by Joyce Porter
MacGregor thought idly of half a dozen cases in his own narrow experience in which this generalization was not true, but knew better than to draw Dover’s attention to them.
‘Yes,’ Dover sighed, ‘ boyfriend, fiancé, husband – you want to have a closer look at them when a woman’s murdered. Well, come on, Sergeant, we can’t stand here all day!’
Inside, Dover demanded a copy of last Thursday’s issue of the Custodian and was informed by a very superior young lady that one could be purchased at any newsagent’s in the town.
‘I don’t want to buy one!’ snapped Dover. ‘I’m a police officer and I want a copy of that paper for my investigations. And I want it now – so get moving!’
The superior young lady gave a supercilious toss of her head and disappeared through a swing door at the back of the counter. She reappeared a few seconds later without the newspaper but with a chubby-faced young man.
‘Now then,’ said the young man, ‘what’s all this about.’
‘And who are you?’ snarled Dover, who was rapidly losing what little patience he possessed.
‘I’m the editor here,’ said the young man.
‘Right! Well, I’m Chief Inspector Dover of New Scotland Yard and I want to have a few words with you in connexion with the murder of Miss Isobel Slatcher!’
The jaw of the young man dropped in a most satisfying manner and the superior young lady gave a faint squeak of fright.
‘Oh, well, perhaps you’d better come into my office, Chief Inspector.’ The editor’s voice was a little hoarse as he lifted up a hinged board in the counter and ushered the two detectives through to the back.
Once he was comfortably esconced in an armchair in the editor’s inner sanctum (as he himself called it), Dover deliberately took his time. There was an ominous silence in the room as he ponderously read through the Custodian’s account of Isobel Slatcher’s purportedly imminent recovery. The article appeared on the front page and was accompanied by a rather smudgy photograph of Curdley’s Sleeping Beauty lying motionless in her hospital bed. It was a rather amateurish attempt at journalistic sensationalism and both Isobel Slatcher’s name and that of the Emily Gorner Memorial Hospital were misspelt, but it made its point none the less. Anybody who read it would be quite justified in believing that the injured girl would soon be restored to full health and consciousness.
When he had finished reading about Isobel Slatcher, Dover gloomily perused the other seven pages of the paper. They were mostly filled with small advertisements and accounts of church bazaars. With a disparaging sniff, Dover handed the paper over to Sergeant MacGregor and amused himself by glaring balefully at the Custodian’s editor.
The young man wriggled uneasily under this prolonged and somewhat unnerving examination. He was an odd-looking creature, with a fat red face and a mass of wiry fair hair. He was wearing a bow tie and a fine-checked shirt. He had no jacket on and a pair of tight, pale-blue trousers were slung low over his hips. He sat behind a large flat-topped desk which was impressively littered with all the paraphernalia of the newspaper world.
Dover, as he occasionally did, let the pregnant silence go on a bit too long. Ralph Gostage – that was the editor’s name – had time enough to realize that, as he had never so much as laid eyes on Isobel Slatcher in his entire life, he had no reason to quail like a guilty felon just because a couple of blooming dicks came to see him.
‘Well now, Chief Inspector,’ he began brightly and confidently, ‘what can the Custodian do for you?’
‘Who wrote this article on Isobel Slatcher?’ demanded Dover sulkily.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, I did. We’ve run several front-page stories on her since her accident – after all, it’s been the most exciting thing that’s happened in Curdley since a gas main burst under the town hall five years ago! Yes, sir, Miss Isobel Slatcher was news, and that’s what the Custodian’s here for – to get the news to the people. Without fear or favour,’ he added in a pious afterthought.
‘Is that so?’ said Dover.
‘And,’ Ralph Gostage continued, his Curdley accent becoming more and more overlaid with American as he went on, ‘we here on the Custodian are not unmindful of our duty, as an organ of the Press, to wage a vigorous campaign against any abuses or short-comings we may find in the running of this town. We have kept the case of Isobel Slatcher before our readers not only because she is news, but because she is a shining witness to the scandalous inefficiency and prejudice of the police force of this town.’
‘Oh?’ said Dover. ‘So you’re running a campaign against the police, are you?’
