by Joyce Porter
‘This blooming business is going to be a real swine, that’s for sure,’ said Dover. ‘Just my ruddy luck to get lumbered with it!’
‘And mine,’ MacGregor pointed out gloomily.
‘Well, you can’t blame me for that, laddie. I didn’t ask for you!’
MacGregor could well believe it.
‘What are we going to do now, sir?’
Dover regarded his sergeant with dislike but answered unhesitatingly. ‘ Go back to the nick.’
‘But oughtn’t we to go and see Cochran’s girl-friend, sir?’
‘We’re not likely to get a cup of tea off her, are we, laddie?’ asked Dover sarcastically. ‘ You can go and see her this afternoon. Now then, which way do we go? I don’t want to spend all morning trailing around this blasted town.’
Before they could move off the door of Mrs Jolliott’s house opened and the good lady herself appeared on the threshold. She gazed disapprovingly at the dirty marks left by the detectives’ feet on her clean steps.
‘You’ve forgotten his things,’ she hissed in a loud whisper, neighbours having ears as well as eyes. ‘They’re all up in his room, waiting for you.’
But Dover was not easily swayed from his purpose. A cup of tea he wanted and a cup of tea he was going to have. ‘ We’ll pick ’em up this afternoon!’ he bawled. ‘After lunch!’ Before Mrs Jolliott could get her protest out he had started off down the street at a smart amble. ‘Job for you there, laddie,’ he said happily as MacGregor caught up with him. Pushing work off on to the shoulders of others was one of his few remaining pleasures.
Dover’s decision to repair to Wallerton police station was not entirely frivolous. The visit was productive of information as well as of refreshment. The station sergeant provided both.
He greeted Dover like a long lost friend. As he had already told his wife, he liked the look of the Chief Inspector. ‘He’s a good, solid chap,’ he had observed. ‘Down to earth, you know. No side about him, that’s what I like. Sort of chap you could have a cosy pint with down at the local.’ It was not the soundest of judgements, but it was a charitable one.
‘Come into the Inspector’s office, Mr Dover, sir! It’s more comfortable in there. Here, let me take your overcoat. My goodness me, you have had a soaking, haven’t you?’
‘Doesn’t it ever stop raining in this bloody town?’ asked, Dover with his usual charm.
‘You don’t call this rain, do you, sir? You ought to be here in August and see it then. Never stops in August, day or night. Harry! Take the Chief Inspector’s coat and hang it over the radiator and then nip down to the canteen and bring up a jug of tea and three cups. Hot tea, mind you, and look lively about it!’
Beaming resolutely, the sergeant found the box of cigarettes which the Inspector reserved for himself and visiting V. I.P.s, and handed them round. When the tea arrived he produced a bottle of brandy from the filing cabinet and laced Dover’s cup liberally.
‘It’ll take the chill out of your bones, sir.’
‘Humph,’ said Dover without either enthusiasm or thanks, ‘ it’s a bit late for that. I reckon I caught a cold on my stomach yesterday, all that messing about. I’ve got a very sensitive stomach, you know. The least bit of a thing and it gets me straight in the gut. I shouldn’t be surprised,’ he added with gloomy relish, ‘if I don’t have to lay up with it again before long.’
The sergeant tut-tutted with smarmy sympathy. ‘I thought you weren’t looking any too chirpy, sir. Tucked up in a nice warm bed, that’s where you ought to be.’
Dover sighed and helped himself to another shot of brandy with the air of a Christian martyr already feeling the flames licking round his feet. The station sergeant had gone up markedly in his estimation and Dover rewarded him with a detailed account of his more lurid symptoms.
MacGregor, with a suppressed sigh of his own, took his brandyless tea over to a chair by the window and sat down. At one time Dover’s gastronomic revelations had made him sick but long familiarity had produced its own immunity.
Eventually the conversation took a less clinical turn.
‘Well,’ said the station sergeant, rather unfairly leaping in as Dover paused for breath, ‘looks as though we’ve seen the last of young Cochran. He’ll be well out to sea by now, what’s left of him. I reckon the fishes are having a good feed.’ He chuckled comfortably. ‘ Poor fellow.’
