She had worked so often with Truffler Mason that she had almost forgotten he’d had a life before he became a private investigator. But she was gratefully aware of his unrivalled knowledge of criminal behaviour, his proficiency at obtaining information from people, and his encyclopaedic list of contacts when less sophisticated manpower was required. The fact that in learning these skills he had not followed the traditional career path of a detective was something to which Mrs Pargeter never gave a moment’s thought.
When Truffler’s tall presence came to greet her at the door of his outer office – a space only marginally less dusty than the inner sanctum – she commented on the absence of his secretary Bronwen.
“Ah, yes, she’s off for a while,” Truffler Mason intoned, in his customary voice, a deeply tragic rumble which made Eeyore sound as bouncy as Little Noddy.
“Not ill, I hope?”
“No, no, she’s got married.”
“Again?” Mrs Pargeter asked doubtfully. She knew that Bronwen’s marital history was a catalogue of unsatisfactory skirmishes and pitched battles, that in fact it shared many features with the Hundred Years War.
“Again,” Truffler concurred gloomily. “Oh yes, I’ve heard all about it for months. Love’s young dream this time. They were meant for each other. They’re blissfully happy. This time it’s for ever.”
“So are you going to have to hire someone else?”
He shook his huge head. “No, give it a couple of weeks… she’ll be back.”
From long, but unjudgemental, knowledge of the hygiene standards that obtained in his office, Mrs Pargeter refused Truffler Mason’s offer of a cup of coffee, but made no attempt to wipe the dust from the seat towards which he ushered her. He coiled his long body down into his own chair the other side of the desk, and listened intently while she brought him up to date with her visit to Chastaigne Varleigh.
“Mrs Chastaigne is dying, you see, Truffler,” said Mrs Pargeter.
“I’m sorry,” he responded automatically, in a voice more doom-laden than ever.
“No need to be. She’s very philosophical about it. Knows that the best bit of her life was while Bennie was alive. Knows that she’s had the great privilege of living in comfort surrounded by beautiful things…”
He nodded. Though Truffler Mason had never actually been to Chastaigne Varleigh, he’d heard on a secret grapevine of its amazing hidden art collection. “So what does she want from us, Mrs P?”
She grimaced. “It’s the beautiful things, Truffler…”
“What, all that stuff Bennie Logan nicked for her?”
Mrs Pargeter nodded. “Right. The paintings. She wants them returned.”
“Returned?”
“Restored to their rightful owners. Every last one of them.”
Truffler Mason let out a low whistle and shook his head in disbelief. “Blimey O’Reilly,” he muttered.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧
Four
“You know, a good copper,” said Inspector Wilkinson, “is a copper who makes his mark.”
“Really?” On his third day of sitting in an unmarked smoke-filled car with the DI, Sergeant Hughes was beginning to vary his responses. No longer was he content with just the subservient ‘yes’; now increasingly he used words that ended with question marks, implying a degree of scepticism, even the blasphemous possibility that he was not accepting everything the Inspector said as gospel truth.
Initially, Hughes had given his boss the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that ponderous manner and apparent stupidity masked a brain of rare brilliance. Maybe the unprepossessing exterior was a smokescreen for a genius of detection.
After two days spent in the man’s company, the Sergeant had ruled out both these possibilities. With Inspector Wilkinson, he came to the conclusion, what you saw was what you got. The only smokescreen he was capable of putting up came from his cigarettes.
“Yes,” said Wilkinson.
Maybe it was this transient moment of role reversal that emboldened Hughes to ask a direct question. “And would you say you have made your mark, sir?”
“Oh, I think people remember me. Yes, though I say it myself, I think Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson is a name that has a certain resonance in the Met.”
“And for what reason does it resonate?” Boredom was driving the Sergeant’s questions ever closer to the limits of acceptability.
This one, however, prompted another slow finger-tap to the inspectorial nose. “Bit hush-hush. Mostly for the kind of undercover operations that, by their very nature, can’t have too much publicity. But which are deeply appreciated by those few authority figures who’re in the know.”
“Oh yes?” Hughes’s sceptical intonation was now a million miles from the unquestioning yeses of his first day. “Would you be referring to the painstaking stalking and capture of criminal masterminds, sir, that sort of thing?”
“That sort of thing,” Inspector Wilkinson confirmed with a knowing nod of the head. “That sort of thing, yes, young Hughes. Of course, I’d like to tell you more, but we’re treading around the kind of delicate area in which one can’t be too careful.”
“And is what we’re engaged in at the moment another operation that involves the painstaking stalking and will lead to the eventual capture of another criminal mastermind, sir?”
“Shrewd guess, Hughes, shrewd guess. You are not a million miles from the truth there.”
“I still think it’d help if you told me a bit of detail about the case we’re actually investigating at the…”
But a slow, admonitory finger had risen to Wilkinson’s lips and once again the Sergeant’s words trickled away into frustrated silence.
“No, no,” said the Inspector. “A case has to be conducted at the appropriate pace, and information has to be fed out sparingly. A few careless words in the pub, a bit of incautious pillow talk… those are the kind of things that can ruin months – even years – of punctilious build-up.”
“Yes,” Sergeant Hughes agreed listlessly, his moment of assertiveness past.
Inspector Wilkinson stroked his moustache complacently. It was a sad moustache. An old moustache. A moustache dating from the days when a pencil line along Clark Gable’s upper lip was deemed to be sexy. And even for people who liked that kind of thing, the Inspector’s moustache was disfigured by being grey – except for a small patch, slightly right of centre, which was yellow from his habit of smoking untipped cigarettes right down to the end.
“No, you’ll find that a good copper,” he went on, “a good copper is aware at all times of the level of security required in a given situation and the degree of information dissemination necessary to –”
“Excuse me, sir. Don’t you think that could be the person we’re looking for? She looks as if she’s going to get into the car.”
The Inspector followed Hughes’s pointing finger to see a plump, white-haired woman in a bright red coat stepping daintily across the pavement between the betting-shop entrance and a limousine parked on the double yellow lines directly outside.