by Simon Brett
To Truffler, all that time ago when he was in his late twenties, Tumblers Tate had already looked an old man, but now a stronger word than ‘old’ was needed. What lay on the lounger was a husk, a wisp of a human being. His parchment skin, mottled by exposure to the sun, looked stretched so thin that his bones might pierce through at any moment.
In spite of the humbleness of his surroundings, Tumblers Tate did not appear to be impoverished. He was dressed in smart blue linen trousers and a blue and white striped short-sleeved shirt. Round his scraggy neck hung a chunky gold necklace and both thin wrists sported matching bracelets. On the low table beside the lounger lay the latest iPhone, a brandy balloon and a bottle of Courvoisier Napoleon Cognac (which Truffler knew retailed at getting on for a hundred quid).
The faded watery-blue eyes were open, but showed no reaction to the new arrival, even when he said, ‘Well, long time no see, Tumblers.’
From his great height, Truffler Mason looked down at the man who had been such a thorn in the side of the late Mr Pargeter. On their team they had had the great skills of Parvez the Peterman, but even he admitted to being no challenge to Tumblers Tate. No lock could impede Tumblers’ progress, no safe door keep out his prying hands. And, though his nickname dated from the days when he could align the key pins of any tumbler lock, as the security business became increasingly more electronic and sophisticated, he still managed to stay ahead of the game.
Like Parvez the Peterman, Truffler Mason did not believe that anyone else in the world could have worked through the layers of security installed in Mrs Pargeter’s safe. And yet it seemed doubtful that the shrunken creature on the lounger could have moved as far as his kitchen, let alone made the long journey from Atmos to Chigwell.
Was there a new champion cracksman in the world, a successor, an apprentice to whom Tumblers Tate had passed on all of his expertise? It was an uncomfortable thought.
Truffler Mason was aware that, since she had ushered him into her employer’s presence, Theodosia had been leaning against the kitchen doorway watching him. Though he felt confident that she genuinely could not understand English, he was still aware of her suspicion. He wondered for a moment whether her delay in letting him through to see Tumblers Tate had been caused by her telephoning someone – no doubt another member of the Philippoussis family – to announce his arrival at the cottage.
He had another try at getting a reaction from the old man. ‘Come on, Tumblers, I know we wasn’t always on the same side, what with you working for the Lambeth Walkers and all, but I’d’ve thought now we’ve reached a stage where we could let bygones be bygones.’
The watery eyes still gave no response.
Truffler chuckled. ‘Funny, I often think back to the times when you and I was both – in our different ways – involved with the work of Mr Pargeter.’
Tumblers Tate had managed to betray no reaction so far, but hearing the name of his old adversary brought an involuntary twitch to his face.
Encouraged, Truffler went on, ‘Ah, they was great times. Of course, most of me old mates’re going straight now. I’m a private investigator, you know, using much the same skills but, like, for a different purpose. Mr Pargeter was very good about sorting training and stuff for us, so that we could go into proper businesses after he had passed. What about your lot – they all turned legit too, have they?’
But, after his lapse on the mention of Mr Pargeter, Tumblers Tate was not about to give anything else away.
‘Listen, Tumblers mate,’ Truffler persevered, ‘I know you can hear everything I say. I also know you can understand it, so can we drop the old dementia routine? It’s not fooling anyone.’
The eyes flashed for a moment and focused a look of pure hatred on the visitor. Then Tumblers Tate spoke. His voice was reedy, but still demonstrated a surprisingly fierce vehemence. ‘You give me one reason why I should say anything to you, Truffler.’
‘Oh, I can think of a good few reasons,’ said Truffler, pushing forward his advantage. ‘For a start, you may think you’re safe from the long arm of the law out here, Tumblers, but there’s things I could pass on to the British police, certain bits of information which could make the rest of your life – however long or short that may be – very uncomfortable indeed.’
‘Blackmail?’ The old man spat the word out. ‘That’s never going to work. Because, you see, if you got dirt on me, I’ve got at least as much on you. I’ve kept a very detailed archive all of my professional life. So I could do exactly what you’re proposing to do – and make your life equally uncomfortable.’
