Dead Easy for Dover

by Joyce Porter

  MacGregor looked up. ‘Something or somebody, sir?’

  ‘Something,’ said Peter Bones firmly. ‘A loud banging. I asked Joe to excuse me and I went outside to see what it was.’

  ‘Which door did you use, sir?’

  ‘The side one. It was the nearest. Well, to cut a long story short, I found that the wind had blown down part of the fencing and that was what was making all the noise. I saw that, if I just left it, not only would it keep the whole house awake all night, but it would probably finish up doing some real damage. So, I got hold of a piece of rope out of the garden shed and tied the thing up as best I could.’

  ‘How long would you estimate it took you, sir?’

  ‘About five minutes. No more. It was pitch dark and raining hard. Naturally, I finished up soaked to the skin and absolutely filthy. I could hardly go back into the dining room like that so I nipped upstairs, had a quick shower and changed into another suit. When I was presentable again, I returned to the dining room, weaned Joe off the brandy bottle and we joined our respective wives here in the sitting room.’

  MacGregor, as was his habit, looked across at Dover on the offchance that he might wish to make some contribution to the proceedings, but the Chief Inspector was fully occupied in a life and death struggle with young Wayland over the last peanut butter and Marmite sandwich. Both protagonists had long since abandoned any pretence to civilized standards and feet and teeth were being brought indiscriminatingly into play on either side. ‘Did you explain what had happened?’

  Maddie Bones stuck her oar in before her husband had got his mouth open. ‘Oh, yes, he explained it all, sergeant! He was most plausible. It’s not for nothing that he’s a professional salesman.’

  Peter Bones hunched his shoulders. ‘My wife doesn’t believe me,’ he said with the air of a man stating the obvious.

  With all the food now gone, Dover was beginning to show signs of restlessness. MacGregor attempted to stave off the inevitable by shoving a cigarette between the old fool’s lips and lighting it for him. The Boneses didn’t allow smoking in their home because of the bad example it set their children, but MacGregor reckoned that Dover ranked as a kind of honorary Joe Bickerton – to whom, apparently, almost anything was allowed.

  MacGregor tried to pick up the threads of the interview again. ‘Couldn’t you have produced the broken fencing to prove that your story was true?’ he asked.

  ‘The whole damned thing blew down completely during the night,’ said Peter Bones sulkily. He watched indifferently as Dover attempted to fend off his only son with the end of a lighted cigarette. ‘Just my luck.’

  Young Wayland, much disconcerted by this first encounter with sincere adult ill-will, retired under the television set to plot his revenge.

  MacGregor was mulling things over, too. It was fairly obvious that Mrs Bones didn’t believe her husband because she thought he’d been upstairs that Wednesday evening having it off with the au pair girl. The point MacGregor was called on to decide was whether or not there was some even more sinister explanation for this absence from the dinner party. ‘How long do you think you were away altogether, sir?’

  Peter Bones wriggled unhappily. ‘Twenty minutes?’ he suggested as though wondering how much he could get away with.

  MacGregor proved he could turn the screws with the best of them. Well, he hadn’t served all those long weary years with Dover without picking up a few of the nastier tricks of a policeman’s trade. ‘Twenty minutes, sir?’ he repeated dubiously. ‘Oh, well, if that’s what you say . . .’ He made an entry in his notebook with all the solemnity of the Recording Angel writing in the Book of Life. ‘We can, of course, always check with Mr Bickerton.’

  Peter Bones licked his lips. ‘It might have been a bit longer,’ he allowed reluctantly. ‘It’s hard to tell.’ He tried to regain his old devil-may-care attitude. ‘I did perhaps take my time a bit because I knew old Joe would be perfectly happy as long as he’d got plenty to drink. He’s not the world’s most sparkling conversationalist.’

  ‘And neither,’ said Mrs Bones with considerable emphasis, ‘is Alice!’

  MacGregor closed his notebook. It seemed a good point at which to break off the interview. It was slightly unexpected and it left the victim to sweat things out on his own for a little. In addition to which, Dover was ready to go. Having eaten and drunk everything in sight, there was nothing to detain him, especially since he had finished smoking his cigarette and was thus completely at the mercy of the Bones children. Ignatia-Jane had taken over as gad-fly in chief and was currently exerting all her infant strength in an attempt to strangle Dover with a craftily thrown skipping rope.

  MacGregor and Dover both stood up at the same time, with Ignatia-Jane taking a very painful tumble in the process, but their immediate escape was impeded by the arrival of a singularly unprepossessing girl.

