Dover Two

by Joyce Porter

  Pegtop, cursing in a subdued mutter, picked himself up from the floor, reassembled his fold-flat chair and sat down. The Pie Gang gazed at their uninvited guests with some apprehension and a little bewilderment. Both increased as Dover, with a wonderfully dead-pan face, slowly pulled the Luger from out of his overcoat pocket. The Pie Gang stared at it, fascinated. With a faint sniff, Dover took out his handkerchief – it was none too clean but MacGregor was the only one to be offended by this. With majestic deliberation Dover lovingly wiped the gun, tested its working parts – it was unloaded – and blew softly down the barrel. Having stretched out this performance as long as he could, he carefully, still without uttering a word, laid it down in front of him on the table.

  After yet another pause Dover broke the silence. ‘We’re from Scotland Yard,’ he announced grimly.

  Freddie Gash dragged his eyes from the Luger and, as leader of the gang, undertook to make the first response.

  ‘So?’

  Dover glared moodily at him. ‘We’re investigating the murder of Isobel Slatcher.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We think you three may be able to help us.’

  ‘Aw, get knotted!’ mumbled Skip, and flinched as Dover looked at him.

  ‘We don’t know nothing,’ yapped Pegtop nervously. ‘ The cops know that. It weren’t nothing to do with us!’

  Dover’s eyes switched back to Freddie Gash’s face. Gash, in spite of the blackheads and a noticeably weedy physique, was the leader of this lot and Dover didn’t believe in dealing with underlings at any level of society.

  It was to him that Dover drawled his next question. ‘Wasn’t it?’ he asked.

  Freddie Gash licked his lips and let his eyes flick for a moment to the gun. ‘Naw!’ he asserted. ‘Yer can’t touch us. We’ve got an alibi.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dover with apparent scepticism.

  ‘Yerse! We was right on the other side of the town when she got shot.’

  ‘Going to dig up a corpse, I hear,’ mused Dover in an understanding tone.

  Freddie Gash smiled rather proudly. All his front teeth were decayed. ‘Yerse, we was. Only they nabbed us first. I reckon somebody squealed.’

  ‘Charming,’ murmured Dover.

  ‘Gorn, he was only a bloody old Protestant!’ retorted Gash contemptuously.

  ‘He were a freemason, too,’ said Skip. ‘They all goes straight to ’ell anyway. Pope says so.’

  ‘And it was them what started it,’ added Pegtop, who had recovered his savoir-faire. ‘They done one of our bints first, yer know!’

  ‘Is that your gun?’ asked Dover, changing the conversation abruptly.

  Freddie Gash looked at it again, with longing. ‘Naw,’ he said regretfully, ‘never seen it before in me life.’

  ‘Pity,’ sighed Dover. ‘Oh well, looks as though we shan’t be able to return it, after all.’

  There was a puzzled silence while Freddie Gash, Skip and Pegtop ruminated over the possible implications of this remark. MacGregor had a livelier mind. His jaw tightened. Surely the old fool couldn’t be going to …

  ‘Return it?’ asked Freddie Gash, his brow furrowed in unaccustomed thought. He picked nervously at a convenient blackhead.

  ‘’Slight,’ said Dover blithely. ‘Once I’ve got this case tied up and the murderer of Isobel Slatcher’s been tried and had his neck stretched a bit further than Nature intended, we, the police, will have no further use for the’ – he squinted speculatively at Gash – ‘the murder weapon.’

  The gang stared avidly at the Luger. As a prestige symbol it already stood pretty high, but as the instrument which had been responsible for the death of that Protestant tart – right here in Curdley … cor!

  Dover picked the gun up and weighed it temptingly in his hand. ‘Yes,’ he went on, lying blandly, ‘ normally we’d give it back to the owner, but in this case, unfortunately, we don’t know who the owner is. Do we?’

  Freddie Gash wiped his hand nervously across his forehead as he struggled to work it out Was it a trap? Did the police really give dubiously acquired guns back to young layabouts, even though they did attend Mass regularly and Confession once a month? The native cunning which had enabled him to live the life of Riley with no visible means of support (except his mother) ever since he left school, failed him dismally now. Recklessly he fell back on greed and self-interest.

