by Joyce Porter
‘I’m merely putting a hypothetical case,’ said Dover, marvelling – and not for the first time – how women would always start taking things personally. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ he added, making a little joke of it, ‘that I’m paid to be suspicious.’
‘You’re not paid to be insulting!’ snapped Miss Henty-Harris. ‘Now, if you have any further questions to ask about the girl I found dead in my front garden, I shall be pleased to answer them. If not. . .’ She gestured curtly in the direction of the door.
Dover flopped back in a sulk and left it to MacGregor to get the interview back onto a more amicable footing. ‘I wonder, Miss Henty-Harris,’ MacGregor began, switching on the winsome, little-boy-lost smile that usually went down so well with elderly maiden ladies, ‘if you could possibly cast your mind back to a week last Wednesday. That would be the twelfth, actually. Er – were you at home that evening?’
Miss Henty-Harris was patently not succumbing to the MacGregor charm. ‘I find your question extremely tasteless, sergeant.’
‘Really?’ said MacGregor unhappily.
‘Wednesday the twelfth was the night my uncle died. Well, actually it was in the small hours of the following morning that he finally slipped away. I spent the whole of Wednesday evening at his bedside. The doctor had called that afternoon and he had warned me that the end could not be far off. Sir Perceval was quite comfortable and peaceful. There was nothing anybody could do for him except be with him and wait.’
‘Of course,’ murmured MacGregor. ‘It’s just that we have reason to think that that might have been the night on which the girl was killed. I was wondering if you had heard anything suspicious.’
‘Sir Perceval’s bedroom, as I told you, was in what used to be the dining room. It’s on the ground floor at the back of the house. It was an extremely stormy night with a lot of wind and rain. I neither heard nor saw anything suspicious. Is that all?’ After this Dover and MacGregor returned to the haven of their police car in some disorder. They installed themselves in the back seat and tried to sort out their differences.
‘I really do think suggesting that she’d murdered her uncle for his money was going too far, sir,’ said MacGregor reproachfully. ‘In my opinion she’d every right to be annoyed.’
‘Gam!’ scoffed Dover, totally unrepentant. ‘She’d got opportunity and motive. What more do you want?’
‘But it’s not our concern, sir,’ said MacGregor, unable to understand Dover’s predilection for going off in full cry after red herrings. ‘We don’t happen to be here to investigate the death of Sir Perceval Henty-Harris. Our job is merely to find out who killed this girl. Now’ – MacGregor’s voice took on a mildly patronizing tone – ‘we don’t want to waste time meddling in things that are none of our concern, do we, sir?’
Dover thought quickly. He could be surprisingly inventive at times, especially when jumped-up, snotty-nosed little sergeants began trying to teach him how to suck eggs. He leaned back, folded his arms and stuck several chins out obstinately. ‘I reckon the two things are connected.’
‘Sir?’
‘Look, we can place this girl in this road on the night of Wednesday the twelfth, right?’
‘Yes,’ agreed MacGregor, frantically searching for some clue as to whither Dover’s thoughts were winging. ‘That would certainly appear to be the situation, as far as we know it. But there’s no indication that the girl was looking for the Henty-Harris house. Mr Plum merely said that she asked her way to The Grove in general. You think that she was actually calling on the Henty-Harrises, do you, sir?’
‘Not necessarily,’ grunted Dover. ‘Makes no odds, actually, as far as my theory’s concerned. In fact, I reckon a chance encounter is more likely because old Miss Thingummyjig over there wouldn’t have dumped the body in her own front garden if there’d been any connection for us to trace.’
MacGregor, quite unable to follow the logic of Dover’s thought processes, chucked in the towel. ‘I’m afraid I don’t see what you’re driving at, sir.’
‘Now tell me something new!’ sniggered Dover who could have majored in cheap sarcasm. ‘Look, suppose that girl just happened to call at What’s-their-name’s house. Maybe to ask where somebody else lived or something. Well, then she sees something.’
‘Like what, sir?’ asked MacGregor with an apprehension born of long experience.
