veronica asked abstractedly.
“Build yourself up,” Toby replied, as he reached across to replenish his plate with a mound of buttered new potatoes and dollops of mayonnaise.
“What for?”
Her son looked thoughtful, but decided not to answer this. He let a pause hang between them, then, with over-elaborate casualness, asked, “Have you done anything about the will yet?” Veronica looked up sharply, as he hastened to soften his bluntness. “I speak as an accountant, not as your son. This is the advice I’d give to any of my clients. It’s just that one has to be practical – one should always have all the loose ends neatly tied up.”
A pale smile came to Veronica Chastaigne’s thin lips. “That could almost be your motto, Toby couldn’t it?”
He looked injured by the injustice of her implied slight. “Mother, I’m only thinking of you.”
“Very kind.” She smiled again, a kindly smile, though neither of them was in any doubt that the conversation was gladiatorial rather than benign. The courtesy was no more than a front. “Though I don’t really see how…” Veronica went on lightly, “because loose ends aren’t going to worry me too much, are they?”
“Well…”
“After I’m dead,” she continued easily, “they’ll be someone else’s problem.”
Toby coughed in embarrassment, sending a fine spray of potato over his plate. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about it, Mother.”
“Why not?” asked Veronica, enjoying her son’s discomfiture. “You said you wanted me to be practical. I’d have thought preparing for something you know is going to happen is extremely practical. And my death is certainly going to happen – in the not-too-distant future. You know, your father always used to say –”
Toby raised an admonitory hand. “I don’t want to hear any more criminal maxims, thank you, Mother.”
That really caught her on the raw. The gloves were very definitely off, as she snapped at him, “Don’t try and disclaim your own father, Toby! He worked harder than you’ve ever worked to provide us with all this.”
“Hard work is not the point at issue,” Toby snapped back. “It’s the nature of his work that was so shameful.”
His words only served to incense his mother further. “Shameful? Your own father? Bennie did all that work so that you would be able to take the legitimate route through life. Eton, Cambridge, the accountancy training. He gave you everything you now possess, Toby.”
“That is your view, Mother.” The flash of anger had given way to his customary controlled urbanity. “As you know, I don’t share it. I think my current position in life is due at least as much to my own intelligence and application as to anything my father gave me.”
“I see,” said his mother, still seething. “So you despise the things your father gave you?”
Toby tried to make his tone conciliatory, but he couldn’t keep out a little tinge of the patronizing. “I didn’t say that, Mother. It’s just… well, we both know what my father was… but there doesn’t seem to me any need to dwell on it.”
“As you wish.” Veronica Chastaigne sighed, aligned her knife and fork on her plate and pushed the hardly touched remains of her meal towards the centre of the table.
Toby smiled a self-satisfied smile, as though his point had been taken and he had won the round. Leaning forward to fork up another mound of salmon, potatoes and mayonnaise, he could not see the expression on his mother’s face. Had he registered its mix of distaste, shrewd calculation and sheer bloody-mindedness, he would have realized that the round was far from won.
In fact, Veronica Chastaigne’s face showed a determination to escalate the conflict with her son into all-out war. And it was not a war that she contemplated the possibility of losing.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧
Three
The offices of the Mason De Vere Detective Agency, situated above a betting shop in South London, would have got a very high rating from the Society for the Preservation of Dust. Other organizations – like the Society for the Maintenance of Tidiness, the Association for Efficient Filing or the Commission for the Removal of Encrusted Coffee Cups – might have marked it rather lower. In fact, they would have given it no marks at all.
But, though unlikely to impress potential clients, the office was arranged exactly the way Truffler Mason liked it. Since he was the sole proprietor – the ‘De Vere’ being merely a fiction to look impressive on a letterhead – he could please himself in such matters. And, though his office might have the musty air of an attic which had lain undisturbed for half a century, inside it he knew exactly where everything was. Every shoebox, fluffy with dust; every overfull and spilling cardboard folder; every pile of frayed brown envelopes, cinched by perished rubber bands; every crumpled clump of yellowed cuttings pinned to the wall; they all meant something to Truffler Mason. Whatever the reference that was required, within seconds and in a minor tornado of dust, he would have the relevant paper in his hand.
Mrs Pargeter had known her late husband’s former associate too long to pass comment on – or even to notice – the squalor in which he worked. Anyway, she was not a woman who set much store by outward appearances. She judged people by instinct; on first meeting she saw into their souls and instantly assessed them. Only on a few, painful occasions had her judgement been proved to be at fault.
And one select band of people she approved of even before she met them. These were the group honoured by inclusion in Mrs Pargeter’s most treasured heirloom – her husband’s address book. The late Mr Pargeter, an adoring and solicitous spouse, had left his widow well-provided for in the financial sense, but from beyond the grave he had also given her a far more valuable protection. In his varied and colourful business career, the late Mr Pargeter had worked with a rich gallery of characters of wide-ranging individual skills, and it was these whose names filled the precious address book. As a result, if ever his widow came up against one of those little niggling challenges which bother us all from time to time – finding a missing person, gaining access to a locked building, removing property without its owner’s knowledge, replacing a lost document, or even obtaining one which had had no previous existence – all she had to do was to look up in the book the number of a person with the appropriate skills, and her problem would be instantly resolved. Such was the loyalty inspired by her late husband amongst his workforce that the words on the telephone, “Hello, this is Mrs Pargeter” prompted immediate shelving of all other work and dedicated concentration on her requirements.