‘Wouldn’t work, Tumblers. One thing Mr Pargeter was always very good at was seeing all of his operatives ended up with clean sheets. You’d be amazed by the network of alibis he set up. Any job we done, everyone involved always could produce a witness to swear he wasn’t near the scene of the crime at the time in question. All of us who worked for Mr Pargeter, we all supported each other on stuff like that.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
An evil smile played around the old man’s lips. ‘I think I could mention a few names of people who showed rather less solidarity with his associates.’
‘Oh?’
‘Let’s say I mentioned the name “Julian Embridge” …?’
‘Julian Embridge has been sent down for a very long sentence.’
‘Maybe, but people don’t become dumb when they’re sent to the nick. Rather the contrary. A lot of them get very garrulous when they’re asked to shop the people they used to work with. Besides, Julian Embridge wasn’t the only one to leave the fold of Mr Pargeter’s protection and work for the other side. The Lambeth Walkers ran a very efficient recruitment scheme.’
Truffler Mason decided that Tate’s assertion was all too likely to be true, and abandoned thoughts of blackmail for a more direct approach. ‘Listen, you know and I know that Mrs Pargeter’s house in Chigwell was broken into and something very valuable was stolen from her safe there. You also know that you’re the only cracksman in the world who could get through Parvez the Peterman’s security to open that safe. So what I’m asking you is to own up to—’
Truffler became aware of sounds behind him. He turned to see Theodosia talking urgent Greek to Yannis, who had apparently just arrived. Seeing the visitor was facing him, Mendy Farstairs’s factotum immediately stepped forward and said in insinuating English, ‘I am sorry, Mr Mason, but Mr Tate is a very sick man. He cannot cope with the stress of visitors. As you see, he has lost the power of speech, as well as many other faculties.’
‘He certainly has not lost the power of speech. He’s just been talking to me as if—’
‘Please, Mr Mason, I must ask you to leave.’
Tumblers Tate, grateful that rescue had arrived, slumped back on to his lounger, back to the torpor in which Truffler had found him.
Recognizing he was not going to get any more from that source, Truffler focused his interrogation on to Yannis instead. ‘Listen, there’s been a serious crime committed in England, a crime which only Mr Tate could have committed. I demand to know whether he has left the island of Atmos in the past few weeks.’
Yannis Philippoussis shrugged helplessly and gestured towards the wizened figure on the lounger. ‘Leave Atmos? How could a man in that condition dream of doing such a thing? He cannot even go to the bathroom on his own. There is no way he could have travelled to England.’
Truffler was beginning to suspect that this might be true, so he tried another approach. ‘But maybe he contacted someone in England and gave them instructions to—?’
‘Mr Mason, I must ask you to leave. You are harassing a very sick man. If you persist in doing so, I will have to take further action. We do have a very efficient police force here on Atmos.’
‘And no doubt they are all your cousins?’ suggested Truffler.
‘You are exactly right. They are,’ said Yannis Philippoussis with a smug and unhelpful smile.
NINETEEN
‘I wo
uldn’t trust him further than I could throw him,’ said Mrs Pargeter. She was referring to Costas Philippoussis, whose attractions for her had diminished with every minute he spent showing her round the cat sanctuary. ‘I’m convinced he’s cheating Mendy in a fairly major way, though I haven’t yet worked out how.’
She and Truffler were seated at a table on the Hotel Thalassa terrace, as far away from the main building as possible, but still she spoke in a whisper. She had an increasingly uncomfortable feeling that there was a Philippoussis cousin listening behind every vine.
‘Mendy has that gullibility of very rich people who’ve made no contribution to the accumulation of their money. Her husband Rufus is the one who’s out there grafting away. If she’d had some part in making the money, she might be more careful with it. The trouble is that Mendy takes her wealth for granted, so it never occurs to her that people might be trying to help themselves to it.’ Mrs Pargeter pursed her lips. ‘It’s very frustrating.’ Then she grinned at Truffler. ‘Still, I haven’t asked you about your little excursion yet. Did you get anything out of Tumblers Tate?’
