Mrs. Pargeter's Point of Honour (19 page)

The van which Mrs Pargeter had last seen in the body shop painted grey was now painted blue. She sat in the passenger seat, with Hamish Ramon Henriques at the wheel beside her. They were parked in the network of streets that Mrs Pargeter and Truffler had selected as ideal for their operation. HRH's fingers drummed lightly on the steering wheel; Mrs Pargeter hummed softly. Both were tense, but tense with excitement rather than anxiety.

At the sound of a fast-approaching vehicle, HRH came to life. ‘Here we go,' he murmured.

As he and Mrs Pargeter got out of their van, the red Transit screeched to a halt behind them, then reversed up, so that the backs of the two vehicles faced each other, some five metres apart. At the moment Mrs Pargeter and HRH opened the back doors of their van, the Transit's swung wide to reveal Truffler, Hedgeclipper Clinton and Kevin the doorman. As Gary appeared from the driver's door, Truffler and Kevin jumped down into the space between the two vans. Truffler turned to receive the first painting from Hedgeclipper, passed it to Kevin, who passed it to Gary, who handed it up to HRH, who in turn stowed it in the back of the blue van.

Mrs Pargeter looked on with quiet pride, as the complete transfer of goods was achieved within ninety seconds. The last to be safely packed away was a rather soulful Raphael Madonna.

At the moment Hamish Ramon Henriques slotted the painting into place, Mrs Pargeter turned towards the sound of approaching cars. ‘Just in time. Close both sets of doors and into the blue van!'

She and Gary bundled into the front seats, the rest climbed into the back, pulling the doors shut behind them.

Seconds later, two cars full of heavies screamed up. The heavy called Ray drove one. The other, with Rod D'Acosta in the passenger seat, was driven by the heavy called Phil. (The heavy called Sid was still blissfully unconscious at the foot of the wall he'd run into.) The cars passed the blue van and homed in on the red Transit. One slid into the space across which the paintings had been passed, and came to rest with its bumper touching the van's back doors; the other backed up till it was parked in contact with the van's front grille. There was no way the Transit could get out of that pincer movement.

Nonchalantly, confident their quarry was trapped, Rod D'Acosta and his two heavies got out of their vehicles. Carrying an array of baseball bats and pickaxe handles, they moved menacingly forward.

At the very second they looked into the cab of the Transit and realized it was empty, the engine of the other van was detonated into action. The chief villain and his two henchmen turned in dismay to watch its blue back doors diminishing away down the street.

‘Get back in,' Rod D'Acosta bawled in fury, ‘and turn the bloody cars round!'

The blue van and its two pursuing cars hurtled through the streets of South London, dropping the jaws of passers-by and threatening the heart conditions of other road-users. In spite of the van's souped-up engine, the superior power of the cars was beginning to tell. They were gaining on their quarry.

In the van's passenger seat Mrs Pargeter, who had been tracing their route across the map on her lap, shouted suddenly, ‘This is it. Swing a left, Gary.'

The blue van did as instructed, the suddenness of the swing forcing its whole weight momentarily on to two wheels. But it righted itself and roared off down the side road.

The pursuing cars slowed, and the one behind eased up alongside its leader. Windows were wound down. Rod D'Acosta grinned wolfishly across the intervening space to the heavy called Ray. ‘Got them now,' he announced. ‘This road's just a loop. You head them off the other end.'

‘Right,' said the heavy called Ray, and fired his car forward to block off the junction ahead. Rod D'Acosta nodded to the heavy called Phil, who turned his car down the side road and moved sedately ahead. There was no hurry now. The blue van was trapped as securely as the red one had been. They could move slowly, relishing the thought of the inevitable violence which lay ahead.

Halfway along the loop road was a service station. The blue van hurtled across its forecourt, straight towards the car wash at the back. It stopped by the control slot.

‘You got a token?' asked Gary, as he wound his window down.

‘Course I have,' replied Mrs Pargeter, almost offended that he thought the question necessary. ‘Full Wash with Wheel Scrub.'

