Dover One

by Joyce Porter

A couple of hours later, rather haggard and drawn but washed and shaved, they were ushered into the Chief Constable’s office to make their final report.

  ‘Jolly good show, chaps!’ said Mr Bartlett, sounding and feeling just like Montgomery after Alamein. ‘I understand you’ve done a really fine bit of work. Well up to the traditions of the Yard, eh? Now, I’d like to have the whole story from you, step by step, just so that I can get the picture clear in my mind. I suppose you have got it completely tied up all right? Aren’t going to be any loose ends or’-he glanced doubtfully at Dover-‘or any repercussions?’

  Dover shook his head. ‘There’ll be no slip-up on this one, sir,’ he promised smugly. ‘Bogolepov’s turning Queen’s Evidence, but we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to put a rope round both their necks.’

  ‘It’s not capital murder, sir,’ MacGregor pointed out.

  Dover frowned. ‘Blast it!’ he snorted in disgust. ‘No more it is. Pity.’

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said the Chief Constable encouragingly, ‘we’ve caught the murderers and that’s what really matters, isn’t it? Now come on, let’s have the whole story. My inspector just told me that you’d made the arrests but he didn’t give me any details.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dover, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, ‘what happened was this. Boris Bogolepov and Eulalia Hoppold decided one fine day to murder Juliet Rugg.’ He opened his eyes suddenly. ‘They may try to wriggle out of it, but there’s no doubt the murder was premeditated. They’d planned out all the details months before they actually pulled the job.’ He shut his eyes again. ‘Now, Juliet Rugg’s regular afternoon off was Tuesday. Most weeks she used to clear off after lunch and not return to Irlam Old Hall until round about eleven at night. Usually she’d been out on the tiles with her current gentleman friend, Gordon Pilley. He used to drop her outside the main gates and she used to walk alone up the drive to the Counters’ house. Anybody at Irlam Old Hall could have found this out if they’d taken the trouble to keep their eyes open. Well, the plan was this. Eulalia was the one who was going to do the actual killing. I think she’s been the instigator all the way through. Bogolepov’s not a very forceful character, what with drink and drugs, but the Hoppold woman’s got nerves of steel, if you ask me. Now then, just before eleven o’clock she was going to go out and hide in the bushes at the bottom of Sir John’s garden. The drive bends round to the left there and, as Juliet walked along, for a brief moment she would be facing the exact spot where Eulalia was concealed, and only ten yards or so away. It would be very dark but Eulalia’s done a lot of hunting under much worse conditions and at that range she was hardly likely to miss.’

  ‘What about the noise?’ asked the Chief Constable, ‘had she got a silencer?’

  ‘Bow and arrow,’ said Dover laconically, ‘believe it or believe it not! She’d got several that she’d brought back as souvenirs from her travels. She’s a crack shot with ’em, too. Well, after Juliet had bitten the dust, Boris was to come out of his house and help load the body into Sir John’s wheel chair. Oh, I forgot to mention, Eulalia had got it out of the shed ready before she took up her position. She knew the wheels squeaked so she gave ’em a good oiling first We found a can of the oil that was used in her kitchen. Nothing very exciting, but corroborative evidence all the same.

  ‘Now, it was Boris’s job to wheel the body back to his house while Eulalia cleared up any traces of the murder which might remain-spots of blood, Juliet’s handbag which no doubt she would drop and so on. Then Eulalia was to give Boris a hand with lugging the dead girl-don’t forget she weighed sixteen stone-into the bathroom. Bogolepov’s place is a bungalow, so they wouldn’t have to carry the body upstairs. Then they were to strip the body and while Eulalia got to work, Boris would take Sir John’s wheel chair back to its shed and have another look round to make quite sure they hadn’t left any clues. All very efficient, you see, and well thought out.

