by Joyce Porter
‘Didn’t fool me for a bloody minute,’ claimed Dover sleepily. ‘I didn’t go haring off after anybody.’
There was no disputing the truth of that statement and MacGregor couldn’t help reflecting that really conscientious and imaginative criminals were wasted on Dover. He abandoned such treasonable thoughts quickly, however, when he realised he was being addressed. ‘Oh – er – I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘I asked you,’ said Dover crossly, ‘where you found the kid. You growing cloth ears or something?’
‘The Prime Minister’s grandchild, sir? Oh, the Claret Tappers had coped with that rather neatly, too, I thought. You remember our “Mary Jones”, sir? The girl in the canteen? Well, her real name is Jean Hamilton and she’s the sister of one of the men in the gang, but I’ll call her “Mary Jones” to make things easier for you.’
‘Oh, ta very much!’
MacGregor took a deep breath and reminded himself that not thumping somebody in the teeth was a positive Christian virtue. ‘It was Mary Jones’s job to look after the baby, sir. Did I tell you she was not only Hamilton’s sister but also the girl friend of Freddie Collins.’
‘The baby was?’ asked Dover, waking up as he got the chance to display his wit. ‘Well, you do surprise me! I thought the kid was a boy!’
MacGregor kept his face icily expressionless. One day, though . . . ‘Mary Jones took the Prime Minister’s kidnapped grandchild to Weston-super-Mare, sir. She has an aunt there who runs a seaside boarding house. Mary Jones went to stay with her. It’s off-season, you see, so there was plenty of room.’
‘The aunt must be a nutter,’ objected Dover, hunting through all his desk drawers on the off-chance that there was something edible lurking there. ‘The papers were full of that brat being nicked.’ He slammed the last fruitless drawer shut. ‘Didn’t it occur to the old cow to put two and bloody two together when her niece turned up with a baby?’
MacGregor knew the answer to that question and, in his eagerness to share this knowledge with Dover, he leaned forward eagerly across his desk. Dover, a great humourist, chose to react as though an assault was about to be made upon his virtue and MacGregor, helplessly watching all those moppings and mowings of mock alarm, chalked up yet another grievance against the disgusting old pig. Gritting his teeth, he resumed his seat with as much dignity as he could. ‘The aunt thought the baby was Mary Jones’s child, sir. Apparently Miss Jones had produced an illegitimate infant – a girl, as it happens – some six months ago. The aunt knew about this but what she didn’t know was that the baby had been adopted almost immediately after it had been born. There’d been some sort of family disagreement or other and the aunt in Weston-super-Mare wasn’t on speaking terms with the rest of the family.’
‘A likely story!’ guffawed Dover. ‘Blimey, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything! You want to get old Auntie in and thump the living daylights out of her. She’d tell you a different tale then.’
‘I’m afraid we can’t touch her, sir. She says she didn’t know and Mary Jones says she didn’t know. Unless we can find some proof that she did know . . .’ MacGregor shrugged his shoulders.
‘Was the Prime Minister’s brat in good nick?’ asked Dover without much interest.
‘Oh, yes, sir. He’d been well looked after. Whatever else the Claret Tippers are, they’re not monsters.’
‘They killed that au pair girl,’ Dover pointed out sourly.
‘They claim that was a most unfortunate accident, sir.’
‘And what about the brutal and sadistic way they treated me?’ demanded Dover, alighting on a subject more up his street. ‘I still haven’t recovered from the inhuman treatment I received at their hands. To say nothing of having to climb up that bloody mountain with the bloody ransom money.’ Dover interrupted his threnody for lost health to make a heartrending appeal. ‘You got a bar of chocolate on you, laddie? Or anything to eat? Well, don’t just sit there shaking your bloody head! Have a look through your pockets to make sure.’
MacGregor obediently went through the motions though he was perfectly sure that the pockets of his expensively tailored suit contained neither scotch eggs, packets of sandwiches nor even the odd cream cake. Very tentatively he made the obvious suggestion. ‘The canteen, sir?’
Dover’s scowl deepened. ‘They’re on bloody strike! Don’t you know anything?’ He slumped back in his chair. ‘Oh, well, you might as well get on with your story. Maybe it’ll take my mind off things.’
‘Actually, sir, I don’t think there’s much more to tell. We found the ransom money, still intact in the mail-bags, in a garden shed at Collins’s house. The Claret Tappers weren’t going to make any attempt to spend it until what they called the heat was well and truly off. They said they were prepared to wait eighteen months or two years, even. They’d got it all planned out.’
