‘Listen, Candida, if you’re saying I’m common, you’d better-’
‘All I happen to be saying, Chloe, is-’
Mrs Pargeter broke discreetly into this unseemly squabble. ‘Girls, please…’
Perhaps this phrase brought back to Chloe and Candida the remonstrance of some half-remembered house mistress; certainly it had the effect of silencing them. They turned demurely to Mrs Pargeter.
‘What I’d like to know,’ she asked, ‘is what — apart from his class — you find objectionable about Tom O’Brien?’
‘Well, he’s got all these ideas…’ Chloe replied.
‘All these notions…’ Candida agreed.
‘All these principles…’ said Chris with distaste.
‘Anything wrong with principles?’ asked Mrs Pargeter innocently.
‘No, obviously not,’ Chris replied. ‘Not in their proper place. And not if they’re the right principles.’
‘What would you say are the right principles?’
Chris’s answer dispelled Mrs Pargeter’s last illusion of student dissidence. ‘Well, keeping things as they are. Protecting property. Law and order. I mean, those are principles worth standing up for.’
‘But they’re not the ones that Tom stands up for?’
‘No. His principles are little short of terrorism.’
‘I thought he was into ecology… you know, ways of saving the planet…’
‘Yes, but the methods he reckons are legitimate to actually save the planet’ — Chris shook her head in disapproval — ‘well, they’re absolutely terrifying.’
‘Perhaps he believes that extreme problems require extreme solutions.’
‘Oh yes, right, I can see the thinking, but they don’t have to be that extreme. I mean, it’s all very well imagining that you can do things to help the Third World, all that stuff, absolutely fine, nothing against it, but you’ve got to get your priorities sorted out.’
‘So what are the proper priorities?’ Mrs Pargeter suggested ironically. ‘You make the odd gesture to the Third World every now and then, but never forget that charity really begins and ends at home?’
‘Exactly,’ said Chris, and her two friends nodded agreement, reassured that, in spite of her rather common accent, deep down Mrs Pargeter was their sort of person.
She took advantage of the hiatus to move the investigation on. ‘You don’t think Tom had anything to do with Jenny’s absence, do you?’
‘In what way?’ asked Chloe.
‘Well, that they might have run off together…?’ Although she knew that that wasn’t what had happened, Mrs Pargeter still wanted to find out what the girls thought.
‘Oh, no,’ Chris and Candida replied in unison.
‘No,’ Chloe agreed. ‘No, we’re fairly certain that Jenny went off to work… you know, make some money after she lost the pub job.’
‘But why would she do that before the end of term?’
‘Because that’s when the job came up, we assume. And we reckon it must have been something so well paid that, to her mind, it justified the risk of missing a week of term.’
‘And do you know any more about what kind of work Jenny might have been doing?’
Chloe and Candida looked interrogatively at Chris, who took up her cue with relish. ‘I actually think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it was — well, not absolutely what it was, but how she got on to it, know what I mean?’
Mrs Pargeter waited, letting the girl time her own revelation.
‘Thing is, being in the room next door to someone, you do live pretty close to them and you know most of what they’re up to. I mean, I suppose I tended to go out more than Jenny — you know, like socially — but I still did see quite a lot of her…’
‘Yes?’ Mrs Pargeter prompted patiently.
‘And I mean, I know after she lost the barmaid job, she was going through all kinds of newspapers and magazines to, like, look out for other things.’
‘And you think you know which magazine she got the job from?’
Chris refused to be hurried. ‘Let’s say I reckon I’ve narrowed it down.’
‘Ah.’
‘Jenny did tend to read some fairly yucky sort of magazines.’
‘Oh?’
Chris’s face settled into a moue of distaste. ‘I mean, some fairly subversive stuff… like, say, Private Eye…’
Mrs Pargeter made no comment, but her mind was reeling. The idea that twenty-year-olds in the 1990s could regard the superannuated enfant terriblisme of Private Eye as subversive was totally incongruous. What had happened to these girls? Had they sprung middle-aged and blue-rinsed from their mother’s wombs?
‘Not that we’re wholly against Private Eye,’ interposed Chloe, perhaps trying to bring a tinge of liberalism into the discussion. ‘I mean, some of the covers are sort of quite funny… and the odd cartoon…’
‘But it is all so negative,’ Chris argued. ‘Knocking things down all the time, not trying to build anything up. I mean, like, you do have to be more positive about things. The government is really trying, doing its best to get this country back on its feet, and I don’t think the kind of sniping Private Eye does is anything but completely destructive.’
Fascinating though it was to witness this reactionary display, Mrs Pargeter, aware of her time limit, felt she had to move the conversation on. ‘So you reckon Jenny went after a job advertised in Private Eye, do you?’
‘Well, I think so. They do have a lot of small ads, you know.’
‘Yes,’ Chloe agreed, ‘though these days most of the job ones are for people looking for work rather than offering it… you know, “Graduate seeks five thousand pounds to change the world, anything considered”, that kind of stuff…’
‘And then of course there are the personal ads… the contact ones, know what I mean?’ Candida blushed. ‘Some of those are pretty.. well, pretty explicit.’
Given more time, Mrs Pargeter would have loved to pursue this theme and find out if the three young ladies’ attitudes to sex were as reactionary as their views on everything else, but it wasn’t the moment. ‘So, Chris, do you think you know the actual ad that Jenny answered?’
The girl smiled smugly. ‘Got a pretty good idea.’ She reached into her handbag and produced a tattered copy of a recent Private Eye. ‘I know she was looking at this just a few days before she went off, and one of the ads is marked.’
She opened the magazine at the relevant page and handed it across. Mrs Pargeter looked at the Eye Earn column. In the middle of the usual encomia for foolproof betting systems, ‘amazing opportunities’ and ‘superb home
businesses’, a few words had been ringed in red ballpoint. 5000 FOR FOUR WEEKS’ WORK. NO TRAINING REQUIRED. DETAILS BOX 20335.
‘And you’re sure that Jenny was the one who put the ring round it?’
‘Of course I am,’ Chris replied. ‘Saw her do it.’ A funny thought struck her. ‘Why? You don’t imagine I’d have done it, do you? Or Chloe or Candida? Good heavens, can you imagine any of us stooping to that kind of thing?’
She let out a quack of laughter, in which her two friends joined. It was the best joke Chris had come up with for some time.
Mrs Pargeter once again felt massive sympathy for the life Jenny Hargreaves must have spent in Cambridge.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mrs Pargeter reported her progress to Truffler Mason on the carphone as Gary’s limousine sped her smoothly back to Greene’s Hotel. ‘I mean, I know box numbers are supposed to be a kind of security device, but…’
‘Mrs Pargeter…’ Truffler’s voice was once again edged with a hint of reproach.
‘Yes, I’m sorry. Of course I know you’ll be able to find out. Well, needless to say, any connection you can get with Brotherton Hall’s going to be terrific. And the sooner the better, obviously.. ’
‘Goes without saying, Mrs Pargeter. Incidentally, on the other things you asked me to check out…’
‘Ank and Dr Potter?’
‘Right.’ There was a pause before the uncharacteristic admission. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t made much headway there.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It’s not for want of trying.’ Truffler Mason’s voice was drowning under an excess of apology.