‘And eventually you succumbed to her blandishments?’ MacGregor had heard that some men were constitutionally incapable of refusing a young woman anything. Privately he fancied that he would have found Pearl Wallace highly resistible, but Mr Kincardine’s tastes might be different.
‘No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact.’ Mr Kincardine grinned and treated MacGregor to a sly, sideways glance. ‘I won’t say that we couldn’t have reached some mutually satisfactory agreement, given time,’ he admitted. ‘What with the wife being out for the day and me not owing Cousin Muriel anything, when you came to think about it. The kid wasn’t all that bad looking, and she was young. However’ – Mr Kincardine sighed deeply – ‘the best laid plans of rats and men . . .’
‘What happened?’
‘The bloody shop bell went, didn’t it,’ said Mr Kincardine crossly. ‘I had to go down. I get enough stock nicked when I’m standing there watching’em without leaving the place unattended. I was probably away five minutes. When I got back, she’d scarpered. Vamoosed. Done a bunk.’
MacGregor stared hard at Mr Kincardine. ‘Just like that?’ he queried.
‘Well, no,’ said Mr Kincardine reluctantly, lowering his voice just in case his wife was behind the door listening, ‘she took fifty quid with her.’
‘Fifty quid?’
‘From the cash box in my desk. I keep it up there for bloody safety,’ he added bitterly.
MacGregor was mildly irritated. When he requested co-operation from the local police, he expected to get it. The Isle of Man coppers had found Mr Kincardine for him efficiently enough. Why hadn’t they also briefed him about this theft? It had been very remiss of them, unless . . .
Mr Kincardine, who had seated himself on a packing case, squirmed uneasily. ‘No, I didn’t report it to the police,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t want to get the girl into trouble, did I?’
MacGregor’s elegant eyebrows shot up.
Mr Kincardine decided that honesty might well be his best policy. ‘It was just a sort of little nest egg I was hiding from the Income Tax people,’ he hissed. ‘If I’d told the police about it, it might have led to more damned trouble than it was worth.’ He managed a sickly smile. ‘I mean, what’s fifty quid these days? Chicken feed, eh?’
MacGregor was more concerned with the fate of Pearl Wallace than with Mr Kincardine’s financial shenanigans.‘And you’ve no idea why she left so abruptly?’
‘I concluded that she’d got what she came for – the cash.’
‘So all this stuff about tracing ancestors and your cousin’s address – you think that was simply part of the con?’
Mr Kincardine shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t sound very likely, I’ll admit. Too elaborate by half. But what other explanation is there? If she really wanted to get in touch with Muriel, she’d have stuck around until I got back, wouldn’t she?’
‘Unless she’d already found the information for herself,’ said MacGregor, ‘while you were in the shop. Well, she obviously went hunting around in your desk.’
‘But, I told you,’ protested Mr Kincardine, ‘I haven’t got Muriel’s address!’
‘There must be something,’ said MacGregor.
‘There isn’t! Definitely not!’ Mr Kincardine was adamant. Then his face changed. ‘Unless . . .’
Meanwhile Chief Inspector Dover had been answering a rather lengthy call of Nature up in the Kincardines’ blue and gold bathroom. As befits the establishment of an ironmonger, the place was full of expensive accessories and gadgets, most of which were securely bolted to the wall. Dover absent-mindedly pocketed a piece of soap that seemed to be going spare and then went foraging around the rest of the flat.
The first room he came to was the lounge and, since it seemed quite a promising proposition, he went in, moving with remarkable stealth for a man of his age, weight and general clumsiness. It would, of course, be grossly unfair to suggest that Dover was going to steal anything. It was just that sometimes in his line of business, in the stress of the moment, people simply forgot to offer the usual hospitality. It slipped their minds. In such circumstances self-help was almost obligatory.
It didn’t take a detective of Dover’s calibre and experience long to find out that the Kincardines didn’t smoke. Nor did the stingy devils keep a few for their friends. The biscuit barrel on the mantelpiece contained nothing more exciting than a couple of cream crackers, both of which were soggy. Dover, disgruntled, moved across the room to have a look at the desk, and it was at this point that the photograph caught his eye. Well, not so much the photograph, perhaps, as the frame it was in. Which was silver and highly portable.
Highly, Dover corrected himself as he picked it up for a closer look, pocketable, actually. He wondered, idly, what such a small, silver frame would fetch these days on the open market. Not enough, he concluded sadly, to make it worth his while risking his pension. He was putting the photograph back on the top of the desk when he belatedly realized just what it was he was looking at. It was the rather stiffly posed picture of a young woman. The hair style was different, the make-up looked old fashioned and the marks of some twenty years of living were missing from the face, but Dover knew who it was. By God, he did! He’d seen that face within the last few days. So recently, in fact, that he hadn’t had time to forget it. That – he would stake his life on it – was What’s-her-name!
In an absolute tizzy of exaltation and excitement, Dover read the inscription. It was scrawled in a bold hand across the bottom comer of the photograph: To
