Mrs, Presumed Dead Read online

  Nestled into her favourite armchair, she took a welcome sip and gave in to the stampede of thoughts rampaging through her head.

  Now there was not just one missing person who had covered their tracks with lies. There were two.

  And one of them might have been missing for as long as six months.

  13

  It was time, Mrs Pargeter decided, to summon help. She was fortunate in having a rich repertory of assistants on whose services she could call. Their names were contained in the late Mr Pargeter’s address book, which, she sometimes considered, was the most valuable part of the rich estate he had left her. It was an unrivalled list of contacts which, had it fallen into the wrong hands, could have caused considerable unpleasantness.

  Mrs Pargeter looked up the name ‘Wilson’ and dialled the number listed there. The gentleman who replied identified himself as ‘Mickey’s Motors’ and regretted that Mr Wilson no longer worked with him. ‘No, he’s gone up in the world. West End, now. Big showroom in Hanover Square. Only deals in Rollers and Bentleys, that kind of stuff. Mind you, sure I can help. Got a great little ‘B’-Reg. Maxi. Only sixty thou on the clock, one lady owner – she was a nun – and it runs like a blooming Swiss watch. I could do you a deal if—’

  Mrs Pargeter managed to stop the flow, apologising that she really wasn’t looking for a car, but needed to contact Mr Wilson urgently. Did Mickey’s Motors, by any chance, have the Hanover Square number?

  He obliged and their conversation concluded amicably with assurances on his part that, if she ever needed some ‘really ace wheels’, he had the biggest selection south of the Thames and could do her a deal that’d be grounds for having him certified.

  Mrs Pargeter rang the number he had given her and was answered by a girl with vowels of pure Waterford Crystal. ‘Ridleigh’s. Good morning. Can I help you?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mr Wilson, please.’

  ‘One moment. I believe he may be in conference with a client who’s just arrived from the Middle East. I’ll see if he’s free.’

  A tasteful burst of Vivaldi played down the line and then another voice, even more cut-glass than the first, said, ‘Hello. Mr. Wilson’s office.’

  ‘Oh, I wondered if I could speak to him, please.’

  ‘I’m not sure that he’s free. Who is it calling?’

  Mrs Pargeter recognised the formula. Mr Wilson was sitting right next door to the secretary, but he would only be free if it was a caller he wished to speak to. An Arab prince seeking a fleet of little runabouts for his wives, perhaps . . . ?

  ‘My name is Mrs Pargeter.’

  ‘Mrs Pargeter?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Melita Pargeter.’

  There was a silence from the other end of the phone while this information was covertly relayed. Then, instantly, another extension was picked up and a voice marinated in Eton and the Guards effused, ‘Mrs Pargeter!’

  ‘Hello, Rewind.’

  ‘Oh, erm . . .’ There was an elaborate cough from the other end. ‘I’d rather you didn’t actually use that name, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sorry, love.’ She could see his point. It had been a bit tactless. A man who’d earned his nickname from the skill with which he wound back milometers would hardly want it shouted around the West End office where he sold Bentleys to Bahrain.

  ‘Don’t mention it. Perfectly natural. Instinctive reaction.’ Rewind Wilson boomed. ‘Oh, it’s such a pleasure to hear you, Mrs Pargeter. You know, I keep thinking about your husband and the things we got up to.’

  ‘So do I,’ she admitted, indulging in a little moment of melancholy.

  ‘He was the best. Absolutely the best. No one to touch him in the field.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so.’

  ‘True, dear lady. Absolutely true. Wouldn’t say it if it weren’t. Anyway, to what do I owe the great pleasure of your call after all these years?’ But before she could reply, he went on, ‘Your late husband, incidentally, did ask me to give you any help that you might ever require. I would have done, anyway, out of loyalty – I only mention it so’s you know how much he cared for you.’

  That was the one thing Mrs Pargeter had never doubted. ‘Thank you, Re – Mr Wilson,’ she hastily corrected herself. ‘In fact, there was a small favour I was going to ask you.’

  ‘Anything, dear lady, anything.’

