He arranged with Mrs Pargeter where they should meet early the next morning. “Oh, and don’t dress too posh,” he cautioned.
“What, not a mink or anything like that?”
“No. Goodness, no. Keep it simple. Don’t want to be conspicuous.”
“All right. If you say so. Anything special I should bring?”
“Some cash wouldn’t be a bad idea. And a couple of half-bottles of whisky might come in,” Truffler Mason concluded lugubriously.
♦
Their rendezvous was outside the Embankment Underground station, but Mrs Pargeter did not travel there by Tube. She was a bit old, she considered, to be traipsing around by public transport so early in the morning. So, mindful of the late Mr Pargeter’s constant advice that small economies only suited small minds, she had Gary’s limousine deliver her.
But, with Truffler Mason’s admonition about being inconspicuous freshly in her mind, she arranged for the car to deposit her outside the Sherlock Holmes pub in Northumberland Street, and walked down to the station.
She had dressed with care – and indeed with some difficulty. Her wardrobe did not boast a great many ‘inconspicuous’ garments. The late Mr Pargeter, during his lifetime, had always encouraged her to wear bright colours. Her beautiful complexion, he constantly maintained, could cope with them, and he liked to see her looking bright and cheerful in every sense when he returned from a business trip. So most of her dresses were in jubilantly coloured silks; her coats were selected from a small armoury of minks; and the ensembles were habitually complemented by a tasteful garnish of large jewellery.
For her encounter with Rod Cotton, she had, with some regret, relinquished all jewellery. She wore beige fur-lined boots, which not only kept out the chill rising from the pavements, but also concealed her silk stockings (she could never bring herself to wear any other kind). And she had foregone even her most humble and domestic mink, in favour of an old Burberry raincoat.
She missed the reassurance of the fur as she stepped briskly towards the Underground station. It was getting very wintry now. The edges of the pavements, not yet trodden away by early commuters, bore a salt-like crust of frost. As she passed their noisome cardboard fortresses under the railway arches, she felt a surge of pity for the newspaper-swaddled dossers who lay asleep on the cold pavements of London.
Truffler Mason was waiting for her. She had never seen him before in the flesh, but had no difficulty in knowing who he was. His great height and the long, sagging lines of his face – almost as if he had been made of candle-wax and melted – fitted perfectly with the doleful voice.
“Play it whatever way you want,” he said. “I’ll come with you and talk to him if you need support.”
“I think I’ll probably be better off on my own,” said Mrs Pargeter with delicate tact. “Don’t want to frighten him off or anything.”
“OK, up to you. I’ll stay in sight, though, just in case you need any help.”
“Why should I need any help?” she asked innocently.
“Don’t know how he’s going to react to being approached, do you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Nor how the others are going to react.”
“Others?”
“Yes.”
“What others?”
“Well, there are quite a lot of them, aren’t there?”
“Quite a lot of who?” Mrs Pargeter looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, Truffler, I’m not really with you…”
He pointed gloomily across the road. “Look, over there. That’s where he is.”
Mrs Pargeter followed the line of his finger, and saw the row of human jetsam she had passed only moments before. “You mean, the dossers…? Rod Cotton is over there…with the dossers…?”
Truffler Mason nodded. “Fourth one from the right.”
“Good heavens,” said Mrs Pargeter.
♦
The smell, a compound of old sweat, urine and stale alcohol, grew almost insupportably strong as she approached the line of padded bodies. The one that Truffler Mason, now protectively watching her from the other side of the road, had pointed out, lay on top of three opened-out cardboard boxes. Under its coverlet of newspapers, the body was wrapped in an old greatcoat, once navy blue, but now faded to grey. From inside this, more newspaper, extra protection against the cold, spilled out. Stiffly-matted hair straying from under a woollen hat was all that could be seen of the head; its face was pushed into a pillow of a grubby padded carrier-bag.
The odorous cocoon gave no signs of life.
With caution, Mrs Pargeter reached forward an elegantly booted foot and touched one of the stained trainers that emerged from the bottom of the greatcoat.
There was no reaction.
She tried again, this time giving the body’s foot a firmer shove.
The third time, it worked. The pile of rags and newspaper twitched alive with remarkable speed. Suddenly it was sitting upright.
A haunted face glared at Mrs Pargeter. It was lined with grime, circled by greasy hair and scrubby beard. The gummy eyes lurked suspiciously in deep recesses.
But, through the disguise of suffering and deprivation, it was undoubtedly the face that Mrs Pargeter had seen in a photograph frame on the mantelpiece when she had first visited ‘Acapulco’, Smithy’s Loam.
The dosser was Rod Cotton.
∨ Mrs, Presumed Dead ∧
Twenty-Nine
“It’s all right. I’ll move on,” said the dosser in instant reaction to his awakening.
His voice had not quite lost its educated origins, but had become slurred into a kind of anonymous, classless growl.
“I’m not moving you on,” said Mrs Pargeter. “I want to talk to you.”
“Bloody do-gooders,” the voice complained. “Why can’t you leave us alone? Things are bad enough without you rubbing our bloody faces in it.”
“I’m not a do-gooder. As I say, I just want to talk to you.”
“Oh yes. Talk, talk, talk – maybe give me a cup of bloody awful soup – and then suddenly the talk’ll get round to God, won’t it? Well, don’t bother. Just leave me to go back to sleep. God’s irrelevant – got nothing to do with anything. If there was a God, he wouldn’t let people end up like this, would he?” His right arm waved vaguely to encompass the other muffled bodies beside him. Mrs Pargeter noticed that the wrist was enclosed in a grubby plaster cast. He turned his face away from her and buried it back into his carrier-bag pillow.
Mrs Pargeter reached into her Burberry pocket. “I’ve got something for you.”
“Don’t want any of your bloody leaflets,” the heap of clothes mumbled.
“I think you might want this.” She turned the top, breaking the seal on one of the half-bottles of whisky.
The dosser turned instantly at this familiar sound and squinted up at her. She held out the open bottle towards him. With a quick look round to see that none of his neighbours were watching, he seized it and took a long swallow. Then another. And another.
Mrs Pargeter held her hand out. “That’s enough for the moment.”
“No.” He cradled the bottle to his chest.
She kept her hand outstretched. “Yes. You talk to me, you tell me what I want to know, and you can have the rest.”
“I can have the rest now. I’ve got it,” he said childishly, still clutching the bottle to him.
“Yes, you can have that,” Mrs Pargeter agreed, “but you can’t have the second bottle.”
“Second bottle?”
She half-lifted it out of her other Burberry pocket. The dosser took a long swig from the bottle he held and looked furtively thoughtful. “Why do you want to talk?”