Dover Strikes Again
Page 17
When he was finally released, Dover made MacGregor lead the way downstairs, just in case. Even so he’d shied visibly when he’d had to pick his way over the chalked outline of Mrs Boyle’s body. There, but for a touch of providential constipation . . .
The uniformed policeman on the landing saluted with reassuring deference and Dover descended into the entrance hall feeling a little better. There were signs of police activity everywhere. Another stalwart in blue was on duty by the front door and wires for the temporary telephones were festooned untidily across the ceiling. The door leading into the lounge was firmly closed and bore a large notice forbidding entry to unauthorized persons. Things seemed very quiet inside but, if you listened carefully, you could hear the gentle click of the dominoes and the soft shuffling of the playing cards. Outside in the drive a whole convoy of police cars held themselves in readiness while their drivers chatted and smoked in the watery sunshine.
‘What,’ sniffed Dover disparagingly, ‘no dogs?’
MacGregor realized this was a joke. ‘Don’t let them hear you, sir, or they’ll bring a whole pack up.’
‘It looks about the only thing they haven’t got,’ grumbled Dover who naturally considered the scientific approach to detection more trouble than it was worth. ‘We’re not going to have all that mob guzzling with us in the dining-room, are we?’
‘No, sir. I believe they’ve set up a mobile canteen round the back.’
‘Thank God for that!’
Dover followed MacGregor towards the dining-room. Just as they drew near, the door opened and Wing Commander Pile came out. He brushed past them without a word and picked up the telephone receiver which was lying on the counter of the reception desk.
‘Hello? Pile here.’ He turned to watch Dover and MacGregor as they went into the dining-room. ‘Well, no – since you ask – it is not a particularly convenient time. I was just about to have luncheon.’
Inside the dining-room everything looked remarkably normal – except for Mrs Boyle’s empty chair and her fellow guests were all managing to reconcile themselves quite cheerfully to that. Miss Kettering and Miss Dewar had both draped themselves in black but they were chattering away together like a couple of excited schoolgirls.
‘It’s so much nicer than mine,' twittered Miss Kettering, ‘and Mr Lickes says I can move in right after the funeral. Ah,' – she broke off to smile a welcome to Dover and MacGregor – ‘a very good morning to you! Isn’t it nice to have the sun shining for a change?’
The tragic events of the night weren’t getting old Mr Revel down either, though he, of course, could be relied upon to accept any casualties suffered by the monstrous regiment with great fortitude. He nodded his greeting to the two detectives. ‘One down and two to go!’ he shouted excitedly to the great indignation of Miss Kettering and Miss Dewar.
Mr Lickes skipped across and flicked a few crumbs off the tablecloth. ‘Lunch will be a few minutes late,' he apologized. ‘We’ve had rather a hectic morning, what with one thing and another.’ He leapt for the sideboard, grabbed a tarnished silver dish and bounced back again. ‘Have a bread roll while you’re waiting!’
Dover and MacGregor obediently helped themselves and Mr Lickes was away again. He did a sort of comic goosestep over to the Piles’ table and offered his dish to the girl, who was sitting there by herself. ‘And how about you, young lady? We mustn’t leave you out!’
The girl stared uncomprehendingly.
‘Go on, Linda!’ urged Mr Lickes. ‘Have one!’
She glanced at the dining-room door and then, uncertainly, shook her head.
‘Nonsense!’ insisted Mr Lickes kindly. ‘Your daddie won’t mind. We can’t have our most important guest suffering the pangs of hunger, now can we? That would never do!’ He picked out a roll and put it in her hand. ‘Tell you what,' he grinned, ‘I’ll try and find you a bit of butter in a minute. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
The girl stuffed the roll in her mouth and gave a little nod.
‘I thought so!’ laughed Mr Lickes while Miss Kettering and Miss Dewar looked on with indulgent approval.
‘Funny man!’ said the girl.
Mr Lickes was delighted. ‘Oh, so you think I’m funny, do you? Well, how about this, then?’ He put his dish down, had a quick look round to see that he’d got enough room and turned a somersault.
