by Joyce Porter
‘Oh no,’ said Dover with an understanding chuckle. ‘I’m just easing the laces a bit. I shan’t be taking my boots off, never you fear!’
‘Tonnerre de Dieu!’ breathed Mademoiselle de Gascoigne. She rolled her eyes alarmingly and flung herself full length on the black divan. Her scarlet négligé slipped a little more and half of Mademoiselle’s ample bosom glowed milkily in the subdued light. MacGregor wondered if he should, perhaps, tell her about it, but the Chief Inspector was already clearing his throat preparatory to starting the interview. MacGregor surreptitiously wiped the palms of his hands on his handkerchief, and pulled out his notebook and pencil.
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s eyes opened wide. ‘You are going to draw peektures?’ she asked.
‘Mais non!’ MacGregor reassured her with easy fluency. ‘Je prendrai des notes.’
‘Pourquoi?’
‘Pour aider ma mémoire,’ said MacGregor proudly. ‘Il faut reporter tout à mes supérieurs.’
‘Mon Dieu!’ said Mademoiselle de Gascoigne. It was more a prayer for help than a simple exclamation.
‘Now then, miss,’ said Dover firmly, ‘we just want you to answer a few questions.’
‘Questions?’ A half realization that she might have been jumping to hasty conclusions dawned slowly on Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s face. Her eyebrows clamped down and the line of her mouth hardened. She gathered her négligé modestly around her. ‘You are making an inquiry, hein?’
‘That’s right, miss,’ agreed Dover placidly. ‘We’re making an investigation into these anonymous letters in Thornwich.’
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s face was blank.
‘Des lettres anonymes à Thornwich,’ translated MacGregor helpfully.
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s face became blanker. ‘Vous ne voulez pas me filer un coup de baguette?’ she asked, looking from one to the other in disappointed bewilderment. ‘Vous ne voulez pas prendre un ticket?’
MacGregor smiled. It was the only contribution he could make. With what was obviously a very powerful curse Mademoiselle de Gascoigne made up her mind. She leapt to her feet and rushed out of the room. In a second or two she was back again, cocooned from head to toe in a thick brown dressing-gown. She sat down in a most business-like manner on an upright chair and folded her arms.
‘Allons!’ she snapped. ‘Ask your questions and be queek about eet! For me, time ees money, hein?’
Dover blinked, but queer customers had ceased to bother him a long time ago. ‘Do you know a man called Arthur Tompkins?’
‘And eef I do?’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Yestairday.’
‘Wednesday? Can you remember what time he arrived?’ Mademoiselle de Gascoigne shrugged her shoulders. ‘Three o’clock. ’Ee ees always vairy punctual. You can regulate your watch by ’eem.’
‘And what time did he leave?’
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s eyes narrowed.’
‘Ee ’as keeled somebody, hein?’ she asked hopefully. ‘You weel ’ang ’eem?’
‘What time did he leave?’
‘At ’alf past four. Exactement. Othairwise ’ee ’as to pay for anothair ’alf ’our.’
‘Now, you’re quite sure about this?’ pressed Dover. ‘Arthur Tompkins was here with you in this room yesterday afternoon for an hour and a half from three to four thirty?’
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne nodded her head. ‘Eet seemed longair,’ she commented-sourly.
‘Well, miss,’ said Dover, looking triumphantly at MacGregor, ‘I think that’s all we want to know. Thank you very much for your co-operation.’
He rose majestically to his feet and all the lights went out.
For a moment or two nothing much happened. Dover sat thankfully down again, Mademoiselle de Gascoigne squeaked and MacGregor groped in his pocket for his lighter. Then they heard somebody calling from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Louise, have you got a shilling, love? This blinking meter’s run out again!’
There was the sound of footsteps coming slowly up the stairs, the door opened and a waft of cheap perfume entered the room slightly ahead of the owner of the voice.
‘Are you there, Louise? I can’t see a bloody thing. Whoops! Ooh, my apologies, I’m sure. I didn’t know you’d got a friend in. A gentleman friend, too.’ She giggled. ‘Pardon me!’
‘That’s quite all right,’ said MacGregor, trying – not very energetically – to disentangle himself from the unseen body which was snuggling up to him in a very friendly way. ‘If I can just reach my pocket, I think I’ve got a . . . Oh, I do beg your pardon!’
