Mrs, Presumed Dead (21 page)

CHAPTER 38

'That's all right, Mrs Pargeter,' said Truffler Mason, rueful as ever. 'You did right to call me. I'll be over within the hour. You're sure there's no danger of anyone coming earlier?'

'No, they'll be locked in that meeting for a long time yet. For the people of Smithy's Loam, even murder takes second place to a threat to property values.'

He let out a small, melancholy laugh. 'You know you shouldn't have done this, though, don't you?'

'Well . . .'

'I told you to watch the old heroics, didn't I?'

'Yes, I know, but— '

'I mean, if anything happened to you, Mrs Pargeter, I'd never be able to look myself in the face again. After all the things I promised your late husband, I'd feel terrible if—'

'Don't think about it, Truffler. Nothing
is
going to happen to me. All that's going to happen is that between us we're going to catch a murderer.'

'Yes.' There was a reflective pause from the other end of the line, and when Truffler spoke again, there was a new, unfamiliar quality in his voice. 'You know, Mrs Pargeter, I haven't felt like this since the last job I done with your husband.'

'Like what?'

'Sort of . . . excited. Mr Pargeter always had that ability of making things seem fun. And you know what, Mrs Pargeter – you got just the same thing going for you!'

Yes, there was no doubt about it. Truffler Mason sounded positively cheerful.

Mrs Pargeter felt very secure in the knowledge that her minder was on his way, but she still thought she ought to check out other means of protection.

The late Mr Pargeter, though the most pacific of men, had had no illusions about the regrettably violent climate of the modern world and it was for that reason that, at times, he had felt obliged to carry a gun. Though of course he never used it, he recognised its occasional usefulness as a deterrent to the uncharitable intentions of others. (The nature of his work did not always allow him to be as selective in his choice of business associates as he might have wished.)

This small handgun, along with the extensive network of lavish financial arrangements specified in his will, he had bequeathed to his beloved wife.

Mrs Pargeter, though even less likely ever to use it than her husband, appreciated the legacy. At times, like the present one, it gave her a warm comforting glow to know that, tucked beneath the exotic silks of her underwear drawer, lay that small amulet against the forces of evil.

So her confidence mounted as she reached through her expensive lingerie. With Truffler arriving in an hour, and with the gun in her handbag, she would have nothing to fear from anyone.

It wasn't there.

She checked and rechecked, scrabbling with growing feverishness through the slipperiness of the drawer's contents.

Still nothing.

She pulled the drawer out, turned it over and dumped its shining riches on to the bedroom floor.

There was no gun.

Mrs Pargeter did not panic. Panic she recognised to be time-wasting and inefficient, and it was a temptation to which she almost never succumbed.

But the situation was undeniably serious. Assuming that the gun had not been mislaid, its absence meant that it had been removed by someone. And that someone was most probably the murderer of Theresa Cotton.

So the murderer had a key to 'Acapulco'. Perhaps not such a difficult thing to obtain, considering the amount of mutual plant-watering that went on while the residents of Smithy's Loam took their holidays.

More seriously, the removal of the gun revealed Mrs Pargeter's adversary to be some steps ahead of her. Mrs Pargeter thought she had only alerted the murderer to her suspicions by her mention of the spurious notebook a few minutes earlier. But the absent gun told a different story.

The swordstick!

Suddenly she remembered it and scrabbled a chair into position against her cupboards. She opened the top one and reached in, her hand feeling along the uncluttered surface.

With a sickening access of understanding, she realised that she was not going to find the swordstick either.

Someone had been inside 'Acapulco' and made preparations. The house had been searched thoroughly for weapons.

The murderer was a long way ahead of her.

At that moment, she heard the back door open. She knew it had been locked. The intruder was using a key.

Drawn by the sound of soft footsteps below, and mirroring them with her own, Mrs Pargeter moved across the bedroom to the landing.

Standing back from the top of the stairs, she could see a little triangle of the hallway.

She held her breath as the figure of a woman crossed that triangle, moving silently from the kitchen to the sitting-room.

And Mrs Pargeter saw who had killed Theresa Cotton.

CHAPTER 39

There was nowhere to hide.

