Mrs. Pargeter's Point of Honour Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Mrs. Pargeter Mystery Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Fourty

  Chapter Fourty-One

  Chapter Fourty-Two

  Chapter Fourty-Three

  Chapter Fourty-Four

  Chapter Fourty-Five

  Chapter Fourty-Six

  Chapter Fourty-Seven

  Chapter Fourty-Eight

  The Mrs. Pargeter Mystery Series

  A NICE CLASS OF CORPSE

  MRS., PRESUMED DEAD

  MRS. PARGETER’S PACKAGE

  MRS. PARGETER’S POUND OF FLESH

  MRS. PARGETER’S PLOT

  MRS. PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR

  MRS., PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR

  A Mrs. Pargeter Mystery

  Simon Brett

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This title first published in Great Britain in 1998 by Macmillan London Ltd

  eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Select an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 1998 Simon Brett.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0022-8 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Corinne

  Chapter One

  Gary the chauffeur whistled, as the spiked gates opened automatically. ‘Bennie Logan done all right for himself, didn’t he, Mrs Pargeter?’

  ‘Yes,’ the plump, white-haired lady in the back of the limousine agreed. ‘Pity he didn’t live longer to enjoy it.’

  What Bennie Logan didn’t live longer to enjoy was the Elizabethan manor house up whose drive they were proceeding at an appropriately decorous pace. The exceptionally warm September afternoon showed the building at its best. Chastaigne Varleigh was a monument to elegance in discreetly mellowed red brick, punctuated here and there by fine leaded windows. It had been sympathetically restored to its earlier magnificence, and the surrounding grounds showed the same punctilious attention to cosmetic detail. No mole would have dared to break through the even green of the lawns, no weed would have had the effrontery to poke up through the valeted gravel that led to the front door of Chastaigne Varleigh.

  Mrs Pargeter’s pull on the chain of the doorbell was answered by Veronica Chastaigne. What the house’s owner saw on her doorstep was a well-upholstered woman in a bright silk print dress. The visitor had beautifully cut white hair, and her body tapered down to surprisingly elegant ankles and surprisingly high-heeled shoes. There was about the woman an aura of comfort and ease. Though this was their first encounter, Veronica Chastaigne felt as if they had met before, and as if here was someone in whom she would have no difficulty in confiding anything.

  The house’s interior reflected the same care and discreet opulence as its exterior. The sitting room into which Veronica Chastaigne ushered her guest was oak-panelled, but prevented from being gloomy by the bright prints which upholstered its sofas and armchairs. Sunlight, beaming through the tall leaded windows, enriched their glow. The room had nothing to prove; it manifested the casual ease of the genuine aristocrat, to whom such surroundings were nothing unusual.

  And Veronica Chastaigne looked as if she had lived in them from birth. Though now nearly eighty, she still had a majesty in her gaunt features, an ancestral hauteur in the long bony fingers that handled the silver and fine china of the coffee tray. But she quickly disabused her guest of the notion that she had always lived in the house.

  ‘Oh, no,’ her effortlessly patrician vowels pronounced. ‘Bennie changed our surname to Chastaigne when we bought the place.’

  Mrs Pargeter looked appropriately surprised. ‘I’d assumed Chastaigne Varleigh had been in your family for generations.’

  The older woman chuckled. ‘I’m afraid nothing stayed in my family for very long – estates, paintings, jewellery – it all had to be sold off eventually. We were the original titled spendthrifts. Bennie was the one who accumulated things.’

  She then showed Mrs Pargeter some of the ‘things’ that her late husband had ‘accumulated’. They were hung in a panelled Long Gallery which ran the length of the third floor of the house, and some of them were very old ‘things’ indeed. Old Masters, in fact. Though Mrs Pargeter had no formal training in art, she could recognize the translucence of a Giotto, the russet hues of a Rembrandt, the softened shadows of a Leonardo. And, coming more up to date, she had no difficulty identifying the haziness of Turner, the geometry of Mondrian, the tortured whorls of Van Gogh. (In artistic appreciation, she had always followed the precept of the late Mr Pargeter: ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what it’s worth.’)

  ‘They’re quite magnificent,’ she breathed to her hostess in awestruck tones.

  ‘Yes, not bad, are they?’ Veronica agreed briskly.

  Then came the innocent enquiry, ‘Do you open the gallery to the public, Mrs Chastaigne?’

  The elderly aristocrat got as near to blushing as her upbringing would allow. ‘No, I don’t think that would be quite the thing.’ In response to an interrogative stare, she continued, ‘You see, my dear, all of these paintings are . . . in the terminology of the criminal fraternity . . . hot.’

