Dead Easy for Dover by Joyce Porter

Author:Joyce Porter [Porter, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0312184921
Published: 2017-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

9

‘Of course,’ said Inspector Walters, painfully conscious that his revelation had been something of an anti-climax, ‘we’ve still got the option of putting the girl’s photo on the telly. We’ll get every crank in the country ringing up but . . .’

‘It’s a bloody paper bag!’ said Dover, indignantly and accusingly.

‘Yes, sir.’ Inspector Walters was beginning to wish he’d let one of his underlings bring the damned thing round and collect the glory. ‘The forensic people have had quite a time with it, as you can see. It’s disintegrated pretty badly. That’s why they’ve put it between these two sheets of transparent plastic, sir, so that it doesn’t crumble away any more. Still, you can read the writing on it quite clearly, can’t you?’

Dover took hold of the talc and paper sandwich again and screwed his eyes up. The paper bag was a white one, some eight inches square, and it had obviously been folded up half a dozen times. It was a special bag, individually printed for the establishment concerned. ‘Ermengilda’s Kitchen’, Dover read aloud in a voice of total disbelief. ‘Gifte Shoppe & Cafe. Souvenirs. Homemade gateaux a Speciality. Barford-in-the-Meadow.’ He handed the sandwich to MacGregor and addressed himself to Inspector Walters. ‘And what the hell am I supposed to do with that?’

Inspector Walters was so unnerved by this display of unashamed hostility that the obvious answer to Dover’s question never so much as crossed his mind. ‘I thought – we thought – it might narrow the search down, sir,’ he bleated. ‘Starting from Barford-in-the-Meadow, you see, and then widening out in ever increasing circles.’

‘I’ll give you ever increasing circles!’ threatened Dover.

It was left to MacGregor to find some more constructive line of enquiry. ‘Where precisely did they find this paper bag?’

Inspector Walters responded with touching gratitude. The relief of hearing a human voice! ‘It was in her shoe, sergeant.’

‘Her shoe?’

‘Yes, she’d got a hole in the sole of her left shoe and this paper bag had been folded up and placed in the shoe, evidently in an attempt to keep the wet out. All her clothing was cheap, rubbishy stuff. Tatty. Her shoes were the same. I doubt if they would have stood up to re-soling, even supposing she’d got the money to pay for it. The lab people have been going through all her clothing with a fine tooth-comb in an effort to track down where she hailed from. It was all chain-store stuff. The sort you can buy in any one of a couple of hundred towns. It was pure chance, really, that one of the team thought of having a look at the soles of her shoes. They were looking more for particles of coal dust or sand or cement or something. The shoes had dried out a bit by then and he realized that there’d been this amateurish attempt to repair them. And that’s how they found the paper bag.’

Inspector Walter’s account tailed off lamely as Dover produced, without benefit of decently concealing hand, one of his enormous, jaw-cracking yawns.

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