by Joyce Porter
Mrs O’Malley, her eyes riveted to the screen, was as helpful as ever. ‘How should I know? I sort out my own letters and dump the rest on the table in the hall. I can’t remember whether she got any letters or not. No, now I tell a lie! She did get one, not long before she scarpered. One of those official ones in a long brown envelope. Typed. At least’ – Mrs O’Malley calmly proceeded to dash every hope in sight – ‘I think it was for her, but I could be mistaken.’
MacGregor asked if he might see the room which Pearl Wallace had occupied and Mrs O’Malley, making it very clear that this ranked as an Imposition, consented. ‘It’ll do you no good,’ she forecast as she took down her bunch of duplicate keys from a nail. ‘I gave that room a right good clean out when I re-let it. You’ll not find any of your clues there now.’
MacGregor opened the door for her. ‘Even so . . .’
Mrs O’Malley pushed past. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ she said as she started laboriously up the stairs. ‘You might let me have her key back sometime. Look, it’ll be a Yale one like this . . .’
Dover indulged himself in a little belch and then, taking Mrs O’Malley’s chair, settled down to see what cosy catastrophes Meg Mortimer was coping with this week.
And so another day of unremitting toil came to an end. All in all, MacGregor reckoned that they’d made some progress. They had found out the dead girl’s name, where she worked and where she lived. And all this had been achieved without Dover unearthing a single new murder suspect. He’d tried, of course, but it had been very half-hearted. Even he hadn’t quite been able to see any of the Barford-in-the-Meadow lot following Pearl Wallace all the way to Frenchy Botham and there killing her.
‘I didn’t go much on that landlady woman,’ said Dover as, sitting well back, he filled the entire police car with cigarette smoke. ‘You’d have thought she’d have wondered where the girl was, wouldn’t you?’
MacGregor was deep in speculation, trying to decide if Dover would notice if he wound down the window a crack. ‘I’m afraid the truth is that nobody cared two hoots about Pearl Wallace, sir. And it’s not only Mrs O’Malley and Ermengilda’s Kitchen. What about the girl’s family? Nobody’s been making enquiries about her from that direction, either. Poor Pearl Wallace seems to have been a complete nonentity, doesn’t she, sir?’
Dover stretched his legs out. ‘They always lumber me with these crummy old cases,’ he grumbled. ‘Anything that hits the headlines, they keep for themselves.’
MacGregor tried to look on the bright side. ‘Never mind, sir! I expect Pomeroy Chemicals can recognize a good professional job when they see it, whether it gets a lot of publicity or not.’
By now Dover had all but forgotten who the hell Pomeroy Chemicals were. ‘D’you know,’ he said, his eyes glazing over quite dreamily, ‘I’ve always wanted to investigate a murder that had got somebody from the Royal Family mixed up in it. Either way,’ he added generously. ‘Victim or killer.’Strewth, that’d get me in the history books, never mind the bloody newspapers! It’d get world coverage. I’d be able to write a book about it. Several books, probably. And then there’d be interviews and film rights and . . .’
MacGregor waited to see if Dover was going to finish the sentence, but he wasn’t. Even day-dreaming about work seemed to tire him out.
‘Oh, well, sir,’ said MacGregor, ‘there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there?’
‘Is there?’
‘And, speaking of tomorrow, sir’ – MacGregor thought he had made the transition really rather skilfully – ‘I was thinking that we ought to go and see the Headmaster of Mottrell Comprehensive School. You remember, sir, he’s the man who gave Pearl Wallace the reference that enabled her to get the job at Ermengilda’s Kitchen.’
‘What the hell do we want to see him for?’
‘We’ve got to see anybody who can give us any information about Pearl Wallace, sir.’
Dover tipped his bowler hat down over his eyes and a few specks of rudely disturbed dandruff floated down onto the shoulders of his overcoat. ‘’Strewth!’ he grunted disgustedly.
11
The Secretary of the Headmaster of Mottrell Comprehensive School was a woman of ample bosom and great calm. Christened ‘The Forlorn Hope’ by a member of the teaching staff who was more interested in military history than sex, she prided herself on taking everything in her stride. After nineteen gruelling years in the world of secondary education, the arrival of a couple of detectives from Scotland Yard didn’t raise so much as a flicker.
