by Joyce Porter
Luckily Mrs Vincent had been a social worker for more than thirty years and it took more than the vagaries of Dover’s bladder to disconcert her. Indeed, she got Dover’s number with commendable speed.
‘I suppose I’d better order a large pot of black coffee,’ she remarked acidly as she and MacGregor watched Dover disappearing at an anxious trot down the long and highly polished corridor.
But Dover was gradually regaining his health and strength and by the time he returned to Mrs Vincent’s office he’d at least found his appetite again. While MacGregor plodded conscientiously through the preliminaries, Dover equally conscientiously gobbled down every biscuit on the coffee tray. It was only when he’d finished these and eaten all the lump sugar as well that he paid much attention to the rest of the proceedings.
Mrs Vincent was handing the photograph of the dead girl back to MacGregor. ‘Yes, that’s her all right. Pearl Wallace. Poor child!’
MacGregor tucked the photograph away. ‘And she came here to see you on Saturday, the eighth of this month?’
‘That’s right, sergeant. She’d telephoned earlier. I wouldn’t normally have given her an interview on a Saturday but I wasn’t free earlier and she seemed so distressed that I felt I had to make an exception. After all, it isn’t the first time and this isn’t a five-day-a-week job.’
‘She came to see you about having her baby adopted?’
Mrs Vincent stared unhappily at MacGregor for quite a long time. ‘I’m so sorry, sergeant,’ she said with a rueful laugh. ‘It’s just that I’m so used to total confidentiality in my work that I’m finding it rather difficult to break old habits.’
‘This is a murder case, madam,’ MacGregor reminded her. ‘Anything not strictly relevant to our enquiries will, however, be treated with as much discretion as . . .’
‘Oh, yes, I’m only hesitating, sergeant, not refusing. I’ve taken the trouble to clarify my position with our Head Office and they have authorized me to give you full co-operation. That still doesn’t mean I enjoy doing it, of course.’
MacGregor thought Mrs Vincent was really rather nice and he rewarded her by giving her one of his special twinkles. ‘It may help us find the girl’s murderer.’
Mrs Vincent sighed. ‘I suppose so. Now, you want to know why she came to see me. It wasn’t anything to do with having any baby of hers adopted, I’m afraid. She simply wanted as much information as we could give her about her own natural mother. Pearl Wallace, as you probably know, was offered for adoption through us some eighteen years ago. I wasn’t here at the time, as it happens, but we have records. We are obliged by law to keep them for at least twenty-five years, so the papers relating to Miss Wallace were readily available.’
‘Here, just a minute!’ Dover broke in pugnaciously. ‘I thought everything to do with adoptions was top secret.’
‘It’s this new law that’s been passed, sir,’ explained MacGregor. He prided himself on keeping abreast of current affairs and read the Daily Telegraph nearly every day. He could, therefore, be forgiven if he tended to expound at length to such as Dover who rarely got beyond the headlines in the Sun and always went to the toilet when the television news came on. ‘From now on, adopted children can, when they reach the age of eighteen, obtain details of their birth, if they want to. And I believe’ – he glanced for confirmation to Mrs Vincent – ‘that the legislation is retrospective.’ Dover wasn’t very good at thirteen letter words so MacGregor explained further. ‘That means, sir, that it’s not only children adopted after the passing of this new Act who can apply to see their birth certificates and so on. Those adopted before it was passed have been given the same rights.’
‘And that’s where our troubles begin,’ said Mrs Vincent.
Dover was still truculent. ‘I’m blowed if I see why!’
‘Well, take this poor girl, Pearl Wallace.’ Mrs Vincent had found from long experience that people with low iqs did better with concrete examples. ‘When she was adopted eighteen years ago, everything was done in an atmosphere of the greatest secrecy. The natural mother gave up all her rights. She usually never met the adopting parents or knew their name or where they lived. The adopting parents, too, were given only the most generalized and meagre details about the child’s background. A real effort was made, you see, to wipe out the past and to get the baby’s new identity established as quickly and securely as possible. All this was done primarily for the sake of the child, but it also allowed the natural mother to make a complete break with her past. She was free to make a fresh start, if that’s what she wanted.’
