by Simon Brett
“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 proveneale.
♦
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!”
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Fifteen
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 ro
ute 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.
But Ricky Van Hoeg showed not a flicker of the unconventional. He had, she later discovered, started working for a property company’s house magazine, then moved across to Swordfish Communications as a sub-editor on Dentifrice and Floss Monthly. From there he’d been promoted to deputy editor of Morris Dancers’ Monthly, and recently moved to take over Inside Out.
He spoke about his job with pride but without humour. He showed his guests the mock-up for the next month’s cover. There was a glossy colour photograph of Wormwood Scrubs gates. Contents promised inside included: GATE FEVER: IS IT ALL IN THE MIND?, HOW TO ORGANIZE A COMING-OUT PARTY, AMATEUR DRAMATICS FOR A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE, MAKE YOUR PINUPS REALLY LAST – TRY SHRINK-WRAPPING, as well as regular features – NEWS OF THE SCREWS: WHICH ONES HAVE BEEN TRANSFERRED WHERE?, THE GOOD NICK GUIDE – WINSOME GREEN, plus of course our invaluable listings: WHO’S IN WHERE, HOW LONG, WHAT FOR, AND DID THEY DO IT?
“All going all right then, Ricky?” asked Truffler after they had shown proper appreciation for the mock-up.
“Excellent. Circulation on the up and up.”
“Well, stands to reason. When you’ve got a prison population that’s going up and up…”
Ricky Van Hoeg gave the detective a narrow look. He didn’t want his achievements underestimated. “Our circulation is going up at a faster rate than the prison population,” he said coldly.
Mrs Pargeter instantly defused any potential atmosphere between the two men. “Obviously means you’re doing a very good job, Ricky.”
“I like to think so. Anyway, what can I do for you, Mr Mason?”
“It’s a touch of the old quid pro quo,” Truffler replied. “You remember, I helped you out with some info on the Machete Murders Retrospective you done?”
“Yes, of course. And very useful it all turned out to be.”
“Good. Well, now I need a bit of gen on a couple of lags, and I thought you’d be the geezer to help out.”
“No problem. We have a variety of research resources here at Inside Out. If we have serious difficulty in finding out about people, we put out requests for information on the Internet. That’s proved very successful. But let’s start with the basic, shall we?” Ricky Van Hoeg turned to his computer and deftly punched at the keyboard. Rapidly changing images flickered across the screen. “Are the people in question actually inside at the moment?”
“No, no, both very much on the loose. That’s why we need to know about them.”
“What’re their names?”
“Well, what I’ve got’re kind of, like, nicknames…”
“We have people listed on the database with their noms de guerre as well as their real names. Some of their aliases run into the hundreds, but…” Ricky Van Hoeg continued with the smug pride of a bank manager unveiling a new savings account, “… we can run a search according to any parameters you care to specify and find them within seconds. So what’re the names?”
“Clickety Clark and Blunt,” said Truffler.
Ricky Van Hoeg immediately keyed in the information. The screen split down the middle. Two photographs appeared. They were not the same poses as those Truffler had produced, but their subjects were easily recognizable.
Below Clickety Clark’s picture was the record of an eighteen-month stay in Lewes Prison for forgery of a Buckingham Palace security pass a few years previously. “Ah,” said Mrs Pargeter fondly, “just after my husband passed on.”
Truffler nodded. “Yeah, a lot of them went off the rails round that time. Without Mr Pargeter’s good sense and guidance, some come horribly unstuck.”
Mrs Pargeter did not allow herself to get misty at the recollection. “But look at Blunt’s record! Now that is what I call ‘form’!”
It was indeed a very full criminal curriculum vitae. The wonder was, given the closeness of the sentences, how Blunt actually found the time to commit the crimes for which he was so regularly sent down. Not that his recent convictions were for major crimes. In fact, for someone with such an awesome reputation in the Grievous Bodily Harm department, they were little more than peccadilloes. Stealing cars, trashing restaurants, handling stolen videos, purloining credit cards – these were the currency of the petty criminal. The only assault on a human being Blunt had committed in the previous three years was whacking one barman in a pub, and even then the victim had only lost two teeth.
