by Joyce Porter
‘I remember all bloody right,’ muttered Dover darkly. ‘Mucky little bugger!’
‘The Bones’s are the ones, sir, who had his boss and wife to dinner and . . .’
‘Where’s the telly?’ demanded Dover suddenly. ‘And the newspaper men?’ He swung round on Inspector Walters. ‘I thought you were supposed to be laying a bit of publicity on?’
Inspector Walters backed off, in order to protect the innocent. ‘Sergeant MacGregor did ask me, sir, but I’m afraid it’s against our Standing Orders. I did check. The Chief Constable apparently likes investigations and particularly arrests to be carried out with as much discretion as possible. He thinks it’s only fair for the protection of the person or persons involved.’
‘’Strewth!’ said Dover in tones of the deepest disgust. ‘A fine bloody pal you’ve turned out to be! You could have tipped ’em off on the bloody quiet, couldn’t you? God damn it, I’d have done it myself if I’d known you were going to be so bloody weak-kneed about it. Where the hell’s this?’
Confused by the abrupt change of subject, Inspector Walters let his torch waver. Then he got his bearings. ‘Ah, this is Ilfracombe, sir. Where Mrs Esmond Gough lives with her retired brigadier husband. She’s the founder of the Sorority for Sacerdotal Sex Equality, as I expect you remember. She wants women to have the right to be ordained as priests.’
‘She wants her bloody head examining!’ grunted Dover. ‘Silly cow!’
MacGregor, stumbling along in the dark behind old Master Mind, tried frantically to work it out. There was only Miss Charlotte Henty-Harris left! But, surely, she was far too old to be Pearl Wallace’s mother? No doubt it was biologically possible – MacGregor did some rapid mental arithmetic – yes, just. But everybody had talked of the mysterious Miss Jones as a young woman. Even eighteen years ago Miss Henty-Harris would have been well into her forties. The sweat began to run down MacGregor’s back. Could it be that the mysterious Miss Jones was only a decoy? A stand-in? Could Pearl Wallace’s mother actually be somebody quite different? If so, though, how the hell had Dover ever unravelled the complications?
‘Oh, sorry, sir!’ MacGregor bumped into Dover who had stopped dead in his tracks to listen to Inspector Walters’s final oration.
‘Watch it!’ squealed Dover, viewing as always any physical contact with MacGregor with the utmost suspicion. ‘You keep your hands to yourself, laddie!’
The darkness mercifully spared MacGregor’s blushes.
‘And that was where Miss Henty-Harris found the body, sir,’ concluded Inspector Walters lamely. He shone his torch on the fatal shrubbery behind the open gate. Inspector Walters didn’t know what the hell was going on between these two Scotland Yard men, but, in his opinion, the sooner the pair of them cleared off back to London, the better for all concerned. ‘Shall we go in, sir? There’s a light on in the front room so it looks as though Miss Henty-Harris is still up.’
‘Go in?’ In the light of the torch Dover’s pasty face looked even more oafish than usual. ‘What the hell for?’
‘Er – aren’t you going to charge Miss Henty-Harris with the murder, sir?’
‘You taken leave of your senses or something?’ enquired Dover with insulting mock concern. ‘It’s not her I’m after, you blockhead, it’s the other one!’
‘Sir?’
‘What’s-her-name!’ explained Dover with mounting exasperation. ‘That silly cow who wants to go poncing around in a dog-collar!’
‘Mrs Esmond Gough, sir?’ It was MacGregor who found his voice first. ‘She murdered Pearl Wallace? Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m bloody sure!’ snapped Dover. ‘Come on, get a bloody move on! We don’t want to be taking all night about it. I haven’t had my bloody supper yet.’ And, so saying, he marched off firmly and resolutely in the wrong direction.
The confrontation between Mrs Esmond Gough and Dover was something of a disappointment all round. Mrs Esmond Gough was obviously disconcerted to find that the connection between her and the dead girl had been traced by a mere male, while Dover, who not only didn’t mind but actually preferred thumping the truth out of weak and helpless females, was profoundly frustrated when his intended victim didn’t put up a fight. Brigadier Gough appeared to have been struck dumb and Inspector Walters wondered exhaustedly why the hell it all had to take so long.
Sergeant MacGregor was the worst sufferer, of course, and it took all his training and sense of discipline not to give way to a temper tantrum when it quickly became established that Dover, by whatever quirk of Fate, had indeed hit the jackpot. His opening statement – made from a deep armchair and with his feet stretched out towards the Goughs’ sitting room fire – had blown the lid clean off.
‘I’ve just come from the Isle of Man,’ was all Dover had said, or needed to say.
Mrs Esmond Gough’s noble face had turned to stone. ‘That,’ she commented bitterly to the room at large, ‘is what one gets for giving way to one’s better feelings. Damn!’ She looked angrily at Dover. ‘It was that photograph, wasn’t it?’
Dover nodded, and MacGregor wondered if he dared ask what photograph they were talking about. After all, it was his job to record the interview and if he didn’t know what they were talking . . .
‘I thought so,’ said Mrs Esmond Gough, giving a tight, affirmative toss of her head. ‘Good old Auntie Flo! I should never have been such a fool as to have sent it to her in the first place, but she’d been so kind to me and I knew she’d keep my secret to the grave.’
‘The secret that you’d given birth to an illegitimate child?’ asked MacGregor, risking Dover’s wrath in an effort to make sure that he had got the facts right.
