Dover Beats the Band

by Joyce Porter

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, where’s that?’

  ‘Third on the right off Barbara Castle Prospect,’ said Captain Maguire promptly and without rancour. He could have mentioned – but didn’t – that these names harked back to the period when Sir Egbert was working for his K.

  ‘I should like to see it.’

  Captain Maguire waved a hospitable hand. ‘Be my guest.’

  MacGregor realised that, where Captain Maguire was concerned, he was already working on borrowed time. Quite apart from the personal magnetism of the nubile Doris, fresh rations of whisky were already wending their way down the bar and it wasn’t to be expected that the Captain would devote much more of his time to investigating a murder. ‘You only seem to have the name and address of the secretary of the Dockwra Society, sir. What about the other members? Haven’t you got any information about them?’

  ‘Always deal with the boss, old chap,’ said Captain Maguire thickly. ‘He’s the one with the money.’

  There is absolutely no doubt that MacGregor would have pursued the matter much further if Dover hadn’t chosen this moment to topple off his stool. What with dragging Dover out of the bar, transporting him across to his bunk-house in a fortuitously handy wheelbarrow, putting him to bed and then returning to the Keir Hardie Saloon only to find that Captan Maguire and Doris had skipped it, even MacGregor eventually felt it was time to call it a day. Outside, as he already knew to his cost, it was pitch dark and raining cats and dogs. Even if he succeeded in locating Shinwell Square he wouldn’t be able to see anything. He decided he might as well behave like everybody else and forget about the whole sorry business until the morning.

  MacGregor treated himself to a dry sherry and then went to have his evening meal in a dining room as large, as uninviting and as chilly as an aircraft hanger. At the next table a dozen or so Mediaevale Feasters slumped miserably over their deepfreeze trout and chips while, away at the far end, a shop steward was trying to persuade the waitresses that their go-slow had gone unnoticed and that they all ought to come out on a proper strike.

  The television in the Cow-poke’s Parlour was out of order.

  And it was still raining.

  At eight o’clock MacGregor retired to bed in the bunk-house he was sharing with Dover. He gritted his teeth and settled down to twelve hours in a hard, damp bed and to a symphony of snores, grunts and snorts which came wafting from down the corridor. When William Schwenk Gilbert had talked about the policeman’s lot, thought MacGregor bitterly at 2 a.m., he didn’t know the bloody half of it.

  Rankin’s Holiday Ranches didn’t run to serving breakfast in bed but, luckily for Dover, detective sergeants from Scotland Yard did.

  ‘I thought you’d bloody well emigrated!’ shouted Dover from his bedroom as MacGregor staggered up the bunk-house steps with his tray. ‘I suppose you’ve had your bloody breakfast,’ he added as MacGregor entered his bedroom.

  MacGregor, not trusting himself to speak, placed the tray on Dover’s knees.

  Dover was sitting up with his overcoat wrapped round his shoulders. ‘’Strewth, what a dump!’ he grumbled as he picked up a piece of bacon in his fingers. ‘And people actually pay good money to stay here?’

  MacGregor perched himself on the bedside chair and tried not to look.’ Dover – bloated, hung-over, white of face and red of eye – was not the sort of sight any fastidious person would choose to contemplate.

  But our natural sympathy for MacGregor mustn’t blind us to the fact that Dover, too, had his problems. Like what the hell happened last night. He’d got a dim feeling that somebody somewhere had made some progress and, since he was pretty sure it wasn’t him, he wanted to slam the brakes on before things went too far. Better that the identity of the dead man on the rubbish tip should remain a mystery for ever than that this bloody little infant prodigy he’d been saddled with should come up with the answer. First, though, he had to find out how the land lay.

  Dover soaked a piece of buttered toast in his tea. That was the trouble with your National Health teeth – they were worth bugger-all when it came to munching. ‘I reckon,’ said Dover in a spray of soggy crumbs, ‘we’d better have a recap.’