  ‘Do you still have all your contacts in the motoring world . . . I mean, even though you’ve gone str – um, changed your line of business?’

  ‘I think you’ll find my contacts are as good as anyone’s in the trade.’

  ‘And you still have, um . . . access to the computers?’

  ‘You name it, Mrs Pargeter, I’ll track it down.’

  ‘Well, I am actually trying to find a specific vehicle.’

  ‘This would not be for purchase, dear lady, would it?’

  ‘No, I’m trying to trace someone. I thought finding them through their car might be a good approach. And I remembered that there was an occasion when you gave my late husband some assistance in a somewhat similar situation . . .’

  ‘Shall we just mention the words “Welwyn Garden City” . . . ?’ asked Rewind Wilson, with a conspiratorial wink in his voice.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Right. No problem. Fill me in on all the information you have, and I give you my word that I’ll track the vehicle in question down for you.’

  ‘Thank you. Well, the car’s a Fiat Uno. Only a year old. And the owner’s name’s Cotton. Might be in the wife’s name, Theresa, or the husband’s, which is Rodney.’

  ‘Fine. Do you have their address?’

  ‘The last recorded address I have for them is . . .’ And she gave her own.

  ‘Splendid. Give me a number where I can get back to you and I’ll be on to it straight away.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ She gave him her telephone number.

  ‘Incidentally, Mrs Pargeter,’ he asked, once again conspiratorial, ‘is this in connection with a “job”?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, suddenly glacial. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.’

  Rewind Wilson was covered with confusion. ‘No, I do apologise. Silly of me. Don’t know what came over me. Forget I said it. Please.’

  She accorded him a magnanimous, ‘Very well.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, dear lady. Can’t say how long it’ll be, I’m afraid – depends on the circumstances – but rest assured that I will set things in motion as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Well, once again may I say what a pleasure it has been to hear from you again. And . . . erm . . .’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘. . . terribly sorry about what I said just then. Didn’t want to imply . . . Hope you didn’t get the idea I—’

  ‘Think nothing of it, Mr Wilson,’ said Mrs Pargeter sweetly. ‘And thank you so much for your help. Goodbye.’

  14

  Through the net curtains, whose advantages she was coming to appreciate increasingly the longer she spent in Smithy’s Loam, Mrs Pargeter saw her next-door neighbour emerge from the front door of ‘Cromarty’ with a bucket, sponge and cloths. Not content with the daily drubbing she gave to the inside of her windows, Carole Temple was now set to punish the outside.

  Mrs Pargeter decided it was time she should do a little gentle gardening. A little gentle front gardening.

  She went to the shed at the back and selected a hoe, an edging tool, a trowel and a trug. Those ought to cover most eventualities, she thought. The trug in particular seemed to say ‘gardening’ to her. She remembered walking with the late Mr Pargeter through the garden of the big house in Chigwell, carrying a trugful of flowers on many a Sunday afternoon. She had loved that garden; it was always so beautifully cared for.

  Not of course that she actually had to do any of the caring herself. The late Mr Pargeter had always ensured that her gardening efforts were restricted to cutting flowers and putting them in
a trug. He organised the men who were their frequent guests to do the real work. It was surprising how happy those men had always been to do a little gardening in exchange for a few days of unobserved calm in Chigwell.

  Mrs Pargeter went round the side of the house to the front garden, and when she saw Carole Temple she called out a cheery, ‘Good morning.’

  Her neighbour froze in mid-wipe, and nodded a perfunctory ‘Good morning’ back. Then she returned determinedly to her window-cleaning, the set of her shoulders a fierce deterrent to further conversation.

  But Mrs Pargeter was not daunted by that sort of thing. After a little tentative scrabbling with her hoe in one of the front beds, she said, ‘Do you do your garden yourself, Carole?’

  This prompted another affronted freeze, before a reply was conceded. ‘Yes. My husband does most of it.’

  ‘Handy things, husbands,’ Mrs Pargeter commented breezily. ‘I miss a good few of the things my husband used to do.’