He grimaced. ‘Not a lot.’ And he recounted almost verbatim the conversation they had shared.
‘So you don’t think he’s got dementia?’
‘Far from it. He’s as sharp as a tack, sharp as he ever was. Sharp as when he was back with the Lambeth Walkers.’
Not for the first time, the mention of this organization produced on Mrs Pargeter’s face a look of innocent incomprehension.
‘Anyway,’ Truffler went on, ‘I know for a fact that there’s nothing wrong with Tumblers’ mental faculties. All of the old boy’s marbles are very firmly in place. There was a laptop in his cottage …’
‘Oh yes?’
‘… and when I touched it, it sort of came to life.’
‘“Came out of sleep mode” is the expression that I think is used,’ said Mrs Pargeter, who did not know a great deal about computers, but certainly more than Truffler did.
‘OK, if you say so. Anyway, what was on the screen was The Times cryptic crossword. Today’s – the date was there, and all.’
‘Yes, I understand you can get most of the papers online these days.’
‘Right. But the thing was … every one of the clues on that crossword had been filled in.’
‘Ah.’
‘Now Theodosia doesn’t speak any English, so I can’t see her getting far with The Times cryptic crossword, can you?’
‘No,’ Mrs Pargeter admitted.
‘And I don’t think Yannis or any of the rest of the Philippoussis cousins are going to make much headway on it either.’
Another, ‘No.’
‘So the only person in that place who could have solved today’s cryptic crossword was Tumblers Tate himself. He’s no more got dementia than I got the bubonic plague.’
‘But did you check anything else on the laptop?’
‘Didn’t have time, really. And, as you know, I don’t know much about computers. But when I jogged the thing, another kind of picture come up. Quite bright blue, with instructions, I don’t know what it was meant for.’
‘Any writing? The name of the programme maybe?’
Truffler shrugged. ‘There was some, but I can’t remember what it said. Only saw like a glimpse of it.’
‘Hm,’ mused Mrs Pargeter.
Truffler let out a rueful chuckle. ‘Where’s Erin Jarvis when you need her, eh?’
Mrs Pargeter’s mobile rang. Accustomed to the ways of synchronicity, she was totally unsurprised to hear that the call was from Erin Jarvis.
‘We’ve identified the name of the person who laid the clue,’ the girl announced excitedly.
‘Sorry? Not quite sure what you mean,’ said Mrs Pargeter. ‘Maybe the Greek sun is fuddling my brain.’
‘I’m talking about ClinkedIn.’
‘Oh, of course. You’re talking about the person who started making enquiries about my husband’s business activities? “Snowy”.’
‘“Snowy”, yes.’
‘So who is he?’ Mrs Pargeter asked excitedly. ‘Will I recognize the name?’
‘I’m afraid you will,’ said Erin in a rather doom-laden way. ‘“Snowy” is Haydon Brighouse.’
‘Ah.’ Mrs Pargeter didn’t ask how Erin had found out the information. She knew there was no point in questioning geniuses about their methods. ‘So … what do you think he’s up to?’ She had an extremely accurate personal assessment of what he was up to, but she felt that this was one of those moments when a little tactical ignorance might fit the bill.
Erin spelled it out for her. ‘As I’m sure you know, Haydon Brighouse, so-called journalist, is the author of books on the Krays and the Richardsons. I’ve also discovered that, under the “Snowy” pseudonym, he’s been fishing for information on ClinkedIn about the “Lambeth Walkers”, a gang led by a guy called Knuckles Norton, who were operating round the same time and on the same patch as your husband. So it seems he’s planning a book on that rivalry, and any dirt he can get on Mr Pargeter will—’
‘But he won’t get any dirt on Mr Pargeter,’ said Mrs Pargeter, her violet eyes at their most innocent.
‘Why not?’
‘Because there is no dirt to be got on Mr Pargeter.’
