‘We’ll start with the Hamilton affair, sir,’ announced Dover firmly. He had no intention of letting off his nuclear device without a suitable build-up. The Chief Constable had a very florid complexion and Dover didn’t want a heart attack on his hands on top of everything else. ‘You remember Hamilton? A dog’s dinner in his own front garden? All right, now we know Hamilton was mixed up with quite a few crooks, financing their various jobs.’
‘No!’ roared the Chief Constable in blank amazement. ‘I didn’t know anything of the kind. Why wasn’t I told about all this?’
‘Oh well, never mind about it now,’ said Dover hurriedly. ‘ It doesn’t really matter. Hamilton dealt with professional villains, not homicidal maniacs. No professional would have wasted his time and his energy chopping up a dead man. No, the motive behind the attack on Hamilton was something quite different.’
‘But the Ladies’ League were nevertheless responsible?’ asked the Chief Constable with withering sarcasm.
Dover nodded. ‘What happened was something like this. Hamilton went off to the Country Club as he frequently did. He had a drop too much to drink and came home by taxi. All perfectly normal. He’d done it before. Now, the taxi-driver was called Armstrong. He’s as blind as a bat but he’s quite sure that he found Hamilton’s house without any difficulty. But the houses in Minton Parade are as alike as two peas in a pod and the house numbers are practically invisible even in broad daylight. So, how did Armstrong find Hamilton’s house with no trouble at all?’
‘Go on,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘surprise me!’
‘The answer’s simple,’ said Dover, ‘he didn’t. Oh, he pulled up at a house numbered 25 all right, but it wasn’t Hamilton’s house. It was a nearby house where somebody had stuck huge and unmistakable figures on the fan light over the door – at least, I reckon that’s how they did it. Armstrong sees these figures, stops, Hamilton gets out of the taxi and goes unheedingly into a house which looks just like his. Any little discrepancies he’s too sozzled to notice. Inside this house they’re waiting for him. As soon as he’s got one foot over the threshold they nab him.’
‘The Ladies’ League?’ asked the Chief Constable, not quite so bumptious now.
‘Of course. The house next door belongs to Miss ffiske, the veterinary surgeon. She’s a leading light in the Ladies’ League.’
‘You’re not accusing her?’ gasped the Chief Constable.
‘I certainly am. Mind you, she’d got accomplices, but she was the king pin. She had to be, of course, because of the operation.’
‘What operation?’
‘The operation they were going to perform on Hamilton, of course. Why else do you think they grabbed him?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ the Chief Constable shook his head in bewilderment.
‘Well, I’m guessing now, of course, but the main outline’s clear enough. They whipped Hamilton into the operating theatre. Did you know that your precious Miss ffiske has a proper operating theatre in her house? Well, she has. She uses it for animals in the normal way but it’s an operating theatre all the same. Well, the operation had only just got started when Hamilton mucks the whole scheme up by dying on them. I’ll bet that fair put the cat amongst the pigeons! Now, they’d got a flipping corpse on their hands, and a corpse with the telltale marks of the operation on it. Panic all round, with nobs on! All they can think of doing is mutilating poor old Hamilton still further in an effort, successful as it turned out, to cover up the signs of the operation. Then they took Hamilton’s body and all his clothes and dumped them over the wall into his own front garden. It’d be the early hours of the morning by then so, of course, nobody saw them.’
There was a pregnant silence while both the Chief Constable and his driver up in front digested what they had heard.
‘I have in my time,’ said the Chief Constable thoughtfully, ‘been forced to listen to a considerable amount of sheer, undiluted poppycock. I have, however, no hesitation, in stating that this unspeakable rigmarole of yours takes the cake – to put it crudely.’
‘It holds water,’ said Dover sulkily. ‘You just try picking holes in it.’
‘All right! Hamilton usually came back from the Country Club in his own car, didn’t he? Well, how did anybody know that on this particular night he was going to return in a taxi driven by a near-blind taxi-driver?’
‘Somebody must have tipped them off.’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, heck,’ I don’t know,’ said Dover crossly. ‘Somebody. Anyhow, what does it matter? That’s just a minor detail.’
‘And what about the evidence of that actress woman, Doris Doughty?’
‘Ah, but she’s a member of the Ladies’ League, too! Her evidence isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. She was primed with what she’d got to say and every time she was asked about it she reeled it all off like a bloody old poll parrot. There was no green van and no two men. That was all made up just to put us off the scent.’
‘Now, look here, Dover,’ said the Chief Constable, trying a kindly, man-to-man approach, ‘this is getting ridiculous. Why on earth should Miss ffiske, a highly respectable and respected woman, kidnap a man like Hamilton and operate on him? What was she doing, for God’s sake? Taking his appendix out?’
‘She was castrating him,’ said Dover calmly.
‘She was doing what?’ The Chief Constable’s blood pressure went up like a lift in a Manhattan skyscraper.
‘I know it sounds a bit queer, sir, but you can take it from me that that’s exactly what she and her friends were doing. You must know Hamilton’s reputation, sir. He was an absolute devil where women were concerned. And you know what the Ladies’ League is like. All right – they clashed! The Ladies’ League disapproved strongly of Hamilton’s way of life and, being a practical body of women,