  ‘I am returned,’ she announced to the room at large, slightly parting the curtain of mousy hair which covered her face. ‘I tek ze children, yes?’

  It was Blanchette Foucher, the au pair girl. MacGregor stared incredulously at her. Was this the femme fatale who had lured Peter Bones away from his dinner party for a touch of the old slap and tickle? Thin, round-shouldered and – as far as one could see through all that terrible hair – stupid looking.

  Nobody said anything as Blanchette, whose heavy breathing suggested that one could probably add adenoids to her other charms, slouched across to the fireplace and picked up the baby off its rug. She then collared Ignatia-Jane by the simple but effective expedient of hoisting the child bodily off her feet by the straps of her dungarees. ‘Où est Vaylant?‘ queried Blanchette in a voice that boded no good to the son of the house. She spotted him squatting down behind the settee. ‘Come ’ere, Vaylant! Queek!’

  Wayland naturally ignored the summons and Blanchette, with an infuriated oath, bore down on him, managing to tuck both the other children under one arm. This left a hand free for Wayland. Blanchette swooped and grabbed.

  ‘Ugh!‘ A very Gallic scream pierced the air. ‘Cochon! Petit sale anglais! Ach, mais comme c’est dégoutant!’

  The sound of a heavy French hand making contact with a bare English bottom rang satisfyingly through the room. The two smaller children, who had been tossed carelessly aside into the settee, joined their howls to those of their brother.

  Mrs Bones was already speeding to the rescue. ‘What on earth’s going on?’ she demanded.

  Wayland raised a tear-stained and scarlet face to his mother. ‘I was only having a wee-wee!’ he sobbed before Blanchette’s hand descended once more.

  Naturally they cleaned Dover’s bowler hat out as well as they possibly could. They scrubbed it with hot soapy water, they rinsed it in a powerful germ-killing disinfectant, and they sweetened it with copious drops of Mrs Bones’s most expensive perfume. It was all in the mind, of course, but somehow Dover still didn’t fancy that hat, and when they finally got away from the Bones’s house, he carried it somewhat ostentatiously in his hand.

  During the half-hour shambles which had followed the discovery of Wayland’s appalling revenge, MacGregor had endeavoured to question Mademoiselle Blanchette Foucher about the events of the fatal Wednesday evening, but it was rather like trying to fry a jelly. A very runny jelly, in effect, as the au pair girl was continually oozing away on the pretext of giving a hand in the purification ceremonies connected with Dover’s bowler hat. One of nature’s skivvies, she was patently unused to the sight of other people doing the work. And then, to cap it all, the stupid vache had not only forgotten all her English in the panic but couldn’t understand a word of MacGregor’s French either. In the end MacGregor decided to abandon the unequal struggle and return, if necessary, at some future date with an interpreter. If Mademoiselle Blanchette had been an attractive young woman, MacGregor might have persevered longer. But she wasn’t, so he didn’t. '

  A light drizzle began to fall as Dover and MacGregor walked down the drive of Otterly House. Actu
ally this was a vast improvement on the foul weather they had been experiencing earlier in the day, but Dover’s constitution was a delicate one and it didn’t behove him to take risks. He looked up at the drizzle, and then down at the bowler hat in his hand. It was an excruciating choice.

  MacGregor noted his superior officer’s dilemma and generously offered a more optimistic view of the tragedy. ‘Never mind, sir, it might have been worse!’

  Dover’s scowl was bleak. ‘I’d like to know how!’ MacGregor told him.

  ‘’Strewth!’ Dover’s pasty face went even pastier. ‘I’d have strangled the mucky little bleeder with my bare hands!’ He reached a conclusion about his bowler hat and clapped it back on his head before the rain could make treacle of his dandruff. ‘You know, laddie’ – he took hold of MacGregor’s arm in one of those friendly, affectionate gestures designed to take some of the weight off his own aching feet — ‘it’s going to be a real pleasure nailing that little bastard’s father! I’m not a vindictive man but, on this occasion . . .’ He sniggered unpleasantly to himself. ‘You’ll see, laddie! I’ll make What’s-his-name rue the bloody day he was born, so help me!’

  MacGregor suppressed an unworthy sense of déjà vu as he asked the inevitable question and got the inevitable answer.

  ‘Well, of course I bloody fancy him!’ snapped Dover. ‘What were you doing back in there? Having a ruddy kip?’

  ‘But, even if he isn’t telling the truth, sir, murder isn’t the only explanation for his absence after dinner. I can think of at least three other reasons why . . .’

