Simon Brett - Mrs. Pargeter's pound of flesh

‘This must be the way down,’ Truffler breathed in Mrs Pargeter’s ear.

She looked dubiously at the huge keyhole in its metal boxed casing. ‘Take more than a picklock to open that. You’ll need a hammer-drill or gelignite.’

‘Let’s see.’ Truffler leaned forward and grasped the door-handle. Tensing himself for the effort, he tried to turn the heavy metal ring.

It gave instantly and the door swung inward. He turned to Mrs Pargeter and, with a defeated wink, whispered, ‘An old trick, but it sometimes works — particularly when the door hasn’t been locked.’

It opened on to stone steps. There was no light ahead and chill, stale mausoleum air breathed against their faces.

‘Better close the door, Mrs Pargeter. Don’t want to leave more calling-cards than we have to.’

Truffler produced a pencil-torch from his inside pocket and directed its beam towards Mrs Pargeter’s elegantly shod feet on the worn stone steps. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said and gently pulled the oak door to behind them.

The network of cellars outlined in a fragmentary way by the tiny torchbeam was surprisingly extensive, running under most of Brotherton Hall’s ground-floor area. Side rooms spread off like fish-bones from the central spine of the passage they walked along. All had been used for storage at some period. In some the dusty detritus had lain undisturbed for centuries, but in others superseded models of exercise bicycles and other training impedimenta bespoke more recent use.

Their progress was slow, as the torchbeam probed each dark space in search of human signs, but suddenly Truffler froze and tapped Mrs Pargeter on the shoulder to still her too. They listened intently and both heard a tiny scrape of metal on metal.

He tapped her shoulder again and they moved towards the source of the sound. It emanated from a room whose relative lack of dust showed that it had been in recent use. As the beam of Truffler’s torch raked the walls, the scraping sound speeded up, almost to a frenetic level, as if someone or something was trying to escape its bonds.

The torch found the source of the sound first, framing a wrist handcuffed to a rusty pipe. Its movements grew even more panicked, straining hopelessly to escape.

As the light moved up the body, its head was suddenly averted and a muffled, fearing groaning joined the metallic scrape.

But Mrs Pargeter had recognized the suit. She rushed forward to put a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Ank,’ she said. ‘It’s Truffler and me — Mrs Pargeter. We’ll get you out of this.’

The face that turned in gratitude to hers was bisected by a thick strip of sticking plaster. Mrs Pargeter reached tentatively towards the corner and Ankle-Deep Arkwright’s eyes encouraged her to rip it off.

This she did, in one quick, agonizing movement.

‘Oh, thank God,’ he groaned. ‘Thank God. I never thought I was going to get out of here.’

‘Don’t worry. You can do the handcuffs, can’t you, Truffler?’

The big man nodded and leaned forward, feeling in his pocket for another set of picklocks. He passed the torch to Mrs Pargeter, who needed no telling where to point it.

‘Hm, bracelets like these are always tricky,’ he said, as he riffled through the fan of tiny wires. ‘Don’t worry, though, Ank. Soon be free.’

‘Be as quick as you can. Won’t be long before they’re back.’

‘That’s the baby,’ Truffler murmured in relief as he felt a wire engage in the handcuffs lock.

But just as he clicked it home, they all heard a loud clang from the doorway and turned to face a sudden blaze of powerful light.

Though the torch was focused on them, light spilled out behind, and, distorted against the low, uneven walls of the cellar, they could see, grotesquely amplified, the shadow outline of the man who carried it.

Stan the Stapler.

They stood frozen like rabbits in the headlights of an oncoming Land-Rover. As her eyes accommodated the glare, Mrs Pargeter saw that in his other hand Stan the Stapler held a snub-nosed automatic pistol.

She was astonished at the speed with which Truffler Mason moved. Projecting himself suddenly forward, he curled over into a ball, somersaulted, and scissored his legs around Stan the Stapler’s as his body straightened out. The torch went flying from Stan’s hand and Truffler reached up to seize the wrist that held the gun.

A brief struggle ensued, before the weapon was wrenched free and sent scuttering away into the passage. Then Stan the Stapler was lifted high, immobilized from behind by the lock Truffler had on his arms. The thug gurgled in a grotesque parody of terrified speech.

‘Well done, Truffler!’ Mrs Pargeter congratulated in an excited whisper. ‘Brilliant!’

But Ankle-Deep Arkwright didn’t seem to agree. ‘Let him go, you fool. He’s on our side.’

‘What?’

‘Stan’s been helping me. They were going to let me starve down here. He’s the one who’s been bringing me food.’

Truffler wasn’t convinced. He didn’t release his hold. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Pargeter chipped in, ‘what do you mean? Stan hasn’t behaved in a very friendly way to me. There’s a long history there, anyway, between him and Mr Pargeter. Going right back to what happened in Streatham.’

Stan the Stapler’s gurgles redoubled at the mention of the word, but Ankle-Deep Arkwright protested, ‘No, people got him all wrong over Streatham. Because Stan can’t talk, he never got the chance to explain what really happened. Yes, he thought Julian Embridge was OK — a lot of us did, Jack the Knife and all — and by the time we realized he was a bad ’un, your husband’d already been sent down. Led to a lot of misunderstandings for a lot of people, that did.’

‘Then why was Stan the Stapler so surly with me from the moment I arrived here?’

‘Because, Mrs P., he was afraid of you. He thought you thought the worst of him — he thought you believed all that stuff about him helping Julian Embridge shop your old man. He was embarrassed, like, that’s all.’

‘But if he’s on your side, Ank, why on earth didn’t he just set you free?’

‘Because he’s afraid of what they’d do to him. Anyway, even if we got away, we wouldn’t get far. They’d either deal with us themselves or shop us to the police. We’ve both got records as long as a gorilla’s arm, enough to get us put away for a two-figure stretch if anyone grassed.’

‘But, for goodness’ sake, who are they?’ Mrs Pargeter pleaded.

The answer to her question came immediately, though not in the form she would have chosen. It was supplied visually, as two men burst in through the doorway. One brandished a baseball bat, the other an automatic weapon as snub-nosed as Stan the Stapler’s but even more bulky.

The baseball bat crashed down on the back of Truffler’s skull. He collapsed like a handless glove-puppet, releasing Stan, who turned, pale with fear, to face the assailants, then backed away with his hands up to join Mrs Pargeter and Ankle-Deep Arkwright.

One of the men switched on the light and the room was flooded with searing whiteness. Mrs Pargeter blinked a couple of times and then, with horror, recognized the two men who had wheeled away Jenny Hargreaves’ body.

She knew now that they weren’t real ambulance men. She knew also that they had disposed of Jenny’s body in some nameless way. She didn’t feel encouraged about the way they were likely to treat people who got in their way.

Nor did their first words inspire in her any greater confidence.

‘Shall we just shoot them straight away?’ asked the first ambulance man.

‘Yes. We’ll have to do it sometime. Let’s get it over with.’