‘Detective Sergeant MacGregor, sir, but he’s asking for a change.’
‘Huh!’ snorted the Assistant Commissioner. ‘He’ll be lucky! We aren’t running an academy for sensitive young ladies. Do him a world of good, working with Dover. Knock a few corners off him. Broaden his outlook. Teach him how the other half live.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right!’ The Assistant Commissioner leaned back in his chair with the air of a man who’s done a good day’s work. ‘That’s settled. Well, don’t just sit there, man! Get moving!’
* * *
Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover cleaned a hole in the steamed-up window of the bus with his handkerchief and peered through. It was pitch-dark outside. Occasionally a flurry of thin snow or sleet pattered against the outside of the glass.
‘ ’Strewth!’ said Dover in tones of deep disgust. He scowled at his companion as though it was all his fault.
Sergeant MacGregor sat silently by his Chief Inspector’s side, and suffered. They were the only passengers on the bus and they made an incongruous pair. MacGregor was young, tall, slim, rather handsome and a very snappy dresser. He was keen, too. He wanted to get on in his chosen profession. That was why he was always whining about having to work with Chief Inspector Dover. Prolonged association with Scotland Yard’s worst detective just wasn’t doing Charles Edward MacGregor’s career any good at all. Detectives, like most other people, are judged by results, and Dover’s results were very poor. Of course, he did manage to solve some of his cases – not many, but some. MacGregor didn’t mind being associated with the successes, it was being associated with a lengthy list of crashing failures that worried him. Besides – well, MacGregor prided himself on not being a snob, but really, it was rather embarrassing to be seen about with a lout like Dover.
The Chief Inspector was a big man, and fat – six foot two and turning the scales at seventeen and a quarter stone. Some coarse-minded colleague had once said that he looked like a pregnant hippopotamus, but this was generally agreed to be grossly unfair to that animal. It was true that most of Dover’s excess burden of fat had settled below waist level and well to the fore, but his face had a most un-hippopotamus-like appearance. For one thing it was too pale, except around the extensive, overhanging jowls which were permanently sown with dark stubble. Dover had a big, flabby face in which the features – small button nose, tiny rosebud mouth and piggy little eyes – were almost lost in the wide expanses of pasty-coloured flesh. On top of his head was a thin covering of dark, dandruff-bespeckled hair.
Dover’s figure generally might be considered to constitute a tailor’s nightmare, but luckily no tailor was ever called upon to answer the challenge. When he bought a suit – a very rare occurrence – he bought it off the outsize peg, and it looked like it. He favoured blue serge, which soon acquired a disgusting patina of grease and dirt. He usually wore an enormous dusty black overcoat and a bowler hat. This latter was no frivolous, guardee affair with a smart curly brim, but a heavy, solid, utility job, designed to protect Dover’s cranium from the onslaughts of the wicked. Throw in a grubby shirt with a too-tight collar and a tie whose original colouring was now quite unidentifiable, and the elegant Sergeant MacGregor’s feelings arouse some sympathy.
Not that Dover in his turn was too enthusiastic about consorting with young MacGregor. He considered his assistant more than a bit of a cissy and frequently asked his superior officers how they thought MacGregor could dress so expensively on the pittance he received as a detective sergeant, second class. ‘Stands to reason,’ Dover was wont to say in the quarters where it would do most harm, ‘the young pup’s taking a bit on the side. You don’t find me coughing up forty quid for a suit and I’m a chief inspector. Where does he get the money from, that’s what I want to know.’
The bus was now churning painfully along in bottom gear. MacGregor shivered and pulled his overcoat collar up round his ears. It was bitterly cold and only the driver, baked by his overheated engine, was making the journey in any comfort.
‘How much longer are we going to be?’ Dover twisted round awkwardly in his seat and bawled the question at the conductor.
That young man stopped writing things in a little notebook and stared out of the window in his turn.
‘ ’Bout half an hour,’ he announced. ‘It’s a long pull up to Thornwich. ’Course, with a decent bus you’d do it in half the time. Not that you’ll find this company wasting its money on decent buses. Not them! Or on anything else. Squeeze every last ha’penny out in profits, they do, so they can run around in their posh limousines. They don’t worry about decent working chaps like you and me and Fred up front there getting stranded out in the dark and cold with nothing but a lot of frozen sheep to keep us company – not them, they don’t! We’re expendable, we are, mate! They weigh up what we’re worth against the price of a new set of piston rings and, take my word for it, brother – you and me and our wives and kids come a hell of a long way down on the list of priorities!’
‘Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer,’ observed Dover in a loud voice. Both he and MacGregor had been at first surprised, and then outraged by the bus conductor’s unexpected tirade. ‘Decent working chaps like you and me’ indeed! Dover scowled blackly. He had had a hard day and he didn’t suffer the proletariat gladly at the best of times.
The bus conductor, sensing that his audience wasn’t exactly with him, lapsed into a moody silence and started writing in his little notebook again.
Dover’s stomach rumbled loudly.
‘Hear that?’ he asked MacGregor with gloomy
