by Joyce Porter
Inspector Dawkins let him get as far as the door. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I almost forgot. Somebody rang up for you.’
‘Rang up here?’
‘Yes. It was all a bit confused but the sergeant on the desk gathered that your boss wanted to see you right away. Chief Inspector Rover.’
‘Dover,’ said MacGregor. He came back a few steps. ‘They didn’t say what he wanted?’
Inspector Dawkins shook his head.
‘I say, do you think you could do me a favour?’ The smile was now ingratiating. ‘ If he rings up again, don’t let on I called in here.’
‘All right.’
Inspector Dawkins’s manner was so distant that MacGregor felt obliged to explain further. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a couple of things to see to and I don’t suppose he wants me for anything urgent.’
‘No,’ agreed Inspector Dawkins, careful to keep his voice quite expressionless, ‘I don’t suppose he does.’
Taffy O’Sullivan’s betting shop wasn’t hard to find and the disloyal thought crossed MacGregor’s mind that even Dover might have stumbled across it without too much difficulty. The window was set out with three or four chipped and shabby model horses in illustration of the sport of kings and a string of down-trodden men passed continually in and out of the finger-smudged, glass plated doors. MacGregor slipped into the line and entered, ploughing his way through the discarded betting slips which carpeted the floor.
Inside the shop the mixture of tobacco smoke and sweaty socks got him by the throat and he made his way across to the counter trying to hold his breath. Behind a steel grill, somewhat like an enclosed nun in her parlour, sat a hard-faced young woman raking in the money with remarkably dirty hands. She chewed slowly and thoughtfully while MacGregor explained that he would like to speak to Mr O’Sullivan. When he’d finished the girl eyed him up and down and apparently decided he was harmless. She jerked her head towards the far end of the counter. MacGregor smiled his thanks – she was quite a nubile young woman – and, following the inclination of her head, made his way behind the counter and into a tiny office at the back.
‘Mr Taffy O’Sullivan?’
The man working away at the untidy roll top desk turned round. ‘Sure is, boss!’ he grinned and leaned back to enjoy the look on MacGregor’s face.
Whatever else MacGregor had been expecting, he had not been expecting to find that Taffy O’Sullivan was a huge, amiable and very black West Indian. Trying to hide his surprise, he began to introduce himself but the massive negro flapped him into silence with a lordly wave of his enormous, pink-palmed hand.
‘You’re the fuzz, man!’ he announced. ‘And I sure don’t need anybody to tell me that. What’s taken you so long?’
‘You’ve been expecting us?’ MacGregor frowned.
‘Sure have. Soon as I heard somebody’d pushed that Marsh cat through dem pearly gates, I knew you pigs’d be snuffling around. I told ’em out there to be sure and show you right in. Mind you,’ – Taffy O’Sullivan made the admission with disarming frankness– ‘I did reckon it’d be the old boar that’d come a-knocking at my door. How come they’ve only sent me a little piglet, huh?’
The body-wobbling chuckles which accompanied this question were meant to take some of the sting out of it, but MacGregor was not amused. He glared at Mr O’Sullivan with a bleak sourness of which Dover himself would not have been too ashamed. ‘You knew Gary Marsh?’
‘You know I did, man! And I know all about Josh’s little old chinwag with you boys at The White Feathers.’
‘Marsh owed you money?’
Taffy O’Sullivan shook his head slowly in mock self-reproach. ‘I will let these trashy white boys bet on credit. It’ll be the ruin of me.’
‘And you wanted him to settle up?’
‘I sure did!’ agreed Taffy O’Sullivan with unshakable good humour. His accent wandered uncertainly between black-faced minstrel and Wolverhampton, but his affability never wavered.
‘And for gambling debts you have no redress in law.’
‘Sure haven’t!’ said Taffy with a laugh. ‘The courts is closed to the likes of me.’
‘So you resort to strong-arm methods?’
Taffy O’Sullivan almost fell out of his chair. ‘I told ’em that’s what you’d say!’ he roared, wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘You cats is sure predictable. They issue you with little old gramophone records or something?’
MacGregor had a sneaking feeling that the interview was slipping out of his control. ‘ Where were you the night Marsh was killed?’ he barked.
