MacGregor pushed the photograph of Pearl Wallace back into Mr Kincardine’s clammy hands. ‘Don’t you know?’
Mr Kincardine was apologetic. ‘These young ladies all look much of a muchness, don’t they. Long hair and great green circles round their eyes.’
‘Maybe,’ said Dover, clawing his way up to the surface for a moment’s unpleasantness, ‘you were paying more attention to her figure than her face, you dirty devil!’
Mr Kincardine blenched. The shrewdness of the bleary-eyed fat man terrified him. God knows, there’d been enough trouble about that other girl without. . . He tried to smile at MacGregor.
‘Yes, it’s her, all right,’ he said, ‘Definitely.’
‘And she came here to see you?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Oh, it’s a couple of weeks ago, maybe three.’ Mr Kincardine consulted a wall calendar which was covered with enigmatic signs. ‘It’d be Tuesday the eleventh.’ He pointed to a thick blue circle round the date. ‘That’s the day they deliver the paraffin. The tanker was just driving off when she arrived. She asked if she could have a few words with me so I invited her into the sitting room upstairs.’
Dover, who seemed to have sex on the brain, interrupted again. ‘Upstairs, eh?’
‘The smell of the paraffin,’ explained Mr Kincardine with an ingratiating smile. ‘This room was reeking with it. Otherwise I’d have talked to her in here, of course.’
Dover leered. ‘Of course! Was your wife in?’
‘Er, no, she was out.’
‘Fancy!’ sneered Dover, finding Mr Kincardine guilty as charged and with no extenuating circumstances. ‘You do surprise me!’
‘I kept the door open at the top of the stairs,’ gabbled Mr Kincardine, anxious to demonstrate that all the proprieties had been observed. ‘In case a customer came into the shop.’
But Dover was no longer listening, being once again obliged to lend an ear to the urgent promptings of one of his inner men. There was a message coming up that it would be injudicious to ignore. Dover broke into Mr Kincardine’s feeble apologia. ‘Where’s your toilet?’
‘Eh? Oh, upstairs!’ Mr Kincardine pulled himself together. ‘I’ll show you.’
‘Don’t bother!’ Dover much preferred exploring other people’s houses in the absence of their owners. ‘I’ll find it.’
Mr Kincardine and MacGregor waited in respectful silence as Dover thumped his laborious way up the stairs to the living quarters above the shop. MacGregor, fastidiously anxious to hear no more, put the whole sordid little incident right behind him and went on with his questions.
‘Did she tell you her name?’
Mr Kincardine thought, ‘No, I don’t think she did. She just said she was the representative of this organization that traces your family tree sort of thing, and could I give her some information about our family.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘Why not? I was a bit surprised, of course, because our family’s nothing special. Ordinary working-class people on both sides, as far as I know. Mind you, the girl did strike me as a bit – well – unprepossessing. I’ve had a fair bit of experience over the years, what with salesmen and reps and wrhat-have-you. There’s a certain style about them. They want something out of you and they turn on the charm to get it. Now, this girl hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about it. There she was, trying to get me to give her some information or whatever for free, and she didn’t even look clean. And as for trying on a bit of the old sex appeal . . . No, I should have been on my guard.’
‘Did you give her the information she wanted?’
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Mr Kincardine. ‘You see, she explained that her company or society or whatever-it-was was particularly interested in my mother’s side of the family. In fact, what it all boiled down to was that, if I could put her in touch with my mother, she wouldn’t need to trouble me at all. Well, that’s when I had to tell her that my mother had passed away four years ago. And then she asked me if I knew anything about any nieces my mother had had – my cousins they would be, of course. She was especially interested in one called Jones – Muriel Jones.’
MacGregor felt a warm glow of satisfaction flood over him. At last – and in spite of Dover’s best endeavours – they were beginning to get somewhere. Some pieces, at least, of the jig-saw puzzle were beginning to slot into place. ‘Muriel Jones,’ he echoed encouragingly. ‘And have you got a cousin called Muriel Jones, Mr Kincardine?’
‘No, not called Jones. I’ve got one called Muriel, of course. She’s the daughter of one of my mother’s younger sisters. Mind you, I haven’t laid eyes on her since we were kids, though I’ve got an idea my mother kept in touch with her a lot longer.’
‘And you told the girl all this?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And what was her reaction?’
‘Well, she seemed quite pleased. Excited, almost. She asked if she could have this cousin’s address so that she could get in touch with her direct.’
‘And you gave it to her?’
‘No.’ Mr Kincardine shook his head. ‘Well, in any case, I haven’t got her address but I was beginning to get a mite suspicious. I mean, it could have been for anything, couldn’t it? Bad debts, tax evasion . . .’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I told the girl I hadn’t got my cousin’s address, but that I thought I could get in touch with her. If she – that’s the girl – would like to send me a proper letter from her firm, I’d do my best to get it forwarded to my cousin who could then reply or not as she wanted. That seemed to me the most satisfactory way of dealing with the problem.’
‘Very business-like!’ approved MacGregor. ‘And the girl – Pearl Wallace – she was equally happy about the arrangements?’
Mr Kincardine grinned ruefully. ‘Not exactly. She got a bit agitated and rather aggressive. She started spinning some fantastic yarn about this
