Dover Two

by Joyce Porter

  Mr Ofield acknowledged defeat. Against a police inspector who was prepared to drop off to sleep when he was supposed to be investigating a murder case, a mere head librarian didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Er, had you got some more questions you wanted to ask me, Inspector?’

  Dover opened his eyes reluctantly, and scowled.

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m not entirely satisfied with the story you gave me yesterday. As you’ve probably heard, there have been considerable developments since then and we’ve received a great deal of fresh information.’

  Dover’s eyelids drooped down again and he seemed to have lost all interest in what he was saying.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Ofield sharply, not wishing to have Dover sitting in his chair all night, ‘I did hear that Violet Slatcher had been arrested for Isobel’s murder and I must confess I am slightly at a loss to know what you’re doing here. Isn’t the case closed?’

  ‘There’s still the minor question of finding the fellow who shot Isobel Slatcher outside the vicarage,’ murmured Dover, opening one eye to squint thoughtfully at Mr Ofield. ‘Attempted murder – you could get twenty years for that.’

  ‘And in what way do you imagine I can help you?’

  ‘You can’t help me, sir.’ Dover shook his head regretfully. ‘ I’ve had all the help I want from, er, other sources. No, I came along here tonight, sir, to see if I could help you.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you.’

  Dover sighed and helped himself to some more wine. ‘ Well, it’s this way, sir,’ he said. ‘When it comes to passing sentence a judge has a great deal of latitude, you know. He can’t, naturally, dish out more than the maximum, but there’s nothing to stop him being lenient, very lenient, if he feels that way inclined. Now then, if this chap who shot Isobel Slatcher was prepared to, shall we say, collaborate with the police, it might save us a lot of trouble. And we might – I only say might, mind you – put in a good word with the judge and it’s possible …’

  He wasn’t allowed to finish. Mr Ofield leapt to his feet, his eyes ablaze with indignation. MacGregor didn’t blame him. At times Dover really went too far. Maybe, thought MacGregor hopefully, this time he’s met his Waterloo. He gazed expectantly at Mr Ofield.

  Mr Ofield spluttered speechlessly for a few seconds, crimson in the face with fury. ‘How dare you!’ he choked. ‘How dare you! I’ll… I’ll report you to the Home Secretary for this! How dare you force your way into my house in the middle of the night and accuse me of trying to murder Isobel Slatcher! How dare you!’

  ‘I haven’t accused you of anything, sir,’ said Dover suavely, quite pleased with the way things were going. ‘I told you that certain new facts have come to our notice and it’s my duty to clarify the situation.’ He looked slyly at Mr Ofield. ‘ I’m sorry if you took my remarks as an accusation, but I think you’d do better to calm down a bit, sir. Losing your temper won’t do any good.’

  ‘I am not losing my temper!’ screamed Mr Ofield ‘I just want to know what the hell you think you’re getting at!’

  ‘The truth, sir,’ said Dover with irritating smugness. ‘The truth, sir.’

  Mr Ofield’s fists clenched ominously.

  ‘Tony, darling!’ His wife spoke in a soothing voice.

  Mr Ofield breathed deeply through his nose.

  ‘Would you mind explaining, Inspector,’ he said carefully through gritted teeth, ‘precisely what you are getting at.’

  Dover frowned. As a matter of fact he did mind explaining, very much indeed. He wanted Mr Ofield grovelling pathetically on the carpet at his feet, confessing all. Dover sighed deeply. Mr Ofield, blast him, wasn’t going to oblige.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, heaving himself a little more upright in his chair, ‘the situation is simply this. I’m not satisfied with your story. No!’ Dover held up a hand. ‘ I’ve given you a chance to come clean but you wouldn’t take it. Now you can listen to me for a change. Just look at the facts. Shortly before her death you were on very friendly terms with Isobel Slatcher. Just how far things had gone between you we don’t know. Isobel Slatcher is dead and we’ve only got your word as to the extent of the relationship. Still, you and she not only worked together but you spent a certain amount of your free time in each other’s company. Then things began to cool off, didn’t they? At least on your side.’

