Alan Hunter - Gently to the Summit

‘Superintendent Gently, sir. A message from the desk.’

‘What is it?’

‘There’s a lady wants to speak to you, sir.’

Evans gazed at the lad. ‘Not another one. Why, there’s no holding the fellow!’

Gently asked: ‘What’s her name?’

‘Sir. A Miss Paula Kincaid.’

‘Paula Kincaid I am, and I live up in Kilburn. I’m an artist’s model, and I’ll thank you to remember it.’

If Gently’s disappointment was keen, he was at pains to keep it hidden; he sat unmoved behind his desk, eyeing his new conquest with mild gravity.

‘Haven’t I seen you before?’

‘Well, p’raps you have and p’raps you haven’t. This is my first time down this way, but I’ve had the treatment back in Kilburn.’

‘Under the name of Paula Kincaid?’

‘Don’t be daft! That’s me proper name. I’m Phyllis Waters on the charge sheet. It makes a change from Smif and Brown.’

She was barely twenty, but she carried herself with a hard self-possession. She was a little above the average in height, a peroxide blonde with brown, unashamed eyes. She had on a bushy-skirted gown of green and over it a short coat of fabricated fur, her stockings were black and her shoes had stub-heels and apart from her mouth she wasn’t heavily made up.

‘Have you brought your birth certificate with you?’

‘Go on. I haven’t got one of them things. Got lost, that would’ve done, years ago. And I don’t know where I was born, so I can’t get another one.’

‘What’s your age?’

‘Eighteen I am. I had me birthday last month.’

‘So why have you come to see me, Paula?’

‘About me ma, of course. Reg Kincaid’s missus.’

Self-possession; she had that, but it was the stock-in-trade of a street-girl. Unless you had it you didn’t take to the business in the first place. You had to tell a lie with a lot of clamour and always have an act ready for the police; you were tough: brazen they used to call it: you put on a burlesque all the time. She sat confidently with her feet apart, her shoes turned over, the stub-heels outwards. She’d be capable of staring down the devil if Gently by chance should adopt the role.

‘Why did you decide to do that? Because you usually assist the police?’

‘Naow — don’t talk silly!’ Her beaming smile wasn’t entirely false. ‘But it won’t do me no harm, that’s the way I looks at it, and it could do me a bit of good. So here I am.’

‘You won’t get any money.’

‘Didn’t ask for none, did I? But you could pass the word I come to see you; had been of assistance, you could say that.’

‘And that was your whole motive in coming?’

‘Ain’t it good enough for you? Coo, I reckon it’s a bit of jam, me coming in here like this.’

He couldn’t help it, he returned the smile. She had a streak of Cockney charm about her. A graceless, graceful, perky sparrowness, the quick gaiety of the London pavements.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re Paula Kincaid. You’ve come to tell me something about your ma. And the first thing you can tell me is where your ma is at this moment.’

‘That’s the point, dear. She ain’t anywhere. Least-ways, not above ground.’

‘You mean she’s dead?’

‘And buried, she is. She was killed in the blitz in forty-three.’

‘ Where was she buried? ’

‘Now do me a favour! I was only two when they buried me ma.’

‘But you must know where it was.’

‘I’m telling you, ain’t I? I never went to the funeral. Don’t even know if they dug up enough of her to bury. A blockbuster it was. Over Notting Hill way.’

Gently gave her the benefit of a long, pointed look. There was something too Kincaid-like about this unsolicited tale! It promised to end things so neatly, so finally, so irrefutably; drawing a firm straight line across all further investigation…

‘Who told you what happened to your mother?’

‘Gertie Fox, what brought me up. Ma had took me to Gertie’s on the night when it happened.’

‘Why did your mother do that?’

‘’Cause she was on the bash, she was. And so was Gertie, if you want to know, but she used to have me there all the same.’

‘And where does this Gertie live?’

‘She had a flat down Maida once. But then she married the bloke what was looking after her. I ain’t seen Gertie since she did that.’

‘So in effect you can’t substantiate any of these statements?’

‘Didn’t say I could, did I? It’s take it or leave it.’

‘Who put you up to coming here?’

‘Not nobody didn’t. I come here on me own.’

She smiled again; but Gently had finished with smiling. He picked up a pencil and did some scribbling on a pad. He passed the result to Evans, who read it frowningly and then nodded. He rose and left the office. Their visitor’s eyes followed him uneasily.

‘Where’s he gorn off to?’

Gently’s answer was merely to stare. He filled his pipe unhurriedly and spent a couple of matches lighting it.

Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear all you know about your mother, Miss Kincaid. And about your father, too. I dare say Gertie will have mentioned him.’

She was seeming far less happy, but she had a good shot at it. Gertie indeed had filled her in on a number of interesting points. She knew that her ‘ma’ had come from Wales and had ‘done all right for herself’ there, but that she’d mucked it up somehow and on her return to London had become a prostitute. When that return had been, Miss Kincaid wasn’t certain, nor whether she’d been born in Wales or in London. As for her father, she had the impression that he’d been her mother’s employer in Wales.

‘What was his name?’

‘I didn’t never know. Ma kept quiet about that for some reason. But he was a bloke with a lot of money. A millionaire, Gertie reckoned he was.’

‘Didn’t he pay your mother an allowance?’

‘Well, he might have done, for all I know. But it never stopped her from going on the bash, so it couldn’t have been much if he did, could it?’

‘How did you learn who her husband had been?’

‘It came up one day through something in the paper. Gertie says to me, “Look. Here’s a picture of your ma’s old man.” It was in one of them Sunday papers, a bit about some people climbing Everest.’

‘And you got in touch with him when you heard he was alive?’

‘Naow! Why should I? Nothink to me, he wasn’t.’

‘He was trying to find his wife. You could have told him what happened to her.’

‘So what? I’m one of those what keeps meself to meself.’

‘Tell me about yourself from the time you were left with Gertie.’

She’d been with Gertie until she was sixteen. She said that distinctly, pausing after it. Before then she’d been to school, ‘just one of them schools down in Maida.’ At the age of fifteen she’d gone to work in an office, the address of which she succeeded in giving, but the boss was for ever making passes at her so she thought she’d better leave. Then she’d got tangled up with a boyfriend — after her sixteenth birthday, of course — and she’d gone to live with him in Kilburn, where he rented a flat in Crossgrove Road. Here she’d become an ‘artist’s model’, the career which she was now complacently following.

‘Does it pay you?’ Gently asked cynically.

‘I’m not one as talks about me private affairs. But I will say this, I’m not a pauper, nor I’m never short of a quid. Which is more than you can say for some women with their la-di-da airs.’

So there it was, take it or leave it; and, strangely enough, it carried a wistful conviction. It didn’t conflict with what he’d learned from Mrs Askham except in the matter of Davies, her housekeeper. Davies must have noticed that Paula Kincaid was pregnant, though it didn’t follow automatically that she would tell her mistress. But for the rest the account tallied, it offered a logical development; without betraying a suspicious knowledge it succeeded in being quite credible.