by Joyce Porter
Mr Tiffin ground his teeth and turned the other cheek.
Mrs Tiffin smacked that, too. ‘Of course, I happen to care about my daughter’s future happiness. I’d nothing against poor Gary, really, but there was a mystery about his birth and you were supposed to be getting to the bottom of it.’
‘Gossip,’ muttered Mr Tiffin as he watched a thin dribble of tea struggle out of the pot and quarter fill his cup. ‘ Idle gossip.’
‘Gossip it may be,’ agreed Mrs Tiffin with the triumphant air of one about to score the winning point. ‘But idle it certainly wasn’t. Why, there’s hardly a soul in this village that hasn’t been credited with fathering or mothering that boy at one time or another. Up to and including Lord Crouch.’
‘I told you I asked Gary all about it,’ said Mr Tiffin dispiritedly. ‘And you want to be careful what you say about his lordship. There’s such a thing as slander.’
The Tiffins were obviously squaring up for the next round and MacGregor sensed that it might well be now or never. He took full advantage of Mrs Tiffin’s slight hesitation as she mulled over the prospects of being sued by Lord Crouch for defamation of character. ‘Ah, yes! Gary Marsh’s antecedents! You discussed them with him, Mr Tiffin?’
‘Oh, no! Not you, too!’ Mr Tiffin was clearly distressed to find that the police were allying themselves with his wife. ‘Good grief, anybody would think we’d still got Queen Victoria on the throne! Look, Gary Marsh was illegitimate. So what? It was hardly his fault, was it? And, in spite of what some of the clever devils in this village may say, there’s no mystery about his parentage. His mother was Miss Marsh’s younger sister and his father was some passing commercial traveller or sailor or something. I don’t know and I doubt very much if his mother did, either. She was that sort of girl. Before Gary was six months old she cleared off again with some new gentleman friend and, apart from a couple of postcards, that’s the last anybody’s heard of her. She’s not going to come around bothering anybody now.’
MacGregor studiously wrote all this down and Dover continued to watch him with sardonic contempt. It was widely believed up at Scotland Yard that the chief inspector couldn’t even sign his own name, but this was a vile calumny on a scholar who had left more than one indelible mark in the outside lavatories of Mafeking Street Boys’ School. MacGregor looked up from his notebook but Mrs Tiffin was already stirring it up again.
‘A likely story!’ she scoffed. ‘ So how do you explain all the interest Lord Crouch was taking in him? He practically reared that lad as his own, by all accounts.’
‘He did nothing of the sort!’ snapped Mr Tiffin.
‘He did! Everybody says so!’
‘He didn’t! And they don’t!’
‘You know your trouble, don’t you, Arthur Tiffin?’ Mrs Tiffin’s rhetorical question was withering. ‘You’re soft! You believe anything anybody tells you.’
It was a harsh accusation to make about a man of Mr Tiffin’s social standing but Mrs Tiffin was a bitterly disappointed woman. Fate had robbed her (and not for the first time) of a mate for her daughter but Fate was not available for reproach and retaliation. Mr Tiffin, on the other hand, was.
Before very long Mr Tiffin took the coward’s way out.
‘Where are you going?’ demanded his ever-loving.
Mr Tiffin smiled a rather silly smile. ‘Just upstairs, dear. I shan’t be a minute.’
‘Typical!’ snorted Mrs Tiffin as soon as her husband had left the room. ‘He does it on purpose,’ she told Dover. ‘ Every time. Regular as clockwork. Soon as he starts losing an argument – off to the bathroom. Claims he’s got a weak bladder. The result of his army service, so he says. If you ask me, it’s a weak head he’s suffering from, not a weak bladder.’
And so, when Mr Tiffin returned from his little expedition, the bickering continued. Dover, surprisingly, didn’t seem to mind though he was not usually noted for his tolerance of witnesses who couldn’t give a straight answer to a blunt question. Today, however, he was prepared to play a waiting game. According to his calculations Miss Tiffin should be arriving on the scene at any moment and with her – with any luck – his third high tea of the afternoon.
At least when Miss Tiffin did turn up, it put an end to the domestic brawling. The decencies had to be preserved in the face of such a cruel loss. In a hushed voice Mrs Tiffin urged her daughter to try and eat something but Miss Tiffin, red-eyed and snivelly, was not to be persuaded. Dover took an instant dislike to the girl.