There was a peal of girlish and delighted laughter. ‘Ooh, you saucy thing, you! If you do that again you’ll have to marry me! Here, you just hold still, gorgeous, and I’ll look for the money. Is it in your trouser pocket?’
‘Oh, please! No, never mind, thank you!’ gasped MacGregor quickly, grateful for the darkness which concealed his blushes. ‘I’ve got it now, thank you so much.’ He unclamped the hand which was crawling seductively up round his neck and pressed a couple of shillings firmly into it.
‘Oh?’ The voice sounded disappointed. ‘Well, ta very much, love. Sorry if I’ve interrupted anything, I’m sure.’
They heard her leave the room and patter, still laughing, down the stairs. Then the lights came on again.
Dover blinked and scowled through screwed-up eyes at MacGregor who grinned sheepishly back and scrubbed his face with his handkerchief.
‘Zat was my friend, Eleanor,’ explained Mademoiselle de Gascoigne since nobody else appeared to be going to say anything.
‘She seems a very jolly girl,’ said MacGregor hoarsely. ‘Very gay.’
‘Ah,’ said Mademoiselle de Gascoigne sadly, ‘you vould not say zat eef you knew ’er. She ’as just lost ’er baby.’
‘Oh dear,’ said MacGregor inadequately. ‘Poor thing.’
‘She was going to sell eet for feefty pounds,’ responded Mademoiselle de Gascoigne, blossoming in the warmth of MacGregor’s handsome sympathy. ‘She was going to get reed of eet but zees woman, she says, no you can sell eet for feefty pounds! Pauvre Eleanor, all zees time and now she ’as lost zee baby and zee feefty pounds. G’est un vrai dommage!’
‘Oh, oui,’ said MacGregor, and then did a quick double-take. ‘Wait a minute! Did you say she was going to sell the baby, and then it died?’ He could hardly contain his excitement. He looked anxiously at Dover to make sure that the significance of all this had penetrated that solid skull. He towered over Mademoiselle. ‘Who was she going to sell the baby to?’
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne cowered away from MacGregor, who was a good deal more intimidating than he realized.
‘Oh, come on, woman!’ barked MacGregor, showing that long association with a natural bully like Dover leaves its mark on the best of men. ‘Le bébé,’ he repeated in what he fondly hoped was Mademoiselle de Gascoigne’s native language. ‘Qui est la femme qui veut acheter le bébé d’Eleanor?’
Mademoiselle de Gascoigne flung her arms up in the air. ‘Je ne sais pas!’ she protested. ‘Why don’t you ask ’er?’
Abandoning the pouting and now near tearful teacher of the French language without more ado, MacGregor led a rapid descent down the stairs to tackle the fair Eleanor in her lair.
Eleanor was a glittering blonde whose eyes lit up like searchlights when MacGregor entered the kitchen where she was just making herself a cup of tea. It is only fair to record that a marked reduction in her enthusiasm took place when she spotted Dover for the first time.
‘Oh, my Gawd!’ she complained in deep disgust. ‘Coppers!’ Dover pushed his way into the kitchen and looked, as was his wont, for somewhere to sit down. The only chair was already being occupied by Eleanor and she didn’t look as though she was going to vacate it in Dover’s favour. With a disconsolate pout Dover perched himself uncomfortably on the edge of the kitchen table, his intention that this part of the investigations was going to be s
hort and sharp, and strongly reinforced. He was beginning to get a little perturbed by MacGregor’s attitude. The lad was tearing into things like a bull at a gate. Dover had no objection to his underlings shouldering nine-tenths of the work, but it needed to be done with tact and to the greater glory of their Chief Inspector. Being dragged along in MacGregor’s wake was not a pleasant experience, nor was it one that Dover intended to repeat or to endure much longer. They had been rushing around from pillar to post like a couple of scalded cats and Dover was in grave danger of losing his bearings. First it had been Arthur Tompkins murdering his wife, and now it was black-market babies. What all this had to do with Thornwich’s poison-pen letters, Dover was blowed if he knew, but the whole affair had generated its own momentum and it was difficult to find an appropriate place at which to bawl halt. They hadn’t, thought Dover scowling resentfully at Eleanor, even had their dinner yet. It wasn’t right, not for a man in his state of health. Light duties, that was all he was supposed to be on. Even the doctor had said that and, God knows, that licensed butcher wasn’t one to err on the side of humanitarianism.
