‘Well, I wasn’t over-impressed by his demeanour this morning, were you, sir? I thought he looked very shifty. If you ask me, he’s hiding something.’
‘With a wife like that, who wouldn’t? He ought to have given her a good belt round the ears years ago. I’d like to see my old woman taking the words out of my mouth like that, by golly I would!’
‘That dark-green car,’ said MacGregor, ‘you can’t get away from that, can you, sir?’
‘You’ve got to make it clear right from the start’ —Dover stared blearily out of the window—‘who’s boss. If you don’t, you’re sunk.’
‘If it wasn’t his car parked in Birdsfoot-Trefoil Close, it’s an amazing coincidence, sir, isn’t it?’ MacGregor watched the passing countryside through his window.
‘If a man isn’t master in his own house,’ asked Dover, ‘what is he? You’ve just got to put your foot down, that’s all. And put it down firmly. If her toes get in the way, hard bloody luck!’
‘As I see it,’ mused MacGregor, ‘he decides to go and call on his cousin Cynthia for some reason or another. Maybe he’s heard somehow that she’s going to have a baby? Well, that doesn’t matter for the moment. But, whatever his reason was, he was trying to do it on the q.t. He puts his own car out of action because anybody in the town would recognize it, and borrows his wife’s.’
‘Course, marriage is a big mistake, a big mistake. It’s the women who want to get married, not the men. Men have more damned sense.’
‘That means the visit, at any rate, was premeditated. Premeditated and surreptitious. And on the very day she’s found murdered. Well, if that doesn’t sound suspicious, I don’t know what does. Don’t you agree, sir?’
‘Eh?’ said Dover crossly.
‘Topping-Wibbley’s behaviour on the day of the murder, sir?’
‘Are you still rabbiting on about that?’ grumbled Dover. ‘You can’t see the wood for the trees, that’s your trouble. I don’t care two flipping hoots what Topping-Wibbley did or what he didn’t do. Perking murdered his wife and if you think anybody else did you’re a bigger nit than I gave you credit for. Look, laddie, give it a rest, will you? Topping-Wibbley wasn’t anywhere near Birdsfoot-Trefoil Close. He was seeing this What’s-his-name fellow at Where-is-it. If it hadn’t been such a nice day and if I hadn’t thought the drive might do me good we wouldn’t be wasting our time sitting here now. Get it?’
‘Well, sir,’ said MacGregor reprovingly, ‘I do think we’d have done better to get on to this Tony Geddes by phone the moment we left the Topping-Wibbleys’ house. By the time we get to Breadford they’ll have had time to cook up half-a-dozen phoney alibis between them.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ snorted Dover. ‘Topping-Wibbley doesn’t need any perishing alibi and, if he did, he’d have fixed it up days ago, wouldn’t he?’
‘Possibly, sir.’
Dover sniffed. ‘If he was planning murder, he’d be a damned fool if he didn’t.’
Tony Geddes was a good-natured-looking young man with a frank and open face. Dover took an immediate dislike to him, a fact which was, if anything, slightly in his favour. Geddes welcomed Dover and MacGregor into his office, sat them down in a couple of comfortable chairs and announced that two cups of the liquid that cheers but does not inebriate would be along toot sweet.
‘Know it’s against the rules to offer you boys in blue any of the hard stuff,’ he chortled merrily.
MacGregor had been very careful. He had simply asked if Messrs Dover and MacGregor could see Mr Geddes for a few minutes on a matter of some urgency. It was not exactly a dishonest approach.
‘How did you know we were policemen, Mr Geddes?’ he asked politely after a brief what-did-I-tell-you glance at Dover.
Tony Geddes’s mouth dropped open. ‘Eh? Oh. Well, didn’t my little bit of office work outside say . . . ?’
‘No,’ said MacGregor, ‘she didn’t.’
‘Oh? Well, you must just look like a brace of rozzers, eh? Big feet, you know, and all that razamataz!’ He laughed heartily.
Dover and MacGregor preserved a stony silence. References to the size of policemen’s feet did not amuse them.
‘After all, you are policemen, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said MacGregor.
‘Well, it was a good guess then, wasn’t it?’
‘Or prior information, sir.’
Tony Geddes’s face creased in hurt bewilderment. He managed to produce another insouciant laugh. ‘I can see I’d better keep my trap shut before I put the old foot in it, eh?’
‘I suppose Mr Topping-Wibbley did phone you that we were on our way, sir?’
‘Eh? No, no, of course he didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Tony Geddes got very red.
‘Pm sorry, sir, but I was under the impression that he was a friend of yours.’
‘Well,’ — defiantly — ‘he is.’
‘And he didn’t warn you that we were coming? That wasn’t very friendly of him, was it, sir? Well, Pm sorry, sir. Pd have phoned you myself but I felt sure that Mr Topping-Wibbley would have let you know.’
Tony Geddes wriggled miserably. Now he didn’t know what to say. Dover watched his discomfort with something approaching approval. That young whippersnapper MacGregor was learning. You had to grant him that. Quite a text-book little lesson, really, in how to deal with members of the public.
Tony Geddes slowly wet his lips. ‘Er—to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit anyhow?’
MacGregor’s eyebrows shot up in most convincing surprise. ‘Well, we were really expecting you to give us some information, sir.’
Tony Geddes began to sweat. What the hell did that mean? Then his face cleared. He’d show ’em he wasn’t as big a fool as he looked. ‘Oh, you’ve come about the pilfering, have you? We always have a certain amount of it but, just recently, it seems to have been getting a touch out of hand.’
‘Two detectives from Scotland Yard to investigate petty pilfering, sir?’ MacGregor shook his head in quite a kindly manner.
Tony Geddes cleared
