Mrs. Pargeter's Pound of Flesh

by Simon Brett

  Still, it didn’t seem she was going to have a lot of choice in the matter. The seductively soothing motion of the passive exerciser was now becoming more stressful. The machine itself had not accelerated – it maintained the inexorable evenness of its rhythm – but Mrs Pargeter’s unaccustomed limbs were beginning to feel the strain. With each rise and fall she could sense a mounting tension in her shoulders and a regular tug at the back of her knees. Sweat had started to trickle into all the crevices of her body.

  Not only was it an inappropriate death, Mrs Pargeter thought ruefully, it was also an extremely cruel one. A death that would take such a long time, apart from anything else, slowly sapping her body’s strength, slowly winding up the tension around her heart.

  ‘This is not the way I want to go!’ she shouted suddenly. ‘I would like it known that this is not the way I want to go!’

  She felt better for saying it. Not that she deluded herself anyone might hear her. The gym was a long way away from the bedrooms in which the righteous guests of Brotherton Hall dreamed of self-indulgence. There was no chance of rescue. But she still felt better for saying it.

  Given that she had time on her hands before she died – or before the welcome intervention of unconsciousness – Mrs Pargeter took the opportunity for a quick mental review of her life.

  Couldn’t complain, really. Except for this bloody death making the ending all untidy, it had been a good life. And an exciting one, thanks to the late Mr Pargeter. Also, thanks to the same benefactor, an emotionally fulfilled one. She had known the beauty of a truly balanced marriage, in which each partner loved the other equally, without inhibition or competition. Many people had to be content with far less.

  And, as a bonus to the great central relationship of her life, she’d always been surrounded with friends. The value of devotion from someone like Truffler Mason was something she could never overestimate. And Truffler was only one of many associates of the late Mr Pargeter who’d made it their business to protect and cherish his widow.

  It was a comfort too, before the end, to have had her suspicions of Ankle-Deep Arkwright and Stan the Stapler dissipated. The late Mr Pargeter really had commanded extraordinary loyalty.

  Except in one quarter.

  Julian Embridge.

  Yes, as the last sands trickled through the hourglass of her life, that was Mrs Pargeter’s one regret. Would have been nice to bring Julian Embridge to justice before she snuffed it.

  Still, she reflected philosophically, can’t have everything.

  A door clicked gently open behind her.

  Mrs Pargeter tried craning round to see who had come in, but the strapping impeded her.

  She heard the soft tread of approaching feet. Then, in the thin light diffused from the ‘Exit’ sign, she was aware of a human figure lowering over her. She looked up to see the dull blue gleam of a knife-blade in its outstretched hand.

  ‘Told you I’d settle up with you one day, didn’t I, Mrs Pargeter?’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  She recognized the voice and sobbed with relief, as Jack the Knife continued, ‘Didn’t know the chance’d come this quickly, though.’

  Then he switched off the passive exerciser and knelt down to cut her bonds. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, flexing the muscles of her arms and legs. Even after their short exposure to the motion of the machine, they felt strained and shaky. ‘Fine,’ she asserted. ‘Just fine. What on earth brought you here, though, Jack? Just a happy coincidence?’

  ‘Bit more than that,’ the surgeon replied. ‘Had a call from Truffler Mason just before he came down here with you. Said he was going to Brotherton Hall on what might turn out to be “pressing business” . . . if you know what that means . . . ?’

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Pargeter. ‘Truffler and Ank – and Stan the Stapler – are all imprisoned down in the cellars by Dr Potter and his heavies.’

  ‘Yes, I did a quick recce before I came along here. Brought it all back,’ he whispered excitedly, ‘what it was like working with your husband in the old days. Oh, it was great back then. He was a wonderful man, Mrs Pargeter. A real life-enhancer – he lit up everything he touched.’

  She nodded fondly, but realized this wasn’t the moment for wistful elegies. ‘We’ve got to save the others!’ she hissed.

  Jack the Knife nodded in the thin light and reached into his pocket. ‘One for each of us. Think we should be able to jump them all right.’

