The chief inspector was brought back to his surroundings by the sound of Sir John Counter’s voice. He was addressing his daughter. He spoke in a tone far curter than Colonel Bing would ever have thought of using to her dog.
‘We shan’t want you! I’ll ring when they’re ready to leave.’
Eve Counter shrugged her shoulders faintly and left the room.
‘Insipid specimen, isn’t she?’ Sir John addressed the question to the company at large. ‘Fancy being practically confined to your room, like I am, and seeing nothing but that walking zombie day in and day out! I wish to God you people would get a move on and find Juliet before I go stark raving mad through sheer boredom!’
Dover sniffed. He didn’t care much for Sir John’s manner of speaking. He sounded like a captain of industry addressing a shareholders’ meeting, polite enough but with a thinly concealed contempt for all those not lucky enough to have been born Sir John Counter. If Dover hadn’t been feeling quite so lethargic he might have tried a bit of heavy-handed bullying himself, but at the moment listlessness and boredom had settled on him like a black cloud, and his stomach didn’t feel too good either. Must have been the cheese.
‘I understand, Sir John,’ he began, ‘that you and your daughter live here alone?’
‘That is quite correct,’ said Sir John briskly in his sharp, clipped, old man’s voice. ‘Now that Juliet’s not here, we have no servants living in at all. My daughter, Eve, claims that you can’t get ’em these days, a statement which I find hard to believe.’
‘And Miss Eve Counter is your only child?’
‘My only legitimate child, yes. However, I flatter myself that there are a goodly number of what we might call Fitz-Counters scattered around, don’t you know.’ Sir John bared his artificial teeth in a well satisfied grin and helped himself to a sweet from a large bag which lay on a table by his elbow. ‘Toffee, Inspector? Constable?’
Dover shook his head and resumed his questioning.
‘And Lady Counter?’
‘Lady Counter, I am glad to say, is dead, and has been these many years. She was an even more colourless woman than her daughter, if you can bring yourself to imagine such a thing. I have made very few mistakes in my life, Inspector, but marrying that woman came dangerously near to being one of them. I was nearly fifty when I married. Up till then I had always avoided matrimony like the plague, going on the principle that there is no need to throw yourself into the river to get a drink of water. But in 1926, I shall never forget the year, my valet, who’d been with me for over a quarter of a century, had the base ingratitude to leave me to go and keep a public house in some godforsaken backwater or other. I found him impossible to replace and, after some ghastly experiences with which I won’t bore you, I finally decided that the only solution was to get married.
‘The girl whom I selected was the daughter of an old friend of mine. She was a sickly, unattractive, dowdy individual who hadn’t enough spirit to say boo to a gosling. Her sole virtue was that she was a very wealthy woman in her own right, with large expectations from her father. I wasn’t exactly a pauper myself, but it is a common fallacy to believe that only the poor want money.
‘She died, rather to my surprise, I must admit, a year after we were married and left me with that.’ He jerked his head at the door through which his daughter had just gone. ‘I inherited all my wife’s money so I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the inconvenience she caused me. I got my sister to come and look after the girl until she was old enough to be packed off to school. I have, of course, never remarried. For the most part I have availed myself of the services of the maids. Whenever I hire a new girl, I make it quite clear to her what is expected. I flatter myself that I have never had one who turned the job down. Juliet Rugg is the latest in a not inconsiderable line.’ He popped another sweet into his mouth and crunched it loudly,
Dover gaped in astonishment at the old man in front of him, sitting bolt upright with a rug over his knees. You might call Sir John wonderful for his age, marvellously active and surprisingly well preserved, but, none the less, he was still a very old man. Dover gazed blankly at the wrinkled parchment skin drawn tautly over the skull, at the eyes sunk deep under bushy white eyebrows, at the thin body lost in clothes which had been cut to fit a more robust frame, and at the thick knotted veins on the slightly trembling hands. He calculated rapidly. Good grief! The old roué must be well over eighty!
‘So Juliet Rugg was your mistress, Sir John?’ he asked in a non-committal voice.
‘She was, Inspector. Do I gather from your question that my daughter had not informed you of this fact? She, of course, neither approves nor understands. Having no sex life of her own she naturally considers herself well qualified to criticize that of others.’
Dover groped for a moment, wondering how best to phrase his next question.
‘We have reason to believe, Sir John,’ he said, ‘that this girl, Juliet Rugg, has other men-friends. You yourself must know that she was the mother of an illegitimate child.’
Sir John shrugged his shoulders. ‘I am a realist, Inspector, I always have been. Juliet is a lusty young wench with a rather insatiable appetite. I
