by Joyce Porter
MacGregor shrugged his shoulders. ‘She may have killed her father.’
‘That sounds a bit far-fetched.’
‘She wouldn’t be the first, sir. On the other hand, she may be protecting her husband.’ MacGregor changed the conversation. Superintendent Underbarrow was a very decent chap but he wasn’t CID. These uniformed fellows didn’t really understand the problems. ‘Where is Chantry’s house, by the way?’
‘Just here.’ Superintendent Underbarrow nodded at a large well-cared-for residence, standing on the comer of North Street and East Street. ‘Practically undamaged, as you can see.’
MacGregor looked around. ‘And practically opposite Wing Commander Pile’s house.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Interesting,’ commented MacGregor in an unworthy attempt to mystify the superintendent. ‘Now, sir, I wonder if you could let me have a list of all the people who were involved in any way in this incident?’
‘You mean the people who weren’t cut off by the broken road in West Street and the church steeple? Yes,’ – Superintendent Underbarrow began to fumble in his pocket – ‘I think we can provide you with that all right.’ He produced several sheets of paper covered with typewritten lists. ‘This is a complete census of the village that was taken immediately after the earthquake. Now all we’ve got to do is check the addresses.’ He fumbled about again and brought out a ball-point pen. ‘I’ll tick off the ones that could have been involved.’
By the time MacGregor got back to the Blenheim Towers just before one o’clock he was really feeling quite chirpy. That’s what a morning away from Dover did for you! Still – apart from that – MacGregor considered himself entitled to some self-congratulation. All in all, he had made considerable progress. He had inspected the epicentre of Sully Martin’s earthquake and seen the site, for what it was worth, of where Chantry’s body was found and got a list of all the people upon whom suspicion might possibly fall. A good morning’s work! Now all he had to do was ensure that a certain person didn’t frustrate all further developments.
Dover was ready and waiting for his lunch. MacGregor, showing a lamentable amount of low cunning, had procured a jumbo-sized helping of steak and kidney pudding for him. If that didn’t send the old fool off to sleep for the rest of the afternoon, nothing would!
Dover demanded a detailed account of the morning’s activities. * ’Strewth,’ he commented, 'you’ve not exactly been straining yourself, have you?’ MacGregor, still hoping against hope for a free rein, sought for the soft answer but, before he’d found it, Dover was grousing on. ‘The trouble with you, laddie, is you do damn-all if you haven’t got somebody standing over you all the time. Now, let’s have a look at this list of suspects.’
The reluctance with which MacGregor took the sheets of paper out of his pocket was not lost upon Dover. The chief inspector may have had his shortcomings but allowing himself to be upstaged by a snotty-nosed sergeant was not one of them. He ran a practised, if jaundiced, eye over the names and addresses.
‘I thought I should perhaps make a start on seeing some of these people this afternoon, sir,’ ventured MacGregor.
‘Good idea,’ murmured Dover. ‘Strike while the scent’s still warm, eh?’
‘If you’ve finished the marmalade pudding, sir, there’s some cheese and biscuits to follow.’ MacGregor got up with pathetic eagerness to change the plates over.
Dover reclined back amiably on his pillows. ‘Got your notebook handy, laddie?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Well now, I reckon we’d better split this lot between us. We’ll do a preliminary investigation so’s we can weed out the sheep from the goats.’
MacGregor’s hopes began to wane. ‘Yes, sir.’
Dover grinned. It was like taking sweets off a baby, and just as enjoyable. ‘Right! Well, I’ll take Chantry’s daughter and her husband, Wing Commander Pile and his daughter – you writing all this down, laddie? – and Mr and Mrs Lickes. You can do the rest.’
MacGregor’s shoulders sagged. God knows how the old fool had done it, but he had skimmed the cream off that list with an unerring hand. All that MacGregor had been left with was an uninspiring collection of old age pensioners and gormless villagers whose murderous inclinations had long since been dissipated in other, more enjoyable, rural pursuits. He poured out Dover’s coffee, picked the sheets of paper up off the floor and played his last card. ‘Do you think it’s wise, sir?’
‘Probably not,’ said Dover, ‘but I can’t do it all single-handed, can I?’