  ‘In fact’ – Dover scratched his head thoughtfully – ‘if it had gone strictly according to plan, there’s a fair chance we might never have got our hands on ’em – well, we mightn’t have been able to bring it home to ’em, anyhow. But the unexpected happened. Eulalia was out waiting in the bushes with her bow and arrow, the wheel chair was standing ready and Boris was peering through his front-room window, ready to rush out and give a hand when the time came. They probably heard Gordon Pilley’s car drive off, and here was Juliet, walking, as they’d expected, up the drive. But, most unexpectedly, when she got level with the gate of Bogolepov’s garden, she turned in, marched up his path and rang the front-door bell. I reckon Boris, who was pretty keyed up with dope and excitement, just about dropped down dead himself with shock. However he managed to keep his head and opened the door. Juliet had just called with a message from Simkins, the chemist, in Creedon. Boris’s prescription, which he collected once a week on Wednesdays – and this was Tuesday night, remember – wouldn’t be ready this week until Friday morning. The prescription was actually Bogolepov’s supply of drugs which he got under the N.H.S., but of course Juliet wouldn’t know this. Boris wasn’t on the phone and Simkins had asked Juliet to give him the message so that he wouldn’t make an unnecessary trip the following morning.

  ‘Well, presumably, Boris thanked her for her kindness and said good night. Juliet went back down the path, out of the garden gate and then started up the drive again towards Sir John’s house. Eulalia, who must have been wondering what the hell was going on, remained as cool as a cucumber and when the girl came level with her, calmly shot her, as planned, clean through the heart with a genuine Australian aborigine bow and arrow.’

  ‘Weren’t they taking a terrible risk that somebody might see them?’

  ‘A bit, sir, but murder’s a risky business, when all’s said and done. Actually there wasn’t all that much danger. It’s very quiet up there and I think they’d have heard if anybody was knocking about. And then all the houses stand pretty far back from the drive and the trees provide a fair amount of cover. I don’t think anybody, looking casually out of a window at the wrong time, would actually have seen anything,

  ‘Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, Eulalia gets a bull’s-eye on poor old Juliet and, right on cue, out pops Boris. They load the dead girl into the wheel chair and the whole thing goes off like clockwork.

  ‘Now, while Boris is returning the wheel chair to its shed and having a last look round, Eulalia sets to work with a carving knife. She’s apparently quite experienced in cutting up the dead bodies of animals for the pot and, as the pathologist fellow remarked, she did quite a good job on Juliet. Bogolepov’s bathroom was the ideal place, all pink tiles, covering the floor as well. There’s a little drain thing in the middle for the shower water to run down so it didn’t matter how much mess Eulalia made, really, because you could just swill the whole place down, walls and all. Very nice, that bathroom was,’ said Dover with envious reminiscence, ‘Wouldn’t mind one like that myself. All pink and black-very artistic. Shower as well and a little foot-bath thing – continental idea that, you know. Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘where was I?’

  ‘Miss Hoppold was dismembering Juliet Rugg in the pink and black bathroom,’ the Chief Constable prompted.

  ‘Oh yes. Well, that’s really all there is to it. She cut Juliet up into handy-sized joints, wrapped the pieces up neatly in that transparent paper stuff and packed them away in the deep freeze cabinet in Bogolepov’s kitchen. No wonder we couldn’t find the flaming body!’

  ‘And are you going to be able to prove all this?’ demanded the Chief Constable.

  ‘Oh, I reckon so,’ said Dover easily. ‘We’ve got Bogolepov’s statement first of all and, even if he tries to retract it in court, which he won’t, he’ll never get away with it. Then we can prove that Eulalia Hoppold has a tin of the same kind of oil as was used on the wheel chair. Your boys have been working on the bathroom and I’m pretty certain they’ll find traces of human blood somewhere – in a crack or something. It’s difficul
t stuff to get rid of, you know. Same with the bow and arrow. Eulalia hung ’em back on the wall with her other trophies when she’d finished with ’em – well cleaned, of course. Even if the lab. doesn’t find traces of blood on the arrow-head, the fact that it has been cleaned thoroughly is significant in itself. None of the other weapons had been.’

  ‘But, how did you get on to all this?’ asked the Chief Constable.

  ‘Well, it was pretty difficult,’ said Dover, anxious not to have his achievement played down. ‘Actually, they both slipped up and like all these flipping amateurs they couldn’t leave well alone. Silly fools tried to be clever and get a rise out of the police. Well’ – Dover sniffed triumphantly – ‘now they know better.’

  ‘All right,’ said the Chief Constable, who knew his wife would be furious if he didn’t give her all the details at lunch-time so that she was well primed for her bridge afternoon, ‘how did they slip up?’

