Mrs Pargeter 03; Mrs Pargeter’s Package mp-3

by Simon Brett

  “That kind of idea, yes. They fly out over the sea, land on the water to fill up the tanks and then fly back to drop it on the fire.”

  “Good heavens,” said Mrs Pargeter.

  Maria shrugged. “Don’t knock it. It works.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure it does. It’s just an unusual idea – well, unusual for someone used to the good old British fire-engine. What starts the fires, though? Is it tourists throwing away cigarettes, lighting barbecues, that kind of thing?”

  “Some of it, yes.” The girl seemed for a moment undecided as to whether to continue, but went on, “And there’s a certain amount of arson.”

  “Arson? By the tourists?”

  “No, by people on the island.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “Feuds, that kind of thing. Or the people from one village will get jealous because another village is doing better out of the tourist industry.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s happened quite a lot in the last few years, since the number of tourists has been going down. Look over there.” She pointed to the scrub-covered hillside, through which the dusty track from the main road wound down to the village. An area of perhaps half an acre in the middle of it was dark grey, bare of greenery, with only a few gnarled and blackened sticks left standing. “That happened a couple of months back. Agios Nikitas did well for tourists last summer – compared to the rest of the island. Somebody tried to ensure that it wouldn’t do so well this year.”

  “And does anyone here know who did it?”

  Maria nodded enigmatically. “Oh, I should think so. These feuds go back a long way. No, the problem is not usually deciding who did it, but deciding what revenge should be taken against them.”

  “So what kind of revenge is likely to be taken?”

  “I don’t know,” said Maria shortly, deciding she had perhaps already given away too much, and went back into the hotel.

  Mrs Pargeter was once again struck by the gulf between the bright smiling ‘No Problem’ tourist image of Corfu and the realities of life on the island.

  ♦

  She had almost given up when he answered the phone. He sounded drowsy and Mrs Pargeter couldn’t quite remove from her mind the image of Larry lingering deliciously in bed with his shy-smiling Greek woman.

  “Good morning, Mrs P. What can I do for you on this bright and sunny?”

  “Well, first, thank you very much for your hospitality last night. It was a lovely evening.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “And, second, I wondered if you knew anyone on the island who could do a bit of chemical analysis for me?”

  “What?”

  She filled him in on what she had found out about Joyce’s ouzo bottle. “So I was wondering if you knew anyone who might be able to tell, me what’s in it?”

  “I think you’d better let me have a look at it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Fact is, in my line of work – documents, passports, that kind of stuff – I deal with quite a lot of chemicals. Always possible I’d be able to recognise it straight away, or, failing that, I could run a few tests and find out what it is for you.”

  “That’d be great. As I say, it doesn’t smell of anything. I haven’t actually tasted it yet, but –”

  “And don’t you try, Mrs Pargeter!”

  “What, tasting it?”

  “Right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, Joyce Dover was murdered. We don’t know why, but one quite common motive for committing murder is to stop oneself from being murdered. Maybe what she’d got in that bottle was intended to help someone on his or her way to the undertaker.”

  “Poison, you mean?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Mrs Pargeter.”

  ∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

  Eighteen

  With all her lines played out, Mrs Pargeter felt there was little she could do but wait for bites, so after breakfast she decided she would investigate the local beach. The bay of Agios Nikitas itself was just a harbour, but over the next headland, she had been assured, was the delightful beach of Keratria.

  Mrs Pargeter bought herself a large straw hat for the expedition, and felt like an intrepid Victorian tracking down the source of the Nile as she set off up the little track out of the village. Although it was not yet eleven o’clock, the sun seemed already to have been turned up to ‘full’, and she was glad of the protective tracery of olive branches above her head.

  She enjoyed the walk. Though undeniably overweight for her height, Mrs Pargeter was not unfit. Indeed, she was in better condition than most women in their late sixties. This state had not been achieved, however, by the indignities of calorie-counting or prancing in leotards. Its provenance was good eating, good drinking and, it must be admitted, a degree of pampering. But the main source of her well-being was the fact that Mrs Pargeter felt at home – and even at peace – in her own body.