Charmian Tiffin was a girl only by courtesy, of course. She was actually twenty-nine, claimed to be twenty-six and looked a good forty. As MacGregor examined her sharp, sallow features, her mousy hair and her generally lethargic bearing, he could only conclude that she would have made a fitting partner for the deceased and dreary Gary Marsh. The only puzzle was how two such utterly negative characters had ever got to the stage of plighting their troths in the first place. MacGregor guessed that Mrs Tiffin might have quite a lot to answer for.
The introductions were made and Miss Tiffin indicated to the accompaniment of some half-hearted grizzling and a tentative dab at her eyes with an already sodden handkerchief that she was willing to undergo the ordeal of being questioned. Dover’s face slipped back into its discontented scowl and MacGregor turned to a fresh page in his note-book. But Mrs Tiffin, a devoted mother if ever there was one, had other ideas. On the painfully thin pretext of getting her daughter to take a dose of iron tonic, she inveigled the girl into the kitchen and there, presumably, gave her a rapid run down on the facts of life. A considerably more animated Miss Tiffin duly returned to the sitting room and joined MacGregor on the settee. The sergeant who, in his innocence, had imagined that Mrs Tiffin and her daughter had merely been plotting to pervert the ends of justice, found himself breaking out in a cold sweat. Miss Tiffin edged a couple of inches closer and managed a watery smile.
Dover now found himself in something of a predicament and he was obliged to make his mind up quickly as to which he disliked the more: Charmian Tiffin or his sergeant. Miss Tiffin won the unpopularity contest by a short head because, much as Dover relished MacGregor’s embarrassment, there wasn’t much joy sitting in a house where no more food was going to be served. The only thing to do now was to get out as quickly as possible and so, with this end firmly in mind, Dover silenced MacGregor with a warning scowl and took over the interrogation himself.
‘I suppose you know,’ he began, just to put the girl at her ease, ‘that you’re my principle suspect in this murder case?’
It was news to Miss Tiffin and she stopped ogling MacGregor with gratifying abruptness. It was a surprise to her doting parents, too, and after a moment’s shocked silence the storm of outraged protests broke.
Dover talked through them. ‘In my experience,’ he bawled, ‘ people always get themselves snuffed out by their nearest and dearest. One of the laws of nature. And if you lot,’ he added venomously, addressing the family group en bloc, ‘ don’t keep your blooming traps shut, I’ll take little Miss Weeping Willow here down to the nick and question her there. Without witnesses!’
Since this dire threat was accompanied by some pretty daunting muscle flexing on Dover’s part, the Tiffins’s expostulations spluttered away into an apprehensive silence.
‘That’s better!’ said Dover, nodding his head with great satisfaction before singling out Miss Tiffin again for his undivided attention. ‘So, it’s up to you, girl, isn’t it? You play ball with me and I’ll play ball with you. Get it?’
‘But I didn’t do it!’ moaned Miss Tiffin, wringing her hands.
‘Of course, she didn’t!’ screamed her mother.
Dover spared a moment to deal with this outburst of parental concern. ‘Button it!’ he advised.
Mrs Tiffin rose to her feet. ‘Arthur,’ she demanded hysterically, ‘are you going to sit there and let me be spoken to like that?’
‘He will if he’s any sense!’ chuckled Dover, beginning quite to enjoy himself. ‘I’ll
run him in as an accessory, else! You, too, if I hear another squawk out of you!’ And having successfully bitten the hands that had fed him, Dover turned back to Miss Tiffin. ‘Well, made your mind up yet?’
‘But I told you,’ whimpered Miss Tiffin, ‘I didn’t do it!’
Dover assumed an expression more of anger than of sorrow. ‘Oh, well, if you want to play it the hard way …’
‘I couldn’t have done it!’ whined Miss Tiffin. ‘ I was with Mumsy all evening. Right from the time Gary left to go and see Lord Crouch until Daddy came in after the evening service. Then I was with both of them until we went to bed. I’ve got an alibi.’
‘Call that an alibi!’ jeered Dover. ‘’Strewth, I’ve seen better alibis crawling out of mouldy cheese. It isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. You’ll have to do better than that, girl!’
‘I loved Gary! I was going to marry him!’
