by Joyce Porter
Boris’s face became more guarded, but he still looked puzzled. He shrugged his shoulders again and gave the address of a doctor in London.
‘And how do you actually get these drugs, Mr Bogolepov? Are they sent to you by post or what?’ Dover was playing it very kid glove.
‘No, I collect them from Simkins the chemist in Creedon.’
‘How often, sir, once a month or once a week?’
Boris’s eyes narrowed swiftly. ‘Once a week.’
‘Which day, sir?’
Boris picked up his wine glass. ‘Oh, it varies. Sometimes one day, sometimes another.’
Dover sighed, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘We can check with the chemist, sir,’ he said wearily.
Boris rose angrily to his feet. ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ he shouted. ‘I have told you, I do not have a special day! I go when I feel like it.’
‘Boris!’ Eulalia’s voice rapped out in an authoritative warning.
The German hesitated a moment and then sat down again.
‘Mr Bogolepov,’ Dover pointed out mildly, ‘no genuine drug addict could be quite so casual about getting hold of a “fix” as you appear to be. He’d want it as soon as the chemist would let him have it, wouldn’t he? Now, which day was it?’
‘Wednesday,’ mumbled Boris sulkily.
‘You go into Creedon to the chemist’s every Wednesday?’
Tes.’
‘Without exception?’ probed Dover relentlessly.
Boris grabbed a knife off the table and began to bend the blade between his strong, nervous fingers. From under lowered brows he shot another glance at Eulalia. This time she stared back at him.
‘No,’ he muttered at last through clenched teeth, ‘last week I went on Friday.’ He waited tensely for the next question. Eulalia seemed to be holding her breath.
Dover didn’t oblige. He always enjoyed a bit of the old cat- and-mouse business.
‘Oh, so you were in Creedon last Friday, were you? Did you go anywhere else except the chemist’s?’
‘No,’ snapped Boris.
‘Mr Bogolepov!’ Dover waggled a reproving finger.
‘Oh, I. . . I went to the post office, I think.’
‘What for?’
‘To post a parcel !’ Boris almost shouted his answer.
‘Who to?’
‘It is none of your damned business! I want to know by what right you are asking these questions. I do not answer any more!’ He leapt up from the table again and MacGregor got ready to stop him if he attempted to dash for the door.
Dover looked at him in surprise. ‘Was there anything wrong about that parcel, sir?’ he asked innocently.
‘Of course not!’ Eulalia took charge. ‘Boris, sit down and don’t be such a damned fool!’ She swung back to the inspector, her eyes boring watchfully into his. ‘You must forgive him, Chief Inspector. As you’ve probably noticed, he’s a rather unstable character. He likes to pretend he’s very tough and detached, a misanthrope in fact, but underneath he’s as much humanity as most of us. The parcel he posted on Friday contained some old clothes – some of them mine, incidentally – for the refugee appeal. Boris is rather ashamed of his good action. That’s why he got so excited.’
‘Thank you, madam,’ said Dover, not without a certain admiration for such quick-thinking composure- ‘By the way,’ he added casually, ‘I wonder if you can help me on one minor point? Ladies notice these things more than we men do. Can you remember, by any chance, what colour nail varnish Juliet Rugg used to wear?’
It was Eulalia’s turn to frown as she carefully examined the implications of this question. She decided to play it safe.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ she smiled, not without a flicker of triumph, ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember.’
‘Pity,’ said Dover slowly. ‘Oh well, it can’t be helped.’
He put his bowler hat straight on his head and got up with a sigh from his chair.
‘Is that all?’ asked Eulalia suspiciously.
‘I think so, madam, unless of course you’ve got anything you want to tell me.’
Eulalia relaxed almost imperceptibly and shook her head. Boris lolled back in his chair, grinning widely.
Suddenly Dover turned on him, dragged him to his feet by a fistful of his whiter-than-white shirt and slammed him up against the kitchen wall. Bogolepov’s head cracked painfully as it came into contact with the unyielding surface.
‘What happened,’ bawled Dover ferociously, his face not more than an inch from Bogolepov’s, ‘what happened when Juliet Rugg called here on Tuesday night at eleven o’clock?’ He underlined the importance of the question by giving his victim a good shaking.