  ‘I’ve already explained to you about that!’ snapped Ofield. ‘And in any case there was nothing between Isobel and me which could cool off, as you put it. We were just good friends!’

  ‘Ho! Ho!’ said Dover sarcastically. ‘Well, we’ve all heard that phrase before, haven’t we? But you’ve already admitted that not long before she was shot, you and Isobel Slatcher became less “good friends” than you had been. She knew you wanted to marry Mrs Ofield here, didn’t she? And she didn’t like the idea, did she?’

  Ofield looked contemptuously down his nose and didn’t deign to answer.

  ‘Let’s just leave it at that, for the moment,’ said Dover urbanely. ‘She felt you’d jilted her and she was out to make trouble for you. You could see yourself losing your job and possibly your fiancee as well Isobel Slatcher was out to ruin you, so you began to take steps to protect yourself.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Mr Ofield, not quite so resolutely as he would have liked.

  ‘Your first bit of luck came,’ Dover rumbled on, ‘ when that gang of young Catholic layabouts attacked the church hall one night. You were there, weren’t you? One of them had a loaded gun with him. He lost it in the skirmish. Somebody found it. Somebody found it, kept it and later shot Isobel Slatcher with it.’

  Mr Ofield licked his lips. ‘Well, it wasn’t me! It’s the first I’ve ever heard about a gun. There were dozens of other people there that night – I wasn’t the only one.’

  ‘Round about the time Isobel Slatcher was shot you were still one of the leading lights at St Benedict’s, weren’t you? You must have known that she used to go round to help Mr Bennington with his paper work for an hour or so every Saturday evening. You did know that, didn’t you, Ofield?’

  ‘Of course I knew it. But so did plenty of other people. There was no secret about it.’

  ‘But there weren’t plenty of other people playing the organ in St Benedict’s Church that night, were there? Might have been better for you if there had, eh?’ Dover grinned unpleasantly. ‘If there’d been somebody else with you while you were searching for the lost chord, you might have had an alibi, mightn’t you? But then, if there had been somebody else there, you wouldn’t have been able to sneak out of the church by the main door, wait until Isobel Slatcher came round the corner – as you knew she would – and shoot her twice with the gun you’d found after the to-do at the church hall.’

  ‘You don’t really believe I shot Isobel?’ gasped Ofield, a look of horror dawning on his face.

  ‘Don’t I?’ sneered Dover. ‘ The man who shot her got away from the scene of the crime without passing either the corner of Church Lane and Corporation Road or the fish and chip shop in the other direction. You know round there well enough. Suppose you tell me how he did it?’

  Ofield shook his head helplessly. His wife was staring at him.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ Dover was having a wonderful time now. ‘He nipped back into the church and went on playing the organ while a girl bled to death on the pavement outside!’

  ‘This is absurd,’ muttered Ofield. ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. You can’t be serious, Inspector?’

  ‘I don’t usually joke about things like this, sir,’ said Dover pompously. ‘You may as well face the facts. You’re in a very sticky position – don’t let’s have any mistake about that. You didn’t want to bring me into this room tonight, did you? Could those cups over there be the reason? You’d be surprised, sir, how very few people know how to handle a gun. Did you know that? But you’re an expert, sir, you’re very familiar with fire-arms. You’d know how to use one all right, wouldn’t
you?’

  ‘You’re damned well right I know how to fire a gun,’ retorted Ofield with a bit of a rally. ‘I am a crack shot, but I’m hardly likely to miss twice at point-blank range, am I?’

  ‘A lot of murderers aren’t quite so calm and collected as they’d like to be,’ growled Dover. ‘Their hands often shake when it comes to the actual point of killing. It’s the choice of the weapon that’s significant. Nobody’d choose a gun unless they knew how it worked and whether it was loaded or not. And only an experienced shot, like yourself, would realize how little noise in fact a gun actually makes.’

