by Joyce Porter
‘There was the card for my birthday.’
Mr Wallace nodded his head again. ‘And she rang up to wish us a Happy Christmas. She wasn’t ungrateful. No, people can say what they like, but that girl wasn’t ungrateful.’
Dover sank deeper into his chair. From not having wanted to come, he now as usual didn’t want to go. Well, not yet. Not when he’d just got comfortable. He was annoyed to see that that idiot MacGregor appeared to be running out of questions.
Dover cleared his throat and both Mr and Mrs Wallace glanced instinctively upwards to see if that crack in the ceiling had suddenly got worse. Dover waited impatiently until their attention was focused back on him. Naturally he didn’t like asking for afternoon tea just like that. This was a house of bereavement, after all. He cleared his throat once again and, unable to think of anything new, went trundling back over the same old ground. ‘Are you sure she didn’t have any reason for leaving home?’ Mrs Wallace expressed herself just as sure as she’d been the first time the question had been put.
Dover drew on his own extensive experience of family life. ‘There wasn’t a row or anything?’
‘No!’ Mrs Wallace wasn’t having any of that, thank you very much!
Mr Wallace, on the other hand, was anxious to be helpful. ‘Not a row, exactly,’ he said. ‘And not then, either, come to that.’ Dover blinked. ‘And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Mr Wallace looked apprehensively at Mrs Wallace, and then he looked at Dover. For the first time in his life he realized what it was really like to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. He wasn’t given time to work out the odds.
Dover who, during the entire course of this investigation, hadn’t yet been able to sink his fist into anybody’s face began to make some ominous rumbles and actually looked as though he might leap aggressively to his feet at any moment.
Mr Wallace quickly, and erroneously, decided that Nell probably wasn’t as cross as she looked.
‘Well, if you ask me,’ he said defensively, ‘our Pearl was never the same since she found out she was adopted. It seemed to upset her somehow. She didn’t say much but, if you ask me, things were never the same after that.’
12
Mr Wallace’s revelation seemed to have released some inner spring in Mrs Wallace. In spite of Dover’s unwillingness to act as an unpaid father confessor, he was more or less obliged to sit there while his hostess let it all come pouring out.
It appeared that Mr and Mrs Wallace, both veritable cat’s cradles of complexes and inhibitions, had been unable to have children, and, faced with the fecundity of their numerous friends and relations, had been bitterly ashamed of their failure to contribute to the population explosion. When, after many trials and tribulations, they had managed to adopt a baby girl, they had broken off all connection with their respective families and former life, and moved right away from Edgbaston to start again from scratch in Mottrell.
‘We made up our minds we were going to bring her up as our very own little girl,’ explained Mrs Wallace, beginning to get weepy. ‘That’s what makes it all so awful now, you see. All that time and trouble and money and sacrifices, all wasted. Eighteen years of it and all gone for nothing, as you might say. Why, we could have had a car or holidays abroad or anything. Here’ – she interrupted her lamentations to strike a more overtly practical note – ‘what was she doing in this place she was killed in, anyway?’
‘Frenchy Botham?’ said MacGregor. ‘We haven’t been able to find out yet. We were hoping you might be able to tell us.’
Mrs Wallace shook her head. ‘A village, is it? I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Me neither,’ said Mr Wallace.
Mrs Wallace resumed her story. ‘We never told her she was adopted, you see,’ she said as she folded and refolded the sodden handkerchief she was clutching. ‘That’s why we finished with all our relations. One of’em would have been sure to blab it all out sooner or later, and neither me nor Mr Wallace was going to have the finger of shame pointed at our little Pearl.’
MacGregor was doing his best to follow Mrs Wallace’s saga on the off-chance that she might say something useful. Occasionally, however, even he got lost. ‘Finger of shame, Mrs Wallace? I don’t quite understand.’
Mrs Wallace glanced furtively round her own over-crowded sitting room and lowered her voice to a barely audible whisper.
‘Well, she was one of those, wasn’t she? Illegit. I mean, they don’t tell you much but they did tell us that. You know – her mother wasn’t – well – married.’