Boris blinked. Don’t hit me!’ he screamed suddenly in a high, terrified voice. ‘Don’t hit me!’
‘What happened?’ roared Dover.
Boris opened his mouth and let out a stream of German. He struggled ineffectively to free himself from Dover’s grip. The chief inspector bunched an enormous meaty fist menacingly under his victim’s nose. In the background Sergeant MacGregor groaned inwardly.
‘What happened?’ snarled Dover again.
‘Nothing! Nothing happened!’ sobbed the young man.
‘Nothing happened when she called?’
‘No, nothing! Nothing!’
‘Oh, so she did call, did she? You did see her on the Tuesday night?’
Boris tried to pull himself together and collect his thoughts.
‘No, I haven’t seen her at all.’
‘Don’t – lie – to – me!’ shouted Dover, punctuating each word with a bone-jarring shake. ‘I know you saw her.’
Eulalia had jumped to her feet. ‘Don’t answer, Boris!’ she screamed. ‘They’re only trying to trap you. Don’t answer!’
But the German wasn’t listening to her. He cringed, whimpering and blubbering, back against the wall. ‘Don’t hit me,’ he begged, ‘don’t hit me!’
‘If you don’t tell me the truth,’ promised Dover, ‘I’ll break every bone in your body, one by one.’
Don’t hit me! It wasn’t me! She killed her! She did it! It wasn’t me. Don’t hit me!’
‘Shut up, you blabbing fool!’ shouted Eulalia from the other side of the table. ‘For God’s sake keep your damned mouth shut!’
‘What did you do with the body?’ demanded Dover. ‘D’you hear me? What did you do with the body?’
‘No!’ Eulalia’s scream cut through the air. With a tremendous leap she flung herself on Dover’s back, her hands clawing desperately for his face. As Dover released his hold to protect his eyes, Boris slipped out of his grasp and laughing in a shrieking hysteria, tears and sweat streaming down his face, he dashed across the room towards MacGregor.
‘The body?’ he screeched dementedly. ‘The body? You wish to know where the body is?’ He broke into a spine-chilling giggle which racked his whole body.
Dover flung Eulalia to one side. ‘Get him, Sergeant!’ he shouted to MacGregor, who was still hovering uncertainly on the outskirts of the fracas.
The two detectives came at Boris with a rush but he sidestepped them smartly. Giggling uncontrollably and dancing about on his toes he went on shouting his refrain.
‘You want the body? You want the body? Well, you are getting quite warm! Do you understand? You are getting quite warm!’
Dover made another clumsy grab at him, but Boris tore himself away and went crashing into the kitchen table. The whole lot toppled over; glasses, cutlery, flowers and wine shattered on to the floor.
‘’Strewth!’ ejaculated Dover, gesticulating ludicrously as he tried to free his feet from the clinging folds of the table-cloth.
‘Look out, sir!’ yelled MacGregor.
Dover did and, much to his annoyance, found Boris charging at him, his eyes wild and a nasty-looking table knife in his hand. The chief inspector parried the savage knife-thrust with his left arm and sank his clenched fist into the pit of Bogolepov’s stomach. His assailant doubled forwa
rd, choking and spitting, just as Dover’s right knee jerked upwards. Boris received the blow right on the point of his chin.
With a sigh Dover tugged his handcuffs out of his hip pocket, snapped one end round Boris’s wrist and dragged his unconscious body across the kitchen floor. With a grunt he bent down and clipped the other end of the handcuffs to the leg of the electric cooker. Boris groaned and began to show feeble signs of reviving. Dover thoughtfully gave him a kick where it would do most good and turned to see how his sergeant was getting on.
MacGregor, inhibited by a gentle upbringing and the mistaken idea that women are the weaker sex, wasn’t doing any too well. Eulalia had already managed to drag her finger-nails effectively down the side of his face while the sergeant tried manfully to restrain her without actually doing anything which might cause annoyance or offence. No such delicacy of feeling deterred Dover. He grabbed one of Eulalia’s arms and twisted it painfully behind her back. She lashed out with her feet at Dover’s shins but he merely increased the pressure. Eulalia may have picked up a few pointers about hand-to-hand fighting from the noble savages with whom she had spent so much of her time, but Dover had learned his methods from free-born Englishmen and modestly reckoned, when it came to slashing and gouging, that he could hold his own with anyone. Once again the arts of civilization triumphed.
