by Joyce Porter
‘Can I help you?’
From behind MacGregor came a grunt of satisfaction. Dover, having found a chair, had duly sat down on it. In a better humour now that he’d got the weight off his feet, he took it upon himself to answer the tiny lady’s query. ‘Yes, I’m looking for a bright pink mini-skirt and young hopeful here’d like to see what you’ve got in gold lame blouses.’
‘We’re from the police,’ said MacGregor quickly, producing his warrant card and passing it across the counter. ‘From Scotland Yard.’
‘Are you here in an official capacity?’ asked the tiny lady.
‘Blimey!’ objected Dover impatiently. ‘We don’t look like customers, do we?’
The tiny lady’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, you’d be surprised at some of the people who come in here,’ she whispered. ‘They don’t even pretend that they’re looking for a wee present for a sweetheart or a wife. Sometimes I hardly know where to look. And such big, hairy men, too! Oh dear,’ – she fetched up a sigh of incredible depth and pathos – ‘when I think what this shop used to be in the old days! Such a nice class of lady! And such lovely wee clothes! People used to come from as far off as Swindon to purchase our all-wool spencers, you know, and our. . .’
‘Actually,’ MacGregor broke in apologetically, ‘we are making enquiries about this blue suede jacket.’ He produced the garment from his brief case.
I he tiny lady took it with regret. ‘I know one ought to be prosecuted for selling such rubbish, but it’s not really against the laws is it? Of course, in the old days before we were taken over – when we were still Clarissa Modes – we wouldn’t have had trash like this in the shop then. Not even for the sales.’
‘A girl bought that coat here,’ said Dover, rushing in where poor devils like MacGregor hesitated to tread. ‘Who was she?’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said the tiny lady, turning back the collar of the jacket, ‘but this garment was bought in London, not here. You can see from the wee label. All garments offered for sale in this establishment bear our own label – Naicewhere, Bath. Mr Diamantopoulos calls it “personalising the merchandise”.’ The tone of voice in which the tiny lady made this last observation was probably actionable under the Race Relations Act.
Dover sat back and left it to MacGregor to sort that particular mess out.
The tiny lady’s face cleared. ‘Ah, I see! Not this actual garment but one similar to it.’
‘With your label on it,’ said MacGregor. ‘Can you remember selling it?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘To a young woman?’
‘All our customers are young. It’s Mr Diamantopoulos’s policy to aim at the teenage market.’
MacGregor tried the Photofit pictures and there was a moment of triumph as the tiny lady unhesitatingly picked one out. ‘That’s that poor girl they found butchered in the Crescent, isn’t it? Why, it must be five years ago at least. Does this mean that you’ve caught the murderer at last?’
MacGregor collected up his pictures and got down to doing things the hard way. ‘flow many of these blue suede jackets did you sell?’
The tiny lady considered. ‘Not more than half a dozen. It wasn’t a popular line. Apart from being incredibly hideous and very badly made, they were rather on the expensive side for our clientele.’
‘Do your customers have accounts?’
The tiny lady shook her head. ‘Mr Diamantopoulos doesn’t believe in extending credit. He’s not very keen on cheques, either.’
‘So most of your customers pay cash?’ MacGregor’s hopes dribbled away. It was obvious that he and Dover were marching resolutely up yet another blind alley.
‘Sometimes it seems more like soap coupons and wee Green Shield stamps!’ tittered the tiny lady, making a tiny joke.
Dover moved fractiously on his chair and, looking up at MacGregor, gave him the thumbs-down sign. MacGregor was loathe to admit defeat but there seemed little point in prolonging the agony. He risked one last question.
‘Can you remember when it was you had these coats in stock? Was it recently?’
‘Oh, no.’ The little lady looked happier as she saw that her two visitors were preparing to leave. ‘About a year ago. They were part of our spring stock.’
‘And you’d sold them all by when?’
The tiny lady frowned. ‘Two we didn’t sell. They were returned to our central depot to make room for the summer stock coming in. That would be just after Easter.’