  The innuendo was deliberate and, Mrs Pargeter knew, a bit childish. But Carole Temple’s stuffiness had that effect on her. She was determined to get some reaction, any reaction, out of her neighbour.

  But that was apparently not the way to get it. Carole continued rubbing the glass as if she hoped to come through on the other side.

  ‘I think I might have to get a little man in to help out.’ Mrs Pargeter went on and then, realising that she was keeping the innuendo going, chuckled throatily. ‘Oh dear, aren’t I dreadful?’ she said, still trying to get a rise out of Carole.

  The rubbing became even more vigorous.

  ‘Did the Cottons do this garden themselves?’

  Faced with a direct question, Carole could not stay silent without overt rudeness, so she had to reply. ‘Yes. Well, of course, for the last few months Theresa did it all.’

  She couldn’t have set up a better cue for Mrs Pargeter if she had tried. ‘Yes. I gather Mr Cotton hadn’t been around for some time . . . ?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs Pargeter was not going to be deterred by monosyllables. ‘Got a job up North, did I hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was that exactly?’

  Carole looked with slight annoyance away from her cleaning, and what she saw brought an expression of shock to her face. Mrs Pargeter had now moved forward and was actually leaning against the dividing wall between their properties, for all the world like a gossip from a northern soap opera.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Carole Temple snapped, her eyes blazing the message that Mrs Pargeter’s behaviour did not conform with the usages of Smithy’s Loam.

  Mrs Pargeter, fully aware of the effect she was having, gave no sign of taking the hint. Instead, she beamed cheerfully and asked, ‘And how long ago was it he got transferred?’

  Again Carole could not evade the direct question.

  ‘I suppose about six months ago. Round March, I think.’

  Ah, so the lie about promotion had been around as long as the reality of redundancy itself.

  ‘And did you see him much after he started work up North, Carole?’

  ‘Hardly at all. Presumably he was busy with the new job.’

  ‘Yes. When you say “hardly at all”, do you mean that, or do you mean “not at all”?’

  ‘What?’ Carole had now given up any attempt at polishing and was looking at her interrogator with undisguised irritation.

  ‘I meant, Carole love,’ – Mrs Pargeter knew exactly how much the endearment would grate – ‘did you see Rod Cotton at all after he had changed jobs?’

  ‘Well, I think so. I think he was here for a while between the two. I don’t know, quite honestly. I mean, he wasn’t around much before.’ She was getting flustered, and annoyed that she was getting flustered. ‘I’m not the sort of person who spends all the time minding my neighbours’ business rather than my own.’

  Mrs Pargeter gave a beatific smile, as if unaware of any possibility of sarcasm in the last remark. ‘No, no. Neither am I,’ she agreed equably.

  She still showed no signs of moving away from the wall. Carole took her frustration out on the windows, which squeaked with protest at their chastisement.

  ‘Must’ve been lonely for Theresa . . .’ Mrs Pargeter mused. ‘Stuck down here, husband away all the time. I wouldn’t have liked it. My husband always had to be away a certain amount . . . you know, in connection with his business . . . and I never really felt right until he came back.’

  This did not seem to Carole to be worthy of reaction.

  ‘No, I didn’t like it. Still, I know there are some couples it doesn’t worry . . . Some seem a lot happier to be separated than to be together . . . Depends how close they are, really, I suppose . . . how things are going between them . . .’

  But if Mrs Pargeter had hoped that this fishing would elicit any comment on the state of the Cottons’ marriage, she was disappointed. Carole Temple just wrung out her cloth as if she were strangling it and attacked a top corner of the window with an air of finality.

  Recognising that she had pushed as far as she dared and got as much information as she was going to get that morning, Mrs Pargeter rubbed her hands together and moved back from the wall. ‘Still, haven’t got time to stay here chatting all day, pleasant though it is. Things to get on with. See you soon, I’m sure. ‘Bye, ‘bye, love.’

  Again the familiarity stung Carole, whose head spun round to face her neighbour. She looked upstaged and very cross. If anyone should be curtailing this unwanted conversation, it should be her and not the person who had forced it on her.

