‘How did she know where to find you?’ asked MacGregor curiously. ‘She seems to have come straight here from the Isle of Man.’
‘There’d been a magazine article about me in Buttons & Beaux. That’s one of these dreadful teenager magazines – terrible rubbish, but they pay quite incredibly well. Unfortunately they happened to mention that I lived near Chapminster. God knows why a ridiculous fact like that stuck in the girl’s head, but it did. Just my luck! Once she got as far as Chapminster it wasn’t, I imagine, difficult to discover my address.’
‘She looked it up in the phone book,’ said MacGregor. He turned over to a clean page in his notebook. ‘Did she say why she’d gone to all this trouble to seek you out?’
Mrs Esmond Gough’s eyebrows rose indignantly. ‘She wanted money! She was threatening to blackmail me I It was absolutely outrageous! It would have been bad enough if she’d come searching for me out of affection but – for hard cash? That was unforgivable!’
‘Did she say how much she wanted?’ asked MacGregor, fancying he saw Mrs Esmond Gough, who was nobody’s fool, beginning to lay down the lines of her defence. English juries are notorious for disliking blackmailers.
‘I didn’t give her the chance!’ Mrs Esmond Gough drew herself up proudly. ‘I listened patiently to all this stuff about what a rotten life she’d had with her adopted parents and how she’d never had a chance and how she’d got herself pregnant and that it was all my fault for rejecting her in the first place. Well, I listened to all that but, when she started talking about how much the newspapers would pay for her story, I’m afraid I completely lost my temper.’
‘And killed her?’
Mrs Esmond Gough wasn’t listening. ‘The little bitch was out to ruin me! Oh, the church is very progressive and broadminded nowadays but you can be quite certain about one thing – the first woman to be ordained in the Church of England will not be the mother of an illegitimate, child. I could see all my work going for nothing. Those years and years of meetings and demonstrations and interviews and protests. All the travelling. All the organizing. All the pushing and the cajoling and the bullying and bribing. The endless sneers and the continued insults!’ She sucked in a deep, almost sobbing breath. ‘Well, no stupid, interfering, insolent chit of a girl was going to take all that away from me!’
‘But I thought you were accusing her of blackmail?’ Inspector Walters wasn’t used to playing third fiddle on occasions like this and he had a few questions of his own to ask. ‘She was threatening to expose you if you didn’t pay her money – right? Well, madam, you had the remedy in your own hands. All you had to do was come along to us. We would have protected you – and preserved your anonymity into the bargain.’
Mrs Esmond Gough stared coldly at Inspector Walters. ‘I don’t, my good man,’ she said as she squashed him right out of the proceedings, ‘have any anonymity! My name is a household word and my face is known from one end of the country to the other. That’s why the solution you are suggesting of going to the police was completely out of the question. I am just too famous. Besides, whatever I had done about the blackmail threats, even submitting to them, would have been to no avail. That girl would have betrayed me. I could see it in her face. No power on earth would have stopped her.’
MacGregor sighed. He got a little tired from time to time with murderers who insisted that they’d had no other choice.
Mrs Esmond Gough declaimed on, looking and sounding like a tragedy queen. ‘It was revenge she wanted. Revenge on me, on her boyfriend, on society, on the world!’ The mask slipped a little. ‘That little bitch was just itching to expose me. Besides, where was I to get the money from? I’m not a wealthy woman. All I earn is ploughed straight back into the Cause.’
Dover was getting hungry. Dinner on the train might have been wildly expensive but it wasn’t filling. His stomach, longing for the super-stodge served up at The Laughing Dog, started rumbling quite loudly. ‘So,’ he said, hoping to speed things up, ‘you croaked her, eh?’
Mrs Esmond Gough drew herself up. Those fine eyes flashed and that noble bosom heaved. ‘I certainly did not!’ she retorted indignantly. ‘Such a course of action would be not only against my most cherished beliefs, but against all my instincts as well. The girl was my own flesh and blood, after all. No, as soon as I realized precisely what she was up to, I fetched my husband. And he killed her. I’m sorry, Esmond’ – she turned to address the Brigadier who seemed to be in considerable doubt as to what had hit him – ‘but we have always agreed that my vocation must come first. With the March of Religious Women next Tuesday and the burning of the Pope in effigy on Saturday, I really can’t afford to be shut up in prison on remand. If there was any question of my getting bail, it would be a different matter, of course, but they don’t give bail if one is on a charge of murder. In any case, dear’ – she smiled encouragingly at him – ‘the truth is bound to come out in the end and it’s really much more convenient to reveal your part in the incident at this stage rather than wait for the actual trial. That mightn’t take place for months, you know.’
MacGregor had been attempting to interrupt for some time. Dear heavens, there were cautions and all sorts of routine things to carry out.
Mrs