Taffy O’Sullivan laughed so much this time that he could hardly speak. ‘ I’ve got six alibis lined up, piglet!’ he gasped. ‘ Which one would you like, huh? They’ll all stand up in court, that I can guarantee!’
‘I’ve a bloody good mind to run you in!’ snarled MacGregor, stripping off the kid gloves with a vengeance.
‘You’ll need help, brother!’ warned Taffy O’Sullivan with a grin.
The implied insult both to his muscles and his manhood cut MacGregor to the quick, but he took another look at the powerful figure confronting him and wisely confined himself to verbal onslaughts. ‘You’ll not get away with this, O’Sullivan!’
‘Now, stop leaning on me, boy! Use them old brains of yours! I’m a peaceful character. You go and ask the local bluebottles.’
‘I already have,’ said MacGregor grimly.
For the first time Taffy O’Sullivan looked disconcerted. ‘You have?’ he asked. ‘Well, there’s a thing, now!’ He whistled softly to himself and gazed up at the ceiling. ‘It seems I have been casting my bread on some very ungrateful waters. Or are they so stupid they don’t know now how to use a telephone? Still,’ – philosophically he pushed the problems of bribery and corruption to one side – ‘go and have another word with them. They’ll tell you I’m not the sort of gentleman to risk fifteen years in pokey for a lousy old twenty pounds.’
‘Forty!’ said MacGregor.
‘It’s still peanuts, man!’
‘You might want to encourage the others.’
Taffy O’Sullivan nodded his agreement and his understanding. ‘Oh, sure. One sign of weakness in my line of business and they’re crawling all over you, the twisting bastards! But give me credit for some basic common sense, man! If I was a-going to rub Marsh out, I wouldn’t have done it myself, now would I? And I wouldn’t have let any of my gallant band of assistants get involved, either. I’m not that stupid. Jesus, man, I’d have hired me a London boy to do me a real professional job. A gun or a knife. You can get likely lads for that two-a-penny up in the Smoke.’
MacGregor couldn’t help but recognize the force of this argument. No crook worth his salt these days settled his own accounts. It was the age of specialization in crime as in everything else. MacGregor also knew that he was getting precisely nowhere in his eyeball to eyeball confrontation with Mr O’Sullivan and he began to search anxiously for some means of breaking off the engagement without too much loss of face. He was saved by the bell.
Taffy O’Sullivan’s large black hand engulfed the telephone receiver. After a few unrevealing words he looked across at MacGregor. ‘ It’s the local pigs, man. Is your handle MacGregor?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know a cat called Dover?’
MacGregor sadly acknowledged that he did.
Taffy O’Sullivan dropped the receiver back on its rest and jerked his head towards the door. ‘He’s whistling, boy!’
When MacGregor got back to Beltour, he found Dover not so much whistling as steaming.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ The chief inspector was reclining on the top of his bed and looking decidedly lumpish.
MacGregor nerved himself to offer a diplomatic, if totally unrevealing, account of his whereabouts and activities, but Dover didn’t really want to know.
‘You can tell me later!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve solved the bloody case, anyhow. It’s a good thing there’s one of us who doesn
’t sit around on his backside all day trying to look pretty!’
‘Yes, sir,’ said MacGregor. ‘Er – who do you think the murderer is, sir?’ With great restraint he didn’t add the words ‘this time’ to his question.
Dover’s never very sunny face clouded over. ‘’Strewth, I haven’t got that far!’ he objected. ‘Trust you to want the whole thing handed to you on a bloody plate. I’ve just worked out the general principle of the thing. It’s up to you to sort out the flipping details.’
MacGregor chided himself for ever having thought otherwise. ‘ I see, sir,’ he said patiently.
One day, Dover promised himself, when he didn’t feel so fagged, he’d punch that smug, superior face into an unrecognizable pulp. ‘Did you know that Henniford was within spitting distance of Tuppeny Hill Camp?’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted. ‘Er – does it matter?’
Dover was impatient to get things over and done with so he ignored this piece of impertinence for the moment. ‘Of course it matters, you moron! Henniford is the dump where Marsh’s mother was living when he was born and Tuppeny Hill Camp is where Lord Crouch’s bunch of little tin soldiers was stationed.’
