Dover One

by Joyce Porter

  ‘Very funny,’ said Dover without a flicker. ‘Go on !’

  ‘Well, Jule was having quite a job getting undies-bras and panties and things – to fit her, with her being so big, like, and naturally when she heard about my job she asked me if I could help her, me being in the trade, like. Well, naturally I was only too pleased to help out if I could and after that she used to tell me what she wanted and the size and everything and I used to get the things for her. And it wasn’t all that easy, I can tell you, not even with my contacts. Why, one of my suppliers thought I was pulling his leg at first, straight he did! He says to me . . .’

  ‘You met Miss Rugg fairly frequently?’

  ‘Er – yes, about once a fortnight. Whenever I was in Creedon.’

  ‘And did she pay you for the goods you supplied her with?’ Poor Mr Pilley licked his lips again and passed a hand over his thinning hair. ‘Well, not in money, if you see what I mean.’ Dover stared gloomily at him and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see what you mean. You were on terms of fairly close intimacy with Miss Rugg?’

  ‘Er – yes,’ agreed Mr Pilley doubtfully.

  ‘And where did your meetings take place?’

  Mr Pilley grinned sheepishly. ‘Well, in the back of my car, as a matter of fact. You see, the lady I stay with in Creedon’s a friend of the wife’s, so . . . Anyhow, Jule didn’t seem to mind,’

  ‘All right. Let’s turn to last Tuesday, the day she disappeared. You were with her then?’

  ‘Yes, we met as usual, like. It was her day off from this place she worked and when I’d finished my business I met her about five o’clock in the cafe at the Regal cinema. We had some tea and then we went to the pictures. We came out about nine o’clock, I suppose, and went and had a quick one in The Fading Rose.’

  ‘What did Miss Rugg drink?’

  ‘Jule? Oh, cherry brandy, same as always. She only had one. I had half a pint of bitter.’

  ‘Then what did you do ?’

  ‘Well, then I took her home, like.’ Even Mr Pilley didn’t expect this innocent statement to go unchallenged.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ observed Dover in a bored voice, ‘take an hour and a half to get from Creedon to Irlam Old Hall by car.’

  ‘No, well,’ said Mr Pilley with another foolish grin, ‘we sat and talked for a bit and, er . . . ’

  ‘You had sexual intercourse with Miss Rugg on the back seat of your car.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Well, yes, if you want to put it like that.’ Mr Pilley appeared shocked at such frankness.

  ‘When you got to Irlam Old Hall, what did you do?’

  ‘I parked the car outside them iron gates, like, and we said good night. Then Jule got out and went through that little gate what’s in the middle of the big ones, and I drove back to my digs in Creedon. I was in bed by half past eleven, straight I was! You can ask Mrs Clayton.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Dover, never one to miss a chance of cheap sarcasm. ‘Was she there with you?’

  ‘Here, there’s no need to be coarse!’ objected Mr Pilley. ‘I only meant. . . ’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ snapped Dover crossly. He couldn’t stand people who couldn’t take his jokes. ‘Now, when you were with Miss Rugg, did she last Tuesday evening, or any other time for that matter, say or do anything to indicate that she intended to run away from home or commit suicide, or anything?’

  Mr Pilley thought for a moment. ‘No, I can’t say she did. She behaved just like normal. She asked me to get her a couple of petticoats – tangerine colour, she wanted them, it’s this year’s colour, you know-and I said I’d try and have them for Tuesday week – that’s when I was going to be in Creedon again.’

  ‘Did you have any quarrel or argument with her?’

  ‘No.’ Gordon Pilley shook his head. ‘Well, I was a bit short with her when I found her painting her finger-nails all over the tea table. I mean, the Regal’s a very respectable place with proper table-cloths and waitresses and everything. It’s not one of these crummy help-yourself joints, you know. I know Jule’s rather common, like, but I thought that was going a bit too far. She was painting ’em green, too.’ Mr Pilley shuddered fastidiously. ‘Fairly put me off my tea, it did. Looked blooming awful, I thought, like a vampire, but it seems she’d just bought the stuff and couldn’t wait to try it. She must have spent a fortune on cosmetics, that girl. Still, it wasn’t a row or anything serious like.’

