by Joyce Porter
‘’Strewth!’ said Dover in disgust. He turned to MacGregor. ‘Get this photographed and run all the usual checks on it. Where’s this picture of Cliff Richard? Oh, it’s in the envelope. Is this hers, Sir John?’
‘Oh yes, she was very proud of it.’ Sir John was thoroughly enjoying the whole thing. ‘She always carried it in her handbag. You can see, it’s got her name on the back.’
Dover turned the photograph over and sighed. ‘I take it, Sir John, that you’ve no intention of paying the ransom?’
‘Not bloody likely!’ The old man chuckled. ‘Five hundred pounds for Juliet? Oh no, I think not! No, my dear Inspector, it’s up to you and your merry men now. Tricky job, too, if the threats are genuine, eh?’
Dover sniffed. ‘Does anybody else know about this letter?’
‘Only my daughter. I told her to get on the phone to you but luckily she’d seen your assistant just going into the Hall so she fetched him.’
‘Well, I don’t want you to mention it to anyone else – no one at all, do you understand?’
‘My dear Inspector’ – Sir John waved a gracious hand – ‘I shall be discretion itself. I shall be silent as the’ – he sniggered – ‘grave.’
‘Come on, Sergeant,’ growled Dover, ‘we shall have to get a move on. We’ve only got twenty-four hours before the money’s due to be collected!’
Eve Counter was waiting for them in the hall.
‘Could I speak to you for a moment, Inspector?’ she asked hesitantly.
‘I haven’t time to be bothered with you now!’ snapped Dover. ‘Oh well, what do you want?’
‘Is my father going to pay the ransom money?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’m prepared to pay it. Five hundred pounds, wasn’t it, in old notes?’
Dover pushed his bowler hat slowly to the back of his head and stood, arms akimbo, staring at Eve Counter.
‘You’re prepared to pay five hundred pounds for Juliet Rugg?’ he asked in utter bewilderment. ‘What in God’s name for?’
‘It’s just that I don’t like to think of the girl being killed for a measly five hundred pounds.’
‘Very noble!’ sneered Dover. ‘Now, let’s have the real reason.’
Eve Counter flashed him an angry look and then shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘Oh well, I suppose you’ll find out some time, whatever happens. I don’t want Juliet to get frightened and start talking. She’s blackmailing me – oh, it’s only the odd pound here and there, I can well afford it. But, if she starts talking to real criminals like these kidnappers, just to save her own skin or buy them off or something – well, then I might find myself facing rather more exacting demands. Five hundred pounds might well be a bargain price in that case.’
‘And what,’ asked Dover grimly, ‘was she blackmailing you about?’
Eve Counter’s chin went up but she avoided looking at either Dover or the silent Sergeant MacGregor.
‘I had an affair,’ she said in a stiff voice. ‘He’s married, naturally. As a matter of fact, he’s my father’s doctor and, technically, I’m a patient of his too. You know what that means. If the medical authorities got wind of his – er – misconduct, he’d be thrown out. He’s no money and he wouldn’t be able to earn his living at anything else – not after all these years – and I, well’ – she swallowed hard-‘I haven’t got enough money to keep us both. Not while my father is still alive, that is.’
Sergeant MacGregor gazed at her sympathetically. She was very near to tears and very angry with herself for being so.
‘Is this liaison still going on?’ asked Dover.
‘No, we broke it off six months or more ago. We just couldn’t stand the strain. It all seemed so underhand and sordid. There didn’t seem to be any hope of our ever getting married and, of course, there was always the danger that the whole thing would come out one day and that would mean that Edward would be ruined, his career and everything. He’s got two children, you know,’ she added miserably, ‘we had to think of them too.’
‘And how did Juliet get on to it?’
‘She found some letters I’d kept. We hadn’t been as careful as I thought. I shouldn’t have kept Edward’s letters, I suppose, but I just couldn’t bring myself to burn them.’
‘All right,’ said Dover, making up his mind quickly, ‘how soon can you get the money?’
