‘ ’Strewth!’ said Dover with good-humoured banter – he was feeling much more at peace with the world. ‘With an imagination like that you ought to be writing novels!’ Coming from Dover, this was not a compliment. ‘Yes, coffee for me, sonny, a large cup. Here you are, measuring up this Freda Comersall for the drop when there hasn’t even been a murder committed. All the evidence points to a straightforward case of suicide. There was no sign of breaking and entry – you checked that yourself. The door of the sitting-room was locked on the inside.’ Dover ticked off the points on his fat, stubby fingers. ‘She wasn’t in any two minds about what she was doing, either. The overdose of sleeping pills and the gas show that. She left a typical suicide note, just a few words scribbled on a bit of paper. She picked the right time when she knew she’d have the place to herself and nobody’d come in and save her at the last minute. And, to cap everything, she even had a bath before she did it so’s she’d be all nice and clean for the postmortem. Gawd, I could go on all night! Everything points to suicide.’
‘But what about motive, sir?’ asked MacGregor as he sadly watched Dover selecting the largest cigar from a tray presented, unasked, by the cunning Oriental. Not many people smoked cigars in Bearle and the management were glad of the opportunity to shift some of their surplus stock.
‘Motive?’ said Dover, puffing away. ‘You can take your pick. Maybe the poison-pen letters drove her to it. Maybe it was not getting this baby. Maybe it was her health. Maybe it was any one of a dozen things we’ve never even heard about and never will. Half the time in these suicide cases you never know what finally pushed ’em over the edge. D’you think that Chink’d fetch us a drop of brandy? My stomach’s feeling a bit queer again. A drop of brandy might just settle it.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said MacGregor, looking at his watch and getting the only satisfaction he’d had from the whole meal, ‘we haven’t time. If we don’t go now we shall miss the last bus back to Thornwich.’
On the long cold bus journey MacGregor tried to restart the argument, but Dover wouldn’t budge. He didn’t object to calling on Freda Comersall and seeing what she’d got to say for herself – it was as good a way of passing the time as any – but not tonight. Tomorrow morning, maybe, if he felt up to it – or tomorrow afternoon. Having said this firmly three times he propped his head on MacGregor’s shoulder and fell asleep.
It was about ten o’clock when the bus disgorged them at the bottom of the hill in Thornwich. They were both stiff, tired and bad-tempered.
‘We might just have time for a quick drink before we go to bed,’ remarked Dover as they waited for a gap in the traffic before venturing on the mad dash across the road. ‘Damned soft place to leave a car!’ he snorted, staring at a little blue mini parked outside The Jolly Sailor.
‘Oh, Lord!’ said MacGregor. ‘I think it’s Dame Alice’s. She must be waiting for us.’
Dover didn’t hesitate. At times he had a remarkable capacity for taking quick decisions. He stepped back from the edge of the pavement, did a quick right turn and strode off in the direction of Freda’s Cafe which stood some fifty yards away in the middle of a vast, muddy lorry park. Freda’s Cafe was open twenty-four hours a day, dispensing cheer and tomato ketchup to the modern knights of the road.
‘Come on,’ he said to MacGregor, ‘we might as well go and get it over with.’
But Freda, unless she had changed her sex and grown a big ginger moustache, was not in the café.
MacGregor bought a couple of cups of coffee and he and Dover sat down at a linoleum-covered table to survey the scene,
‘I told you it was a waste of time,’ said Dover, stirring his coffee crossly with a spoon which looked as though it had been found on the battlefield after Waterloo. ‘If we ask for her it’ll only make her suspicious. We’ve been spotted already.’
A sullen silence had fallen over the large wooden hut in which Freda’s Cafe was situated. There were only some six or seven other customers, big burly men with dirty faces and thick lumber jackets. They all stared suspiciously at the newcomers. One youngish man in a pair of tight jeans swaggered across to a battered juke box and rammed his sixpence into the slot. Under the cover of a raucous, souped-up version of ‘Come Into The Garden, Maud’ rendered by the latest adolescent idol, wary conversations were resumed.
Eventually the song came to a blessed halt.
‘ ’Strewth!’ said Dover, speaking from the heart. ‘I thought my ruddy ear-drums had gone.’
‘What do we do now, sir?’ asked MacGregor.
‘Search me,’ said Dover whose thoughts were now exclusively concentrated on getting back to The Jolly Sailor and bed.
However, in every successful criminal investigation there comes a moment when Lady Luck smiles upon the detective involved. We should have an even higher rate of unsolved crime than we enjoy today if this were not so. Hard work, shrewd assessments, inspired deductions, the wonders of modern forensic science – these things are all very well in their way but, as Chief Inspector Dover’s record shows, they aren’t everything. On many of the occasions when he solved a crime he had employed none of these traditional methods. True~ the little bit of luck which he enjoyed in Freda’s Transport Cafe didn’t exactly permit him to bring his investigation to a glorious and resounding conclusion, but it did enable him to
