‘I don’t know, sir,’ explained MacGregor patiently. ‘That’s what we’ve got to do a routine investigation for. But two days ago she did draw three hundred pounds in cash out of the bank, and there’s no sign of the money anywhere in the house or in the shop.’
‘I expect there’s a perfectly simple explanation,’ said Dover, glaring furiously at his sergeant.
‘There probably is, sir, if you ask Mr Tompkins about it.’
‘Besides,’ said Dover, switching quickly, ‘Tompkins can’t have anything to do with it. Damn it, MacGregor, I was there when he found her.’
‘He might have set the whole thing up earlier, sir. You know that.’
Dover snorted despairingly. ‘What for?’ he demanded. ‘God damn it, the man’s got a hundred and seventy thousand quid! What in hell’s name should he want to kill his wife for?’
‘I think you should ask him to account for his movements this afternoon, sir, that’s all,’ said MacGregor, stubbornly determined that, however long it took, he was going to get his own way.
‘Can’t we wait until after the post-mortem?’ asked Dover.
MacGregor shook his head. ‘Even if the p.m. confirms suicide, sir, it still doesn’t mean anything. We shall still be expected to make purely routine inquiries.’
Dover clutched at a last straw. ‘I don’t reckon it’s our job at all. It’s up to the local police.’
‘They won’t touch it, sir. I had a chat with them earlier on. They say this business is tied up with the poison-pen. letters and the poison-pen letters are our pigeon.’
‘What bloody nonsense!’ snorted Dover. ‘How the hell do they know what it’s tied up with? That note Mrs Tompkins left might mean anything.’
‘Well, that’s why we must do a routine investigation, sir, isn’t it? Just to determine if Mrs Tompkins did commit suicide and, if she did, why she did it.’
Put like that MacGregor’s proposals sounded eminently reasonable, but that wasn’t, from Chief Inspector Dover’s point of view, any reason for accepting them. The trouble was, he thought petulantly after the sergeant had at last gone and left him in peace, that you just couldn’t talk to a fellow like MacGregor. He was too rigid, too much bound by rules and regulations, didn’t realize that a policeman had to use a bit of judgement and discretion. Any fool could see that Mrs Tompkins’s suicide was an open and shut business. There was just no point in trampling around and upsetting her poor bereaved husband. Just because you were a copper it didn’t mean that you hadn’t got a heart. And where Mr Tompkins was concerned Dover certainly had got a heart, or something.
He had spent the evening with the newly created widower and had chatted about a variety of subjects, just to take the poor chap’s mind off things. They had discussed some of Dover’s more successful cases, of which Mr Tompkins had received a skilfully edited account, and then, somehow, the conversation had drifted on to capital punishment. At this point Dover had got rather starry-eyed and spoke at length and with nostalgia of the good old days when you could wave the threat of the gallows before a suspect.
‘It’s hot the same now,’ he complained. ‘You can’t scare the living daylights out of a chap with life imprisonment. He knows as well as you do that he’ll be out in twelve years or so, as long as he keeps his nose clean and doesn’t spit in the governor’s eye.’
‘Really?’ said Mr Tompkins with a very faint, polite smile.
‘Ah,’ said Dover smacking his lips. ‘It was different in the old days. The pinions, the white cap, the knot under the left ear. They didn’t strangle you, you know. The drop broke your neck. Or,’ – Dover chuckled lugubriously – ‘it was supposed to! There was many a slip.’
Mr Tompkins gulped but it simply didn’t enter Dover’s head that anybody would object to his homely ‘shop’ talk about miscalculated drops, ropes incorrectly adjusted, novice hangmen and nervous performers in the main role.
Mr Tompkins did. He changed the conversation. He asked Dover’s advice about his future. He was going to sell the shop and clear out of Thornwich. Now that Mrs Tompkins had gone there was no point in staying on. Maybe he should go abroad? Dover, who’d once gone on a day-trip to Calais, didn’t think this was a very good idea. Too many bloody foreigners jabbering away like a parcel of monkeys. Maybe, said Mr Tompkins, he could use his pools money to invest in another sort of business, something a bit more exciting than the grocery trade. He knew Mr Dover would think him silly, but – now, he was quite serious, really – he’d always wanted to be a private detective. Well, of course, he knew it wasn’t anything like what you read about in books, but even so . . . What did Mr Dover think?
Mr Dover, his brain working with the speed of a computer, didn’t think it was such a silly idea as all that. ‘There’s a lot of money to be made out of a private detective agency,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ he pointed out slowly, ‘you’d need an experienced chap to go into partnership with you.’
Mr Tompkins grinned shyly. ‘I’ve heard that a lot of senior detectives retire from the Yard and go into business on their own account.’
Dover took it even more slowly. ‘You need quite a bit of capital for that sort of thing.’
‘I’ve got quite a bit of capital,’ said Mr Tompkins.
And there, for the time being, the matter rested. While Dover fully realized that nothing definite had been said he did go to sleep that night, when he’d got rid of MacGregor, musing gently about a nice, comfortably furnished office with ex-Chief Inspector Dover sitting there. He dropped off before he got much beyond the ‘sitting there’ stage but, obviously, there would be a staff of hardworking operatives to do the actual labouring. Dover smiled in his sleep. He’d been dreaming about the joys of retirement ever