Eve Counter’s face brightened. ‘Right away,’ she said, ‘this morning, if you like. I can get it from the bank.’
‘Well, you’d better come into Creedon with us now. We’re not going to pay the ransom, mind you, it’d be against the law anyhow, but I’d sooner have the trap baited with the real thing. Now, come on – there’s no time to waste!’
There are certain people who really rise to a crisis and it can be fairly said that Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover of New Scotland Yard was one of them. At Christmas-time some children have the distressing habit of blowing up toy balloons to their fullest extent and then releasing them so that the air rushes out of the mouthpiece and the rapidly deflating balloon shoots around dementedly all over the place. This is how Dover habitually rose to a crisis, with the same undignified lack of control and pretty much the same kind of noise.
He reduced the police headquarters in Creedon to a gibbering, panic-stricken shambles within thirty seconds of his right boot crossing the threshold. His unfortunate habit of equating speed with noise produced a screaming pandemonium which the old building had not seen since the Relief of Mafeking when they brought the drunks in. Dover rampaged happily around, bawling his head off.
‘I want all your policewomen brought in!’ he yelled. ‘Right away! There’s no time to lose!’
‘But – ‘ began the local inspector.
Don’t argue!’ roared Dover. ‘Get ’em !’
By late afternoon some semblance of order had been achieved and Dover marshalled his troops for their battle briefing.
The kidnapper’s plan was quite an ingenious one as the local pessimists were delighted to point out. Wednesday was market- day and along with other establishments in the town the ladies’ convenience in the Market Square did a roaring trade. Convention being what it is, Dover had not been able to visit the place, but he had been given a pretty accurate description of what it was like by the Chief Constable’s secretary, an intelligent girl who also produced a rough plan of the layout.
The convenience was an underground one, approached by a steep flight of stone steps. Once inside the visitor found herself in a largish, white-tiled dungeon with three cubicles containing lavatories occupying half the available space. All the lavatories had the usual penny-in-the-slot machine fixed on the door. The rest of the furnishings need little description. There was a large bespeckled mirror on one wall and a wash-basin fitted with a cold tap. There was also a machine from which you could buy a nasty little paper towel for twopence and a waste-paper basket in which to throw it when it had disintegrated in your still wet hands. There were a couple of framed notices, one threatening dire penalties to those who misused the place in any way and another fly-blown exhortation on the dangers of concealing venereal disease. Thanks to a completely inadequate ventilation system (one small grille set high in the wall and usually choked with newspapers and old cabbage leaves from the market stalls outside) the convenience had a highly distinctive and peculiarly unpleasant atmosphere. Nobody lingered there longer than the calls of nature demanded, and there was no attendant.
Surveillance here was going to be more difficult than Dover had at first imagined, though he had recognized immediately that this was a job for the girls, hence his urgent summoning of all the policewomen in the county. He envisaged an elaborate roster system whereby every time a lady came out of the vital centre lavatory, a policewoman would immediately nip in and check whether the ransom money was still there. He could see the snags in this plan as well as anybody. It meant that every customer who used the middle lavatory would have to be followed by another policewoman until her coll
eague indicated that the money had not yet been taken. But, how was the first policewoman to let the second policewoman know? After all, the second policewoman and her suspect might be half-way across the Market Square while the first policewoman was looking in the Vim tin to see if the five hundred pounds was still there. Well, there’d have to be a third policewoman acting as runner and . . . Oh, well, they could work out the details later.
Now it was later and tricky little points of procedure paled into insignificance as Dover balefully eyed his women colleagues. There were only two of them.
‘Where are the others?’ he screamed in fury.
‘That’s all we’ve got,’ said the local inspector. ‘I tried to tell you, sir. Recruiting’s very bad at the moment.’
‘Obviously!’ snarled Dover, and raised his eyes eloquently to the unkind heavens.
Woman Police Sergeant Joan Kempton and Woman Police Constable Miriam Alice Smith waited patiently for Scotland Yard’s master mind to give them their instructions. Woman Police Sergeant Kempton was an alert, bird-like young woman with a mass of flaming red hair. Miriam Alice Smith stood six feet one inch in her uniform shoes and had a pair of shoulders on her which many a heavyweight boxer would have been glad to own. Both were well-known figures in the town and not perhaps ideally suited for the inconspicuous role in which Dover had cast them.
