‘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
