Mrs. Pargeter's Point of Honour by Simon Brett Page A

gave the two men a cheery smile and hurried off.
    Toby’s small eyes followed her suspiciously down the corridor until she was out of sight. Then, with a nod to his companion, he opened the door to his mother’s room. ‘Come on in.’
    Through the slit of her drooping eyelids, Veronica Chastaigne took in the new arrivals without enthusiasm.
    â€˜Good morning, Mother,’ said Toby, bending down to give her cheek the most perfunctory dusting with his lips. ‘I brought my solicitor along, so that we can tie up a few loose ends . . .’
    Veronica Chastaigne feigned sleep.

Chapter Sixteen
    Inspector Wilkinson sat alone in the unmarked car, thinking gloomy thoughts. The mistimed raid on Chastaigne Varleigh had been a body blow to him. He’d been planning the operation so long that he’d invested more hopes and ambitions than he’d realized in its successful outcome. This had been intended to be the big one, the masterstroke which wiped away the memory of so many past failures, even of the terrible moment when he had just missed entrapping the late Mr Pargeter. Proving the Chastaigne Varleigh connection to the art thefts would have ensured that Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson had made his mark.
    Except that the coup hadn’t worked. The Long Gallery had been empty, although there were enough tell-tale clues – picture-hooks, rectangles of dust, outlines of darker wood where pictures had hung – to suggest it hadn’t been empty for long.
    Detective Inspector Craig Wilkinson was going to have to find another way to make his mark.
    It was a relief to be alone in the car that morning. He was beginning to find the presence of Sergeant Hughes distinctly irksome. From the start Wilkinson had detected in the young man an unattractive cockiness, which at times bordered on disrespect. Since the Chastaigne Varleigh débâcle, the disrespect had been overt.
    No, Wilkinson decided, it was a relief not to have Hughes with him (though he might have revised that opinion had he known that the Sergeant was at that moment once again immersed in files of the Inspector’s old cases).
    Life has dealt me a pretty lousy hand, Wilkinson thought self-pityingly. In the cop shows he watched and the crime novels he read many of the heroes had family connections to make them interesting. A crippled sibling always helped, or a child with a serious medical condition. Wives could also be very useful as a means of enriching their man’s personality. A wife in an iron lung could do wonders, or one with a secret drinking problem.
    And wives who had terminal illnesses or, even better, wives who were dead, could do much for a detective’s sympathy rating. A dead wife in the background could leave a hero embittered, throwing himself wholeheartedly into his work so as not to have time to brood, but also available for the odd entanglement with a cleared suspect or an attractive young colleague. (These entanglements were doomed to be of short duration, but usually involved some very good sex on the way.) Yes, the right sort of deceased wife profile offered another way for a good copper to make his mark.
    But Inspector Wilkinson hadn’t had that kind of luck. His ex-wife was still very much alive, living in Stockport with a croupier fifteen years younger than her. She had not had any secret illnesses or agonies. Nor had their parting been a dramatic, tempestuous moment always to be regretted by one of those magnificent couples who could not live with each other but could not live without each other. No, the former Mrs Wilkinson had left her husband because she found him terminally boring.
    Maybe that’s what he was, the Inspector thought in a rare moment of total self-doubt. Maybe the moment that was going to salvage his career – or his whole life – was never going to happen. Maybe he was terminally boring.
    But even as he reached the nadir of this dispiriting thought, it gave