Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

“Ivy lumber herself with a baby? I don’t think so. Apart from anything else, she’s a teeny bit mature to get broody.” Mrs. Wark hesitated, and he picked up the sharp indrawal of breath before her next, hurried speech. “Actually, I’m a bit worried about Ivy. She seems a bit stressed. Wanted me to sell her painkillers, powerful stuff you can’t get without a prescription. I was unable to oblige, of course.” For an instant Tania sounded schoolgirl-virtuous, in comical contrast to her heavy perfume and strident makeup.

“Of course not,” Inspector McKell echoed solemnly.

“Good,” she said briskly, as if they had struck a bargain. Her smile was almost natural. “Nice to chat like this. Maybe we can do it again. When I think of anything to interest you. And I’m sure there will be.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He hoped that Tania perceived the silent subtext as, “There better had be.” He was sure that she had. Not an admirable woman; by the same token, not a stupid one. Tom McKell scribbled on a scrap of paper and passed it to her. “Home number, and the other is my direct line. Phones have ears, remember, so just fix up a meet whenever you feel like a nice chat.”

At this early stage of the narrative (balder and more factual in McKell’s mouth, but my version is accurate) I called time out, on grounds of bafflement. “This is supposed to be about a grass. The way you tell it, the Wark woman told you nothing in particular and no money changed hands.”

Tom McKell looked pained. “Then you didn’t listen right. She told me ever so much and, having told it, laid herself open to be squeezed for more. As for money, she expected money’s worth.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Look, for good and sufficient reasons we were very anxious to locate Ivor Grange. He had been involved in a major brawl and taken a first-rate beating some days before La Wark confided in me. Longdown’s jungle drums suggested that Grange had crawled away to die — unless he’d been helped. All the usual tales were circulating: his body was part of a motorway bridge foundation or floating around the English Channel in an oil drum.

“I didn’t let on to Tania, but we believed the rumors had substance. Ivor Grange was Ivy Challis’s fancy man, lived with her at Longdown inasmuch as he had any fixed abode. Her home was his foregone refuge after a fight. But she denied seeing him again after he went out for a drink on the night he disappeared. She invited me to see for myself that Grange wasn’t in her house, and I did. What’s more, Ivy was ringing Central every day, asking if we had news of him.

“Then up popped Tania Wark with two nasty bits of news, count ’em — Grange was still alive, and his girlfriend knew where he was. Wake up, chum... the baby food! Get your teeth broken, maybe a fractured jaw into the bargain, that’s the only slop you can handle. Especially if you daren’t go to a hospital or even a dentist in case that gets police on your tail.”

“And the painkillers,” I said, anxious to shine. “They weren’t for Ivy Challis, she wanted them for her missing lover.”

“Top of the class,” the inspector commended, insultingly insincere. “Of course, when Mrs. Wark went out of her way to tell me she hadn’t sold tablets to Ivy, it meant that she had.

Probably charging well over the odds for the privilege, else why bother. That’s what I meant by Tania getting her money’s worth. She’d scratched my back, so... you know how the saying goes.

“Tania Wark was what you might call a sociable sort. Given the slightest encouragement, she’d have had my trousers off on that park bench, even if it was a business discussion. What a cheated wife would call our Tania is a husband-stealing bitch. Women like her have enemies. She reckoned that sooner or later one or more of them would tip us off about her dodgy dealings at the chemist’s. She wasn’t wrong, by the way; I’d already had a poison pen letter, and one of my sergeants was sniffing around on the same line. So she was just in time, applying for her insurance policy.”

“That’s corruption or conspiracy or something,” I said.

“No, it’s the way things work in the real world,” Tom McKell said. “Don’t start the po-faced and tut-tut routine. La Wark wasn’t operating a crack kitchen in her basement. Run a small retailing business these days, you cut corners or go under. For the price of a bus ticket, her suburban customers could get any item she sold twenty percent cheaper at the hypermarket outside Long-down or any of the big outlets in town. So why did they keep going to her shop? Partly for convenience, it was just round the corner.

“And because she did little favors, not just hand delivering medicine if a customer was housebound but bending the rules when she thought it was safe. Like selling painkillers, and probably the occasional uppers or downers, without benefit of prescription.”