  It didn’t fool MacGregor for a second, of course, but he pulled out his notebook. Actually, he’d be quite glad to run over things again, just to clarify his own thoughts. ‘I think we’re beginning to make some headway, sir.’ He was slightly surprised to realise that this was true. Somehow one didn’t associate making headway with cases in which Dover was involved. ‘I think we can work on the assumption that our Mr X was here at the Holiday Ranch, in some capacity or another, shortly before he was killed. The piece of Funny Money – that’s the blue bead, you remember, sir – and the venison he’d consumed at his last meal virtually prove that. Indeed, sir, I think we may conclude that he deliberately swallowed the blue bead in order to lead us here.’ MacGregor paused. ‘Of course, that implies he knew he was going to be killed and that he had some time to think about leaving a clue.’

  Dover spooned up a lump of marmalade from his top sheet. ‘We still don’t know who the blighter is,’ he groused, as willing as ever to look on the dark side.

  MacGregor agreed. ‘But we are narrowing the field down, sir.’ He consulted his notes. ‘Venison was served here at midday on Saturday the fourteenth of October, which fits in well with what the post mortem came up with as the probable time of death. So we have our unidentified man eating his last meal here at the Holiday Ranch on that Saturday.’ MacGregor stopped speaking to let all this sink in. It didn’t do to overload Dover’s brain with too many facts all at once.

  After a few moment’s delay, the oracle uttered. ‘Humph,’ said Dover.

  ‘The next thing, sir, is that we have to ascertain who was here at the Holiday Ranch at that particular time. Of course we can discount anybody who’s been seen alive and well since that time. They can hardly be our unknown dead man, can they?’

  As jokes go, this one hit rock bottom like a lead pancake. ‘Yack, yack, yack!’ chanted Dover wearily.

  ‘Captain Maguire and I have virtually eliminated all the staff who were around at the critical time, sir.’

  Dover was scowling again.

  MacGregor, a devout believer in the Scotland Yard myth that there were times when Dover couldn’t even remember his own name, hastened to elucidate. ‘Captain Maguire is the manager of this Holiday Ranch, sir.’

  Dover was not inhibited by gratitude. ‘Oh, him!’ he commented viciously, fully aware to whom he was indebted for his present splitting head and queasy stomach.

  ‘That just leaves us with the two groups who were staying here, sir. A party of senior citizens, mostly ladies and in any case far too old for us. Our chap wasn’t anywhere near drawing

  his pension.’ »

  ‘I wish I bloody was,’ said Dover, thinking wistfully of those halcyon days whose golden hours would be unmarred by work in any shape or form. He began to grow mawkish. ‘Not that I’ll last that long,’ he whined. ‘Not with my health. I ought to be out on a disability pension now. Those damned quacks on the medical board – they’ve got it in for me, you know. They . . .’

  ‘Which just leaves us with the other group, sir.’ Long experience had taught MacGregor not to indulge Dover when it came to a discussion of the latter’s failing powers. ‘There were only seven of them, luckily. Or, at least,’ he added as he recalled the insouciance with which the Holiday Ranch’s books appeared to have been kept, ‘that’s the number the records show.’

  ‘All men?’ asked Dover, who occasionally confused everybody by not consistently being as stupid as he looked.

  The question led MacGregor neatly on to the next point he wanted to make. ‘Ah, that we don’t know as yet, sir. The group is called the Dockwra Society and all the arrangements for the weekend they spent here were made by their secretary. We’ve got his name and address, but nothing about the rest of the party.’

  ‘Can’t this Major Mollie chap
remember?’

  ‘Captain Maguire, sir? I’m afraid not. He doesn’t seem to take what you might call a personal interest in the people who come here.’

  ‘Have you asked the rest of the shower that work in this dump?’

  MacGregor made a point of not being caught napping as easily as that. Whilst Dover had still been sleeping it off, the sergeant had conscientiously been questioning everybody he’d met when he went in search of breakfast. ‘The ones I’ve managed to catch so far don’t seem any more helpful. The Dockwra Society only spent the weekend here – Friday evening to Sunday lunch-time. Hardly long enough to make their mark unless they did something really outrageous.’

  ‘Like getting themselves croaked,’ said Dover, indicating to MacGregor that he was ready to have the breakfast tray removed from his paunch. He began to sink once more beneath the blankets. ‘Well, that’s that, eh?’ he murmured as he pulled the sheets up round his ears.

