Dover Beats the Band

by Joyce Porter

  Mrs Nora Hall drew the number one spot on the agenda and it was the garden gate leading to her cottage that MacGregor dragged open for Dover on the following morning.

  Dover, the embodiment of suburban blight, didn’t have much feeling for the country life. ‘’Strewth,’ he ejaculated as he picked his way gingerly up a chaotic little garden path bordered with beds of rotting cabbages and mouldering sprouts, ‘what a pong!’

  MacGregor didn’t lightly agree with any sentiment expressed by Dover but, on this occasion, he had to admit that the old fool had hit the nail on the head. What with the shortcomings of rural sanitation and an obsessive devotion to fertilisers, the atmosphere surrounding Mrs Hall’s ramshackle cottage did come rather thick and strong.

  MacGregor knocked on the front door and was immediately savaged by a rambling rose. ‘We’re probably expected to go round the back, sir,’ he said to Dover when he’d stopped the bleeding.

  They both gazed disconsolately at the small lake of mud which lay between them and the rear of the cottage.

  ‘See if the door’s locked!’ urged Dover. ‘They never lock their doors in the country.’

  Not true.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Dover.

  MacGregor tried to peer through the windows but they were too well guarded with coarse lace curtains and dirt. He sighed, wished he wasn’t wearing his posh Italian shoes and offered Dover his arm. Not that he wouldn’t have been in ecstasy if Dover had fallen flat on his face in the slurry but he had learned not to be self-indulgent in these matters.

  Moving slowly from one half-submerged stepping stone to another, the two detectives rounded the corner of the cottage only to find their way barred by parts of an old iron bedstead, behind which a half-grown billy goat waited hopefully for them with a dark, malicious little face.

  Dover and MacGregor backed off. They would, indeed, have made a strategic withdrawal if it had not been for a gaggle of geese which moved in, hissing angrily, behind them.

  Dover, although unaccustomed to making such value judgements, tried to work out where the main threat lay. As soon as he had got this straight, he intended to manoeuvre MacGregor’s unblemished young body into the front line.

  Luckily, rescue was at hand and Dover was not called upon to make the supreme sacrifice of somebody else. A strange, bulky figure carrying a bucket emerged from one of the outbuildings. It was a woman and, taking in the situation at a glance, she came sloshing across through the mud and the muck, scattering a flock of bantams in all directions.

  ‘You must be the chappies from Scotland Yard!’ she bellowed, sending the billy goat on its way with a good-natured gum-boot up the backside. As her be-mittened fingers fumbled awkwardly with the binder twine and electric flex which held the iron bedstead shut, she turned and called back over her shoulder, ‘They’re here, Mavis!’ She manhandled the bedstead out of the way and addressed herself to Dover. ‘I’m Nora Hall,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable inside?’ She discouraged the geese from accepting the invitation by biffing them affectionately round the ears with her bucket.

  Dover and MacGregor, watching very carefully where they put their feet, went round to the back door and into the tiny kitchen.

  Mrs Hall kicked off her gum boots and cleared a space on the table for her bucket. ‘Sorry about the imbroglio but we’ve had one hell of a morning with the old sow.’

  MacGregor eyed the kitchen table with dismay. Bits of food fought for lebensraum with unwashed crockery, grubby towels were draped higgledy-piggledy over blackened saucepans and a dishcloth lay forlornly across a thick brown liquid. In the middle of everything crouched a large ginger cat which interrupted its assiduous licking of a piece of butter paper only to glare at the intruders.

  ‘Come through into the parlour!’ invited Mrs Hall, conducting Dover and MacGregor into an even smaller room but which at least had the virtue, since it was never used, of being tidier.

  Dover sank thankfully into an easy chair by the empty fireplace, and then wondered if he’d done the right thing. If he’d been worried about getting piles from the stone wall outside Mrs Knapper’s front door, what were his emotions as he sank into cushions so cold and clammy that you could have grown watercress on them? Dover tugged his overcoat more closely over his paunch, screwed his bowler hat further down his forehead, and miserably hoped for the bloody best.

