by Joyce Porter
‘It was dark,’ grunted Dover. ‘And I don’t suppose it would look all that suspicious from up there. Now, are we going?’
‘Just a minute, sir!’ Selflessly disregarding all the health hazards that were likely to ensue from contact with Dover’s overcoat, MacGregor placed a restraining hand on his master’s arm.
Dover, who had his own ideas about MacGregor’s proclivities, shied away like a frightened horse. ‘Hey, watch it!’
But MacGregor was too excited to register yet another slur on his manhood. ‘Sir,’ he said, still hanging onto Dover like grim death, ‘we really should have thought of this before!’
‘Thought of what?’
‘How did the kidnappers know the exact time of your departure from the Yard?’
‘They didn’t.’ If it meant taking the wind out of MacGregor’s sails, Dover could think with surprising speed and logic. ‘They just hovered around waiting till I appeared.
MacGregor considered this and then firmly shook his head. ‘No, that won’t work, sir. Scotland Yard is a pretty sensitive area these days. Even a taxi couldn’t hang around here for three hours without somebody getting suspicious. They’re down on parked vehicles like a ton of bricks.’
‘Who says it was parked?’ asked Dover. ‘They could have just driven round and round. Nobody’d pay any attention to a passing taxi.’
‘But they might have missed you, sir. They could easily have been stuck in a traffic jam out in Victoria Street when you left the Yard. And suppose there’d been other policemen knocking about – would the Claret Tappers have risked abducting you from under the noses of a pack of trained observers? Or suppose you’d been with somebody? Me, for example. They could never have pulled off a stunt like that if I’d been with you.
It took Dover a bit longer to pick holes in this argument. ‘Maybe you were with me!’
MacGregor broke the news gently. ‘I was on my Explosives Course, sir.’
This information was greeted with a really vicious scowl. I mean earlier on, you bloody fool. The Claret Tappers could have been waiting for the right opportunity for weeks for all we know. Maybe Tuesday was simply the first chance they had. There weren’t any coppers around and I hadn’t anybody with me. Anyhow,’ – he sniffed loudly – ‘what was all that about three hours?’
‘Three . . .? Oh, well, just that normally, sir, you leave the Yard at five o’clock. If not earlier. If the kidnappers were counting on you keeping to your usual routine on Tuesday, they would have had to wait, hanging around, for three hours. It doesn’t sound very likely, sir, does it?’
Dover’s bottom lip stuck out. ‘It was old Brockhurst,’ he explained sulkily. ‘While you were away, the rat took to ringing me up just before knocking off’ time. Trying to catch me out, you see, in case I left early.’
It was MacGregor’s turn to start feeling cold. There was a biting gale whistling down the street. “I don’t quite see what you’re getting at, sir.’
‘The kidnappers wouldn’t have had to wait three hours for me to come out of the Yard on Tuesday,’ explained Dover with remarkable patience. ‘They would only have had to wait two because, thanks to old Brockhurst, I had to sit there twiddling my bloody thumbs till six.’
‘Does it really make all that much difference, sir?’ asked MacGregor. ‘The taxi wouldn’t have hung around for two hours any more than for three.’
‘I was just trying to keep the record straight,’ said Dover. ‘And now, if you’ve finished, let’s get to the boozer. It’s cold enough out here to freeze half a dozen brass monkeys!’
Dover had got MacGregor so bemused that the sergeant was actually bringing the drinks over from the bar before he remembered the point he had been trying to make. Ready to kick himself he handed Dover his large rum and peppermint (guaranteed to ward off chills on the stomach) and took the chair next to him.
‘Good health!’ said Dover cheerfully.
MacGregor let his pale ale grow flat untouched. ‘Sir, this question of the Claret Tappers apparently knowing the exact time of your departure from the Yard . . .’
The beam of contentment faded from Dover’s face. ‘Oh, ’strewth, you’re not still harping on that are you?’
‘Sir,’ – MacGregor looked round the empty pub and lowered his voice – ‘the only way the kidnappers could have been ready and waiting for you as you left the Yard was if somebody inside tipped them off.’
