The second point, which even Dover grasped, was in its way equally repugnant. He hadn’t been in the house thirty seconds before he realized that Mrs Veitch was the one who wore the trousers. Not literally, of course. The mere idea of Mrs Veitch in slacks would have been enough to make strong men tremble. Another fifteen seconds passed and Dover was grimly forced to recognize that she was also the one, metaphorically speaking, wearing the police uniform. And a grisly old bogy she made, too.
Sergeant Veitch was hardly given time to get his coat off before he was directed into the kitchen to brew the tea and told to finish off laying the table.
‘I can’t abide sandwiches and bread-and-butter left out on plates and going all dry and curly at the edges,’ said Mrs Veitch as she placed Dover at the top of the table nearest the fire. ‘ Can you?’
‘No,’ said Dover.
Sergeant Veitch scuttled in with the teapot.
‘For goodness sake, Sydney,’ his wife rebuked him sharply, ‘why don’t you put an apron on? If you get that suit marked again …’ Out of deference, no doubt, to the presence of their visitor she left the threat unfinised.
The Veitchs kept a good table and were hospitable. Goodies of every description were piled liberally on Dover’s plate. Each offering was accompanied by a short history of how its ingredients had been acquired, at what cost, and how they had been transformed to their present state by Mrs Veitch’s own hands, usually according to a formula which had been handed down in her family for generations.
This domestic gloss was contributed exclusively by Mrs Veitch. In twenty-five years of connubial bliss Sergeant Veitch had learnt the hard way not to open his mouth in his wife’s presence, except for the insertion of her culinary triumphs. When on occasion Mrs Veitch appealed to him to support her assertation that her home-made veal and ham pie, for example, was the best he had ever tasted, he contented himself with nodding his head enthusiastically.
Dover was amazed, remembering the sergeant’s bullying manner at their first encounter in the police station. It was obviously the only chance the poor devil got to assert himself, Dover thought with, if not affection, at least satisfaction, of his own lady wife. She’d have got the back of his hand very smartly if she ever showed the faintest sign of developing into a second Mrs Veitch. By God, she would!
They had reached the trifle, completely non-alcoholic, when Mrs Veitch abruptly stopped talking about how good a cook she was and got down to the basic motive behind the invitation to Dover.
‘How’s your investigation going?’
Dover spluttered through a mouthful of soggy cake and cream, a fair proportion of which splattered all over Mrs Veitch’s clean table cloth. It says a great deal for her single-mindedness that she refrained from comment.
‘You don’t seem to have been overworking yourself lately,’ she remarked reprovingly.
Dover choked on a bit of purple stuff with which the trifle had been liberally decorated. ‘My foot,’ he explained.
Mrs Veitch sniffed.
Dover tried again. ‘It’s a very tricky case.’
‘Remorse,’ said Mrs Veitch.
‘Eh?’
‘Cochran committing suicide. Remorse for an ill-spent and dissolute life.’
‘Oh,’ said Dover. ‘We thought there might be some tie-up with that Hamilton business,’ he added casually.
‘Did you? No, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there. Some raspberries and cream, Mr Dover?’ Dover’s eyes bulged but he nodded his head. ‘They’re our own raspberries, picked straight from the garden. We’ve got some very good bushes, haven‘ t we, Sydney?’ Sergeant Veitch offered his usual silent agreement. ‘The best bushes we’ve ever had, the ones we’ve got now. The cream’s fresh, too. I always buy it from Hutchinson’s; that’s a farm a couple of miles down the road. Of course, I can get it from the Dairy but I like Hutchinson’s better. They’ve got Jersey cows, you see. Of course, the Dairy’s handier but Sydney doesn’t mind getting the car out and popping down to Hutchinson’s, do you, Sydney?’
Sydney, musing gently about wife-murderers who had got away with it, missed his cue and nodded his head. His wife, ever sensitive to the possibility of worms turning, glared at him. Sergeant Veitch smiled weakly and obediently shook his head.
Dover accepted his dishful of raspberries and cream. ‘The Hamilton affair’s giving us a real headache,’ he observed.
It wasn’t giving Mrs Veitch any. ‘That Country Club, that’s where you ought to be looking. Disgusting place. I can’t think why they don’t close it down.’ She stared accusingly at her husband.
Dover struggled on through the raspberries. ‘ Hamilton was all right when he left the Country Club. In fact, he reached his own front door quite safe and sound, as far as we can tell.’
Mrs Veitch frowned. ‘You’re not thinking of accusing his wife, I hope? Not but what she wouldn’t have been justified in murdering that brute a dozen times over.’
Dover belched gently.
‘Have some of this Madeira cake, Mr Dover. I can thoroughly recommend it, even if I do say it as shouldn’t. I baked it myself and if there’s one thing I do pride myself on it’s my cakes. They’re really very good, aren’t they, Sydney?’ She was already wielding the cake knife.
Dover’s eyes glazed over. He was near bursting point but it went strictly against the grain of his nature to refuse. ‘Just a small piece,’ he gasped.
‘No,’ said Mrs Veitch, ‘not Mrs Hamilton. Well, it wasn’t a woman’s crime in any case, was it? She’s only a poor, thin mite of a thing. She couldn’t possibly have coped with lugging that great lump around, never mind chop him up like that.’
‘She’s got
