‘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.
All MacGregor could do was pray, for the umpteenth time, that the earth beneath his feet would open up and swallow him. He gestured helplessly towards the back of the house. ‘Oh, sir, you haven’t?’
‘Gam!’ blustered Dover. ‘Don’t be such a bloody little namby-pamby! Besides, I read somewhere it is supposed to be good for cabbages. Now, how far have we got here?’Strewth’ – he paused to listen to the shrill battle cries and Red Indian war whoops which were proceeding unabated from behind the still-closed door of Number Twenty-seven – ‘he’ll be doing himself a mischief if he keeps on like that!’
‘And we’ll be accused of police brutality,’ agreed MacGregor bitterly.
Dover was always ready to cut his losses. ‘He probably doesn’t know anything anyhow. Let’s leave him to it.’
MacGregor didn’t like admitting he was beaten but, on this occasion, he was inclined to agree with Dover. ‘I don’t suppose Pearl Wallace would have got any information out of him, either, sir,’ he observed as he trailed behind his lord and master back to the car. ‘I think we can assume that Mrs Kincardine is no longer living at this address and, if the old boy in there does know where she is, he’s not telling.’
Dover began to squeeze himself into the back seat of the car.
‘Told you it was a waste of time.’
‘Maybe if I just asked around, sir?’
Dover was concentrating on making himself comfortable.
‘Nobody’ll know anything. It was all nearly twenty years ago.’
‘Was you inquiring about Mrs Kincardine?’
The female neighbour, who had previously been accosted by the police driver, had returned from the corner shop with her loaf of sliced bread and had been standing, unnoticed by our eagle-eyed detectives, listening to the greater part of their conversation.
MacGregor turned to her eagerly. ‘Yes, we were, as a matter of fact. Did you know her?’
‘Oh, yes.’ The female neighbour rested her shopping basket companionably on the bonnet of the police car. ‘We’ve lived at Number Eighteen for nigh on thirty-two years. I knew Mrs Kincardine quite well. Like I told that girl, we were never what you might call close friends, but we never missed speaking. She moved ten years ago. No—I tell a lie—it must have been eleven.’ MacGregor chivalrously restrained himself from grabbing the good woman and shaking the information out of her. ‘What girl?’
‘I don’t know what girl, do I? She never told me her name and I didn’t ask. Well, you don’t, do you?’
MacGregor whipped out his picture of Pearl Wallace and handed it across with absurdly trembling fingers. Were they really going to be lucky at last? ‘Is this the girl you’re talking about?’ The female neighbour – her name was Mrs Shackleton – agreed that it was. ‘But she didn’t look like that. Here’ – Mrs Shackleton pushed the photograph back into MacGregor’s hands with a shudder of distaste – ‘she’s not dead, is she?’
‘I’m afraid she is.’
‘Well, I’ll go to our house!’ Mrs Shackleton swayed a little on her feet. ‘I think I’d like to sit down,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I’ve come over all faint.’
They put her in the back seat next to Dover who was persuaded with considerable difficulty to reduce his occupancy of the available space to a mere two-thirds.
Mrs Shackleton, it transpired, was in the habit of carrying a small flask of British Ruby Sherry for just such emergencies. When she had ‘wet her lips’, as she put it, and, much to Dover’s fury, tucked the flask away in her handbag, she pronounced herself fit and willing to continue with her story.
‘She was just like you lot,’ she began. ‘Hammering away on that silly old devil’s door and getting nothing but whistles and howls and bangings for her pains. His brain’s gone, you know. Senile decay, my husband says it is. They ought to put him away, really. The Welfare keep calling but they never seem to do anything much. Of course, like I said to Mrs O’Brien, as long as she keeps going round and doing for him,