‘She didn’t even know who the father was,’ added Mr Wallace morosely before being silenced by a warning glare from his wife.
‘We weren’t,’ declared Mrs Wallace with noble simplicity, ‘going to have our little chick called a bastard.’
It was MacGregor who broke into the ensuing respectful silence. He could see that Dover was wilting and he always felt it made such a bad impression when a senior, top-ranking Scotland Yard officer just got up and walked out in the middle of somebody else’s sentence. ‘Er – how did your daughter find out she was an adopted child?’
Well, it was a long and complicated story which not even MacGregor thought was worth the trouble of unravelling. It was something to do with passports and a school trip to Holland, and MacGregor was content to let it go at that.
‘I was so took aback,’ declared Mrs Wallace, ‘when she asked me that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just told her the truth. That did it, of course. She took it very hard. Almost overnight she seemed to sort of turn right against us.’
‘I reckon she’d always half suspected it,’ said Mr Wallace. He was clearly voicing an opinion that he had voiced many times before.
Mrs Wallace’s response seemed equally automatic. ‘Nonsense! How could she?’
Mr Wallace inclined towards MacGregor. ‘Things got so bad that, in the end, we went to the doctor.’
‘For advice,’ said Mrs Wallace. ‘And to the vicar. Fat lot of good either of them did.’
‘Well, we don’t go to church, of course,’ said Mr Wallace dully.
‘We go to the doctor!’ snapped his wife. ‘And what’s the good of telling us seventeen years later that we should have told her she was adopted from the start?’
‘They did advise us to be patient with her,’ said Mr Wallace, miserably addressing the room at large.
‘We were patient with her!’ stormed Mrs Wallace, the tears gushing forth again. ‘And look where it got us! Our Pearl running away from home and getting herself pregnant and dead! If that’s what being patient gets you, I’m sorry we bothered!’
MacGregor himself was getting bored with the Wallaces. With some difficulty he managed to extract the only piece of factual information which they seemed capable of supplying: the name and address of the adoption society from which they had got Pearl.
‘Of course I bloody well noticed!’ roared Dover when, some fifteen minutes later, they were back in the police car and speeding on their way to Frenchy Botham and a promised supper of boiled brisket and dumplings, with bread-and-butter pudding and gorgonzola cheese to follow. ‘Wadderyethink I am? A bloody moron or something?’
Luckily MacGregor knew a rhetorical question when he heard one and didn’t feel obliged to answer.
‘It might,’ opined Dover, sinking several of his chins deep into the collar of his overcoat and tipping his bowler hat well down over his eyes, ‘be the break-through we’ve been looking for.’
MacGregor felt he had to play Devil’s Advocate. ‘Just because the adoption society where Pearl Wallace came from is in Birmingham, sir, it doesn’t mean that that’s where she was telephoning. She could have been ringing thousands of other places in Birmingham when she made that call from Ermengilda’s Kitchen. It’s probably just a coincidence, sir.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ rumbled Dover. ‘Besides, it’ll be easy enough to check.’ He sniggered softly to himself. ‘Like father, like son, eh?’
Dover’s face, glowing milkily in the lights of passing cars, emerged momentarily from its cocoon of greasy, dark-blue abercrombie. ‘’Strewth, I should have thought even you could see that. She was following in her mother’s footsteps, wasn’t she?’
‘Following in her mother’s footsteps, sir?’ MacGregor had had a long, tiring day, too and he wasn’t at his brightest.
‘Oh, use your brains, laddie!’ snorted Dover impatiently. ‘Look, she runs away from home and heads for the bright lights. Before you can say “Women’s Lib”, she’s got herself enrolled in the Pudding Club. Well, if that isn’t the spitting image of Mum, I don’t know what is.’
‘And then she starts thinking about having the child adopted,’ said MacGregor slowly, trying the idea on for size. ‘Again, as her mother did.’
‘If you ask me, she didn’t have much blooming choice. I’ll lay odds there was no question of marriage and she’d not be likely to get much help from her adoptive mother and father, would she? That leaves abortion or adoption.’