‘So why’ve they changed things?’ demanded Dover, scowling horribly.
‘Some adopted children want to know who their real parents were,’ said Mrs Vincent simply. ‘Not all of them, but some. Occasionally the desire becomes obsessive. This new law was designed to help them. However, in recognizing the undoubted rights of the adopted child to information about himself, the rights of the natural mother to anonymity have been sacrificed. Girls who offer their babies for adoption today know what they’re in for. Pearl Wallace’s mother eighteen years ago was, on the other hand, given every assurance by the courts, by society and by us that she would never see or hear of her child again.’
Dover grasped the implications. ‘Some women,’ he sniggered, ‘are in for a nasty shock when their little bastards come waltzing up the garden path shouting, “Mummie!” Well’ – he sat back and folded his arms in instant judgement – ‘serves ’em bloody well right! They should have behaved themselves in the first place.’
Mrs Vincent very sensibly decided not to get involved in a slanging match with Dover. Their views on unmarried mothers were poles apart, and no expenditure of logic or emotion was
likely to bring them any closer. She turned back to MacGregor who did, of course, tend to look better and better the more one saw of Dover. ‘From our point of view, then, Pearl Wallace was just one of many. We’ve dealt with dozens of these cases. Children who were adopted through this Society and who apply to us for any information we may have about their real parentage.’
‘Information,’ queried MacGregor, who was anxious to get the situation absolutely clear in his own mind, ‘which you are required by law to give?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Mrs Vincent. ‘Roughly, what happens is this. The adopted child now has the right to see his original birth certificate but, before even this is allowed, he has to have an interview with a social worker first. This is necessary because some of these adopted children are going through a real crisis of identity. They think that finding their real mother will solve all their problems and usher in the Golden Age. The social worker’s job is to point out that such an encounter will produce problems of its own and there is, of course, always the danger that there will be a second rejection by the natural mother which could be even more hurtful than the first. Now, this whole process may take as long as a couple of months and may not, as far as hard facts are concerned, be all that helpful. Any information will be at least eighteen years old and trying to trace the mother from that . . . Well, it’s usually at this stage that they come to us.’
MacGregor nodded. ‘But you are not legally required to help?’
‘No, but in practice we do. Some of us are not altogether happy about the situation but I feel that, in today’s climate of opinion, we must help if we can. After all, if there is any guilty party in an adoption – which I would dispute – it is certainly not the child.’
Dover was getting restless. MacGregor quickly gave him a cigarette but even this wasn’t enough to stop his loud mouth. ‘I thought,’ he said in an aside which was probably heard quite clearly in Wolverhampton, ‘we’d come to find something out about this dead girl, not listen to a blooming lecture. Can’t you get her to belt up? She’s making my bloody head ache!’
MacGregor twinkled quite hard at Mrs Vincent after this but, somehow, the magic seemed to have gone. This time Mrs Vincent definitely did not twinkle back.
She sat ve
ry stiff and upright behind her desk and made her next statement with a certain amount of curtness.‘Pearl Wallace came here for information about her natural mother. I gave her what we had.’
MacGregor wiggled his pencil by way of an interrogative.
‘Her mother was a young, unmarried woman of twenty-six,’ stated Mrs Vincent, still cold and unbending. ‘She either didn’t know or wouldn’t say who the father was. It appears she wasn’t a local girl. She was staying with an aunt and appeared to have come to this part of the world, where she wasn’t known, to have the baby.’
MacGregor, realizing that he wasn’t going to get the aunt’s address without actually asking for it, meekly asked.
Mrs Vincent stared right past him. ‘Do you have to have it?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ MacGregor wrote the address down carefully at Mrs Vincent’s dictation. ‘And the aunt’s name?’
‘Kincardine. Mrs Kincardine.’
Dover broke into the exchanges. ‘We’ll need the name of the blooming mother, too,’ he pointed out.
‘Jones,’ said Mrs Vincent, her lips puckering disdainfully. ‘Muriel Jones.’