  ‘Well, first of all there was the green nail varnish,’ said Dover, making a mental note to write up the final report himself instead of leaving it to Sergeant MacGregor – just to keep things in perspective. ‘We found that Juliet couldn’t have been wearing green nail varnish until tea-time on the day she disappeared. Red nail varnish, yes-but not green. So when Eulalia Hoppold talked about Juliet having green nail varnish on we knew she must have seen her after the girl returned to Irlam Old Hall – as, of course she did, when she cut the body up.

  ‘But much more important was the slip Bogolepov made. The damned fool actually acted on the message that Juliet had brought from the chemist. Instead of going into Creedon to collect his drugs on the Wednesday, as he normally did, he waited and didn’t go in until the Friday. That was a bad mistake because, of course, it showed that he, too, had seen Juliet round about eleven o’clock on the Tuesday night. Obviously no junky would casually wait a couple of days before getting hold of his supplies.

  Mind you, I reckon Boris was getting dope illegally somehow in any case, but when I challenged him about going into Creedon on the Friday he just hadn’t got any answer.’

  ‘And what about this kidnapping note to Sir John Counter?’

  ‘Oh, that was Eulalia and Boris being a bit too damned clever. It was meant, as I suspected at the time, just as a red herring. They’d no intention of collecting the money. Boris bundled up a parcel of Juliet’s clothes and sent them to a refugee organization in London. The ransom letter, addressed to Sir John’s bank, you remember, was inside. One of the helpers unpacking the parcels found it, handed it on to the woman in charge and, quite naturally, she posted it. The whole thing was planned to make us think that somebody in London had kidnapped Juliet because everybody at Irlam Old Hall could prove that they hadn’t been in London at the time the letter was posted. Unfortunately, they hadn’t realized that the finger-print was a complete give-away. It showed Juliet was already dead.

  ‘Well’ -Dover reached for his bowler hat- ‘if there’s nothing else we’ll be getting back to town, sir. I’ll let you have my report as soon as I can get it done. Might be useful to let some of your chaps have a look at it – just to give ’em some idea of how we tackle a job at the Yard, Meticulous attention to detail, you know, studying and restudying every tiny point and then the flash of inspiration . . . ’ Dover smiled complacently.

  ‘I still don’t understand quite,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘what the motive was. I mean, why did they bother to kill this perfectly harmless girl?’

  Dover avoided MacGregor’s eye. ‘Well, I don’t know that you could call Juliet a perfectly harmless girl, sir,’ he said. ‘We know she’d been trying a bit of the old blackmail game on at least two other people at Irlam Old Hall. My guess is that she’d spotted that Bogolepov and Hoppold were having an affair and she started trying to put the pressure on there too. Unfortunately, La Hoppold wasn’t the one to submit to that sort of thing quietly – hence the murder.’

  The Chief Constable didn’t look very satisfied. ‘Sounds a bit thin,’ he objected.

  The fact that this was the opinion Dover himself had held only a few hours before didn’t make it any more palatable.

  ‘Well, there it is!’ he snapped impatiently. ‘You can take it or leave it! And anyhow, we don’t have to prove motive – not with the blooming body there in the deep freeze.’

  ‘I know we don’t have to prove motive,’ retorted Mr Bartlett testily, ‘but it makes a case more convincing if you do, doesn’t it? Besides, I’ve had quite a lot to do with dope addicts in my time and I’m blowed if I can remember one of them who was really hooked, as you say Bogolepov was, who ever bothered over much with women. And Miss Hoppold’s not exactly what you’d call a sex kitten, is she?’

  Dover snorted crossly down his nose. He didn’t relish having all his own arguments tossed back at him like this, especially with Big-Ears MacGregor greedily drinking in every word.

  ‘I know it’s a bit unusual,’ he admitted grudgingly, ‘but there it is. Damn it, there’s no law about it, is there? Eulalia Hoppold was Bogolepov’s mistress and she didn’t want her husband to find out and she didn’t want to be blackmailed by Juliet’ That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said the Chief Constable doubtfully. He hesitated for a moment and then picked up a bright green envelope from his desk. ‘I got this this morning. Of course,’ he added hastily, ‘I’m not saying there’s anything in it, but perhaps you’d like to have a look at it – just to see what you think.’

  With an irate sigh Dover took the envelope and removed several sheets of bright green paper. He raised his eyebrows pityingly at the Chief Constable and began to read.

