‘I’m afraid I don’t see any alternative, sir.’
Dover scowled. ‘Well, I bloody well do, laddie!’
MacGregor gritted his teeth. ‘We must follow this through, sir.’
Dover could be equally mulish.? There’s not an atom of proof that the girl’s murder had anything to do with her being illegitimate.’
‘Sir, we can’t ignore the fact that, immediately before her death, Pearl Wallace was trying to trace her real mother. We must follow in her footsteps. If she leads us to a dead end and she didn’t find her mother – all right! Then we’ll have to start looking elsewhere. But until then . . .’
The real trouble was that Dover – to paraphrase the words of that fine old song – was tired of living but scared of flying. He didn’t like boats, either. All of which made the prospect of a trip to the Isle of Man look most unattractive.
Naturally Dover marshalled his objections under a horse of a very different colour. ‘We can’t go haring off to the other end of the world on a wild-goose chase, just like that,’ he muttered. ‘Think of the expense. We’ve got the tax-payer’s money to think of. These are hard times.’
MacGregor didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Pearl Wallace,’ he said patiently, ‘came to Norrisbridge searching for her natural mother. The person she thought could help her was her mother’s aunt, Mrs Kincardine. Mrs Kincardine no longer lives in Norrisbridge, but a neighbour, Mrs Shackleton, tells the girl that she left some ten or eleven years ago to live with her son in the Isle of Man. Mrs Shackleton can’t remember the address after all these years, of course, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t Douglas. She thinks it might be Ramsey. Now, with clues like that Pearl Wallace had every chance of tracking Mrs Kincardine down. The Isle of Man is a comparatively small place and Kincardine’s by no means a common name. All I’m saying, sir, is that we must do the same.’
‘We can get the Isle of Man police to do it, can’t we?’ whined Dover.
‘Naturally we’ll call on them for help in tracing Mrs Kincardine, sir, but I really do feel we ought to conduct the interview with her ourselves.’ Grimly MacGregor sought for something that would spur Dover on to greater heights. ‘What about Pomeroy Chemicals, sir?’
But Pomeroy Chemicals was now so far back in Dover’s past that he’d almost forgotten who they were. The incident of the grossly misused application form seemed to have wiped them completely from his mind.
‘Or,’ MacGregor went on, seeing that Pomeroy Chemicals had failed to do the trick, ‘what about me popping over there quickly by myself while you consolidate the main lines of the investigation at Frenchy Botham?’ MacGregor was rather pleased with the way he had phrased that.
It worked like a dream.
‘How long does it take to fly?’ demanded Dover, capitulating to the green-eyed god of jealousy without a qualm.
16
A tactful veil will be drawn over the precise circumstances of how they brought Dover to the Isle of Man. Suffice it to say that Detective Sergeant MacGregor, British Airways, a very broadminded air hostess and a considerable amount of malt whisky were all involved. It was agreed by those concerned that, such was Dover’s euphoria, he could probably have made the journey without the assistance of powered flight, if pushed.
The Isle of Man police, whose co-operation had been requested both as a matter of courtesy and in order to save time, had done their job and the right Kincardine had been found without much difficulty. This was the son of the Mrs Kincardine they had been trying to trace, and an appointment was made for Dover and MacGregor to see him. The Isle of Man police had also kindly placed a car at the disposal of their distinguished visitors from Scotland Yard.
The young police driver helped decant Dover into the back seat. He was a fresh-faced, innocent lad who had come from a rather sheltered home. His Inspector, who had heard about old Wilf on the police grape-vine, had specially selected the boy for the job, feeling that it would be a good idea to let him see something of the seamier side of life before the tourist season got into full swing.
It was a comparatively short drive from the airport, which was just as well as Dover wouldn’t have the windows open and the young police driver was in grave danger of vicarious intoxication from the fumes.
Dover was in great form. Feeling happier now that he had got his bottom on terra firma, he gesticulated sketchily at the passers-by. ‘I thought everybody’d have three legs!’ he quipped merrily. ‘And the cats!’ He turned to MacGregor. ‘I thought all the bloody pussy cats’d have no tails and all the bloody people’d have three legs, eh?’
MacGregor pushed Dover back into his own comer and tried to make out that they weren’t together.
Mr Kincardine turned out to be a man of noteworthy mediocrity. He ran a small ironmonger’s shop and only managed to make ends meet by being amazingly unbusinesslike about Value Added Tax and other fiscal matters. He took Dover and MacGregor through to a back room while his wife took charge in the shop. She was congenitally incapable of adding two and two together but, since her mistakes were rarely in the customer’s favour, Mr Kincardine didn’t mind letting her stand in for him occasionally.
The back room was really more of a store room but it contained a couple of chairs and a table and Mr Kincardine thought it would do. MacGregor picked out the sturdier looking chair and dumped Dover on it before getting down to brass tacks.
‘Oh, I expect it’s her,’ said