She handed it across. Gary pushed the token into the slot and, winding his window up, edged forward, guided by rails, into the car wash. The overhead sprays of water started, and moved slowly back over the blue van's body.

As they did so, something remarkable happened. The blue paint stippled, paled and trickled away down the van's sides into the car-wash gutters, revealing gleaming white gloss beneath.

By the time the wheel scrub, the final feature of the cleaning cycle, was finished, not a trace of blue remained anywhere on the gleaming body. Had there been anyone present to witness the colour transformation, as Gary inched the van primly out of the car wash, they would also have noticed that he and Mrs Pargeter were now wearing navy-blue jackets and caps.

And at the moment the conjectural observer noticed the word ‘Ambulance' printed on the front of the cab, they would have seen a slot in the roof open, and an array of blue flashing lights rise up to fill it. Simultaneously, as the vehicle sped forward on to the road, they would have heard an emergency siren start.

The heavy called Ray had his car parked directly across the outlet of the loop road to the main thoroughfare. And he wasn't going to let anything out.

Except of course for an ambulance. You never knew with an ambulance. The geezer in the back whose life was at risk could be a cop, true. But, on the other hand, it could be one of your own. Better to be safe than sorry.

So, at the sound of the siren and the sight of the flashing blue lights, the heavy called Ray edged his car out of the way. Once the ambulance had passed, he moved back to block the roadway once again.

Then he sat and waited.

He waited a long time. All the time until a familiar car came slowly out of the loop road. Behind its windscreen the heavy called Ray could see a familiar face. It belonged to Rod D'Acosta, and it was suffused with a familiar expression of fury.

‘It's gone!' Sergeant Hughes announced dramatically, as their car drew up outside the open metal gates.

‘Now just a minute, just a minute. Don't let's jump to conclusions. We don't know what we're looking for yet.' Inspector Wilkinson didn't like being rushed in this manner. The raid on Rod D'Acosta's yard was his assignment and he had planned to start on it at four o'clock in the afternoon. He had not responded well to Hughes's melodramatic intervention and insistence on moving the whole schedule forward.

‘We do know what we're looking for. It's a red Transit van, and it's not here.' Then, as an almost condescending afterthought, the Sergeant added, ‘Sir.'

‘Where did you say you got this information from?'

‘The source called Posey Narker who put me on to the Dover thing.' Hughes reached forward to the car phone. ‘I've got the van's registration. I'll put out a general alert. We'll track it down.'

Wilkinson snatched the receiver from his hand and started punching in a number. ‘
I
'll put out a general alert, thank you very much. And
I
'll track it down.' He got through. ‘General alert for a red Transit in the South London area.' He turned testily to the Sergeant. ‘What's the registration, Hughes?'

While the Inspector gave details into the phone, Sergeant Hughes became aware of a large man behaving strangely on the other side of the road. He was weaving around, as if in a daze, with an expression of deep puzzlement on his bruised face.

Hughes got out of the car, and went across to the man. ‘Are you all right?'

The eyes of the heavy called Sid took a moment or two to focus on the young man in front of him. ‘'Ere. Have you got my fifty quid?' he asked in a slurred voice.

‘No, I haven't. What happened to you?'

‘Well, I ran into this wall, didn't I?'

‘Ah. Why?'

‘To get the fifty quid.'

‘Oh.'

‘Are you sure you haven't got it?'

‘Absolutely certain.'

‘Oh.'

The big man looked almost pitifully disappointed. Sergeant Hughes got out his notebook. ‘Can I just take a few details about you? What's your name?'

‘Sid,' the man replied uncertainly. ‘I think.'

‘And what do you do?'

His fuddled state removed the normal caution with which he would have replied to such a question. ‘I work for Rod D'Acosta. Threatening and GBH, mostly. Occasionally a bit of petty theft.'

‘Right,' said Sergeant Hughes, wishing that all arrests were as easy as this one promised to be. ‘I think you'd better come along with me.'

The two cars were parked on the service station forecourt. The knot of three men stood with heads bowed. They could have been attending a funeral, but it wasn't a grave they were looking down at, just the traces of blue pigment in the gutters of a car wash.

