by Joyce Porter
“Miss Porter shows splendid fertility in comic invention. The comic-horrific ending must be the best crime fiction joke of the year.”
—Julian Symons, Sunday Times
“Meet Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover. He’s fat, lazy, a scrounger and the worst detective at Scotland Yard. But you will love him.”
—Manchester Evening News
For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg. Though there’s every cause to assume that she has been murdered—she gave her favors freely and may even have stooped to a bit of blackmail— no body is to be found. Weighing in at sixteen stone, she’d be rather hard to overlook. But where is she? And why should Dover, of all people, be called upon to find her? Or, for that matter, even bother to solve the damned case?
JOYCE PORTER lives in Wiltshire, England where she continues to write Inspector Dover mysteries, as well as her two series featuring the “Hon-Con,” a gentlewoman/detective, and secret agent Eddie Brown.
Second printing
Copyright © 1964 by Joyce Porter
This edition first published in 1989 by Foul Play Press,
an imprint of The Countryman Press, Inc.,
Woodstock, Vermont 05091
ISBN 0-88150-1344
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
To
MY MOTHER
Chapter One
IT was spring. The windows of the chain-stores bloomed with plastic daffodils and the first buds were beginning to burgeon through layers of London soot.
The Assistant Commissioner (C) took a deep breath and smiled happily as he detected a vernal whiff in the mingled petrol and diesel fumes. With reckless abandon he celebrated the rebirth of the year by purchasing a one-and-sixpenny pink carnation for his buttonhole. The bloom had been forced in a continental hothouse and glistened not with dew but with a mouthful of tap water which had just been spat upon it by the flowerseller, but for the Assistant Commissioner it symbolized being in England now that April was there. He strode jauntily along to his office in New Scotland Yard, casting roguish glances at the legs of such young ladies as he happened to meet.
By four o’clock in the afternoon both the pink carnation and the Assistant Commissioner were looking their age. The Assistant Commissioner had spent most of the day on one of those futile committees which bedevil the lives of our top administrators. After five hours of acrimonious bickering he had been defeated over a matter of such staggering insignificance that both sides had rapidly discarded not only common sense but even expediency, and based their arguments on matters of principle. And in matters of principle, as well as in everything else, the Assistant Commissioner liked to get his own way.
He was still resentfully chewing over his defeat when, just after four o’clock, his phone rang.
He snatched the receiver up. ‘Well ?’ he snarled.
His secretary was unperturbed. ‘The Chief Constable of Creedshire on the line for you, sir,’ she said calmly, ‘Mr Bartlett.’
‘Hullo, Bartlett!’ roared the Assistant Commissioner, who always shouted on the telephone. ‘You’re in the chair now, I take it?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Mr Bartlett’s voice came tinnily over the wires. ‘I took over yesterday.’
‘Must be a very nice little job!’ bellowed the Assistant Commissioner. ‘Down there in the country at this time of the year Wouldn’t mind changing places with you myself, I must say.’
‘Yes, it’s very . . . ’
‘Not too much work, either, I’ll bet! Bit of sheep stealing and failing to notify foot-and-mouth and that’s your lot, eh?’
‘Well, not quite. That’s what I wanted to . . . ’
‘I used to tell old George Turner he’d got the cushiest job in the country. God only knows, he won’t have any problems adjusting to retirement! He hasn’t done a stroke in the last fifteen years to my certain knowledge !’ The Assistant Commissioner chuckled ruefully and prepared to launch into a well-oiled dissertation on his own unfair burden of cares and responsibilities.
Mr Bardett cut the small talk short. ‘I need your help,’ he said flatly.
‘Oh?’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘A young woman’s disappeared.’
‘How long?’
‘Her employer – she works as a kind of maid – hasn’t seen her since Tuesday lunch-time.’
‘But, dammit, man, it’s only Thursday now!’ protested the Assistant Commissioner. ‘You don’t want to start getting into a muck-sweat yet! She’s probably only hopped off for a few days with her boy-friend!’