MacGregor immolated himself on a rack of plastic shower coats as Dover moved relentlessly towards the door. ‘But that means you only sold four of these coats, doesn’t it? Are you sure you can’t remember any of the girls you sold them to?’
The tiny lady was genuinely sorry. ‘I try to put everything that happens in here right out of my head,’ she confessed. ‘It’s the only way to retain what wee bit of sanity one still possesses. And it may only have been three other jackets, actually. I can’t recall if Mr Diamantopoulos allocated us live or six. We carry such a multiplicity of garments that it’s really quite impossible.
Dover stood in the middle of the pavement outside and let the tourists flow round him. ‘Did you notice how that silly cow in there kept calling everything “wee”?’ he demanded crossly as MacGregor, having made the apologies and given the thanks, joined him.
‘Not particularly, sir,’ said MacGregor.
‘Well, I bloody well did!’ snapped Dover, looking up and down the street with some anxiety. ‘Where do you reckon the nearest gents’ toilet is?’
* * *
And it was on that note that the attempt to bring the kidnappers of Detective Chief Inspector Dover to book really came to an end. In the public lavatory at the bus station in Bath. Like most of the criminal investigations with which Dover was associated, it expired not with a bang but with a whimper and you’d have been hard put to it to find anybody who cared tuppence either way. The top brass at the Yard weren’t pushing things. I hey’d decided that the kidnapping of Dover didn’t herald a full-scale attack on the forces of law and order, and that was all they were really worried about. Even Sergeant MacGregor tailed signally to work up much enthusiasm for the capture of the men who had taken Dover off his back for a few short, glorious hours.
And what about Dover himself? Well, our hero had been keen enough on vengeance at the beginning but it soon penetrated even his thick skull that you couldn’t carry on a vendetta without involving yourself in a quite unacceptable amount of work. And work, in Dover’s estimation, was the worst of all the four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words.
The Great British Public, of course, had packed it in weeks ahead of anybody else and would have responded now with a look of blank astonishment if anybody had asked them who either Dover or the Claret Tappers were.
Not that the Bath fiasco brought all activity to a grinding halt. Dover managed to maintain the appearance of being busy whenever anybody looked at him and kept MacGregor on the hop with various niggling little jobs. Reports continued to dribble in as police forces throughout the country and various departments in New Scotland Yard pursued their enquiries until they reached the blankest of blank walls. The fingerprint boys failed to identify any of the prints in the house in Flam borough Close. An old Austin taxi was found burnt out on the sands at Southport but whether it was the one in which Dover had been abducted no-one could say.
From time to time Dover made the odd telephone call, urging his colleagues to greater efforts but he knew as well as anybody that things couldn’t go on like this much longer. Commander Brockhurst was wonderfully generous and it was only when he simply couldn’t stand Dover making the whole of Scotland Yard look shabby and untidy any longer that he took the easy way out. There was a particularly dreary murder up in Northumberland. The local police took one look at it, declared themselves baffled and called in the Yard. They got Dover. Within a matter of hours both he and MacGregor had disappeared into those Northern mists. New Scotland Yard smartened up overnight, Com
mander Brockhurst was seen to smile again and – well – who cares about a few disgruntled Northumbrians?
It was then that the Claret Tappers struck for the second time.
Twelve
FOR REASONS WHICH MUST REMAIN SECRET FOR many years to come, Dover spent most of Maundy Thursday sitting in a tool shed on one of the better-known Northumbrian golf courses. For company he had a couple of oily grass-cutters, a rusty hand lawn-mower, and a platoon of spiders which kept peeping out at him from behind a mouldering heap of old rakes and brushes. By early afternoon he had consumed all the coffee and sandwiches he’d brought with him and was idly wondering if time would ever remove the marks which the empty beer crate he was using as a chair had cut into his ample posterior.
The shed was cold, damp and smelly.
Dover was fed up.
At four o’clock MacGregor arrived, soaked to the skin and looking worried.
‘And about bloody time!’ Dover welcomed him.
MacGregor sensibly refused to be drawn into an argument about the justice or otherwise of their system of watch-keeping. ‘We’ve got to go back to London, sir.’