  MacGregor had naturally been taking a less subjective interest in his surroundings. He noted the musty, unlived-in atmosphere of the room, of course, but his attention was chiefly drawn to an overly large Victorian sideboard in a bellicose mahogany which stood against one wall. On the sideboard was evidence of Mrs Hall’s little hobby – a brand new Stanley Gibbon’s stamp catalogue, a stamp album, a, packet of stamp hinges and a pair of tweezers.

  MacGregor was just about to get things under way by some friendly query about the attractions of philately when the hitherto unseen Mavis came padding in on stockinged feet.

  ‘Oh, please don’t get up!’ she cooed, to Dover’s complete bewilderment. ‘I don’t want to interrupt.’ She slid self-effacingly onto a stool by the door.

  ‘My associate, Mavis Beauvis,’ said Mrs Hall gruffly. ‘We breed pedigree goats together.’ She indicated her two visitors with a hand which bore much evidence of honest toil. ‘And these are the chaps from Scotland Yard, dear! That one’s Detective Chief Inspector Dover and this is Detective Sergeant MacGregor.’ Mrs Hall, having taken a good hard look at Dover, very sensibly directed all her subsequent remarks to MacGregor. ‘You don’t mind if Mavis stays, do you? Just as a chaperone.’

  MacGregor shook his head though privately he thought Mrs Hall could well have cooled the ardour of even the randiest male with one hand tied behind her back. Still, if she wanted a chaperone, she could have one. There were other aspects of her personality that he was finding much more puzzling. Like – was the woman psychic or something.

  Mrs Hall cleared her throat. She was a busy woman and pedigree goats wait for no man. ‘Fire away, sergeant!’

  MacGregor fired and the outcome was, information-wise, a lemon. Mrs Hall, astounding in her ability to answer questions almost before they were asked, had little to tell and nothing that Dover and MacGregor didn’t already know.

  Mrs Hall was a keen member of the Dockwra Society and when the Annual General Meeting at Rankin’s Holiday Ranch had been announced had thought she might as well toddle along. ‘I felt I needed the break,’ she explained. ‘You can stomach just so much of pedigree goats, you know, and old Mavis here kindly volunteered to hold the fort while I took a couple of days off.’

  Old Mavis smirked demurely. ‘I do feel it’s important that we don’t live in each other’s pockets the whole time,’ she simpered.

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said MacGregor. ‘Now, was Mr Knapper already there when you arrived at the Holiday Ranch?’

  Mrs Hall nodded. ‘I was tail-end Charlie, if I remember correctly. Spot of muck in the carburettor, you know, and had to stop off at a garage to borrow their air-line to clear it.’

  ‘And you were allocated a bedroom in Bunkhouse number . . .’

  Twelve. That was the hut we had our room for meetings in so, at night, I had the place to myself. I was the only female present, you see. It was jolly thoughtful of Mr Pettitt,’ she added seriously, ‘and I appreciate it. I’ve always been the sort of lass who likes to see the proprieties observed.’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said MacGregor again before going on with the questions.

  Mrs Hal! answered them all. No, she had never met the late Mr Knapper before and, if her audience would forgive her for speaking ill of the dead, she was jolly glad to be spared the possibility of ever meeting him again. Luckily no-one could accuse Mrs Hall of being a snob, but there was no getting away from the fact that Knapper was a very nasty little pleb.

  ‘Absolutely no breeding, you know. In fact, if he’d been a goat,’ declared Mrs Hall roundly, ‘I’d have had him parcelled up and in the deep freeze befor
e you could say Tropic of Capricorn. There are some strains one doesn’t wish to perpetuate.’

  ‘I suppose,’ murmured MacGregor, ‘that you get all sorts interested in stamp collecting.’

  Mrs Hall’s mouth twisted sourly. ‘Most of ’em are pretty decent,’ she allowed. ‘I just didn’t happen to take to Knapper.’

  Since Knapper was not her type, Mrs Hall doubted if she’d so much as passed the time of day with him during the whole weekend. She was unable to tell MacGregor if Knapper had chummed up with anybody else much because, frankly, she’d had better things to do with her time than go mounting a round-the-clock watch on that jumped-up, snivelling little Yid.