‘There’s no indication at all that she intended to go away, rather the reverse.’ The Chief Constable sounded petulant. He had not expected an argument. His objections were grandly pushed aside.
‘My dear chap,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, only too obviously trying to be kind and helpful to the new boy, ‘girls are like that, specially servant girls. Some bright young spark catches their eye and it’s up with their skirts, hot foot to the nearest haystack. Figuratively speaking, of course. Happens in a flash, you know. Spring and all that!’
‘Well, you may be right. . . ’ began Bartlett.
‘Of course I’m right!’ Even two hundred miles away the interruption rang with self-satisfaction.
‘But I don’t think you are,’ Bartlett pressed on while he had the chance. ‘I’ve got a feeling there’s something fishy about this case and I’m not going to take any chances. Better be safe than sorry, that’s my motto! I don’t want to be caught like old George Turner was.’
‘Why, what happened to him?’ The Assistant Commissioner was a great one for a bit of police gossip.
‘In all the twenty years he sat in this chair before me, they only had one murder in the county. Woman battered to death with an axe, blood and brains all over the kitchen floor, you know the sort of thing. Well, George turned the local boys loose on it and you’ve never seen such a cock-up in your life! They ended up by arresting the vicar’s son on such rubbishy evidence that the public prosecutor wouldn’t even let ’em bring the case before the magistrates. All the yokels were laughing themselves silly because everybody knew who’d done it, except the poor old cops. The chap got off scot-free and poor old George Turner never lived it down. They never let him forget it, I can tell you! Well, they’re not going to get me tied hand and foot like that!’
‘No, no, of course not!’ the Assistant Commissioner chimed in with evident sympathy. ‘Watch Committees can be devils, I couldn’t agree more! You’ve got to be top dog or they’ll lead you a -er- a dog’s life.’
There was a pause while both men pondered over the infelicity of this metaphor.
‘Well, you see, don’t you?’ Mr Bartlett went on. ‘If my sixth sense is right and this girl hasn’t just slipped off for a bit of slap and tickle with somebody else’s husband, it might be a very nasty case, very nasty indeed.’
‘Murder, you mean?’
‘Or kidnapping.’
‘Kidnapping? Now, steady on, old man, you’ve been seeing too much telly! We don’t have kidnapping in this country, place is much too small! Besides, it’s not English!’
‘There’s always a first time,’ said Mr Bartlett darkly, ‘and it’d just be my bloody luck to get clobbered with it’’
‘Well, what have you done so far?’
‘The local bobby’s scratched around a bit. Like everybody else he thought she’d be turning up again right as rain. Bar reporting it to H.Q., I don’t think he’s done much. There’s an outbreak of fowl pest or swine fever or something and, naturally, that’s far more up his street than one of these vanishing-lady larks
.’
‘I suppose you’ve circulated the usual description?’
‘Yes, we did that right away.’
‘Hm. Not that it helps much. One young girl looks pretty much like another these days.’
‘Not this one! She stands five foot three in stiletto heels and she turns the scales at nearly sixteen stone !’
‘My God!’ said the Assistant Commissioner, duly impressed at last.
‘And she’s got bright ginger hair! It makes a difference, doesn’t it?’
‘It does indeed, old man !’
‘Yes, dead or alive, she’s going to be difficult to hide. Now do you see why I want some help? Sixteen stone of bouncing British girlhood can’t just disappear into thin air, can it?’
‘No, indeed it can’t, old chap. Once seen, never forgotten, by the sound of it. Yes, I’m inclined to agree with you, you should have got a line by now if she’s still kicking around.’
‘Then can you let me have somebody right away? Somebody good, mind, I don’t want one of your old dead-beats!’