Rod D'Acosta shook his head ruefully.

‘It was the ambulance . . .?' asked the heavy called Ray.

But the question was a formality. He knew the answer.

‘Yes, you bloody fool, it was the ambulance!' said the heavy called Phil. ‘The ambulance that you so public-spiritedly allowed to drive straight past you!'

‘It wasn't my bleedin' fault. I wasn't to know that—'

‘Ssh . . .' Rod D'Acosta was too distracted to join in their bickering, too distracted even to give a personal carpeting to the heavy called Ray. He looked down at the blue-stained gutter and shook his head once again. ‘You know, I haven't heard of this stroke being pulled since . . .'

The heavy called Phil breathed the word, ‘Chelmsford . . .?'

‘Yes,' Rod D'Acosta confirmed.

‘Oh, my good Gawd!' said the heavy called Ray on a note of panic. ‘Mr Pargeter hasn't come back to life, has he?'

It didn't take Inspector Wilkinson and Sergeant Hughes long to find the abandoned red Transit. And it didn't take them long to establish that the van was empty.

‘What do you reckon they've done?' Hughes asked the befuddled man in the back of their car.

‘Dunno,' said the heavy called Sid. ‘Probably transferred the loot to another van. Or one of their cars, possibly.'

‘Could you give us the registration numbers?'

The heavy called Sid did as requested. Sergeant Hughes profferred the car phone politely to his boss. ‘Would you like to put out a general alert, sir?'

With bad grace, Wilkinson took the phone and keyed in the number.

While his boss gave instructions to base, Hughes turned again to the man in the back. ‘What was the loot in the Transit, as a matter of interest?'

‘Paintings. Old paintings, you know. Stuff we nicked from an old house called Chastaigne Varleigh.'

This was terrific. It seemed there were no beans the bewildered man was not prepared to spill. Hughes gleefully envisaged another crime dossier, to match the one he was building up on the late Mr Pargeter. Confident that imminent promotion was a certainty, he pressed home his advantage. ‘Who actually nicked the stuff?'

‘Me and Rod D'Acosta.'

‘Can you give me details of any other jobs you've done with him?'

‘Oh
yes
,' the heavy called Sid replied, and proceeded to rattle off a long catalogue, all of which Sergeant Hughes transcribed into his notebook.

The ambulance was now bowling cheerfully through the open Surrey countryside. Its siren and lights had been switched off, and Mrs Pargeter was leading her male voice choir in singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful'.

They'd just got to

when she noticed a crudely painted roadside sign: ‘CAR BOOT SALE – ONE MILE'.

‘Nearly there,' cried Mrs Pargeter. ‘Ooh, I must just make a phone call.' She reached for the phone and dialled the number that Inspector Wilkinson had given her. She didn't identify herself, but gave him a few terse words of information.

She ended the call, beamed cheerily and picked up again with the hymn.

In his car as it sped through the lanes of Surrey the heavy called Phil seemed to have caught the anxiety of the heavy called Ray from the car behind. ‘You don't think Mr Pargeter really is back alive again, do you, Rod?'

‘Of course he bloody isn't! He died years back. I sent a couple of my men to his funeral to make sure he was good and buried.'

‘But you don't know what was in the coffin, do you?'

‘For Christ's sake! Mr Pargeter is dead! Dead, dead, dead! No one will ever see him in the flesh again – all right?'

‘All right,' the heavy called Phil conceded grudgingly. Then, after a silence, he asked, ‘Rod . . . you don't believe in ghosts, do you?'

‘Of course I don't bloody believe in bloody ghosts! Now will you drive this bloody car a bit bloody faster!'

The car boot sale was being held in a grassy field which abutted ploughed land beyond. Either side of a wide aisle a large number of cars was parked facing outward. A tatty mixture of goods were displayed on picnic tables in front of their open boots and hatchbacks. Large numbers of potential purchasers ambled up and down the aisle, convinced they were going to find bargains.

As the ambulance turned off the road into the field, Mrs Pargeter suffered an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt. ‘I hope Vanishing Vernon's done his stuff,' she murmured to Gary.