‘You can ask about this celluloid stencil thing at the same time – you know, the one the ransom letter was written with. You never know, we might be lucky and find somebody who owns one.
‘When you’ve finished you can come back here and pick me up and we’ll go into Creedon and see the girls in the chemist’s shop about this green nail varnish.’
‘I could ask Eve whether she ever saw Juliet wearing the stuff.’
Dover gave him a sharp look. ‘You could,’ he admitted, ‘but tell her to keep her trap shut! If there is anything in this green and red nail-varnish idea, it’s a very delicate thread. And it won’t take much to snap it, so just you watch out where you put your big flat feet!’
‘But if we can prove that Juliet never wore green nail varnish before late on Tuesday afternoon, we’ve got our man, haven’t we? Eulalia Hoppold, I mean?’
‘Look, MacGregor,’ said Dover with heavy patience, ‘if you go yapping your head off about green nail varnish all over Irlam Old Hall, Eulalia Hoppold may get wind of it and start thinking.
Once she realizes she’s made a slip, if she has made one, she’ll cover up immediately and we’ll be up against a blank wall.’
‘But how can she cover up, sir? We know what she said at the time.’
Dover sighed fretfully. ‘My God, I can think of a dozen things she could say. She could deny she ever said it in the first place – after all it’s her word against a bit of your private shorthand scribble, isn’t it? Or she could say it was a slip of the tongue and she didn’t mean green at all. Or she could say she’s colour-blind and can’t tell the difference anyhow.
‘Just you take a hold on yourself, my lad! Even if all the castles you’re building on a botde of green nail varnish are true, you couldn’t hang a cat on that sort of evidence, much less drag anyone into a court of law. It’s just, at best, a teeny weeny pointer, and don’t you forget it! ’
‘Very good, sir,’ said MacGregor huffily. ‘Do you want me to do any more checking on the oil? I could find out which of the tenants have got cans of this type of oil and ’
‘No,’ said Dover, ‘we’ll leave that one for a bit. We don’t want to show our hand too much at this stage. You might tell your girl-friend and this Bondy fellow not to go around discussing it’
‘I’ve already done that, sir.’
‘Good! Well, get moving!’
‘Are you going to stay here, sir?’
‘I am.’
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a message if the lab. people come through with a report on the exact make of the oil used on Sir John’s wheel chair?’
‘Oh, all right,’ grumbled the chief inspector, putting on his ‘I-don’t-know-why-everything-is-left-to-me’ expression. ‘And you just remember, Sergeant, don’t start trying to clap a pair of handcuffs on Eulalia Hoppold if she looks sideways at you.’
‘But you do think she’s got something to do with it, don’t you, sir?’
‘If I were a betting man,’ said Dover pompously, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, ‘which I’m not, I’d give you shorter odds on a few of the others. There’s your fancy bit’ – he opened his eyes to see how this was received – ‘for one. She’s no alibi. She’s the one who says Juliet never entered the house on Tuesday night. She, better than anyone, knows all about the wheel chair, where it’s kept and that the wheels were squeaking. And’ – he waggled a fat finger — ‘she’s got not one but two motives, and damned strong ones at that. Juliet could have got this doctor-lover struck off the Register and she was trying to drag Eve Counter’s father to the altar. Sex and money, my lad – the basis for most crimes, as you well know! And then there’s the question of this ransom letter. We may not know how that letter was posted but we do know that whoever sent it knew the address of Sir John’s bank. Who better than his one and only daughter? Then there was all this business of rushing forward to pay the ransom money. Very fishy, that! But, of course, if she knew the kidnapping was all a red herring anyhow, she’d be the first one to offer to pay the money-just to put us off the scent. I mean, she wasn’t risking anything, was she? She’d know her five hundred pounds would be perfectly safe.’ He thought moodily for a moment. ‘I think you’d better get the name and address of this doctor chap. If we can’t pick up a lead anywhere else we’ll have to have a word with him.’
‘Oh, sir!’ Reproach was written in every line of MacGregor’s handsome face.
‘Well, dammit!’ yelped Dover. ‘You don’t expect me to turn a blind eye to murder, do you? Just because you’ve taken a passing fancy to one of the birds in the case! I’m telling you again, Eve Counter’s quite high on my list. And if you’re going to bump somebody off, I can’t imagine a better accomplice than a doctor, can you? We still haven’t found the body-well, I can think of plenty of ways in which a doctor would help there!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Anyhow, you don’t have to ask the girl herself. You can get the name and address from Sir John. You don’t need to tell him why you want ’em.’
‘No, sir. But, surely, you’re not serious about this, sir?’
‘For God’s sake, Sergeant, she’s a possible, same as the others! There’s Mrs Chubb-Smith, for example, either with or without that shiftless