‘She could have kept the child, sir.’
‘And I,’ scoffed Dover with a rare flash of insight, ‘could become Chief Bleeding Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police! I’ll tell you one thing, though, laddie.’
MacGregor waited with well-controlled eagerness for the next pearl of wisdom.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t tell these people at this Bullfrog place who the father was.’
‘It’s Bullrush, actually, sir.’ MacGregor had a tidy mind and just couldn’t stop himself. ‘The Bullrush Interdenominational Adoption Society.’
‘What I said!’ grunted Dover. ‘You mark my words, if she’s told anybody who Young Lochinvar is, she’s told them.’
‘If she’s told anybody, sir,’ agreed MacGregor doubtfully. He was not blessed with Dover’s bounding optimism. ‘Actually, sir, I don’t quite see how all this is going to fit in.’
‘With what?’
‘Well, with what we’ve been assuming up to now, sir.’
Dover submerged himself even deeper into his overcoat. ‘Such as what?’ he demanded in a voice that was muffled but menacing.
‘Well, sir, if Pearl Wallace was intending to have the baby adopted, what was she doing in Frenchy Botham?’
The response came as surely as night follows day. ‘Frenchy Botham?’
‘Where her dead body was found, sir.’
‘She was gunning for the father.’Strewth, I thought we’d settled all that bloody years ago. Blackmailing him or whatever.’
‘But, if the child was going to be adopted, sir,’ ventured MacGregor a little diffidently, ‘would she still be going to all that trouble to contact the father?’
‘Why the hell not?’
MacGregor didn’t quite know. ‘It’s just that she would seem to be in a stronger position to put pressure on the father, sir, if she was intending to keep the child.’
Dover yawned noisily and thought quickly. ‘The father wouldn’t know she was going to have it adopted, would he?’ he asked triumphantly. ‘She could spin him any old yam. Look, laddie, stop picking at it! We’ve got the picture clear now and I’m buggered if I’m going to have you keep messing it up. The putative father’ – Dover was rather pleased with this piece of jargon so he repeated it – ‘the putative father passes through What-do-you-call-it . . .’
‘Barford-in-the-Meadow, sir.’
‘. . . and has it off with young What’s-her-name . . .’
‘Pearl Wallace, sir.’
‘. . . leaving her holding the baby. Somehow or other she’s got hold of his address. Or partial address.’ Dover corrected himself quickly as he sensed rather than saw that MacGregor’s mouth was opening to remind him about the telephone kiosk on Chapminster railway station. ‘She follows him, demands money or marriage or whatever, and he smacks her over the head with whatever blunt instrument he happens to have handy. Got it now? Right, well’ – Dover sank once more into his coat collar – ‘I’m just going to have a quiet think about – er – things, so belt up for a bit!’
Inspector Walters turned up at The Laughing Dog again just as Dover and MacGregor were finishing their supper. In Dover’s case it had been the usual ‘feeding-time at the zoo’ spectacle, and Inspector Walters didn’t appreciate what he’d been spared by arriving only in time for the coffee. Not that the Inspector relished this business of trying to hold conferences across gravy-bespattered tablecloths, but it seemed, to be the only time he could ever get hold of these Scotland Yard men. And this conference had to be held because Inspector Walter’s Chief Constable was beginning to get quite neurotic about not knowing what the hell was going on.
Dover, mindful of past favours, greeted Inspector Walters warmly. The local chap had proved himself more than willing to stand his round, and Dover didn’t ask more than that of anyone. ‘What, no brandy tonight, Inspector?’ he had called out jovially.
Inspector Walters had been half-hoping that it was somebody else’s turn to push the boat out. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he muttered awkwardly and shuffled off to rectify the omission.
With the Inspector’s drinks and the sergeant’s cigarettes, Dover was quite content to sit on over the supper table while MacGregor gave a somewhat optimistic account of the progress so far in the case of the murder of Pearl Wallace. Inspector Walters, while not bursting a gut with enthusiasm, had to admit that some progress had indeed been made. The identity of the dead girl had finally been established and that, Inspector Walters grudgingly conceded, was marginally better than the proverbial slap in the belly with a wet fish.
