‘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
