“Miss Porter shows splendid fertility in comic invention. The comic-horrific ending must be the best crime fiction joke of the year.”
—Julian Symons, Sunday Times
“Meet Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover. He’s fat, lazy, a scrounger and the worst detective at Scotland Yard. But you will love him.”
—Manchester Evening News
For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg. Though there’s every cause to assume that she has been murdered—she gave her favors freely and may even have stooped to a bit of blackmail— no body is to be found. Weighing in at sixteen stone, she’d be rather hard to overlook. But where is she? And why should Dover, of all people, be called upon to find her? Or, for that matter, even bother to solve the damned case?
JOYCE PORTER lives in Wiltshire, England where she continues to write Inspector Dover mysteries, as well as her two series featuring the “Hon-Con,” a gentlewoman/detective, and secret agent Eddie Brown.
Second printing
Copyright © 1964 by Joyce Porter
This edition first published in 1989 by Foul Play Press,
an imprint of The Countryman Press, Inc.,
Woodstock, Vermont 05091
ISBN 0-88150-1344
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
To
MY MOTHER
Chapter One
IT was spring. The windows of the chain-stores bloomed with plastic daffodils and the first buds were beginning to burgeon through layers of London soot.
The Assistant Commissioner (C) took a deep breath and smiled happily as he detected a vernal whiff in the mingled petrol and diesel fumes. With reckless abandon he celebrated the rebirth of the year by purchasing a one-and-sixpenny pink carnation for his buttonhole. The bloom had been forced in a continental hothouse and glistened not with dew but with a mouthful of tap water which had just been spat upon it by the flowerseller, but for the Assistant Commissioner it symbolized being in England now that April was there. He strode jauntily along to his office in New Scotland Yard, casting roguish glances at the legs of such young ladies as he happened to meet.
By four o’clock in the afternoon both the pink carnation and the Assistant Commissioner were looking their age. The Assistant Commissioner had spent most of the day on one of those futile committees which bedevil the lives of our top administrators. After five hours of acrimonious bickering he had been defeated over a matter of such staggering insignificance that both sides had rapidly discarded not only common sense but even expediency, and based their arguments on matters of principle. And in matters of principle, as well as in everything else, the Assistant Commissioner liked to get his own way.
He was still resentfully chewing over his defeat when, just after four o’clock, his phone rang.
He snatched the receiver up. ‘Well ?’ he snarled.
His secretary was unperturbed. ‘The Chief Constable of Creedshire on the line for you, sir,’ she said calmly, ‘Mr Bartlett.’
‘Hullo, Bartlett!’ roared the Assistant Commissioner, who always shouted on the telephone. ‘You’re in the chair now, I take it?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Mr Bartlett’s voice came tinnily over the wires. ‘I took over yesterday.’
‘Must be a very nice little job!’ bellowed the Assistant Commissioner. ‘Down there in the country at this time of the year Wouldn’t mind changing places with you myself, I must say.’
‘Yes, it’s very . . . ’
‘Not too much work, either, I’ll bet! Bit of sheep stealing and failing to notify foot-and-mouth and that’s your lot, eh?’
‘Well, not quite. That’s what I wanted to . . . ’
‘I used to tell old George Turner he’d got the cushiest job in the country. God only knows, he won’t have any problems adjusting to retirement! He hasn’t done a stroke in the last fifteen years to my certain knowledge !’ The Assistant Commissioner chuckled ruefully and prepared to launch into a well-oiled dissertation on his own unfair burden of cares and responsibilities.
Mr Bardett cut the small talk short. ‘I need your help,’ he said flatly.
‘Oh?’ said the Assistant Commissioner. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘A young woman’s disappeared.’
‘How long?’
‘Her employer – she works as a kind of maid – hasn’t seen her since Tuesday lunch-time.’
‘But, dammit, man, it’s only Thursday now!’ protested the Assistant Commissioner. ‘You don’t want to start getting into a muck-sweat yet! She’s probably only hopped off for a few days with her boy-friend!’
‘There’s no indication at all that she intended to go away, rather the reverse.’ The Chief Constable sounded petulant. He had not expected an argument. His objections were grandly pushed aside.
‘My dear chap,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, only too obviously trying to be kind and helpful to the new boy, ‘girls are like that, specially servant girls. Some bright young spark catches their eye and it’s up with their skirts, hot foot to the nearest haystack. Figuratively speaking, of course. Happens in a flash, you know. Spring and all that!’
‘Well, you may be right. . . ’ began Bartlett.
‘Of course I’m right!’ Even two hundred miles away the interruption rang with self-satisfaction.
‘But I don’t think you are,’ Bartlett pressed on while he had the chance. ‘I’ve got a feeling there’s something fishy about this case and I’m not going to take any chances. Better be safe than sorry, that’s my motto! I don’t want to be caught like old George Turner was.’
‘Why, what happened to him?’ The Assistant Commissioner was a great one for a bit of police gossip.
‘In all the twenty years he sat in this chair before me, they only had one murder in the county. Woman battered to death with an axe, blood and brains all over the kitchen floor, you know the sort of thing. Well, George turned the local boys loose on it and you’ve never seen such a cock-up in your life! They ended up by arresting the vicar’s son on such rubbishy evidence that the public prosecutor wouldn’t even let
