‘No, no, of course not!’ the Assistant Commissioner chimed in with evident sympathy. ‘Watch Committees can be devils, I couldn’t agree more! You’ve got to be top dog or they’ll lead you a -er- a dog’s life.’
There was a pause while both men pondered over the infelicity of this metaphor.
‘Well, you see, don’t you?’ Mr Bartlett went on. ‘If my sixth sense is right and this girl hasn’t just slipped off for a bit of slap and tickle with somebody else’s husband, it might be a very nasty case, very nasty indeed.’
‘Murder, you mean?’
‘Or kidnapping.’
‘Kidnapping? Now, steady on, old man, you’ve been seeing too much telly! We don’t have kidnapping in this country, place is much too small! Besides, it’s not English!’
‘There’s always a first time,’ said Mr Bartlett darkly, ‘and it’d just be my bloody luck to get clobbered with it’’
‘Well, what have you done so far?’
‘The local bobby’s scratched around a bit. Like everybody else he thought she’d be turning up again right as rain. Bar reporting it to H.Q., I don’t think he’s done much. There’s an outbreak of fowl pest or swine fever or something and, naturally, that’s far more up his street than one of these vanishing-lady larks.’
‘I suppose you’ve circulated the usual description?’
‘Yes, we did that right away.’
‘Hm. Not that it helps much. One young girl looks pretty much like another these days.’
‘Not this one! She stands five foot three in stiletto heels and she turns the scales at nearly sixteen stone !’
‘My God!’ said the Assistant Commissioner, duly impressed at last.
‘And she’s got bright ginger hair! It makes a difference, doesn’t it?’
‘It does indeed, old man !’
‘Yes, dead or alive, she’s going to be difficult to hide. Now do you see why I want some help? Sixteen stone of bouncing British girlhood can’t just disappear into thin air, can it?’
‘No, indeed it can’t, old chap. Once seen, never forgotten, by the sound of it. Yes, I’m inclined to agree with you, you should have got a line by now if she’s still kicking around.’
‘Then can you let me have somebody right away? Somebody good, mind, I don’t want one of your old dead-beats!’
‘There are no dead-beats on my staff, old man.’ The Assistant Commissioner spoke with heavy reproof, but the expression had given him an idea. He still wasn’t convinced that this was a case for the Yard but he didn’t want to turn down a chap who was understandably being a bit wary in his new job. And, anyhow, Bartlett might just conceivably turn out to be right Murder would be bad enough but kidnapping, from the professional point of view, could be terrible. At least in the case of murder you couldn’t blame the dead body on the police, but in kidnapping whatever you did might be wrong. If you let ’em hand over the ransom money, the kidnappers might still kill their victim, and if you stopped the ransom money you were equally likely to be left with a corpse on your hands. The Assistant Commissioner shuddered gently as he thought of all the messes you could get into in a kidnapping case. It wasn’t the sort of job you’d wish on a dog.
He turned back to the telephone. There was only one man for the job. ‘I’ll send you one of my chief inspectors,’ he said. ‘Good chap. Name’s Dover. I’ll get him down to you first thing in the morning.’
The Assistant Commissioner dropped the receiver back in place and grinned wickedly. A man in his exalted position shouldn’t indulge in petty spite where his subordinates were concerned, but it was, oh, so pleasant to give way to these little human frailties, once in a while.
‘I’d love to see the old bugger’s face when he hears what he’s got landed with this time!’ The Assistant Commissioner chuckled happily to himself and picked up his phone again to send the good news down the line.
‘Bloody waste of time!’ snarled Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover as he sat slumped and sulky in the comer of his first-class reserved compartment’
His sergeant, sitting opposite him, sighed with resignation. He’d had nearly four hours of this and whatever sympathy he’d had at the beginning had now worn very thin.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and gazed hopelessly out of the window.
‘I don’t know why it is,’ Dover grumbled remorselessly on, ‘it always seems to be me that gets landed with these jobs. You’ll see, we’ll hang around there for a couple of days and then she’ll turn up again, older and wiser, if you know what I mean. Holed up in Brighton, that’s where she is! And when her money runs out, the boy-friend’ll hop it and she’ll come back home.’ Dover snorted petulantly down his nose. ‘Wadder say her name was?’ he growled.
Sergeant MacGregor told him, wearily and for the fourth time. ‘Rugg, sir, Juliet Rugg.’
Dover paused to give his little joke an appropriate build-up.
‘Well, I reckon Juliet’s found her Romeo !’
Sergeant MacGregor smiled bleakly. He’d heard this four times before, too.
Charles Edward MacGregor was, in fact, feeling nearly as hard done by as Dover was, though for a slightly different reason. He regarded himself, and was indeed regarded by his superiors, as one of the up-and-coming young officers at the Yard’ He was intelligent, efficient, courteous and sympathetic, and extremely well dressed to boot. It seemed unfair that he should be coupled with Chief Inspector Dover, who was his exact opposite in almost everything. But the Assistant Commissioner, who kept a fatherly eye on these matters, was a great believer in baptisms of fire and salvation through suffering and he frequently used Dover
