Dover and the Unkindest Cut of All

by Joyce Porter

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  Contents

  Joyce Porter

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joyce Porter

  Dover and the Unkindest Cut of All

  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.

  Dedication

  To Kathleen Wood

  Chapter One

  Crack!

  Wallop!

  ‘’Strewth!’ said Chief Inspector Dover.

  Gingerly he put up his hand to that side of his forehead which had just been in painful contact with the windscreen. Then he felt his back. Seventeen and a quarter stone hurtling around in the interior of a Mini-Minor can lead to a man being injured for life. When he was satisfied that everything was more or less intact he turned ominously to his wife.

  ‘You bloody fool!’ he howled.

  Mrs Dover, her hands still gripping the steering wheel, peered white-faced through the rain-soaked windscreen. She had stalled the engine but the wipers were still scraping lazily across the glass.

  ‘Oh, Wilf!’ she said in a shaky voice.

  ‘Don’t you “ oh, Wilf” me!’ snarled her husband. ‘You damned near killed me! What’s the matter now, another bloody puncture?’

  It had been one of those days, not infrequent in the Dover menage, when nothing had gone right. It was still barely half past nine in the morning but the Chief Inspector and his wife had already managed to stage three blazing rows and were now apparently heading for their fourth. And they were on holiday, too. What should have been a period of exquisite bliss for Dover – temporarily freed from the strain of looking as though he was working – was already turning into one of those nightmares that we would wish only on our worst enemies.

  The cloud of impending disaster had loomed up on an otherwise quite sunny horizon some six months earlier. On the day, in fact, when Mrs Dover had finally made up her mind about how she was going to spend her legacy. Mrs Dover was always inheriting odd sums of money. She had an inordinately large number of comfortably off, elderly relations and, as with the passage of time they departed from this vale of tears, it was usually found that they had remembered Mrs Dover before they went.

  Up till now Dover had had no complaints. His wife’s little windfalls had been disposed of in accordance with his interested advice and invariably to his greater comfort. But on this occasion, with no less than six hundred and forty-three pounds to play around with, Mrs Dover had gone berserk.

  ‘I’m going to buy a car,’ she had announced. ‘Don’t you think it’s a good idea, Wilf?’

  Wilf did not, and told her so. When at last he’d come hoarsely to the end of his objections his wife proved unexpectedly adamant.

  ‘I’m still going to buy a car,’ she said.

  ‘But you can’t even drive!’ protested Dover desperately.

  ‘I shall learn,’ she replied proudly.

  Dover got nasty. ‘You’ll never pass the test, not at your age.’

  But she did. Whether the fact that before taking her test she had mentioned casually to the examiner that her husband was a high-ranking, influential detective at Scotland Yard helped or not, no one will ever know. She removed her L-plates with an air of smug triumph which made Dover long to belt her one, and announced that they would travel to Filbury-on-Sea for their annual fortnight’s holiday by car. Dover, completely snookered, could only fight her decision to the last hopeless ditch.

  ‘And don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he concluded when all other arguments had failed.

  ‘I won’t, dear,’ said Mrs Dover with a forgiving smile.

  From then on the Chief Inspector had firmly washed his hands of motoring and everything connected with it. The car was resolutely placed in his wife’s domain. Hers were the hands that washed it, hers the purse that provided the money for its petrol. She was the one who got out to open the garage doors and worried when bits dropped off the engine. And serve her damned well right, thought Dover.

  The holiday had been blighted almost before it had even started. Mrs Dover was still no very great shakes when it came to driving and felt considerably safer when there was no other traffic on the road. They had left the house at five o’clock in the morning. It was pouring with rain and Mrs Dover had hunted for five uncomfortable minutes before she located the switch which worked the windscreen wipers. Thoroughly demoralized and painfully conscious of the sulking bulk of her husband in the seat beside her, she had struggled on through the downpour at an erratic thirty miles an hour.

  There had been one break in the monotony. At a quarter to eight they had a puncture. Dover had sheltered under a tree while his wife, now in tears, changed the wheel.

  Damp and lowering, he hadn’t spoken to her since. Not, that is, until her thoughtless slamming on of the brakes had awoken him so abruptly from his doze.

  ‘Oh, Wilf!’ whimpered Mrs Dover again, still staring fixedly in front of her.

  ‘My God!’ said her husband, a note of panic creeping into his voice. ‘ My nose is bleeding!’ He groped under his overcoat and produced a grubby handkerchief from the top pocket of his blue serge suit. ‘Well, don’t just sit there, woman! Do something!’

  Mrs Dover turned to look at him. Her eyes were wide with fright. She ignored the handkerchief with its two small spots of blood which her better half was waving reproachfully at her.

  ‘Wilf,’ she choked, ‘I’ve just seen a man jump over that cliff.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Dover snorted automatically, and dabbed hopefully at his nose again.

  ‘But I did! He deliberately climbed up over that fence and jumped! I saw him!’