‘Like old Miss Thingummyjig holding a pillow over Uade Percy’s face,’ said Dover, shrugging his ample shoulders. ‘The old boy was in a downstairs room. Well, it’d only need a chink in the curtain and God knows what that girl might have seen.’
MacGregor, in spite of his better self, began to see the possibilities. ‘Miss Henty-Harris said it was a very stormy night,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the girl knocked at the front door and, when she couldn’t get an answer, went round to the back. Where Sir Perceval’s bedroom was.’
Dover nodded. ‘And there’s old Miss Thingummyjig, caught in the bloody act! She wouldn’t have much choice, would she? Either she’d got to kill the girl or kiss goodbye to living the life of Reilly on uncle’s fortune. I know which I’d bleeding well do.’ He gave MacGregor a dig in the ribs with his elbow. ‘Well, it’s an idea, isn’t it?’
It was, indeed. And no one knew better than MacGregor how dangerous it was to let such ideas take root in Dover’s fertile brain. It took a long time for anything to sink into Dover’s thick skull but, once in, wild horses couldn’t drag it out again. And ideas which the old fool had thought up for himself were even more tenacious. MacGregor was anxious to lose no time exposing Dover’s hypothesis to the harsh light of day. ‘Actually, sir,’ he said, ‘I doubt whether you could see into the downstairs windows of Les Chenes from the outside. I fancy they’re too far from the ground but, of course, we can easily check. And then, would Miss Henty-Harris be so careless as to murder her uncle with the curtains open? She’s a bit of a funny old girl, I agree, but she didn’t strike me as being stupid. We’ll have to look into all this, of course, but . . .’
He was interrupted by a sharp tapping on the car window. It was Inspector Walters who, having attracted the attention of the Scotland Yard men, proceeded to join them. It proved to be more of a tight squeeze than he had anticipated as Dover was sprawling inelegantly over most of the available space. Inspector Walters had innocently assumed that the Chief Inspector would make room for him as a matter of simple courtesy, and only found out his mistake when he had committed himself too far to draw back.
‘I hope you’ll both be very happy!’ tittered Dover.
Inspector Walters, perched uncomfortably on Sergeant MacGregor’s knees, held a blush at bay by sheer will power. ‘I’ve just had some advance information from Professor Soames, the pathologist, sir, about the post mortem,’ he said and decided not to make a full-scale production out of his news. ‘The girl was three months pregnant.’
‘Ho, ho!’ said Dover. ‘That makes it a very different kettle of fish.’
‘Does it, sir?’
‘Well, it means we’re looking for a bloody man, for starters,’ said Dover, always ready to share the fruits of his long years of experience with his inferiors. ‘And a man, moreover, who lives right here in this blooming road. Yes, I’ve got the picture now. Some over-sexed joker from one of these houses gets the girl in the family way and she comes gunning for him. He can’t stand the scandal so – biff, bang! – and over the nearest wall with the dead body.’
‘It needn’t necessarily be a man, sir,’ MacGregor pointed out as he saw Dover prepared to go haring off down another false trail.
‘It does unless you know any woman capable of fathering a bastard!’ retorted Dover crushingly.
‘That’s not quite what I meant, sir,’ said MacGregor, trying to address Dover across the intervening bulk of Inspector Walters. ‘All I’m saying is that, assuming the girl had come to Frenchy Botham to confront the putative father of her unborn child, it still needn’t have been him who actually killed her. It could j
ust as easily have been the man’s wife, or his mother even.’
‘What the hell for?’ demanded Dover incredulously.
MacGregor shrugged his shoulders as best he could with Inspector Walters still sitting in his lap and wondered why he bothered. He might just as well keep his mouth shut for all the good reasoned arguments did. ‘Well, to protect the man, for instance, sir. Or the marriage or something. Or perhaps out of jealousy. Women do sometimes react quite violently to this sort of situation. They put all the blame on the girl, you see, and . . .’
‘All I see is that you know as much about it as my old boot!’ said Dover disparagingly. ‘’Strewth, where do you get these ideas about marriage from anyhow? The back of cigarette cards?’
‘I was just trying to cover all the possibilities, sir,’ muttered MacGregor who, being as yet an unplucked rose, was fair game for the sneers of much-married martyrs like Dover.