Linda Pile clapped her hands and spurred Mr Lickes on to more acrobatic feats. He did a couple of cartwheels which sent the poor child into ecstasies.
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ murmured Miss Kettering.
‘Such a shame!’ agreed Miss Dewar and dabbed her eyes.
Mr Lickes let rip with an allez-oop and stood on his head,
peering up at Linda and pulling funny faces. Then he hoisted himself a little higher and began to walk, rather unsteadily, on his hands.
The performance began to get rather noisy and Mrs Lickes came out of the kitchen to see what on earth was going on. At the same time Wing Commander Pile came through the door from the entrance hall.
Wing Commander Pile must have had the gift of instant comprehension because he took the entire scene and its implications in at one glance: his daughter jumping about in unfeigned joy, Mr Lickes willingly making a fool of himself and everybody else watching.
‘Stop that!’ he roared.
Linda’s giggles continued but the rest of the room fossilized into a shocked silence as Mr Lickes picked himself up off the floor.
Wing Commander Pile marched across and stood towering over his daughter. ‘Be quiet, Linda!’ he shouted.
The girl didn’t seem to understand. She pointed at Mr Lickes.‘ Funny man, Daddie!’
‘I told you to shut up!’ The wing commander had his hand half raised in a gesture that might have meant anything before MacGregor was out of his seat. Mr Lickes was nearer and quicker. He caught hold of the wing commander’s arm.
Wing Commander Pile’s face went black with fury. He whipped round and knocked Mr Lickes’s hand away. ‘Don’t you touch me!’ he snarled with such ferocity that Mr Lickes took a precautionary step backwards. ‘And don’t you dare speak to my daughter again, you . . . you performing monkey! I shan’t warn you a second time!’
‘Here, steady on!’ stammered Mr Lickes.
Wing Commander Pile advanced on him, clenching his hands into useful looking fists. ‘I’m sick to death of you hanging round her, you lecher! What’s the matter – aren’t there enough normal girls for you to paw about?’
‘Here, I say!’ protested Mr Lickes.
The wing commander turned back to his daughter. ‘Come on, Linda!’
Linda’s pretty face fell. 'Din-dins,’ she said. A dribble of saliva began trickling down her face.
‘We’ll have luncheon in our rooms. Oh, do come along when you’re told!’ He reached across the table and dragged her to her feet. The laughter of a few minutes ago turned inevitably to tears, loud and uninhibited.
‘Look,’ said Mr Lickes, ‘there’s no need to . . .’
The wing commander continued to propel his squawling daughter out of the dining-room. ‘There’s every need!’ he barked. He stopped for a moment to throw his next words straight into Mr Lickes’s face. ‘And don’t you try creeping up on me in the dark! You might get rather more than you bargained for!’
‘Never a dull moment,’ said Dover as the door banged shut and MacGregor resumed his seat at their table.
‘The man must be mad, sir.’
‘Pile?’ Dover tore a chunk off his bread roll and shoved it into his mouth. ‘He’s got a point, if you ask me. A child’s mind in a woman’s body? You can’t blame him for taking a few precautions.’
A pale-faced Mr Lickes set the soup bowls down on the table with a trembling hand. Dover watched with sly amusement. ‘That’s knocked a bit of the bounce out of him,' he observed.
MacGregor glanced at Mr Lickes as he served the other tables. ‘You realize that Pile practically accused him of being the murderer, sir?’
After lunch MacGregor still insisted that Dover should inspect the scene of the crime, in spite of having it very forcibly pointed out to him that the chief inspector’s stomach was likely to react with unspeakable violence if it didn’t get its postprandial nap.
‘Nonsense, sir!’ said MacGregor with all the callousness of the young and healthy. ‘Fresh air and a bit of exercise will do you the world of good.’
Dover doubted this from the bottom of his heart but actually he was quite pleased to be getting out of the Blenheim Towers for a bit. Even he appreciated an occasional change of scenery.