‘Of course.’ Mrs Esmond Gough glanced at MacGregor as though he’d just crawled out from under an exceptionally slimy stone. ‘Oh, I know it’s not supposed to matter two hoots these days, but twenty years ago it was a very different story. Especially for somebody of my age and standing. I was twenty-six, you know, and a university graduate. Not the type of girl to whom such “mistakes” are easily forgiven. My father had married beneath him, you know, with the result that my mother was socially and financially a great deal better off than the remainder of her family. She never actually lost touch with them, but contact did tend to be rather spasmodic. When I found out I was pregnant the only thing to do was to go and hide myself away somewhere, have the child and then get it adopted. I didn’t fancy having a back street abortion and, in any case, I hadn’t the least idea how to go about getting one. Auntie Flo was wonderful. She sheltered me, made all the arrangements for everything – and I knew I could rely on her to keep her mouth shut. She even went along with the fact that I was using an assumed name. On reflection I think I might have picked something a little more imaginative than Jones, but it seemed nice and anonymous at the time.’
MacGregor couldn’t really believe that Dover had dozed off there in his comfy chair, but his eyes were closed and his breathing was suspiciously regular. ‘You were lying then when you told us that you were unable to have children?’
‘Naturally,’ said Mrs Esmond Gough indifferently. ‘I was trying to put you off the scent.’
‘And the child you gave birth to was Pearl Wallace, the dead girl?’
‘Presumably.’ Mrs Esmond Gough seemed to resent these questions much as she would have resented impertinence in a servant. ‘I certainly had a female child. Miss Wallace herself had no doubt that I was her mother.’
‘She called here to see you that Wednesday evening?’
Mrs Esmond Gough nodded. ‘She came round to the back door. She was that sort of person. I was, as I told you, in the kitchen painting the posters for our Rally.’
‘You asked her in?’
‘Of course. I didn’t have much choice. It was a simply filthy night and, anyhow, I assumed she was one of our helpers or a new recruit or something. She’d traced me through that photograph, you know. The one I’d sent Auntie Flo when I first started making a name for myself with my work
. Who’d have thought the dear old thing would have kept it all these years – or that that dratted son of hers wouldn’t have thrown it away when she died.’
Dover stirred gently in his chair. ‘You’re the family celebrity,’ he pointed out sleepily. ‘A household name. I reckon that’s why he hung onto it. Besides,’ he added through one of his jaw-unhinging yawns, ‘it was in a silver frame.’
‘If I hadn’t been a household name,’ Mrs Esmond Gough commented tartly, ‘that girl would never have found me – and neither would you! She recognized me, you see, even though that photograph was taken donkey’s years ago. She knew her mother’s Christian name was Muriel – they’d told her that at the adoption society or wherever — and once she’d read my signature the rest was too easy. She’d tied her mother up to Mrs Esmond Gough.’
‘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 Esmond Gough’s flow was not, however, to be stemmed. Well, not by a mere sergeant, at any rate. She held up her hand to silence him and launched herself into a brisk exposition of the murder as she saw it. ‘My husband came into the kitchen at my request and I explained our predicament to him. He attempted to remonstrate with the girl but her response to his overtures was extremely rude and insolent. Thus provoked, Esmond seized the nearest heavy implement – an electric iron, as it happens – and struck the girl several violent blows on the head. No, no, my dear’ – the Brigadier seemed anxious to make some statement on his own behalf – ‘it’s much better that you shouldn’t say anything at this stage. Wait until we can get you a solicitor. Now, do be guided by me, my dear! You know that I’ve had considerably more experience of criminal proceedings than you have. Now, where was I? Oh yes, well, when we realized that the girl was dead, my husband got his wheelbarrow from the garden shed and took the body away to dispose of it. While he was attending to this, I cleaned up the kitchen – thanking my lucky stars, I don’t mind telling you, that I’d had the floor tiled last year. I can really recommend it. One wipe with a damp cloth and it all comes up as good as new. Oh, and I burnt the girl’s handbag in the boiler. Without examining the contents, of course. I may have my faults, but vulgar curiosity is not one of them. Well, now’ – Mrs Esmond Gough rose gracefully to her feet – ‘I think that about covers everything. I would appreciate it if we could get the preliminaries over as expeditiously as possible. I’ve got an especially heavy day tomorrow. I have to go up to London to see the printers and then I’m preaching in the evening in Wapping.’ She smiled round at her audience as, with the notable exception of Dover, they began standing up in their turn. ‘By the way, do any of you gentlemen have any contacts at Scotland Yard with whoever it is who deals with processions and marches?’
Dover and MacGregor followed the Esmond Goughs out of the house to where a couple of police cars were waiting to drive them
away. Husband and wife were to travel separately and Mrs Esmond Gough was already chatting earnestly away to the stolid policewoman who was her escort.
Dover picked his way gingerly down the front steps. ‘She’s going to get one hell of a shock when she finds they’re going to keep her in the nick.’
MacGregor agreed. ‘I don’t think it’s registered with her yet that she’s going to be charged as an accessory to murder. I suppose, sir’ – he helped Dover negotiate the last two steps – ‘you saw this photograph in Mr Kincardine’s sitting room?’
‘That’s right!’ Dover grabbed hold of MacGregor’s arm and clung on tightly as they made their way down the drive which seemed very dark now that the police cars with their headlights had purred softly away. ‘That woman’s got a very distinctive face, you know. Twenty years hasn’t made all that much difference. I knew as soon as I saw that snap that I’d got the murderer.’
‘Well’ – MacGregor couldn’t, in the interests of accuracy, let that remark pass – ‘it would appear that Brigadier Gough is the actual killer.’
Dover was in a benign mood. ‘I said it was him all along, didn’t I?’ he asked happily. ‘Right at the bloody beginning I said he was our man.’ He smiled complacently in the darkness as he hobbled along. ‘Even if I says it as shouldn’t, laddie, I do have a nose for these things!’