Mrs Pargeter 02; Mrs, Presumed Dead

∨ Mrs, Presumed Dead ∧

Thirty-Nine

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 She saw that hand withdrawn, ready to plunge into the back of the armchair.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 naïve 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?”

“For the last time in his life, he had money. Oh, what a fool I was – I gave him a hundred pounds. And he wanted to spend it on cocaine, so he rang you, and – ” Mrs Pargeter’s thoughts accelerated. “Oh, my God, yes. I remember, when I got back from seeing him, Sue had just had to come back from work, so that you could go out. Some excuse…what was it? Oh yes, visa ran out, you had to go to the Norwegian Embassy. I don’t think you went anywhere near the Norwegian Embassy that day.”

“No? And where do you think I did go?” the girl asked coolly.

“I think you went to the Embankment and found Rod. I think maybe you waited till the evening – it would have been easier in the evening – and then you asked him to walk down towards the river to do your deal. And I think when you reached the parapet of the river, you pushed him over it.”

“It is possible,” Kirsten conceded. “You could never prove it.”

“Oh, I don’t need to prove it. This is only for my own satisfaction,” said Mrs Pargeter, again donning her mantle of bumbling naïvete. “Remember, I’m never going to breathe a word of this to anyone. Once I’ve given you the notebook, I forget all about the whole business. Right?”

“Right,” said Kirsten, with an unpleasant smile. She took another look at her watch. “Now, the notebook, please.”

Mrs Pargeter felt a little chill of fear. There was a finite amount of time she could spend pretending to look for a fictitious notebook, and she didn’t want to put Kirsten’s patience to too much of a test. She had a feeling the results might be rather unpleasant.

Play for a little more time, though, before she started the search. “Yes, just before I get the book, Kirsten, tell me, am I right?”

“Right?”

“Right about the two murders.”

The Norwegian girl jutted out her lower lip and wobbled her head contemplatively from side to side. “Near enough right,” she said eventually.

“Oh, good,” said Mrs Pargeter.

“And now, no more wasting time. Where is this notebook?”

“Um…”

“Come on, quickly. I have a plane to catch tonight.”

“Are you going back to Norway?”

“No. Not that it’s any of your business, but I go first to Paris. Then South America.”

“Oh?”

“I have many friends there. You see, you did not get all the details right. I did not just buy drugs casually at London clubs. I am part of a larger network.”

“Based in South America?”

“Yes. And since I think Europe is not too good for me for a little while, I go to South America. My friends will look after me.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Now, the notebook…”

Mrs Pargeter looked at her blankly.

“The notebook.” The swordstick was once again brandished. “You know, I think I would be prepared to risk a little torture if –”

“Oh, no, no. It’ll be all right, I’ll – ” Suddenly Mrs Pargeter was immobilised by a burst of coughing. It seemed to fill the room.

Which was just as well, because, as it had been intended to do, the coughing covered the sounds of Truffler Mason’s approach.

Indeed, Kirsten was only aware that he was in the house when suddenly her arms were pinioned from behind her chair. The swordstick fell, clattering on to the tiles in front of the fireplace.

The murderer struggled, but was held as effectively as by a straitjacket. A stream of Norwegian obscenities flooded from her mouth.

Mrs Pargeter rose from the sofa and patted her hair into place. “Well, I’m very glad to see you, Truffler,” she understated.