‘Not only against the police,’ proclaimed Mr Gostage, raising his right forefinger to stress his point, ‘but against all religious prejudice wherever it may be found and from whichever side it may come.’
‘Religious prejudice?’ yelped Dover, feeling that the interview was rapidly slipping out of his grasp. ‘What in God’s name has religious prejudice got to do with the Curdley police?’
‘You may well ask!’ beamed Mr Gostage as he climbed with evident relish into the saddle of his hobby-horse. ‘Oh, it’s easy to see you boys are strangers in this town. Well, you’ve come to the right guy to give you the low-down on the set-up here. Say, how about having a cigar?’
Dover accepted with alacrity, as he always did. With his cigar well alight, he settled back happily in his chair. His original feelings of hostility to Mr Gostage had now been dissipated and he regarded that young man benignly as he proceeded to give the detectives the Custodian’s eye view of Curdley.
‘Well, it’s this way, you see.’ His American accent, fortified no doubt by the cigar, had almost completely ousted that of his native town. ‘ Curdley is an unusual sort of burg if you don’t know it. Several towns up here have got the same sort of problem but Curdley’s got it worst. This town is split, you see, almost dead in half, between the Catholics and the Protestants. It all goes back to Henry the Eighth – or most of it does. You remember, he was the one that had six wives and started the Church of England? Well, Curdley was pretty remote from London in those days and the people up here didn’t take much notice of the King’s decrees and what have you. They just went on being Catholics in the same old way. Well, things got a bit tougher for ’em under Elizabeth and by the time Cromwell was in power the persecution was quite lively. The Catholics in Curdley have got twenty-nine genuine martyrs who were burnt here at the stake because they wouldn’t renounce their religion. As time went by, of course, lots of people switched over because life was so much simpler that way – apart from anything else – but quite a number of them never did. When things got really tough the Catholic religion in Curdley just went underground, but it was never completely extinguished. They do say that even when the persecution was at its height there was never a day that Mass wasn’t celebrated properly, with a properly ordained priest, somewhere within the boundaries of the town.
‘Well, you can imagine there must have been some bitter old scenes in Curdley in those days. One part of a family renouncing the old faith – and not always for the highest motives, let’s be frank about it – and the other lot clinging to it and both sides denouncing each other as traitors. And when at last the Catholics were allowed to practise their religion openly, things got worse if anything. Both communities went mad in the effort to outdo the other. If the Catholics built a new church, then the Protestants had to shell out and build two, even bigger. If a C. of E. parish gives its vicar a motor-bike, the Catholics down the road have a whip round and give their priest a motor-car.
‘Mind you, it’s not as bad nowadays as it was – the war shook things up a bit and broadened a few minds – but it’s bad enough. You ought to see what happens now if a Catholic boy wants to marry a Protestant girl, and vice versa! As far as the families are concerned, you’d think the end of the world had come. And naturally it doesn’t stop at purely religious matters. Take the town council! Every single man jack on it has been elected because he’s either a Ca
tholic or a Protestant. Nobody gives a tuppenny damn what his political views are apart from his religious affiliations. Take education! Half the schools are Catholic ones and any Protestant kid who set foot in one’d be torn to pieces. Or take the public library! The Library Committee’s got a majority of Protestant councillors and has had for donkey’s years. If you’re a Catholic and you want to be a librarian, you haven’t a hope in hell of getting a job in Curdley. But the Parks and Gardens department – that’s practically reserved for Catholics.’
‘Like the police?’ observed Dover slyly.
‘You’ve got it, Chief! Just like the police! Before the war not a single policeman in Curdley was a Protestant – you’d hardly believe it, would you? Of course, they’ve got a fair number now – with recruiting being so bad they had to take what they could get – but they’re all out pounding the beat and likely to stay there for the rest of their naturals. Every single man who’s a sergeant or above is a faithful son of Rome.’
‘I see,’ said Dover, ‘and where does the Custodian stand in all this?’
‘Well, I’m a Protestant myself,’ admitted Mr Gostage, ‘but naturally I stand apart from all these petty squabbles. Intelligent people of my generation don’t take these things very seriously. We’ve got a broader outlook than our parents had, naturally. The Custodian is quite impartial. We attack inefficiency and corruption wherever we find it.’