  Mrs Pargeter felt the cool bulk of an automatic pistol pressed into her palm. As a rule, she didn’t like firearms – indeed, she didn’t favour violence of any kind – but these were exceptional circumstances.

  They moved noiselessly out of the gym, along the corridor and down the stairs to the cellar entrance. Though presumably in his Harley Street practice he had little chance to practise them, Jack the Knife’s skills of stealth and subterfuge showed no signs of rustiness. He drew back the cellar door without a sound and beckoned Mrs Pargeter to follow him down.

  ‘When we get there, I’m going to shoot out the light and catch them off guard.’ He drew a large rubber-covered torch from his pocket. ‘Then switch this on. That should give us the advantage. I’ll deal with the two thugs. You keep Dr Potter covered.’

  ‘No problem,’ Mrs Pargeter breathed back.

  ‘And if he tries anything, just pull the trigger. Will you have any difficulty about doing that?’

  ‘No,’ she replied, with a certitude whose instinctiveness surprised her.

  They moved silently downwards. With each step Mrs Pargeter felt the strain at the back of her knees, a chilling reminder that it really wouldn’t have taken long for the exerciser to exhaust her totally.

  Along the passage some way ahead, light spilled from the room where their friends were held and, as they approached, they could hear the icy precision of Dr Potter’s voice outlining his plans for the prisoners.

  ‘. . . particularly convenient since the drugs require further testing – and on a more robust body than that of a young girl. Mr Mason here will be an ideal candidate for the treatment.’

  ‘But, Doctor,’ Ankle-Deep Arkwright’s voice protested, ‘those drugs have already killed one girl. Surely you don’t want Truffler Mason to—?’

  ‘Truffler Mason has caused me considerable inconvenience,’ Dr Potter snapped back. ‘He’s lucky I haven’t just killed him straight off. At least with what I’m proposing, he has a chance of survival.’

  ‘Not much of a chance.’

  ‘No, Mr Arkwright, not much of a chance,’ the doctor conceded with a hint of humour.

  Mrs Pargeter wondered why Truffler was silent during this exchange, and concluded that he was probably still unconscious. As she and Jack the Knife edged closer, this conjecture was confirmed by the sight of Truffler’s body still stretched out on the cellar floor.

  Ankle-Deep Arkwright maintained his protest. ‘I don’t think you should do it, Doctor. There’s been enough destruction here. I never wanted to be part of this in the first place. I—’

  ‘Mr Arkwright!’ Dr Potter interrupted malignantly. ‘You will do as you’re told. Either we get back to the arrangement we had before – that you run Brotherton Hall and do whatever I ask of you whenever I ask it – or I inform the police of your criminal past. And the same goes for you, Stan.’

  ‘But I can’t stand any more of this killing. First there’s the student kid, then Lindy Galton, and if you’ve done anything to Mrs Pargeter, there are people all over the world who worked with her husband and will avenge her, whatever—’

  ‘Mr Arkwright! If I cannot count on your co-operation, then I will put you on the same medical programme as Mr Mason. My product still needs a lot more testing, you know.’

  There was a chill silence as the impact of these words sank in, and Jack the Knife seized his cue.

  A gunshot sounded, shatteringly loud in the enclosed space. Then came the smashing of glass, followed by a muddle of curses in the blackn
ess.

  By the time Jack the Knife had switched his torch on, half the job was done. Ankle-Deep Arkwright and Stan the Stapler, well trained by the late Mr Pargeter, had taken advantage of the confusion to immobilize the two ambulance men, who found themselves looking down the barrel of Jack the Knife’s gun.

  And in the spill of light from the torch, Dr Potter and Mrs Pargeter faced each other, machine-gun and automatic pistol trained.

  ‘I will have no hesitation in using this,’ he announced silkily.

  ‘Nor will I in using this.’

  ‘Do you know the rate at which this machine-gun pumps out bullets, Mrs Pargeter?’

  ‘No. And I’m not particularly interested. It’ll only take one bullet from my gun to blow you away, Dr Potter. I’m not going to miss from this range.’

