"Did we come together?" She smiled. "Of course you did. You were only a very tiny baby, you know. I remember it quite well. Such a sad little family."
"My father..."
Here Mrs. Meyton shook her head. "No, it was just after he was killed. I never met him."
"But," urgently, "you do remember us coming together?"
"Certainly. Boundary Cottage had been empty for a long time-since old Miss Potter died, in fact-and I remember how glad we were that someone was going to live in it after all." Mrs. Meyton raised her eyebrows heavenwards. "A rare old state it was in, I can tell you, but your mother soon got to work on it and she had it as right as ninepence in next to no time-garden and all."
"She liked things just so..."
Mrs. Meyton wasn"t listening. "How the years do go by. It hardly seems the other day but it must be all of twenty years..."
"Twenty-one," said Henrietta. "I"ll be twenty-one next month."
"I suppose you will." Mrs. Meyton regarded the pa.s.sing years with disfavour. "I don"t know where the time goes. And the older you get the more quickly it pa.s.ses."
"Baptism," said Henrietta suddenly.
"What about it, dear?"
"Was I christened here in Larking?"
But here Mrs. Meyton"s parochial memory failed her. She frowned hard. "Now, I would have to think about that. Is it important? Edward would know. At least," she added loyally, "he could look it up in the Register."
Memory was not one of the Rector"s strong points.
"Do you think he would? You see,"-she swallowed hard-"you see, the police have just told me that Grace Jenkins wasn"t my mother after all."
Mrs. Meyton looked disbelieving. "Not your mother?"
"That"s what they said."
"But," said Mrs. Meyton in a perplexed voice, "if she wasn"t, who was?"
"That"s what I"d like to know." There was a catch in her voice as she said, "I expect I"m illegitimate."
"Nonsense." Mrs. Meyton shook her head. There were thirty years of being a clergy wife behind her when she said, "Your mother wasn"t the sort of woman to have an illegitibaby."
"She hadn"t ever had any children," said Henrietta bleakly, "and she wasn"t my mother, so it doesn"t apply."
"I shouldn"t have said myself," went on Mrs. Meyton, "that she was the sort of woman either to say she"d had a baby if it wasn"t hers."
"Neither would I," agreed Henrietta promptly. "That"s the funny thing..."
"But if she did," sensibly, "I expect she had a good reason. They must have adopted you."
"I hadn"t thought of that."
"A cup of tea," said Mrs. Meyton decisively, "that"s what we both need."
Ten minutes later Henrietta put her cup down with a clatter. "I"ve just thought of something..."
"What"s that, dear?"
"How do I know I"ll be twenty-one in April?"
"Because..." Mrs. Meyton"s voice trailed away. "Oh, I see what you mean." Then, "A birth certificate, dear. You must have a birth certificate. Everyone does."
"Do they? I"ve never seen mine."
"You"ll have one somewhere. You"ll see. Your mother will have kept it in a safe place for sure."
"The bureau..." cried Henrietta. - "That"s right," said Mrs. Meyton comfortably.
"It"s not right," retorted Henrietta. "Someone broke into the bureau on Tuesday."
"Oh, dear."
"And there"s certainly no birth certificate in there now..."
"A copy," said Mrs. Meyton gamely. "You can send for one from Somerset House."
"But don"t you see," cried Henrietta in despair, "if she wasn"t my mother I don"t know what name to ask for."
CHAPTER FIVE.
"Crosby..."
"Sir?" Crosby had one ear glued to the telephone receiver but he listened to Sloan with the other.
"You tell me why a woman brings up a child as her own when it isn"t."
"Adopted, sir, that"s all."
"Why?"
"Why adopt, sir? I couldn"t say, sir. Seems quite unnecessary to me. Asking for trouble." His early years on the beat had made a child-hater out of Crosby.
"Why adopt when she did," said Sloan. "That"s what I want to know."
"When?" echoed Crosby.
"The middle of a war, that"s when. With her husband on active service."
"Do we know that, sir, for sure?"
"We don"t know anything for sure," Sloan reminded him with some acerbity, "except that Dr. Dabbe swears that this Grace Edith Jenkins never had any children." He paused. "We know a thing or two that are odd, of course."
"The bureau?"
"The bureau. Someone broke into that for a reason."
"They found what they were looking for..."
"Yes, I think they did. Something else that"s odd, Crosby..."
Crosby thought for a moment. "Odd that they didn"t have to break into the house. Just the bureau."
"Very odd, that."
"Yes, sir." Crosby waved his free hand. "Dr. Dabbe is coming on the line from the hospital now, sir."
Sloan took the receiver.
"This road traffic accident you sent me, Sloan, one Grace Edith Jenkins..."
, Doctor."
" I confirm of death. Between six and nine o"clock on Tuesday evening. Nearer nine than six."
"Thank you." Sloan started to write.
"She was aged about fifty-five," continued the pathologist. "Forty-five; I think it was, Doctor." Sloan turned back pages of the file. "Yes. Her daughter said she was forty-five. Forty-six next birthday."
"And I," said Dr. Dabbe mildly, "said she was about fifty-five."
Sloan made his first significant note.
"She had also had her hair dyed fairly recently."
"Oh?" said Sloan.
"From-er-blonde to brunette."
"Had she indeed?" The pathologist never missed anything.
"I should say she had been hit from behind by a car which was travelling pretty fast. The main injury was a ruptured aorta and she would have died very quickly from it.
"Outright?"
"In my opinion, yes."
That, at least, was something to be thankful for.
"I should say the car wheel went right over her, also rupturing the spleen. There are plenty of surface abrasions...""I"m not surprised."
"Both ante-mortem and post-mortem.""Post-mortem?"
"There was also a post-mortem fracture of the right femur," said the pathologist.
Sloan said, "I"m sorry to hear that." .
"I fear," said Dr. Dabbe, "that these injuries are consistent with her having been run over by a heavy vehicle twice.
"Two successive cars?" asked Sloan hopefully.
The pathologist sounded cautious. "I"d have to see the planof how she was lying but I"d have said she was definitely hit from behind the first time."
"That"s what the constable in attendance thought.""And from the opposite direction the second time."
"Nasty."
"Yes."
Sloan replaced the receiver and looked out of the window "A car, Crosby, and quickly. I want to get back to, Lading before the light goes. And get on to Hepple and tell him to meet us at the scene of the accident."
Henrietta was still at the Rectory when the Rector returned.
He was undismayed when his wife told him that Henrietta was not Grace Jenkins"s daughter.
"That explains something that always puzzled me," he said.
Henrietta looked up quickly. "What was that?"
"Why she came to Larking in the first place. As far as I could discover she had no links here at all. None whatsoever." Mr. Meyton was a spare, grey-haired scholarly man, a keen student of military history and the direct opposite of his tubby, cheerful wife. "If I remember correctly you both arrived out of the blue so to speak. And no one could call Boundary Cottage the ideal situation for an unprotected woman and child in war time."
Henrietta blinked. "I hadn"t thought of that..."
"If she was deliberately looking for somewhere lonely..."
"Nowhere better," agreed Henrietta. "I just thought she liked the country."
"It occurred to me at the time she had set out to cut herself off," said Mr. Meyton. "Some people do. A great mistake, of course, and I always advise against it."
"Now we know why," said Henrietta.
"Perhaps."
"She wanted everyone to think I was hers."
"She probably didn"t want you to know you weren"t," said Mr. Meyton mildly. "Which is something quite different."