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?’
‘Sir?’
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