‘Thank God!’ said Dover piously and began to put some real effort into working the stiffness out of his joints. ‘We’ll never be able to pin it on that Sunday School teacher, not if we hang around this dump till the bloody cows come home. I told Brockhurst that months ago.’
‘We can catch a train at six, sir.’
‘Tonight?’ Dover was understandably outraged. They’d been stuck up in Northumberland for three weeks doing damn all and nobody seemed to have missed them. ‘What’s all the sweat about?’
I don’t know, sir,’ admitted MacGregor. ‘I just got a very curt message from the commander. They did want us to fly down but I pointed out that it would be much quicker by train.’ MacGregor shivered. ‘Especially in this weather.’
‘I won’t have time to pack,’ complained Dover. ‘And what about this murder? Are we supposed just to chuck our hands in and leave it hanging in mid air?’
‘We’ve got to catch the six o’clock train, sir,’ said MacGregor patiently. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘But, why?’ demanded Dover as they left the shed together and braved the howling gale and the driving rain outside. ‘What do they want us in London for?’
MacGregor had been feeding his ulcers with worries like that. ‘They didn’t say, sir. It all seems to be a bit hush-hush.’ Dover completed the manoeuvres which placed him on the lee side of his sergeant. ‘’Strewth, we’re not going to be on the carpet for something, are we?’ He tried to search his memory but there were really too many sins of omission to keep track of. ‘That’s the trouble with people these days,’ he muttered obscurely.
It was difficult talking in those near hurricane conditions but MacGregor made the effort:. ‘What is, sir?’
‘Always writing to their bloody MPs!’ shouted Dover, clutching at his bowler hat. ‘Do no more than rest your hand in a friendly way on their bleeding shoulder and they’re bloody threatening you with assault.’ However, Dover was never one to waste his time on theoretical calamities when there were more pressing problems close at hand. ‘How much further to this bloody car?’
‘It’s just by the ninth tee, sir!’ screamed MacGregor, the wind tearing the words out of his throat. ‘Only half a mile!’
‘Jesus!’ gasped Dover and, not being inhibited by any false pride, grabbed hold of MacGregor’s arm and generously allowed him to share the burden.
British Rail was up to its usual tricks and so it was two o’clock in the morning before Dover and MacGregor clambered wearily up the steps of New Scotland Yard and passed through its portals. Even at that ungodly hour there was an air of suppressed excitement about the place which MacGregor found reassuring. Nothing that Dover did or didn’t do could have got things buzzing like that.
Commander Brockhurst was waiting for them in his office. He was stripped down to his shirt sleeves and silk braces and was, figuratively speaking, wearing his naval hat. This was the term disrespectful subordinates used for the occasions when the commander saw himself, blue of eye, tanned of skin and firm of jaw, standing foresquare on the bridge and running a tight ship. It was a bit of play-acting that usually presaged squalls ahead.
Dover and MacGregor were, most untypically, invited to sit down while Commander Brockhurst completed the nautical scene by lighting a rather nasty-looking pipe.
‘What I have to tell you,’ he began, making smoke in a way that would have warmed the heart of any destroyer captain, ‘is strictly confidential. You’re not to breathe a word of it to anybody inside this building, never mind outside it.’ He caught sight of the silly smirk on MacGregor’s face and hastened to make the correction. ‘Except for the other members of the special squad which is being put together for this operation. Now, is the need for absolute secrecy understood?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘You, too, Dover?’
Dover endeavoured to terminate his jaw-cracking yawn prematurely with the usual disastrous results. Seething with impatience Commander Brockhurst took the watering eyes and contorted features of his bête noire as indicating assent.
‘The Claret Tappers have pulled off another kidnapping job!’
If Commander Brockhurst had expected to startle Dover and MacGregor out of their skins with the news, he was disappointed. They had already worked out for themselves that another kidnapping was a possible explanation for their abrupt recall to London.
‘A police officer again, sir?’ asked MacGregor.
‘The three-month-old grandson of the Prime Minister!’
