Dover, unprompted for once, resumed his story. ‘Then we drove off. From start to finish I don’t reckon the whole business of snatching me took more than a minute at the outside. Oh, I’m telling you – those boys were professionals, all right! As slick and ruthless as they come. I didn’t stand a chance. Well, eventually we arrived at our destination and it’s no bloody good you asking me where it was because I don’t know. I told you, I was gagged and blindfolded. Well, I was forced out of the taxi – at gun point, mind you – and hurried into a building of some sort and taken upstairs. Then they made me lie face down on the floor.’ Dover’s bottom lip protruded disconsolately as he recalled the indignities to which he had been subjected. ‘They untied my hands and the next thing I heard was a door being slammed and locked. I waited till everything had gone quiet and then I pulled the bag off my head and removed that damned sticking-plaster.’ Dover felt tenderly at his little black moustache. ‘And then I had a rest. The room I was in was dark so, when I’d got my circulation going again, I started groping about until I found an electric light switch. I switched it on and discovered that I’d been incarcerated in a small room with no windows.’
MacGregor’s pencil paused in its mad rush over the paper. ‘A cupboard, sir?’
‘No, not a cupboard!’ said Dover tartly. ‘A small room. And now,’ – he folded his arms resolutely – ‘you’d better nip outside and organise some coffee because you’re not going to get another cheep out of me till I’ve wet my whistle. It’s blooming dry work, all this talking/
It took MacGregor longer than he would have believed to bribe and cajole a pot of coffee and a few biscuits out of a most uncooperative hospital staff. In the end, more by good luck than judgement, he chanced upon a blackleg who was prepared to sacrifice her most deeply held principles for hard cash. ‘And you want to think yourself lucky,’ she informed MacGregor as she shoved a tray swimming with spilt coffee into his hands, ‘that it isn’t laced with arsenic!’
MacGregor managed to direct the stream of coffee away from his trousers. ‘Oh, come now,’ he chided his benefactress, ‘things can’t be as bad as all that, surely? He’s only been here a few hours.’
‘And, if he’s here for many more, sonnie,’ – the tea-lady’s curlers wobbled menacingly under her headscarf – ‘there’ll be ructions that’ll leave your head ringing!’
MacGregor woke Dover up again, plumped his pillows for him, poured out his coffee and sugared it, and finally lit another cigarette for him. In return Dover grudgingly consented to answer a few questions.
‘These kidnappers, sir,’ began MacGregor, consulting his notes without much hope. ‘Can you tell me a bit more about them? What age were they, for example?’
Dover thought about it. ‘Mid-twenties, p’raps. Like I told you, I barely clapped eyes on ‘em.’
Tall? Short? Fat? Thin?’
‘Medium,’ said Dover firmly.
‘All of them, sir?’
Dover nodded his head and gave most of his attention to spooning some soggy biscuit out of the depths of his coffee cup.
MacGregor was past sighing. ‘What about their voices, sir?
‘Nobody said more than half a dozen words to me the whole time.’
‘But the man who invited you into the taxi, sir? Had he got an accent of any sort? Was it a cultured voice or . . .?’
‘Ordinary,’ said Dover. The soggy biscuit was now sliding gently down the front of his pyjama jacket and his efforts to scoop it up were being hampered by the cigarette smoke that kept getting in his eyes.
MacGregor abandoned the voices. ‘This taxi ride, sir, – how long would you say it was?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Dover, always ready with the quick repartee. ‘I could hardly consult my bloody watch, could I? Not with my eyes blindfolded.’
‘Couldn’t you make a guess, sir?’
‘I dozed off, didn’t I?’ demanded Dover, getting cross. ‘I’d had a hard day and it was dark and what with that bag thing pulled over my head . . . The journey could have lasted five minutes or five hours for all I know.’
MacGregor had got a whole batch of questions about turning corners and stopping for traffic lights and speeding in a straight line down motorways. He now proceeded to forget about them and moved on to other topics. ‘When you finally stopped, sir, did you get the impression that you were in a town or in the country?’
Dover looked at him in astonishment. ‘How the hell should I know?’
‘Didn’t you hear anything, sir?’
‘Such as what?’
‘Well, cars and lorries going past, sir. Or owls hooting or cows mooing. Anything like that.’
Dover gazed blankly round the room. ‘They ought to be bringing me my dinner soon.’
But MacGregor was not to be deflected from his purpose – and men have been given medals for less. ‘Now, this “building” you say you were taken into, sir . . .’
‘Frog-marched!’ Dover corrected him indignantly. ‘My arms are black and blue!’
‘Was it a house, sir?’
‘What else could it have been, for God’s sake?’
‘Well, it could have been a disused factory or a barn or a cricket pavilion or. . .’
Dover blew unpleasantly down his nose. ‘You’ve been seeing too many of these television thrillers, sonnie,’ he observed scathingly. ‘It was a house. And we went down a bit of a hall before we got to the stairs.’
That was better! MacGregor struck while the iron was tepid. ‘Carpeted, sir?’
Dover pondered long and hard over this one. Finally he shook his head. ‘Bare boards!’ he announced with somewhat unjustified pride. ‘Stairs and hall!’
‘Did you hear any aeroplanes living overhead, sir?’
Dover, not having seen the him in which this clue led to the capture of a whole clutch of kidnappers, was puzzled. ‘Fat chance I had of hearing anything with