  But she was too late. Mrs Pargeter had picked up her unused garden tools and, with a little twitch of mischief at the corners of her mouth, waved serenely, before disappearing round the side of her house.

  15

  In spite of his new up-market address and his new up-market business, Rewind Wilson had lost none of his old efficiency in negotiating the labyrinth of crooked passages which unites the country’s car dealers. He rang back the widow of his former employer the next morning at half-past eleven.

  ‘Mrs Pargeter, hello,’ the ersatz Etonian tones rumbled. ‘Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you . . .’ – which was simply showing off under the circumstances – ‘. . . but I do now have the information you require.’

  ‘About the Fiat Uno?’

  ‘That’s right. Very easy to trace, as it turned out.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I might have to get the road scouts out on to it, but in fact it’s with a dealer.’

  ‘With a dealer?’ Mrs Pargeter echoed, slightly puzzled.

  ‘Yes. It was sold to a fellow in Clapham. Sid Runcorn . . . never met him, but I’ve heard he’s a bit heavily into the old F and R . . .’

  For an innocent widow in her late sixties, Mrs Pargeter had a surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of underworld slang, but on this occasion she had to admit ignorance.

  Rewind Wilson supplied an immediate gloss. ‘F and R – Fill-in and Respray. A lot of it done on dodgy bodywork . . . never mind the rust, slap on the filler, sand it down, couple of coats of spray – fool ninety-nine per cent of the punters any day.’ He suddenly recollected his new status in the motor industry. ‘Or so I’m told.’

  ‘What, so he’s done that to the Cottons’ car?’ asked Mrs Pargeter, her mind racing with images of vehicles disguised to avoid detection.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. I only mention it because it’s the only thing I know about him. No, in this case it was a straight purchase for resale.’

  ‘You mean the Cottons sold him their car?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s had his engineers look it over and it’s standing out on his forecourt in Clapham with a price stuck on the windscreen.’

  ‘What kind of price?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, compared to what the Cottons sold it for . . . ?’

  Rewind Wilson dropped back instinctively into a professional defensive posture. ‘Of course,
there would be quite a mark-up . . .’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘About forty per cent on this one.’

  ‘Forty per cent!’

  ‘Well, come on, the dealer’s got his overheads and it’s no picnic trying to offload motors at –’ Again Rewind Wilson seemed to realise that his past was encroaching, and recovered himself. ‘Erm, yes, I believe some of the dealers down that end of the market can be a little unscrupulous in the matter of pricing.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Mrs Pargeter thought for a moment. ‘Anything unusual about this sale?’

  ‘Unusual? I believe it was all perfectly legitimate. With a car only a year old you don’t usually have to do much in the way of cosmetics . . . you know, unless it’s an insurance write-off and you’ve got to weld the chassis and – or so I believe. I mean, so I have heard from operators in that kind of area of the market,’ he concluded cautiously.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything illegal. I just meant was there anything odd about it, anything that struck Mr Runcorn as odd . . . ?’

  ‘Ah, I’m with you. Well, there were only two things he mentioned. One, the call about the car was from way off his usual patch. I mean, that address is down near Dorking, isn’t it? Sid rarely strays out of South London.’

  ‘Then why did he this time?’

  ‘Because the car was such a bargain.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why he could make such a healthy mark-up. She was asking way below the current price guide, so he didn’t mind a bit of travel to pick it up.’

  ‘Mr Runcorn picked the car up himself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hmm. What would it suggest to you, Re–’ Mrs Pargeter cleared her throat to cover the gaffe ‘Mr Wilson . . . you know, when someone tries to sell a car below its market value?’

  ‘Could be various reasons. Might be just they’re clueless, don’t know a thing about motors . . . Or could be for a quick sale . . .’

  Mrs Pargeter preferred the second explanation. It fitted in well with the rest of her thinking about Theresa Cotton’s disappearance. A quick sale of the car to a dealer from outside the area – probably randomly selected from the Yellow Pages – would raise less questions in Smithy’s Loam than a local transaction. And the lowered price was probably just an incentive to make sure that Theresa’s chosen dealer rose to the bait.