  Keratria proved, as promised, a beautiful beach. At one end a simple concrete taverna offered bamboo-covered shade and refreshment, and a few villas spotted the shoreline woods. Under a beach umbrella a mahogany-skinned young man kept a desultory eye on piles of blue fabric-covered loungers, a line of orange pedalos and a stack of sailboards, whose vivid sails splashed the pebbles behind him. He’d done all right with the loungers, there were a couple of pedalos circling lazily out in the bay, but nobody seemed interested in hiring the sailboards. Too much like hard work, as the sun spread its hazy lethargy. The young man didn’t appear to be troubled by his lack of business.

  Mrs Pargeter recognised a few people on the beach. The renters of the villas of Agios Nikitas did not stray far; they soon homed in on favourite beaches and tavernas. Even those with hire-cars tended, after a couple of days of frizzling sightseeing, to settle down and use their expensively-hired vehicles only to save the quarter-mile walk to minimarket or beach.

  She saw Keith and Linda and Craig from South Woodham Ferrers. Linda, wearing a bikini which advertised her decision not to worry about stretchmarks, was trying to interest Craig in building a tower of stones, while Keith pored over his calculator, working out how the cost of the kilo of plums they had bought from the mobile fruit van that morning compared to English prices. Every now and then he commented to Linda how sorry he felt for all those poor devils stuck back in the office.

  Craig was finding stone architecture less than riveting. He tried pottering down to the sea, but soon subsided on to his bottom, crying that the stones hurt his feet. With a child that age, Mrs Pargeter thought, Keith and Linda should really have gone to the sandier west of the island. Still, Craig’d be all right if his parents bought him some plastic sandals. Give Keith something else to compare the prices of.

  She nodded at them and, a little further along the beach, passed the Secretary with Short Bleached Hair and the Secretary with Long Bleached Hair. They were prone on loungers, Walkmans plugging out the reassuring susurration of the sea. Both that day wore bikinis apparently designed by the inventor of the garotte, but the skin of their shoulders and thighs testified to the outline of every garment they had worn over the last forty-eight hours. Thin strap-lines showed white in the middle of the pink bands left by wider straps, while the puce area which had been exposed all the time already bore the tell-tale white flaking that presaged the loss of a whole layer of skin.

  Now, belatedly, they had started to baste each other with cream and oil, but the damage had already been done. They were both going to be very uncomfortable for a couple of days, in no state to enjoy the abandoned Greek dancing of the taverna party nights which they had been promising themselves. Mrs Pargeter felt a maternal urge to tell them just to keep out of the sun for a couple of days, but she knew it wasn’t her place to say anything.

  She moved a little further along the beach, took a towel out of her bag and laid it down on the stones. Then she slipped off the cotton dress to reveal a brightly printed bikini beneath. Hers was more substantial than those wor
n by the two secretaries, but made no attempt to hide her voluptuousness. Mrs Pargeter knew her skin to be smooth and unmarked, and people who found plumpness unattractive were under no obligation to look at her. ‘My Goddess of Plenty’, that was how the late Mr Pargeter had always referred to her, she remembered fondly as she stepped in sandalled feet down to the sea.

  The water was deliciously warm and Mrs Pargeter, a strong swimmer, enjoyed its therapy for more than half an hour. Then she rubbed herself down with the towel and slipped her dress back on, confident that any damp patches would dry as she walked along to the taverna.

  The menu at Keratria was remarkably similar to that at Spiro’s (which in turn bore an uncanny resemblance to the one at the Hotel Nausica). The predictability of Greek taverna food was something that Mrs Pargeter always forgot until, two or three days into a holiday, she was forcibly reminded of it.

  Still, it was healthy. And tasty. She had a plate of moussaka, a Greek salad and half a litre of retsina. Very pleasant. Again glad of the olive trees’ shadow, she set off back to Agios Nikitas.

