‘Strewth!’ groaned Dover.
‘We’ve having frozen cod fingers, tinned peas and chips tonight,' Mr Lickes went on happily. ‘The menu is decided by the relief organization that sends the food up. Saves us an awful lot of worry, I can tell you, not having to work out the menus. Oh – and reconstituted Scotch broth to start with and sago pudding for afters. Awful, isn’t it? Still, this is a crisis and we must all tighten our belts.’ He took a deep breath and held it for fifteen, vein-throbbing seconds. ‘Mind you,' he blurted out with a gasp, ‘we lay on cocoa, hot toast and dripping in the lounge at nine o’clock so nobody need go hungry to bed. And now,' – he broke off to touch his toes three times in quick succession – ‘it’s time for supper.’
Under the astonished gaze of Dover and MacGregor, Mr Lickes leapt for the huge brass gong that stood in one comer of the hall and, seizing the leather-covered stick, began to thrash mercilessly away.
The response was well nigh instantaneous. Down the stairs in a genteel stampede came the Blenheim Towers guests: two men, a teenage girl and three old ladies. Sparing only a brief sideways glance, they swept inexorably into the dining-room.
Mr Lickes watched them pass and replaced his gong stick with a flourish. ‘Like the zoo, isn’t it?’ he asked in a conspiratorial whisper before following his livelihood through the open doorway.
Dover slowly shook his head. ‘We’ve been dumped in a loony-bin,' he moaned. ‘Did you see that lot?’
MacGregor nodded and tried to look on the bright side. ‘I don’t think they were too bad, sir. Some of them were rather elderly, perhaps, but. . .’
‘Elderly?’ snorted Dover. ‘A couple of ’em had rigor mortis setting in!’
‘Well, shall we wait till they’ve finished, sir, and have our meal later?’
‘Warmed-up fish fingers?’ asked Dover incredulously. ‘If your stomach can stand that, you’re lucky! Mine blooming well can’t.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘Come on! You can take the suitcases upstairs afterwards.’
Mr Lickes shot forward to welcome them as they entered the dining-room. ‘You’re over there, gentlemen,’ he informed them and nodded to a vacant table on which the white cloth was already heaving inauspiciously in the breeze. ‘But, first, you must meet your fellow guests. We’re all one big family here.’ It was a civility with which Dover would have been happy to dispense but Mr Lickes was not to be denied. He took hold of the chief inspector by the coat sleeve and led him over to the three old ladies. They were at the far end of the room but Mr Lickes was too wily a hotelier to ignore the demands of age, seniority of residence and sex.
Dover glowered with impartial dislike at Mrs Boyle, Miss Kettering and Miss Dewar. Their reactions, however, varied considerably. Mrs Boyle, the relict of a rear-admiral and a noted stickler for the ship-shape, stared in blank astonishment at the untidy hulk which confronted her.
‘Interestin’,’ she remarked in a very loud voice to her companions. ‘First time I’ve ever come across a peeler in good society. They’ll be presentin’ omnibus drivers to us next.’
It was not an observation calculated to endear her to Dover and he tied a mental knot in his mind to pin the murder on Mrs Boyle, if it was humanly possible.
Meanwhile Miss Dewar appeared to be trying to submerge her scarlet face in her soup bowl. This was not the consequence of Mrs Boyle’s somewhat unkind comments but Miss Dewar’s normal reaction to any member of the male sex who came within twenty feet. She was, as she frequently told her female friends, a martyr to shyness.
Miss Kettering, on the other hand, wasn’t. At sixty-two and with several very near misses behind her, she had not yet abandoned hope. MacGregor looked much the more enticing proposition, of course, but Miss Kettering was a realist and knew her limitations. She fixed her sights on Dover and ogled him relentlessly until Mr Lickes led him away to the next table.
Old Mr Revel was sitting alone. The batteries in his hearing-aid had run down and he hadn’t the faintest idea who Dover and MacGregor were or what they were doing there. Nevertheless he greeted them like long-lost brothers and, staggering to his feet, would have enfolded them in a warm embrace if Dover hadn’t fended him off with a well-directed shove in the chest. Mr Revel fell back, spluttering but not speechless.
‘God bless you!’ he quavered. ‘I knew it would happen one day.’ He flung a defiant, if watery, glance round the room. ‘We’ve got the bitches outnumbered at last!’
Mr Lickes hurried Dover on. ‘Bit of a misogynist, our Mr Revel,’ he murmured. ‘Always going on about being incarcerated in a matriarchal society. And now,’ he said in a normal voice as he stopped at the third and last table, ‘let me introduce you to our two earthquake victims. Their house was destroyed, you know, and they’re staying with us until they can arrange other accommodation.’
Dover’s stomach was now rumbling louder than ever and it was a lack-lustre eye that he turned on Wing Commander Bertram Pile (Retired) and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Linda. The indifference was mutual.
Mr Lickes conducted the two policemen over to their own table and improved the brief moment with a quiet warning. ‘I should give those two a wide berth, if I were you,’ he whispered. ‘The girl’s not quite all there – mentally retarded, you know – and her father tends to be a mite over-possessive. They keep themselves very much to themselves.’
Supper at the Blenheim Towers was consumed in total