MacGregor had noted the protruding bottom lip and the lowering eyebrows. They were danger signs he had learnt not to ignore. ‘Will you ask the questions, sir,’ he asked tactfully, ‘or shall I?’
There were times when Dover really hated MacGregor. If he’d been at all sure of why they were invading this Eleanor girl’s kitchen he would have started shooting off some well-directed questions long before this, but the fact was that Dover’s powers of concentration were never at their best when he was hungry. And he was damned hungry now.
MacGregor was still waiting for an answer. Dover gave a deep, bad-tempered grunt and left him to make what he could of it.
‘Here,’ said Eleanor, ‘are you two going to be sitting here all night?’
‘We shan’t keep you more than a minute,’ said MacGregor with a shining smile which might have devastated Eleanor five minutes ago but produced no softening of her attitude now. ‘We understand that you were going to have a baby some time ago and that you decided to let somebody else have it.’
‘So?’ said Eleanor.
‘We would like to know a few more details about the – er – transaction.’
‘Ooh, hark at him!’ said Eleanor.
‘For instance,’ MacGregor went on, still keeping his smile, ‘to whom were you going to sell the baby?’
‘What baby?’ said Eleanor.
‘Your baby.’
‘I ain’t got no baby. You must be thinking about somebody else.’
‘But you were going to have a baby,’ persisted MacGregor.
‘Is that a crime?’ demanded Eleanor. ‘First I ever heard of it, if it is.’
‘For God’s sake!’ snarled Dover. ‘We shall be here all night at this rate! Now, listen you,’ – he directed his scowl at Eleanor – ‘I’m a very busy man and I don’t intend to sit here taking lip from a cheap little tart like you. Now, you can either answer the questions here and get it over with, or you can come down to the nick and answer them there. Suit yourself, but you’re going to answer ’em somewhere. And if you start trying to make things difficult for me, my girl, I’ll make things so hot for you that you’ll regret the day you were born. If I want to turn nasty, I can turn very nasty indeed!’
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor with a last flicker of insubordination, ‘I’ll bet you can. All right, all right!’ she added hastily as Dover showed signs of getting to his feet. ‘You win. Here, I shan’t get into trouble over this, shall I?’
‘Not if you co-operate,’ said Dover. ‘We’re not concerned with any minor misdemeanours which may lie outside the scope of our investigations. In other words, get on with it!’
Once she had decided to sing, Eleanor sang clearly and fluently. She had had, so she said, a gentleman friend who, taking advantage of her innocence and with seemingly sincere promises of future marriage, had got her in the family way. ‘And then,’ said Eleanor succinctly, ‘the slimy bastard scarpered!’
Looking at Eleanor in the unflattering light of a naked electric light bulb, Dover couldn’t find it in his heart to blame the absconding putative father, but it was, he thanked God, no concern of his. ‘Never mind the sob stuff,’ he snapped, ‘get to the point! You decided to get rid of-the baby.’
‘Well, natch,’ said Eleanor. ‘What else could I do? I didn’t want it and I was damned sure nobody else did.’
‘So you found somebody who’d get rid of it for you?’ said Dover impatiently. It was the old, old story and after listening to it with variations all these years he found it just boring.
‘Well, yes,’ admitted Eleanor. ‘I asked around a bit, and somebody give me the name of this woman. Well, I went off to see her, to have a look at the set up, like, because some of ’em are dirty devils and I didn’t want to finish up on no marble slab. And I wanted to know how much the damage was going to be because I wasn’t exactly rolling in the stuff at the time. Well, I went to see this woman and I was quite surprised, really, because she seemed quite decent – not a bit like the creepy old witch down Benion Street I went to . . . Well, we got talking and she said how would I feel about having the kid and then flogging it. And I said, how much, because to tell you the honest I wasn’t looking forward to going through all that business again. And she said, fifty quid, plus a pound a week in advance to cover all the extra expenses. Well, it didn’t sound so dusty to me because I reckoned I could go on working for quite a bit and most likely fiddle a few quid out of the Welfare or one of these societies as well. So I said, yes. After all, what had I got to lose? It’d have set me back ten or fifteen quid to get rid of it.’