‘There are no dead-beats on my staff, old man.’ The Assistant Commissioner spoke with heavy reproof, but the expression had given him an idea. He still wasn’t convinced that this was a case for the Yard but he didn’t want to turn down a chap who was understandably being a bit wary in his new job. And, anyhow, Bartlett might just conceivably turn out to be right Murder would be bad enough but kidnapping, from the professional point of view, could be terrible. At least in the case of murder you couldn’t blame the dead body on the police, but in kidnapping whatever you did might be wrong. If you let ’em hand over the ransom money, the kidnappers might still kill their victim, and if you stopped the ransom money you were equally likely to be left with a corpse on your hands. The Assistant Commissioner shuddered gently as he thought of all the messes you could get into in a kidnapping case. It wasn’t the sort of job you’d wish on a dog.
He turned back to the telephone. There was only one man for the job. ‘I’ll send you one of my chief inspectors,’ he said. ‘Good chap. Name’s Dover. I’ll get him down to you first thing in the morning.’
The Assistant Commissioner dropped the receiver back in place and grinned wickedly. A man in his exalted position shouldn’t indulge in petty spite where his subordinates were concerned, but it was, oh, so pleasant to give way to these little human frailties, once in a while.
‘I’d love to see the old bugger’s face when he hears what he’s got landed with this time!’ The Assistant Commissioner chuckled happily to himself and picked up his phone again to send the good news down the line.
‘Bloody waste of time!’ snarled Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover as he sat slumped and sulky in the comer of his first-class reserved compartment’
His sergeant, sitting opposite him, sighed with resignation. He’d had nearly four hours of this and whatever sympathy he’d had at the beginning had now worn very thin.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and gazed hopelessly out of the window.
‘I don’t know why it is,’ Dover grumbled remorselessly on, ‘it always seems to be me that gets landed with these jobs. You’ll see, we’ll hang around there for a couple of days and then she’ll turn up again, older and wiser, if you know what I mean. Holed up in Brighton, that’s where she is! And when her money runs out, the boy-friend’ll hop it and she’ll come back home.’ Dover snorted petulantly down his nose. ‘Wadder say her name was?’ he growled.
Sergeant MacGregor told him, wearily and for the fourth time. ‘Rugg, sir, Juliet Rugg.’
Dover paused to give his little joke an appropriate build-up.
‘Well, I reckon Juliet’s found her Romeo !’
Sergeant MacGregor smiled bleakly. He’d heard this four times before, too.
Charles Edward MacGregor was, in fact, feeling nearly as hard done by as Dover was, though for a slightly different reason. He regarded himself, and was indeed regarded by his superiors, as one of the up-and-coming young officers at the Yard’ He was intelligent, efficient, courteous and sympathetic, and extremely well dressed to boot. It seemed unfair that he should be coupled with Chief Inspector Dover, who was his exact opposite in almost everything. But the Assistant Commissioner, who kept a fatherly eye on these matters, was a great believer in baptisms of fire and salvation through suffering and he frequently used Dover to provide both for young detectives whose opinion of themselves was, perhaps, a little too high. The Assistant Commissioner felt, with some justification, that if a lad could stick Dover, he could stick almost anything. It was damned good character training! He had, therefore, turned a deaf ear to the pleas of both Dover and Sergeant MacGregor that the first case[1] upon which they had been engaged together should be their last.
And so here they were again, already chafing in their double harness and setting out with sinking hearts and mutual ill-will to solve the apparently unmysterious disappearance of Juliet Rugg.
A police car was waiting for them at Creedon Station. The police driver saluted smartly, opened the door, packed their cases in the boot and leapt athletically into his seat. He was alert and keen. Ten minutes later, at the end of their journey, he was wondering if his brother-in-law’s offer of a job in the slaughterhouse was still open.
Chief Inspector Dover was a nervous passenger and he didn’t care who knew it. A non-driver himself, he was none the less acutely sensitive to the hazards which beset the man at the wheel. Crouching tensely on the back seat he shared all his premonitions of impending danger with the unfortunate man who was actually driving the car. The endless stream of advice to look out for dogs, old ladies, young children, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, bicycles, learner drivers, blind corners and one-way streets, was relieved only by pungent post-mortems on previous risky manoeuvres which had already brought the three of them within kissing distance of the jaws of death.
