Dead Easy for Dover

by Joyce Porter

  Mr Plum backed off as far as he could get. ‘Dinner’s at seven,’ he said humbly. ‘The wife was going to give you lobster patties followed by Beef Stroganov, with apple fritters and cream for afters. But, if you’d sooner have a milk pudding or . . .’

  ‘That’ll do fine!’ said Dover, brightening up considerably at the prospect. ‘And I’ll take a pint of your best bitter to swill it down with!’

  Mr Plum correctly concluded that the official part of his interview was at an end and he reverted smoothly to his role of genial mine host. ‘Talking of beer,’ he said, ‘I hope you’ll be able to find time to partake of a jar or two in the bar this evening? A number of my regulars would, I know, be delighted to make your acquaintance. It’s not every day that The Laughing Dog is honoured by the presence of one of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. One or two of my customers have, actually, already indicated that they would like to commemorate the occasion by really pushing the boat out. If you find you can spare the time, that is,’ he added hopefully.

  For once, Dover was all smiles. ‘Oh, I can spare the time all right!’ he said.

  On the following morning Dover’s face presented a somewhat more sombre picture. The clientele of The Laughing Dog were well known in the district for their open-handed generosity, and Dover was now paying the price. It was a good thing that Pomeroy Chemicals couldn’t see him. Grey, shaky, a mouth like the banks of the Thames at low tide on a hot day, and a splitting head, he showed a marked reluctance to move any distance away from the nearest lavatory. It was ten o’clock before MacGregor could coax him out of bed and gone eleven before Scotland Yard’s finest could be induced to poke a toe into the great big world outside.

  ‘It’s less than two minutes by car, sir,’ said MacGregor, holding out Dover’s overcoat as enticingly as he could.

  ‘It must have been that stuff they gave us for supper,’ whined Dover pathetically as he groped for the armholes. ‘All that foreign sauce muck!’

  MacGregor nerved himself and removed Dover’s bowler hat from the hook behind the door with his bare hands. ‘I did think that perhaps the third helping was something of a mistake, sir,’ he said. ‘Especially with your nervous stomach.’

  If there was any hint of sarcasm in these remarks, Dover was too far gone to notice it. ‘I just hope I can keep that bacon and egg down,’ he grumbled as he allowed MacGregor to shepherd him towards the door. ‘Here, steady on! There’s no need to rush me!’ He rubbed one flaccid hand wearily across his face. ‘Where the hell are we going anyhow?’

  ‘To the house where the girl’s body was found, sir.’

  Dover gulped. ‘If I have to look at any more bloody stiffs,’ he promised, ‘I’ll not be answerable for the consequences.’

  MacGregor was able to reassure him. ‘The body was removed yesterday, sir. We’re only going to see the occupant of the house – Miss Henty-Harris.’

  Dover nodded, and immediately regretted such rash behaviour. ‘And I don’t have to walk?’

  ‘Only as far as the car, sir. Inspector Walters is letting us have one, and a driver, for as long as we need.’

  Dover was concentrating on getting to the head of the stairs. ‘’Strewth,’ he whimpered as, with MacGregor’s assistance, he began the long descent, ‘I wish I was bloody dead!’

  Funnily enough, although Miss Charlotte Henty-Harris looked and acted like one of the leading ladies from Cranford, she knew a man with a jumbo-sized hangover when she saw one. Clucking compassionately, she helped MacGregor manoeuvre Dover across the threshold of Les Chenes and into a comfortable armchair by the drawing room fire.

  ‘Poor boy!’ cooed Miss Henty-Harris as she leaned forward and unscrewed Dover’s bowler hat from his head. ‘What you need is a nice glass of my rhubarb and parsley cordial.’

  ‘What I need,’ retorted Dover in a feeble attempt to regain his old ungraciousness, ‘is a bloody week in bed!’

  ‘Of course you do, dear!’ agreed Miss Henty-Harris with a sweet smile. ‘But you’ve got work to do, you see. Important work. We can’t have you laid up just at this moment, now can we? So, you just sit well back while I go and mix you up a draught of something that will bring the roses back to your cheeks. We’ll soon have you your old merry self again!’