  ♦

  It was probably just perverseness that made Mrs Pargeter go back to the hotel via the Villa Eleni, but she wanted to see how efficiently the murder scene had been sealed off, pending police investigation.

  The answer, she discovered with only the mildest of surprises, was that it hadn’t been sealed off at all.

  The shutters and windows at the front were open, their thin curtains shimmering a little in the light breeze.

  The front door was also wide open. Mrs Pargeter walked in. The living-room looked immaculate, every surface gleaming, as if ready to welcome new tenants.

  She heard a slight sloshing sound from the room that had been Joyce’s and moved towards it. Through the crack by the door hinges she could see the maid Theodosia on the far side of the bed, her arms busily swishing an unseen mop across the marble floor.

  Mrs Pargeter went into the room. Theodosia looked up and caught her eye, but only stopped for half a beat in her rhythmic floor-washing. The rest of the marble was still damp from her ministrations.

  Mrs Pargeter moved round the foot of the two beds and looked at the patch of floor she had last seen hideously discoloured with her friend’s blood. Nothing remained. She looked at the bucket into which Theodosia had wrung her mop, but the water showed no brown tinge. This was not the first clean-up of the murder scene, just a final spit-and-polish.

  How very convenient, Mrs Pargeter found herself thinking, almost like the houseproud ‘little woman’ she had never been, how very convenient marble floors are. Household stains… jam, mud, tomato ketchup, even someone’s lifeblood… all vanish with a few easy strokes of a wet mop. No mess, no fuss – make sure you choose a marble floor when you’re next thinking of committing murder.

  The detached cynicism of these thoughts pained her and Mrs Pargeter felt tears threaten. Again she caught Theodosia’s eye and seemed for a moment to see in them a reflected pain. Oh, if only the woman could speak… It would be in Greek if she could, of course, but the words could be interpreted. Mrs Pargeter felt certain that Theodosia knew something about Joyce’s murder. If only there were a way of extracting that information…

  “What are you doing here?”

  The voice was shrill with anger. Mrs Pargeter turned to face Ginnie. The bruising on the rep’s face had subsided a little, but was still painfully evident.

  “I thought I’d just come in to see how the police were getting on with their investigations.”

  “As you can see, they’ve finished.”

  “If they ever started.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that Joyce Dover was murdered, but there seems a marked unwillingness for anyone out here to investigate that crime.”

  Once again Mrs Pargeter saw the light of fear in Ginnie’s eye, the same fear she had seen when she first told the girl of her friend’s death.

  “That’s nonsense, Mrs Pargeter. Joyce Dover killed herself. I heard her say she couldn’t cope since her husband’s death, you heard her say it too. I’m sorry that the truth is so hard for you to accept, but I’m afraid you will just have to accept it.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Mrs Pargeter cheerfully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that if the proper authorities aren’t going to investigate Joyce’s murder, then I’ll find out who killed her myself.”

  “I think you’d be extremely foolish to pursue the matter, Mrs Pargeter. You could get yourself in a great deal of trouble if you – ” Ginnie’s manner suddenly changed as, her professional grin firmly in place, she turned to welcome Mr and Mrs Safari Suit, who had just walked into the room.

  “Well, here you are. I think you’ll find this villa is a lot more convenient for the shops and the beach.”

  “Oh yes.” Mr Safari Suit nudged his wife. “Won’t have so much trouble with your varicose veins here, will you, love?” He then favoured Ginnie with one of his witticisms. “Sorry I had to make a fuss, but at least my efforts haven’t been in… varicose vein, have they?”

  He laughed immoderately at this inept sally. Mrs Safari Suit also thought it pretty hilarious. Ginnie smiled weakly.

  “But tell me,” Mr Safari Suit went on, emboldened by his own brilliance, “how does this villa suddenly come to be free? Hasn’t been any trouble here, has there?”

  “Good heavens, no,” said the rep, her eyes daring Mrs Pargeter to disagree. “Just happened to be free, that’s all.”