By the grace of God, and in spite of Dover, the police driver, a man of fourteen years’ unblemished experience, got the car safely to the headquarters of the Creedshire Constabulary.
Dover heaved himself out of the back and lumbered off into the building without a word. MacGregor did the honours on his behalf.
‘Thank you very much, driver,’ he said with a winning smile.
The driver just looked at him, not trusting himself to speak, and turned away with trembling hands to unload the baggage.
Inside the police headquarters Dover was ushered rapidly into the presence of the Chief Constable. Mr Bartlett had prepared and practised a little speech of welcome, brief but covering rather neatly, he thought, all the essential points. When the two detectives were announced he glanced up distractedly from his desk. This had been rehearsed too. He was about to flash a frank, manly smile at them when his first actual sight of Dover literally took his breath away.
The chief inspector, purple in the face and with his bowler hat rammed well down over his ears, came into the room like a charging rhinoceros.
‘That bloody driver of yours isn’t fit to drive a toy scooter on a fairground roundabout!’ he roared.
The Chief Constable’s jaw dropped. Was this what the Assistant Commissioner had sent him? He gazed in helpless fascination at the figure which loomed, snorting furiously, above his desk.
Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover was a big man. His six-foot-two frame was draped, none too elegantly, in seventeen and a quarter stone of flabby flesh, an excessive proportion of which had settled round his middle. Well-cut clothing can, of course, do wonders to conceal such natural defects as the spread of middle age, but Dover bought his suits ready-made, and the one he was wearing at the moment had been purchased a long time ago. It was made of shiny blue serge. Round his thick, policeman’s neck he wore a blue-striped collar which was almost submerged in the folds of fat, and a thin, cheap tie was knotted under the lowest of his double chins. He wore a long, dark blue overcoat and stout black boots.
Over the whole of this unprepossessing ensemble there was, naturally enough, Dover’s face.
It was large and flabby like the rest of him. Only the details – nose, mouth and eyes – seemed out of scale. They were so tiny as to be almost lost in the wide expanse of flesh. Dover had two small, mean, button-like eyes, a snub little nose and a sulky rosebud of a mouth. He looked like one of those pastry men that children make on baking day out of odd scraps, with currants for eyes – an uncooked pastry man, of course. His hair was thin and black and he had a small black moustache of the type that the late Adolf Hitler did so much to depopularize.
Mr Bartlett gulped and pulled himself together.
‘Chief Inspector Dover?’ he asked in the faint hope that it might be somebody else.
‘Yes,’ The hope died. ‘And this is Sergeant MacGregor.’
‘Well, I’m pleased to meet you both.’
Dover grunted derisively,
‘I just wanted to see you, Dover, to assure you that we’ll try and – er – give you every assistance we can. Naturally we all want to get this business cleared up as soon as possible . . . ’
‘Too right we do!’ said Dover bluntly, and stared sneeringly round the room.
‘Er, yes, well, I’ve arranged for my C.I.D. inspector to brief you and then I expect you’ll be wanting to get off and have a look at the scene of the crime, eh?’
‘What crime?’ demanded Dover. Don’t tell me you’ve actually found the body now?’
‘No, no – she’s still missing. I just meant where she lived and where she was last seen, and everything.’ The Chief Constable had had more than enough of this and was already ringing the bell for his inspector.
Unlike Mr Bartlett, the local C.I.D. inspector hadn’t bothered to prepare anything. He rummaged dejectedly among the mountain of files and odd sheets of loose paper which covered his desk.
‘Judy Rudd,’ he muttered, his attention momentarily caught by the sight of his football coupon. He put it carefully on one side and scrabbled around a bit more until he found the accompanying envelope. ‘Judy Rudd,’ he murmured again, ‘I’ve got the file on her here somewhere,’