Dover Two

by Joyce Porter

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  Contents

  Joyce Porter

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Joyce Porter

  Dover Two

  Joyce Porter was born in Marple, Cheshire, and educated at King’s College, London. In 1949 she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force, and, on the strength of an intensive course in Russian, qualified for confidential work in intelligence. When she left the service in 1963 she had completed three detective novels.

  Porter is best known for her series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Wilfred Dover. Dover One appeared in 1964, followed by nine more in a highly successful series. Porter also created the reluctant spy Eddie Brown, and the “Hon-Con”, the aristocratic gentlewoman-detective Constance Ethel Morrison Burke.

  Chapter One

  The phone rang.

  ‘Hello? Chief Constable here.’

  ‘Colonel Muckle? Doctor Austin here, from the Memorial Hospital. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, sir. You remember our local ‘Sleeping Beauty’? Well, she’s dead. One of the nurses found her about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Blast!’

  ‘That makes it a murder case now, doesn’t it, sir?’

  ‘It does indeed, Doctor, it does indeed.’

  The Chief Constable dropped his phone slowly back in its cradle. He stared blankly at it for a full minute and then, with a shrug, picked it up again.

  ‘Get me Scotland Yard,’ he said. ‘The Assistant Commissioner – Crime.’

  At six o’clock the next morning British Railways disgorged Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover and Detective Sergeant Charles Edward MacGregor, both of New Scotland Yard, at Curdley Central Station. Their journey from London had been a distressing one. The vital connexion which they should have caught at Crewe had been axed a mere twenty-four hours before by Dr Beeching, and the two detectives had spent the small hours – five of them as it happens – huddled and sulky on a hard railway bench. Eventually their train had arrived, unheated and no later than usual, and they had sat, staring bleakly through the grimy windows, as it slowly ambled its way north. One dreary industrial town had followed another with no noticeable break between them, and even a crisp October dawn couldn’t glamourize the gasometers, pit shafts and belching steel mills which moved slowly across their line of vision.

  When they finally arrived at Curdley both men were cold, hungry and bad-tempered, but, the police hierarchy being what it is, only the Chief Inspector was allowed to give full rein to his feelings. No one could ever accuse Chief Inspector Dover of being tolerant and easygoing and now that he really had something to blow up about he went off in megatons. He cursed the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) at Scotland Yard, he cursed the Chief Constable of Curdley, he cursed British Railways in general and the author of their economy cuts in particular, he cursed the Sleeping Beauty whose inconsiderate death was the root cause of all his troubles and, naturally, he cursed Sergeant MacGregor just because he was nice and handy. By no means exhausted, but feeling much warmer, he roared into the Station Hotel and had a blazing row with the night porter, who at first was for refusing to let them go up to their rooms to get washed and shaved.

  By eight o’clock Dover had calmed down a bit. Fortified by an enormous breakfast and with his eighth cup of tea steaming gently in front of him, he accepted a cigarette from Sergeant MacGregor with the graciousness which had made his name a byword in Scotland Yard.

  ‘’Strewth!’ he growled in disgust. ‘Filter tips!’

  Sergeant MacGregor gritted his teeth manfully and gave him a light.

  The Sleeping Beauty Case, as the Press had been calling it for some months now, was not the sort of investigation which made any appeal to Dover. To be perfectly frank, nothing which entailed any work made any appeal to Dover, but he reacted to murder cases like an outraged bull to a fluttering red flag. The idea that detectives spend their time actually detecting is held only by the most naive and credulous readers of romans policiers. As Dover never tired of pointing out to the stream of fresh and enthusiastic young sergeants who were assigned to him for general character training and baptisms by fire, all a real detective ever did (or should ever be expected to do) was to poke around the scene of the crime (so that the Press photographers could get their pictures) and then go and sit quietly in his office. Sooner or later some professional informer, spurned girl friend or disgruntled rival would ring up and tell him who the real villain was. Provided the suggested culprit was a reasonable possibility, the detective reviewed and adjusted what evidence he had so that it pointed in the right direction, and, usually, that was that. Another professional criminal was tucked up safely behind bars.

  Professional – ah yes, that was the crux of the matter! Dover loathed murder because most murderers are amateurs and just don’t play the game according to the established rules. Why, even when the neighbours know perfectly well who croaked that Mrs Jones at Number 7, do they ever think of telling the police? Not likely they don’t! Not on your Nelly! They start remembering how often they themselves had wanted to croak Mrs Jones and what good and lurid reasons they had for doing so. They fear, not without some justification, that the police are likely to take the thought for the deed and they begin hedging and lying and generally messing things up until the poor wretched creature in charge of the case actually has to start looking for clues and making deductions.

  No, Chief Inspector Dover definitely didn’t like murder cases. There was too much hard work and trouble attached to them. And this Sleeping Beauty business, from what little he knew about it, looked like being a real stinker.