‘Poor fellow, be blowed!’ snorted Dover. ‘Damned nuisance, that’s what he is!’
‘And was when he was alive,’ said the station sergeant feelingly. ‘There’s more than one’ll be glad to see the back of him round here.’
Dover cocked a quizzical, if bloodshot eye at the station sergeant. ‘The Chief Constable thinks he was hounded to death by his copper colleagues.’
The station sergeant grunted. ‘He would! Sounds likely, doesn’t it? Hounding the Chief Constable’s favourite nephew and leading blue-eyed boy to death? We may be a lot of country bumpkins down here but we’re not that barmy!’
‘What sort of a copper was he?’ asked Dover.
The station sergeant looked at him shrewdly. ‘Off the record and in the strictest confidence – lousy.’
‘Thick?’
‘Bent!’
‘Bent?’
‘Crooked as a corkscrew, in my humble opinion. If he hadn’t been the old man’s protègé I’d have had him out of here so fast his feet wouldn’t have touched the ground. As things were, I kept my mouth shut and looked the other way. What else could I do?’ he demanded defensively. ‘ If I hadn’t made it stick I’d have been finished. And if I had, well the Chief Constable would have been gunning for me just the same. More so, probably.’
‘What was wrong with him?’
The station sergeant sighed. ‘You name it, he was up to it. It shook me, I can tell you. He was up to some tricks a chap with five times his experience wouldn’t have thought of in a hundred years. Girls – that was the first thing that started me scratching my head. We don’t get much trouble of that kind down here, but we get the odd bit. Every now and then young Cochran would bring one in – shop-lifting or some such charge. He’d take ’em in the Interviewing Room. No chaperone or witness or anything. Half an hour later the girl would come out, looking a bit hot and bothered and pulling her frock straight. All charges dropped. It happened two or three times. I knew what I’d find all right if I went and opened the door. But I didn’t. And neither did anybody else.
‘And then there was his off-duty hours. He was ear-marked for C.I.D., you know. He’d have been transferred already but even the Chief Constable couldn’t move him with less than a year on the beat. Well, I suppose young Cochran thought he’d better start getting his hand in. Started keeping some very queer company and hanging around in some very queer places.’
‘In Wallerton?’ asked Dover sceptically.
‘Oh, we’ve got our seamy side, sir, never you fear. Even the Ladies’ League can’t keep a whole town on the straight and narrow, though I must admit they have a damned good try. No, we’ve one or two characters knocking around that could do with an eye keeping on them.’
‘And that’s what young Cochran was supposed to be doing?’
‘So he said, Mr Dover, sir, so he said. There’s two ways of looking at it, isn’t there, though? Even so, I’ve got to admit, he got some results. I heard on the grape vine that the C.I.D. were quite impressed with him. You know what they’re like, sir. They think very highly of a young chap who goes out and finds his own villains and brings ’em in without waiting for somebody to tell him. They keep their eye on a young copper who shows a bit of initiative.’
‘Oh, very true,’ said Dover sententiously. ‘ That’s the hall-mark of a good detective, that is. Initiative, drive, thinking for yourself. I’m always telling MacGregor, here, that. Not,’ said Dover with a sniff, ‘that it seems to have much effect. Why, when I was a detective constable, never mind a sergeant, I …’
Dover’s entirely fictitious reminiscences continued unabated for s
ome considerable time.
MacGregor waited with growing impatience until the eyes of even the station sergeant bulged with boredom and then plunged nobly into the breach. ‘A cigarette, sir?’
Dover, who’d never been known to refuse a free fag from anybody, even a dyed-in-the-wool criminal, grabbed for the case. While the Chief Inspector was temporarily speechless lighting his cigarette, MacGregor firmly turned the conversation back into more productive channels. He didn’t intend to spend the rest of his life rotting away in Wallerton, even if Dover did.
‘You were talking about Cochran’s underworld associates, Sergeant,’ he said smoothly.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ The station sergeant was grateful to find himself once more in the centre of interest. ‘ Like I was saying, Cochran started going out into the highways and byways, as they say, and began bringing in the odd tiddler. Nothing spectacular. He didn’t nick a Train Robber or anything, but he collared quite a nice selection of small fry.’
