Chapter Three
THE village of Earlam lay in a shallow hollow about two miles from Irlam Old Hall. It was a small, rather uninteresting place, containing one or two pleasant-looking houses, the pub in which Dover and MacGregor were quartered, two scruffy multi-purpose shops plastered with advertisements for cigarettes and detergents, and a house which the representative of Lloyds bank visited for one and a half hours each week. Standing back a little from the village proper was the church. Next door to it was a large empty vicarage and nowadays Earlam had to share its vicar with three other neighbouring parishes.
Mrs Rugg, the mother of the missing Juliet, lived in a council house. A small estate of them had been built at the north end of the village and while, architecturally, they were really no worse than the older houses lining the main street, for some unfair reason, they looked it. The raw red brick, the gaudy modernistic paintwork, the unmatured naked-looking gardens added up to a rather unattractive vista. Sergeant MacGregor edged the car carefully along the road which was littered with sheets of dirty old cardboard, battered toy motor-cars, dogs of dubious parentage and children. At the same time he searched among the welter of Balmorals and Sandringhams, Elms and Holly Views for Ingoldis- thorpe which was where, according to his notes, Juliet’s mother lived.
Dover looked up casually. ‘There it is!’ he snapped, a split second ahead of Sergeant MacGregor, who had swerved to avoid a large eyeless Teddy bear abandoned in the middle of the road. ‘You want to get your eyes seen to, my lad!’ he said patronizingly as he climbed out of the car.
Sergeant MacGregor carefully repeated the same rude word to himself ten times as he followed his chief up the path to the front door. He could only hope that the chief inspector’s petty little success would put him in a better frame of mind than he had been so far.
Lunch at the village pub had not been an entirely happy affair. Dover’s amour propre was still quivering from its encounter with Colonel Bing, or rather with Colonel Bing’s revolting dog, and he continued to harp fretfully on his favourite theme: there was no case here, there never had been a case and there never would be a case. At any moment the blasted girl would turn up safe and sound and everybody would blame everybody else for making a lot of fuss and palaver about nothing. It was disgraceful that the time of an experienced senior police officer like himself should be wasted on such trivialities. He’d a good mind to put in a formal complaint about it. But, nevertheless, if Sergeant MacGregor wanted to waste his own time and that of other overworked branches of the police organization, he could get them to trace the owner of the car which Colonel Bing was purported to have seen parked outside on the road. For all he, Dover, cared, Sergeant MacGregor could stand on his hands and wiggle his toes in the air. He, Dover, for his part, was hungry and was now going to have his lunch, to which he had been looking forward ever since he had eaten that abortion of a breakfast which to his amazement British Railways had had the nerve not only to serve, but to charge for as well.
The village pub was called The Two Fiddlers, a name which was not inappropriate when the character of the landlord and his wife were taken into consideration. The landlord, Mr Jelly, had complacently assured Dover that his house knew its limitations. There was none of that fancy foreign muck, all written in French, here. Good plain English cooking at its best, that’s what they offered.
Dover sat down with a glass of beer and high hopes.
After a repast of tinned tomato soup, congealed shoulder of New Zealand lamb, which might well have been cooked and carved in that distant country, soggy potatoes and bright green cabbage, his face had sunk even deeper into its habitual, sullen scowl and his stomach was rumbling ominously. Through gritted teeth he refused the lump of off-white ice-cream which it was proposed to inflict on him as a sweet, and finished off his meal with a slab of unripe Danish blue cheese and two limp water-biscuits. The coffee was quite undrinkable.
Dover rose from the luncheon table with a face like thunder, and Sergeant MacGregor sighed miserably. All the signs were set for a stormy afternoon.
Dover was, in fact, looking at his most boot-faced and terrible as he ignored with a sneer the small bell-push adorning the front door of Ingoldisthorpe. He raised a large meaty fist and crashed it three times into the top left-hand panel. The row was satisfying. He stood, with Sergeant MacGregor close behind him, glowering balefully at the door. Nothing happened. Dover cursed and thumped again, even more energetically. Neighbours four houses away peeped curiously out from behind their curtains.
‘Fer Gawd’s sake,’ came a weary, lacklustre voice, ‘I wonder yer don’t use yer boots on it! Gawd knows, they look big enough.’
A small thin woman with stringy, peroxide blonde hair had appeared from the back of the house. She was wearing a faded grubby overall and a pair of down-at-heel shoes. A cigarette dangled permanently out of the side of her mouth.
Dover glared at her. ‘Mrs Rugg?’ he queried.
She looked him contemptuously up and down. ‘Y’ll have to come round the back,’ she said, ‘that door’s stuck.’
Dover and MacGregor followed her meekly round the comer of the house and into the kitchen. Mrs Rugg resumed her ironing, pausing only to blow the ash off the end of her cigarette, a feat which she performed without removing it from her mouth.
Sergeant MacGregor rapidly cleared a couple of chairs of a mixed collection of toys, articles of clothing, a pile of
