Mrs Pargeter 06; Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour

∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour ∧

Seven

The flat in which Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson spent as little time as possible was only one step up from a bedsitter, and demonstrated as many little personal touches as the average policeman’s office. Indeed, the flat’s sitting room was virtually identical to the office where the Inspector worked at the station. It had the same cream walls and 1950^s metal window frames. The curtains were institutional green and, on the rare occasions they were pulled across, gave an uneven striped effect from years of bunched bleaching by the sun. Furniture was minimal and functional – chairs with scuffed light wood arms and prolapsed seats in green mock leather, a table whose Formica top was scarred and pitted with old cigarette burns. Though the kitchen was rarely used for cooking, just as a depository for the foil and polystyrene boxes of takeaways, it still contrived to be extremely grimy. When he walked in there the Inspector’s soles made a slight sucking sound against the sticky linoleum.

And the atmosphere of the flat was heavy with the smell of long-dead cigarettes.

Still, Craig Wilkinson had years before ceased to be aware of his surroundings, and it was a long time since anyone else had been there to notice them. Nowadays he had the same attitude to sex as he did to promotion. Since all attempts were doomed to failure, it was hardly worth filling in the metaphorical application forms. What was the point of going through the elaborate – and expensive – rigmarole of chatting up, buying drinks for, buying meals for, and luring back home, someone with whom it was never going to work out from the start? Wilkinson found that, as he progressed through his fifties, his libido had shrunk till it was like some residual nub of an organ left behind by the evolutionary process, a vermiform appendix whose function wasn’t quite clear. The Inspector did sometimes still have romantic thoughts, but he very rarely had erotic ones.

The predominant thoughts he had when he was in the flat tended to be gloomy ones, which was why he spent the minimum amount of time possible there. Sitting alone, puffing on another cigarette, he would become obsessed by old fiascos and frustrations, by the failures in both his private and professional lives. Because, in spite of what he had hinted at to Sergeant Hughes, Inspector Wilkinson had never really ‘made his mark’ in the Police Force. Nor, it has to be said, had he ‘made his mark’ significantly at an emotional level. The attitude of his former wife to him was one of undiluted contempt and, so far as he could tell, none of his other women remembered him as anything other than a mildly distasteful detour from the main ongoing journey of their lives.

But, in spite of all this, Craig Wilkinson was not a pessimist. Gloomy and grumpy he might be, but it never occurred to him for a moment that his aspirations were at an end, that he was destined never to ‘make his mark’. Oh no, in his heart of hearts, he knew it would still happen. He’d left it late perhaps, but he, Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson, was still going to be remembered as a remarkable detective.

He had long since recognized that his basic problem was one of identity. The worlds of television cop shows, which he watched avidly, and crime fiction, which he read avidly, were full of truly individual policemen, quirky, gifted, eccentric, bolshie, hard-drinking, unlikely, but, above all, memorable. There were even one or two such men and women – though obviously many less – in the world of the real Police Force. And Inspector Wilkinson longed passionately to join their number.

The trouble was that police work remained an incredibly painstaking and repetitive business. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, as boring as hell. And this quality was one which the Inspector’s character, in spite of any wishes he might have for himself, reflected all too accurately.

At times he’d tried to make himself more interesting by grafting characteristics on to his personality. There had been experiments with alcohol. Booze, after all, was the natural accompaniment to the long lonely sessions of self-recrimination in his flat. He should be one of those cops who was never without a bottle at the bedside, a hip flask in the raincoat pocket. Every morning he should wake up with a brain-crushing hangover, but still somehow manage the day’s work. He should get into fights and smash up furniture in bars. It would be entirely appropriate – indeed the perfect solution to his lack of identity – for Craig Wilkinson to be a cop with a drink problem.

The trouble was, he didn’t like the taste of alcohol that much. He wasn’t teetotal, but found that after a couple of drinks he’d had enough and didn’t want any more. What he really enjoyed was sitting down with a nice cup of tea, a cigarette, and a packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits.

He also disliked the way alcohol affected his stomach. Even more, he disliked the way it affected his judgement. Craig Wilkinson hated to feel that he was losing control at any level.

So, whatever his route to becoming a memorable cop was, it wouldn’t be as a boozer.

Still, there are other ways, he thought to himself the evening after he’d met the woman in the limousine, other ways I can ‘make my mark’. I’m not finished yet, by any manner of means.

He sat in his institutional green armchair, lighted cigarette in hand, with a pot of tea and an open packet of chocolate bourbon biscuits, and for once his mind wasn’t flooded with gloom. The old thoughts of past failures were there, sure enough, but they didn’t swamp him. Now he had a glimmer of hope. Now there was something he could achieve, something so magnificent that it would pay off all debts, eclipse all memories of the operations that had not worked out for him.

Yes, even of the big one, the one whose recollection never failed to bring him a new pang of disappointment. He had been so close then, so very close. As usual, he had taken the ‘softly, softly catchee monkey’ approach. He had started with a tip-off from an informer, an anonymous voice at the end of a telephone line who called himself ‘Posey Narker’. That initial contact had been expensive, but worth every penny.

And from that first detail Wilkinson had built up a huge database of information. He had resisted the temptation to rush, to pick up minor villains as soon as he had enough evidence to convict them. He had waited, patiently watching link join to link, seeing where the operations of one villain overlapped with those of another, until he had almost mapped out the complete network.

And he had watched, with mounting excitement, the direction in which these lines of connection pointed. He had seen how they were all converging, all coming together till they met in one man, the spider at the centre of the huge complex web.

And Wilkinson had identified that man, built up a dossier of evidence against him. He’d been within an ace of catching the man, of putting him under arrest and sending out wider and wider ripples of lesser arrests until the whole organization would have been under lock and key.

Would have been. Would have been… if something hadn’t gone wrong.

But something had gone wrong. And it had left Inspector Wilkinson seething with frustration for the rest of his life.

Until now. Now he had a glimmer of a hope of a possibility of staging something that would settle the old scores for good. Once this was sorted, no one would ever forget the name of Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson.

He poured himself some more tea, puffed on his cigarette, and picked up a fresh chocolate bourbon biscuit. Once this was sorted, he reflected, everything he did would become trendsetting. The role model for all future detectives would be of a tough, hardbitten tea-drinker who liked chocolate bourbon biscuits.

As he thought this heart-warming thought, Craig Wilkinson mouthed silently, confidently to himself, the name of his old adversary. “Oh yes, I think I’m about to erase all memories of the failure I had in nailing you down… Mr Pargeter.”