‘The Headmaster is expecting you,’ she acknowledged. ‘I’ll let him know you’ve arrived.’ She depressed the switch of the intercom on her desk. ‘It’s Miss Hope here, Headmaster!’
‘Carmen Miranda!’ crackled the intercom.
‘Vladivostok!’ responded Miss Hope placidly. She took time off to put her visitors in the picture. ‘Today’s password. That’s to let him know that I’m not contacting him whilst under duress. If I’d been standing here with a knife at my throat, I should have said, “Little Dorrit”.’ She addressed the intercom again ‘Detective Chief Inspector Dover from New Scotland Yard has arrived with his sergeant. Shall I show them in?’
The intercom croaked anxiously and unintelligibly.
Miss Hope permitted herself a slight gesture of impatience. ‘Yes, I have examined their credentials, Headmaster, and no, they are not carrying offensive weapons of any kind.’ She switched off and got to her feet. ‘This way, gentlemen.’
Dover and MacGregor, intrigued but not in view of Miss Hope’s supremely composed manner liking to comment, followed her obediently across the office to a communicating door largely labelled: ‘PRIVATE! NO ENTRY!! KEEP OUT!!! THIS MEANS YOU !!!!’
Miss Hope raised a capable looking hand and knocked. Two loud knocks. A pause. Two soft knocks. Another pause. Three loud knocks in rapid succession.
There was a short wait and then came the sound of chains being rattled, keys being turned and bolts being withdrawn. The door opened and Miss Hope returned to her desk. Dover and MacGregor entered the inner sanctum.
‘Do, please, sit down!’ The Headmaster, having conscientiously re-chained, re-locked and re-bolted his door, blocked it for good measure with a heavy filing cabinet before scurrying back for cover behind his desk.
Dover regarded the two wooden chairs with some disapproval but, since that was all there was, he moved one nearer to the desk and prepared to deposit his weary bones on it. Or, at least, he tried to move it. Both chairs were, as it happens, securely bolted to the floor.
‘A Senior Geography teacher in Crawley,’ explained the Headmaster with a death’s head grin, ‘had his skull fractured the other day by an umbrella stand. One can’t take too many precautions. Now’ – nervously he realigned the pick-axe handle with the edge of his blotter – ‘I understand you want some information about an ex-pupil of ours called Pearl Wallace?’
MacGregor took his eyes away from the windows which were well protected with fine-mesh chicken wire and tried to concentrate on the enquiries he was being paid to make. ‘Do you recognize this girl, sir?’
The Headmaster cringed away instinctively as MacGregor got up to pass his photograph of the dead girl across the desk. ‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘I don’t.’
‘But you’ve hardly looked at it, sir!’ MacGregor spoke sharply.
‘I don’t have to, sergeant. I have nearly two thousand pupils in my care. They are continually changing and I’ve so managed things that nowadays I hardly ever see any of them. The whole art of being the head of a comprehensive school,’ he added sententiously, ‘is delegation. I have succeeded in delegating practically everything, except the over-all responsibility, of course, and the paperwork. What,’ he asked as he wiped the palms of his hands on a large white handkerchief, ‘is the point of having a staff of seventy if you don’t trust them, eh?’
Dover was looking very boot-faced. He didn’t relish the prospect of having to move again when he’d only just got settled. ‘There must be
somebody who can tell us about the bloody girl.’
The Headmaster winced visibly at the brusqueness of this remark. ‘Oh, I have all the information here, all right,’ he said, removing the cosh which he had been using as a paperweight and picking up a bright pink folder. ‘This is Pearl Wallace’s file. Everything we know about her is in here.’
Dover pouted discontentedly. He was allergic to paper. ‘We were looking for more of the personal touch,’ he grumbled. ‘Like somebody who knew her and could fill us in about what sort of a kid she was.’
‘Not a hope!’ The Headmaster shook his head firmly. ‘It’s two years since she left and all her classroom contemporaries will have departed, too. And if there’s one thing my teaching staff are it’s uninvolved. It might be different if the girl had made her mark in some way or another. If she’d been very good or very bad. Those are the ones who tend to stick in the memory, however much one tries to forget them. But Pearl’ – he looked at the cover of the folder for the surname – ‘Pearl Wallace was nondescript to the point of vanishing, one might say. She was outstanding only in being perfectly average. Or’ – he rifled professionally through the papers – ‘just a little below average, if anything.’