  There was a momentary impasse. Nobody moved, or seemed to breathe.

  Then the doctor spoke again, his voice corroded with bitterness. ‘I haven’t come this far, I haven’t come through everything to get so close to recognition as a brilliant chemist, to be thwarted by you. You’re in my way, Mrs Pargeter, and when there’s someone in my way, I always succeed in getting them out of my way!’

  He concluded the sentence as if it were a cue – presumably a cue to squeeze the trigger of his machine-gun and blow Mrs Pargeter out of his way.

  But the cue was missed. There was a sudden movement from the floor. Truffler Mason, with surprising athleticism, arched his body and brought his legs up to send the machine-gun spinning. The impact hurled Dr Potter back against the wall, where his head slammed against a low pipe. He crumpled unconscious to the floor.

  ‘Brilliant, Truffler!’ Mrs Pargeter gazed fondly down at her protector, who sat on the floor lugubriously rubbing his head.

  Jack the Knife looked across at the two ambulance men, dispirited in the unyielding embraces of Ankle-Deep Arkwright and Stan the Stapler. Any fight there had been in the thugs was gone. ‘Tie them up,’ he ordered.

  Then the surgeon moved across to focus his torchbeam on Dr Potter. He noticed something behind the man’s ear and looked closer.

  ‘Good heavens!’ he murmured.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Mrs Pargeter.

  ‘These scars behind his ears.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Just that I recognize them.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘A surgeon always recognizes his own handiwork, Mrs Pargeter.’ Jack the Knife pushed Dr Potter’s head sideways and peered closely at the network of lines around his eyes. ‘Good God! Do you know who this is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Julian Embridge.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Hell had no fury like Mrs Pargeter in pursuit of justice. Shylock was not more pertinacious in his demands than she in her determination to settle scores with Julian Embridge.

  The three villains were tied up to cellar pipes as Ankle-Deep Arkwright had been. ‘Dr Potter’ was still unconscious as he was manacled and Jack the Knife inspected his body, first removing the man’s shoes.

  ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to the heavily built-up sole. ‘Made him a good three inches taller.’

  ‘Which explains why his body looked so out of proportion,’ said Mrs Pargeter. And also, she thought to herself, why he refused to take his shoes off when he removed the body of the girl he’d killed from the Dead Sea Mud Bath.

  ‘The hair’s dyed, obviously,’ Jack the Knife observed, ‘and he had coloured lenses over his blue eyes . . .’

  ‘Which is why they looked that strange muddy colour.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Pargeter. And all that, with the work I’d done on him, was sufficient to change his basic appearance.’ The surgeon paused and looked puzzled. ‘But there’s more to it than that. I mean, Julian Embridge was a short, tubby person. This isn’t the body of a short, tubby person.’

  Mrs Pargeter smiled a bleak smile. ‘I don’t think we have to look far for the explanation, Jack. Think of the drug “Dr Potter” has been trying to develop, the drug that killed that poor girl. I think he was his own first guinea pig.’

  Jack the Knife slowly nodded agreement as she went on, ‘His background was as a chemist. He always had ambitions to produce something that would make him famous. The need to change his identity gave him the perfect incentive to experiment. But clearly the side-effects of whatever he developed meant that he couldn’t put it straight on to the market. He needed to test it first and maybe he had suffered so much from earlier versions that he decided to try the drug out on other guinea pigs . . .’

  ‘Hence the Private Eye small ad and all of that . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  The surgeon looked thoughtful. ‘Mind you, if he ever had developed it – a drug that could change basic body type – the slimming industry would have killed to get hold of it.’

  ‘Unfortunate choice of phrase in the circumstances, Jack.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘But it explains Sue Fisher’s interest.’ Mrs Pargeter pursed her lips. ‘Hm, I’d really like to get Sue Fisher too . . .’ But no, Ellie Fenchurch had made a deal with the creator of Mind Over Fatty Matter. Sue Fisher could not be implicated unless she broke her side of that bargain.