‘Get your handcuffs out, you fool!’ he shouted at MacGregor.
They managed to get one handcuff on Eulalia’s wrist and then Dover picked her up bodily, still kicking and biting and cursing, and carted her across the room. He dumped her heavily and unceremoniously on the floor beside Boris and clipped the handcuff to the other leg of the cooker,
‘Hell’s teeth!’ he exclaimed as he looked round the room, his bowler hat still resting squarely on his head. ‘What a mess!’
MacGregor mopped the blood off his face. ‘Whew!’ he said. ‘I never expected ’em to run amuck like that, did you, sir?’
‘No, and that’s not the only thing I didn’t expect either. What was it he said about the body? “You’re getting warm” or something, wasn’t it?’ Dover looked grimly round the room again. ‘Just have a look in that deep freeze thing, MacGregor,’ he said casually.
MacGregor threw his chief inspector an inquiring glance and then went obediently across to the deep freeze and opened the lid.
‘Seems to be full of food or something, sir,’ he said, pulling out a fair-sized, Cellophane-wrapped package.
He wiped some of the frost off one end of it and peered through the transparent paper. For a second he didn’t get it Then the significance of the object he was holding penetrated. It was a human arm, frozen solid and ending in five green-painted finger-nails.
‘Oh my God!’ he said in a horrified voice. ‘It’s . . . ’ His eyes bulged and he gulped ominously. Dropping the parcel on to the floor he stuffed his blood-bespattered handkerchief into his mouth and made an ignominious dash for the back door. From the pitch blackness outside came a distressing, choking sound. Detective Sergeant Charles Edward MacGregor was being sick in the garden,
Dover, sneering complacently to himself over the squeamishness of present-day policemen, strolled over to the deep freeze and pulled out another tidily wrapped bundle. It was large and round, like a football. His own stomach gave a sympathetic heave. He slammed the lid down and hurried, rather shakily but with an unerring instinct, across the room to one of the kitchen cupboards. Inside was Boris’s supply of whisky.
‘I reckon poor old MacGregor could do with a shot of this,’ he muttered as he poured out a tumblerful and then tossed it, with one tremendous gulp, down his own throat.
It was at this somewhat inopportune moment that Colonel Bing arrived.
‘Hello!’ she called inanely. ‘Anybody home?’
With Peregrine in her arms she stepped through the open back door into the kitchen.
‘I’ve come for Peregrine’s bone. He did so enjoy the last one, the greedy little . . . ’ her voice trailed off.
She gaped at Dover, still clutching his bottle of whisky, and stared in blank astonishment at the prostrate bodies handcuffed to the legs of the electric stove. Eulalia was cursing horribly and Boris had started to giggle feebly again. Finally her eyes wandered to the mess of plates and broken glass on the kitchen floor,
‘Dear God!’ she exclaimed, almost inaudibly. ‘What on earth’s going on?’
‘I’m just in the process of making an arrest,’ announced Dover loftily. ‘I think it would be as well if you didn’t stay here.’
Colonel Bing ignored him. ‘Eulalia!’ she cried. ‘What have they done to you?’
She dropped Peregrine and hurried across to her neighbour.
The dog, pausing only briefly to cock his leg up against one of the overturned chairs, headed straight for the grisly parcel MacGregor had dropped on the floor. He grabbed it and started proudly for the back door.
‘Hey!’ yelled Dover with visions of his evidence disappearing before his eyes. ‘Drop that, you filthy brute! ’
The chief inspector had never played Rugby in his life, but, with a valiant lunge, he got Peregrine round the back legs in a superb flying tackle. The poodle squealed in outrage, dropped his trophy and bit Dover.
Just as Sergeant MacGregor, his face tinged unpleasandy with an obscene yellow hue, appeared sheepishly in the doorway, the electric cooker suddenly began belching out an inordinate quantity of black, greasy smoke. Colonel Bing, Boris and Eulalia practically disappeared from view. The stew was burning.
