Mrs. Pargeter's Plot (10 page)

‘No, you know what I mean. Streatham. Julian Embridge Streatham.'

The mention of the name sent darkened clouds over Mrs Pargeter's habitually sunny face. ‘I thought we had dealt with that problem. Julian Embridge is currently serving a very long jail sentence – which is an inadequate revenge for what he did in Streatham, but better than nothing.'

She referred to an unhappy incident in her husband's generally successful career, when betrayal by a trusted lieutenant – the same Julian Embridge – had caused him a longer absence from the marital nest than either of them would have wished for. Though, as Mrs Pargeter mentioned, she had since exacted her revenge, the memory of Embridge's perfidy could still cause her anguish.

Truffler elaborated. ‘Reason I mentioned Streatham is—'

He was interrupted by a sudden scream of Welsh anger from the outer office, and shrugged apologetically. ‘Sounds like Bronwen's husband – ex-husband I should say – is back from Mauritius and has just phoned her up.'

Their ensuing dialogue was punctuated by further vituperation from the valleys. Through the wall they could not distinguish the words, but when a tone of voice is that expressive, who needs words?

‘What were you saying about Streatham?' Mrs Pargeter prompted.

Truffler sighed ruefully. ‘Just that there's little doubt that
he
. . .' a large finger prodded the photograph of Blunt, ‘. . . was in it right up to his neck.'

Mrs Pargeter looked grim. ‘Right. So I have the odd score to settle with Blunt, don't I?' An even louder scream of Welsh fury thundered through the partition. Mrs Pargeter raised an eyebrow to Truffler, then asked, ‘What about the other name Concrete mentioned?'

‘Yes. Clickety Clark . . .' His hands instinctively found the relevant dossier and passed it across the desk. As he did so, Truffler shook his head in puzzlement. ‘Odd: I mean, Clickety was in a totally different part of the business.'

‘Still worked for my husband, though?'

‘Oh yes, but he didn't do no heavy stuff.' Mrs Pargeter gazed at the detective with charming incomprehension. What on earth could he mean by ‘heavy stuff'?

‘He done photography,' Truffler explained. ‘Passport photographs, that kind of number, anything photographic where sort of . . . specialized work was needed. We used to call him “Wandering Hands”.' Mrs Pargeter looked at him for elucidation. ‘Because he was always touching everything up.'

‘Ah.'

‘What old Clickety's doing now, though, I've no idea. I think we should—' He was interrupted by the sound of a heavy object being hurled with some force at the dividing wall between the two offices. ‘Excuse me a moment, Mrs Pargeter.'

With the long-suffering weariness of someone who has gone through these motions many times before, Truffler Mason rose to his full length and crossed to a dusty cupboard. He unlocked it to reveal shelves piled high with brand-new plastic-wrapped telephones. He took one out and turned to face the door.

As he did so, a diffident tap was heard, and the door opened. Bronwen stood there, flushed and apologetic. In her hands were the tangled remains of a smashed telephone.

Wordlessly, Truffler took the debris and handed her the new one. Bronwen smiled embarrassed gratitude and went back to her desk, closing the door behind her. Truffler chucked the shattered telephone into the bin.

With no reference to the incident, he then said, ‘Right, Mrs Pargeter. I think we need to get some up-to-date info on Blunt and Clickety Clark.'

‘And how are we going to do that?'

‘We are going,' said Truffler with a foxy grin, ‘to visit the offices of
Inside Out
.'

The offices of
Inside Out
were housed in Swordfish Wharf, a gleaming new tower block in Docklands. ‘Not a million miles from Wapping,' Truffler Mason observed, as Gary's limousine deposited them outside the entrance. ‘They say that's the new Fleet Street, don't they?'

‘The only people who say it are people who haven't been here,' said Mrs Pargeter, looking up with distaste at the glass box that loomed above them. ‘The only journalists I've met recently say nothing will replace the old Fleet Street.'

‘Ah, but where did you meet them, Mrs P.?' asked Truffler, as they crossed a foyer, whose copious vegetation was apparently trying to reproduce an air-conditioned rainforest. The steel sculpture of a swordfish rising out of the green looked confused by its alien environment.