‘Very commendable,’ observed Dover. His stomach rumbled – a sure sign that he’d done enough work for one morning.
‘Ah, so you might think, sir, but, I dunno, it all stank a bit to me.’
Dover raised a languid eyebrow. His interest in the late Constable Cochran, Wallerton and crime in general was waning rapidly.
‘Too pat, sir,’ explained the station sergeant, who had not yet learned the butterfly nature of Dover’s powers of concentration when lunch was in the offing. ‘I don’t know about you, sir, but I’m always suspicious of these cases where everything’s cut and dried and every loose end neatly tied up in a bow. Life, in my experience, isn’t like that, sir. There’s always a few discrepancies, a few things that don’t fit in. But when Cochran nabbed somebody it was different. Take Charlie Hutchinson, for example, nicking radio sets from cars. We’ve been after him for months without being able to lay a finger on him. But one dark night Cochran just happens to be lurking out of sight not fifty yards from the very car that Charlie’s got his eye on. Not only that, but when Cochran runs Charlie in he had no less than five other radio sets on him – all stolen. And to cap everything, Cochran even runs the fence in as well. And then there was …’
‘I get the point,’ said Dover wearily. He yawned and made little smacking noises with his lips.
MacGregor glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Hell’s ringing bells, it was only just after twelve! He was blowed if he was going to let the old fool pack it in as early as this. ‘You think he was getting tipped off, do you. Sergeant?’
‘That’s it. You just keep off me and my friends and I’ll give you the nod when one of my enemies is up to a bit of villainy. Something along those lines.’
‘But you’ve no proof?’
‘No, it’s just a feeling. When you’ve been in the police as long as I have, you learn to respect your intuition.’
‘Was there anybody in particular that you thought Cochran was hob-nobbing with?’
‘Well, now, it’s funny you should mention that,’ said the station sergeant comfortably, and quite oblivious of Dover’s black looks. ‘Cochran was on first-name terms with half the town, of course, before he’d been here five minutes. He was that type. But, soon after he got here, he chummed up with a chap called Bill Hamilton. Now we’ve never been able to pin anything on Hamilton but we’ve had our suspicions for years. He started off in the second hand car business when he first came here a year or two after the end of the war and, naturally, he flourished like a green bay tree. Then he branched out’ – the Sergeant chuckled – ‘if you’ll pardon the expression, into several other lines. Nothing absolutely bent, you understand, but everything he touched seemed to be just on the edge, if you see what I mean. Now, young Cochran was thirty years younger than Hamilton so it was an odd sort of friendship, even though they did have certain interests in common.’ The sergeant paused expectantly. Dover had now got his eyes shut – he always claimed he thought better that way so MacGregor kindheartedly obliged.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Skirts!’ said the station sergeant with a knowing wink.
‘Oh, yes?’ said MacGregor, turning to a fresh page in his notebook. ‘Well, we’ll follow that up. It won’t do any harm to have a word with Mr … what did you say his name was?’
‘Hamilton,’ said the station sergeant, his face breaking into a delighted grin of anticipation. ‘William Hamilton.’
‘And where can we find him?’
‘Well now, that’s not a question I’m really qualified to answer.’ The station sergeant was rocking with barely suppressed mirth.
MacGregor smiled politely and waited.
‘He’s dead!’ chortled the station sergeant. ‘ Not four weeks ago!’ His laughter turned into a cough and he went dangerously red in the face. ‘Murdered!’ he spluttered as he leaned, choking and wheezing, over the Inspector’s desk.
Chapter Four
They had to wake Dover up to tell him the joke. It was some time before they could make him grasp the point.
‘Who was murdered?’ he demanded ferociously. ‘Here, what time is it? I want my lunch.’
‘William Hamilton,’ said MacGregor, enunciating the syllables loudly and clearly.
Dover glared at him. ‘And who’s William Hamilton when he’s at home?’
‘William Hamilton was a close friend of Cochran.’
‘Cochran?’ said Dover frowning. ‘All right!’ he roared as MacGregor opened his mouth to explain that, too. ‘I remember. Well, so what?’
‘William Hamilton was murdered only a few weeks ago.’
‘By Cochran?’
‘Oh, no!’ put in the station sergeant hastily.