  ‘But you can’t really believe I tried to murder Isobel just because I thought she was making a bit of trouble for me in the town? I mean, it’s absolutely ridiculous! As soon as Trudi and I got married the storm broke anyhow. I mean, well, I knew it would. Why in God’s name should I try to kill Isobel because she spilled the beans a few weeks early? Or do you think I’m a homicidal maniac or something?’

  ‘Oh, I agree with you there, sir,’ said Dover, reaching across to a small table and opening an exotic-looking cigarette box. ‘’Strewth!’ he muttered. ‘Turkish!’ He took one all the same. ‘Er, got a light? Oh, thank you. Yes, sir, I’m inclined to agree with you. If Isobel Slatcher was just being a bit bitchy because you were marrying another girl, you wouldn’t have much of a motive, would you? That’s why I didn’t regard you as a serious suspect at the beginning of my investigations.’ He paused to emphasize his next casual remark. ‘However, that was before we found the letter.’

  Mr Ofield couldn’t help himself. ‘What letter?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘The letter from your brother.’

  Mr Ofield’s habitual sang froid was rapidly deserting him. He looked as though he had been having a particularly unpleasant nightmare and had woken up to find that it was true. His wife was watching him with rather a speculative look in her eye. Marrying Tony Ofield had been rather more of a step up for her in the social and financial scale than her husband, perhaps, realized. Beneath her seductive, extremely feminine exterior she was quite a hard-headed little realist. If Tony had not been an English gentleman, an intellectual, and reasonably well off she wouldn’t have married him. She had been wondering for some time if her judgement of the social scene in England had been quite so accurate as she had thought when she had first arrived from Austria. But while she may have been a little uncertain as to the real extent of Tony’s nobility, intelligence and wealth, she had certainly not expected that he was going to get mixed up in a murder case. She was extremely annoyed about the whole business.

  Her husband however had got beyond mere annoyance. He was frightened. The chief inspector’s sinister insinuations were too ridiculous for words, but one heard such disquieting stories about the police these days. He licked his lips again.

  ‘A letter from my brother?’ He wished crossly that he could stop this bleating repetition of the inspector’s words but, dear God, what else could he say?

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said Dover. ‘We found it in Isobel Slatcher’s belongings. She’d preserved it quite safely. I suppose you reckoned that we wouldn’t be able to connect you with it, but it never pays to underestimate Scotland Yard, sir, as no doubt you’re beginning to realize.’

  ‘But I haven’t got a brother.’ Mr Ofield looked as though tears of frustration were not far away.

  Dover chuckled grimly. ‘No more you have, now, sir,’ he agreed. ‘Not since he was hanged last week.’

  ‘Hanged last week?’

  ‘Oh come, Mr Ofield, let’s stop messing about!’ Dover was getting bored with all this fencing to and fro. ‘ Your brother was Cuthbert Boys! The murderer! Bigamous Bertie! Get it? When he was arrested at the beginning of this year he wrote to you from prison asking you for financial help. Cuthbert Boys had a long criminal record and you were obviously ashamed of your connexion with him. Years ago you changed your name and started a fresh life as Ofield. It’s quite natural. Lots of people with relations behind bars do the same thing. However, Bertie apparently hadn’t lost track of you completely and when he was arrested for multiple murder he wrote to you, his brother, appealing for help. Isobel Slatcher found that letter and she realized the significance of it. The papers were full of Bigamous Bertie’s arrest and she was able to put two and two together and get the right answer. She used that letter as a threat. I don’t know whether she wanted money, or marriage, or just revenge for the way you’d jilted her, but whichever way it was, you saw her as a real danger and you took appropriate, if violent, steps to remove her from the scene.’

  ‘For God’s sake! You don’t believe all that rubbish, do you?’

  ‘I believe in facts, sir.’

  ‘All right! Well, here are some facts for you! I haven’t got a brother and I’ve never had a brother. All I know about Bigamous Bertie is what I’ve read in the papers. I’ve never had a letter from him in my life, so Isobel Slatcher couldn’t have been using one to threaten me with. What the hell is this, a frame-up?’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re taking this attitude, Ofield,’ said Dover. ‘I suppose you think you can still get away with it.’ He shook his head reproachfully. ‘ I had hoped you’d be more co-operative.’

