by Joyce Porter
Dover sniffed. ‘Proper little encyclopedia, aren’t you?’
‘I have explored both paths, sir,’ explained MacGregor, still smarting. ‘The murderer could have approached the Donkey Bridge along either, of course. One imagines that he probably came from the village but, of course, there’s no evidence either way.’
‘That’s the trouble with this bloody case,’ said Dover, rejecting the pleasures of tearing a strip off MacGregor in favour of a good old grumble. ‘ No bloody clues. ’Strewth, you’d have thought there’d have been a footprint or a cigarette packet or something to give us a lead.’
MacGregor felt obliged to point out a basic fact which appeared to have escaped Dover’s notice. ‘We wouldn’t have been called in, sir, if the identity of the murderer had been obvious.’
‘Trust you to start finding excuses!’ muttered Dover. ‘ Well, come on then! No point in standing around here all blooming morning.’ And, so saying, he set off along the path which led to the village.
MacGregor strolled along behind.
The path was muddy here, too, and both Dover and MacGregor had their work cut out to keep their balance. Before they had gone more than a few yards, Dover slammed on the brakes again. ‘We might,’ he said, ‘get a cup of coffee somewhere.’
The Bull Reborn, thanks to the ginger cat’s vendetta, was presumably out of bounds. ‘There is a rather grubby little snack bar, sir,’ said MacGregor cautiously.
‘It’ll do!’ responded Dover, who cared naught for hygiene, and proceeded on his way with renewed vigour in his step. Nothing was more calculated to raise his spirits than the imminent prospect of food and drink, especially after one of Lady Priscilla’s meagre, nut-cutlet breakfasts. Dover fell to musing on whether or not it might be worth breaking with tradition and dropping his wife a postcard, demanding the immediate despatch of food parcels.
They reached the church, an undistinguished building for which an earlier Lord Crouch had footed the bill. Dover, out of breath again, leaned on the wall and contemplated the gravestones. Some buggers had all the luck! Having nothing better to do, he read the inscription on the nearest headstone and lingered enviously over the final words: Rest in Peace. It wasn’t that Dover had a death wish or anything kinky like that. It was just that he was drawn irresistibly to the horizontal and the motionless.
The first drops of rain came spattering down. ‘ Oh, hell!’ said Dover.
There were not many things which would induce the chief inspector to enter a church, but a heavy shower of rain happened to be one of them. MacGregor, trailing unwillingly along behind and possessing at least the rudiments of correct behaviour, managed to whip off Dover’s bowler hat before the proprieties were offended. They sat down in a pew to wait until the heavens should close again.
It was dark inside the church and for a few moments the claps of thunder rolling around outside smothered all other sounds. It was only when this died away that MacGregor realized that they were not alone. Up by the altar a couple of embarrassed tourists were getting an unsolicited tour from the vicar. Currently they were paying rather less attention to the glories of a large stained glass window (c.1924 and sacred to the memory of Queenie Benckenbinder Crouch) than to the problem of whether and, if so, how much to tip the importunate cleric when he finally allowed them to make their escape. They needn’t have worried. The vicar himself was not in the least squeamish about these delicate financial transactions. Quite a number of the visitors to Beltour House popped into the village church on the off chance that it might contain something worth looking at. It didn’t, but even rubbish needs money for its upkeep and the earlier Lord Crouch had been a mite stingy with his endowments. Nor did the vicar reckon on giving his services for free. Having talked long enough and spent long enough with the tourists to put them into his debt, he left them with a smiling and precise description of where the various boxes were for the Poor, the Church Fabric, the Roof, the Flower Fund and the Foreign Missions.
‘No obligation, of course!’ he leered and, gathering up his skirts, swept majestically down the centre aisle to corral the new arrivals.
Dover lost no time in disillusioning him.
The vicar didn’t mind at all. An ex-Army padre, he was very keen on uniforms and the maintenance of law and order and delighted to meet a couple of chaps who shared his attitude. In the gloom of the church Dover’s unspeakable scruffiness and bolshie expression were not immediately discernible.