  Mrs Pargeter nodded comfortably. ‘Oh. I see.’

  It was after six o’clock when they returned to the sitting room. ‘Certainly time for sherry,’ Veronica Chastaigne announced in a tone which admitted no possibility of disagreement.

  Not that Mrs Pargeter would have disagreed, anyway. She was of the belief that there were qu
ite enough unpleasant things in life, and that it was therefore the duty of the individual to indulge in the pleasant ones at every opportunity. She raised her crystal glass of fine Amontillado to catch the rays of the September evening sun.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, waiting patiently for the information which she knew must come. Veronica Chastaigne had invited her to Chastaigne Varleigh for a purpose. Soon she would discover what that purpose was.

  But the old lady was in nostalgic mood, caught in bitter-sweet reminiscence of her late husband. ‘No woman could have asked for a more considerate companion than Bennie. Or more loving. The moment he first burst on to my horizon when I was twenty-one years old, I was totally bowled over. I’d never met anyone like him.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mrs Pargeter knew to a nicety how minimal the prompts to confidence needed to be.

  Veronica chuckled. ‘Could have come from another planet. You see, up to that point my social life had all been the “season” and hunt balls. I’d been surrounded by chinless wonders. People of “our own sort”. The “right class of person”.’

  ‘So your parents didn’t approve of Bennie?’

  ‘Hardly. They were absolutely appalled. Mind you, I was far better off with him than I would have been with any of the titled peabrains they were offering. And the day we were married, Bennie promised that he would keep me in the lifestyle to which I was accustomed.’

  ‘Hence Chastaigne Varleigh?’

  ‘Yes. And, er, the pictures.’ The old lady gave a sweet and innocent smile. ‘I never thought it proper to enquire into the sources of my husband’s wealth.’

  ‘Very wise.’ Mrs Pargeter had had a similar arrangement with the late Mr Pargeter.

  ‘Shortly before Bennie died . . .’ Veronica Chastaigne spoke more slowly as she approached the real purpose of their encounter, ‘he assured me that, if ever I needed any assistance . . . assistance, that is, in matters where an approach to the police would not have been the appropriate course of action . . .’

  Mrs Pargeter nodded. She knew exactly what the older woman meant.

  ‘. . . I should contact his “good mate”, Mr Pargeter.’ She focused faded blue eyes on her guest. ‘I was therefore not a little surprised when my summons was answered by you rather than by your husband.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that Mr Pargeter is also . . . no longer with us.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Dead,’ Mrs Pargeter amplified readily.

  ‘I understood the first time.’ Veronica Chastaigne’s face became thoughtful, and even a little disappointed. ‘Mmm. So perhaps I will have to look elsewhere for assistance . . .’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Mrs Pargeter hastened to reassure her. ‘I regard it as a point of honour to discharge all of my husband’s unfinished business.’

  This news brought a sparkle back to the old lady’s eye. Her guest leant enthusiastically forward in her armchair. ‘So tell me – what is it needs doing?’

  There was only a moment’s hesitation before Veronica Chastaigne also leant forward and began to share the problem that had caused her to summon Mrs Pargeter to Chastaigne Varleigh.

  Chapter Two

  A silver open-topped Porsche was approaching the automatic gates of Chastaigne Varleigh as Gary’s limousine, with Mrs Pargeter tucked neatly in the back, swept out of the drive. The Porsche was driven by a man of about forty, dark-haired, good-looking, but beginning to run to fat.

  He watched the departing limousine with curiosity tinged with suspicion before surging up the drive to the old house in an incautious flurry of gravel.

  The Porsche’s driver entered the sitting room, gave Veronica Chastaigne a functional peck on the forehead and an ‘Evening, Mother,’ before crossing to pour himself a large whisky.

  She shook herself out of a wistful daze to greet her son. ‘Hello, Toby dear.’

  ‘Who was that driving off in the limo?’ he asked casually.

  The faded blue eyes grew vague. ‘What? Oh, just someone about the Guide Dogs for the Blind Bring-and-Buy.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Toby, as if that settled the manner.

  But his dark eyes, sinking in rolls of fat, flashed a suspicious look at his mother. He didn’t believe her.

  Veronica’s son wasn’t the only one with suspicions about Chastaigne Varleigh. Had Toby known it, the arrival of his Porsche had been observed through binoculars from an unmarked car parked at a local beauty spot which overlooked the estate. The same binoculars had also registered the arrival and departure of Gary’s limousine. And these comings and goings had been noted down on a clipboard by the passenger next to the man with the binoculars.