  Mrs Pargeter didn’t contest it. No point in making Mr and Mrs Safari Suit feel uncomfortable. She had nothing against them – well, nothing if you excluded his jokes.

  It was interesting, though. Not only had Joyce’s murder been swept aside as a suicide; now Ginnie was even denying that the suicide had taken place.

  Another thing was interesting, too. Mrs Pargeter had no doubt in her mind that, at the moment when Ginnie was interrupted by the entrance of Mr and Mrs Safari Suit, the rep had been threatening her.

  ∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Package ∧

  Nineteen

  “Basically,” Truffler Mason’s despondent voice intoned from the other end of the phone, “I can’t find out anything about Chris Dover’s life before he came to England.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs Pargeter. She was standing in the reception area of the Hotel Nausica, at the only phone available to residents (or, quite possibly, the only phone in the hotel). There didn’t seem to be many people about, but she still felt exposed. Next time she talked to Truffler, she would do it from Larry’s. The sense of conspiracy around Agios Nikitas was strong, the feeling that everything anyone said or did was very quickly communicated along the local grapevine.

  “I mean,” Truffler continued, “obviously I haven’t had a chance yet to get proper investigations going in Uruguay, and maybe I’ll be able to unearth something through my contacts out there. But it does seem from all accounts that Chris Dover kept very quiet about his origins. In fact he seems to have worked hard on presenting himself as the perfect English gentleman. Uruguay was hardly ever mentioned.”

  “Perhaps that was just because nobody was interested,” suggested Mrs Pargeter.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know how insular the English are. So far as most of them are concerned, a foreigner’s a foreigner – doesn’t matter where he comes from. They just about recognise the difference between a Frenchman and a German, but when it comes to less well-known countries, so far as your average Englishman is concerned, they’re pretty much interchangeable. I bet most people you stopped in the street in England couldn’t even tell you where Uruguay is.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that possibly at first Chris Dover talked about his former life, but when it became clear no one was interested, he gave up and decided if you can’t beat them, join them. Perhaps presenting himself as English made things easier for business.”

  “You co
uld be right.”

  “Oh, by they way, you didn’t find out what his real name was, did you, Truffler?”

  “No records of him ever being called anything other than Chris Dover.”

  “Hm, doesn’t sound very Uruguayan, does it? Not very Hispanic. Must’ve been made up. Probably,” Mrs Pargeter went on, suddenly remembering how Larry Lambeth had arrived at his surname, “based on his port of entry into England.”

  “Could be. Anyway, he seems to have arrived in London in the late Fifties. Difficult to find out much about the early years, but he must’ve got involved in the export business at some level. First time there’s much about him is when he started up his own company in 1963.”

  “And was his business always legitimate?”

  “Well…” Truffler paused ponderously. “Certainly in recent years no problems. Pure as the driven snow. Reading between the lines, though, I’d have said his early dealings was a bit more dubious. Haven’t got anything definite yet, but hints I’ve heard from people in the business suggest Chris Dover may have started out as a bit of a villain.”

  “What, not violence? Not gang stuff?”

  “No, no. More your sort of white-collar crime. Export business, but it was what he was exporting that was interesting.”

  “What was he exporting?”

  “Arms, it seems.”

  “Oh?”

  “To Africa, mostly. Always some nice little war going on in Africa to keep up the demand, isn’t there? Anyway, from what I can gather, that’s what he was into in the early Sixties – exporting stuff whose paperwork might not bear too close an investigation.”

  “Gun-running.”

  “Always one to call a spade a spade, wasn’t you, Mrs Pargeter? So, anyway, presumably he made a pile from that, which provided the capital when he started his company in 1963. From then on, though, as I say, all very respectable.”

  “Yes, certainly Joyce always seemed the soul of respectability. One would never have imagined that her husband was involved in anything he shouldn’t be.”

  Mind you, thought Mrs Pargeter with a little inward smile, of course the same could be said of me.