MacGregor gritted his teeth. ‘I really meant with your cold, sir.’
‘What about my cold?’
‘Well, the weather’s rotten outside, sir, really chilly and damp. And, of course, the village is ankle-deep in mud, as you already know. I was just wondering if it was really such a good idea for you to go out this afternoon when you’ve got such a bad cold.’
‘Who said I was going out this afternoon?’ demanded Dover.
‘Oh, sir, I honestly don’t think we ought to put these interviews off any longer. There’s been enough delay on this case as it is and . . .’
‘I shall conduct the interviews here,’ said Dover, snapping his fingers imperiously for a cigarette. ‘You don’t want me to catch my blooming death, do you?’
MacGregor reached for his cigarette case and refrained from answering what was no doubt a rhetorical question. ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, sir. Of course it will be much better for you to stay in the hotel and keep . . .’
‘Not only in the hotel, laddie! I’m staying here, in bed. And now, if you’ve finished lolling around on your backside, you can buzz off and get things organized. I’ll see Lickes in ten minutes and then his wife after him. Tell Pile and his potty daughter to stick around because I’ll do them after the Lickeses.’
‘And Mr and Mrs Hooper, sir? That’s Chantry’s daughter and her . . .’
‘I know who Mr and Mrs Hooper are!’ roared Dover. ‘I’ll see them later on. You can call round on your way out and tell ’em I want ’em around here at seven tonight.’
‘Very well, sir.’ McGregor rose to his feet. ‘I’ll send Mr Lickes up in ten minutes, shall I?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ said Dover with heavy sarcasm. ‘Here – take the blooming tray down with you, moron!’
Mr Lickes had been born and brought up in the hotel business and so he took the sight of Dover, wallowing under the bedclothes like a stranded whale, in his stride. Even the grubby, much-darned, blue and white army surplus pyjamas didn’t distress him overmuch. Any man who has had the experience of finding a judge of the High Court dead on the floor of his rooms and clad only in a flowered bikini and a lady’s rubber bathing cap is, sartorially speaking, pretty well immune to shock.
Mr Lickes’s sensibilities were offended, however, by the frowzy atmosphere which Dover’s lengthy occupation had engendered. He bounced over to the window and, without so much as a by-your-leave, succeeded in opening it at least half an inch.
Dover scowled fearfully and sank even farther beneath the sheets.
‘That’s better!’ announced Mr Lickes and took up a position of rigid attention at the foot of the bed. Slowly he placed his hands on his hips and rose to the tips of his toes. ‘You wanted to see me about the murder of Mr Chantry, I believe?’
‘I suppose so,’ came a glum and muffled voice from the bed. The remark was followed by a deep sigh as Dover wondered where the hell to begin. ‘Knew Chantry, did you?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Everybody in Sully Martin knew Walter Chantry. He was one of the leading personalities in the village – the leading personality, I suppose.’
‘Popular chap, was he?’
Mr Lickes considered this whilst inclining his trunk in a series of sharp jerks to the left. ‘Yes, I think so. On the whole. Some people might have found him a bit overbearing but, on the other hand, he was a great one for getting things done.’
‘What sort of thing
s?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things.’
Dover poked his head crossly out of the blankets. ‘Don’t give me any of that, laddie! If you want me to come over there and drag it out of you word by bloody word, I will – don’t you fret!’
‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Mr Lickes who could have made mincemeat out of an unhealthy lump like Dover with both hands tied behind him. ‘It’s just that it’s difficult to think of anything he wasn’t involved in. He was president of this and chairman of that and patron of the other. You name it. Boy Scouts, the Old People’s Welfare Committee, National Savings, Vicar’s Warden at the church, the Library Committee . . . Mr Sully Martin, I suppose you could call him. My wife always used to say that he was after an MBE or something in the Honours List but, personally, I don’t think it was just that. He was a very energetic man, you know, and he thoroughly enjoyed having a finger in every pie. He’d got some pretty big ideas for Sully Martin. If he’d had his way, he’d have put us on the map all right.’
‘As what, for God’s sake?’ asked Dover, who had not been impressed by what he’d seen so far.
‘Oh, a tourist centre.’