  MacGregor viewed this development with alarm. He knew – none better – how very stressful life could become when Dover took to his bed in the middle of a murder investigation. Senior officers back at Scotland Yard just didn’t understand why nothing kept on happening for weeks on end, and they were inclined to place the blame and vent their wrath on the innocent and guilty alike. ‘Er – don’t you think you’d better be getting dressed, sir?’

  Dover uncovered one malignant, piggy eye. ‘Wa’for?’

  ‘Captain Maguire will be round in five minutes, sir.’

  Dover weighed the implications carefully. Free booze was free booze and not to be sniffed at, but enough was also enough. He shook his head regretfully. ‘Tell him I’m not well,’ he said. ‘An old war wound playing me up. Maybe I’ll meet him in the bar at lunch-time.’

  MacGregor suddenly realised that he might be able to find a silver lining here. ‘Very well, sir,’ he said carefully, ‘I’ll make your excuses.’

  But Dover’s sensitive ear had caught the nuance and he raised his head from the pillow. What was little snotty-nose up to now? ‘What’s he coming for?’

  ‘Oh, only to show us round the chalets the Dockwra Society members occupied, sir,’ said MacGregor nonchalantly. ‘Not that there’ll be anything left to see. They’ve all apparently been thoroughly cleaned and even occupied again since, so 1 doubt if there’ll be much left in the way of clues. Still, I’ll just pop along with Captain Maguire and have a look, shall I, sir?’

  Dover shoved the bed-clothes back. ’Strewth, it was a dog’s life, but he had no intention of letting a young whipper-snapper like MacGregor go stealing a march on him.

  It was only then that Dover realised that he was still fully clothed.

  ‘God damn it,’ he whined as he contemplated several acres of crumpled blue serge, ‘you might have taken my bloody trousers off!’

  Six

  ‘Stone a crow,’ chuckled Captain Maguire ruefully, ‘but we had a skinful last night! Really tied one on, eh?’ Reeking pungently of the hair of the dog upon which he had breakfasted, he took a deep breath and bent down once more to his task. Which was to insert the key in the keyhole of Bunk-house Number Eleven, Shinwell Square.

  Dover leaned up against the door jam. The shock of discovering that he’d slept in his best suit had been reinforced by a bracing walk, on foot, down the entire length of Barbara Castle Prospect. Captain Maguire had promised that it wasn’t more than a step and would be less of an effort than getting in and out of a car. Captain Maguire had been lying in his teeth.

  ‘Beginning to think I need glasses,’ mumbled Captain Maguire as he let MacGregor take the key off him.

  With Attila the Doberman Pinscher in the vanguard, they all trooped inside, out of the howling gale.

  The interior of Bunk-house Number Eleven contained little of interest and less of surprise. It was exactly the same as the interior of the bunk-house in which Dover and MacGregor had spent the night. There were two bedrooms, each containing one bed which did duty either as a single or a double according to need. There was a small bathroom and an even smaller, rudimentary kitchen. All these rooms opened off a narrow corridor which ran the length of the building and into which the outside door opened. Along the front of the bunk-house ran a primitive sort of verandah equipped (if not already nicked by the neighbours) with a couple of deck chairs and a wobbly cane table. It was here that holiday-makers were expected, weather and temperature permitting, to sit well back and take their ease.

  ‘And imbibe the odd cocktail or chota peg,’ added Captain Maguire, cutting Attila off in mid-stream with a resounding thwack from his riding crop. He led the way across the sand-drifts to Bunk-house Number Twelve.

  The bunk-houses which had been occupied by the Dockwra Society were grouped round three sides of Shinwell Square and formed a little, self-contained enclave. The middle of the square was taken up with a patch of coarse grass and a couple of stunted trees which Attila was not walloped for irrigating.

  ‘We let ’em park their cars in the roadway here,’ said Captain Maguire, ‘as long as they don’t cause an obstruction. We have a proper car park, of course, but the bastards won’t use it. Insist on keeping their vehicles where they can see ‘em. Not surprising, really,’ he added with uncharacteristic understanding, ‘when you consider the sort of clientele we get staying here.’

  ‘Do most people come by car?’ asked MacGregor, making a quick tour of the rooms in Number Twelve while Dover sat moodily on the first bed he came to.

  ‘Fifty-fifty,’ guessed Captain Maguire. ‘They can get to Bowerville easily enough by train or bus, and we run ’em to and fro for a purely nominal charge.’