‘Really, sir?’ MacGregor suppressed a sigh. They couldn’t – surely – be back at poor Lord Crouch again, could they?
Dover knew exactly what MacGregor was thinking, and resented it. ‘I reckon Marsh’s mother was the regimental sweetheart. And obliging with it.’
‘Ah!’ MacGregor received Dover’s wilder speculations coolly.
‘Do you know how many men in this village served in that regiment?’
MacGregor saw which way Dover’s thoughts – for want of a better word – were wending and sighed audibly this time.
‘The Royal South Shires Fusiliers, sir? Oh, quite a number, I should imagine. I gather it mainly recruits in these parts. Well, there’s Lord Crouch, himself, of course, and the landlord of The Bull Reborn. The vicar, too. Didn’t he say he was attached to the South Shires at some time or another? I don’t know whether he was with them at the time of Marsh’s conception.’
‘So, that’s what you’ve got to find out, isn’t it?’ Dover was now paying more attention to the plumping up of his pillows. He wondered whether it was worth the effort of getting off the bed so that he could get the eiderdown free to pull over him.
‘Your theory, sir, is that one of the ex-soldiers in the village is Marsh’s father?’ said MacGregor slowly. He was thinking hard. Sometimes, the law of averages being what it is, even Dover hit on the truth. ‘But, supposing that he is, what difference does it make? It doesn’t mean that he murdered Marsh. I mean, what would his motive be? Fear of exposure?’
‘Could be,’ grunted Dover as he settled down. The eiderdown wasn’t worth the trouble.
‘It’s a bit thin, isn’t it, sir?’ MacGregor shook his head doubtfully. Suddenly he looked up. ‘That stroppy little snout of yours, sir! Josh! He’s an ex-fusilier, too!’
Dover lifted his head a quarter of an inch from the pillow. ‘How do you know that?’
‘He was wearing a badge in his lapel, sir. One of those old comrades’ association things. I remember wondering vaguely how on earth a misbegotten runt like that ever got accepted into the army. The South Shires Fusiliers,’ said MacGregor, remembering Lord Crouch, ‘ must be a pretty crummy bunch.’
‘Uh,’ said Dover sleepily. He brightened up a bit. ‘ I wouldn’t mind pinning it on that little rat. You’d better have a good look at him while you’re at it.’
MacGregor nodded his head absently. He’d more important things on his mind just at that moment than exchanging idle chit-chat with Dover. There was somebody else. Sometime somebody had just casually mentioned.… ‘Arthur Tiffin!’ gasped MacGregor.
Dover came out of the arms of Morpheus with an almost audible pop. ‘Arthur Tiffin?’
MacGregor, shaken by his own brilliance, sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Arthur Tiffin was in the South Shires, sir. Don’t you remember? His wife told us.’ MacGregor smacked himself across the forehead in a gesture of self reproach. ‘She told us he’d actually been Lord Crouch’s batman. You see what that means, don’t you, sir? That would almost certainly put him in Tuppeny Hill Camp at the relevant time because Lord Crouch’s military career was a pretty short one and I don’t think he was ever stationed anywhere else. And, by golly,’ – MacGregor stared at Dover – ‘Arthur Tiffin would have an absolutely first class motive for murdering Marsh, wouldn’t he?’
Dover struggled into a sitting position as some of MacGregor’s excitement got through to him. ‘ Wouldn’t he?’ he asked, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes.
‘Of course, sir!’ There was nothing MacGregor enjoyed more than explaining the painfully obvious to Dover. ‘Gary Marsh was going to marry Charmian Tiffin, Arthur Tiffin’s daughter. They were half-brother and sister, for God’s sake!’
‘Oh.’ Dover was disconcerted by the speed with which MacGregor was advancing and decided it was about time he started picking holes in a theory which, with a modicum of decent luck, he might have thought of first. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that can’t be right.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because everybody says Tiffin and his missus were breaking their necks to get that girl off their hands, that’s why. They practically shanghaied Marsh. Tiffin would hardly have gone to those lengths if the lad had been his blooming bastard, would he? He’d have busted a gut trying to stop ’em. And it wouldn’t have been difficult because, by all accounts, Marsh wasn’t overkeen in the first place.’