Dover’s mouth opened and then shut again. MacGregor was shocked to see how white the old fool had suddenly gone and, with the callousness of comparative youth, was inclined to attribute it to the too rapid consumption of the rum.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
Dover swallowed. ‘Somebody in the Yard tipped ‘em off?’ His voice was hoarse and rather unsteady.
‘I can’t see any other explanation, sir.’
Dover’s blood ran cold. He wanted to make some jokey remark about having been nursing a viper in his bosom, but the words wouldn’t come. In spite of all his whining and grumbling, the reality of his experience was only now beginning to come home to him. The Claret Tappers were for real – a bunch of ruthless criminals who’d been fully prepared to barter his life against a ridiculously large sum of money. They would, if he hadn’t escaped their clutches by some miracle, have killed him. Dover shivered. But the worst was yet to come. He wasn’t just any old, haphazardly chosen victim. On the contrary, he had been carefully selected. Somebody had set him up. Somebody inside Scotland Yard itself had actually planned and plotted to deliver him up to these merciless thugs. What a terrible realisation! ’Strewth, it got you right in the gut and . . .
Dover gulped down the remains of his rum and peppermint. ‘Get us another!’ he croaked and staggered to his feet.
MacGregor looked up at him in some surprise. That well-known podgy pasty face had gone quite green round the edges. ‘Are you going somewhere, sir?’
‘I’m going to the bog!’ replied Dover with what dignity he could muster before making a run for it.
It was twenty minutes before he came waddling back.
‘Feeling better, sir?’
Usually there was nothing that Dover liked better than a rosy little chat about his more intimate bodily functions, but at the moment he had more weighty matters on his mind. He went straight to the meat of the problem. ‘Who is it?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You’re my Number One suspect, laddie!’
‘Me, sir?’ To his dismay MacGregor saw that Dover wasn’t joking. ‘But I wasn’t even here, sir!’
Dover picked up his second rum and peppermint. ‘And that’s just where you were so clever, isn’t it? You manufacture yourself a nice little alibi just when it’s most needed. You weren’t stupid enough to have me kidnapped while you were here, were you?’
There are some occasions when argument is a pure waste of breath and MacGregor could see that this was one of them. For his own peace of mind, though, he was anxious to get the needle of Dover’s thought processes out of this particular groove. ‘In the first place, sir,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of being involved in anything so dreadful, as you very well know. And, in the second place, how could I possibly have known in advance that on that one particular night you would be working late and not leaving the Yard until eight o’clock? It’s never happened before, sir, not in all the years I’ve known you. And, in the third place . . .’ MacGregor hesitated. Surely he’d got a third place, hadn’t he?
‘And in the third place?’ echoed Dover, looking roguish and waving his now empty glass suggestively.
MacGregor bowed to the inevitable. ‘Rum and peppermint again, sir?’
The pub had been filling up and customers had begun to move away from the bar to sit at the tables. Seats were soon at a premium and Dover was several times obliged to repel intruders who thought they could come and sit at his table just because there were three empty places there. It didn’t take much to put them off, of course. Usually one look from
Dover and one look at him were more than enough. When they weren’t, a growled ‘bugger off!’ speedily completed the operation.
‘Sir,’ – MacGregor came back with yet another rum and pep – ‘why were you working late on Tuesday night?’ This was very tactful because, like everybody else in Scotland Yard, MacGregor had heard the joke about oversleeping.
Except that it wasn’t a joke.
It was the rum that must have made Dover careless as he was usually at pains to preserve his image. ‘I dozed off!’ he admitted with a boozy snigger. ‘Mind you, I’d had one hell of a day and what with having to muck about till six o’clock just to spike old Brockhurst’s guns. . . Well, I just closed my eyes to rest ’em for a couple of minutes and it was bloody five to eight when I came to.’
‘What time did you doze off, sir?’
‘How do I know? What does it matter, anyhow?’
‘Well, we’ve still got this business of an informer inside the Yard, sir, tipping the rest of the gang off. How could he even suspect that you were going to be so conveniently late that evening?’
‘Second sight?’ asked Dover, trying to be constructive.