  They moved on to Bunk-house Number Fourteen.

  ‘No Thirteen, of course,’ explained Captain Maguire, managing to find the key-hole quite quickly this time. ‘Just another instance of having to capitulate to the irrational superstitions of the labouring classes.’

  ‘That’s a master key you’re using, is it, sir?’ asked McGregor, mustard keen as ever to demonstrate that no detail escaped him.

  Captain Maguire grinned. ‘You could call it that, old boy,’ he agreed. ‘Actually, all the bloody locks are the same. Kills me to watch ’em all solemnly locking their doors when they toddle off down to the beach or wherever! Bloody peasants!’

  Dover chose this moment to stick his two-pennyworth in. ‘You could kick your way through these doors,’ he rumbled. ‘Easy as pie.’

  ‘Too right, squire!’ Captan Maguire nodded his head sadly. ‘And hundreds of the beggars have done just that. Irate husbands for the most part,’ he added for no apparent reason.

  ‘I believe you said that one of the bedrooms was turned into a sort of common room, sir,’ said MacGregor as they began to make yet another desultory tour of inspection.

  ‘Yes, we moved a bed out or something. Damned imposition but we got our own back on the bill.’

  ‘Can you remember which room it was, sir?’

  Captain Maguire flicked at the sand which had drifted through onto the window sill. ‘Haven’t an earthly, old chum. Does it matter?’

  MacGregor didn’t know.

  ‘Shall we move on then, sergeant?’

  MacGregor looked round. ‘Where’s Chief Inspector Dover, sir?’

  Captain Maguire jerked his head. ‘Shot into the bog before I could warn him, old son.’

  ‘Warn him, sir?

  ‘You don’t think we leave the water turned on in these match boxes do you, squire? Not in the middle of winter, we don’t!’ Dover caught up with them as they were going through Bunk-house Number Fifteen. He gave Captain Maguire a poke in the back. ‘I reckon you’d better have this,’ he said, surrendering a small, chromium-plated lever. ‘It sort of came off in my hand.’

  With the completely fruitless inspection of the four chalets concluded, there was nothing to detain Dover and MacGregor any further at the Holiday Ranch, especially as Captain Maguire now seemed anxious to see the back of them. Indeed, his attitude had grown so unfriendly that Do
ver was probably right in suspecting him of hot passing his hip flask round but of retiring into dark corners and taking surreptitious swigs. Dover had never been quite nippy enough to catch Captain Maguire in this inhospitable act, but the old fool wasn’t a detective for nothing. He knew that honest, decent people didn’t keep emerging from around corners with their eyes watering and wiping their mouths on the back of their hands.

  The train had already rushed many miles southward before Dover stopped brooding on the queerness of folk in general and of Captain Maguire in particular. ‘Who’s this joker we’re going to see now?’ he asked.

  By MacGregor’s reckoning, this information had already been furnished three times – but who’s counting? ‘A man called Rupert Pettitt, sir.’

  ‘Rupert Pettitt?’ Dover tried the name for size. It didn’t sound like a hard drinker. ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

  MacGregor appreciated that this sudden thirst for knowledge was merely a temporary aberration and unlikely to last. ‘The secretary of the Dockwra Society, sir. He made all the arrangements for their weekend at the Holiday Ranch.’

  ‘That was a funny sort of place,’ said Dover reflectively. ‘You wouldn’t catch me spending my bloody leave in a dump like that. The wife’s always saying we ought to try one of these holiday camp places but I’ve always put my foot down.’ Even to those not privileged to have made Mrs Dover’s acquaintance this male chauvinist boast would have sounded unconvincing. ‘Expecting us, is he?’

  ‘Rupert Pettitt, sir? No, he’s not, actually.’ MacGregor was on a hiding to nothing, and he knew it. Whichever way he responded to Dover’s question, he was laying himself open to the old fool’s nit-picking.

  Dover didn’t disappoint him. ‘You damned fool, suppose he’s not in? If I go traipsing all the way across London to Wapping and then find . . .’

  ‘It’s Hither Green, actually, sir.’

  ‘Same thing!’ snarled Dover. He scowled. ‘Now you’ve made me forget what I was bloody saying!’