  ‘Just a lovers’ tiff, no doubt,’ said Dover, indulging in a bit of elephantine irony.

  The questioning went on. Dover took Mr Pilley through his story again and succeeded in getting nothing more of interest. Mr Pilley, not surprisingly perhaps in view of everything, was able to supply the chief inspector with a highly detailed account of every single item of clothing which Juliet was wearing that night. For the underwear he gave, with a superb air of professional detachment, not only the colour but the make, style, size and cost as well. Sergeant MacGregor dutifully wrote down all the details.

  At long last Dover gave a disgruntled sigh and looked as though he was about to take his leave. Mr Pilley was sweating slightly and now, seeing an end to his ordeal, relaxed understandably with relief.. Dover noted this and fired, as he always did, a parting shot aimed at the solar plexus, or even lower.

  ‘How much did Juliet Rugg blackmail you for?’ he demanded abruptly with a terrible, menacing scowl.

  ‘Eh?’ yelped Mr Pilley.

  ‘You heard me!’ snarled Dover. ‘How much were you paying her to keep her mouth shut?’

  ‘I wasn’t paying her nothing!’ howled Mr Pilley. ‘Here, what are you getting at? There was no question of payment between Jule and me. I give her a few presents now and again but that’s all. What the hell do you think I am?’ He bridled at the implied slur on his manhood. ‘I don’t have to pay for it, you know!’

  ‘I’m suggesting,’ repeated Dover doggedly, ‘that Juliet Rugg was blackmailing you. I want to know how much she got out of you in return for not spilling the beans to your wife!’

  ‘Oh no,’ wailed Mr Pilley, ‘you’ve got it all wrong, straight you have. Jule never even mentioned my wife. I’m not saying she wasn’t a bit on the greedy side and she certainly stung me a packet on all these suspender belts and things – course I got ’em at cost, but even so. But Jule wasn’t a fool-give credit where it’s due, I say. She knew I’d no money to spare! What do you think I am, a bleeding millionaire? What with the kid and the payments on the furniture and Marge wanting a holiday at Butlin’s this year! God help me, I can hardly keep me head above water as it is! And I’ve got to spend a lot on my clothes, you know, you’ve got to dress snappy in my line of business.’

  Dover blew crossly down his nose and scowled at Gordon Pilley, who was now quite pink with indignation.

  ‘So you deny that Juliet Rugg was blackmailing you?’

  ‘I do indeed. Definitely!’ said Mr Pilley with dignity,

  ‘Make a note of that, Sergeant, just in case!’ This was Dover being nasty. His shock tactics hadn’t worked quite so successfully as he’d hoped, but that was no reason for letting Gordon Pilley think he’d got away with it.

  There was a long pause while Sergeant MacGregor wrote up his notes, during which Dover stared unblinkingly and ferociously at Mr Pilley. Mr Pilley fidgeted uneasily. He was feeling terribly guilty and knew that he looked it. If only he’d known that they were coming he could have smartened himself up a bit, but getting caught like this, unshaven and in his shirt-sleeves, well, it gave rather a bad impression.

  At long last he had his statement read over to him and listened anxiously to Dover’s warning that if it wasn’t the truth he’d better say so now, otherwise it would be the worse for him. With a trembling hand he signed his name, failing miserably to produce his usual flourish.

  Then the two detectives, as unsmiling and menacing as when they arrived, took their leave.

  The drive back was not enlivened by the fact that Dover was sulking. When he put himself to
the trouble of bullying a possible suspect, he liked some concrete results for his efforts-a nice ‘voluntary’ confession, for example. He was extremely peeved that Gordon Pilley had, so to speak, let him down. Dover had heard, of course, of the Judges’ Rules, had probably even read them at some stage in his career, but his detailed knowledge of their contents had become a little blurred with the passage of time. He found that, on the whole, he managed quite well without them. There was trouble sometimes. Prisoners in the dock often started whining to the judge about tricks and promises and threats, and sometimes the judge believed them. This invariably enraged Dover but, philosophically, he took it as one of the occupational hazards of his chosen profession, like getting flat feet.

  ‘Bit of a dirty dog, our Gordon Pilley,’ said Sergeant MacGregor with a smirk. ‘Wife looked a bit of a shrew. I reckon she’ll half kill him if this comes out.’

