To say that MacGregor was staggered would be an understatement. Of course the blundering old goon was barking up the wrong tree, but he’d produced quite a logical little piece of deduction. In all their long and unhappy association MacGregor had never heard him achieve anything like it before. It was rather touching, really. To have thought it all out so carefully and to be so utterly wrong.
MacGregor gave his boss an encouraging smile. He’d have to handle this tactfully. ‘Hereward Topping-Wibbley might have switched the television set on after killing Mrs Perking and before he left the house, mightn’t he, sir?’
‘What the hell for?’ demanded Dover pugnaciously.
‘Well, to put us off the scent, sir,’ MacGregor suggested with a playful little laugh.
Dover blurted out a very rude word. It exploded into the comparative quiet of the dining-room and an elderly clergyman at the far end nearly spilt his Bloody Mary.
‘I say, steady on, sir!’
‘Much more of your damned patronizing, MacGregor, and I’ll swing for you, so help me I will! I’m blowed if I know what you think you’ve got to be so blasted smug about. I’ve been trying to let you down gently because I didn’t want to discourage you but I can see I’ve been wasting my breath. If you used your eyes half as much as you use your mouth you’d have seen it for yourself.’
MacGregor frowned. ‘Seen what, sir?’
‘The kitchen, you stupid young whelp! If you’re a sample of the rising generation of coppers, the villains are in for a right old field-day. Look—the unknown caller leaves the Perking’s house at twenty-five past five or so. Cynthia Perking watches the tail end of her television serial. The she turns the set off and . . . ’
‘But you just said . . . ’
‘If you don’t hold your tongue!’ gobbled Dover in an excess of fury. ‘She turned the bloody set off, went into the kitchen and started getting the bloody supper ready. At ten past six, or whatever blasted time it was, John Perking comes home on his bloody bicycle. On some pretext or another he lures his wife back into the front room. There he picks up the bloody poker and bashes her brains out. Then he builds the fire up because he knows a high temperature is going to make fixing the time of death more difficult, and he switches on the telly. Then he rushes back into the kitchen and removes all traces of the fact that his wife was getting the supper ready. He tries to make it look as though she’d never started —and, as far as morons like you are concerned, he succeeded. Then he heads for the front door, pausing only to rip the telephone wires out in the hall. That’s to give him a bit more time, see? It all helps to confuse things. Now, what time was it when he phoned the police?’
‘Er — ’—MacGregor searched hurriedly through his notebook—‘six twenty-nine, sir.’
‘Twenty bloody minutes!’ snorted Dover. ‘He’d all the time in the world.’
MacGregor stared thoughtfully at his notebook. He didn’t like the way things were developing at all. Suppose that, just for once, by some miracle, Dover had got it right?
‘You didn’t bother to have a proper look round that kitchen, did you, laddie?’
‘The fingerprint boys still hadn’t quite finished when I went back there after lunch today, sir, and . . . ’
‘But I looked,’ said Dover, waggling a fat and reproving finger, ‘before the fingerprint boys even got there. You remember me looking, don’t you, laddie? You thought I was buggering all the clues up, didn’t you? You didn’t realize that I was just solving the whole perishing case while you floundered around doing things by the book. Do you know what Mr and Mrs Perking were going to have for their supper that night, laddie?’
Dumbly MacGregor shook his head.
‘They were going to have chop and chips and fried tomatoes and if, when you’ve got a moment to spare, you care to look in that little plastic dustbin thing, you’ll find the whole bang-shoot in there. Now, I know Cynthia Perking wasn’t supposed to be any great shakes as a housekeeper but I don’t think she was so feckless as to chuck two perfectly good, partly cooked chops, a pile of raw chips and four tomatoes away just for the hell of it, do you? Why the blazes should she? And I’ll tell you something else, laddie, since, being a bachelor, you haven’t been house-trained yet. Women are creatures of habit. Cynthia Perking was quite a tidy-minded person really—you can see that from the house. So when I find just two knives and two forks and a couple of pudding spoons chucked all higgledy-piggledy in the cutlery drawer I start thinking that, maybe, she didn’t put them away. Dover looked contemptuously at MacGregor. ‘I could tell you practically every move Perking made in that kitchen—tablecloth not folded in the folds, basket in the chip pan all twisted round the wrong way — but I can’t be bothered. Tomorrow morning, after we’ve arrested Mr John Perking, you can go round there and work it out for yourself.’
MacGregor opened his mouth but, not being able to think of anything appropriate to say, helplessly shut it again.
Chapter Six
THE following morning Dover was, not surprisingly, most intolerably cock-a-hoop. It wasn’t often that he could chalk up such a triumph and he had no intention of letting his moment of glory run to waste. With undisguised glee he set about rubbing MacGregor’s nose in it as hard as he could. That young gentleman, considerably shaken, had to suffer in silence as his Chief Inspector swaggered around the hotel, bawling his head off and telling indignant chambermaids to jump to it and show a leg there.
It was nearly ten o’clock before MacGregor got back, armed with a warrant for the arrest