The vicar sat down companionably in the next pew. ‘Well, we shall give the poor lad a good send-off at all events,’ he said happily. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow, you know. Would you like me to reserve you a couple of seats? I’m expecting a full house so it’s advisable to book!’ He rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘I hear they’re running a couple of coaches over from Claverhouse. With a bit of luck and if this weather clears, it could be standing room only.’
‘I suppose you knew him,’ said Dover grumpily, staring curiously at the vicar and wondering who he reminded him of.
‘As far as anybody could,’ agreed the vicar. He was a shortish, compact man with one of those square, bristly heads which were the hallmark of Prussian junkers before the First World War. When he had first come to the Beltour living there had been a movement amongst the older parishioners to nickname him ‘The Gauleiter’ but this had not caught on and the choirboys, on the grounds that his name was Liddle, had settled for calling him ‘Box-top’. His humourous habit of sporting a rimless monocle on high days and holidays, while acknowledged to be somewhat bizarre, was generally approved. The inhabitants of Beltour were an old fashioned lot and expected their lords and their clergy to be different from the ordinary run of folk. ‘I believe,’ he went chatting on, ‘that Marsh was a choirboy when he was younger, but that was before my time. He only started attending church on anything like a regular basis when he became engaged to that poor young woman, Charmian Tiffin. Of course, we’ve really got Arthur Tiffin to thank for that.’ He broke off to enquire if they knew Arthur Tiffin.
‘Oh, yes,’ said MacGregor, hoping that the Reverend Mr Liddle didn’t mind too much that Dover was now resting his aching feet on the little shelf provided for hymn books.
‘Stout fellow, Arthur!’ declared the vicar enthusiastically. ‘A real pillar of the church – and of the village. We’re lucky to have him. Got his early training in the army, you know. It always shows.’
The rain had slackened off to a heavy drizzle and the two tourists were summoning up their courage to leave. The vicar smiled wolfishly at them as they approached the door with its formidable array of begging boxes. Under the gaze of three interested pairs of eyes the man panicked and dropped one coin in the Church Fabric and yet another in Foreign Missions.
‘God bless and God speed, dear friends!’ called the vicar heartily and, in a profusion of muttered thanks, the tourists gratefully took their leave.
‘Two fifty pence pieces!’ said the vicar with understandable triumph. ‘ They made a quite unmistakable sound, you know.’ He chuckled. ‘Ah, well, it’s more blessed to give than to receive, as we parsons always say! Now, what was it we were talking about?’
‘You were telling us about Gary Marsh,’ said MacGregor.
‘Wrong!’ laughed Mr Liddle whose natural high spirits were proof even against the pall of gloom Dover was endeavouring to cast over the proceedings. ‘I was actually talking about Arthur Tiffin.’ He leaned across and struck MacGregor a playful blow on the knee. ‘You’ll have to be sharper than that, sergeant, if you’re going to get anywhere as a detective! Yes,’ – he leaned back, making himself almost as much at home as Dover had been doing for the last ten minutes – ‘salt of the earth, that chap! A born organizer! Of course The Royal South Shires Fusiliers was always a very good regiment. I did a couple of tours with them when I was a padre and I know what fine chaps they turned out. He practically runs Beltour House, you know, and I can’t tell you what an asset he is to us here in the church. I was telling him so only the
other day. “Give you a couple more years, Arthur,” I said, “and you’ll have the parish showing a profit!”’
Dover dug MacGregor in the ribs. ‘Hasn’t it stopped raining yet?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
Dover sighed heavily and eyed the vicar with more distaste than resignation while he thought of something rude to say. ‘I should have thought you and Tiffin would have bored the pants off everybody with your reminiscences about the days when you were both playing soldiers.’
MacGregor cringed but Mr Liddle, in spite of his brutal Teutonic appearance, was inclined both by his nature and by his calling to see the best in almost everybody. ‘Well, I might,’ he admitted with a rueful grin. ‘I enjoyed the army and I confess I do like talking about the good old days. But you can’t accuse Arthur Tiffin of that. He never talks about his soldiering days and I respect him for it. He takes the view that he’s a civilian now and there’s no future in always harking back to the past. Funnily enough,’ – and here even the vicar assumed that slightly smug expression which Beltour people acquired when they were about to introduce a certain name into the conversation – ‘I was saying pretty much the same sort of thing to Lord Crouch only the other day. As a matter of fact, I even went so far as to compare Arthur with St Augustine of Hippo.’