Grimly the chief inspector explained the problem to them.
‘Now, Sergeant,’ he concluded, pushing the burden on to the weaker sex without a qualm, ‘how do you propose to tackle it?’
Sergeant Kempton rose to the situation like a true-born Englishwoman. ‘Quite simply, sir,’ she replied firmly, ‘it can’t be done.’
‘God damn and blast it!’ stormed Dover. ‘It’s got to be done !’
‘All right! You tell us how, sir, and we’ll do it.’ Sergeant Kempton tossed her ginger head, folded her arms and waited. Dover could cheerfully have wrung her neck.
‘Well, what about this?’ he suggested through clenched teeth. ‘One of you waits by the entrance and whenever a woman comes out of the middle toilet you engage her in conversation while the other goes into the toilet and checks if the money’s still there?’
Sergeant Kempton laughed, shortly and with contempt.
Dover bridled. ‘What’s wrong with that?’ he snarled viciously.
‘Just about everything,’ said Sergeant Kempton airily. ‘I thought we were supposed to be inconspicuous. What with one of us making polite conversation with every third woman who uses the place and the other popping in and out of the middle lavatory every thirty seconds like a jack-in-the-box, we’re likely to be the talk of the town before lunch-time. What are we supposed to talk to ’em about? The weather or the international situation or what? And do you know what that place is like on market-day? It’s like Waterloo Station on a bank holiday! There’s a queue there nearly all day long. How do you think I can keep popping inconspicuously into the middle lavatory every second turn? Talk about queue-breaking — they’d lynch me!’
Miriam spoke up for the first time. ‘Who’s going to pay for the pennies?’ she asked.
‘That’s a good point, Smith.’ The sergeant nodded her head in approval. ‘This lark’s going to cost a fortune. Who is going to pay?’
‘Police funds,’ snapped Dover.
‘Well,’ said Sergeant Kempton gazing boredly at the ceiling, ‘it still won’t work.’
‘How about putting one of the side toilets out of order?’ Dover tried again with a new inspiration. ‘Then you could stand in there and peep over the top of the partition?’
‘No thank you,’ snorted Sergeant Kempton. ‘What do you think we are? Anyhow,’ she added, ‘the side walls go right up to the ceiling, so that wouldn’t work either.’
‘You’re a bloody fine help, I must say!’ yelped Dover, fast reaching his breaking-point.
‘Here! Don’t you speak to me like that!’ The sergeant was reaching her breaking-point too. ‘I’ve got my rights, you know!’
‘Well, I shouldn’t count on having ’em much longer, if I were you!’
At this point the briefing degenerated into an exchange of vulgar abuse in which Sergeant Kemp ton and Chief Inspector Dover both gave as good as they got. Dover threatened disciplinary action and Sergeant Kempton countered by promising a formal complaint to Higher Authority. The problems of supervising the Market Square ladies’ convenience in order to thwart the dastardly designs of the kidnappers were rapidly abandoned for more acceptable and fruitful topics such as personal appearance, probable moral and intellectual standards, family background and so forth – on all of which the two protagonists waxed long and eloquent.
When signs of exhaustion at last began to appear, it was Sergeant MacGregor who undertook the delicate and thankless job of acting as peacemaker. Employing all his well-known charm he at last restored some semblance of peace and order to the discussion and it was finally agreed, with a marked lack of enthusiasm all round, that the two policewomen should hang round all the next day in the Market Square ladies’ convenience in plain clothes and generally do the best they could. This was not quite the all-embracing, watertight master plan that Dover had envisaged, but, as he pointed out loudly numerous times, if they didn’t give him the tools, he couldn’t get on with the job.