‘Could I have a look, sir?’ MacGregor stretched out his hand slowly so as not to cause undue alarm and panic.
‘Certainly not!’ The Headmaster clutched the file possessively to his chest. ‘These records are highly confidential.’
‘We can easily get the necessary authorization, sir,’ said MacGregor in a bored voice. Past experience had taught him that such threats usually did the trick.
But the Headmaster of Mottrell Comprehensive was made of sterner stuff. He had not devoted twelve years of his life to these records for nothing. ‘In that case, sergeant,’ he responded loftily, ‘I suggest you go ahead and get it. Until such time as you do, these documents do not leave my hands.’
It was Dover who found a way out of the impasse. ‘Maybe you could read us out a few bits,’ he said, more reasonably and more understanding than was his wont, but still determined not to shift for at least the next half hour.
The Headmaster cautiously agreed that such a course of action might be possible. ‘What sort of thing did you want to know? She got a prize for Scriptural Knowledge in her first year here, and she sprained a finger playing netball when she was in III(d). Not badly, I’m glad to say, as the injury was dealt with by our own Sick Bay.’
Dover slumped in his chair. ‘What about boyfriends?’ He glanced across at MacGregor and snapped his fingers. That was his charming way of indicating that he wanted a cigarette.
There was a moment of confusion as the Headmaster dived down behind his desk and it took MacGregor some time before he could make him understand that the sounds he had heard were not those of a high-powered rifle. Then there was the problem of settling Dover, whose own nerves were in no very steady state after all the commotion. The information that smoking was not permitted within those particular confines of Academe seemed likely to prove the last straw.
‘Why the bloody hell not?’
An ashen-faced (and non-smoking) Headmaster stuck to his guns with the doggedness of which only the inherently timid are capable. ‘It’s a bad example for the children!’ he bleated.
Dover snatched the matches out of MacGregor’s hesitating hand and lit up defiantly. ‘There aren’t any bloody kids here!’
‘There are bloody kids everywhere!’ moaned the Headmaster, rocking desperately backwards and forwards in his chair. ‘They’re here all the time, watching and listening and sniffing. I try to keep them out but I’m fighting a losing battle. Dear God, don’t you people outside realize that Pupil Power has already taken over. It’s the hand that’s still in the cradle that’s rocking the world!’
‘In that case,’ snarled Dover, puffing smoke in all directions like the most satanic of those dark mills, ‘a few more fags here or there won’t make a ha’porth of bloody difference, will they?’ The three men remained closeted together for another hour without anything very profitable being achieved by anybody. This wasn’t as big a waste of Public Money as might at first appear, as none of them had really anything better to do with their time. In the end Dover and MacGregor were forced to beat their retreat with nothing more than the last known address of the girl’s parents to show for their morning’s pains.
‘And I’m telling you,’ said Dover when they were back once again sharing the rear seat of the police car, ‘that we’ll go and see Mr and Mrs What-d’you-call-’em tomorrow.’
‘But it seems such a waste of time, sir, to go all the way back to Frenchy Botham only to have to do the same journey again tomorrow. The Wallaces only live a mile or so away. We could be there in a matter of minutes.’
‘And have to break the news to them that their blooming daughter’s been croaked?’ Dover’s heavy jowls wobbled indignantly. ‘’Strewth, you know what it’ll be like. We’ll have ’em blubbering and snivelling all over the place. And we’d not get a sensible answer out of’em for bloody hours. It’ll be much better to let the local coppers handle it and us move in later when they’re over the shock.’
‘I doubt if there’ll be all that much grief, sir,’ observed MacGregor rather sadly. ‘The girl’s been missing for some time now and the parents seem to have done damn-all about it.’
Dover had found more arguments for his comfort. ‘Identification!’ he trumpeted, slapping a fat hand on an even fatter knee. ‘One of’em’ll have to come down to Frenchy Botham to identify the body. We’ll have ’em both shipped along tomorrow and then I can interview’em in peace and quiet at my leisure.’
