‘Shall I carry on with the briefing meanwhile, sir?’
‘You might as well. But, if you start getting any twinges, you let me know right off.’
‘Very good, sir.’ MacGregor returned to his notebook.
‘Well, Mrs Boyle, sir, died just after half past one this morning.’
‘And good riddance!’ muttered Dover, gazing at his breakfast with longing.
‘She died of severe injuries, sir, which included a broken neck and a broken back.’
‘Did she, by golly!’ Dover, recalling the pin he had stuck in Miss Kettering’s dolly, was more than a little impressed. ‘It must be a coincidence,’ he said uneasily.
‘Sir?’
‘Oh nothing!’ Dover couldn’t bear to wait any longer. He grabbed his knife and fork and, after a quick glance at MacGregor to make sure that he was still hale and hearty, started in on the bacon and eggs. ‘Well, go on, laddie!’
‘The doctor was a little surprised at the extent and severity of Mrs Boyle’s injuries but she was, of course, a very heavy old woman and she must have fallen extremely awkwardly. He’s quite satisfied, however, that none of the injuries was inflicted after the fall. In any case, he considers that the shock alone would have been enough to kill her.’
‘Somebody give her a shove?’
‘Oh, no, sir! It was a much more carefully set up job than that. I don’t think there’s any doubt but that this was a matter of cold-blooded, deliberate murder. Somebody had fastened a length of fine wire across the top of the stairs, here outside your room. Anybody going either up or down would almost certainly have tripped over it and gone crashing down the stairs. It’s a long, steep flight, sir, and . . .’
‘You’re telling me!’ grumbled Dover.
‘. . . and anyone plunging down like that would have been extremely lucky not to be killed. It looks as though Mrs Boyle was ascending the stairs when she tripped. She actually broke the wire but she still must have lost her footing in the dark – and that was that.’
‘In the dark?’ Dover stopped digging the marmalade out with his butter knife. ‘I left the light on.’
‘I fancy the murderer must have switched it off again, sir. With the only switch being here at the top of the stairs, Mrs Boyle had no choice but to come up in the dark. I was the first on the scene, sir, after the screams, and the staircase was in darkness then. I’m afraid Mr Lickes is going to have to answer some very awkward questions at the inquest. I can see the coroner wanting to know why there wasn’t another light switch at the bottom of the stairs. Mr Lickes’s excuse that our two rooms are hardly ever used isn’t going to be very acceptable, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes,’ grunted Dover. ‘Well, let’s not waste any time snivelling over Lickes’s trouble. We’ve got enough of mine to sweat about. Now – this bit of wire. Suppose somebody had been at the top of the stairs, coming down and with the light on – would the wire have tripped him then?’
MacGregor looked thoughtfully at ‘somebody’ and nodded his head. ‘Almost certainly, sir. It was very cunningly placed, though whether this was by accident or design, we don’t know.’
‘What do you mean – you don’t know?’ asked Dover, moodily pouring himself out another cup of tea.
‘It’s the hook that was screwed in the wall, sir. The murderer didn’t bore a special hole for it. He merely inserted it in a crack in the woodwork that was already there. So the fact that he got his wire stretched across at just the right height and everything could be a lucky coincidence.’
‘I like your idea of luck!’ snarled Dover. ‘You wouldn’t be so bloody detached about everything if it was your neck in the firing line.’ By a natural progression of ideas, Dover suddenly realized that he was sitting right in front of the window with only MacGregor’s body between him and certain death. Any Charlie out there in the grounds with a high-velocity, telescopic-sighted rifle could . . . He got up and went and sat on the bed. ’Strewth, you needed eyes in the back of your head at this game!
MacGregor blushed for him. ‘Would you like a cigarette, sir?’ he asked, recalling that tobacco was supposed to be a sovereign remedy for the blue funk.
Dover, however, was not going to be caught napping as easily as that. ‘You light it,' he ordered, ‘and have a few drags first.’
‘Oh, sir,' laughed MacGregor awkwardly, ‘you don’t really think . . .’
‘I bloody well do! Look, after I came up to bed last night, some bastard came creeping out, fixed that wire up and put the light off. Well, he wasn’t setting traps for flipping rabbits, was he? Here,' – he broke off this masterly analysis of the criminal mind to snatch the cigarette out of MacGregor’s mouth – ‘there’s no need to puff it down to a blooming dog end! ’Strewth,' – he filled his lungs and erupted into a series of hacking coughs – ‘you don’t half smoke some cheap muck!’ MacGregor declined to be side-tracked into a discussion about the quality of the cigarettes he purchased for his superior officer’s consumption. ‘You were saying about the murderer, sir.’
CI don’t need you to tell me what I was saying, laddie,' snapped Dover, spacing the words out between further coughs. ‘The day I can’t out-remember you, you can nail the lid down on me. That wire was put up for one of two people: you or me. Well, nobody’s going to get out of a warm bed on a cold night just to snuff you out, are they?’
‘Detective Inspector Stokes is working on the theory that Mrs Boyle was the intended victim, sir.’
‘More fool him! Who’d want to croak old Ma Boyle?’
‘She was a rather unpopular lady, sir.’
‘And why should anybody expect her to be coming up those stairs? Nobody could have foreseen that. There’s only your room and mine