  ‘Now look, Inspector, just let’s stop all this playing about. Bigamous Bertie is not my brother and I can damned well prove it. My name is Ofield and my family have been living here in Curdley for at least three hundred years! My mother and father are still living in the town. My grandfather was Mayor and one of my uncles was the local Member of Parliament. You’ve only got to make a few inquiries. We’re a well-known Curdley family. How on earth could we have changed our name? Ask anybody about the Ofields. We’ve been here for generations!’

  ‘Oh!’ said Dover, his confidence rapidly ebbing away.

  ‘And there’s another thing!’ Mr Ofield had now got the bit firmly between his teeth. ‘How old is this Bigamous Bertie supposed to be? He was about fifty, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Fifty-one,’ said MacGregor, who made a point of knowing things like that. He had no doubts at all now that Scotland Yard’s master mind had, once again, gone charging off, like an infuriated rhinoceros, down the wrong track. The blithering old fool! Mr Ofield would probably make a complaint, and there’d be reprimands, if not worse, issued all round. Well, this was the last time, it really was! He’d apply for a transfer. He’d demand a transfer. If he got his name linked with any more of Dover’s crashing blunders he could say a sweet farewell to all his hopes of promotion, and he didn’t relish the idea of staying a measly detective sergeant for the rest of his life.

  Meanwhile Mr Ofield had leapt to his feet and started searching through the drawers of a writing bureau. Amongst a collection of prospectuses for the Third Programme and old issues of progressive magazines, he finally unearthed a large leather-bound album. He flicked quickly through it and found the page he wanted. With a triumphant flourish he slapped it down on Dover’s knees.

  ‘Now then! Just look at that!’

  With his head held high, he went and sat next to his wife on the settee and comfortingly patted her hand. She gave him an absent smile; but her attention was fixed on Dover.

  The chief inspector scowled fiercely at the photograph in front of him. It showed a young simpering couple surrounded by bridesmaids and self-conscious men in morning suits, all standing on the steps of St Benedict’s Church. The likeness of Tony Ofield to both of them was quite remarkable, and unmistakable.

  ‘My mother and father,’ said that young gentleman firmly.

  Dover sniffed and looked sullenly at the date which was inscribed in a neat copperplate underneath: June 14th, 1930.

  ‘My mother was twenty when she got married, and my father was twenty-two,’ Mr Ofield pointed out, ‘ I’m sure even you will admit that it is unlikely that they could be the parents of a fifty-one-year-old man! My mother is herself only fifty-two now and my father will be fifty-four in a couple of weeks.’

  Dover didn’t go d
own without one last feeble struggle. ‘What’s your father’s Christian name?’ he asked.

  ‘John William,’ replied Mr Ofield with a knowing sneer. ‘And when Isobel was shot he was in New York, on business.’

  There was a long silence. Dover turned over the page of the photograph album and was confronted by a charming picture of his host lying stark naked on the inevitable fur rug. He was grinning toothlessly at the camera. Underneath it said: Antony Victor, aged eight months, September 1932.

  Dover shut the album with a loud bang. He accepted his defeat as resentfully as usual.

  ‘We shall have to check all this,’ he growled.

  Mr Ofield waved an indifferent hand. ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Anybody in Curdley will be able to tell you all about my family. It’s a pity,’ he added sarcastically, ‘that you didn’t bother to verify a few simple facts before you came barging in here with your preposterous and outlandish accusations. I have been forced to endure your ridiculous allegations on two occasions but, although I am fully conscious of my duty as a citizen to help the police in any way I can, I do not intend to tolerate a third intrusion. In fact, if I so much as lay eyes on you again, I shall consult my solicitor with a view to taking legal action!’

  And that was, really, that. Dover huffed and puffed for another five minutes or so before the Ofields finally managed to get rid of him, but there was no doubt in anybody’s mind. Whoever had shot Isobel Slatcher with Freddie Gash’s gun, it was not Antony Victor Ofield, F.L.A.