‘If you could just try and remember even approximately what time you dozed off, sir, it might help.’
Dover chose to take offence at MacGregor’s wheedling tone. ‘Well, I can’t remember!’ he snapped. ‘So that’s that, isn’t it? All I know is that it must have been some time after the girl brought me the tea.’
MacGregor had to count up to fifty this time. ‘What girl was that, sir?’ he asked calmly, though his nerves were still jangling with the shock. ‘This is the first time you’ve mentioned her.
Dover shrugged off the reproach. ‘Don’t blame me, laddie! I’d have told you about her quick enough if you’d asked me. ’Strewth, there’s nothing mysterious about her. She just came into my room round about half past four, carrying a little tray with a cup of tea on it and some biscuits. She said the Assistant Commissioner had ordered it but then he’d gone out before she’d brought it. She said she didn’t drink tea herself and, rather than let it go to waste, she’d popped in to see if I’d like it.’
‘And you did, sir, of course.’
‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth, laddie!’
‘Then what happened, sir?’
‘Nothing happened!’ Dover was growing irritable under this merciless cross-examination. ‘She pushed off and I drank the tea and ate the biscuits.’
‘And fell into a deep sleep, sir?’
For once in his life MacGregor got Dover’s full attention. ‘Hell’s teeth, d’you think it was doped?’
‘Well, it’s a possibility, isn’t it, sir? I mean, didn’t it strike you that the whole incident was a bit fishy?’
Dover scowled. ‘Why should it?’
MacGregor stared deep into his glass of pale ale. ‘The Assistant Commissioner’s room is two floors below ours, sir.’
‘So?’
It was at moments like this that MacGregor wondered why he’d ever volunteered for C.I.D. in the first place. ‘It’s rather unlikely, isn’t it, sir, that this girl, whoever she is, would wander halfway over New Scotland Yard just to get rid of an unwanted cup of tea?’
‘And the biscuits,’ Dover pointed out. ‘I see what you mean, though.’ A lesser man might have been tempted to attribute the girl’s unusual behaviour to his own fatal charm, but Dover had few illusions on that score. He preferred to defend himself by attacking his sergeant.
‘Course, any fool can see it was a bit peculiar now, seeing it with bloody hindsight. It’s a different kettle of fish when you’re on the spot trying to sort things out at the time.’
MacGregor couldn’t see any future in pursuing that line of argument. ‘You woke up about eight, sir? Did you leave the Yard immediately?’
‘You can bet your bloody boots I did!’ said Dover, astonished that even MacGregor was fool enough to ask such a question.
‘Did you wake up on your own, sir, or did something rouse you?’
The spectacle of Dover trying to think was one to make strong men tremble. ‘The telephone rang,’ he said at long last. ‘Yes that’s right! The phone rang.’
MacGregor’s head came up with a jerk. ‘Did you answer it, sir?’ Dover frequently reframed from picking up the receiver on the grounds that no communications could, with luck, mean no work.
‘Of course I answered it!’
‘And?’
Dover glared resentfully. Nag, nag, nag! ‘There was nobody there.’
‘I see.’
Dover resented MacGregor’s quiet air of superiority. ‘Well, what’s funny about that?’ he exploded. ‘The phones are always going cock-eyed. It’s the mice getting in the bloody switchboard.’
‘Oh, it may mean nothing at all, sir,’ agreed MacGregor soothingly, ‘but it is just one more small point, isn’t it?’ He got his notebook out. ‘Can you give me a description of the girl, sir?’
‘Eh?’
MacGregor tried again. ‘What did she look like, sir?’
‘Somebody’s sitting there!’
The lady who had been about to slide into the vacant seat next to Dover all but jumped out of her skin. ‘Oh, oh, I do beg your pardon!’ she gasped and, being rather sensitive, rushed off to the ladies’ room to have hysterics.
Dover moodily watched her go. ‘Youngish,’ he said in answer to MacGregor’s question. ‘And hairy.’
‘Hairy, sir?’
‘She’d got a lot of hair, you fool! On her head. Sticking out! Like they all wear it these days.’
‘Could it have been a wig, sir?’ asked MacGregor with sudden inspiration.