  ‘In that case she’s probably swinging the hatchet now,’ observed Dover glumly, his eyes resting on the speedometer.

  ‘Why? You don’t think he’s up and confessed all, do you, sir?’ asked MacGregor in astonishment. ‘I thought he looked fly enough to cook up some cock-and-bull story to explain us away.’

  ‘Won’t do him any good,’ said the chief inspector with bleak relish. ‘She was listening at the door.’

  The rest of Sunday passed uneventfully. Dover ‘thought’ all afternoon, flat on his back and snoring gently. Sergeant MacGregor was packed off on a lot of not very important missions, checking this and counterchecking that. Dover didn’t really mind very much how the sergeant occupied his time as long as he got out from under his, Dover’s, feet.

  As far as Dover was concerned the whole case had ground to an unimpressive halt, if you could use such a phrase about an undertaking which had never got moving in the first place. It was obvious that Juliet Rugg was not a particularly nice girl. There were a number of rather woolly motives which, in the continuing absence of the body, didn’t amount to all that much. Sir John Counter might have murdered her because she was two-timing him with one of his social equals, though there was no evidence that she was. Eve Counter might have murdered her to stop her marrying her father. Michael Chubb-Smith and/or his mother might have done the girl in to put a stop to her blackmailing game- Maxine Chubb-Smith might have finished her off in a fit of wild jealousy. Gordon Pilley might have . . . Oh, what the hell, thought Dover crossly, if pigs could fly, anybody in the entire country could have done the dratted girl in! All he’d got so far was a lot of airy-fairy speculation. He hadn’t enough factual evidence to cover a sixpence. He’d no proof that Juliet was even dead, although, he told himself pompously, and not risking all that much, he’d stake his professional reputation that she was.

  As the chief inspector slipped gently towards sleep he brooded uneasily on the case as a whole- He didn’t like these amateur jobs,

  he thought fretfully. Give him a good professional crime every time. All you had to do then was sit back and wait for some disgruntled villain or other to start singing. Then, when you knew which one of them it was, you just dolled up the evidence a bit and made it point in the right direction. Easy as falling off a tree. ’Strewth, he’d give his right arm for an informer on this case. It wasn’t fair to expect him to go round searching for clues and making deductions and God knows what! He sighed deeply. Perhaps the body’d turn up tomorrow. Then they’d have something to go on . . . That’s what he wanted. A nice solid body . . . dripping . . . with . . . clues . . .

  Monday morning came, as it always does if you wait long enough, but it didn’t bring the body of Juliet Rugg. Dover couldn’t understand it. He took her continuing disappearance as a personal insult, and Sergeant MacGregor had a very uncomfortable breakfast in consequence. However, Dover’s thwarted fury at least drove him to a bit more action and in sheer desperation he decided to interview all the tenants in the flats at Irlam Old Hall.

  ‘You’ve got to look as though you’re doing something,’ he explained to MacGregor, ‘and you never know, one of the old fools might have seen or heard something.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you, sir?’ asked MacGregor, with his fingers crossed for luck.

  Dover glanced balefully at him. ‘No,’ he decided, ‘you’d better go into Creedon and trace that girl’s movements on Tuesday afternoon. She may have met somebody somewhere. And you’d better check Pilley’s account of what they did, just in case the little rat’s trying to pull a fast one. Oh, and go and see his landlady, too. If he’s lying about the time he got back, he’s the man we’re after!’

  ‘But Colonel Bing saw the car drive away, sir,’ MacGregor pointed out.

  ‘I know what Colonel Bloody Bing saw!’ thundered Dover. ‘But he could have driven back again, couldn’t he? And how do we know Colonel Bing isn’t lying? Have you thought about that, eh?’

  Sergeant MacGregor turned the other cheek. ‘No, sir,’ he admitted, and shrugged his shoulders slightly.

  ‘The whole flaming lot of ’em might be lying like troopers for all we know!’ Dover ranted on. ‘They’re all sitting up there on their backsides not doing a day’s work between the lot of ’em. They’ve all the time in the world to think up any kind of crooked tale, I wouldn’t trust any of ’em as far as I could throw ’em! ’Strewth,’ he snorted in disgust, ‘give me an honest crook any day of the week.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you, while you’re in Creedon go and check with the local boys to see that they really have covered all the railway stations and hospitals and things. You know what I mean. And if they haven’t done it properly, make ’em do it again! They’re quite capable of overlooking a sixteen-stone body, I’ll be bound.’

