‘There is one thing, sir’ – MacGregor frowned a little – ‘it may be nothing but it is a discrepancy. I read through all my notes again last night and for some reason or another, well, it struck me as a bit odd. I don’t know whether you think it’s worth following up but it just. . . ’
‘Well, what is it?’ snapped Dover with a lightning return to his habitual manner.
MacGregor got his notebook out and thumbed through until he found a marked passage. ‘Well, sir, you remember, early on, when Eve Counter was talking about Juliet, she mentioned her nail varnish. I’ve got her exact words here. She was talking about what a dirty slut Juliet was, and she said that her nails were thick with grime and looked as though they’d been dipped in blood.’
‘So what?’
‘Well, “dipped in blood” – that means red nail varnish, doesn’t it?’
Dover snorted fretfully. ‘For God’s sake, get on with it, Sergent! We’re not a pair of blasted cross-talk comedians!’
‘No, sir. Well, sir, somebody else just casually mentioned her red nail varnish. It was the waitress in the Regal cafe. Well, actually, she said Juliet was wearing a silvery-pink colour when she first came in and then she painted the green stuff on while she was waiting for Pilley.
‘Now, we know she bought a bottle of green nail varnish on Tuesday afternoon when she was shopping in Creedon at the chemist’s. She didn’t start painting her nails green until she was in the cinema café at the Regal – the evidence of Gordon Pilley and the waitress shows that.
‘But, according to the other evidence we’ve been given, nobody, except Colonel Bing, at Irlam Old Hall saw her again at all. In other words, before Juliet disappeared she always wore red nail varnish, or pink, but not green. Now, Colonel Bing never said a word about Juliet’s nail varnish, and at that distance, late at night, I don’t see how she can have seen what colour it was anyhow. But somebody else at Irlam Old Hall did talk about Juliet wearing green nail varnish, although they denied having seen her after Tuesday lunch-time at the very latest Now, Juliet couldn’t have been wearing green nail varnish then, because she didn’t even buy it until the middle of Tuesday afternoon.’
‘Here, hold on a minute, lad!’ protested Dover. ‘You’re jumping to a few too many conclusions, aren’t you? All right, Juliet bought a bottle of green nail varnish on Tuesday afternoon and then painted her nails with the disgusting stuff. But that doesn’t mean that she’d never used green nail varnish before. She might have bought a bottle weeks or months ago and this one was just a replacement.’
‘Oh, I’d thought of that, sir,’ Sergeant MacGregor pointed out smugly, much to his chief inspector’s irritation, ‘but there are a couple of points which seem to indicate that green nail varnish was a novelty for Juliet. First of all, she was in such a hurry to daub it on her nails in the Regal cafe-Gordon Pilley said . . . ‘ MacGregor hunted through his notebook again ‘. . .he said, “she’d just bought the stuff and couldn’t wait to try it”. Now, that seems to indicate that she’d never had green nail varnish before, doesn’t it?’
‘Hm,’ grunted Dover reluctantly.
‘And then you remember when we searched her room at the Counters’ and found all that money? She’d got lots of old bottles of nail varnish littered all over her dressing-table, but none of them was green. I checked that last night.’
‘Ah, but’ – the chief inspector thought quickly – ‘if she had had green nail varnish before, she wouldn’t have bought a new bottle until the old one was finished, would she? And then she’d have thrown the empty bottle away. That’s why we didn’t see any green nail varnish in her room !’
‘Well, yes’ – Sergeant MacGregor sounded disappointed — ‘that might be the explanation, but it’s worth checking up with the girls at the chemist’s shop, isn’t it, sir? I mean, they’d probably know whether or not Juliet had bought any before, or she might have said something which’d give us a clue to whether or not it was her first bottle.’
Tim,’ Dover regarded MacGregor pensively. He was always complaining about the stupidity and bone-headedness of present-day detective sergeants, but, God knows, he didn’t want one of the clever-devil types working with him. If MacGregor was going to develop into a real smart alec, life was going to get very uncomfortable. Still, the lad had obviously got something here. It was a very neat bit of deduction, and Dover would be the last one to admit it.
‘All right,’ he went on, pretending not to be very interested, ‘might be worth checking. We’ll do it later today.’
This was one occasion when Dover wasn’t anxious to push all the work off on to someone else. If this was going to lead to anything, he, Dover, had every intention of being in on it, right from the beginning.
‘By the way,’ he asked elaborately off-hand, ‘who was it who mentioned seeing Juliet with green nail varnish?’
‘It was Eulalia Hoppold, sir. You remember she talked about telling Eve Counter to get rid of Juliet, no matter what her father thought, and she talked about black babies, green nail varnish and stiletto heels.’
‘Oh,’ said Dover doubtfully, ‘Eulalia Hoppold?’
‘You see what this means, sir? If my theory’s correct and Juliet wasn’t wearing green nail varnish until, say, after five o’clock on the Tuesday afternoon, then Eulalia Hoppold must have seen her after she got back to Irlam Old Hall at eleven o’clock that night.’
‘The Hoppold woman might have been in Creedon too on Tuesday afternoon and seen Juliet then.’
‘Well, in that case, sir, why didn’t she tell us about it? There’d be nothing suspicious about that, would there? And, don’t forget, we’ve already