MacGregor was dismayed. ‘But wouldn’t it be better to see them against the background of their own environment, sir? I know Pearl Wallace wasn’t living there at the time of her death, but it was presumably her home for the greater part of her life. You see, she seems to be such a nebulous sort of person, sir, that I feel any information we can get about her is valuable.’
‘We’re investigating a murder, laddie!’ Dover reminded him with that special sneer he reserved for anything smacking of the intellectual, ‘not doing an in-depth psychological study, for God’s sake! Besides, if she was all that bloody wishy-washy, she wouldn’t have gone and got herself killed, would she? She must have managed to get up somebody’s nose.’
‘Yes, and she managed to get herself pregnant, too, sir,’ agreed MacGregor. ‘I see your point. Poor kid, she didn’t have much of a life.’
Dover was indignant. ‘You want to save your sympathy for the living, laddie!’ he snorted. ‘There’s some of us who have to keep soldiering on no matter what.’
In the end a compromise was reached. In return for yet another expensive hotel lunch (plus liquid refreshment) Dover agreed to visit the Wallaces in their own home that very afternoon, provided that somebody else had broken the tragic news to them first.
MacGregor installed Dover in the nearest bar and rushed off to make the necessary arrangements and cash another cheque.
By the time Dover and MacGregor loomed up on the scene, the Wallaces had got over their initial shock and were now in the mood to start looking for a scapegoat. Or, at least, Mrs Wallace was. Mr Wallace liked a quiet life, though he had of course found out quite early on that agreeing with Mrs Wallace was the surest way of getting it.
Mrs Wallace hardly waited until she’d got Dover and MacGregor trapped in the three-piece suite in her front room. ‘I think it’s disgusting!’ she complained, opening her innings with an impressive display of righteous indignation. ‘A young girl like that! What were the police doing, that’s what I’d like to know!’
‘You’ve no doubt that the photograph you were shown is of your daughter, Pearl?’
Mrs Wallace fixed MacGregor with an angry glare and agreed that there was no doubt. ‘And I recognized the description of her clothes.’ She dabbed at her eyes. ‘I bought her that pantie and bra set myself, for her birthday. No, it’s our Pearl, all right.
I knew something terrible would happen to her.’
Mr Wallace put his two-pennyworth in while his wife indulged herself noisily in her grief. ‘They’re taking us down there tomorrow to make the formal identification. We’re both going to go. It should be a nice run if the rain keeps off.’
MacGregor kept an impassive face. ‘When did your daughter leave home?’
‘The minute she could!’ snapped Mrs Wallace. ‘She was just turned seventeen. Collected her birthday presents, got herself this job in Barford-in-the-Meadow and she was off. Just when we’d every right to expect a bit of a return on all the money we’ve laid out all these years. Why, we even let her spend a year at one of these commercial schools so’s she could learn to be a secretary, though for all the good it did I don’t know why we bothered. Paying, of course. She could have gone to the Tech but we were prepared to make sacrifices so that she could have the best.’
‘You get nothing for nothing in this world,’ said Mr Wallace, nodding his head wisely. ‘I always say that.’
MacGregor remained looking at Mrs Wallace. ‘Did your daughter give any reason for leaving home?’
‘No. She just said she was going, and she went.’
‘Was there anybody else involved? A man, for instance?’
Mrs Wallace bridled. ‘Not as far as I know. Besides, our Pearl wasn’t that sort of girl. She’d much rather watch television.’
‘They told you that she was pregnant?’
‘They told me,’ agreed Mrs Wallace grimly, ‘but I don’t know as how I believed it.’ It was a statement that seemed to put an effective stop to that line of questioning.
MacGregor plodded on, though. He clarified a few dates and settled the odd minor detail. Then there didn’t seem to be much more he could do. Barring some really extraordinary development, the dead girl was definitely Pearl Wallace, only child of Mr and Mrs Wallace. She had left home and gone to work in Barford-in-the-Meadow as a waitress. About her recent history, her parents seemed to know even less than the police did. There hadn’t been a complete break, though. Mrs Wallace acknowledged that they knew the girl’s address and . . . .’