  ‘Three other fiddlesticks!’ snarled Dover. ‘Next thing you’ll be telling me that you believe that banging fence yam! As if he’d go standing out in the rain in his best suit in the pitch dark for half a bloody hour. To say nothing of the fact that he’d got important guests to look after.’Strewth, he admitted himself that he was sucking up to this chap to get a promotion.’

  ‘That’s true, sir,’ conceded MacGregor who, with his background, probably appreciated the value of social contacts more than Dover did. ‘The presence of Mr and Mrs Bickerton would also tend to militate against what, I fancy, Mrs Bones thinks might have happened.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘I imagine Mrs Bones suspects her husband of nipping upstairs and seducing the au pair girl, sir.’

  ‘Seducing the au pair girl?’ howled Dover. ‘Have you seen her, laddie? No man in his right senses would try and seduce her. I should have thought even a namby-pamby like you’d have realized that.’

  MacGregor swallowed the insult. ‘What do you think happened, sir?’ he asked dutifully.

  ‘I’ve told you once,’ said Dover. ‘He’s a commercial traveller, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, a sales manager, actually, sir.’

  ‘Same thing!’ grunted Dover irritably. ‘They’re all as randy as buck rabbits. So, What’s-his-name . . .’

  ‘Peter Bones, sir,’ said MacGregor, with no hope at all that it would stick.

  ‘. . . gets this girl into trouble and she comes gunning for him. It’s as simple as falling off a log.’

  MacGregor nodded. As theories go, he’d heard worse – and most of them from Dover. ‘The timing’s not very good, sir. It must have been nine o’clock at least before they’d finished dinner and Bones went out to mend that fence. The dead girl called at The Laughing Dog round about seven. That leaves a couple of hours to account for.’

  Dover brushed such pettifogging details aside. ‘She was wandering around looking for the house!’

  MacGregor tried another tack. ‘There were six people in Otterly House that Wednesday evening, sir,’ he pointed out, ‘not counting the children. How did the dead girl manage to attract Peter Bones’s attention without anybody else noticing?’

  ‘Secret signal!’ said Dover who was now really firing away on all four cylinders. Pomeroy Chemicals Limited just didn’t know what was going to hit them! ‘Whistling or singing a song or something.’

  ‘Or tapping,’ said MacGregor as he grasped the possibilities.

  ‘Like I said,’ agreed Dover. ‘She creeps up to the house, peeps in at the dining-room window and sees his lordship sitting there with that other fellow. She taps out their coded signal or whatever and What’s-his-name makes some tom-fool excuse to his guest and goes outside. There the girl threatens him with exposure or demands money or something, so he picks up a stone – or a chunk of wood from that famous broken fence of his – and clouts her one. Then all he has to do is get rid of the corpse in his neighbour’s shrubbery.’

  MacGregor looked at Dover with something bordering on respect. Really, the old fool had produced quite a logical case against Peter Bones. MacGregor didn’t believe in it for one moment, but he was quite prepared to award high marks for effort.

  Dover was meanwhile rounding off his thesis. ‘The whole blooming business needn’t have taken more than five minutes. Mind you, he’d have got himself wet and muddy, like he said. He might even have got some of her blood on him. So, all that about going upstairs for a bath and change is likely true. It’d give him time to work out that story about mending the broken fence as well.’

  ‘Hm,’ said MacGregor.

  ‘And another thing,’ said Dover, really intent on gilding the lily. ‘The only person who could say how long he was actually away or why precisely he left the dining room or anything is this other fellow.’

  ‘Mr Joseph Bickerton,’ prompted MacGregor.

  ‘Well, did you notice how many times he mentioned his drinking habits? Damn it, he’s already branded the only witness against him as a drunk and discounted any evidence he might

  give at the trial. Here’ – Dover’s laborious progress ground to a complete halt as he cast a liverish eye at his surroundings — ‘where the hell are we? What are we doing here? Where’s the bloody car? Look, laddie, I want a bit of a rest and a think before we start on . . .’

  MacGregor gently unhooked Dover’s arm and, mounting the last of the steps, seized hold of the large brass knocker wrought in the shape of a snarling cat and rapped loudly on the door. ‘Mr and Mrs Talbot, sir,’ he informed an astounded Dover in a suitably hushed voice. ‘He’s a bank manager. He sent a message via Inspector Walters saying that it would be convenient for him to see us at half-past four and he kindly invited us to tea at the same time.’

  Dover, who had been all set to hobble indignantly away, wavered.

  MacGregor smiled, partly in encouragement and partly at his own cleverness. ‘We might as well stay now that we’re here, mightn’t we, sir?’