  In the first place the actual crime had been committed way back in February, nearly eight months ago. The victim, a girl called Isobel Slatcher, had been shot in one of the quieter streets of Curdley at about eight o’clock on a Saturday night. The gun used, an untraceable German Luger, had been dropped beside the body. Needless to say, it had been wiped clean of any fingerprints. The girl had not been killed outright, although she had been shot in the head at close quarters. She had been rushed to the local hospital and there had been an emergency operation which, no doubt, had saved her life, but she had never regained consciousness. While the local police had tried, unsuccessfully, to find her attacker, the girl had lingered on in a coma until she had died, the day before Dover’s arrival in Curdley. Now it was a murder case, and the Chief Constable had called in the Yard.

  It had been some not very original journalist who had first thought of calling Isobel Slatcher the Sleeping Beauty. It was the kind of romantic label that the Press likes although, strictly speaking, Miss Slatcher was not asleep, nor was she a beauty.

  Chief Inspector Dover wasn’t very optimistic about his chances of solving the case after all this time. Most of his cases he never solved anyhow, but he belligerently attributed this to the fact that the sticky ones were always, unfairly, shoved on to him. There m
ay have been a faint whiff of truth in this because the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) couldn’t stand the sight of him (this feeling was mutual) and ruthlessly pushed him out on cases which were located in the remote provinces, whenever he got the chance.

  Dover finished his cigarette and dropped the end with a sizzle into his teacup. He sighed heavily and thought longingly of bed.

  Sergeant MacGregor broke the silence, otherwise Dover might have gone on sitting there all day.

  ‘I’d better go and phone the Chief Constable, hadn’t I, sir?’ he said. ‘Just to let him know we’ve arrived.’

  Dover regarded his sergeant sourly. ‘All right,’ he grumbled. ‘You do that.’

  As MacGregor strode out of the dining-room Dover indolently surveyed his surroundings. At a near-by table somebody had left a newspaper. With a quite remarkable turn of speed for so weighty a man, Dover got to his feet to fetch it. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted that a rather elderly, bent woman had got designs on it too. He unsportingly increased his pace and grabbed the paper just before the old lady could lay a hand on it. He treated her to a small smirk of triumph and returned to his table happy in the knowledge that, once again, he’d got something for nothing.

  He opened the newspaper and the smile faded quickly from his fat, pasty face. The nostrils of his tiny snub nose flared and his piggy little eyes narrowed with sheer fury as he read the headlines. BIGAMOUS BERTIE HANGED! they screamed. LAST TRIBUTE TO SUPER PERCY! Green with envy he plodded sulkily on through the story. Cuthbert Boys, whose exploits had kept the British public in raptures for months, had now finally got his just deserts at the end of a rope, secure in the knowledge that under his soubriquet of Bigamous Bertie he had passed into history as surely as Crippen or Joseph Smith. There was no need for the paper to give a detailed obituary for Bertie. Dover, in common with every other literate person in the country, knew the whole story bv heart. Briefly, Bigamous Bertie had, over a period of ten years, gone through a form of marriage with, at a conservative estimate, some twenty ladies of independent means. Posing as a pilot in the employ of a foreign airline he at one and the same time gave himself a touch of the necessary glamour and provided an excuse for his frequent absences. It also explained his chronic lack of money – all his salary being tied up by those confounded currency regulations which were the speciality of whatever country he was supposed to be working in. There is no doubt that Bigamous Bertie was a crook, but he was also a gentleman and it was this, perhaps, which endeared him to the readers of the popular Press. All his surviving ‘wives’ spoke of him as kind and considerate and as a great giver of expensive presents. These presents were a consistent feature of Bertie’s technique, purporting as they did to come from abroad. In actual fact he was quite an accomplished shop-lifter, but he stole nothing but the best and, as one ‘wife’ remarked, ‘ It’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?’

  Bertie was so successful that there seemed no particular reason why he shouldn’t have gone on marrying more and more wives to the end of his days. Unlike most of his kind, he wasn’t excessively greedy and, although he relieved his wives pretty heavily of their income, he never made any attempt to touch their capital. This moderation helped to allay the suspicions of relations, as did his habit of posing as a devout (but broadminded) Roman Catholic. He made all his contacts through the Church and was ‘married’ on every single occasion with the full nuptial mass. This rather bizarre trade-mark was eventually, of course, his downfall. Somebody became mildly suspicious and, before you knew where you were the Yard had been called in in the person of Detective Superintendent Percival Roderick. Some people, as Dover remarked frequently and bitterly, had all the luck, and Superintendent Roderick rocketed to fame on the coat-tails of Bigamous Bertie.

  For some inexplicable reason Bertie panicked when he heard that the police were on his tracks. He rushed around and in the space of less than a week he murdered no fewer than four of his wives by the simple, but messy, method of chopping them to bits with an axe. In doing so he naturally left a trail so obvious that, as Dover remarked frequently and bitterly, a backward child of two could have followed it, never mind a senior detective from New Scotland Yard.