Dover groaned. ‘How should I know?’
‘Was she tall, sir?’
‘Not really.’
‘Fat?’
‘Sort of average,’ said Dover, conscious that he wasn’t cutting too good a figure. ‘She was just an ordinary girl.’
To tell the truth, MacGregor hadn’t actually expected anything better. He really would have been a fool if he’d expected Dover to take any notice of a mere popsie when there was food and drink in the same room. ‘Did she wear glasses, sir?’
Dover hadn’t the faintest idea. ‘No!’
‘Was she wearing a skirt or trousers, sir?’
Dover grimaced with relief. ‘I couldn’t see, could I?’ he asked. ‘The edge of the desk hid her bottom half.’
MacGregor drew little matchstick men all over his notebook. ‘She wasn’t wearing a uniform, I take it, sir?’ He glanced up to find Dover staring helplessly at him. ‘She wasn’t a policewoman?’
No, Dover was almost one hundred per cent sure that his lady visitor had not been a uniformed policewoman. ‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it?’ he demanded, infuriated by MacGregor’s barely veiled exasperation. ‘It must narrow the held down, for God’s sake.’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘Sir, there must be hundreds of women in Scotland Yard at any given moment. Legitimately there, I mean, if we’re actually looking for somebody who slipped through the security checks – well, then I don’t think we’ll ever find her.’
‘She was wearing a sort of overall!’ crowed Dover, swelling with pride. ‘A blue overall! Sort of shiny.’
‘And as soon as she gets out of your room, sir, she takes it off and pops it in her handbag. In other words, we’ve no idea how she was dressed. If, on top of that, she was wearing a wig . . .’
Dover caught MacGregor’s pessimism and glumly finished off his drink. ‘We’ll have to have an identity parade,’ he said.
Seven
WHAT DOVER HAD HAD IN MIND TURNED OUT TO be rather impracticable. He’d had visions of lolling back at his ease while the entire female work force of Scotland Yard paraded past his totally unlickerish gaze. It fell to MacGregor to indicate a few of the difficulties. The number of women concerned ran into several hundreds and they would never all be available for inspection at the same time. Then there was the quite unacceptable disru
ption such a procession would cause and, finally. . .
‘We’d have a strike on our hands, sir,’ said MacGregor. ‘Or a riot. The Yard’s full of Women’s Libbers, you know, and they wouldn’t take kindly to being put through a process which would strike some of them as being on a par with the selection of candidates for the harem.’
Dover, looking more disconsolate than any frustrated pasha, asked for alternative suggestions.
MacGregor was well used to doing Dover’s thinking for him and had come prepared to offer a solution. ‘I thought we might just stroll around, sir, and see if you could recognise anybody.’ It was a plan which relied rather heavily on the benevolence of Lady Luck for its success and required a mite too much effort on Dover’s part to be entirely palatable, but the chief inspector raised no objection.
‘Come on, then!’ he said.
MacGregor blinked. ‘Now, sir?’ It was live past nine on a damp Monday morning and Dover usually required at least an hour to recuperate from the rigours of his journey into the centre of London.
But Dover had got his dander up. I hat he should have suffered the indignities of being kidnapped was bad enough, but that they should drug him into submission in his own bloody office was unforgivable. ‘Now!’ he repeated, and off they went.
By eleven o’clock, of course, all Dover’s righteous anger had evaporated and his feet were playing him up something cruel. MacGregor spotted the danger signs and led the way to the nearest canteen. Dover sank down thankfully at one of the tables while MacGregor queued up for two cups of coffee and enough tasty snacks to feed a family of five for a week or, alternatively, to keep Dover going till lunch-time.
So far, the search for the elusive lady had been unsuccessful. Although he would have died rather than admit it, Dover’s eyesight wasn’t what it was and several women had already taken vociferous objection to the dose and intimate scrutiny to which they had been exposed. At least two of the more delicately nurtured females were even now penning their indignant resignations and one stalwart trade unionist, who prided herself on knowing a rapist when she saw one, had convened a protest meeting of sister lady-cleaners for one o’clock.