Mrs. Pargeter's Point of Honour (18 page)

He had been all set to arrest Mr Pargeter, and then bring in the shoals of smaller fish who travelled in the master criminal's wake. The Inspector's triumph seemed assured. His was an operation that would continue to be talked about in awestruck voices round the Met for years to come.

The memory of how it had all gone wrong could still bring a cold shiver to Wilkinson's spine. Even he sometimes felt a bit of a fool about it.

He tried never to think about the incident. He'd certainly drive miles out of his way to avoid passing through the place where it had happened. And if he heard the town mentioned on the radio or television news, it still gave him an unpleasant little
frisson
.

Yes, it would be a long time before Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson forgot the name of Chelmsford.

The red Transit was still inside the fortified breaker's yard, but it didn't look as if it would be there for much longer. Rod D'Acosta and two of his heavies emerged from their hut and crossed towards the van. They had received orders to move out that morning. But just as Rod's hand reached to open the passenger-side door, his attention was attracted by something happening in the street outside, and he moved closer to the gates to get a better look.

Apparently a television programme was being made. A man with a portable BBC-TV camera was filming another man with an oleaginous smile and odious leisurewear. As always, the scene had attracted its little knot of gawping viewers, fascinated by being close to the manufacture of the country's favourite medium.

The man in the odious leisurewear seemed to be recording some direct-to-camera links. He stood in front of the wall of a house, on which a huge poster had been plastered, and fixed his unctuous smile on the camera lens. The links evidently recorded to his satisfaction, he redirected the beam of his unctuousness to the growing crowd.

‘Now listen, everybody,' he smarmed, ‘we've set up a stunt here for Saturday night's programme.' At this news his audience giggled in witless anticipation. ‘We're going to get some unsuspecting member of the public to look a right idiot and we're going to film them so that everyone at home can have a good laugh.' His audience roared at the prospect of such hilarity. ‘Just like we do every Saturday. Isn't that right, Kevin?'

The cameraman, chuckling to demonstrate what a good sport and how much part of the joke he was, agreed, ‘Yes, that's right, Des.'

Rod D'Acosta, inside the gates of his yard, chuckled too, and waved two of his henchmen across. ‘Hey, Ray, Phil! They're doing one of those daft telly stunts over there.'

The two heavies who'd suffered such a rude awakening in their car a few nights before, lumbered across to check out what their boss was talking about.

‘Oh yeah?' said the heavy called Ray.

‘Who's the geezer fronting it?' asked the heavy called Phil.

The correct answer to this question was Hedgeclipper Clinton, but Rod D'Acosta couldn't have been expected to know that. ‘Looks familiar,' he said. ‘Can't remember his name, though. I get all those blokes on the telly mixed up.'

The heavy called Phil pushed open the gates of the yard. ‘Let's go and have a butcher's then, eh?'

All three men moved forward to join the periphery of the crowd, amongst whose number they did not recognize Truffler Mason or Gary the chauffeur. And, like their boss, Ray and Phil didn't know that the presenter with a permanent nudge in his voice was Hedgeclipper Clinton, as he went on, ‘. . . and, though it looks as if the wall's perfectly solid, in fact behind the poster there's nothing there and somebody would be able to walk straight through it!'

The crowd, including Rod D'Acosta and his two heavies, oohed and tittered at the daring wit of this concept. Inside the yard, the remaining heavy, whose name was Sid, was drawn by the noise and moved slowly towards the open gates. Sid was the heaviest of all the heavies, and big with it.

‘But,' Hedgeclipper went on mischievously, ‘who'll be caught in the stunt? That's what we want to know, isn't it? I'm going to offer fifty pounds to someone to walk straight into that wall.'

Rod D'Acosta, always quick to recognize that fifty pounds was indeed fifty pounds, immediately volunteered. ‘Can I have a go?'

‘No, of course you can't,' the presenter replied in exasperation, ‘because you know what's going to happen. We've got to find someone who doesn't realize it's a set-up. We'll try the trick out on the next unsuspecting passer-by who comes along.'