‘Jones?’ Dover was not one for mincing matters. ‘Now pull the other one!’ he invited with heavy humour.
Mrs Vincent shuddered. ‘That was the name she gave.’
‘And you lot accepted it?’ asked Dover incredulously.
‘Why not? It’s a perfectly reasonable name. Why should you assume that it’s not genuine?’
Dover sniffed to indicate that he wasn’t there to answer questions, thank you very much! ‘And what was the girl going to do with all this information of yours? Try and follow it up?’
‘One would imagine so.’ Mrs Vincent’s helpful nature got the better of her and she became fractionally more co-operative. ‘She was extremely keen to find her mother, but I was puzzled by her attitude.’
‘In what way, madam?’ MacGregor got in quickly before Dover could start putting everybody’s back up again.
Mrs Vincent sighed, hesitated and frowned. ‘I must have dealt with scores of adopted children in my time – teenagers, mostly – who were trying to trace their real parents. They were searching for love, of course. Pearl Wallace wasn’t like that.’
‘Well, what was she like?’ demanded Dover impatiently.
‘It struck me that she wasn’t trying to find her real mother out of love, but out of hate. I felt she was seeking a confrontation, a show-down. God forgive me, but the idea of blackmail even crossed my mind.’
‘Blackmail?’ MacGregor looked up. ‘Really?’
Dover concentrated on the basics. ‘And you didn’t know she was pregnant herself?’
Mrs Vincent shook her head. ‘No, but it would explain a lot. Pearl implied that she needed help – financial help. Presumably her adopted parents wouldn’t or couldn’t give it her, and no doubt the father of her child was equally unwilling. That only leaves the real mother, doesn’t it?’
‘Or the State,’ said Dover sourly. ‘She could always have got a hand-out there.’
‘I think she preferred to try and get it out of her mother,’ said Mrs Vincent with some reluctance. ‘It would give her more satisfaction.’
‘Suppose the real mother refused to pay up? You know — publish and be damned?’
Mrs Vincent looked steadily at MacGregor. ‘There’d be trouble,’ she said quietly. ‘I only saw Pearl Wallace for about three-quarters of an hour but I don’t have any doubts about that. She seemed to be nursing a grudge against the whole, wide world.’
Dover and MacGregor took their leave. Back in the cosiness of the police car, Dover took a quick snooze while MacGregor and the driver searched out the village which Pearl Wallace’s mother had given as her address.
‘There it is, sarge!’ The driver jabbed his finger into the dogeared map. ‘Norrisbridge! It’s not all that far off. We could be there in ten minutes.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the back seat. ‘Why don’t we just go, eh? If I take it nice and easy we could be there before His Nibs knows what’s hit him.’
MacGregor was second to none in his low opinion of Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover, but that didn’t mean he was prepared to tolerate disparaging remarks from a lowly police driver. ‘Watch it!’ he warned and, thanks to Dover, made another enemy for life.
‘Pearl Who?’ asked Dover, staring dopily at his sergeant.
‘The girl whose dead body was found in amongst the bushes at Frenchy Botham, sir!’ MacGregor regretted he’d been unable to take the driver’s advice and only wake the old fool when they got there.
‘Oh, yes.’ Dover hoisted himself more or less into the horizontal and gazed vacantly around. ‘What are we stopping here for?’
‘We were just checking the route to Norrisbridge, sir.’ MacGregor snapped his fingers. ‘Carry on, driver!’
Dover sullenly watched the suburban landscape flow steadily past the car windows. ‘Norrisbridge?’
‘Where the dead girl’s mother’s aunt lived, sir.’
Dover grunted. ‘I reckon we’re wasting our time over this long-lost mother business,’ he grumbled, all but unhinging his jaws in a mighty yawn. ‘We’ve got the broad outlines of the case. Why’ – he paused to give the waiting world another look at his tonsils – ‘complicate things? I mean,’ – he scratched his stomach with a good deal more energy than he ever devoted to detecting – ‘that Waifs and Strays woman clinched it as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Mrs Vincent, sir?’ MacGregor couldn’t for the life of him think what Mrs Vincent had said that would confirm Dover’s theory that Pearl Wallace had been murdered by the father of her unborn child.
