Mrs Pargeter 06; Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧

Thirty-Three

Inspector Wilkinson went into his office the next morning without enthusiasm. Attempts to interview Veronica Chastaigne had not met with success. She was still in hospital and the consultant in charge said she was far too frail to submit to any kind of questioning. When she had recovered, of course, there would be no problem. But the way the consultant said this implied slender hopes that she was ever going to recover.

So Wilkinson felt he was up against a brick wall. This sense had been exacerbated by a meeting the day before with his immediate superior, the ‘jumped-up, university-educated, pen-pushing desk-driver’, with whom the Inspector, like all good coppers, didn’t get on. His Superintendent reckoned that the arrest of Reginald Winthrop represented a result, and that therefore no further investigation was required into the series of art thefts. Wilkinson was off the case.

To rub salt in the wound, the Superintendent had also somehow found out the part that Sergeant Hughes had played in events at Dover, and was putting the young man’s name forward for some kind of commendation.

So Wilkinson approached work that day in a low mood. But for one tiny spark of a distant thought glowing in his mind, he would have been very depressed indeed. He knew for sure that the next couple of days would be depressing. Concentrating on the art thefts had spared him other, more tedious jobs, but now that he was off the case, his boss was going to ensure that he got the most tedious available.

That day he was down to give a lecture on Road Safety at an inner city primary school. The last officer who’d been landed with that number had come back having had his wallet stolen, his eye blacked by a stone that had been thrown at him, and with the left-hand side of his car sprayed fluorescent green.

But when Inspector Wilkinson actually looked at the printout of the daily roster, he could hardly believe his eyes. Could hardly believe his luck either. The Road Safety duty had been apportioned to one of the toughest and most successful inspectors in the unit, a man who was on record as saying, with considerable frequency, “School visits are for braindead wimps.”

While he, Craig Wilkinson, had been given instead one of the most attractive assignments for years.

It was a raid on a suspicious breaker’s yard, where stolen goods were thought to be hidden. And the yard was believed to belong to Rod D’Acosta, a South London villain on whom they’d been trying for years to get enough evidence to make a conviction stick.

This was terrific news for Wilkinson. The operation would involve taking a large squad of men, some of them armed. It would make him, as their leader, look impressive, while putting him at minimal personal risk. It would involve bulletproof vests, searchlights and lots of shouting through loudspeakers. It was the kind of rare job opportunity, the chance to play cops ‘n’ robbers, for which Inspector Wilkinson – and indeed most of his colleagues – had joined the Police Force.

He turned away from the printout, then had another, rather dampening thought. Was this wonderful assignment destined to be spoiled, like so much of what he’d done over the previous two weeks, by the presence of Sergeant Hughes?

But no. Wilkinson’s luck held. More than held, it was very good. The list told him that, instead of the odious Hughes, he’d been allocated the support of a new female detective sergeant, who’d been the subject of much ribald suggestion and erotic aspiration in the canteen.

Inspector Wilkinson preened his moustache, which wasn’t growing as quickly as he’d hoped it would. That didn’t worry him at that moment, though, because he was thinking of the female DS. She’d be really impressed when she saw him masterminding the raid on Rod D’Acosta’s yard. She couldn’t fail to look on him with respect after the operation was completed. Yes, he might be in with a chance there. Power, he knew, was a great aphrodisiac.

To complete his euphoria, Wilkinson saw that Sergeant Hughes had been allocated to one of the real short-straw duties. Policing teenyboppers at Heathrow. What was known round the station as a ‘not a dry seat in the house’ patrol.

Tee-hee. Serve the cocky little smart-arse bloody well right.

Wilkinson went to check the details of the D’Acosta operation with the detectives who’d been working on it. They seemed rather miffed that, after all the graft their regular inspector had put in setting the raid up, he was not scheduled to complete the job. Still, they couldn’t argue with the roster and, with varying degrees of bad grace, they gave Wilkinson the information he required.

It was perfect. Surveillance from four in the afternoon, then slam in hard at around eight when it was dark. Going through the stuff in the yard’d take an hour top-weight. There’d still be time for Inspector Wilkinson to go to the pub near the station afterwards to accept the plaudits of his inferiors.

To build himself up for the day ahead, he went down to the canteen to wallow in the grease of an All-Day Breakfast.

It was while he was sitting there over his congealing eggs that a pale shadow of recollection crossed Inspector Wilkinson’s sunny mood. He found himself thinking back, as he so often did, to the one big failure of his life. The biggest failure. The moment when he had been so close to success and when his plans had suddenly gone pear-shaped.

He had built everything up, prepared the whole operation in his customary painstaking way. He’d tested every stage of his plan for weaknesses and he’d felt ridiculously, headily confident that it was going to work. This was to be the moment when he, Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson, made his mark on the British Police Force.

He had been all set to arrest Mr Pargeter, and then bring in the shoals of smaller fish who travelled in the master criminal’s wake. The Inspector’s triumph seemed assured. His was an operation that would continue to be talked about in awestruck voices round the Met for years to come.

The memory of how it had all gone wrong could still bring a cold shiver to Wilkinson’s spine. Even he sometimes felt a bit of a fool about it.

He tried never to think about the incident. He’d certainly drive miles out of his way to avoid passing through the place where it had happened. And if he heard the town mentioned on the radio or television news, it still gave him an unpleasant little frisson.

Yes, it would be a long time before Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson forgot the name of Chelmsford.