MacGregor couldn’t get the unpleasant scene in the dining-room out of his mind. ‘I wonder if Lickes could be involved in Chantry’s murder, sir?’
‘Anything’s possible,’ grunted Dover, noting with disgust that they were back on that boring old subject again. ‘If he is, his wife must be in cahoots with him.’
‘Not necessarily sir. She’d come back to the hotel with the . . .’
Dover scowled. ‘The attempt on me, you fool! You seem to be paying no blooming attention to that at all. Lickes couldn’t have fixed that wire up in the middle of the night without his wife at least guessing what he’d been up to.’
‘I suppose not, sir. I was wondering, though, if Lickes could be a bit of a lad for the ladies.’
‘Oh, ’strewth!’ groaned Dover.
‘Perhaps it is a bit far-fetched, sir,’ admitted MacGregor, ‘but suppose Lickes was having an affair with somebody in the village and Walter Chantry found out about it. He threatens to expose Lickes and Lickes kills him.’
‘You’ve got a mind like the wall of a public lavatory,’ said Dover, stopping to give his feet a rest. ‘Any proof that Lickes is a womanizer?’
‘Well, only what Wing Commander Pile more or less hinted at just now, sir.’
Dover thought for a moment. ‘How about Chantry being a sex maniac, the Don Juan of Sully Martin? He makes improper advances to the Pile girl and her father rises in wrath and clobbers him?’
‘Oh, sir ’ said MacGregor reproachfully.
‘Look who’s talking!’
They plodded on and eventually reached the bottom of the lane and turned into East Street. Outside the Studio was a small van and Miss Wittgenstein and Jim Oliver, watched by Lloyd Thomas, were loading a heavy box into it. Work stopped as the two detectives approached.
‘Planning a moonlight flit?’ asked Dover pleasantly as he rested his weight on the van’s radiator.
‘At two o’clock in the afternoon, goon?’ Lloyd Thomas tucked his legs up so that Miss Wittgenstein could squeeze past him up the steps into the house. ‘Why don’t you do something socially acceptable for a change and give the lady a hand?’
Miss Wittgenstein appeared again, carrying another box. ‘Oh, come on, you chaps! I don’t want to miss that train.’ She was surprised and gratified when MacGregor stepped forward to relieve her of her burden and put it in the back of the van. ‘Oh, thanks very much!’
‘Are you going away?’ asked MacGregor as Jim Oliver sat down on the steps next to Lloyd Thomas.
‘Oh, no – I’m just sending this batch of pots down to London. It’s the first day we’ve managed to get any transport since the earthquake.’ She patted one of the boxes proudly. ‘Part of the export drive, you know. Would you like to see?’
MacGregor, being a nice young man, said he would and Miss Wittgenstein poked open one comer of the box, dug around in the straw and eventually brought out a newspaper- wrapped bundle. ‘There you are! 'she crowed as she stripped the covering off. ‘Specially designed for the American market. Now, what do you think of that?’
‘Very nice,’ said MacGregor and gazed in some dismay at a rather nasty, mis-shapen beaker in thick pottery. He read the inscription, ‘A Presente from ye olde Camelot’.
‘Some of your best work,’ said Jim Oliver loyally. He got up and came across, narrowing his eyes appreciatively. ‘You’ve managed to get a really cosmic feeling into it.’ He flourished a judicious thumb. ‘That curve there – so chaste and yet so surfeited.’
Lloyd Thomas shook his head pityingly.
‘What’s it for?’ asked Dover, who was a complete Philistine where art was concerned and reckoned, in this instance, that a chimpanzee could have done better with its feet.
‘It’s not for anything,’ explained Miss Wittgenstein patiently. ‘It just is.’
Jim Oliver backed her up. ‘A work of art doesn’t need any justification, dear. You don’t ask what the Mona Lisa is for, or the Sistine Chapel, do you?’
‘No,’ said Dover.
Miss Wittgenstein turned the mug round so that its wishy-washy brown and green glaze caught the sun. ‘This is one for living with!’ She looked at Dover. ‘Would you like it?’
Dover wasn’t one to turn down a free gift.