‘Practically putting the noose round her own neck,’ commented Dover to Mr Tiffin in an amiable aside. ‘Best motive I’ve heard for a month of Sundays.’
‘Oh, you brute!’ sobbed Miss Tiffin.
‘What was he going to see Lord Crouch for anyhow?’
‘I don’t know. Something to do with business, I expect. Gary’ – Miss Tiffin’s sobs doubled as she remembered all she had lost – ‘Gary didn’t believe in women worrying their heads about business so, of course, I didn’t ask.’
‘Shows the lad had some sense,’ grunted Dover who prided himself on being very much of a Kinder, Kirche, Kuche man.
MacGregor, suspecting that Mrs Tiffin might be about to nail the flag of Women’s Lib to her masthead and so confuse what little issue there was, intervened smoothly in an attempt to cool things down. ‘Perhaps they were discussing this new motel that Lord Crouch is going to open?’ he suggested. ‘I believe that your late fiancé was going to manage it?’
Miss Tiffin nodded and gave MacGregor such a grateful smile that he regretted that he hadn’t left her to Dover’s tender mercies.
But, even for the handsome and eligible sergeant, Mrs Tiffin was not prepared to bottle up her righteous wrath for long. ‘Now, just you look here!’ she all but shouted at Dover. ‘Our Charmian had nothing to do with Gary’s death, and neither did I, and neither did her dad! I don’t know what sort of a game you think you’re playing but, if you ask me, things have gone just about far enough. I’m not trying to teach you your job but, if this is the way Scotland Yard investigates a murder, the sooner something is done about it the better. You’re nothing but a great bully! Arthur,’ – she gave her husband a commanding nod – ‘ just give your friend, the Chief Constable, a ring! And’ – she swung back to Dover again – ‘if he can’t do anything, we shall have to have a word with Lord Crouch. Luckily the Home Secretary is a cousin of his, by marriage.’
Dover sunk back in his chair. If there was one thing that riled him more than another, it was having a bloody woman shouting at him. Especially one with connections. In his chequered career Dover had had too many complaints brought against him not to know the grief and unpleasantness they brought in their wake. It just wasn’t worth the trouble, to say nothing of the fact that one more blot on the Dover escutcheon would probably lead to instant and ignominious dismissal. Dover reckoned he’d better not chance his arm. He scowled at Mrs Tiffin. ‘Oh, all right!’ he muttered sullenly. ‘Have it your way! No need to fly off the bloody handle!’
He heaved himself up a little in his chair. ‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘who do you think did it?’
Chapter Ten
‘Very tricky case,’ said Dover. ‘Endless complications and ramifications. Not,’ he added complacently, just in case anybody should have any doubts, ‘that I haven’t cracked plenty worse in my time.’
His companions at the dinner table, Lord Crouch and Lady Priscilla, stared fascinated at the oracle. So this was how Scotland Yard really worked! It was quite incredible!
Dover basked happily in the atmosphere of awed attention and obligingly launched into some highly coloured and totally fictitious reminiscences. Sinister Chinese, criminal master-minds, blood-thirsty gangsters and cunning psychopaths flitted across the scene, only to find themselves being cut down in their evil prime through the personal courage and rapier sharp mind of the speaker.
Lord Crouch and Lady Priscilla were dumb-struck.
All in all, Dover’s return to Beltour had been highly successful. He had arrived in nice time for supper and nobody had been so ill-bred as to mention either his peculiar withdrawal to The Bull Reborn or his even more peculiar return from it. The stewed tripe, specially prepared by Lady Priscilla’s noble hands, hardly reached the standards Dover usually required in either quality or quantity but, for once, even this didn’t matter as Dover’s stomach was still trying to cope with the blow-out it had received in the Tiffins’ cottage. Indeed, so strained were Dover’s digestive processes that he was obliged to bestow upon his hosts the supreme accolade of undoing the top button of his trousers before tackling the tinned treacle pudding which Lady Priscilla had bought for him, 2p off.
Lady Priscilla smiled happily. Nothing that Dover did either surprised or shocked her. To her he was a real man of the people, a son of the soil, and if his ways were not as hers she knew she was in no position to criticize. ‘How absolutely fascinating!’ she breathed as Dover brought his lurid account of how he had bust up gangland single-handed to a close.