  ‘Never mind,’ Mrs Pargeter concluded easily. ‘Julian Embridge is the important one. He’s who I really want to get.’

  ‘And how are you going to get him?’ asked Jack the Knife.

  ‘He’s a criminal,’ she replied primly. ‘I’m going to turn him over to the police.’

  Mrs Pargeter usually kept her dealings with the police to a minimum. She had no disrespect for the force, and was frequently heard to praise them as ‘a fine body of men’. But she never liked causing unnecessary confusion. She was often of the opinion that an excess of information could only serve to make the constabulary’s life more complicated.

  And she was a model citizen in the sense that, rather than overburdening an already stretched force with problems that other people might have taken to their door, she usually sorted out such matters for herself (with the help of the late Mr Pargeter’s associates).

  But there were some cases in which she recognized that the police should be involved. And Julian Embridge’s was such a case.

  For one thing, the man was a public menace. People who go around illicitly testing drugs on young girls – and committing murder – deserve to be put away for a long time.

  There was also a personal score to settle. It was through the offices of Julian Embridge at Streatham that the late Mr Pargeter had had a closer encounter with the British police force than he had wished for.

  It was only fitting, therefore, that Julian Embridge should become a victim of the same authorities.

  So, once the three villains had been secured in the cellar, with Stan the Stapler left to guard them, Mrs Pargeter and the others went upstairs to Ankle-Deep Arkwright’s office. Truffler Mason, who spent much of his time as a private investigator typing up reports for clients, was seated behind the word processer, while he and Jack the Knife searched their memories for details of Julian Embridge’s wrongdoing.

  These recollections were rigorously edited by Mrs Pargeter. Nothing was allowed to appear in the text that could not be incontrovertibly proved. For example, the suspicion that Julian Embridge had taken on the identity of the doctor from Hong Kong, and might even have done away with the real Dr Potter, was not admitted. Only crimes that could be proved, and for which reliable witnesses could be quoted, were allowed to feature.

  But there was still plenty of material. Enough to put Julian Embridge away for a very long time indeed.

  Once the deposition had been completed, it would be faxed to the police. They would be given an untraceable fax number (a facility which Truffler Mason had developed and frequently used) to respond to if they were interested. Given the long list of crimes Truffler was keying in to the word processor, the police would quite definitely be interested. When they contacted the untraceable fax number, details of the wh
ereabouts of Julian Embridge and his accomplices would be then faxed back to them.

  Unfortunately, the two murders could not be included in the accusations. Jenny Hargreaves’ body was still missing, and Lindy Galton’s death seemed to have been passed off successfully as an accident.

  ‘Pity about that,’ said Mrs Pargeter, looking over Truffler Mason’s shoulder at the screen. ‘I’d really like to nail him for those.’

  ‘Well, we could put in that the two deaths might be worth further investigation . . . ?’ Truffler suggested.

  ‘What, and leave the police to try and get to the bottom of them?’ Mrs Pargeter wrinkled her mouth sceptically. ‘I’d feel safer if we could give them a bit of specific direction for their enquiries. Police’re never that good when they have to use their own initiative.’

  ‘No,’ Jack the Knife agreed.

  ‘What about Stan?’ asked Ankle-Deep Arkwright suddenly. ‘Might he know anything?’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Jack the Knife enthused. ‘I’ll go and get him.’

  The oddjob man appeared a few minutes later, the surgeon having stayed downstairs on guard. Mrs Pargeter explained the information they required and he responded enthusiastically. Although Stan the Stapler couldn’t speak, he could write. And he wrote furiously.

  It was better than they’d dared hope. He had actually, unbeknownst to the perpetrator, witnessed ‘Dr Potter’ hitting Lindy Galton over the head and holding her under the Dead Sea Mud until she was dead.

  And now he knew that the murderer had been Julian Embridge, Stan would be prepared to do anything to bring him to justice – even risk revelation of his own criminal background by standing up in court and bearing witness against the man who had betrayed the late Mr Pargeter.

  ‘And what about Jenny Hargreaves?’ asked Mrs Pargeter. ‘Have you got any information on her death?’