‘Eulalia Hoppold?’ suggested Sergeant MacGregor.
‘That be her! Drinks neat gin, she does. Doubles too.’
A youth, incongruously sporting both a cowlick and Elvis Presley side whiskers, leaned towards Dover across the old man’s shoulder.
‘I read one of her books once,’ he announced, not without pride. ‘It weren’t half hot stuff! Some of the things them blacks got up to out there-cor!’
‘Walter Gabriel’ elbowed the village intellectual back out of the limelight ‘Well, we know what some of them blacks round here get up to, don’t we? I’d have given two loads of horse manure to see our Juliet’s face when she saw that babby for the first time!’
Dover broke through the laughter which greeted this witticism.
‘Do you know who the father was, by the way?’
‘No, no more than she does, I reckon. They say all cats looks grey in the dark, don’t they? We had some of these ’ere West Indians working on the motor-way t’other side of Creedon round about that time. Must’ve been one of they heathens.’
Dover had endured another hour of this sort of thing and then thankfully retired to bed at closing time, his head buzzingwith the local accent and his stomach awash with the local beer. His night had not been a peaceful one, and thanks no doubt to the peculiar qualities of Long Herbert, he greeted the start of a new day with a lacklustre eye and flaming bad temper. The thought of spending another stretch of dismal hours asking endless questions about this dratted girl almost made him groan aloud. If only they’d some idea whether she was dead or alive there might be a bit more point to all this, though Dover doubted if he could work up much enthusiasm either way.
When they got back to Irlam Old Hall after breakfast, for no reason at all, except perhaps to annoy and confuse Sergeant MacGregor, Dover decided to call on Eulalia Hoppold first, instead of tackling Michael Chubb-Smith.
Miss Hoppold showed her visitors into her study, or perhaps ‘den’ would be a better word for it. It was certainly full of wild animals. They were there, stuffed, skinned or in photographs, wherever the eye was turned. In the odd spaces unoccupied by the animals or bits of them were other trophies of Miss Hoppold’s apparently fruitful travels. There were bunches of wicked-looking spears, there were primitive bows and arrows with nasty brown marks on their tips, there were native drums and tomahawks, samples of African beadwork and a collection of nose bones from fourteen different tribes. There were iron cooking-pots and gaudily painted clay bowls. There was even, in a little glass case all of their own, a couple of doll-sized, shrunken human heads, the piece de resistance of the collection.
Dover moved an elephant-hide whip and a boomerang to one side and sat down. He gazed slowly round the packed room, not so much fascinated as stupefied. He noted the four shelves devoted to copies of Miss Hoppold’s literary endeavours (translated into eight languages). He read some of the titles: Lone White Woman, Initiation Rites in the Dark Continent, My Hosts were Cannibals, The Silent Killers of the Upper Amazon, Zulu Bride. He vaguely remembered having read somewhere that Eulalia Hoppold’s books were certainly exciting and sold like the proverbial hot cakes but, in some quarters, her scholarship as an anthropologist was, not to put too fine a point on it, suspect.
He had a look at the photographs which crowded in on him. They had been taken in innumerable foreign climes but they all had one thing in common, the central figure was invariably Miss Eulalia Hoppold, dressed in a khaki shirt and slacks and grinning broadly into the camera. She was everywhere, towering over sheepish-looking pygmies or being dwarfed by gigantic, satinskinned Zulu warriors. She was portrayed draped in boa constrictors, nursing tiger cubs and cuddling chimpanzees. The photographs also revealed her as a huntress of no mean achievement, and she appeared time and again standing in dramatic poses over the dead bodies of every kind of rare and exotic animal. Were there tigers, Miss Hoppold had shot one. Were there gazelle, Miss Hoppold could be seen skinning one with her own strong, brown hands. Were there elephants, Miss Hoppold had just hit this poor tusked brute plumb between the eyes, or wherever it is that the real experts shoot elephants.
Dover turned from his inspection to stare poutingly at Eulalia Hoppold herself, in the flesh. He was a little disconcerted to find that she was already gazing avidly at him, as though she were mentally drawing a bead on an interesting specimen of a hitherto unknown species. Dover’s stomach rumbled loudly, and Miss Hoppold, with a slight shake of her head, relaxed behind her desk.
She was a small, tough, wiry woman in her early forties. She looked rather like an engaging monkey with sharp, pale blue eyes. A mop of short, ruffled, straw-coloured hair framed her brown, finely wrinkled face. She wore no make-up at all. She was a very intense woman with a positive greed for life. As an anthropologist, one would expect her to be interested in her fellow men, and she was, rather overpoweringly so. ‘I love people,’ she had declared in one of her books, ‘people are meat and drink to me!’ It was to be hoped that Dover wouldn’t give her indigestion.
But on the subject of Juliet Rugg, Miss Hoppold wasn’t very helpful. She knew the girl by sight, of course, but then-who didn’t? ‘Great overweight slob,’ was Miss Hoppold’s forthright pronouncement. ‘Looked like a cow hippopotamus in calf and had, I imagine, about the same I.Q. rating. How Eve could tolerate her in the same house for more than five minutes, I really don’t know! Oh I know she was supposed to be a companion to