  As a story, Bigamous Bertie was a God-sent gift to the Press. While the hunt was on, they clarioned the latest developments to a waiting world. When Superintendent Roderick made his arrest, they printed special editions. Then there were the magistrates’ hearings and the trial itself. Sensation! The jury couldn’t agree, thanks to one woman who, in the face of all the evidence, held out for an acquittal. Some people claimed that she was a fanatical opponent of capital punishment and others that she had been bribed by a famous Sunday newspaper. But, whatever the reason, there had to be another trial and much to Dover’s mounting disgust Superintendent Roderick, now called ‘Super Percy’, had his name plastered all over the front pages once again.

  When Bigamous Bertie was eventually found guilty, Dover hoped to see a speedy end to the whole sordid affair, including the glare of publicity in which Super Percy was most unjustifiably basking. Dover’s hopes were in vain. There was an appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal. Once more the newspapers went to town. Then there was an appeal to the House of Lords. The newspapers went wild! All else having failed, Bertie made a plea for clemency to the Home Secretary. Britain waited with bated breath for the outcome. The plea was rejected and, much to Dover’s relief, the Bigamous Bertie episode had come now to a final end, though not without one last gratuitous bouquet flung in the direction of Super Percy.

  ‘Cuthbert Boys,’ Dover read with his blood pressure dangerously high, ‘ paid a last, generous, gallant tribute to Superintendent Roderick just before he went to his death. “Super Percy,” he said of the man whose determination and brilliance had brought him to the gallows, “is a real gentleman and a credit to the fine traditions of the British police.”’

  Dover nearly spat. With a curse he crumpled the newspaper up into a ball and flung it petulantly to the floor.

  ‘Damn and blast Superintendent Percival Bloody Roderick!’ he snarled.

  Sergeant MacGregor, who had just returned from the telephone, got the full force of this in the face. He sighed. Dear lord, the old fool wasn’t still on the rampage about Roderick, was he?

  ‘There’s been a slight change of plans, sir,’ he began, in an attempt to divert Dover’s mind to his own investigation.

  Dover looked at him suspiciously. He didn’t like changes.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  ‘The Chief Constable left a message for us. He wants us to go to the hospital first and then go and see him afterwards.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘For God’s sake, didn’t you think of asking?’

  ‘I only got the message from the station sergeant, sir. Colenel Muckle isn’t in yet.’

  ‘Lazy devil!’ commented Dover. ‘Oh well, what time’s the car coming round?’

  ‘Well, apparently the hospital’s only a few minutes’ walk from here and the police headquarters is just round the corner from the hospital so it didn’t seem worth while bothering about a car. Parking’s so difficult and, well, I thought we could walk,’ said MacGregor lamely.

  Dover just looked at him.

  When at last the forbidding bulk of the Emily Gorner Memorial Hospital loomed into view, Dover’s feet were hurting him but at least they took his mind off Superintendent Roderick.

  The detectives were shown into a small waiting-room and Dover sat slumped in his chair with his enormous overcoat wrapped round him and his bowler hat plonked squarely on the top of his head. He didn’t like hospitals.

  ‘Pongs, doesn’t it?’ he remarked, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  The door opened and a little man in a white coat bustled in importantly.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said brightly. ‘I’m Doctor Austin.’

  ‘So what?’ said Dover.

  The doctor looked at him uncerta
inly. ‘You are the detectives from Scotland Yard, aren’t you?’

  ‘We are,’ said Dover unhelpfully.

  ‘Oh.’ The doctor took off his spectacles and wiped them. ‘Well, I’m the doctor who was in charge of Miss Slatcher – you know, the Sleeping Beauty girl. Colonel Muckle said he’d get you to come round here first thing because he thought it would be best for me to put you in the picture straight away. The whole thing’s really got rather complicated and I think the simplest thing would be if I gave you an outline of the case right from the beginning.’

  ‘All right,’ said Dover. ‘Get on with it, but just see you keep it simple. We’re detectives, not blooming Harley Street specialists!’ And with this he settled down deeper in his chair, closed his eyes and prepared, one hoped, to listen.

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Dr Austin, who had quite a different mental picture of a Scotland Yard chief inspector. ‘ Well, as you probably know, Miss Isobel Slatcher …’

  Dover opened one eye. ‘Age?’ he demanded.

  ‘Er, twenty-eight.’

  Dover closed his eye.

  The doctor began again. ‘Miss Isobel Slatcher …’

  Dover opened one eye again. ‘Virgin?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Was she a virgin?’

  ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, she was.’

  Dover opened both eyes. ‘’Strewth!’ he said.

  Dr Austin looked in something like despair at Sergeant MacGregor, who gave him a faint smile of encouragement and waited with pencil patiently poised over his notebook.

  ‘Well,’ he tried again, ‘on Saturday the seventeenth of February, at about eight PM, Miss Isobel Slatcher was shot twice in the, er, back of the head at point-blank range. She was brought here almost immediately and we operated right away. We managed to get the bullets out but there was, er, considerable damage to certain areas of the brain. Miss Slatcher came through the operation quite well and, at first, we had some hope that she would at least make a partial recovery. However, as again you probably know, she never came out of the coma. Apart from the brain injury she was physically in quite good shape – heart strong, blood pressure normal, no sign of post-operative complications – you know the kind of thing.’