‘That all?’
Inspector Walters, unused to being addressed quite so savagely, gave a little jump. ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
Dover’s heavily jowled face settled into its habitual scowl of discontent mixed with dyspepsia. ‘I said, is that all you’ve got to tell us or are you sitting there waiting for a bloody bus?’
Even Inspector Walters could take a hint when it came wrapped round a brick. Before he could make his escape, though, he had another mission to carry out. He took an envelope out of his pocket and endeavoured to hand it to Dover. Dover, who’d been caught like that before, refused to take it and, after some confusion, the inspector was obliged to entrust the envelope to MacGregor. ‘It’s just some photographs of the dead girl,’ he explained lamely. ‘I thought they might come in useful. Our chap’s made her look as life-like as possible.’
MacGregor examined the photographs. ‘Oh, well, better than nothing,’ he allowed. ‘By the way, you’ve got your men making enquiries on the railways and buses, have you?’
‘Of course!’ Inspector Walters was slightly affronted at the question. He mightn’t be a member of Scotland Yard, but he did know his job. ‘I’ll let you know the minute we get any lead. I can’t help feeling that somebody somewhere must have seen her. Oh, by the way, sir’ – he turned to Dover – ‘what do you want me to do about the newspapers and the television?’
For once Dover had the answer worked out. ‘I’ll hold a press conference,’ he said grandly, already seeing his name in headlines and his face on the box. Pomeroy Chemicals Limited would like that!’Strewth, if he played his cards right, it might mean another couple of thou a year at least.
Inspector Walters squirmed uneasily. k Well, I don’t think we’ve quite got enough for a conference at the moment, sir,’ he said, eyeing Dover much as a nervous matador eyes the bull. ‘The boy from the Chapminster Gazette is sort of covering it for everybody at the moment. Mind you, as soon as there are any spectacular developments the big bugs from London’ll be down quick as a flash, but they’re not actually here at the moment.’
Dover turned nasty. ‘Then why ask me what to bloody well do about them, you moron?’
‘Actually, it was more about the girl’s picture, really, sir.’ Inspector Walters knew he was grovelling and was furious with himself but, somehow, he couldn’t seem to help it. ‘I was wondering if we should distribute copies now for publication in the media or wait till later – in case our own enquiries turned up something. I mean, you know what it’s like if we publish a picture and ask people if they’ve seen the person concerned. We get swamped with replies, most of which are a complete and utter waste of time.’
‘I think we’ll hang on for a bit,’ said MacGregor as Dover, apparently bored out of his mind with such trivial details, stared bleakly and silently out of the window. ‘It’s early days yet and there’s no point in making more trouble for ourselves than we need.’
‘No,’ agreed Inspector Walters, privately thinking that they’d already got more than their fair share of trouble sitting right there in the back seat with them.
4
In happier and more carefree days it was at this point that Dover, drained and exhausted by the effort of having done half-a-morning’s work, would have knocked off for lunch. But the prospect of a highly paid sinecure with Pomeroy Chemicals Limited was proving a hard taskmaster and Dover determined to press relentlessly on. He would, he announced to a suitably astounded MacGregor, conduct one more interview before withdrawing for a well-earned pint, two helpings of Lancashire hotpot and a quiet kip.
‘In that case, we’d better tackle the Goughs, sir,’ said MacGregor, consulting his list of people who lived in The Grove. ‘I understand Mrs Esmond Gough has a preaching engagement this afternoon.’
‘Mrs Esmond Gough?’ Dover wasn’t good at names but this one rang a faint bell.
‘That’s right, sir. She’s the woman who wants to be a bishop.’ MacGregor tucked his notebook away and reached for the door handle. ‘I expect you’ve seen her on the telly. She’s always coming on these chat shows and what-have-you. She’s running this terrific campaign for having women priests and they say she’s dead set on being the first woman bishop in England.’
‘Oh, that nutter!’ snorted Dover disparagingly. As a card-carrying male chauvinist pig, his views on the position of women were crudely predictable and certainly didn’t include having ’em up there in the bloody pulpit spouting morality at him. ‘What she wants is a good belt round the ears. And, if she was my wife, she’d get it! Silly cow!’