This time the reaction was all that Commander Brockhurst could have wished. MacGregor’s jaw dropped with a click that was all but audible and even Dover produced a strangled ‘’strewth’, from a dry throat.
‘I’ll bet that’s put the cat amongst the pigeons,’ said MacGregor shakily. ‘Gosh!’
M hope you appreciate the heavy responsibility this places on your shoulders, Dover!’
Dover stared pop-eyed across the desk at the commander and swallowed painfully. His bemused brain managed to recollect that some have greatness thrust upon them – but this was ridiculous. ‘You’re putting me in charge, sir?’ he asked.
Commander Brockhurst caught his pipe just in time and cursed mightily as some of the hot ashes spilled out onto his hand. His reply to Dover’s timid query was appropriately salty but, shortened and expurgated of all obscenities, it still amounted to ‘no’. ‘The Commissioner, himself, is in overall control, of course, but I’m the one who’ll be doing the real work. They’re all trying to get in on the act,’ added Commander Brockhurst bitterly. ‘Special Branch, the Ministry of Defence, the Regional Crime Squad from where the kid was snatched . . . Good God, I’ve even had an inspector from Motorways Patrol on the blower this evening trying to stick his twopenny worth in. And that’s not mentioning that bloody MP who reckons he ought to be running the show because his younger brother once thought of becoming a police cadet.’
MacGregor looked up. ‘So the kidnapping’s not entirely secret, sir?’
‘Well, – Commander Brockhurst had the grace to look a little sheepish – ‘there has been some slight leakage, of course, but it’s not got to go any further. We don’t want the general public getting hold of the story.’
Meanwhile Dover had been experiencing a faint twinge of sympathy for Commander Brockhurst. It was a lousy business when you got yourself lumbered with a job that was destined to involve you in endless labour and then end in tears. Fortified by a lifetime’s experience of shirking, Dover had spotted a way out and now generously offered it to his superior. ‘You want to tell ’em where to stick it!’ he advised. ‘Kidnapping’s not your pigeon. You’re the boss of the Murder Squad and kidnapping’s not murder, is it?’
Commander Brockhurst had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder on the mystery of how Dover always alighted with such unerring accuracy on the inessentials o
f any problem. ‘I have been put in charge of this investigation, Dover, for two damned good reasons. One – it is a murder case. The Claret Tappers killed the au pair girl who’d been left in charge of the baby. And, two – you’re the only person who’s been in direct contact with the kidnapping gang and you happen to be under my command. Now, let’s get one thing straight right at the beginning, Dover!’ Commander Brockhurst leaned across his desk and thrust his chin out more pugnaciously than ever. ‘Whatever else happens, I intend to emerge from this business smelling of roses. If, to achieve this, I have to wash my hands in your blood, that’s perfectly OK by me. Get it?’
Dover got it all right and sank back miserably in his chair, his pasty face growing gradually pastier as he contemplated the awful prospect that lay ahead of him. ’Strewth, he’d be lucky if he sneaked more than a couple of days off for the next bloody fortnight!
Meanwhile MacGregor was looking all bright-eyed and eager. ‘How do we know that this kidnapping is the work of the Claret Tappers, sir? Have they already made contact?’
‘They have,’ said Commander Brockhurst grimly. He was really no fonder of clever young sergeants than he was of addle-pated old chief inspectors.
‘It might just be another gang using the Claret Tappers’ name, sir, in order to put us off the scent. After all, the Claret Tappers did get a tremendous amount of publicity when Chief Inspector Dover was . . .’
‘Sergeant!’ Commander Brockhurst remembered what they’d taught him on that man-management course and modified his tone to the merely brusque. ‘In the message that we got from the gang who’ve kidnapped the Prime Minister’s grandchild, mention was made of the exact room in which Mr Dover here was detained in that house in Flamborough Close. Now, nobody knew about that except a tiny handful of people here at the Yard and the kidnappers themselves. Right?’
‘Well,’ began MacGregor.
Commander Brockhurst rolled right over him. ‘Suppose you keep your questions until you’re in possession of all the facts, sergeant.’