The supervision which he tried to arrange outside the purely feminine domain of the underground convenience wasn’t, he was unhappily aware, very much better. The local police grudgingly agreed to provide an indequate number of police constables, also in plain clothes, to keep an unobtrusive eye on such inhabitants of Irlam Old Hall as might make their way into Creedon on the Wednesday. Gordon Pilley and Mrs Rugg were also included in the list of those whose movements were to be supervised.
Though, mind you,’ said Dover gloomily, ‘the odds are they’ll use some blasted woman that nobody’s ever seen before. I’d give six months’ pay to get my hands on the bastard who thought this one up!’
‘Where are we going to be stationed, sir?’ asked Sergeant MacGregor, wondering if Dover had overlooked this small point. He underestimated the chief inspector.
‘Here,’ said Dover, jabbing a fat finger at the map. ‘ “Miss Mathilda’s Tea Shoppe”-it’s right opposite the ladies’ convenience and we’ll be able to sit there all day, if needs be, without attracting too much attention. You’ll have to park the car as near as you can in one of the side streets, just in case we have to use it’ With an unerring instinct, fortified by long experience, Dover had picked out for himself the cushiest job in the whole operation. But even the prospect of sitting quietly all day in a Tea Shoppe didn’t lift the burden of gnawing anxiety which both he and Sergeant MacGregor were beginning to experience. If things went wrong, somebody’s head was going to roll, and Dover recognized resentfully that his neck was already stretched out on the block.
Chapter Eleven
DOVER didn’t get much sleep on the Tuesday night. In the quiet of his hotel room, tossing about irritably from one side to the other in bed, he began to think about things which he might have done better to have considered earlier. A telephone call from his superior in Scotland Yard, who had been alerted by the horrified Chief Constable as to what was going on, had not made Dover feel any easier about his hastily-conceived plan. An icy voice had informed him clearly where the responsibility lay in case there was any mishap (squarely on Dover’s shoulders, of course) and drew his attention to the fact, in case he had overlooked it, that the safety of the missing girl and of five hundred pounds in untraceable notes was a matter of not inconsiderable importance.
Dover’s mind shied uneasily back to the ransom letter itself’ He had been so astounded and infuriated by its arrival that he had without thinking assumed that it was genuine. Well, that was fair enough. Juliet Rugg’s life might be in danger and he had to take all possible precautions to protect her. If the whole thing turned out to be a hoax, nothing had been lost, except an incredibly large number of police man-hours.
There was nothing particularly significant about the note from a physical point of view. Both the envelope and the paper were mass-produced items which could be bought in every stationer’s shop from one end of the country to the other. The minor problem of the large, neatly printed, pencilled lettering had been solved – by Sergeant MacGregor unfortunately, but that couldn’t be helped. Whoever had written the note had used one of those celluloid stencils which are, again, on sale everywhere to people who want to do some neat lettering or sign-writing on a do-it- yourself basis. In this case they had been able to identify the actual make of the stencil used-a very small one which was combined with a ruler. Sergeant MacGregor possessed one himself and had recognized the shape of the letters.
It was, Dover acknowledged, a clever idea. Obviously the writer was well aware of police expertise in identifying handwriting or printing, however well disguised, and the stencil was plainly a good deal less troublesome than the more usual method of cutting words and letters out of old newspapers and sticking them on a sheet of paper. The police had reported that the pencil used was an ordinary HB one and asked if it was worth while trying to identify the actual make. Dover had said yes, just to be awkward. He didn’t really expect to get a lead that way.
There were no finger-prints on the letter, except those of Sir John and the ink impression which had indeed been made by Juliet Rugg’s right-hand index finger. It had been compared with the prints which were scattered all over her bedroom. The letter had however been sent up to the finger-print laboratories in Scotland Yard in case they could discover something which the much less experienced local men had missed. Dover hadn’t much hope of success on this score but he was never one to cut down work and trouble as long as it was somebody else’s.
At this stage in his ruminations he climbed resentfully out of bed and rummaged round in his suitcase until he found the crumpled packet of cigarettes which he carried in case of emergency. He lit one and climbed back into bed again, frowning as he sucked the acrid-tasting smoke into his lungs.