MacGregor doubted very much if the man had yet been born who was capable of taking on the formidable Mrs Esmond Gough. She was an athletically built woman in her early forties who had a good brain and the single-mindedness of a steamroller. If it came to a straightforward contest between her and Dover, she’d win hands down every time. On the other hand, it was not Dover’s style to get himself involved in straightforward contests and MacGregor felt that old depression creeping over him as he got out of the car. He’d seen Dover pinning murders onto people he didn’t like too often not to be worried about it. In view of the old fool’s feelings about women who earned more money and got more attention than he did, MacGregor felt that Mrs Esmond Gough would be well advised to watch her step. He turned to help Dover get out and found some consolation in the thought that even so rabid a proponent of sex equality as Mrs Esmond Gough could hardly be the father of the dead girl’s child.
Mr Esmond Gough could, though.
MacGregor was rather surprised to find that there was a Mr Esmond Gough although, now he came to think of it, he had heard Mrs Esmond Gough wax lyrical on the joys of married love on several occasions. Actually, Mr Esmond Gough was a retired brigadier-general, and it was he who answered the door and welcomed the two detectives. He conducted them into a large sitting room which was apparently doubling as campaign headquarters. There were pamphlets and posters everywhere, a duplicating machine, a couple of typewriters and several huge piles of envelopes which the Brigadier had been labouring to address.
‘Mrs Esmond Gough will join us in a minute, gentlemen,' he said as he cleared a heap of collecting boxes and files off a couple of chairs. ‘She’s on the phone to Sweden. We get a lot of support, both moral and financial, from Sweden. They’re so much more enlightened about things over there.’ As a matter of fact the Brigadier was far from being a fanatic about women’s rights in general or female priests in particular, but he loyally gave his wife one hundred per cent support in her endless campaigns. Not only did this make for marital harmony, but the contributions Mrs Esmond Gough received enabled the Brigadier to enjoy a higher standard of living than his own unaided army pension would have permitted. The Brigadier had something of a taste for the good things in life. He also appreciated his wife’s frequent absences from the domestic hearth as she carried out her engagements in every quarter of the globe. With a few elementary precautions, an attractive middle-aged man with a reasonably fat wallet could still find life worth living.
This side of the Brigadier’s personali
ty had not, as it happens, escaped Dover who, having sat down heavily on the chair which had been cleared for him, had been making his own moody assessment of his host. He was just the type, Dover reckoned, to go lusting after a kid young enough to be his grand-daughter.
‘This is a bad business,’ said the Brigadier.
Dover scowled. ‘What is?’
‘Well, this murder,’ said the Brigadier, who’d only been making polite conversation and was disconcerted to find himself apparently in the dock.
‘You speak for yourself!’ growled Dover with an unpleasant sniff. ‘Murder may be a bad business to you, but it happens to be my bread and butter.’
‘Oh, quite,’ said the Brigadier hurriedly. ‘Quite. I – er – I hadn’t looked at the tragedy in quite that light before.’ He turned, as so many did after their initial encounter with Dover, to Sergeant MacGregor for relief and comfort. Apart from anything else, the younger man was, of course, so much pleasanter to look at.
MacGregor obligingly produced a nice, innocuous question. ‘Do you and Mrs Gough live here alone?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘No servants?’
‘None living in. There’s a char-lady who comes in a couple of mornings a week.’
‘And no children?’
The Brigadier sighed and shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Things might have been different if we had, I suppose. I mean, whatever else you say about children, they do tend to keep a woman occupied, don’t they? Fill up the day for her. Give her something to think about.’
‘I suppose so,’ agreed MacGregor, assuming that these somewhat generalised remarks had particular application to Mrs Esmond Gough.
The Brigadier sighed again. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘it was not to be. My fault, too,’ he added despondently. ‘Some damn-fool bug I got into the old system out in Korea – or so the medics tell me. Rotten thing for a chap to have to admit to, but I don’t care to have people going around putting the blame on my lady wife.’