  ‘Who the hell is she?’ demanded Dover as Miss Henty-Harris bustled off happily to her kitchen. ‘Whistler’s bleeding grandmother?’

  ‘She’s the lady who found the girl’s body, sir,’ said MacGregor with as much patience as he could muster. Well, you did get a bit cheesed off with saying everything three times and even then the old fool didn’t know what you were talking about. ‘It was in her shrubbery behind the front gate that .. .’

  ‘I do wish you’d belt up for a bit,’ moaned Dover, letting his head sink back into the cushions of his chair. ‘Why don’t you read your notebook or contemplate your navel or something, and let me get a bit of rest, for God’s sake?’

  But there is, as we know, no rest for the wicked, and Dover’s puffy eyelids had barely drooped over his equally puffy eyes when Miss Henty-Harris came trotting in again. All the ingredients for her concoction were ready to hand in her kitchen and this, coupled with a rather lengthy experience of mixing the stuff, accounted for the speed of her return.

  ‘Just drink it right down, dear!’ she advised as Dover, understandably, shied away from the evil-smelling brew.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘Never you mind, dear!’ chuckled Miss Henty-Harris. ‘You get it swallowed down! Hold your nose if you can’t stand the smell.’

  Since Dover reckoned he was in extremis anyhow, he did as he was told and, though no instant miracle took place, he did gradually begin over the next half hour or so to feel better. Not better enough, of course, to conduct the examination of Miss Henty-Harris himself, but well enough to listen quite intelligently to MacGregor doing the job for him.

  Miss Henty-Harris began by describing how she had come to find the dead body of the unknown girl. ‘I was going away for a little holiday,’ she explained, almost apologetically. ‘Just for a week. To a cousin in North Wales. She’d wanted to take me back with her when she came over to the funeral but, of course, there was far too much clearing up to be done here for me to leave then.’

  ‘That’s the funeral of your uncle, Sir Perceval Henty-Harris?’ questioned MacGregor who had sat up late the previous night studying the notes provided for him by the local police.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Miss Henty-Harris cheerfully. ‘We had the funeral on the Saturday, which was very nice because it meant that a lot more people could come. The village church was absolutely packed. Uncle Percy would have liked that. He liked to be appreciated. Of course, it meant a great deal of work for the rest of us because a simply enormous crowd came back to the house afterwards. I thought at one time we were going to run out of food. Relations, mostly, of course. None of them had been down here for years and years and I think they wanted to see if there’d been any changes. There hadn’t, of course. Uncle Percy couldn’t bear changes of any sort, especially as he grew older. Do you know, sergeant, I had to take all his sweets out of those nasty plastic bags they sell them in these days and put them in little white paper-bags. Little white paper-bags were what he was used to, you see. And they’re getting very hard to find, I don’t mind telling you. I managed to collect about half a dozen, but I have to keep ironing them. Had to,’ she corrected herself with a happy little smile. ‘Lots of the silly, time-wasting things I had to do are finished with now, thank goodness.’

  MacGregor tactfully reintroduced the question of the dead body and its discovery.