As if drawn by magnetism, Mrs Pargeter found herself walking down the stairs towards her adversary. At their foot she stopped and saw the murderer pause behind the tall outline of an armchair. Mrs Pargeter's favourite armchair.

It was then that she saw the naked blade of the swordstick in the murderer's hand. She saw that hand withdrawn, ready to plunge into the back of the armchair.

'Stop,' said Mrs Pargeter calmly, 'I'm not there. And I don't really want to have to have it re-upholstered.'

The murderer swung round to face her and, again drawing back the sword, advanced.

Mrs Pargeter stood her ground at the foot of the stairs and, with a confidence she didn't feel, said, 'You can kill me if you like. Obviously. I can't stop you. But all you'll achieve by that is stopping me from taking Theresa Cotton's notebook to the police in the morning. You won't have the notebook itself.'

The murderer had stopped her advance, and stood, listening.

Emboldened, Mrs Pargeter continued, 'And, without my help, you won't find it. If you kill me straight away, you could search the house all night and still not find that notebook.'

Little did the murderer know how true that was. There was a kind of satisfaction in the thought of the murderer turning the whole house upside down looking for something that didn't exist. But the satisfaction of the thought was considerably reduced when Mrs Pargeter reflected that it could only be realised after her own murder.

'The police, on the other hand,' Mrs Pargeter went on, 'are experts in searching for clues. And, if my body was found here – or even traces of it – they'd certainly subject this house to one of their most thorough searches. I don't think there's any doubt that they'd find the notebook. And, of course, it'd be a simple matter for them to have the shorthand deciphered. And then they'd know what it was that Theresa Cotton found out about you – the truth that she confronted you with when she came round to your house the evening she died.'

'Where is the notebook?' the murderer hissed, once again threatening with the swordstick.

Mrs Pargeter moved forward. 'Oh, don't worry, I'll tell you all about the notebook. In time. Now shall we go into the sitting-room and have a little talk . . . ?'

Open-mouthed, the murderer watched as Mrs Pargeter moved past her in a stately manner and went to sit on the sofa. Ever the gracious hostess, Mrs Pargeter waved to the big armchair. 'Please . . .'

With bad grace, the murderer sat down.

'I suppose you heard what I said about the notebook from behind the hatch . . . ?'

The murderer nodded.

'I have to confess, it never occurred to me that it might be you, Kirsten,' Mrs Pargeter apologised. 'You see, I was under the impression that only Sue was in the house the evening when Theresa called. That you were out. That's what Sue told me.'

'But Sue was—'

Mrs Pargeter raised a magisterial hand for silence. 'No, I've worked it out now. I should have realised before. Sue was lying. You were the one who was there and she was the one who was out. Out with her lover, of course, with Geoff. But she didn't want anyone to know about their affair, so when I asked if she'd been in when Theresa called, rather than raise questions about her absence, she said yes. She'd been in, you'd been out. And when the police started interrogating her, the lie became even firmer.'

'She thought she could keep the affair quiet,' said Kirsten, her vowels even more deformed than usual by contempt, 'from her husband.'

'Yes, but you knew about it, didn't you?'

The Norwegian girl shrugged. 'Maybe.'

'Oh, you did. And you used the knowledge to blackmail Sue.'

'How do you mean?'

'That's why you never did any work for her. You were useless as an
au pair
, never lifted a finger. But she didn't dare get rid of you until her divorce was sorted out, in case you spilled the beans about Geoff. And the arrangement suited you very well, because it allowed you time to get on with your main business.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

Mrs Pargeter didn't quite know what she was talking about herself, but as she went on, she found everything got clearer. Her mind was working well, seeing relationships between previously unregarded details, building up little chains of logic and joining them together into longer chains.

'I'm talking about drugs,' she hazarded.

The girl in the armchair stiffened, telling Mrs Pargeter that she had hit a bull's-eye.

'Nice little set-up you'd got here. Cocaine mostly, wasn't it? Easy enough to buy the stuff in the London clubs you were always going to. Easy enough to send it back to Norway in those many letters you kept sending back. And maybe a little local dealing for anyone who wanted it . . . Like Rod Cotton, for instance . . . Fitted his Yuppie image, didn't it, cocaine?'