  ‘So what?’ said Dover irritably.

  ‘But, that’s Cully Point! It’s a sheer drop there, right down into the sea. He’ll be drowned, Wilf!’

  ‘Not if the tide’s out,’ said Dover, rarely able to resist scoring a point, however feeble.

  ‘If the tide’s out he’ll be smashed to pieces on those rocks.’ Mrs Dover shivered. She had a vivid imagination. ‘ Oh, Wilf, I do wish you’d go and look.’

  ‘It’s raining cats and dogs,’ protested Dover. ‘I’ve got soaked once today.’

 
‘Wilf, there’s a man lying down there, dead or dying.’

  Dover, having decided that he wasn’t going to bleed to death and so taking a more optimistic view, said, ‘You’ve been imagining things. I didn’t see anybody.’

  ‘Well, I did,’ snapped Mrs Dover tartly. ‘And if you look over there by that waste-paper bin you can see his bicycle. That’s not my imagination, is it?’

  Somewhat disgruntled Dover followed the line of his wife’s pointing finger. There was indeed a bicycle propped up against the fence. ‘Probably been there for weeks,’ he muttered.

  ‘Wilf!’ Mrs Dover’s voice rose to a near scream. ‘ Will you go and look?’

  With much grumbling and moaning Dover eventually prised himself out of the car. The rain beat relentlessly down on him and the wind tore at his overcoat as he made his way across the road to the small lay-by which had been provided for motorists who wished to stop and enjoy the chilling splendours of Cully Point. He walked over to the bicycle. As he approached a gust of wind caught it and smashed it over on to its side. Dover clutched at his bowler hat and peered glumly at the bicycle. Even he could tell that it hadn’t been standing out in that rain for more than a matter of minutes. He glanced back at the car. He could see his wife’s white face watching him through the window.

  With a curse he lumbered over to the fence itself and, hanging on grimly to a stout post, peered down into the abyss below.

  Cully Point from any angle was an impressive sight. A bare, over-hanging cliff, it towered four hundred and thirty-two feet above the swirling churning sea beneath. And Dover was very relieved to see the swirling churning sea. It was high tide and the jagged rocks at the foot of the Point were decently covered with several feet of grey foaming water.

  Dover nearly jumped out of his skin as his wife appeared suddenly and grabbed his arm. She looked down too.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ she whispered.

  ‘No,’ said Dover. ‘Thank God!’

  ‘He’ll have been swept out to sea for miles by now,’ said Mrs Dover in an awe-struck voice. ‘They never recover the bodies, not when it’s high tide and a rough sea like this.’

  ‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about, it,’ observed Dover grimly.

  ‘Aunt George used to live in Wallerton – she was Uncle George’s wife, you know. We always used to call her Aunt George; funny really when you come to think about it. I often used to stav with her when I was a girl. I expect it was all over very quickly, don’t you, Wilf? He wouldn’t last long in a sea like that.’

  ‘If he ever went in it,’ said Dover sourly.

  ‘But I saw him! It was as clear as daylight.’ Mrs Dover emitted a jubilant squeak, ‘Look at that down there! What is it? It looks like a cap to me.’

  It looked like a cap to Dover, but he would rather have died than admit it. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he lied.

  ‘Yes, you can! Look there; banging up against the side of the cliff. Yes, look, it is a cap! Dark blue. Or black. I can see the peak. Look, there it is, Wilf! Oh – it’s gone.’

  Yet another wave surged over the dark sodden object and sucked it down into the whirlpool.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ said Dover resolutely and truthfully. ‘Anyhow, come on! I’m not standing out here in this gale catching my death any longer. There’s nothing we can do.’

  He beat his wife back to the shelter of the Mini by a good five yards.

  ‘What shall we do now, Wilf?’ asked Mrs Dover when she was once more in the driving seat. All the car windows were steamed up.

  ‘Get a ruddy move on,’ rumbled Dover. ‘It’ll be midnight before we get to Filbury at this rate – what with your driving and punctures and one thing and another. Still,’ he sighed with exasperation, ‘I suppose it’s not far short of a miracle that we’ve got as far as we have.’

  ‘But we’ll have to report this suicide, Wilf,’ said Mrs Dover as she pressed the starter. The car was still in gear and Dover took another dive into the windscreen. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Wilf. Seeing that man – it’s upset me a bit.’

  Through bruised lips Chief Inspector Dover told his wife precisely what he thought of her, her deceased aunt, the inclement weather, the Mini-Minor, her driving and her thoughtless habit of watching complete strangers commit suicide.

  ‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘we are going to Filbury. Straight to Filbury. I’ll be down with pneumonia if I don’t get these wet things off.’

  His wife looked at him apprehensively. ‘We must go to the police. Wilf,’ she said, timid but stubborn.