  Miss Henty-Harris blinked her baby-blue eyes. ‘Oh, haven’t I told you about that yet? Well, I was very busy after the funeral, tidying things up and sorting things out. Uncle Percy was a terrible hoarder, you know, and that didn’t make things any easier. Then there were bills to pay and certificates to get and people to notify. So it wasn’t until yesterday that I felt I could get away t
o my cousin in North Wales with a clear conscience. Several other people had asked me to go and stay, you know. So kind after all these years. But my cousin in North Wales was the first, so that’s why I was going to go and stay with her.’ Miss Henty-Harris caught MacGregor’s despairing eye and giggled shame-facedly. ‘Oh, dear, am I rambling on again, sergeant? I’m so sorry! It’s not having had anybody to talk to all this time. Uncle Percy just wanted a listener, you see. And then he got so deaf that it wasn’t really worth . . . Oh, well, that’s all over and done with now. So – where was I? Oh yes, well, I was a bit worried about leaving the house empty, you know. I mean, it never had been before, not in all the thirty years I’ve been living here with Uncle. He had this thing, you know, about sleeping in his own bed and . . .’ She pulled herself up again with a rather touching moue of dismay. ‘Well, I took every precaution. I sent the silver to the Bank, put the best china out of sight in the cellar, turned off the gas and the water and the electricity, stopped the newspapers and the milk, told the police and asked the Boneses to keep an eye on things in general. They live opposite, you see, and they’re always pottering about what with the children and everything and . . .’ Miss Henty-Harris was quite incorrigible, but she did keep trying. She took a deep breath and started again. ‘So, yesterday morning I was all set to go. I’d done my packing, booked my train ticket and provided for every eventuality . . . I thought! It was only when I was actually in the taxi and he was turning out into the road that I suddenly thought about the gate and how I’d really better close it. It came to me, just like that! I don’t know why because I can’t remember the last time that gate was shut, if ever. Anyhow, I thought it would make the whole place look more secure so I told the taxi driver to stop and I got out. Well, I found that I couldn’t pull the gate closed. It was all sort of jammed up, you see, with dead leaves and gravel and goodness knows what. The hinges were rusty, too. So I went round to the other side of the gate, in amongst the bushes in the shubbery, to get behind it and push it. I’d allowed ample time to get to the station, you see, so I wasn’t really worried about missing my train or anything. And, then, there she was, poor child. Just lying there. All huddled up and sort of crumpled. I knew right away that she was dead. Well, you do, don’t you? And do you know, sergeant, what my very first reaction was?’ Miss Henty-Harris shook her head reproachfully. ‘I’m almost ashamed to tell you, I really am. I thought – thank goodness Uncle Percy isn’t here to see this. He’d have gone mad! He really would. If there was one thing he simply couldn’t stand it was having people take advantage of his good nature.’

  3

  The silence which descended upon the drawing room when Miss Henty-Harris went off to make some coffee was almost too precious to break, but MacGregor felt that he really had to rouse Dover from a meditation so profound that it was beginning to look suspiciously like outright sleep. ‘Er – have you any questions that you’d like to ask, sir?’

  In normal circumstances an enquiry like that would have sparked off some glittering repartee but, in spite of Miss Henty-Harris’s hair-of-the-dog, on this occasion Dover couldn’t summon up anything more memorable than a sickly swivel of his bloodshot eyes and a belch.

  ‘I’ve just got a couple more myself,’ said MacGregor, refusing to notice this latest manifestation of Dover’s abdominal problems, ‘and then I think we can move on to the next people on our list. I don’t really see Miss Henty-Harris as our murderer, do you, sir?’

  No, Dover didn’t, but it went against all his finer instincts to agree with his sergeant. ‘You never can tell with women,’ he grunted at his most piggish.

  MacGregor looked up in amazement. ‘But what possible motive could she have had, sir?’

  ‘That’s for you to find out, laddie!’ Dover sighed and let his eyelids, plus everything else, sag downwards.

  Miss Henty-Harris returned with the coffee. ‘Now, don’t force yourself, dear!’ she advised Dover as she deposited the plate of hot buttered scones right by his elbow. ‘If you don’t feel like eating anything, don’t! I shan’t be offended. I only brought a little snack along out of force of habit, really. Uncle Percy always liked to have a little something to chew on with his elevenses. And now, sergeant’ – she took up her own coffee and resumed her seat on the sofa – ‘is there anything more I can tell you?’

  ‘Did you know the dead girl, Miss Henty-Harris?’

  ‘Oh, good heavens, no!’ Miss Henty-Harris’s reply was vigorous and unequivocal. ‘I’m certain I’d never ever seen her before. Unless’ – she hesitated – ‘unless she’d been on the television, of course.’

  ‘Have you any reason to think that she was?’ asked MacGregor, wondering if some promising avenue of investigation was about to open up before them. .

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Miss Henty-Harris with her usual smile. ‘It’s only that Frenchy Botham is such a stuffy, respectable sort of place. We simply don’t seem to have teenagers like the dead girl knocking around. Or not more than one or two. That’s why I thought, if I ever had seen her, it was more likely to have been on the telly rather than in real life. That’s where I’ve had to go, you see, for all my information about the seamier side of things. Up till now, of course. Now that Uncle’s gone, I hope to be able to travel around a bit and see all this degeneracy they keep talking about for myself.’