‘A tourist centre?’ Dover let fly with a nasty sort of laugh and pulled the sheets up even farther round his fat, policeman’s neck. ‘He must have been a bloody optimist!’
‘Well, it was only going to be on quite a small scale. He wasn’t planning to turn us into another Brighton or Stratford-on-Avon or anything. In fact, the tourists were going to be a sort of by-product, really. What he was actually after was to make Sully Martin a beautiful place to live in. You see, we’ve got the church, which is supposed to be a very fine one, and most of the houses are pretty old and basically rather charming. They just need doing up, that’s all. And that’s where poor old Chantry did run into a bit of opposition.’
Dover grunted a query.
‘Money,’ sighed Mr Lickes. ‘The local people haven’t got it and, even if they have, they’re not going to spend it stripping their Tudor oak beams or painting their front doors yellow. And the gardens, too. They were a great source of contention. Mr Chantry wanted flowers and the cottagers wanted rows of beans with untidy bits of coloured paper to keep the birds off. From Chantry’s point of view there was only one solution.’ Mr Lickes paused for another grunt of interrogation but Dover was feeling mean and refused to oblige. Mr Lickes had no choice but to carry on. ‘Get rid of the villagers,’ he explained. Dover yawned. ‘How?’
‘Buy them out and replace them with people who were ready and willing to spend a small fortune on conversions. Retired people, artists, writers, film stars – you know the sort of thing. It’s been done in other places.’
‘And Chantry would have made a packet out of it?’
‘Well, one imagines that he didn’t intend to lose on the transaction but things weren’t quite as simple as that. You’d need a terrific amount of capital to do the whole thing properly and Chantry just didn’t have it. He didn’t want to let anybody else in on the scheme so he had to be content with making a modest start here and there. Wing Commander Pile’s place, for example. Mr Chantry bought that up for about four hundred pounds, got the sitting tenant out, did it over and sold it to Pile for a cool four thousand.’
‘That must have made him a few enemies.’
‘Not murderous ones. Oh, some people had started muttering about Rachmanism but that was a gross exaggeration. His ideas were always a jolly sight bigger than his means.’
With a considerable amount of puffing and blowing Dover hoisted himself into a sitting position and began wondering morosely if he was getting bed sores. ‘Was he after this dump?’ he asked.
‘The Blenheim Towers?’ Mr Lickes shot a wary glance at the unkempt figure in the bed who was now scratching himself luxuriously under the armpits. It didn’t do, Mr Lickes reminded himself, to underestimate people. This chap was a high-ranking detective from Scotland Yard and he couldn’t possibly be as big a fool as he looked. On the contrary, to get away with this sort of behaviour, he must be a positive genius. Mr Lickes congratulated himself on having penetrated beneath the boorish exterior to the Great Detective lurking underneath. He was not, poor man, the first, nor would he be the last, to make this mistake.
‘Yes,’ said Dover, judging from Mr Lickes’s hesitation that he had accidentally scored a bull’s eye, ‘the Blenheim Towers.’ He leered invitingly. ‘Why don’t you sit down, laddie, and tell me all about it?’
Four
Mr Lickes, for reasons best known to himself, preferred to stand and twitch alternate calf muscles.
‘Chantry, you and the Blenheim Towers,’ prompted Dover, pressing home his advantage with all the vigour of a damp sponge.
Mr Lickes was becoming more and more impressed with the sheer devilish cunning of Dover’s technique. ‘Motels,’ he said.
‘Motels?’
‘Mr Chantry was a great believer in motels. He thought they were the coming thing in the tourist industry. He was all for me turning the Blenheim Towers into one.’
‘And?’
‘Where would I find twenty-five thousand pounds? Don’t get me wrong. I’m as eager as the next man to make a million but I’m not the tycoon type and I never shall be. Even if the scheme had been a roaring success, I should have been in hock to my bank manager or whoever it was advanced the money for the rest of my life. And if it wasn’t a success – well,’ – he shuddered as he thought about it – ‘Mrs Lickes and I would have been out on the street, wouldn’t we? The Blenheim Towers may not exactly be the Ritz but it is mine and I can cope with it. I kept telling Mr Chantry that.’
‘But he wouldn’t listen?’