‘She said Thingummy-jig was capable of blackmail. Right? Well, all she got wrong was who the victim was. The one that girl tried to put the squeeze on was lover-boy.’ He stopped straining his eyes by gawping out of the window and sank back into the cushions. ‘You mark my words, laddie! Pound to a penny I’m right!’
15
‘I should have gone again,’ admitted Dover in a rare orgy of self-criticism, ‘back at that bloody orphanage place. Well, don’t just stand there like a lemon!’ he urged. ‘Ring again! Use your bloody boot if they won’t answer!’
‘They seem to be out, sir,’ said MacGregor, disloyally reflecting that it had been many a long year since Dover had been so keen to get an interview.
‘Nonsense!’ snarled Dover, looking more worried than angry.
‘It looks all shut up to me, sir.’ This contribution came from the police driver who had emerged from the car to stretch his legs.
They were all standing in front of a row of mean little semidetached houses, most of which had been further disfigured by the addition of such improvements as heliotrope front doors, picture windows and wrought-iron door furniture made of plastic. Number Twenty-seven, the house they were interested in, was however still untouched and in the ignoble state its jobbing builder had intended.
The police driver – the only one of the trio who had retained the common touch – collared a passing neighbour. ‘Anybody at home at Number Twenty-seven, love?’
The neighbour took in the situation at a glance, though she was slightly puzzled by the fat man in the bowler hat who kept hopping about from one foot to the other. ‘Come to take him away, have you?’ she asked confidently. ‘Well, not before time, if you ask me. You’ll have to break in, you know. He’s not opened that door for the last five years to my certain knowledge. Except to Mrs O’Brien and it’s no good you trying to get hold of her because she’s gone off to Morecambe for the day to see her sister.’ The neighbour neatly eluded the police driver’s restraining grasp and went rejoicing on her way.
Dover, whose predicament was growing acute, turned on the police driver. ‘You bloody moron!’ he howled. ‘Why didn’t you ask her if I could use her place?’
The police driver was unversed in the eccentricities of Dover’s physiology and didn’t know quite what to make of this outburst. Before he co
uld ask for enlightenment, though, MacGregor broke in with some good news.
‘It’s all right, I think somebody’s coming!’
It was only the letter-box that opened.
‘Bugger off!’ advised a wavering voice which had long since decided that the best way of dealing with visiting humanity was via a two-inch thick door. ‘Bugger off or I’ll set the Alsatian on you!’
MacGregor bent double and tried to project all his persuasive charm through that narrow slit. ‘Er – could we just have a word, sir?’
‘Bugger off!’ came the amiable response. ‘I’ve already sent for the bobbies!’
MacGregor produced his warrant card and held it out to the letter-box. ‘We are the police, sir!’
The yellowed eye, which was all that was visible of a very misanthropic old man, blinked contemptuously. ‘Any idiot can get hold of a bit of cardboard! Go on, push off! I’ve got a loaded shot-gun here,’ he added with peculiar malice.
‘Break the bloody door down!’ ordered Dover, taking up a position well clear of any possible line of fire. ‘Don’t waste your time talking to him!’
But MacGregor bent down to the letter-box again. This time his honeyed words were greeted by a series of blasts on a police whistle, interspersed with unlikely appeals to even more unlikely accomplices.
‘You ready with your pitchfork, Tom?’ screamed the unseen occupant of Number Twenty-seven. ‘Got the machine-gun loaded, Bert? Stack the hand-grenades by the bedroom window, Harry, and tell Jack to keep his rifle trained on this young devil by the door!’
MacGregor’s head was spinning with the noise, to which had been added some frantic banging on a dustbin lid, and he turned round to tell Dover that in his opinion the situation was hopeless. But Dover wasn’t there. Before MacGregor could make further enquiries about the current whereabouts of his lord and master, however, that familiar and gruesome figure came waddling back round the side of the house.
‘’Strewth, that’s better!’ puffed Dover. He now seemed prepared to take a rosier view of life.