  ‘It were mine,’ he croaked in a voice strangled by emotion and pride.

  ‘Oh, it was, was it?’ said Dover gently.

  ‘Yerse, I gor it when Father O’Brien took us on a coach trip to London to see Westminster Cathedral. Cost me twenty bloody nicker, it did.’ He stretched out his hand towards the gun.

  Dover landed him a hefty crack across the wrist. ‘You’re not getting it yet, sonny boy!’ he snapped. ‘I want to know a bit more about it first. Now then, when did you go on this trip to London?’

  ‘’Bout a fortnight before Christmas last year,’ said Freddie, sulkily rubbing his wrist.

  ‘Did you get any ammunition with it?’

  ‘Yeah. This same chap gimme four bullets.’

  ‘Did you fire any of them?’

  ‘’Course I did! I fired one shot at old Mother Arnfield’s ginger tom, but I missed the bugger. And then on New Year’s Eve me and Skip went down t’railway line. Mate of mine’s fireman on one of them goods trains and I took a shot at him as he went by in the cab. Him and his driver nearly wet their pants with fright when they heard the bang! Weren’t half a giggle, weren’t it, Skip?’

  Dover broke impatiently through the gang’s reminiscent chuckles. ‘So, there were two shots left?’

  ‘’Sright.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘’Ow d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, did you lose the gun, or what? You hadn’t got it in your possession in February, had you, when Isobel Slatcher was shot? Did you lend it to somebody?’

  ‘Naw, I lost the bloody thing.’

  ‘Where?’

  Freddie Gash, very sensibly, put the brakes on. He exchanged glances with his two mates, stared longingly again at the Luger and raised his eyes dubiously to Dover’s face. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said with a sigh of disappointment.

  ‘Don’t give me that crap!’ bawled Dover. ‘Of course you can remember! Look, I’m only interested in this murder case, see? I don’t give two tuppenny damns about anything else you and your little playmates have been doing. And,’ he added significantly, ‘I shan’t pass on anything you tell me to the local police, either. Get it?’

  Young Gash understood what Dover meant all right, but he wasn’t sure if he believed him. He had imbibed a deep suspicion of the police with his mother’s milk, and his subsequent contact with them had done nothing to remove this feeling. Of course, even he recognized that Dover was not what you might call a run-of-the-mill policeman, but he was still a flattie and, presumably, tarred to some extent with the same brush.

  Dover gave an exasperated snort down his nose and made as if to put the Luger back in his overcoat pocket. That did it. Freddie Gash sang.

  It was a rather incoherent story with some confusion as to times, dates and motives, but Dover gathered that the teenage element in Curdley were vigorously carrying on the Catholic v. Protestant warfare of their elders. While the adult members of the community restricted themselves in general to verbal thunderings from the pulpit and verbal sniping on committees and elsewhere, the youngsters went in for more direct action. They tossed bottles at each other’s religious processions and broke the windows of each other’s churches. From time to time one rival gang would beat up their opposite numbers and a retaliatory attack would follow in due course.

  During the couple of months which preceded Isobel Slatcher’s attempted murder, the pace had hotted up a little and the rape of the Daughter of Mary and the Pie Gang’s attempt to dig up the deceased freemason were merely two of the more lurid skirmishes. Freddie Gash was now telling Dover of a third.

 
‘We thought we’d go and bust up one of these mothers’ meetings things they have, see, just to give all them old cows a bit of a scare, like. Well, we went along one night to this parish hall place where they have their dos and we all got us faces blacked up like commandos and I’d got me gun and we was going to bust in on ’em all and do a sort of hold-up, see? Well, summat went wrong or the buggers had changed the night or something, because when we kicked the bleeding doors open, the place were full of men. There were about twenty or thirty of ’em and before we knew what was happening they were coming at us like a pack of bleeding wolves. There was only about six of us and we hadn’t a hope against that mob – so we beat it, pretty damned quick. Well, everything got a bit mixed up like and this little entrance hall was all cluttered up with coats and chairs and hymn books and things and before we could get out of the bleeding door into the street they was on top of us. Well, we had a bit of a punch-up and this other lot weren’t too keen at coming close in because my mob had all got coshes or bicycle chains or something and after a bit we managed to get away. But some bleeder’d knocked me gun out of me hand and I’d lost it. I weren’t half chocker, too. Twenty bleeding quid down the drain! And that’s it, mate. This were long before that bint got hers.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Dover. ‘And the gun was loaded?’