  ‘Patience is probably the most important quality in a good copper, certainly in a good detective,’ said Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson, tapping the ash of his cigarette out of the open slot at the top of his window. ‘Patience and timing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Detective Sergeant Hughes, not for the first time that day. He found that being with the DI involved saying ‘yes’ a lot. Not that the Sergeant regarded himself as a yesman. By no means. When the moment came he would assert himself, he had no doubt of that. Nor did he have any doubt about his exceptional skills as a policeman.

  But he’d only just been made up to detective sergeant and transferred down from Sheffield; this day’s surveillance with Inspector Wilkinson was his first in his new status; so deference to superior experience was clearly in order. But Hughes didn’t plan that the situation should stay that way for long. This job with the Met was going to be a new start for him. He’d abandoned the girlfriend he’d been living with for the previous four years; he didn’t want any hangovers from his Sheffield life to slow down the advance of his career in London. Hughes was a bright, ambitious young man, and he was in a hurry to have his brightness recognized and his ambition realized.

  ‘Oh no, softly, softly catchee monkey,’ the Inspector went on. ‘When you’ve been in the Police Force as long as I have, you’ll find that’s the only method that really pays off in the long term. Though I dare say at times, to a youngster like you, that approach could seem pretty boring.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Hughes, with rather more feeling than on the previous occasions. They had been sitting for four hours watching Chastaigne Varleigh; so far all they’d seen had been the arrival and departure of the limo and the arrival of the Porsche. To compound the pointlessness of the exercise, at the moment of Mrs Pargeter’s emergence from Gary’s limousine, Inspector Wilkinson had had his binoculars lowered while he pontificated about the number of years it took to make a good copper and how there were no short cuts possible in the process. Since he’d also managed to miss her coming out of the mansion, Wilkinson had no idea what Veronica Chastaigne’s visitor looked like. It was only at the insistence of Sergeant Hughes that they’d made a note of the limousine’s registration number.

  To add to the serious doubts he was beginning to entertain about his superior’s competence, Hughes, a non-smoker and something of a fitness fanatic, was not enjoying the acrid fug that had been building up in the car. He knew that when he took them off in his flat that evening, his clothes would still smell of tobacco smoke.

  Inspector Wilkinson’s ruminative monologue continued. ‘No, you have to plan, look ahead, build up your case slowly, and then, when everything’s ready, double-checked and sorted, you have to – move in like lightning!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Hughes, who by now had an instinct for the length of pause that required filling.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ His boss nodded thoughtfully. Inspector Wilkinson was a large, craggy man, only a few years off retirement. He had all the standard accoutrements for someone in his position – a divorce and a variety of subsequent messy relationships, an expression of permanent disappointment, a thin grey moustache, and an antagonistic attitude to his immediate superior, whom he regarded as a ‘jumped-up, university-educated, pen-pushing desk-driver’.

  Wilkinson was not close to any of his professional colleagues. He had
always hoped that at some stage in his career he would be paired up on a regular basis with a congenial young copper, with whom he could build up an ongoing mutually insulting but ultimately affectionate relationship. However, it hadn’t happened yet, and from what he’d seen of his latest sidekick, wasn’t about to happen.

  Wilkinson had been an inspector for longer than most people at the station could remember. He had been passed over so often for higher promotions that now he no longer even bothered to fill in the application forms. But that did not mean he was without ambition. Once before in his career, he had been very close to making a major coup, bringing an entire criminal network to justice. For logistical reasons, things hadn’t worked out on that occasion, but now he felt he was close to another triumph on a comparable scale. And this time nothing was going to screw it up.

  Inspector Wilkinson looked at his watch. Like all his movements, the raising of his arm, the turn of his wrist to show the time, was slow and deliberate. Sergeant Hughes already knew that if the two of them had to spend a lot of time together, he would very quickly get infuriated by these slow, deliberate movements.

  ‘Another forty-two minutes and we can have another cup of coffee from the thermos,’ said Inspector Wilkinson. Then, generously, ‘You can have another cup of mine, Hughes.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘But another day, be a good idea to bring your own thermos. Always be as independent of other people as you can. That’s another mark of a good copper.’

  ‘I’ll bring my own next time,’ the Sergeant mumbled.

  ‘Be best. Of course you have to plan your coffee intake when you’re on a stake-out. Don’t want to be needing a widdle at that vital moment when you have to – move in like lightning! Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Sergeant Hughes, welcoming the variety. Then, emboldened by the change of monosyllable, he ventured a question. ‘Can you tell me a bit more about why we’re actually doing this stake-out, sir?’

  ‘Well, I could,’ the Inspector replied, tapping his nose slowly with a forefinger, ‘but whether I will or not is another matter. When I’m on a case, I always operate on a “need to know” basis, and what I have to ask myself in this instance is: “How much do you need to know?”’