  MacGregor decided to forget about the television line of enquiry. ‘I believe you acted as companion to Sir Perceval for a number of years?’

  ‘Getting on for thirty,’ agreed Miss Henty-Harris with little sign of nostalgia and even less of enthusiasm. ‘And, believe me, dear, it seems a lot longer. Companion’s not the word I’d use, either. Secretary, nurse, cook, housemaid, general dogsbody and whipping boy – that’s what I was.’

  ‘So you weren’t exactly heart-broken when Sir Perceval died?’

  ‘I was not!’ said Miss Henty-Harris shortly.

  Dover leaned forward to collar the last buttered scone. ‘Who gets the money?’

  Miss Henty-Harris jumped. ‘What money?’

  Dover encircled the drawing room with a greasy wave of his hand. ‘All this lot!’ he explained. ‘Whacking big house, posh furniture, choice knick-knacks! Don’t try telling me the old josser died a bloody pauper.’

  ‘Of course he didn’t,’ admitted Miss Henty-Harris. ‘Uncle Percy was a very rich man.’

  ‘So, who gets it?’ repeated Dover who, although he had every reason to be grateful to Miss Henty-Harris, wasn’t.

  ‘Really, you’re almost as bad as my relations,’ she said rather crossly. ‘Uncle Percy left everything to me. And why shouldn’t he? Dear heavens, I’ve earned it! Putting up with him with his meanness and his bad temper and his tantrums and all the rest of it for nearly thirty years. And for a mere pittance. “You’ll have it all when I’m gone, Charlotte,” he used to say. Well, now he has gone and I have got it and I mean to enjoy myself with it.’ Miss Henty-Harris drew herself up, clamped her mouth shut in a hard line and folded her arms defiantly. She looked a little too much like a thwarted hamster to carry total conviction, but there was no mistake but that these questions about the disposal of Sir Perceval’s estate had got her on the raw.

  Dover, meanwhile, was definitely perking up. Miss Henty-Harris’s ministrations had done their work and he began to flex his muscles. After all, as he himself frequently said, why start mixing it with sixteen-stone desperadoes when there are lots of widows and orphans and frail little old ladies just asking to be shoved around. He got down to brass tacks with a crudity that brought the tears to MacGregor’s eyes. ‘What did this old geezer die of, anyhow?’

  ‘He died of old age,’ said Miss Henty-Harris stiffly. She was beginning to regret a number of kindnesses in the recent past. ‘He was ninety-one years old and even Knights of the British Empire cannot expect to live for ever.’

  ‘Where did he kick the bucket?’ Dover was away now like a house on fire.

  ‘Where? Why, here, of course. In this house. In the dinin
g room if you want the precise location. We had it fitted up as a bedroom for him some fifteen years ago to save all that traipsing up and down the stairs.’

  ‘Anybody with him at the time?’

  ‘I was!’ snapped Miss Henty-Harris who had caught the drift of Dover’s questions and didn’t like it. ‘It happens to be quite impossible to engage a night nurse in this area. They won’t come for love nor money.’

  Dover’s boot-button eyes narrowed. He’d still got the remnants of a headache lurking around in his skull, but he was stoutly determined to carry on. If he could actually arrest a killer within less than twenty-four hours of . . .’Strewth, the mind boggled! Pomeroy Chemicals Limited would have to sit up and take notice of that, all right! Dover dragged his mind away from four-figure expense accounts and keys to the Executives’ washroom, and put the boot in with practised skill.

  Miss Henty-Harris was outraged. ‘How dare you?’ she spluttered, the carmine mounting in her quivering cheeks. ‘I thought you were supposed to be investigating a murder, not making extremely unpleasant allegations about me.’

  ‘Depends on whose murder we’re talking about, missus.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Look at it from my point of view,’ invited Dover with every appearance of being reasonable. ‘Here’s an old geezer who’s left you all his money, and there’s the two of you, all alone at night in this house. Then – surprise, surprise! – the old fellow goes swinging through the pearly gates. Well, what’s anybody in their right mind going to think, eh?’

  ‘Not, I hope,’ riposted Miss Henty-Harris tartly, ‘that I murdered my uncle after looking after him with unstinting devotion since the end of the Second World War. I’ve a good mind to sue you for slander!’