Mrs Pargeter 06; Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧

Thirty-Five

There’s only so much you can do at Heathrow Airport, as Sergeant Hughes was finding out, to his considerable annoyance. The flight on which pop sensation Boymeetzgirl were arriving from their tour of Poland had been delayed by two hours, and the Sergeant was bored stiff.

Also it looked as if the whole policing operation was going to be entirely unnecessary. Boymeetzgirl were evidently not quite as big a pop sensation as their record company’s publicity department had puffed them up to be. The promised hordes of uncontrollable teenyboppers which prompted the police presence had not materialized. Maybe a dozen smallish girls with braces on their teeth, headphones on their ears and incipient puberty on the other parts of their bodies, clustered round the Arrivals gate, bearing hand-scrawled Boymeetzgirl banners. Rioting and public affray did not look to be on the cards.

Sergeant Hughes felt very frustrated. Like Inspector Wilkinson, he had been told that, following the arrest of Reg Winthrop, the arts theft investigation was at an end. It had progressed as far as it could. Hughes didn’t believe this. To his mind they’d just lifted up a corner of the carpet on that one, and considerable riches lay yet to be discovered. They’d hardly started.

Hughes was also frustrated by the knowledge that Inspector Wilkinson had been scheduled for a much more appealing assignment. The raid on Rod D’Acosta’s breaker’s yard sounded real fun. It would undoubtedly involve bullet-proof vests, searchlights and lots of shouting through loudspeakers. It was exactly the sort of shooty-bang opportunity for which Sergeant Hercule Hughes had joined the Police Force.

Why a juicy job of that sort should go to a useless old dinosaur like Wilkinson, Hughes could not begin to imagine. It was the sort of assignment that should go to a young Turk, someone with a bit of style, someone with charisma. To him, in fact.

Yes, he wasn’t going to be Sergeant Hughes for long. Once he presented the Superintendent with the completed dossier he’d been building up on the laptop in his flat, fast-track promotion would be a certainty.

Hughes’d had a cup of coffee, he’d read all the newspaper headlines in the bookshop, he’d decided he didn’t want to buy any ties, smoked salmon or inflatable travel cushions, and his boredom was getting deeper by the minute. He looked at his watch. Still an hour and a half before the rescheduled flight from Warsaw was due to arrive. That was assuming there wasn’t another delay.

For something to do, he got out his mobile phone and dialled his home number. Check the answering machine, see if there were any messages. He wasn’t optimistic. There was no way the dumped long-standing girlfriend in Sheffield was going to ring him, and he had yet to develop much of a social life in London. (He did have plans in this direction, though. Once he’d got his career established, then he’d sort out his sex life. In his view, London’s lucky women didn’t know what was about to hit them.) But his current lack of a social life was another reason why he liked working on his days off. It was something to do.

To his surprise, the machine indicated there was a message for him. He played it back, casual interest quickly giving way to mounting excitement.

It was an educated voice, which spoke with little intonation. “Hello, Sergeant Hughes. This is another message from Posey Narker, who tipped you off about the Dover smuggling attempt. Congratulations on following up on that. I must say, after years of giving information to Inspector Wilkinson, it’s a relief to be dealing with someone who seems to have a bit of intelligence.

“I have more information for you about the Pargeter set-up. Mr Pargeter, as I’m sure you know, is dead, but some of his old accomplices are banding up again to perpetrate a major art theft. This morning they will be hijacking a lorry full of stolen paintings from a breaker’s yard owned by a villain called Rod D’Acosta. It is situated at…”

Sergeant Hughes continued listening to the address as he broke into a run towards the car park. Never mind about Boymeetzgirl. Their frenzied fans could tear the whole airport apart so far as he was concerned. Hercule Hughes had bigger fish to fry.