Dover Goes to Pott

to him he began to get some really big ideas. I told him he wanted his head examining but you might as well have talked to a brick wall.’ She got the best cups and saucers out of a cupboard and put them on the table. ‘I mean, how old was he then? Twenty? And she was twenty-seven if she was a day and no oil painting. Why’s nobody wanted to marry her before, I asked him. Because she’s as poor as a church mouse and because she looks like something the cat brought in, that’s why. He wouldn’t listen, of course. Took it for granted that because she lived in a big house and called Mr Wibbley “Uncle Daniel” she must be rolling in it.’ She warmed the teapot and reached for the caddy. ‘Mind you, I blame her as much as our Jack. Talk about cradle snatching! And the gossip! Our dad used to dread having to go to work of a morning. The whole town knew about it and they were laughing themselves fit to bust. One of the Wibbleys’ lot carrying on with a kid of a clerk from Canal Bank Street! Not that she was a proper Wibbley—only by marriage, of course. Do you both take milk and sugar? Well, she was the one who introduced our Jack to Cynthia. Took him along to a tennis party at the big house and that was where she made her big mistake. Because Cynthia was only eighteen, she wasn’t bad-looking and her dad was a millionaire. Our Jack fell in love with her on the spot. It was just like something out of a blooming film.’

‘Was he really in love with her?’

Mrs Stafford shrugged her shoulders. ‘You tell me. He might have married her if she hadn’t had a farthing to her name, I suppose, but he never really had to face up to that sort of a decision, did he?’

‘I thought Mr Wibbley slung her out without a penny?’

‘Oh, our Jack didn’t take that seriously. He thought the old bastard’d come round, given time. Cynthia was his only child, after all, and there was never really any question but that she would come in to it all when her dad dies. Mind you, I reckon our Jack thought that if Cynthia’d bend a bit and suck up to the old fellow everything’d be forgotten and forgiven. But she was as stiff-necked as old Wibbley, from what I gather. She wouldn’t go cap in hand to him and our Jack couldn’t make her. This last few months or so, though, I thought he’d got reconciled to just having to sweat it out.’

‘Suppose there had been children?’ asked Dover slyly.

‘Ah, well—that would have made a difference, wouldn’t it? That’d have brought the old man round quicker than anything. They badly wanted a kid but, as my husband says, you’ve got to do more than want. Another cup?’

‘Did you know your sister-in-law was pregnant?’

‘What?’ The teapot dropped with a crash on to the table. Mrs Stafford gaped at Dover. ‘Never!’

‘She was, you know.’

‘Well, I don’t know what to say. Our Jack can’t have known it, that’s for sure.’

‘We’re pretty certain he did.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Stafford, shaking her head so that the curlers rattled, ‘I’ll go to our house! That takes the biscuit, that does! I mean, I couldn’t understand what had got into him before, but if she was expecting . . . ’ She shook her head again. ‘Well, he must have had a brainstorm or something, that’s all I can think of.’

‘Like hell he did!’ snarled Dover who wasn’t having any of that defeatist talk. ‘He did it in cold blood—and he tried to cover up his traces afterwards. It wasn’t a bad effort but, of course, it didn’t fool me for a minute.’

MacGregor decided to cut short what might possibly develop into a trumpet voluntary. ‘You appear to think that your brother is guilty, Mrs Stafford,’ he said gently.

She looked doubtfully at him and then shrugged her shoulders with weary resignation. ‘I can always tell. I could ever since he was a little nipper. He used to think he was being as clever as a box of monkeys but he couldn’t pull the wool over my eyes. Not that I claim to understand it, mind. I couldn’t before and now you say she was expecting . . . Well, it’s beyond me. I mean, why should he? He thought the world of her, you know, really. I mean, there she was—the great Daniel Wibbley’s daughter—and out of all the men in the world she’d chosen him. And it hadn’t been made easy for her, had it? She’d defied her father, she’d sacrificed a life of luxury—and all for our Jack. Any man’d be flattered, wouldn’t he? He was terribly grateful to her. She made him feel like Robert Taylor and one of the Beatles and I don’t know who all rolled into one.’

‘Maybe there was another woman?’ asked Dover hopefully.

‘Never in your life! You ask anybody. It must have been a brainstorm. What reason could he possibly have for doing a dreadful thing like that?’

Dover’s bottom lip pouted out. He was beginning to go off Mrs Stafford. She made a good nourishing cup of tea but all this talk about brainstorms was getting on his wick.

‘She has got a point though, hasn’t she, sir?’ said MacGregor when they were once more reclining in the Rolls.

‘No!’ snapped Dover, pulling down the folding seat opposite and putting his feet on it. ‘She knows he’s as guilty as hell so what else can she say? They make me sick, they do. Everything-suddenly-went-black-and-I-can’t-remember-a-thing. It’s the classic defence.’

‘But there doesn’t seem the faintest hint of a motive, does there, sir?’

‘Look, laddie,’— Dover was getting fed up with this continual carping and niggling—‘we’ve enough evidence on Perking to pin this job on him a dozen times over. Even you ought to be able to see that. It’s all there, as clear as