This statement was made in such a definitive manner that Erin Jarvis could only respond with a less-than-convinced: ‘Right.’
‘Still,’ Mrs Pargeter mused, ‘it’s very important that Haydon Brighouse should be stopped from publishing any lies, isn’t it?’
Truffler Mason was alerted by the mention of the name. ‘Haydon Brighouse? What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘He is “Snowy”,’ said Mrs Pargeter.
‘Blimey. Yes, that would figure, though, when you think about it. But what’s this about him publishing lies?’
‘He’s got to be stopped from doing it.’ Mrs Pargeter turned the full beam of her eyes on to Truffler. ‘Actually, you’ve probably got more experience of stopping people from doing things than I have.’ She said into the phone, ‘Erin, I’m going to pass you over to Truffler. All well with you?’
‘Fine, thanks,’ said the girl.
‘Good. Lots of love – and thanks for your detective work on identifying “Snowy”. Here’s Truffler.’
She passed the phone across, and felt a glow from the warmth with which the private investigator greeted his surrogate daughter. Erin quickly brought him up to speed with what she had told Mrs Pargeter.
Truffler Mason rubbed his chin ruefully. ‘I’ve always been afraid something like this would happen.’
‘Something like what?’ asked Erin.
‘Someone getting too nosey about the late Mr Pargeter’s business affairs.’ He caught a look from Mrs Pargeter and hastily continued, ‘Not of course that there was ever anything wrong with the late Mr Pargeter’s business affairs, but it’s so easy in this life for people to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. And, as Mrs P says, it would be disastrous if any lies about the boss ever got published.’
‘Aren’t there libel laws,’ suggested Erin, ‘to stop that kind of thing happening? Injunctions or something? Superinjunctions?’
‘Trouble with libel,’ said Truffler dolefully, ‘is that you can’t libel people who’re dead.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that. Well, couldn’t Mrs Pargeter take out an injunction to stop publication?’
‘That would depend rather on what was actually written in the book. And finding that out could be rather costly – and public. Kind of thing that might have to go to court, and then there’d be beans spilt all over the place. No, Mr Pargeter always said – and he had the services of some of the best lawyers in the country – “Keep the lawyers out of things unless it’s absolutely necessary to get them involved.”’
Mrs Pargeter nodded respectfully on hearing her late husband’s sage advice repeated.
‘OK,’ said Erin. ‘So what other ways do we have of stopping Haydon Brighouse from publishing
?’
‘I can think of a few,’ replied Truffler. But he didn’t mention that one of them was by stopping Haydon Brighouse from doing anything. Ever again. Such thoughts were not to be voiced within the hearing of Mrs Pargeter.
‘We’ll have to think about it,’ he pronounced in a terminal manner. ‘Incidentally, Erin …’
‘Yes?’
‘There was something I wanted to ask you about, something to do with computers?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Well, look, I was just in someone’s house where they’d got a laptop—’ no need to spell out the details of whose house – ‘and on the screen they had a copy of today’s Times crossword.’
‘Nothing strange about that. You can get almost all daily papers online these days.’
‘So I gather, but the thing was, when I touched something on the laptop, another screen came up.’
‘What did it look like?’
Truffler started out on the minimal description he’d treated Mrs Pargeter to, but before he’d got a sentence into it, Erin said, ‘That sounds like Skype.’
‘Skype?’
‘Really, Truffler, it’s about time you came into the twenty-first century. Skype is a means of having conversations with people when you can actually see them.’
‘Like a sort of video-phone?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So you can see the person you’re talking to on your laptop?’
‘Laptop, tablet, mobile phone, all those devices.’
‘Oh,’ said Truffler Mason. And only people who knew him very well would have recognized how excited he was as, lugubriously, he continued, ‘So someone could be seen by someone else a long way away while they gave them instructions about how to do a complicated job …?’
‘Certainly.’
‘… a complicated job like breaking into a safe?’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Erin.
Mrs Pargeter was getting a little frustrated by only hearing one end of the ongoing conversation. ‘Might I have another quick word?’ she asked.