‘You sound as though you’ve got a soft spot for these young thugs!’
MacGregor took time off to give this accusation some serious consideration. Nobody who’d thought of kidnapping Dover could be all bad, of course, but on the other hand they had let the old devil go again. It was hard to forgive thoughtless behaviour like that. MacGregor shook his head. ‘The Claret Tappers are just a bunch of cheap crooks like all the rest of ’em, sir. Greedy and lazy.’
The most idle and avaricious policeman in the United Kingdom (and, possibly, the world) nodded his head in righteous agreement. ‘Do anything for money except bloody work,’ he said.
‘Precisely, sir.’ MacGregor took a surreptitious glance at his watch. Good heavens, was that all it was? He could have sworn he’d been sitting there for hours and hours, not just a twenty-five lousy minutes.
Dover’s mind, meanwhile, had latched onto happier fantasies. ‘Was it you that found the ransom money?’ he asked enviously.
‘Superintendent Trevelyan and I, sir. Once the Claret Tuppers realised that we were on to them and that the game was up, they became quite cooperative. I think the death of that au par girl upset them quite a lot.’
‘You and Trevelyan, eh?’ Disappointed, Dover helped himself to another of MacGregor’s cigarettes. ‘Pity.’
‘Sir?’
‘Skip it! What about that horse thing?’
‘Horse thing, sir?’
‘Jesus!’ exploded Dover. ‘Sometimes you strike me as being thicker than a couple of bloody planks. The horse thing I had to climb that bloody mountain to tie the money bags on the lousy back of! What else, for God’s sake?’
‘Oh, the Shetland pony, sir?’ MacGregor’s face brightened as comprehension dawned. ‘Oh, it’s line as far as I am aware, sir. None the worse for its experiences, you know.’
‘Very humorous!’ snarled Dover, who could always be relied on to see a joke and take umbrage at it. ‘How did the Claret Tappers come to use the nasty little brute?’
‘Oh, one of the lads – Joe Buller, the redundant factory worker – had spent a sort of working holiday at harvest time last year on the next-door farm, sir. He’s a bit more au fait with the country than the others are and he realised that the pony, once it was untied, would lose no time in taking the shortest way home for its breakfast. The Claret Tappers knew we wouldn’t hand over all that cash without at least trying to follow them, so they took a few precautions. They assumed – quite rightly, as it turned out – that we would place all our hopes on an unobtrusive surveillance of the roads. Well, in that particular area, there was very little else we could do. The Claret Tappers simply came up with a collection method which didn’t use the roads at all – or not roads that were passable for cars. Actually, the one thing which would have foxed them would have been a helicopter hovering overhead, but, if they’d spotted any kind of aircraft in the vicinity, they would have called the whole operation off.’
‘And killed the kid?’
‘Well, they say not, sir, but your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Better!’ sniggered Dover.
‘And they do point out, sir, that t
hey didn’t kill you when the ransom money wasn’t forthcoming.’
‘I’m well aware they didn’t kill me, laddie!’ snapped Dover. A feeling of tiredness seemed to be creeping over him and making him more fractious than usual. ‘What about. . .?’ The end of the question sank without trace in an unhibited yawn.
‘What about what, sir?’
Dover was blowed if he could remember, so he gave expression to something else that had been on his mind for some time. ‘I suppose they’ll be dishing a few medals out for this business, eh?’
‘Medals, sir?’ MacGregor picked an invisible piece of lint off the sleeve of his jacket. ‘What on earth for?’
‘For deeds of bravery and endurance beyond the call of bloody duty!’ snapped Dover. ‘Some of us have sacrificed our health and strength on this particular battlefield.’
MacGregor got a piece of paper out of his drawer and unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen. His next claim for expenses was going to need some working out. ‘Well, there might be the odd commendation, sir, I suppose. Seeing that there were VIPs involved.’
‘Well, even that’d be better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish,’ said Dover, wondering if MacGregor had been taking private lessons in obtuseness.
MacGregor got his notebook out. ‘Now you come to mention it, sir, I believe I did hear some talk about Superintendent Trevelyan being in line for something.’
‘Would you bloody believe it?’ demanded Dover, his jowls quivering with rage and disappointment.
It wasn’t a commendation, though, sir.’
Dover clutched his head. ‘Not a cash reward?’
‘A personal letter from the Prime Minister, I think, sir.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘To the best of my knowledge, sir.’
Dover folded his arms across his chest and issued his final pronouncement, not only on the kidnappings but upon life as he saw it in general. ‘There’s no bloody justice!’ he said.