‘And at the present moment you reckon you’ve found it in the Curdley police, is that it?’
‘Definitely,’ agreed Mr Gostage. ‘We’ve been running a “Purge the Police” campaign for some time now, on and off, you know. Mind you, it’s only one what-you-might-call crusade of many, but this attack on Isobel Slatcher was real grist to our mill.’
‘Isobel Slatcher was a Protestant, of course?’
‘Staunch C. of E. and a leading fighter in the battle against the Scarlet Woman!’
‘I presume,’ said Dover, looking dubiously at the cigar ash he had dropped down the front of his overcoat, ‘that you are accusing the police of lack of enthusiasm, at any rate, in their investigations into last February’s attack on the girl?’
‘If not something worse,’ said Mr Gostage darkly. ‘ What do you think, Chief? This town’s got – what? – a population of, say, sixty thousand. A girl’s shot, not three minutes’ walk from a main shopping centre with a gun which is left beside the body. And eight months later the police haven’t – or say they haven’t – got a clue as to who did it. After all, you’re an expert – does that strike you as a likely story?’
‘Him,’ said Dover, thoughtfully and non-committally. From what he knew of small local police forces they were more likely to be guilty of sheer inefficiency than deliberate corruption, but he loyally refrained from expressing this point of view to Mr Gostage. ‘Let’s just get back to the latest story of yours about Isobel Slatcher,’ he said, seeing from the clock on the editor’s desk that the morning was slipping away rather rapidly and they still hadn’t seen the Chief Constable. ‘You say you wrote it. Where did you get your information from?’
‘Sorry, old chap,’ Ralph Gostage leaned back in his chair and grinned complacently. ‘I can’t reveal my sources of information to you, you know.’
Dover forgot about the free cigar. ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish!’ he snapped. ‘This is a murder investigation, not a flaming television serial! There are serious consequences for anybody who tries to hinder the police in their investigations, and, by God, if you don’t tell me where you got your facts from, I’ll throw the whole bloody book at you! Who do you think you are, mate? Lord Beaverbrook?’
‘Oh, all right,’ muttered Ralph Gostage, his stand for the rights of the Press collapsing sulkily. ‘It was the girl’s elder sister – Violet Slatcher, her name is. She’s been coming along to see me, oh every month or so since this thing happened, trying to get me to feature it in the paper. You know what some people are like – go half barmy trying to get their names in print At first it was a damned good story but, well, when it started dragging on, well, people forget, don’t they? I mean, what was there to say? That she was still unconscious and still in hospital – that’s all.’
‘But you printed this story,’ Dover pointed out, nodding his head at the newspaper which now lay on the edge of the desk.
‘Ah, yes, but that was different! Isobel Slatcher, Curdley’s own Sleeping Beauty, on the verge of waking up and naming her attacker – boy, that was news! Of course we printed it!’
‘When did Miss Violet Slatcher come to see you with this story?’ asked Dover.
‘Er, Tuesday morning she called in, I think. Yes, that’s right, just in time because we go to press on Wednesday.’
‘Did it ever strike you that it wasn’t true?’
Poor Mr Gostage gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know what the newspaper business is like, don’t you? I must confess that the thought did cross my mind that this “miracle recovery” business sounded a bit fishy, but, after all, my informant was the girl’s own sister, wasn’t she? She ought to know if anyone did.’
‘You didn’t think of checking with the hospital?’
‘No. They wouldn’t have told me anything, anyhow. You know what the medical profession’s like. I phoned up the London papers, though. Thought they might have taken it up, but they didn’t. Here,’ he said suddenly, ‘ you and I might get together on this, Chief. If you keep me in the picture with your investigations, I’ll try and get you into the London papers. They won’t bother sending their own chaps up here – not exciting enough – but they might take the odd bit if I phone it in to ’em. How about it? ’Course, I’ll want it exclusive, but you might get a bit of free publicity out of it, and even the odd quid or two if I get it accepted.’