MacGregor tried hard to look as though the comparison had some meaning for him. Dover didn’t bother.
‘Or,’ said Mr Liddle helpfully, ‘St Francis of Assissi.’
‘Oh, quite!’ said MacGregor confidently.
‘Or even St Paul.’
‘Ah,’ said MacGregor with a smile.
Mr Liddle, however, was not the man to be bluffed by a member of the benighted laity. ‘A conversion,’ he explained. ‘After a life more distinguished for high living than piety.’
‘Of course,’ agreed MacGregor, nodding his head while Dover picked up a hymn book and began leafing through it. ‘You – er – think Mr Tiffin has had a bit of a past then, eh?’
The vicar shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have sometimes wondered,’ he admitted. ‘Judging by the odd hint he’s dropped, I don’t think he was always a religious man. Few of us were, of course. Still,’ – he grinned cheerfully – ‘that’s all water under the bridge now. Arthur is an outstanding church worker and a model to all of us, whatever he might have been in his youth. Frankly, I can’t imagine what we should do here without him. He …’
Dover tossed his hymn book down with a loud bang. He’d got a sure fire method for shutting up people who seemed prepared to talk the hind leg off a donkey and he brought it into play now. ‘Where,’ he demanded abruptly, even pointing an accusing and nicotine-stained finger at the startled clergyman, ‘were you at the time of the murder?’
Chapter Fifteen
For a split second Mr Liddle was tempted to treat the question as some sort of merry jape, but one look at Dover’s scowling face was enough to make him revise his ideas pretty sharply. ‘ You can’t be serious!’ he protested. ‘Where was I? Now, come on, my dear chap, you surely don’t think that I had anything …’
‘You got something to hide?’ asked Dover.
The vicar choked down his indignation. No doubt the fellow was only doing his duty but, even so, … ‘ I can hardly tell you where I was at the time of the murder until you tell me what time the murder took place, can I?’ he said with what he considered was commendable reasonableness.
Dover jerked his head knowingly at MacGregor. ‘He’s trying to be clever now!’
‘Not at all!’ objected the vicar.
‘Garn!’ scoffed Dover. ‘If you don’t know to the bloody minute when Marsh got rubbed out, you must be the only halfwit in the county who doesn’t.’
Mr Liddle flushed and scraped one hand nervously over the stubble on his head. ‘I was in church,’ he said coldly. ‘Taking evensong.’
‘Oh, I see!’ sniggered Dover, anxious to display his ready wit. ‘So there’d be no witnesses!’
This was a little too close to the truth for comfort. ‘Of course there were witnesses!’ retorted the vicar sharply. ‘There are at least six people who can vouch for my presence here throughout the whole service, including Mr Tiffin. I should imagine his word would be good enough for anybody. He played the organ for us that evening and I would never be out of his sight from the first moment to the last. I preached a rather longer sermon than usual so for a good twenty minutes I was standing up there in that pulpit. If you think that left me with any opportunity to sneak out and murder Gary Marsh, you’ve got another think coming.’
Dover wasn’t going to let old square-head off the hook as easily as that. ‘Never mind the protests, mate!’ he snarled. ‘Let’s be having some times.’
‘The service began at six o’clock and finished at ten to seven, or a minute or two before.’
With this plain statement of fact Dover lost interest and MacGregor butted in to try and put the interview on a more business-like footing. ‘Perhaps you could give me the names of those present, sir?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, now, there’s yourself and Mr Tiffin to start with.’ MacGregor entered the names in his notebook. ‘And the others, sir?’
Mr Liddle rattled off the distressingly short list of his evening congregation and pointed out a salient fact for Dover’s especial benefit. ‘I imagine that we all alibi each other, don’t we?’