‘Too busy expounding his next bright idea,’ said Mr Lickes, pulling a rather rueful face. ‘That involved me selling out to one of the big hotel chains, getting them to convert us into a motel and putting me in charge of it as manager.’
‘Sounds all right,’ said Dover.
‘All Mr Chantry’s ideas sounded all right. It was only when you started looking into them that you saw the snags. Take this one, for example. No big hotel chain has ever shown the slightest interest in buying me out and they wouldn’t make me manager if they did. I know how these things work. The best I could hope for was enough capital to go and buy myself another hotel somewhere. Well, as I said to Mr Chantry, why bother? I’m perfectly happy and contented here.’
‘So he dropped the idea?’
‘Not really. That’s as far as we’d got before he was killed.’
Dover let his gaze wander wearily out of the window and tried to twist all this into a motive for murder. Was Mr Lickes the sort of man who would kill for the sake of a quiet life?
‘It was upsetting my regulars, too,’ said Mr Lickes, forcing his chin into his neck and squaring his shoulders.
‘What was?’
‘All this talk about converting the Blenheim Towers into a four-star motel. They could see themselves being turned out into the snow at a moment’s notice. You’d never seen such a panic. I even had Mrs Boyle weeping on my shoulder so you can imagine what a state the others were in. And of course the more I told them I wasn’t going to change anything, the less they believed me.’
Dover nodded, almost as though he was actually listening, and stared out of the window again. It was still raining.
Mr Lickes risked a surreptitious glance at his watch. He really was frightfully busy and, while it was one’s undoubted business to assist the police in every way one could, one would prefer not to spend the whole day doing it. He waited a moment or two and then cleared his throat as loudly as he dared.
Dover dragged his eyes away from the window and looked blankly at Mr Lickes.
‘Would you like me to tell you what I did on the night of the earthquake?’ asked Mr Lickes hopefully.
Dover’s bottom lip pouted out. It was all go. ‘You might as well, I suppose.’
The permission was grudging but Mr Lickes seized it eagerly and began to rattle at great
speed through his story. The first part was pretty much what Dover had been led to expect from Miss Kettering’s evidence.
There had been the sudden, terrified awakening in the small hours as the earthquake shook the Blenheim Towers from attic to cellar. Then a few moments of bewilderment and near panic followed, in the case of Mr and Mrs Lickes, with a commendable concern for the safety of others. As soon as they gathered their wits, the pair of them rushed off to see that their guests were all right. Luckily they were, and Mr Lickes’s anxiety spread to wider fields.
‘I just had a sort of feeling,’ he explained to Dover, ‘that something terrible must have happened somewhere and, since we were comparatively unscathed, I felt free to go out and see if there was anything I could do. My wife decided to come with me.’
‘How long after the earthquake?’
Mr Lickes hunched his shoulders. ‘I’d have to guess – ten minutes, fifteen. Not much more, I don’t think.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, when we got out on to the drive, we could hear people shouting and screaming. It was coming from the direction of North Street and so we hurried off that way as quickly as we could. We’d had the foresight to bring a couple of torches with us and that proved a great help because, really, you could hardly see anything. I don’t remember noticing anybody in our lane but when we turned into East Street there seemed to be a bit more activity. We could see people in the distance, up towards North Street, moving about with torches and there was a lot of shouting going on. No,' said Mr Lickes, cleverly anticipating the question that Dover should have asked, ‘I didn’t recognize anybody, not at that stage. Well, we’d got nearly to the top of East Street when we practically bumped into Wing Commander Pile and his daughter. They were in a terrible state. The girl was crying and as near hysterical as makes no difference and the wing commander’s face was covered in blood. They were only wearing pyjamas, too, and it was pouring with rain and very cold. The wing commander told us that the roof of their house had come down on top of them and then we decided that the best thing would be for my wife to bring the girl back to the Blenheim Towers and put her to bed. I thought the wing commander should have gone with them but he refused. He said he wanted to go back to his house and try and salvage some of his belongings and get some clothes and things. After that, he was determined to help with the rescue work. I must confess I thought that was a quite unnecessary gesture, considering the state the chap was in, but he insisted. I suppose,’ added Mr Lickes with a slightly disparaging sniff, ‘it’s the service training. Gives them a sense of duty.’