“Seems to have gone soft in his old age,” said Mrs Pargeter.
Truffler, who had had the same thought, nodded and said judiciously, “Well, that was probably his way of going off the rails when your old man died.”
That got a rather piercing look from the violet-blue eyes, so he moved quickly on. “This is great, Ricky.”
“Anything else you need? Only…” the editor took a none-too-discreet look at his expensive watch, “… I’ve got to see someone at the Home Office about getting Inside Out on to their regular distribution list for all staff. I think the deal’s in the bag, mind you, and that could be another very healthy boost to circulation.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” said Mrs Pargeter.
“No, that’s great, Ricky,” said Truffler. “Thanks for your help. If it’d be possible to have a printout of the info…?”
“No problem.” Ricky Van Hoeg pressed a key and, in seconds, Clickety Clark and Blunt’s details were printed out in colour. The photographer’s fitted on to one sheet; Blunt’s ran to seven.
In the lift, Mrs Pargeter asked Truffler what his next step in the investigation would be.
“Try and find out what’s really been going on inside the nicks.” He grinned mournfully. “Stan the Orang-Utan’s been inside for a while. He’s the kind of bloke who keeps his ear to the ground. Might have a word with his boy.”
Mrs Pargeter had never heard of Stan the Orang-Utan, but her discretion was far too finely tuned for her to ask any embarrassing questions, like how he had got his nickname. Instead, as they emerged from the lift into the foyer of Swordfish House, she observed to Truffler what a boring man she had found Ricky Van Hoeg to be. “I mean, I’m sure, back in the old days, people connected with crime had a bit of colour and glamour about them…”
“Ah, but he’s not connected with crime, you see, Mrs P. He’s a pukka, legit journalist, isn’t he?”
“Well, mind you, in the old days, pukka legit journalists had a bit of colour and glamour. Never mind…” A smile spread across her plump, comfortable features. “We’re going to have lunch with one of the few who still has.”
They hailed a cab to the Savoy Grill. And, as Ellie Fenchurch had promised, they all got thoroughly rat-arsed.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Sixteen
On the rare occasions that she did get thoroughly rat-arsed, there was nothing Mrs Pargeter liked b
etter than to work off her intoxication with a little lavish shopping. Some of the best purchases of her life had been made when mellow with alcohol, and she was very pleased with the haul she made that afternoon. She also found, as always, that an hour or so’s vigorous workout with the credit cards had the effect of clearing her head completely.
The limousine was parked outside Greene’s Hotel under the approving eye of a doorman who would instantly have moved on a vehicle containing anyone other than Mrs Pargeter. Gary, loaded down with Harrods carrier bags, followed his employer into the foyer.
“Hedgeclipper’s really had this place done lovely, hasn’t he?” the chauffeur observed, as they crossed the black and white marble floor. “Strikes me every time I come in here.”
“Oh yes, he always did have a good eye,” Mrs Pargeter agreed.
The object of their compliments, immaculately dressed in black jacket and pinstriped trousers, was standing behind the elegant antique desk which served as the Greene’s Hotel Reception. The only out-of-place element in his soigne image was once again the marmoset perched affectionately on his shoulder. Gary opened his mouth to make some comment on this, but was stopped by a slight shake of his employer’s head.
Hedgeclipper Clinton beamed at his most favoured guest. “What a lovely afternoon, Mrs Pargeter.”
“Indeed. And how’s Erasmus behaving himself?”
The hotel manager shook his head and tutted. “He’s been a little tinker this morning, I’m afraid. Smeared an orange all over my William and Mary walnut chair. Still…” he went on with an indulgent shrug, “not a lot one can do about it, is there?”
Gary’s instinctive answer to this too was prevented by a look from Mrs Pargeter. Instead, the chauffeur nodded amiably to his former colleague. “Just saying you done a lovely job here, Hedge – ” A look from the hotelier froze off the second half of the word. “Mr Clinton,” Gary corrected himself.
Mr Clinton was once again wreathed in smiles. “Thank you so much. I’m delighted you like it. And all well with you, Mrs Pargeter?” he asked solicitously.