  7

  The way to Dover’s co-operation lay through his stomach and he tackled this, his second afternoon tea of the day, with every appearance of benevolence and good-will. Mrs Talbot, presiding with matronly grace over the teapot, sensibly kept his plate well piled with goodies.

  Raymond Talbot proved to be a pompous man, full of his own importance as the local representative of the Shire & Eastern Bank. He wielded, and everybody knew he wielded, power of life and death over several very substantial overdrafts in the district. Responsibilities like that impart a certain air to a man.

  He took immediate charge of the interview. Naturally he would have preferred to deal with the senior of the two Scotland Yard detectives but, if Mr Talbot had one saving grace, it was that he was a realist. He soon appreciated that he wasn’t going to get much in the way of sensible answers out of a fellow whose mouth was stuffed successively with sardine sandwiches, ham sandwiches, egg and cress sandwiches, homemade sausage rolls and tipsy cake. And the way he clutched that bowler hat to him, balancing it precariously on what remained of his lap – that didn’t inspire much confidence either. Mr Talbot attributed this particular phenomenon to a deep-rooted sense of insecurity. Mr Talbot had not watched all those programmes about The Mind on the telly for nothing.

  ‘Of course, we’ve already had the local police round,’ said Mr Talbot as he passed the photograph of the dead girl across to his wife with
a negative shake of his head. A non-customer of the Shire & Eastern Bank if ever he’d seen one. Probably – Mr Talbot didn’t feel he was really being unduly harsh in his judgement – a non-customer at every bank in the country. ‘We weren’t able to give them any assistance, I’m afraid. However, I understand that more positive information has since come in concerning the probable time of her demise, and concerning a possible connection on her part with this particular area of Frenchy Botham. Plum at The Laughing Dog, wasn’t it? Well, I wouldn’t have classified him as a fanciful man, I must admit, but I can’t help feeling he’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick on this occasion.’

  ‘Why is that, sir?’

  Mr Talbot looked down his nose at MacGregor. If there was one thing that Mr Talbot disliked it was the way the lower orders threw their weight about these days. There was plenty of time for that sort of thing, Mr Talbot always maintained, when a man has reached a position of authority and standing in his chosen field. ‘Why is that?’ he repeated rather distantly. ‘Well, my dear chap, The Grove is hardly that sort of place, is it? Anonymous, pregnant, teenage girls’ – he corrected himself — ‘anonymous, pregnant, murdered teenage girls simply don’t, quite frankly, fit into an area where every single property would come on the market at not one penny less than forty thousand pounds. I think you gentlemen must take it from me that people who make that kind of investment in a community definitely don’t go around involving themselves in affairs of such a sordid and degrading nature. I shudder to think what would happen to the price of houses if they did. No, I suggest you have another word with Plum. He must have misunderstood.’

  MacGregor thought it was about time he got Mr Talbot shunted back onto some more profitable line, but before he could do more than open his mouth the bank manager was holding forth yet again.

  ‘Mind you, I fully appreciate that you have to explore whatever avenues open up in front of you, however outlandish and improbable they may appear. That is why I am prepared to co-operate fully. Now then, it’s the evening of Wednesday the twelfth you’re interested in, I understand? That’s when you believe the girl was killed and therefore the period for which we unfortunate residents in The Grove are being asked to furnish an alibi. Right? Well, luckily, Mrs Talbot and I are in the ideal situation for doing precisely that. We were both at home and in each other’s company from half-past five onwards, when I returned from the Bank. I was a trifle earlier than usual because we were giving a small bridge party that evening. We had dinner at a slightly earlier hour, too. Our guests arrived between a quarter to seven and seven o’clock. They all came by car. From seven o’clock onwards, then, we were all continually together until about eleven o’clock when the party broke up. No one else called at the house during that time, and no one left it. You may have noticed as you came in that my front door is liberally supplied with locks and bolts. The back door is much the same, and so are all the windows. In addition I have a burglar alarm which is connected directly with Chapminster police station. This is because, as a bank manager, I am in an extremely vulnerable position. A number of my colleagues have, as you will know, been kidnapped and forced to open their own bank vaults to robbers. I have no intention of allowing that to happen to me and I take every precaution. This house has, with the full approval of my Head Office, been turned into what amounts to an impregnable fortress, and next week I am having the latest model of spy-holes installed in the front door. One cannot take too many precautions. I change my route to and from the Bank every day and you will remember that I insisted upon seeing your Warrant Cards before I permitted you to cross my threshold.’