It was a woman who opened the door. She had a rosy-red face and was wiping her wet hands on her apron. She looked like a woman who had worked hard all her life and who would be completely lost if she hadn’t got a duster or a scrubbing brush in her hand.
MacGregor’s suave announcement that they were detectives from Scotland Yard threw her into considerable confusion.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she kept muttering as she showed them into a tiny kitchen. Dover, as was his custom, headed straight for the most comfortable chair and dropped down heavily into it. He found himself a mere six inches away from a cheerful fire which was roaring up the chimney, but since they were enjoying yet another of Walterton’s blustery, bracing days, that was no disadvantage.
MacGregor seated himself at a small table covered with a green, bobble-trimmed, velvet tablecloth. Mrs Armstrong, she had confessed with resignation that she was Arthur’s mother, stood and hovered. Worried as she evidently was, she still gave more than half her attention to a large saucepan bubbling dyspeptically on the gas stove.
‘I can’t understand it,’ she said as much to herself as to anybody else, ‘I can’t understand it.’ She darted across to the gas stove and raised the lid of the saucepan. ‘ They said he was cured. I mean, well, he’s been all right for over a twelvemonth now, hasn’t he?’
Dover looked at her with acute distaste and hooked a small stool forward to rest his injured foot on. A pile of old newspapers and magazines, which had been stacked on the stool, duly collapsed on to the floor and Mrs Armstrong, apologizing profusely, hurried to pick them up. Dover raised his eyebrows and scowled at a television sat standing in the comer. It was worth the examination. The entire set, with the exception of the tube, was swathed in a hand-knitted coverlet of red and blue wool. It was too much for the Chief Inspector. Composing his face into a sneer, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Once again MacGregor shouldered the burden of the interrogation. He spoke loudly and clearly in an effort to wean Mrs Armstrong’s attention away from her gas stove.
‘We would like to ask your son a few questions about the night he drove Mr Hamilton home from the Country Club.’
Mrs Armstrong shot towards the kitchen table and grabbed a spoon out of the cutlery drawer. ‘ Oh, he wouldn’t do anything like that to a man. I mean, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?’
MacGregor took a grip on himself. ‘You remember Mr Hamilton, don’t you?’ he asked slowly and carefully. ‘The man whose dead body was found in his front garden about a month ago?’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mrs Armstrong distractedly.
‘Your son drove him home that night.’
‘Well that’s his job, him being a taxi-driver.’
MacGregor gave up. ‘ Is your son at home, Mrs Armstrong?’
Mrs Armstrong was now slicing potatoes at an incredible speed into her saucepan. ‘ Oh, yes.’ She seemed grateful for a straight-forward question. ‘He’s upstairs in bed. Did you want to see him?’
‘That was the idea, rather,’ said MacGregor, lapsing into mild irony.
It was wasted on Mrs Armstrong. She concentrated on adding a generous helping of salt to whatever brew she was manufacturing and just didn’t answer.
There was a mild grunt from Dover. MacGregor took it as a warning that somebody’s patience was becoming exhausted.
‘I would like to see your son, Mrs Armstrong.’
‘Oh? Well, I should come back about three o’clock this afternoon then, if I was you, sir. He’s usually up about then.’
There was a definite snort from Dover. MacGregor fixed Mrs Armstrong with a firm eye and eventually got through to her with the message that two high-ranking detectives from New Scotland Yard were not to be denied. Young Armstrong must be roused from his slumbers forthwith and brought downstairs.
Mrs Armstrong turned down the gas under her pan and, rather surprisingly mumbling something under her breath about the Gestapo, left the room.
There was a moment’s silence. Dover opened his eyes and looked round. ‘Been carted off in a plain van, has she?’ he remarked pleasantly and closed his eyes again.
Five minutes went by. The cosy fire, the comfortable chair and the stuffy room did their work. Dover’s mouth dropped open and his head lolled helplessly to one side. Even MacGregor was beginning to find it difficult to keep on the alert.
Suddenly there was the sound of voices from upstairs, then a yelp, then a series of heavy bumps, then a dull crash.
Mrs Armstrong opened the kitchen door. ‘He’s fallen downstairs again,’ she said. ‘I keep telling him to take his glasses upstairs to his bedroom with him but oh, no, he knows best. Lose his head, that boy would, if it was loose. Where did you leave ’ em then?’ she bawled over her shoulder. ‘On the mantle-piece? Well, don’t you move till I’ve got ’em for you. I don’t want the whole place smashed to smithereens.’ Pausing only to peep under the saucepan lid, she scurried across to the fire-place. Dover’s propped up leg was barring the way. Mrs Armstrong thought she could reach without disturbing the Chief Inspector. She was wrong.
A detective’s life is one of constant danger. To survive a man needs razor-sharp reactions. Chief Inspector Dover had been a detective for over twenty years. Some people, MacGregor for instance, might have thought that the old man’s reflexes had got bogged down in the fat which draped his unshapely form. Some people would have been goggle-eyed, as MacGregor was, to see Dover’s seventeen and a quarter stone leap dramatically out of the chair and fling itself on Mrs Armstrong before that poor woman could get so much as half a squawk of terror out.
The pair of them came crashing to the ground. In their progress they broke the stool and rocked the television set on its table. Mrs Armstrong put up a brave fight