  ‘Yid?’

  For the first and only time, Mrs Hall looked taken aback. She bit her lip and muttered something about well, she wouldn’t be surprised. Then she pulled herself together and belted the ball back into MacGregor’s court by expressing the hope that the interrogation was now at an end. ‘Mavis and I ought really to be getting back. We’re up to our necks in goats at the moment.’

  But MacGregor hadn’t finished.

  No, said Mrs Hall with evident impatience, there had been no quarrels of any sort between anybody as far as she knew. The group only existed thanks to their shared interest and it would be a sad reflection on philatelists in general if a few of them couldn’t spend a weekend together without squabbling.

  And no, she couldn’t recall whether she had left the Holiday Ranch on the Sunday morning before Mr Knapper or after. Probably before. ‘I didn’t hang around. As soon as I’d had breakfast and done my bit of packing, I was off. Far too much to do back here, don’t you know.’

  ‘We had to get that stuff off for Packets for Our Own Poor hadn’t we, dear?’ chirped up Mavis from her seat by the door. She turned to MacGregor, anxious that Mrs Hall’s philanthropy should not go unnoticed. ‘She’d collected such an enormous parcel of old clothes, you wouldn’t believe! I offered to help her bundle them all up but – oh, no! – she had to do it all herself. That’s her all over,’ concluded Mavis proudly. ‘Insists on seeing every job through from start to finish.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Mavis!’ It was no doubt humility which made Mrs Hall’s voice so sharp. ‘I don’t think that that was when I sent the POOP bundles off, anyhow.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was, dear!’

  Mrs Hall rode roughshod over the contradiction. ‘I do so much charity work,’ she told MacGregor loudly, ‘that it’s difficult to keep track. Always collecting for something. I can’t remember why it was I had to come rushing back that weekend and’ – she fixed Mavis with an icy glare – ‘neither can she!’

  MacGregor kindly poured oil by saying that such extraneous details were of little interest to the police, and his kindness was reciprocated by an offer of refreshment. Dover came winging back to full consciousness but even he jibbed at homemade chicory wine and parsnip biscuits.

  ‘I can’t bloody well understand it,’ he complained later when they’d been conveyed back past the baby goat and through the geese. ‘Fancy not having tea or coffee! It’s unnatural. They wouldn’t,’ he added grimly, ‘go around eating all that health-food muck if they had my stomach. Chicory wine? ’Strewth, I’d have had the runs for a week!’

  ‘Very odd, sir,’ agreed MacGregor. ‘Especially when they were expecting us.’

  ‘Eh?’

  They had reached the car which was waiting for them out in the lane and MacGregor moved forward to open the door. ‘Didn’t you notice, sir? Mrs Hall knew all about us – our names, who we were, why we’d come, everything – without us having said a word.’

  ‘’Course I noticed!’ snarled Dover, in whose gullet the ready lie never stuck. ‘Think I’m an idiot or something?’

  There was no answer to this so MacGregor covered the hiatus by retrieving Dover’s bowler hat from the gutter where it had landed during the complicated manoeuvres required to get its owner stuffed into the back seat. ‘Didn’t it strike you as odd, sir?’ asked MacGregor as he wondered whether he could clean the fresh mud off the bowler without actually touching the patina underneath with his bare hands. ‘I didn’t phone up to say we were coming.’

  Dover had got himself settled and the rear off-side springs protested audibly as they took the strain. He grabbed his bowler hat from MacGregor and clapped it back on his head. ‘It was that poncy little toe-doctor!’ he growled. ‘I’ll lay you odds he started ringing round the whole bloody bunch of ’em as soon as we left.’ He dropped the blame fairly and squarely where it belonged – on somebody else’s shoulders. ‘You should have thought of that, laddie, and stopped him.’

  MacGregor squeezed into the few square inches of space that Dover had left for him. ‘But don’t you see how suspicious this is, sir? If that group of stamp collectors are as innocent as they claim of Knapper’s murder, why does Pettitt have to tip everybody off that we’re on our way? What have they got to hide? We’re only making routine enquiries. I think somebody’s got a guilty conscience somewhere.’