A lump of pudding slowly dropped off one of Dover’s chins and sank without a trace in the rest of the debris on his waistcoat.
‘What interesting lives you ordinary people lead!’ cooed Lady Priscilla enviously. ‘It’s been a revelation, it really has. Watching you at work, I mean. I just didn’t realize how you had to go about things. Silly old me, I thought you spent all your time searching for clues!’ She chuckled indulgently at her own stupidity. ‘You know, examining the scene of the crime with a magnifying glass and analysing bloodstains and measuring footprints and everything.’
For one dreadful moment Dover thought that Lady Priscilla was taking the mickey. When he realized that she wasn’t, however, he relaxed and even consented to explain his peculiar technique. ‘ I use the psychological approach,’ he said modestly. ‘Brains, that’s my speciality!’ Solemnly he tapped the side of his head with a grubby, nicotine stained finger.
Lady Priscilla nodded with complete understanding. ‘Of course!’ she agreed eagerly. ‘You know my trouble, Mr Dover! I read too many of those dreadful detective stories! They’re just too fantastic, aren’t they? I mean, one couldn’t expect people to go rushing around like that in real life, could one?’
Dover bestirred himself to put the record straight. I’ve hardly been letting the grass grow under my feet!’ he pointed out truculently.
‘No, no, of course not!’ Lady Priscilla hastened to placate Dover before he could turn nasty. ‘Besides, I expect you leave all that routine stuff to your sergeant. Such a nicely spoken, well mannered boy, I thought.’
She could have been more tactful. Dover’s face broke into a discontented scowl. ‘That bloody young pansy?’ he snarled. ‘Believe you me, missus, I’d be sitting pretty if I didn’t have that snivelling little queer tied round my neck twenty-four hours a day!’
Lady Priscilla belonged to a generation which was not accustomed to having the sexual proclivities of third parties discussed, however obliquely and unfoundedly, at the dinner table. She went slightly pink and changed the conversation. ‘Er – are you going out again tonight, chief inspector?’
Dover looked highly aggrieved. ‘’Strewth,’ he groaned, ‘ I’m not made of flipping iron!’
It took Lady Priscilla a second or two to work out that the answer to her perfectly straightforward question was in the negative. ‘Oh, well, in that case,’ – she turned brightly to her brother – ‘I think we might offer Mr Dover a glass of port, don’t you, Boys?’
Lord Crouch inclined his head and rose from the table with all the ponderous dignity, if not the s
peed, of a Saturn rocket at take-off.
Lady Priscilla went on chatting to Dover. ‘My dear father was something of a connoisseur where wine was concerned, you know, though it was our grandfather, of course, who laid down the cellar. He had quite a reputation, I believe, for shrewd buying and of course he had the very best advice from his shippers.’
The prospect of getting his paws on the cream of Beltour’s wine cellar quite brought out Dover’s sunnyside again and, sweeping his pudding plate out of the way, he cleared the decks eagerly for action. His brief sojourn at The Bull Reborn had obviously inspired his hosts to spark up their ideas a bit. They’d finally learned that a stalwart, red-blooded fellow like Dover needed more than this teetotal, vegetarian pap to keep him happy. Dover licked his lips. Vintage port as laid down by old grandpa, eh? A couple of bottles of that and he’d sleep the sleep of the just!
Lord Crouch ambled back from the kitchen with a bottle in his hand. Unlike the late earl, Dover hardly ranked as a connoisseur in anything more exotic than bottled beer, but even he could read.
Lady Priscilla sensed that somehow she had raised Dover’s hopes a deal too high. ‘Of course,’ she explained as her brother methodically opened the bottle of invalid tonic wine, ‘what was left of the cellar was sold off years ago. Death duties, you know. However, they recommended this label very highly in the village shop. With Boys and myself not’ – she gave an apologetic little laugh – ‘indulging, we are obliged to lean rather heavily upon the opinions of the experts. I do hope you’ll find it agreeable to your palate.’
The sullen quivering of Dover’s jowl should have been enough to indicate his opinion to anyone, but Lady Priscilla was in many ways one of Nature’s innocents and, as she watched glassful after glassful slurp down Dover’s throat, she simply assumed that he must be enjoying the stuff. She was wrong. Dover was drinking this invalid muck because there was no hope of getting anything else, but it was not quenching his thirst for vengeance.
