‘All fits my eye!’ snarled Dover, tossing the bedclothes aside with reckless abandon. ‘My God!’ He started undoing the buttons on his pyjama jacket. ‘If you haven’t got somebody standing over you every five minutes, you go off like a berserk clockwork mouse! First you have me tearing about like a maniac all over the countryside over this baby buying business which proved to have no relation to anything, and now you’re trying to pin the poison-pen letters on to a poor harmless soul who’s dead and can’t defend herself. You’re damned well not fit to be walking the beat looking for lost dogs, never mind be a blooming G.I.D. man. Oh well,’ sighed Dover, rummaging in his suitcase for a shirt, ‘if you want something done properly, do it yourself. It’s the old, old story!’
He reiterated his theme over lunch. ‘Don’t you worry, old man,’ he informed an astonished Mr Tompkins, ‘I’m back on the job now. I shouldn’t be, I know, but there are some things that are more important than a man’s health. I know your wife didn’t write those letters and nothing is ever going to make me believe she did. Gall it instinct, if you like,’ said Dover generously, ‘but it’s an instinct I have learned, over many years of conducting successful criminal investigations, to trust!’ Dover waved his knife and fork in the air to emphasize the point. ‘Now then’ – he pointed the knife accusingly at Mr Tompkins while shovelling a pile of potato into his mouth with the fork – ‘you were her husband. You were living with her twenty-four hours a day. Did you ever suspect she was writing those poison-pen letters? No, of course you didn’t! Did you ever hear or see your wife typing? No, of course you didn’t! Ever see her buying large supplies of Tendy Bond notepaper – a brand, according to this genius of a sergeant here, she never used? No, of course you didn’t! Did you ever see her popping out every five minutes day and night to post the letters? No, of course you didn’t! How could she have even kept a typewriter in your house without you knowing about it? Why, I don’t suppose she could even type, could she?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ admitted Mr Tompkins, ‘she was a shorthand typist before I married her. She’d done a proper course and everything.’
‘Well, that settles it, doesn’t it?’ demanded Dover triumphantly. ‘The joker we’re looking for used two fingers. Your wife would have used all ten!’
‘She hadn’t done any typing for a long time, Mr Dover. Perhaps she’d forgotten.’
‘They never forget,’ said Dover firmly. ‘It’s like riding a bicycle. Once you know how, you know how.’
‘Did Mrs Tompkins ever do any typing for you in the shop?’ asked MacGregor, feeling the investigation could do with a touch of common sense at this stage. ‘I noticed you had a typewriter in your house.’
Mr Tompkins shook his head. ‘Oh no, she said it used to damage her nails. She’d very brittle nails, you know, so what bit of typing there was to do in the business, I did.’
‘Brittle nails!’ snorted Dover. ‘Well, that just about clinches it. She wasn’t the poison-pen writer.’
‘But what about the rubber gloves, sir?’ asked MacGregor. ‘We’re pretty sure that whoever typed those letters was wearing rubber gloves – because of the fingerprints. That might make all the difference. A touch-typist wearing rubber gloves might well resort to two-finger typing, it would be pretty awkward to do anything else. And, of course, rubber gloves would protect the fingernails from getting damaged.’
Dover scowled at MacGregor. ‘Why don’t you keep your trap shut?’ he asked savagely. ‘When I want your half-baked opinions, I’ll ask for ’em.’
But Dover didn’t just leave it there. As soon as he’d had his lunch and a short nap to settle his digestion, he was off again. This time it was another visit to Mrs Poltensky, who greeted the two detectives like long lost friends. The laying out of Mrs Tompkins had eventually been entrusted to her and she felt, quite erroneously, that she had Dover to thank for a novel experience.
‘I’ve never laid out a suicide before,’ she informed them as she showed them into her front room. ‘Quite a feather in my cap. I did an extra-special job on her, poor thing. I made her look quite nice, I really did. Well, considering what she looked like when she was alive. In fact,’ – Mrs Poltensky beamed happily – ‘she looked a jolly sight better in her shroud than ever she did when she was up and walking around, though I says it as shouldn’t.’
Eventually Dover succeeded in stopping the flow and got down to the serious business. It soon emerged (as Dover, a shrewd judge of character, if ever there was one, suspected it would) that very little went on in the Tompkins ménage of which Mrs Poltensky was ignorant. Apart from Mr Tompkins’s shed out in the back yard which neither she nor Mrs Tompkins ever entered for fear of being blown up, there was hardly a nook or cranny which was not thoroughly investigated at least twice a week by Mrs Poltensky in the course of her dusting.
She laughed to scorn the mere idea that anything as large as a portable typewriter could have been hidden from her. The suggestion that piles of Tendy Bond notepaper and sheets of stamps might have escaped her eagle eye was contemptuously pooh-poohed. ‘When I clean a house, young man,’ she told MacGregor, ‘I clean it.’
Could the items under discussion have been concealed in the shop amongst the piles of merchandise?
They could not. Apart from the fact that Mr Tompkins would have