MacGregor hesitated only for a second before his brain, now ticking over like a well-tuned computer, rattled out the answer. ‘Ah, but he didn’t know, sir!’
‘Says who?’
‘The landlord of The Bull Reborn, sir!’
Dover had an awful suspicion that he was being left behind in the race. ‘The landlord of the Bull Reborn?’ he repeated.
‘Don’t you remember, sir?’ To Dover’s astonishment, and alarm, MacGregor edged further up the bed. ‘The landlord told us that, when they called in the pub for a drink on the Sunday afternoon, Marsh and Arthur Tiffin were talking about Henniford and Tuppeny Hill Camp. The landlord only registered the names at all because he’d been up there himself when he was a soldier. Now, at the time, I assumed – and I expect you did too, sir’ – MacGregor put it kindly – ‘ that this was just Arthur Tiffin boring the pants off the younger man with stories about his military career. But, you recall what both the vicar and Mrs Tiffin told us, sir!’
Dover duly nodded his head and tried to look as though he did.
MacGregor wasn’t fooled and, in any case, he had no intention of not continuing his masterly exposition. ‘ They both said that Arthur Tiffin never talked about his time as a soldier. Never. So, if he and Marsh were talking about Henniford and Tuppeny Hill Camp, it’s a fair bet that it was Marsh who introduced them into the conversation. He was probably telling Tiffin about the circumstances surrounding his birth. You remember Mrs Tiffin said that that was what the interview was supposed to be about.’
Dover had been trying to shove a word in edgeways for some time and now he managed it. ‘ So, for the first time, Tiffin realizes that he must be Marsh’s father!’
MacGregor filled his lungs and snatched the conversation back again. ‘Or, at least, that there was a good chance he might be. Even that would be enough to make him act.’
‘’Strewth,’ said Dover, with some admiration, ‘he didn’t waste much blooming time, did he?’
‘He probably realized that he might never get a better opportunity. He’d know all about Marsh going to catch his train along that deserted path through Bluebell Wood and, besides, he simply daren’t take the risk of waiting. The longer he let the engagement go on, the worse things might get. I mean, I know that neither Gary Marsh nor Charmian Tiffin seem to have been the wildly passionate type but – well – you never know, do you?’
Dover chewed his
bottom lip. ‘Why didn’t Tiffin just tell Marsh?’
‘Oh, there are a dozen reasons, sir!’ MacGregor’s cockiness was beginning to get on Dover’s wick. ‘ For one thing, Marsh might have been a bit kinky and not minded marrying his half sister.’
‘Oh, blimey!’ groaned Dover.
‘Well, actually, sir, I think it’s far more likely that Tiffin just couldn’t face all the family complications a broken engagement would cause. You can imagine what Mrs Tiffin would have to say about it. She’d make his life a hell on earth.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Dover gloomily. He was a married man himself and knew what he was talking about. ‘’Course, he might have been able to persuade Marsh to keep his mouth shut.’
‘And be held responsible for breaking off the engagement, sir? In a small village like this? He’d have had to flee the country.’
‘I suppose so,’ sighed Dover. ‘No, I reckon Tiffin took the only way out. That way, he saves his reputation, keeps his wife off his back and stops a misalliance. I don’t know that in those circumstances I wouldn’t have committed murder myself.’ He looked up as MacGregor jumped to his feet. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Don’t you think we’d better go and see Tiffin right away, sir?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Dover reluctantly. Privately, he thought Arthur Tiffin could well keep until morning but he suspected that, now MacGregor was hot on the trail, there was going to be no holding him. If Dover didn’t get a move on, that young whelp would be off, nabbing Arthur Tiffin and all the glory for himself. ‘Now?’ he asked. ‘Oh, well, in that case, stop standing there like a bloody lemon on a monument! Make yourself useful! Shove my boots over!’
MacGregor put Dover’s boots on for him. It was quicker that way though close proximity to Dover’s feet was not to be recommended to those with weak stomachs and sensitive noses.
Dover watched sullenly while MacGregor struggled with the laces. ‘Tell you one thing,’ he said in his least enthusiastic voice.
‘Sir?’
‘You haven’t got a scrap of bloody evidence.’
