However good Lindy Galton may have been at body sculpture, she had no skills in the art of deception. ‘How much do you know about it?’ she blurted out.
‘Well, clearly not as much as you do, Lindy. Which is why I’m asking you these questions.’ Mrs Pargeter moved closer. ‘ Was the girl on the third floor Jenny Hargreaves?’
Lindy Galton’s mouth opened to reply, but she was distracted by a slight clang from above. They both looked over the top of the cubicle wall to the ladder from which Stan the Stapler was still doing his Dynorod routine.
The oddjob man was not looking at them, but he did seem almost too studiously preoccupied with his task. The two women exchanged glances. ‘Can’t talk now,’ Lindy Galton breathed. ‘Later in the day.’
‘All right. When?’
‘Quarter past nine. Down here. Everyone else’ll be involved in the Weigh-In.’
Mrs Pargeter gave a quick nod, as Lindy Galton crossed to cancel the ‘Empty’ switch and say in a voice that was suddenly loud, ‘No, I’m very sorry, Mrs Pargeter, but I think it would be unwise. The salts and minerals in the mud could all too easily trigger off your allergy.’
With appropriate expressions of annoyance and frustration at this cruel deprivation, Mrs Pargeter left the Dead Sea Mud Bath unit.
Chapter Thirteen
There was another message to ring Mr Mason when she got back to her room. Truffler, as ever, had done his stuff. He’d tracked down Tom O’Brien, Jenny Hargreaves’ boyfriend.
‘How did you find him — through Cambridge?’ asked Mrs Pargeter.
‘No,’ Truffler replied dolefully. ‘I had to track him down by.. other routes.’
She knew better than to enquire further. ‘Any chance of my meeting him?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve set it up. That is, if you’d be able to get out of that place for a while…’
‘For heaven’s sake, Truffler. Brotherton Hall isn’t Colditz.’ Though when she came to think of it, there were similarities.
‘Good. Well, he said he could give us an hour at lunch time today. In London, that’d be.’
‘Great. Shall I book us into the Savoy Grill?’
‘Erm. I don’t think that’d be exactly young Mr O’Brien’s style, Mrs Pargeter.’
Young Mr O’Brien’s style proved to be a greasy spoon cafe round the back of King’s Cross Station. He and Truffler were tucking into the All-Day Breakfast — bacon, egg, sausage, tomatoes, beans, fried bread, and a huge mug of tea — when Mrs Pargeter arrived. Though she turned a few heads in her scarlet linen jacket over floral silk print, she did not look out of place. Mrs Pargeter had that rare quality in any surroundings of being always conspicuous, but never out of place.
After basic introductions, Truffler asked if he could order her anything. “Fraid they probably won’t have that much that’ll fit in with your Brotherton Hall diet.’
‘Oh well,’ said Mrs Pargeter nobly, ‘can’t be helped.’ She looked at their plates. ‘I’ll have the same as you.’
While Truffler vied with a couple of gas fitters for attention at the fat-smeared counter, Mrs Pargeter made a quick assessment of the boy opposite her.
He was good-looking, black hair slicked back, and pale blue eyes, which at that moment were giving her a sullen once-over. Tom O’Brien had not a spare ounce of fat on him. He wore a shapeless navy-blue raincoat over a black T-shirt and jeans, and sat in a defensive posture that firmly stated he was there under suffrance.
Mrs Pargeter smiled at him. ‘I want to find out about Jenny.’
‘So do I,’ he replied, the sourness in his tone accentuating a slight Irishness. ‘That’s why I’m here. Mr Mason said you had some information.’
This was difficult. The information Mrs Pargeter did have was the last information the boy would want to hear. Anyway, it was not information she could divulge. At that moment she couldn’t be sure that the starved body she had seen was that of Jenny Hargreaves. She had only Ankle-Deep Arkwright’s word to go on, and he was clearly lying about at least some aspects of the case.
Seeing the hunger for news in Tom O’Brien’s face, for a moment Mrs Pargeter entertained the attractive idea that the body had not been Jenny’s, that Ank had invented a name just to cloud the water.
But if that were the case, why had he come up with an address too? And an address which matched the name he had chosen?
This, Mrs Pargeter realized, was not the moment to pursue such questions. ‘I don’t so much have information,’ she said gently, ‘as maybe some pointers to where Jenny’s been the last few months.’
Tom O’Brien was instantly alert. ‘Well, that’s more than I’ve managed to get. What have you found out?’
Truffler’s return to the table, placing a large mug of tea in front of her, gave Mrs Pargeter a moment to shape her reply. ‘It’s just I’ve heard Jenny’s name mentioned round Brotherton Hall… you know the place I mean?’
The contemptuous nod showed exactly what Tom O’Brien thought of health spas — and the kind of people who frequented them.
‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Mrs Pargeter went on, ‘that Jenny may even have booked in there for a while.’
The interest faded from the boy’s eyes. ‘Well, they’re crap rumours then. Even assuming Jenny would ever want to go to a place like that… And she wouldn’t! Just because she’s at Cambridge, don’t imagine she’s some bone-headed upper-class snob. Jenny’s got her head firmly screwed on — she’s not a class traitor like some of those social-climbing girls you meet at…’ He realized he was getting off the subject. ‘What I’m saying is there’s no way she could have afforded to go to somewhere like Brotherton Hall. That was Jenny’s problem, for God’s sake — she didn’t have any money.’
‘But, just imagining for a moment that she somehow found the money
…’
‘If she’d found any money, there’s a million other things she would have spent it on.’
‘Or if someone had given her the stay at a health spa as a present
…’
The thought he might have a rival brought a haunted look into Tom’s eyes. ‘Who?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know there was someone?’
‘No, no, I’m just imagining. But what I really want to know is — would Jenny have had any reason to go to a health spa?’
The boy looked confused by the question.
‘What Mrs Pargeter means,’ Truffler elucidated, ‘is — was Jenny fat?’
‘Oh. No. Well, not particularly.’ A distant hunger of recollection softened his words. ‘She was… well rounded and…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Certainly not thin, anyway.’
Mrs Pargeter tried to force from her mind the skeletal body she had seen on the trolley at Brotherton Hall. ‘And she never expressed a desire to go to a health spa?’
‘No, no, of course she didn’t. She wouldn’t have dared.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she knew I’d disapprove of poncy places like that.’
‘And she wouldn’t have done anything that you disapproved of?’
The question was casual, but Tom O’Brien was instantly aware of its subtext. ‘And I don’t mean because I was a chauvinist, Mrs Pargeter. Jenny and I talked a lot, about everything. We thought alike about the really important things.’
‘And what would you say are the really important things?’
There was no hesitation about his reply. The issues were ones he had thought through in great detail and about which he was passionate. ‘The environment, obviously. That’s the most important item on the world’s agenda. If we don’t get that sorted out, then it’s all over for humankind. We’ve got to make people think differently. So long as their dominant motive remains profit and money-making, nothing’s going to get any better. There’ll be more poison pumped into the atmosphere, more forests cut down, more animal species sacrificed in the cause of consumerist experimentation. We’ve got to change the world whilst we still have a world left to change!’
Mrs Pargeter, though never an activist herself for any cause, could respect such fervour in others. And there was no doubting the boy’s sincerity.