The crowd giggled delightedly at the prospect of a fellow human being's imminent humiliation. But, as they looked up and down the street, their giggles died away. There was no one in sight. Why was it, they mused with irritation, that just when you need a patsy, there's never one around?

A tall, mournful-looking man in the crowd turned to Rod D'Acosta and his two heavies. He indicated the one called Sid, still lingering, fascinated but out of earshot, by the yard gates. ‘Why not ask your mate over there? He doesn't know what's going to happen, does he?'

Rod caught on straight away. ‘True.' He shouted across, ‘Here, Sid. You want to make fifty quid and be on the telly?'

Sid lumbered across to join them willingly enough, but a look of suspicion had overspread his Neanderthal features. ‘What you say, Rod? What's the catch?'

His answer came from the presenter. With a smile that plumbed new depths of unctuousness, Hedgeclipper Clinton said, ‘There is no catch, sir.' He gestured to his cameraman. ‘OK, roll, Kevin.' The presenter pointed up to the poster-covered wall and fixed his expression of professional
bonhomie
in place. ‘This, as you see, is a perfectly ordinary wall.' He focused the rictus of his grin on the heavy called Sid. ‘Now, sir, are you the kind of gentleman who normally walks into walls?'

‘Course not.'

The audience tittered at this Wildean exchange.

‘But, sir, would you walk into a wall for
fifty pounds
. . .?'

This exchange between presenter and patsy, and the delicious prospect of someone shortly being made to look a fool, exercised their customary magnetism on the British public. Every eye was focused on the two men standing in front of the poster-covered wall. So nobody noticed when the tall, lugubrious man and another, shorter one detached themselves from the fringes of the crowd and sauntered unobtrusively across towards the gates of the breaker's yard.

‘Might think about it,' said Sid, responding to the presenter's appeal to his greed.

‘Particularly if I guaranteed that you wouldn't hurt yourself . . .?'

‘Well . . .'

‘Go on,' Hedgeclipper Clinton urged seductively, and then he brought up the clinching argument that would have persuaded almost anyone in the country to do anything. ‘You have a chance to appear on television. Don't you want to show the people at home what a good sport you are?'

Urged on by shouts from the crowd and his own instinct that, given an opening, he could show some of those professional TV smoothies a thing or two, Sid put on his best smile and ran a comb of fingers through his thinning hair. ‘Yeah, go on,' he said in his ‘good sport' voice. ‘I'm game for anything.'

‘Great!' the ecstatic presenter cried. ‘What a lovely person you are!' He pulled five ten-pound notes out of his pocket, and the crowd who, like all television audiences, will always applaud money and consumer durables, cheered and stamped their feet in the excitement of the occasion.

‘See, there it is,' Hedgeclipper went on, ‘fifty pounds if you'll trust me, take my word for it when I say you won't get hurt and . . . walk into that wall!'

‘OK,' said Sid who, in his imagination, had just collected the Most Popular TV Personality Award for the fifth year running.

With a cheery grin into Kevin the doorman's camera, Sid gathered his energies and made as if to sprint towards the false wall.

‘Ooh,' the presenter cried, with an unfailing instinct for what makes good television. ‘Is he actually going to
run
into it for us?'

‘You bet!' replied Sid, whose imagined television career had just started to take off in the States.

To ever rising cheers from his audience – and ever rising career expectations in his imagination – Sid the heavy launched himself forward and sprinted towards the poster. Showing good professional instincts, he flashed a smile at Kevin the doorman's camera just the moment before he hit the poster and, as he expected, burst through it into the void.

That wasn't what happened, however. Behind the poster there was no void. There was nothing except for a solid brick wall, into which Sid smashed with all the velocity of his eighteen-stone body.

The cheers of the audience trickled to nothing as, clutching at his face, Sid the heavy tottered back from the wall. But suddenly the focus of attention shifted away from him. It was drawn by the sound of a vehicle's engine starting.

The crowd turned as one to see the red Transit surge out through the yard's open gates. While they gaped uncomprehendingly, the van's back doors were opened by Truffler Mason. Hedgeclipper Clinton and Kevin the doorman, who'd been ready for this moment, jumped inside. The doors swung shut again, as Gary gunned the engine and the red Transit screeched off into the distance.