‘Boozing in pubs round Fleet Street,' she replied. While they waited by the over-designed slate-grey counter for one of the uniformed security men to get off the telephone or stop staring portentously at his monitor screen, Mrs Pargeter indulged in a moment of nostalgia. ‘No, these days they're trying to get rid of all the old stereotypes. Proper, heavy-drinking journalists are being replaced by Perrier-swilling suits who never leave their keyboards. Television producers now sit around earnestly thinking of minority interests and sipping nothing stronger than a large
espresso.
Do you know,' she concluded on a note of awe, ‘nowadays apparently there are even teetotal publishers?'

Truffler Mason shook his head and grinned. ‘Still, you'll never go that way, will you, Mrs P.?'

‘I should think not!' she replied indignantly. ‘I'm not a religious person, but clearly whoever devised this world we live in filled it full of delightful treats – food and drink being high on the list. And not to take advantage of that divine generosity – whatever creed you may happen to believe in – amounts to downright blasphemy, so far as I'm concerned.'

‘Too right,' Truffler nodded. ‘Too right.'

One of the security men had disengaged himself from the telephone. He looked up at them balefully. ‘Can I help you?' he asked unhelpfully.

‘The names are Mason and Pargeter.'

‘Oh yes?' His tone was heavy with disbelief.

‘We've come to see Ricky Van Hoeg,' Truffler continued. ‘He is expecting us.'

‘Really?' This appeared to the security man an even less likely assertion. He punched some numbers vindictively into his telephone. After a brief conversation, he was forced grudgingly to concede that they were expected.

He thrust a clipboard towards them. ‘Fill in your names, companies represented, whom visiting, time of arrival, estimated time of departure, name of insurance company, telephone contact number for next of kin, and nature of business. Then the computer will issue you with a visiting number which you wear in
this
plastic badge. Do not remove your visiting badge at any time while you are within the building, and return it to the desk here on departure. Under no circumstances change your visiting badge with anyone else – it is
not
transferable.'

Mrs Pargeter fixed the security man in the beam of her violet-blue eyes. ‘I don't really think we want to bother with any of that,' she murmured sweetly.

The security man shrugged. ‘Oh, well, please yourself,' he said, and, as they crossed to the lifts, he turned back to watch his security monitor, which was showing a mid-morning cookery programme. He made notes on a pad of the ingredients for
mangetouts au gratin à la provençale
.

The lift doors opened and an infinitely tall, infinitely thin woman emerged. She had the contours of a stick insect, and was dressed in designer clothes that would be the envy of stick insects all over the world. She looked fabulous.

‘Mrs Pargeter!' she exclaimed in hearty Cockney, and swept the shorter, fatter woman up into her arms.

‘Ellie!' Ellie Fenchurch was the country's most vitriolic celebrity interviewer. Her Sunday newspaper column made compulsory reading for anyone who enjoyed seeing the great and good humiliated (and that, of course, included just about everyone). Talentless and graceless minor royals, devious cabinet ministers, testosterone-choked sports heroes, oversexed rock stars, unfaithful newsreaders, and supermodels whose braincell count didn't reach double figures – they had all had cause to smart from the interviewing technique of Ellie Fenchurch. Which made all the more remarkable the huge and continuing queue of celebrities desperate to be given the same treatment.

As they disengaged from the hug, Mrs Pargeter said, ‘You know Truffler, don't you?'

‘Course I do.' Ellie was exactly the same height as the detective. She enthusiastically kissed the air to either side of his cheeks.

‘What you doing here then?' asked Mrs Pargeter.

‘My office is here, isn't it?'

‘Is it? I thought you worked for one of the Sundays.'

‘I do. And that's based here.'

‘Oh, I see, so there're legitimate papers here, and all, are there?'

Ellie's brow wrinkled. ‘What do you mean – legitimate?'

Truffler clarified the situation. ‘We're coming to see Ricky Van Hoeg at
Inside Out.
I think Mrs Pargeter may have somehow got the impression that it isn't a legitimate publication.'

‘What, you mean it
is
?' asked Mrs Pargeter innocently.

“Course it is. Everything here comes under the Swordfish umbrella,' said Ellie.