  Dover told her what she could do with the police, too. ‘And if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times, keep away from ’em! We’ll be kept hanging around for hours answering a lot of damned-fool questions and being looked at as though we‘d shoved the beggar over the cliff ourselves. They’ll find out what’s happened soon enough. There’s no need for us to get involved. Besides, for God’s sake, what have we got to tell ’em, anyhow?’

  ‘But you’re always grumbling about members of the public not helping the police,’ pointed out Mrs Dover, who knew what she was talking about.

  ‘That’s different!’ snapped Dover.

  ‘And that man – what’s-his-name – he told us to have a go.’

  ‘For crying out loud!’ groaned Dover. ‘What the hell’s that got to do with it?’

  Mrs Dover shook her head. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t care what you say, Wilf. It’s our public duty to report that we’ve seen a man committing suicide and we’re going straight to the police station in Wallerton to do just that.’ She patted her husband encouragingly on the arm. ‘Don’t worry, dear, it won’t be half so bad as you think.’

  After some reflection, Mrs Dover got the car moving again, and a quarter of an hour later they drew up outside the police station in Wallerton.

  ‘You can wait here if you like, Wilf. I shan’t be a minute.’

  ‘Not bloody likely!’ retorted Dover, still mopping away at his nose which had started bleeding again. ‘ I’m not letting you go in there alone. And just you keep quiet. I’ll do all the talking.’

  The station sergeant was listening to Housewives’ Choice. He turned the sound down and removed his feet from the desk as Dover and his wife came in. One look at Dover’s blood-bespattered face was enough. He took the pencil from behind his ear and reached for the book on the counter. ‘Another road accident?’ he asked with resignation.

  ‘No.’ barked Dover.

  The station sergeant looked surprised. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Had a punch-up with the old woman, then?’ he inquired pleasantly. ‘Bit early in the day for a spot of bother like that but then it wouldn’t do for us all to be the same, would it?’

  Dover planted two beefy paws on the counter and advanced his face to within a couple of inches of the sergeant’s, ‘If you would stop bleating like an old sheep with the colic for a couple of minutes, I could tell you what has happened.’

  The station sergeant glanced sympathetically at Mrs Dover. ‘Been bending the old elbow, has he, love?’

  ‘No, I have not!’ bellowed Dover.

  The station sergeant took it all in good part. He tapped Dover playfully on his bowler hat with the pencil. ‘Now, keep your hair on, Grandpa! There’s no need to go raising your voice now, is there?’

  Dover gobbled helplessly. He seemed on the point of scrambling over the counter and subjecting the sergeant to grievous bodily harm when the door of the police station was flung open with a bang. Mrs Dover, who had been preparing to restrain her irate husband, relaxed and sat down quietly on a near-by bench.

  Two men, both clad in their underpants and nothing else, were pushed forward by a worried-looking young policeman.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the station sergeant with evident relish, ‘ and what, as the bishop said to the strip-tease dancer, have we got here, eh? Here, watch ’em, Darwen!’

  The two half-naked men, taking advantage of the momentary lapse in the constable’s attentio
n, had started throwing punches at each other. The blows were ill-aimed and lethargic. Neither man was in the first flush of youth and both amply fleshed abdomens were heaving strenuously from their exertions. The police constable had no difficulty in dragging them apart. One man, the bald-headed one, flopped panting across the counter. He had a nasty bruised cut over one eye and the blood had trickled down the side of his face and on to his chest. The other man, wearing underpants with a pale-blue stripe, was muttering under his breath and glaring fiercely at his companion.

  ‘Well, well,’ said the station sergeant again when peace and order had been restored, ‘this is a bit of a turn-up for the book and no mistake.’ He looked at the man with the cut head. ‘Why, it’s Mr Collingwood, isn’t it? Well, well!’ He turned to the other man. ‘And Mr Davenport?’ He seemed over-awed by his identifications. ‘All right, Constable,’ he said sharply, ‘ let’s be having it.’

  The constable put his cap straight and made his report. ‘It was Bert McTurk, Sarge, the boatman at the Sailing Club – he called me in. He said these two gentlemen were fighting like a couple of wild cats in the changing room and he couldn’t stop ’em. He was afraid they’d be doing each other a mischief. Well, I went in, Sarge, and I couldn’t stop ’em either; going at it hammer and tongs, they were, so I brought ’em in here. They’ve calmed down a bit now, but you should have seen ’em!’

  The sergeant jerked his head to one side and obediently the constable moved down to the bottom end of the counter.

  ‘Been drinking, had they?’ asked the sergeant softly.

  ‘Not so far as I know, Sarge. It’s a bit early in the morning even for that lot, isn’t it?’

  The station sergeant raised his eyebrows. Then another thought struck him. ‘You haven’t been laying about you with your truncheon, I hope?’

  The constable shook his head.

  ‘Good lad! These are local residents, you know, not blooming trippers. These two won’t stand for being pushed around.’

  With an air of considerable importance he moved back to the two half-naked and now shivering men.