  The letter was written in purple ink and bore the address of Irlam Old Hall. It began in a neat, old-fashioned hand:

  Dear Chief Constable,

  I don’t think we have actually ever met but I know your cousin Nancy Sells very well so perhaps that will serve as an introduction (!).

  I don’t know whether they’ve told you but a young girl called Juliet Rugg has been missing from Irlam Old Hall for over a week now. She worked for Sir John Counter, of whom you may have heard.

  Naturally everybody is very worried about her and I myself have spent a long time trying to solve the riddle of her disappearance. I have tried once or twice to talk the matter over with Chief Inspector Lover (such an unusual name)

  from New Scotland Yard, but he has been so busy that we haven’t really had time to discuss my theory in detail so I thought I would write to you and then you can bring all the weight of your high office (!) to bear on the investigation.

  It was really Sir John Counter who sowed the first seed of the idea in my head – purely by accident, you understand. You may know that he is a great sweet eater (much better than cigarettes, as we all know, but unfortunately he smokes as well). Usually he has special sweets sent to him from London but from time to time he buys half a pound (or even a pound) of jelly-babies. Not long ago in the drive I met him and he offered me the bag, saying ‘Let me give you a baby, Miss Frail!’ He always says this and it is his idea of a joke. (Sir John, in spite of coming from a very old family, is unnecessarily coarse at times, but I never let on that I know his words have a secondary meaning.) (He always calls me Miss Frail though, of course, he knows quite well what my real name is.)

  On this occasion I refused his offer of a jelly-baby, saying with a laugh, ‘No, thank you, Sir John, they always make me feel like a cannibal! ! !’

  When Juliet Rugg disappeared everybody seemed to be worried about the whereabouts of the body and I thought – remembering the jelly-babies – that a good way to get rid of a dead body (always a difficulty, I understand) would be to eat it!!

  Purely by chance I had been reading one of my brother’s books on this very subject. It was written by a missionary to the Fiji Islands and naturally the cannibalism of those dreadful heathens played a large part in his memoirs. (I still have the book and would be pleased to lend it to you should you so desire.) (There i
s no need to let my brother know about it.) Now, this missionary, the Reverend Dr Augustine Browne, said that once people started eating human flesh, they came to prefer it above all other.

  Well, you will appreciate, this gave me furiously to think!

  I began looking at my neighbours with a critical eye. ‘Has this one,’ I asked myself, ‘ever eaten another human being?’

  To my surprise, and horror (because Irlam Old Hall is really very select and well thought of in the district) I found that the answer in two cases was, YES! Two people had been in circumstances when, at the very least, they had the opportunity to eat human flesh.

  And who are these people? You may well ask! They are Miss Eulalia Hoppold and Sergeant-Major Bondy!!

  I will take the member of the fair sex first. Miss Hoppold is a noted woman explorer and has even appeared on television, though I have not seen her, and she has spent many years living with savage tribes and studying their habits. She has written at least three books about her adventures with tribes who practise cannibalism! Miss Hoppold is a very whole-hearted person and one who is eager for new and exciting experiences. Can we believe that she could resist the temptation to try a morsel of human flesh herself??

  Then there is Sergeant-Major Bondy. Did you know that during the war a troopship on which he happened to be travelling was sunk (by the Japanese, I believe)? He and fourteen other of our Brave Boys were adrift for twenty-three days on an open raft. Only Sergeant-Major Bondy and one other survived!! ! I have questioned Mr Bondy several times about his experiences and his extreme reticence about how he survived this shipwreck strikes me, under the circumstances, as very suspicious! He admits they had no food, and only rainwater to drink. What other explanation can there be, except that to preserve his own life he ate some, or all, of his companions??

  That is my theory! ! These two people have already tasted and enjoyed (!!) human flesh. The longing to repeat this terrible experience grew on them. Together they killed poor Juliet Rugg to satisfy their vile desires! I have, of course, no proof but I feel sure that you can convince Chief Inspector Lover that it is worth investigating further. Since formulating my theory I have kept a careful eye on my two suspects. In my opinion they are studiously avoiding any contact with each other – a well-known habit of malefactors hoping to avoid suspicion until the heat dies down! Miss Hoppold and Mr Bondy have not, to the best of my knowledge, exchanged one word since the disappearance of the unfortunate Juliet Rugg. What do you think of that??