‘But I thought it was called the Lag Mag for prisoners and—'

‘It is. That doesn't mean it's not legit, though. There's a market out there. Swordfish Communications are very shrewd operators. They'll publish a magazine about
anything
, so long as they can make money out of it. Isn't that right, Truffler?'

He nodded. ‘You bet. They do
Knicker-Nickers' World
. . . and
Morris Dancers' Monthly
. . .'

‘The Ferret-Fanciers' Gazette . . .'

‘Which Depilatory? . . .'

‘Matchstick Modelling Today . . .'

‘The Cribbage Quarterly . . .'

‘Oh yes,' Ellie Fenchurch concluded. ‘Swordfish magazines'll explore any niche market there is. You see, the thing about ferret-fanciers or matchstick-modellers is: there may not be that many of them, but, by God, they're loyal. Circulation guaranteed to stay steady. All the same articles get recycled – with slight editorial adjustments – every three or four months, production costs are pared down to the bone, but, in spite of all that, the punters just keep on buying.'

Mrs Pargeter looked bewildered. ‘I thought Swordfish was about the big newspaper titles – the daily and the Sunday one. That's what they're known for, surely?'

Ellie Fenchurch shook her head. ‘Don't you believe it. Those're the public profile, yes, but they both make a big loss. Swordfish's profit comes from the advertising it sells for local papers and the specialist markets. I mean, if you're trying to sell protective underpants for people who want to do ferret-down-trouser tricks in pubs, there's not many places you can advertise, is there? Got to be
The Ferret-Fanciers' Gazette,
hasn't it?'

‘I suppose so.' Mrs Pargeter smiled. ‘What're you up to at the moment, Ellie?'

‘Right this minute, I'm just off to do a character assassination on an Australian soap opera star.'

‘Oh, nice.'

‘Well,
I'll
enjoy it. But that won't take long. Once he knows I know about his very close interest in sheep, I think the interview could come to an abrupt end. How's about lunch? You not going to be with Ricky all day, are you?'

‘Hour, maybe,' said Truffler.

Ellie Fenchurch looked at her watch. ‘Great. See you both at the Savoy Grill half past one. We'll all get thoroughly rat-arsed.'

‘But, Ellie,' said Mrs Pargeter ingenuously, ‘I didn't think journalists drank these days.'

‘No, of course they don't.' Ellie Fenchurch let out a snort of laughter. ‘And, what's more, politicians don't take backhanders!'

These days, Mrs Pargeter thought regretfully as she and Truffler were ushered into the presence of
Inside Out
's editor, even journalists' offices don't look any different from anyone else's offices. The huge floor-space covering a whole storey of Swordfish House, the rows of open-plan low-walled cubicles, each centred on the winking coloured screen of a computer, could have belonged equally convincingly to a bank or a mail-order firm or an insurance company.

What she thought of as the hack's natural environment – battered manual typewriters, overspilling wicker wastepaper baskets, encrusted coffee cups with cigarette butts floating in them, a half-bottle of whisky in the bottom desk drawer, and maybe even the odd green eye-shade – had vanished for ever. Journalism had followed the route of so many professions, hands-on human contact giving way to a life lived by remote control, its reality distanced from its operators through the medium of the microchip.

Dear oh dear, thought Mrs Pargeter, not like me to be so maudlin. She pulled herself together with the memory of some words the late Mr Pargeter had often spoken to her. ‘Everyone should home in on what they're good at, Melita my love. You're good at being positive. So be positive. There are quite enough people out there who're good at being negative, but what you've got going for you is something much rarer.'

She smiled at the recollection as she leant forward to shake the hand of Ricky Van Hoeg, editor of
Inside Out
. His superior status over the other hacks at least gave him the right to a small cubicle in the corner of the office, but its glass walls and open door did not make it seem very separate from the hushed, open-plan keyboard-clacking environment outside.

Ricky Van Hoeg was in his thirties, earnestly bespectacled, with the look of someone whose life mission it is to sell you a mortgage. Mrs Pargeter wasn't sure what she was expecting – or even wanting – but it wasn't this. She would have hoped that the editor of a prisoners' whereabouts magazine might have some minimal element of loucheness about him.