Dover sighed and wriggled about on his table and tried to find a more comfortable spot. ’Strewth, how they went on! You asked ’em a perfectly simple question and off they went, yack, yack, yack for hours. It poured out like a blooming great dam bursting its walls. It got a chap down in time, listening to nothing else but people talking. They swamped you with words and half the time they never told you what you wanted to know. Just look at this one! Mouth opening and shutting like a speeded up goldfish. Fair made you sick!
Dover scowled and sighed and grunted. Indifferent to the suffering she was causing, Eleanor happily continued to reveal all. She conducted her two listeners steadily through the nine uneventful months of her pregnancy.
‘And then I went in this Home, see? Quite the little heroine, I was, because all these other girls that’d got caught just wanted to get their babies adopted and have done with it. But me, I told the old dears I wanted to keep mine and they thought I was a blooming marvel. It wasn’t half a giggle! Well, then my time came and that wiped the grin off my face. Fifty quid? They’ll have to give me five hundred before I’ll go through that again! The first pains started coming, see, about six o’clock and . . .’
‘You can spare us the details,’ said Dover wearily. ‘I suppose the baby was born dead, was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Eleanor, rather disgruntled at having the thread of her narrative chopped callously in twain, ‘It lived for about a week, see. Then something went wrong and they put it in an oxygen tent but it didn’t do any good and then it died. A little boy, it was . . . I was ever so upset.’
‘I’ll bet you were,’ said Dover unkindly. ‘What did you do then?’
‘Well, I rang this woman up and told her. Gawd, was she mad! She nearly went through the roof. Galled me every dirty name under the sun, the old bitch, as if it was my fault. It seems she’d been paying this pound a week to me out of her own pocket because the woman who was going to take the baby wouldn’t cough up till she actually got it. To be fair, I can’t say I blame her, but it made things very awkward for this other woman with the baby dying. “It’s no use yelling your head off at me,” I told her. “I haven’t got no money and you can’t get blood out of a stone.” Well, she huffed and puffed a bit longer and said she couldn’t afford to chuck nearly forty quid down the drain and I said �
�bloody hard luck” and she rang off and that’s the last I’ve heard of her.’
A blessed silence invaded the kitchen as Eleanor finished her story and MacGregor waited for Dover to ask the vital question. But Dover, still staring glassily at Eleanor who was now lighting a cigarette, had switched off long ago. MacGregor cleared his throat. Dover blinked, heaved a deep sigh and looked round as though wondering where he was.
MacGregor ground his teeth with impatience and then plunged recklessly in. ‘Who was this woman?’
‘Which woman?’ said Eleanor who had already written MacGregor off as the light-weight in the partnership.
‘This woman who was going to sell the baby for you?’
‘Ooh!’ said Eleanor coyly. ‘I don’t know as how I can tell you that. It’s very confidential, like. I swore I wouldn’t tell a living soul.’
‘Here,’ said Dover, now staring fixedly at the ceiling, ‘or down at the nick. Take your choice.’
‘It was a woman called Comersall, Freda Comersall,’ said Eleanor quickly. Her mother had habitually threatened to fetch a policeman when she was naughty and young Eleanor had always thought this was a load of old cod. Looking at the mean, flabby face of Chief Inspector Dover she wasn’t so sure now.
‘Freda Comersall?’ said MacGregor, trying hard to remember where he’d heard the name before.
‘She runs Freda’s Cafe in Thornwich,’ said Dover, at last relieving his aching buttocks by transferring his weight to his aching feet. ‘You want to train your memory, laddie. It’ll let you down badly one of these days. And now, young woman,’ – he swung ponderously round on Eleanor – ‘what is your surname anyhow? Smith? ’Strewth! Well, Miss Smith, I think that’s about all we shall want from you for the moment. Unless, of course, you actually know the name of the woman who was going to adopt the baby?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘No, I never knew who it was. Freda never told me.’
‘Well, no,’ said Dover, stifling an enormous yawn, ‘she wouldn’t, would she? Not if she’d any sense.’