But Dover had already chucked the towel in. His grasshopper mind, ever unhealthily preoccupied with the delights of hanging, was now mulling over the problems likely to be posed by the vicar’s neck. It was a very short, very strong and very muscular neck. It’d give any Jack Ketch one hell of a job, if topping hadn’t been abolished and if this God-botherer here hadn’t just successfully wriggled out of a murder charge.
‘Sir?’
Reluctantly Dover broke off his ruminations about how you’d stop the hempen rope slipping up over the vicar’s head because those little tightly set ears’d be no damned good. ‘What?’
MacGregor put away his notebook. ‘I was wondering if you had any further questions, sir?’
Dover sighed a dejected sigh, thought for a bit, remembered the cup of coffee he had promised himself for his morning’s labours and dragged himself to his feet. MacGregor and the vicar stood up, too, and in silence watched Dover stump bad-temperedly out of the church.
MacGregor caught up with him by the lych gate, having done his best to restore the image of the Metropolitan Police in the eyes of the vicar. It is unlikely that he succeeded because a very stiff letter about police brutality appeared the following week in the Church Times under Mr Liddle’s signature.
Dover got his coffee in the Ermyntrude Snack Bar and generously allowed MacGregor to stand him a couple of ham sandwiches as well. His generosity, however, did not extend to permitting further discussion of the case and MacGregor was shut up pretty smartly when he tried to bring up the question of the murder. Dover claimed that his brain needed a rest and, since there appeared to be no answer to this bland assertion, MacGregor drank his coffee in silence. When he had finished he gave Dover a cigarette and set off to walk back to Beltour Park to get the car. Dover remained in the snack bar and was soon snoozing gently over the table.
Not that Dover was asleep the whole time that MacGregor was away. On the contrary, the chief inspector stayed awake long enough to map out his activities for the whole of the afternoon. He’d have whatever muck it was Lady Priscilla served up for his lunch and then retire to his bedroom for a few hours of quiet and solitary thought. In a bit he’d get round to working out something useless for MacGregor to do.
In due course MacGregor deposited Dover at Beltour House and then made his own way to The Bull Reborn for his lunch. Dover moodily threaded his way through the groups of visitors and began clambering up those dratted stairs. All in all he was not displeased with his morning’s labours. They were getting on, he told himself in between desperate gasps for breath, they were getting on. A few more suspects h
ad been eliminated.… And what matter if they were … for the most part … the elderly and female members of Mr Liddle’s congregation.… Thousands of murders … had probably … been committed … by elderly … and female … church … goers.
Lady Priscilla, looking harrassed, opened the door in response to Dover’s kick. Lunch, she explained with grovelling apology, was not ready. Dover’s face blackened immediately. He felt – and said – that this was inexcusable. He had long ago given up expecting his hostess to produce a decent meal but there was no reason why she shouldn’t produce a prompt one.
Lady Priscilla bore the complaints with a stiff upper lip. ‘My brother would like to see you right away,’ she said.
‘Your brother? I thought he was supposed to be in London.’ Dover reflected, and not for the first time, that nobody ever told him anything.
‘He’s just got back. He said he must see you the moment you came in. That’s why I’ve held lunch back.’
Dover’s mouth settled into a discontented pout. ‘ What’s he want?’
Lady Priscilla bit her lip, looked extremely worried and shook her head. I’m afraid I don’t know. He’s in the sitting room. I’ll have your lunch ready the moment you’ve finished.’
Dover weakened sufficiently to ask a civil question. ‘What is it?’
‘Well, we’re having a nettle and raddish salad but I’ve got you some chips and fish fingers from the deep freeze. The man at the village shop said they were frightfully good and very popular. I’ve read the cooking instructions most carefully and I don’t think I shall have any problems.’
‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ said Dover. ‘Or less. Don’t forget the tomato ketchup! Oh, and I’ll have a few rounds of bread and butter, while you’re at it.’
Lord Crouch was standing by the window when Dover entered the sitting room. His Lordship had had ample time to prepare his opening remarks and blurted them out before Dover had even had time to sit down.