‘For God’s sake,’ bawled Dover, still fighting it out with Peregrine on the floor, ‘why doesn’t somebody do something?’
MacGregor seized a towel and flung himself heroically at the oven door. He grabbed the casserole, burnt black and still smoking furiously, and rushed outside with it. Colonel Bing switched the cooker off and opened a window. Dover managed to struggle to his feet and Peregrine, his rear end a couple of inches ahead of Dover’s boot, fled to the safety of his mistress’s arms.
‘What on earth’s happening?’ demanded Colonel Bing, coughing, black-faced, dishevelled and not at all impressed by Scotland Yard’s detection methods.
‘Never you mind!’ rasped Dover. ‘None of your business.’
‘I’m a tax-payer,’ snapped Colonel Bing, ‘I have a right to know what’s going on.’
MacGregor staggered in again.
‘Sergeant,’ roared Dover hoarsely, ‘get this blasted woman out of here! And that damned dog too!’
While MacGregor, always a miracle of tact, was carrying out his instructions, Dover helped himself to another shot of whisky. It made him feel better, but not all that much.
After a bit the sergeant came back, somewhat unenthusiastically, into the kitchen.
‘She’s going to write to her M.P., sir,’ he said, squeamishly keeping his eyes away from the deep freeze, ‘and the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Silly old bitch,’ said Dover. He helped himself to yet another glass of whisky. ‘That foreign swine come round yet?’
‘I think so, sir.’
‘Good, Well, I’m going to have another little chat with Mr Bloody Bogolepov and see if I can get a bit more information out of him. The woman obviously isn’t going to say anything, but I think, with a little persuasion, I can make him open his mouth and sing.’
Dover flexed his muscles. They creaked a bit.
‘Now, you nip off and phone the local police in Creedon and tell ’em to send the lot over here pronto. Finger-print men, photographers, a doctor and the police wagon for these two. Oh, and they’d better get hold of a Home Office pathologist as well. We shall no doubt want him.’
‘Where shall I phone from, sir?’ asked MacGregor.
‘How the hell do I know?’ snorted Dover crossly. ‘There isn’t one here. Try next door – no, better still, try the Hoppold woman’s house. She’s probably got one.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said MacGregor, and moved over to Eulalia who was still handcuffed to her leg of t
he cooker. MacGregor knelt down beside her. She kicked and screamed at him as he stretched out his hands towards her.
‘MacGregor,’ said Dover with diminishing patience, ‘are you attempting assault on that woman?’
MacGregor looked up, ‘Of course not, sir, I was just looking for her keys.’
‘Never mind about the blasted keys!’ The chief inspector’s control broke. ‘Kick the bloody door down if it isn’t open. And for God’s sake get a move on!’
When MacGregor returned half an hour later he found Boris, calm and relaxed, sitting up on one of the kitchen chairs. Most of the smoke had dispersed and Dover was just putting a hypodermic syringe back on the shelf.
‘Well, the bugger’s talked all right,’ he announced casually.
‘You haven’t doped him, have you, sir?’ asked the sergeant, unwilling to believe that even Dover would go quite so far.
‘I gave him a shot’ – Dover dusted his hands fastidiously on his handkerchief – ‘after he’d made a free and voluntary statement. Now both of us have got what we want.’
Chapter Fifteen
FRIDAY morning dawned at last, bright and sunny but distinctly chilly. The police were still hard at it in Bogolepov’s bungalow. Boris and Eulalia had been carted off – Eulalia protesting, fighting and screaming the whole way-in a police van and the experts had moved in. The Home Office pathologist had rushed through the night to get his hands on what promised to be the most interesting corpse of his entire, none too distinguished, medical career. With little whimpers of admiration for the surgery, ‘very good, very good indeed for an amateur,’ he lovingly unloaded the deep freeze. All the bits and pieces of Juliet, now frozen solid, had been neatly wrapped up in transparent paper. ‘Just like the supermarket,’ remarked one youthful uniformed policeman with a silly giggle.
By six o’clock everything was finished and Dover and MacGregor returned wearily to The Two Fiddlers for breakfast. Neither had much of an appetite.