  ‘Yerse. I’d still got these two shots left, see?’

  ‘What was the exact date? Can’t you remember?’

  Freddie Gash looked at Skip and Pegtop and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘End of January, beginning of February, p’raps.’

  ‘We’ll want it a bit closer than that,’ said Dover. ‘ What day of the week was it?’

  ‘’Ere, Skip,’ said Gash with authority. ‘Nip round home and get me perishing press-cutting book. Me mum’ll be in the pub now, but the key’s under the door mat.’ He turned to Dover as Skip hurried out. ‘I think we got a write-up on that job,’ he commented nonchalantly. ‘That’ll give you the date and everything, won’t it?’

  ‘Which parish hall was it?’ asked Dover.

  ‘That one off Corporation Road – what’s it called, Pegtop?’

  ‘St Benedict’s,’ said Pegtop with a sniff.

  ‘St Benedict’s!’ yelped Dover. ‘ But that’s near where Isobel Slatcher was shot!’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ agreed Freddie helpfully. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. She got croaked in Church Lane, didn’t she? It’d be just round the corner from this church hall place of theirs.’

  Dover leaned back complacently in his chair. ‘Well, well,’ he said, highly pleased with himself, ‘just fancy that!’

  While they waited for Skip to return with the press-cutting book Freddie Gash relaxed to such an extent that he pulled his cigarettes out and stuck one in his mouth. Being an ill-bred young lout he made the tactical error of not offering the chief inspector one. Dover scowled evilly, leaned across the table and plucked the cigarette out of Freddie’s mouth. He crumbled it slowly to pieces in his hand. ‘ Don’t push your luck, sonny!’ he advised threateningly.

  The press-cutting book, when it arrived, proved to be most useful. Freddie Gash had apparently been publicity conscious from a very early age and the first pages were devoted to reports of choir outings and Sunday-school football teams in which he had taken a prominent part. These were followed by write-ups of various incidents of hooliganism in which Freddie presumably had also had a finger, though his name was not actually mentioned. He was lucky in a way that the Custodian was a Protestant paper and tended to give more space to the wrongdoings of the Catholic youth than it did to those of its own faction. The account of the Pie Gang’s raid on St Benedict’s church hall filled two half-columns and ended with a biting indictment of the local police, who once again had failed to bring the perpetrators to justice. There was no mention of a gun being found on the scene of the crime.

  ‘Hm,’ grunted Dover as he read the story, ‘ Monday, twenty-ninth of January. Make a note of that, Sergeant!’

  ‘Told you it were about then,’ Freddie pointed out cheekily. ‘See, it were two or three days before that Daughter of Mary kid got hers.’ He jabbed a grubby finger at the next cutting. ‘’ Course, it was some Protestant bugger did her.’

  ‘Garn!’ sneered Pegtop, interrupting his nose picking to join in the conversation. ‘It were that fancy man of her mother’s what done her! Everybody knows that.’

  His leader turned on him fiercely. ‘You keep your bleeding trap shut!’ he raged. ‘I’ll tell Father on you, straight I will! It were some Protestant bugger what done her, and don’t you bleeding well forget it!’

  Pegtop blinked, but Dover intervened curtly. ‘Cut it out!’ he snapped. ‘Now, have you got anything else to tell me? No? All right, beat it!’

  ‘What about me gun?’ protested Freddie, sullenly watching Dover replace it in his pocket.

  ‘I’ve told you. You’ll get it back when the case is closed. It’s all right, lad’ – Dover leered unconvincingly – ‘you can trust me. Now, hop it!’

  The Pie Gang slouched disconsolately out of the café and Dover and MacGregor prepared to follow them. The proprietress, Elsie, who was still leaning on the counter and had listened to the whole conversation, spoke.

  ‘I used to know the Slatchers,’ she remarked conversationally.

  ‘Oh?’ said Dover.