Dover scowled. He disliked the implication that neither he nor his case was important enough to interest the national Press and, although the mutually beneficial arrangements suggested by Mr Gostage were attractive, they were not the sort which could be accepted in the presence of Sergeant ‘Big-Ears’ MacGregor.
Regretfully he declined.
‘Oh, well,’ said Gostage, ‘it was an idea. Now, wait a minute, I’ve just thought of something else! You must know Superintendent Roderick – Super Percy? Now, if you could give me a few inside details about him, we could do an article – or even a whole series. Fleet Street’d pay a fortune for it! We don’t want the official stuff about his career but the intimate bits – does he take sugar in his tea, what does he think of the modern teenager, is he fond of animals? Gosh, a piece like that on Super Percy – it’d sell like hot cakes!’
This was too much for Dover. With a face as black as thunder he left the newspaper offices at top speed and in a blazing temper.
‘God help,’ he snarled to Sergeant MacGregor, ‘the next person who mentions Percy Roderick’s name to me! What’s so special about him I’d like to know? Any fool could have caught Bigamous Bertie. From the way they go on about him you’d think he was the only blooming detective in Scotland Yard!’
MacGregor muttered a few soothing grunts and fell into a pleasant daydream where a kindly assistant commissioner at last listened to his implicit and explicit requests and, breaking the long and unhappy association he had not enjoyed with Chief Inspector Dover, attached him instead to the soaring Superintendent Roderick. The mere prospect of such a transfer was enough to make a young and ambitious detective sergeant swoon.
Chapter Three
It was half past twelve when Dover and MacGregor at last found themselves shown into the Chief Constable’s office. Colonel Muckle was not pleased. It was, after all, Saturday, and he liked to get away early on Saturdays. At this rate he’d never make the golf course in time to get a round in before it grew dark. He frowned crossly.
‘I’d almost given you two up,’ he observed caustically. ‘ Well, we’re obviously not going to have time for lunch so I’ve asked them to send some sandwiches and coffee up. You’ll have to make
do with that. Where on earth have you been all morning? I rang the hospital and they said you left at a quarter to eleven.’
‘We called in to see the editor of the Custodian about this article,’ said Dover, handing his copy of the newspaper over. ‘You realize, of course, that this story of the girl being on the point of recovering consciousness may well have been the reason for this second, and fatal, attack?’
‘Humph,’ said Colonel Muckle. ‘So the hospital people were right, were they? There’s no doubt she was murdered?’
‘None at all, as far as I can see,’ said Dover. ‘I’ll get your lab to run a check on the lipstick, just to make sure it is hers on the pillow-case. But I think we can take it as murder all right.’
‘Same chap trying again, d’you reckon?’ asked Colonel Muckle.
‘Looks like it,’ said Dover. ‘After all, you’re hardly likely to have two people wanting to murder a girl like that, are you?’
‘No,’ agreed the Chief Constable, ‘but, mind you, people do funny things, even in a town like Curdley. We’ve got our problems same as anywhere else.’
‘So we’ve been hearing,’ said Dover blandly. ‘We had quite a little lecture from Mr Gostage on the religious, antagonism in this town.’
‘Oh? Oh, well it’s not as bad as all that, you know.’
‘Mr Gostage seemed to think that the police dragged their feet a bit over the first attack on Isobel Slatcher – because she was a Protestant.’
‘What absolute nonsense!’ exploded Colonel Muckle, glancing dubiously at a brightly coloured Sacred Heart which hung on the wall opposite his desk. ‘As if it would make any difference what dratted religion the girl was! Of course, it’s just the kind of comment you’d expect from a fellow like Gostage – he comes from one of the most bigoted C. of E. families in the town. Father Clement was only saying the other day that there are more lies in one issue of the Custodian than in ten of Khrushchev’s speeches. Mind you, I wouldn’t go as far as that myself. I’m a Catholic’ – he nodded at a small crucifix which adorned his desk – ‘but I can assure you I wouldn’t dream of letting my religious views influence my official actions in the slightest degree. Of course, I wasn’t born and bred in Curdley so I can take a bit more broadminded and tolerant view of the whole problem. Why, when I was in the Army, some of my best friends were heretics.’