‘Well, who did murder him then?’
‘We don’t know, sir.’
Dover’s mouth assumed its most petulant pout. His last shreds of patience were already exhausted. He was fed up, bored and hungry. ‘Then what the hell,’ he growled, ‘has he got to do with it?’
The station sergeant looked puzzled. ‘Do with what, sir?’
‘Anything!’ bellowed Dover. ‘What the blazes is going on here? Don’t you understand the Queen’s English, man?’
It was MacGregor who, as usual, stepped in where an angel would, with some justification, have feared to tread. ‘We were just discussing Cochran’s friends, sir, and the sergeant here happened to mention that one of his close associates, William Hamilton, had been murdered recently. I thought it might possibly be significant.’
Dover stared at him with unconcealed disgust. ‘If you’ve started thinking we’d all better look out, hadn’t we?’
The station sergeant was looking uncomfortable. ‘There is just one thing, sir,’ he said tentatively. ‘This chap, Hamilton, well – he wasn’t exactly what you might call, well, murdered exactly, if you see what I mean.’
Dover just contemplated the now gently sweating station sergeant. Then he turned slowly and just contemplated MacGregor. MacGregor industriously practised his signature in his notebook and waited for the storm to break.
Dover sucked in his breath. MacGregor and the station sergeant cringed instinctively. Dover rose in all his majesty to his feet and settled his bowler hat into the furrows on his forehead.
‘We’ll continue this when I’ve had my lunch,’ he announced with dignity and stalked out.
Unhappily the station sergeant hurried after him. ‘I’m off duty at two o’clock, sir.’
‘Indeed?’ said Dover with the sweet smile of a tiger faced by a particularly succulent lamb. ‘In that case we will all foregather in my room at the hotel at five p.m. this afternoon. We don’t want to keep you hanging around here in your free time, do we, Sergeant? Ah!’ A constable came up with Dover’s overcoat and helped him into it. ‘Thank you, laddie!’
Surreptitiously the constable wiped his hands on the seat of his uniform trousers.
‘I promised to take the wife to see her auntie this afternoon,’ the station sergeant whispered in an aggrieved tone to MacGr
egor. ‘She fixed it all up weeks ago. What am I going to do?’
‘You’re going to be in his hotel room at five o’clock, if you know what’s good for you,’ MacGregor told him with little sympathy. ‘What on earth did you say Hamilton was murdered for when he wasn’t?’
The station sergeant didn’t get time to answer. There was a muffled howl from the street outside as of a bullock being slaughtered. MacGregor took to his heels and ran.
Dover had fully intended to be up and dressed by the time the station sergeant arrived at five o’clock. Unfortunately that blithering idiot MacGregor didn’t return from his afternoon’s expeditions until ten minutes before zero hour. Dover decided to remain where he was – in bed. It was warm and comfortable, which was more than could be said of the rest of the hotel bedroom. Outside, the July rain streamed down out of a bleak July sky.
The station sergeant arrived promptly, if resentfully, upon his hour. MacGregor opened the door and hoped that the ill-tempered slating he had just received from Dover had not penetrated the solid woodwork. The station sergeant staggered into the room carrying a heavy suitcase.
‘I don’t remember inviting you to stay for a week,’ said Dover with heavy-handed irony.
‘Oh, no, sir!’ The station sergeant was about to take all in good part (it being one of the pleasanter traditions in the police that junior officers always laugh heartily at their superiors’ jokes) when he suddenly caught sight of Dover reclining on his couch. It was a sight to make strong men tremble. The Chief Inspector’s pasty, flabby face was surmounted by an untidy thatch of thin black hair. His two button-like, malicious little eyes were still screwed up with sleep. Above his pouting rose-bud mouth twitched a tiny black smudge of a moustache and a short stumpy nose. More, regrettably, than the Chief Inspector’s face was visible. Fleshy shoulders, clothed in a yellowing long-sleeved vest, rose from admidst the bed-clothes. Two buttons on the neck of the vest were missing, affording tantalizing glimpses of Dover’s hairy chest.
The station sergeant gaped, mouth open.
‘Where’s that dratted tea?’ demanded Dover, scraping the palm of his hand over his five o’clock shadow.