‘Forty-nine and eleven,’ said Miss Wittgenstein brightly.
MacGregor, after making what excuses, explanations and farewells he could, caught up with Dover as he reached the top of East Street. Things had been tidied up quite a bit since MacGregor’s last visit, but the scene of min and devastation was still pretty breathtaking. Dover cut it down to size.
‘I’ve seen worse,' he commented after standing and staring for a couple of minutes.
MacGregor was sorely tempted to ask where, but his attention was caught by a movement behind him. He turned just in time to see young Mrs Hooper beating as hasty a retreat as she was able to back through the front door of her house.
Dover had spotted her, too. ‘Didn’t want to meet us,’ he grinned. ‘I suppose in your book that’s proof positive of a guilty conscience?’
‘Not necessarily, sir,’ said MacGregor, privately thinking that anybody who deliberately cultivated Dover’s company wanted his or her head examining.
Dover grunted and resumed his contemplation of Sully Martin’s big moment. MacGregor left him in peace for a few minutes. The last hour or so had not been totally useless. Dover had been given the chance to renew his acquaintance with nearly all of the chief actors in the drama. Only Colin Hooper had not put in an appearance and he was no doubt away at his work. MacGregor wasn’t too distressed at his absence. He himself had been present at the encounter between Dover and the Hoopers and he was pretty certain that no vital snippets of evidence had slipped past him.
Dover looked round. He was actually looking for somewhere to sit down but MacGregor pounced eagerly on any flicker of interest or intelligence.
‘Is anything stirring, sir?’
Dover glanced glumly down at his paunch. ‘Not yet. I’ll have to lay off liqueur chocolates if this is what they do to me.’
MacGregor restrained himself with difficulty. ‘Well, actually sir, I really meant about the murder.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Dover.
‘I was just wondering if, having seen everybody again, you might perhaps have recalled . . .’
‘No,’ said Dover.
There was a couple of minutes’ silence out of respect for MacGregor’s hopes.
‘There’s one thing,’ said Dover, moving unhappily from one foot to the other. ‘Why didn’t you ask that bunch of layabouts what they were doing in the small hours of this morning?’
‘The artists, sir? Oh, they’ve already been questioned by the local police.’
Dover snorted resentfully. ‘You don’t seem to be taking this attack on me very seriously.’
‘I honestly think we’d do better to concentrate on the Chantry murder, sir.’
More minutes ticked by.
Dover sighed. ‘How much longer are we going to stand here?’ he demanded.
MacGregor gave himself a little shake. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see where Walter Chantry’s body was found, sir?’
‘No,’ said Dover.
MacGrego
r gazed round in the hope of finding something that would keep Dover out of his bed for just a little longer. ‘That’s all that’s left of Wing Commander Pile’s house, sir.’ He pointed to the heap of rubble directly in front of them. ‘It must have been very nice before all this happened. The back half split clean away – you can see where the line of the fault ran – and collapsed almost immediately, I imagine. This front part, though, remained more or less standing. It was the demolition men who knocked it down. With the roof caved in and everything, it was just too risky to leave it standing. And’ – MacGregor turned round to indicate what he was talking about – ‘there’s Mr Chantry’s house, only just across the road and practically undamaged. It’s astonishing, really.’
‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ sneered Dover. ‘His wonders to perform.’
MacGregor ignored the remark. ‘Chantry and Colin Hooper would have come out of the front door, I imagine, sir, and Chantry would have come across the road about here somewhere to get to the Piles’ house. Hooper must have gone off in that direction – towards the Sally Gate. Now, the three artists must have come out of the Studio over there and gone away from us, down East Street.’ MacGregor frowned. ‘I still think that’s a bit funny, don’t you, sir? I know it was dark and nobody knew what the dickens was going on but – to go right away from where all the damage was?’
Dover fidgeted uneasily. If he didn’t look out, he’d be landed with yet another blow-by-blow account of the whole blooming business. He decided to break up MacGregor’s rhythm. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to a spot somewhere to the left of where Wing Commander Pile’s house had been.