'So what if you're right?' asked Kirsten sourly. 'I don't think the knowledge is going to do you much good.' She waved the swordstick menacingly. 'Come on, where is this notebook?'

'Oh, I'm not ready to tell you yet,' said Mrs Pargeter with a complacent smile.

Kirsten rose from her chair. 'Then maybe I'll have to make you tell me . . .'

'Torture? Hmm, it might take a long time. And of course you always might kill me by mistake. Or suppose I screamed . . . ? I have rather a loud scream, you know. Neighbours might notice.'

'I have to get that notebook, and I'll be getting it by whichever method it is needed," said Kirsten, sinisterly ungrammatical.

'I'll tell you the best way of getting it.'

'What's that?'

'It is for you to wait till I give it to you.'

'Don't be silly, old woman!'

'No, listen. I will give it to you, I promise. And I won't say any more about it . . .' Mrs Pargeter smiled ingenuously '
on the understanding
that you won't hurt me. OK? My side of the bargain is that I give you the notebook – your side of the bargain is that then you leave the house and I'm not hurt at all.'

'OK,' said Kirsten. 'That's a deal.'

What kind of naefve old idiot does she think I am, Mrs Pargeter wondered. If her past behaviour's anything to go by, only a few seconds would elapse between my handing over the notebook (assuming, of course, it existed) and her running me through with the swordstick.

'All right. Where is the notebook?' Kirsten went on.

'I'll tell you. But in a minute. I just want to check out first if I'm right about how you killed Theresa Cotton.'

Kirsten shrugged and looked at her watch. 'Five minutes, then you give me the book. Or . . .' She waved the swordstick meaningfully.

Yes, thought Mrs Pargeter, this girl really must have written me off as stupid, if she thinks I think she'll let me survive once I've spelled out the details of her crime. Still, it's all helping in my current game of playing for time.

'Right, this is the way I see it, Kirsten. You supplied cocaine to Rod, probably while he still had a job, and then certainly during that spell after he lost his job. You used to come over to the house here.'

Suddenly she saw how she had misinterpreted Carole Temple's references to someone younger coming to 'Acapulco' while Rod was there, someone with two children to look after. She had assumed that had meant Vivvi, but in fact it had been Kirsten. And their dealings had not been in sex, but in drugs.

'So?' said Kirsten. She was bored and looked at her watch.

'When Theresa came to the house and said she knew about your cocaine-dealing, you thought she was about to shop you to the police. Which was why you decided you had to kill her.

'Easy enough to do. You could go out of the back of 'Perigord' and round by the path to the garden gate of this house. Sue had been given a key when she came in to water the plants. Maybe you used that, maybe you'd had a copy made . . . anyway, that was how you got in then – and how you got in tonight, come to that. When you got Rod's tie I don't know, but it wouldn't have been difficult.

'So you came in, strangled Theresa – she gave no resistance because you caught her by surprise . . . she probably even obligingly died on the polythene sheet she was using for packing her belongings. Then you sealed up her body in the convenient polythene, put it in the freezer and locked it.

'And of course you found a nice little bonus here, didn't you? Two thousand pounds, very handy. Have a nice few days shopping on that.

'Hmm . . .' Mrs Pargeter smiled grimly. 'It was using the freezer that should have made me realise it was you.'

'What you mean?' asked Kirsten, with her first flicker of interest.

'Well, hiding the body that way was risky. It would have been discovered at some time – after the six months of prepaid storage, if not before. So the person who killed Theresa had to be someone prepared for that risk, someone who knew that within six months – in your case, less, two months – they'd be out of the country.

'Anyway, there's another reason I should have worked out it was you.'

'What?'

'The murderer also had to be someone who knew Rod's real situation, who knew he was out of a job. And I think he kept in touch with you during the six months after he left here.'

'Why should he do that?' the girl asked languidly.

'For the same reason he'd made contact with you in the first place. Cocaine. I think, whenever he had some money during that dreadful decline, he would get in touch with you to buy more of the stuff.'

'Maybe,' Kirsten acknowledged.

Another hideous piece of the jigsaw fell into place. 'And I think that's why he died,' said Mrs Pargeter softly.

'What do you mean?'