‘And now you’re off again tomorrow to Birmingham to see the people at the adoption society, are you?’ he asked unhappily. The Chief Constable would run amuck when he heard this.‘I suppose that’ll take all day, too?’
‘It’s a long way,’ MacGregor pointed out, put on the defensive by Inspector Walter’s obvious disapproval.
‘Wouldn’t a telephone call do just as well? After all, you said yourself, you don’t know for sure that Pearl Wallace was ever in touch with them at all. She could have been ringing anybody on that Birmingham number and it may have nothing to do with her death at all.’
‘I’ve got a feeling,’ declared Dover, who wasn’t going to be deprived of another day joy-riding round the countryside in a nice comfy car. ‘In my gut.’ He belched comfortably. ‘There’s a connection there all right.’
Inspector Walters knew a case of malingering when he saw one and remained sceptical. ‘I still can’t help feeling that the solution to the murder lies here in Frenchy Botham, sir,’ he said stubbornly. ‘After all, she did come here – half-way across the country, it seems. And she did ask the way to The Grove – and that’s where the dead body was found. To my way of thinking it stands out a mile that somebody in The Grove killed her – or at the very least knows a hell of a lot more about her than he’s admitting.’
‘Me, I’ve learned to distrust the obvious,’ pontificated Dover, trying to convey at the same time the message that it wouldn’t take much to put him right off Inspector Blooming Walters. ‘Result of a lifetime’s experience. And now’ – he bestowed an avuncular beam on his two young companions – ‘how about the same again, eh?’
MacGregor went off to do the honours this time, and Dover skilfully turned defence into attack though he was not actually feeling entirely himself. He pointed an accusing finger more or less in the direction of Inspector Walters. ‘And what’bout you, matie? What’ve you been doing with yourself all day, eh? Been handing out bloody parking tickets?’
Inspector Walters repudiated the charge indignantly. ‘I’m not Traffic!’ he protested. ‘I’m CID like yourself, sir. And I’ve been busy all day on the enquiries you asked me to make.’
‘Is that so?’ Dover’s eyes crossed most disconcertingly as he raised his empty glass hopefully to his lips.
Inspector Walters dragged a handful of papers out of his pocket and deposited them on the tab
le in front of him. ‘You remember, sir? You asked me to check and see if any of the residents in The Grove had got criminal records. Well, I’ve got the results here.’
‘Good for you!’ applauded Dover, paying more attention to trying to lick round the inside of his glass. ‘Well done!’
‘And I think you’ll be surprised to learn, sir, that most of’em have.’
‘Not me,’ mumbled Dover gloomily. ‘I’ve got past being surprised at anything, I have. Ah!’ He turned happily to welcome MacGregor who was back with fresh supplies.
‘I’ll get rid of those first, sir,’ said Inspector Walters, ‘who have led blameless lives of undetected crime. Then we can concentrate on the bastards who were stupid enough to get caught, OK, sir?’
‘OK!’ agreed Dover, absentmindedly commandeering the whole tray of drinks. ‘Carry on, laddie! I’m all ears!’
MacGregor resumed his place at the table and got his notebook out. Had he left it too late, he wondered hopelessly, to train as a dentist or an income tax inspector?
13
‘Actually,’ began Inspector Walters as Dover refreshed himself audibly with a mouthful of Three Star, ‘there’s only a couple of them who aren’t, as we say, known to the police. That’s old Miss Charlotte Henty-Harris and young Mrs Bones. They’re both clean. Now, we haven’t had time to do much about Mademoiselle Blanchette Foucher, the Bones’s current au pair girl, but I’ve been in touch with the French police. Frankly, though, I don’t expect anything startling to turn up there, but it never does any harm to be thorough.’
Dover seemed to be experiencing some difficulty in getting both his eyes to function in harmony. He also appeared somewhat confused. ‘What the hell’s he nattering on about?’
The appeal was addressed to MacGregor who attempted to explain. ‘Inspector Walters has been checking to see if any of the suspects has a criminal record, sir.’