‘Oi!' screamed Rod D'Acosta. ‘They got the stuff!'

‘Come on!' shouted the heavy called Ray.

While he, Rod and the heavy called Phil fought their way through the confused crowd back to their yard, the heavy called Sid slipped quietly to the ground at the foot of the wall, where he lay with an extremely stupid grin on his face. ‘'Ere!' he demanded in the moment before he lost consciousness. ‘Where's my fifty quid?'

There's only so much you can do at Heathrow Airport, as Sergeant Hughes was finding out, to his considerable annoyance. The flight on which pop sensation Boymeetzgirl were arriving from their tour of Poland had been delayed by two hours, and the Sergeant was bored stiff.

Also it looked as if the whole policing operation was going to be entirely unnecessary. Boymeetzgirl were evidently not quite as big a pop sensation as their record company's publicity department had puffed them up to be. The promised hordes of uncontrollable teenyboppers which prompted the police presence had not materialized. Maybe a dozen smallish girls with braces on their teeth, headphones on their ears and incipient puberty on the other parts of their bodies, clustered round the Arrivals gate, bearing hand-scrawled Boymeetzgirl banners. Rioting and public affray did not look to be on the cards.

Sergeant Hughes felt very frustrated. Like Inspector Wilkinson, he had been told that, following the arrest of Reg Winthrop, the arts theft investigation was at an end. It had progressed as far as it could. Hughes didn't believe this. To his mind they'd just lifted up a corner of the carpet on that one, and considerable riches lay yet to be discovered. They'd hardly started.

Hughes was also frustrated by the knowledge that Inspector Wilkinson had been scheduled for a much more appealing assignment. The raid on Rod D'Acosta's breaker's yard sounded real fun. It would undoubtedly involve bulletproof vests, searchlights and lots of shouting through loudspeakers. It was exactly the sort of shooty-bang opportunity for which Sergeant Hercule Hughes had joined the Police Force.

Why a juicy job of that sort should go to a useless old dinosaur like Wilkinson, Hughes could not begin to imagine. It was the sort of assignment that should go to a young Turk, someone with a bit of style, someone with charisma. To him, in fact.

Yes, he wasn't going to be Sergeant Hughes for long. Once he presented the Superintendent with the completed dossier he'd been building up on the laptop in his flat, fast-track promotion would be a certainty.

Hughes'd had a cup of coffee, he'd read all the newspaper headlines in the bookshop, he'd decided he didn't want to buy any ties, smoked salmon or inflatable travel cushions, and his boredom was getting deeper by the minute. He looked at his watch. Still an hour and a half before the rescheduled flight from Warsaw was due to arrive. That was assuming there wasn't another delay.

For something to do, he got out his mobile phone and dialled his home number. Check the answering machine, see if there were any messages. He wasn't optimistic. There was no way the dumped long-standing girlfriend in Sheffield was going to ring him, and he had yet to develop much of a social life in London. (He did have plans in this direction, though. Once he'd got his career established, then he'd sort out his sex life. In his view, London's lucky women didn't know what was about to hit them.) But his current lack of a social life was another reason why he liked working on his days off. It was something to do.

To his surprise, the machine indicated there was a message for him. He played it back, casual interest quickly giving way to mounting excitement.

It was an educated voice, which spoke with little intonation. ‘Hello, Sergeant Hughes. This is another message from Posey Narker, who tipped you off about the Dover smuggling attempt. Congratulations on following up on that. I must say, after years of giving information to Inspector Wilkinson, it's a relief to be dealing with someone who seems to have a bit of intelligence.

‘I have more information for you about the Pargeter set-up. Mr Pargeter, as I'm sure you know, is dead, but some of his old accomplices are banding up again to perpetrate a major art theft. This morning they will be hijacking a lorry full of stolen paintings from a breaker's yard owned by a villain called Rod D'Acosta. It is situated at . . .'

Sergeant Hughes continued listening to the address as he broke into a run towards the car park. Never mind about Boymeetzgirl. Their frenzied fans could tear the whole airport apart so far as he was concerned. Hercule Hughes had bigger fish to fry.