He turned away from the printout, then had another, rather dampening thought. Was this wonderful assignment destined to be spoiled, like so much of what he’d done over the previous two weeks, by the presence of Sergeant Hughes?
But no. Wilkinson’s luck held. More than held, it was very good. The list told him that, instead of the odious Hughes, he’d been allocated the support of a new female detective sergeant, who’d been the subject of much ribald suggestion and erotic aspiration in the canteen.
Inspector Wilkinson preened his moustache, which wasn’t growing as quickly as he’d hoped it would. That didn’t worry him at that moment, though, because he was thinking of the female DS. She’d be really impressed when she saw him masterminding the raid on Rod D’Acosta’s yard. She couldn’t fail to look on him with respect after the operation was completed. Yes, he might be in with a chance there. Power, he knew, was a great aphrodisiac.
To complete his euphoria, Wilkinson saw that Sergeant Hughes had been allocated to one of the real short-straw duties. Policing teenyboppers at Heathrow. What was known round the station as a ‘not a dry seat in the house’ patrol.
Tee-hee. Serve the cocky little smart-arse bloody well right.
Wilkinson went to check the details of the D’Acosta operation with the detectives who’d been working on it. They seemed rather miffed that, after all the graft their regular inspector had put in setting the raid up, he was not scheduled to complete the job. Still, they couldn’t argue with the roster and, with varying degrees of bad grace, they gave Wilkinson the information he required.
It was perfect. Surveillance from four in the afternoon, then slam in hard at around eight when it was dark. Going through the stuff in the yard’d take an hour top-weight. There’d still be time for Inspector Wilkinson to go to the pub near the station afterwards to accept the plaudits of his inferiors.
To build himself up for the day ahead, he went down to the canteen to wallow in the grease of an All-Day Breakfast.
It was while he was sitting there over his congealing eggs that a pale shadow of recollection crossed Inspector Wilkinson’s sunny mood. He found himself thinking back, as he so often did, to the one big failure of his life. The biggest failure. The moment when he had been so close to success and when his plans had suddenly gone pear-shaped.
He had built everything up, prepared the whole operation in his customary painstaking way. He’d tested every stage of his plan for weaknesses and he’d felt ridiculously, headily confident that it was going to work. This was to be the moment when he, Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson, made his mark on the British Police Force.
He had been all set to arrest Mr Pargeter, and then bring in the shoals of smaller fish who travelled in the master criminal’s wake. The Inspector’s triumph seemed assured. His was an operation that would continue to be talked about in awestruck voices round the Met for years to come.
The memory of how it had all gone wrong could still bring a cold shiver to Wilkinson’s spine. Even he sometimes felt a bit of a fool about it.
He tried never to think about the incident. He’d certainly drive miles out of his way to avoid passing through the place where it had happened. And if he heard the town mentioned on the radio or television news, it still gave him an unpleasant little frisson.
Yes, it would be a long time before Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson forgot the name of Chelmsford.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧
Thirty-Four
The red Transit was still inside the fortified breaker’s yard, but it didn’t look as if it would be there for much longer. Rod D’Acosta and two of his heavies emerged from their hut and crossed towards the van. They had received orders to move out that morning. But just as Rod’s hand reached to open the passenger-side door, his attention was attracted by something happening in the street outside, and he moved closer to the gates to get a better look.
Apparently a television programme was being made. A man with a portable BBC-TV camera was filming another man with an oleaginous smile and odious leisurewear. As always, the scene had attracted its little knot of gawping viewers, fascinated by being close to the manufacture of the country’s favourite medium.
The man in the odious leisurewear seemed to be recording some direct-to-camera links. He stood in front of the wall of a house, on which a huge poster had been plastered, and fixed his unctuous smile on the camera lens. The links evidently recorded to his satisfaction, he redirected the beam of his unctuousness to the growing crowd.
“Now listen, everybody,” he smarmed, “we’ve set up a stunt here for Saturday night’s programme.” At this news his audience giggled in witless anticipation. “We’re going to get some unsuspecting member of the public to look a right idiot and we’re going to film them so that everyone at home can have a good laugh.” His audience roared at the prospect of such hilarity. “Just like we do every Saturday. Isn’t that right, Kevin?”
The cameraman, chuckling to demonstrate what a good sport and how much part of the joke he was, agreed, “Yes, that’s right, Des.”
Rod D’Acosta, inside the gates of his yard, chuckled too, and waved two of his henchmen across. “Hey, Ray, Phil! They’re doing one of those daft telly stunts over there.”
The two heavies who’d suffered such a rude awakening in their car a few nights before, lumbered across to check out what their boss was talking about.
“Oh yeah?” said the heavy called Ray.
“Who’s the geezer fronting it?” asked the heavy called Phil.
The correct answer to this question was Hedgeclipper Clinton, but Rod D’Acosta couldn’t have been expected to know that. “Looks familiar,” he said. “Can’t remember his name, though. I get all those blokes on the telly mixed up.”
The heavy called Phil pushed open the gates of the yard. “Lets go and have a butcher’s then, eh?”
All three men moved forward to join the periphery of the crowd, amongst whose number they did not recognize Truffler Mason or Gary the chauffeur. And, like their boss, Ray and Phil didn’t know that the presenter with a permanent nudge in his voice was Hedgeclipper Clinton, as he went on, “… and, though it looks as if the wall’s perfectly solid, in fact behind the poster there’s nothing there and somebody would be able, to walk straight through it!”
The crowd, including Rod D’Acosta and his two heavies, oohed and tittered at the daring wit of this concept. Inside the yard, the remaining heavy, whose name was Sid, was drawn by the noise and moved slowly towards the open gates. Sid was the heaviest of all the heavies, and big with it.
“But,” Hedgeclipper went on mischievously, “who’ll be caught in the stunt? That’s what we want to know, isn’t it? I’m going to offer fifty pounds to someone to walk straight into that wall.”
Rod D’Acosta, always quick to recognize that fifty pounds was indeed fifty pounds, immediately volunteered. “Can I have a go?”
“No, of course you can’t,” the presenter replied in exasperation, “because you know what’s going to happen. We’ve got to find someone who doesn’t realize it’s a set-up. We’ll try the trick out on the next unsuspecting passer-by who comes along.”
The crowd giggled delightedly at the prospect of a fellow human being’s imminent humiliation. But, as they looked up and down the street, their giggles died away. There was no one in sight. Why was it, they mused with irritation, that just when you need a patsy, there’s never one around?