  ‘’Sright! ‘ Course I’ve never spoken to ’em, but donkey’s years ago, when we was kids, they used to live in our street. On the other side, of course,’ she added piously. ‘They was all heathens what lived on the other side.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dover.

  ‘’Sright. We never had nothing to do with ’em, of course, but I remember Violet quite well. Stuck-up little bitch she were, too.’

  ‘That’s the elder sister?’

  Elsie waggled a couple of chins. ‘Sister?’ she said sardonically. ‘Well, I suppose you might call her that.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs … er …?’

  ‘Miss Leddicoat,’ said Elsie obligingly. ‘L, e,d,d,i,c,o,a,t – same as the martyrs.’

  ‘Er, quite,’ said Dover. ‘Well, Miss Leddicoat, what’s this about Violet Slatcher? She is the elder sister, isn’t she?’

  ‘Them,’ responded Miss Leddicoat with a contemptuous sniff, ‘as believes that’ll believe anything.’

  ‘But you know better?’

  ‘I’ll say I do! Stands to reason, doesn’t it? You’ve only got to put two and two together, haven’t you?’

  Dover waited with growing irritation for her to continue.

  ‘After all,’ Miss Leddicoat obliged, ‘I’d known the Slatchers all me life. He was a chauffeur in them days, though from the way him and his wife used to look down their noses at everybody else you’d have thought they was king and queen of England. ‘Course, chauffeuring weren’t a bad job in them days, and it were clean too, but that didn’t give ’ em no right to set themselves up like they did. They only had one kid too – that was Violet. There was fourteen of us at home and it makes a difference, I can tell you. ‘Course, it’s a mortal sin – birth control, I mean – and they’re probably both in hell paying for it now, but it did mean Violet had a damned sight easier time of it than most of the kids in our street. When she left school she didn’t go into the mill like the rest of us. Oh no, her ladyship used to go off, tarted up to the nines every morning, to some job her dad’d got her in an office. Oh well’ – she sighed massively and not without relish – ‘they say pride goes before a fall.’

  ‘And Violet fell, did she?’

  ‘Not half! Nobody never knew who the chap was but he must have given Miss High and Mighty a fair old tumble in the hay. Well, she started getting a bit fatter, you know, but at fifteen or sixteen you put it down to puppy fat, don’t you? None of us ever suspected that she’d got a pudding in the oven.’

  ‘She was going to have a baby?’ asked Dover with a bit more interest than he had shown so far.

  ‘Sright. Not that they
ever admitted it, you know. No, after a few months Mrs Slatcher – the mother, that is – let it get around that she was going to have a baby, see? Well, old Mr Slatcher, her husband, came in for a bit of leg pulling, I heard, because, God only knows, everybody thought he’d been well past that sort of thing for years. ‘ Course Mrs Slatcher was no chicken either, but everybody thought she’d been caught just before the change, you know. Well, two or three months before the baby was due, Mrs Slatcher clears out of town and takes Violet with her. I forget what reason they gave for that but it was something pretty slim. Anyhow, in due course back they came and Violet’s had a little sister – I don’t think! Bit after that they moved away to another part of the town.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dover. ‘So Isobel was really Violet’s own daughter. Tell me, did a lot of people know about this?’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, everybody in our street knew, that’s a cert. But it was only a nine days’ wonder, you know. We all had a good laugh at the way they tried to cover it up, but what’s one more kid born out of wedlock, eh? I’ve had three myself and you’d be surprised how quick people forget about it. ‘Course, all this hooha with Violet Slatcher took place nearly thirty years ago. If it hadn’t been for Isobel getting herself shot like that I don’t suppose I should have given a second thought to the business. I mean, you can’t remember everything, can you?’

  Dover shook his head. ‘No, I suppose not, madam.’

  ‘Are you stopping for your dinner? Pie and beans we’ve got today.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Dover quickly, remembering the coffee. ‘Come on, Sergeant, we’ve got a lot to do!’

  They left the café and walked back down the street towards the waiting police car. They passed a group of little girls solemnly moving round in a circle and chanting in shrill, off-key voices the latest folk-song:

  ‘Big’mous Bertie is me name!