  Dover was paying more attention to the warning rumbles that were coming from his stomach than to what MacGregor was saying, but contradicting his sergeant was a way of life. ‘Guilty conscience, my foot!’ he jeered. ‘It’s a simple act of friendship. ’Strewth, if I knew one of my mates was going to have the bloody cops sicked on him, I’d give him a ring and tip him off. Any man with a spark of decency in him would.’

  MacGregor was fascinated by this peep into Dover’s ethical standards. He hadn’t known that the old fool possessed any friends, certainly not any that he would go to so much trouble for.

  But Dover’s bird brain was already alighting on a more concrete problem. Like food. ‘We’re not going to sit here all bloody day, are we?’ he enquired. ‘I want my lunch. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.’ He settled back – a sullen, ungainly lump – in his corner. ‘Tell that bloody girl to get her skates on!’

  Nine

  To his surprise, MacGregor had managed to borrow a car and driver from the police force upon whose patch they were temporarily operating. He naturally attributed this success to his own personal charm as provincial coppers were traditionally disobliging where peripatetic members of the Metropolitan Police were concerned. In acutal fact, the superintendent of the local traffic division had an axe of his own to grind.

  He had recently, and unbeknown to his lady wife, taken a rather fetching young policewoman called Elvira under his wing. Elvira, it must be confessed, needed all the help and patronage she could get, as far as her professional duties were concerned. The superintendent had managed to get her transferred to where he could keep an avuncular eye on her but, after one or two hairy experiences, he had grown reluctant to have her driving about on her own. He was, therefore, continually on the look-out for nice little jobs which were within the range of her capabilities and which provided her with a strong masculine shoulder to lean on in case things went wrong again. He wasn’t completely blind, of course, to the dangers to which a young girl could be exposed, alone with some randy policeman in a car Elvira herself had probably forgotten to fill up with petrol. This was why, when MacGregor’s hesitant request for transport came through, the superintendent had been delighted to help. Chauffeuring a couple of sober and respectable detectives from London round the country was just about Elvira’s mark, and she was the ‘bloody girl’ to whom Dover had been referring.

  So far she’d done very well. The roads were quiet, the pedestrians had been keeping their eyes skinned, and McGregor had been doing the map reading. Elvira had driven the two miles from the railway station to Mrs Hall’s cottage with practically no trouble at all. But now a sterner task lay ahead – a task, moreover, in which a pretty face and a smashing figure would do her no good at all as Dover was long since past all that sort of thing.

  As Dover pictured it, the future was beautiful in its simplicity. En route to the home of Mr Keith Osmond, the next member of the Dockwra Society on their list, a stop would be made at some conveni
ent hostelry for a luncheon break which Dover saw as stretching from opening time to closing time, at least. He left it to Elvira to find the type of establishment he had in mind.

  Elvira wasn’t entirely to blame for what happened and it wouldn’t have made any difference even if she had been able to tell her right from her left.

  With MacGregor’s help, she set off in the right sort of direction for the small town in which Mr Osmond lived but the route lay across moorland of astonishing bleakness and desolation. If there were any public houses in the vicinity Elvira managed to avoid finding even one of them until well after closing time. She couldn’t find top gear, either, but that’s another story.

  Inside the police car, tempers began to get frayed, tears began to flow and Dover’s language became such as would have melted the wax in a drill sergeant’s ears. In the end, however, even he had to accept the inevitable and with the illest of ill grace he told MacGregor to tell the stupid little bitch that he’d settle for a snack bar.

  Elvira’s response to such generosity was to throw back her head and blubber.

  Dover couldn’t believe it. ‘Wadderyemean?’ he howled. ‘Early bloody closing?’

  Elvira took both hands off the wheel while she blew her nose. Lover boy back in Police Headquarters was going to get a piece of her mind about all this! Early closing, she explained damply, meant that everywhere closed early. She might have said more if she hadn’t found MacGregor swarming all over her in an attempt to get at the steering wheel before the whole kit and caboodle of them finished up in the ditch.