‘Very good,’ said Dover sourly. ‘Sounds almost as though you’d learned it off by heart.’
‘Read a thing twice and I’ve got it off pat. Up here,’ replied Miss Doughty, tapping her head with one hand and treating herself to a stiff gin with the other. ‘Mark of an old pro. Besides,’ she looked solemnly at Dover, ‘it’s about the sixth time I’ve gone through it. I did it four or five times right at the beginning and then that young man came round again a week or so ago, and now you two.’
‘Young man? Was his name Cochran?’
‘I think so,’ said Miss Doughty, not enunciating quite so clearly. ‘Don’t really remember. Handsome boy, though. Bit of a devil if you ask me, but very handsome. If I’d been fifty years younger … Well, gentlemen,’ she gathered her kimono round her and reached yet again for the bottle of gin, ‘if you have no further questions, it’s time for my luncheon.’
It suited Dover, who’d had more than enough of the silly old coot.
‘There are one or two questions,’ began MacGregor.
Dover scowled malevolently at him. ‘Later, laddie, later!’ he said. ‘Miss Doughty wants her lunch and I want mine.’
‘I’ll see you out,’ announced Miss Doughty with blurred dignity. Her eyes acquired a slight squint and she stood bolt upright. MacGregor grabbed her as she swayed. ‘Whoops! Steady, ye Buffs!’ she giggled and sat down abruptly.
‘Oh, leave the old soak alone,’ snapped Dover, already half way to the door. ‘She’s over three parts sozzled.’
‘But we can’t leave her like this, can we, sir?’ MacGregor looked anxiously at Miss Doughty who was now sleeping peacefully, a faint smile on her lips.
There was no answer. Dover had gone.
Chapter Seven
‘What a dump!’ grumbled Dover.
They were sitting in the hotel lounge having their after-dinner coffee. Dover, his injured foot resting on a stool, had some justification for his comment. The room was bleak, shabby and cold. The other guests had either already retired to bed so as to build up their strength for the ozone-impregnated rigours of the morrow, or were in the television room watching whatever the B.B.C, chose to provide them with. Only the very lowest people in Wallerton watched commercial telly.
The leaves of a plastic palm tree quivered in the draught which blew continually through the entire hotel.
‘What a day!’ said Dover gloomily.
MacGregor was inclined to agree with him. The morning had been bad enough but at least something had been happening then. The afternoon had been unbearably dreary. Dover, of course, had retired to his room to think about the case and rest his toe. MacGregor had been left to kick his heels around as best he might, and Wallerton on a wet July afternoon was not a place over-burdened with amusements. The cinema didn’t open until six o’clock and MacGregor considered it beneath his dignity to patronize Wallerton’s sole Amusement Arcade.
‘We’re wasting our bloody time,’ observed Dover.
‘Perhaps you could convince the Chief Constable of that, sir?’ said MacGregor, always an optimist.
‘I’ve tried,’ said Dover, his jowls wobbling miserably. ‘I rang him up just before dinner. I told him we were stuck up a gum tree.’ He sighed self-pitying. ‘It was no good. He told me he’d promised his wife he’d leave no stone unturned to find what had driven his nephew to suicide. Stupid devil.’
MacGregor nodded and thought longingly of his ruined holiday.
‘It’s me that’s got to turn the stones up, you notice.’ Dover pointed out truculently. ‘Not him. Oh, dear me, no – not him.’
‘If only we knew which stones, sir.’
‘Quite,’ said Dover vaguely.
‘Do you think we’re getting anywhere at all, sir?’ asked MacGregor.
‘Do you?’
‘Not really, sir.’
‘Let’s begin at the beginning. You never know, we might have overlooked something. Now then, young Constable Cochran – blast him – commits suicide …’
‘We think he did, at any rate, sir.’
Dover’s face fell. ‘Don’t start that! If that young blighter turns up out of the blue all bright and smiling, I’ll boot him off Cully Point myself, so help me! No, he’s a goner. He must be.’
‘Now all we’ve got to do is find out why, sir,’ said MacGregor with a merry laugh. It was meant as a joke.
Dover scowled blackly and continued as though MacGregor’s interruption had never taken place. ‘ Motive for suicide. His private life?’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘Not that girl anyhow, sir. Somebody might swing for her but nobody’d commit suicide over her – not unless they were completely crackers.’
‘Which Cochran, as far as we can judge, wasn’t. Well, what about his fellow coppers? He wasn’t popular at the station, you know. The Chief Constable might be right. They might have all ganged up on him and given him hell till they drove him to it.’
MacGregor shook his head even more firmly. Not without justification he considered himself an expert on what would or would not drive a young policeman to take his own life. ‘He could have told his uncle, sir, or,’ MacGregor grew starry-eyed, ‘asked for a transfer. The Chief Constable’s nephew; why he could have pulled every string in the book.’
‘Well, that just leaves us with something to do with his work. But even if he’d stumbled on to something that was pure dynamite, I still don’t see why he should kill himself. If he’d been bumped off – well, that’d make some sort of sense, wouldn’t it?’
‘You don’t think there’s any tie-up with this Hamilton business then, sir?’
Dover pursed his tiny rosebud mouth and wrinkled his little black moustache. ‘Well, it’s odd, and so’s Cochran’s suicide. I’m buggered if I can see any other connection. Damn it, Hamilton wasn’t even killed.’
‘Suppose it was a gang of some sort, sir,’ – MacGregor had not wasted the entire afternoon – ‘and they meant to kill him for revenge or something. Well, before they can, he has this attack and dies, so they just go on and mutilate