  It was only when MacGregor had already gone beyond recall that Dover realized that he had left himself without transport. Luckily the village possessed a one-man taxi service and thanks to the landlord’s good offices (they were brother Elks) the one-man agreed to place himself and his taxi at the chief inspector’s disposal for the rest of the day. Dover spent several long and fruitless hours with the elderly, childless and petless tenants in the Irlam Old Hall flats. He emerged a convinced supporter of compulsory euthanasia for the over-seventies, but this was his sole achievement.

  It was a fine sunny day and he walked slowly down the drive towards the main gates, wondering what the dickens he was going to do next. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he all but fell over Sir John Counter, who was being wheeled out in his bath chair for an airing by his daughter. Her expression was almost as sulky and discontented as Dover’s own.

  ‘Well, Mr Policeman,’ Sir John greeted him, with a mocking grin, ‘have you found the girl yet?’

  Dover treated the senile old fool to a blistering look.

  ‘Not yet, sir,’ he said with a peculiar intonation which implied, he hoped, that in fact they had but, for reasons best known to themselves, were not yet prepared to divulge this bit of news to the general public.

  ‘Making heavy weather of it, aren’t you?’ demanded Sir John. ‘Been looking for the best part of a week, haven’t you?’

  ‘Three and a half days, sir,’ Dover corrected him through clenched teeth.

  ‘Humph,’ came the reply, ‘shouldn’t have though it would have taken you three and a half minutes!’ He gave a high-pitched snigger’

  ‘Why, even these chaps on the telly don’t take longer than half an hour. And’ – he shook a bony finger at Dover – ‘and their cases are much more complicated. Shouldn’t have thought it would have been much of a job to find a wench as fat as Juliet.’

  Dover was saved the trouble of a rejoinder by the approach of Colonel Bing and Miss McLintock apparently engaged in exercising the poodle, Peregrine.

  ‘Look out!’ exclaimed Sir John in a deliberately penetrating whisper. ‘Here come the local Lesbians! ’

  ‘Father, really! They’ll hear you!’ Eve Counter frowned reproachfully at the old man.

  ‘Humph. Do ’em good!’ snorted Sir John
. ‘And, Bingo,’ he bellowed to the colonel, ‘if that damned dog of your pees on my offside wheel again, so help me, I’ll fetch a gun out next time and let him have both barrels in the guts! I’m warning you, now!’

  Colonel Bing laughed heartily. It never entered her head that Sir John might not just be having his little joke.

  ‘Good morning, Sir John,’ she shouted cheerfully. ‘How are you keeping?’

  Sir John stared at her. ‘What’s she say?’ he asked his daughter.

  ‘She says, “How are you keeping”, father.’

  ‘Well, tell the nosy old devil it’s no business of hers who I’m keeping. My private life’s my own affair!’

  Colonel Bing beamed admiringly and turned to Dover. ‘He’s a witty old bounder, isn’t he?’ she boomed. ‘Doesn’t matter what you say to him, he’s always got a snappy answer’ Gets me, how he thinks of them. And how’s your case going, Inspector, found that girl yet?’

  ‘Not yet!’ snapped Dover, keeping a wary eye on Peregrine, who was sniffing around him in an ominous manner.

  ‘Oh,’ said Colonel Bing, evidently disappointed, ‘it’s taking a long time, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m reading a book,’ said Miss McLintock, ‘about a man who disappeared. He was in M.I.5 and they haven’t found out yet what happened to him. Of course,’ she added with a kindly smile, ‘I’ve only got up to page twenty-five, so it’s a bit early yet, isn’t it?’

  Dover just looked at her.

  Colonel Bing roared into action again. ‘Well, Sir John,’ she screamed down his ear, ‘glad to see you out enjoying the sunshine. Do you a world of good! Eve, why don’t you bring him over to tea with us one day? And, by the way,’ she added bossily as Eve muttered some polite rejoinder and began to push the bath chair down the drive, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve oiled those damned wheels at last. Can’t bear things squeaking when all they want is a drop of oil!’