‘Oh, sir \’ said MacGregor reproachfully.
‘Look who’s talking!’
They plodded on and eventually reached the bottom of the lane and turned into East Street. Outside the Studio was a small van and Miss Wittgenstein and Jim Oliver, watched by Lloyd Thomas, were loading a heavy box into it. Work stopped as the two detectives approached.
‘Planning a moonlight flit?’ asked Dover pleasantly as he rested his weight on the van’s radiator.
‘At two o’clock in the afternoon, goon?’ Lloyd Thomas tucked his legs up so that Miss Wittgenstein could squeeze past him up the steps into the house. ‘Why don’t you do something socially acceptable for a change and give the lady a hand?’
Miss Wittgenstein appeared again, carrying another box. ‘Oh, come on, you chaps! I don’t want to miss that train.’ She was surprised and gratified when MacGregor stepped forward to relieve her of her burden and put it in the back of the van. ‘Oh, thanks very much!’
‘Are you going away?’ asked MacGregor as Jim Oliver sat down on the steps next to Lloyd Thomas.
‘Oh, no – I’m just sending this batch of pots down to London. It’s the first day we’ve managed to get any transport since the earthquake.’ She patted one of the boxes proudly. ‘Part of the export drive, you know. Would you like to see?’
MacGregor, being a nice young man, said he would and Miss Wittgenstein poked open one comer of the box, dug around in the straw and eventually brought out a newspaper- wrapped bundle. ‘There you are! 'she crowed as she stripped the covering off. ‘Specially designed for the American market. Now, what do you think of that?’
‘Very nice,’ said MacGregor and gazed in some dismay at a rather nasty, mis-shapen beaker in thick pottery. He read the inscription, ‘A Presente from ye olde Camelot’.
‘Some of your best work,’ said Jim Oliver loyally. He got up and came across, narrowing his eyes appreciatively. ‘You’ve managed to get a really cosmic feeling into it.’ He flourished a judicious thumb. ‘That curve there – so chaste and yet so surfeited.’
Lloyd Thomas shook his head pityingly.
‘What’s it for?’ asked Dover, who was a complete Philistine where art was concerned and reckoned, in this instance, that a chimpanzee could have done better with its feet.
‘It’s not for anything,’ explained Miss Wittgenstein patiently. ‘It just is.’
Jim Oliver backed her up. ‘A work of art doesn’t need any justification, dear. You don’t ask what the Mona Lisa is for, or the Sistine Chapel, do you?’
‘No,’ said Dover.
Miss Wittgenstein turned the mug round so that its wishy-washy brown and green glaze caught the sun. ‘This is one for living with!’ She looked at Dover. ‘Would you like it?’
Dover wasn’t one to turn down a free gift.
‘Forty-nine and eleven,’ said Miss Wittgenstein brightly.
MacGregor, after making what excuses, explanations and farewells he could, caught up with Dover as he reached the top of East Street. Things had been tidied up quite a bit since MacGregor’s last visit, but the scene of min and devastation was still pretty breathtaking. Dover cut it down to size.
‘I’ve seen worse,' he commented after standing and staring for a couple of minutes.
MacGregor was sorely tempted to ask where, but his attention was caught by a movement behind him. He turned just in time to see young Mrs Hooper beating as hasty a retreat as she was able to back through the front door of her house.
Dover had spotted her, too. ‘Didn’t want to meet us,’ he grinned. ‘I suppose in your book that’s proof positive of a guilty conscience?’
‘Not necessarily, sir,’ said MacGregor, privately thinking that anybody who deliberately cultivated Dover’s company wanted his or her head examining.
Dover grunted and resumed his contemplation of Sully Martin’s big moment. MacGregor left him in peace for a few minutes. The last hour or so had not been totally useless. Dover had been given the chance to renew his acquaintance with nearly all of the chief actors in the drama. Only Colin Hooper had not put in an appearance and he was no doubt away at his work. MacGregor wasn’t too distressed at his absence. He himself had been present at the encounter between Dover and the Hoopers and he was pretty certain that no vital snippets of evidence had slipped past him.
Dover looked round. He was actually looking for somewhere to sit down but MacGregor pounced eagerly on any flicker of interest or intelligence.
‘Is anything stirring, sir?’
Dover glanced glumly down at his paunch. ‘Not yet. I’ll have to lay off liqueur chocolates if this is what they do to me.’
MacGregor restrained himself with difficulty. ‘Well, actually sir, I really meant about the murder.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Dover.
‘I was just wondering if, having seen everybody again, you might perhaps have recalled . . .’
‘No,’ said Dover.
There was a couple of minutes’ silence out of respect for MacGregor’s hopes.
‘There’s one thing,’ said Dover, moving unhappily from one foot to the other. ‘Why didn’t you ask that bunch of layabouts what they were doing in the small hours of this morning?’
‘The artists, sir? Oh, they’ve already been questioned by the local police.’
Dover snorted resentfully. ‘You don’t seem to be taking this attack on me very seriously.’
‘I honestly think we’d do better to concentrate on the Chantry murder, sir.’
More minutes ticked by.
Dover sighed. ‘How much longer are we going to stand here?’ he demanded.
MacGregor gave himself a little shake. ‘Wouldn’t you like to see where Walter Chantry’s body was found, sir?’
‘No,’ said Dover.
MacGregor gazed round in the hope of finding something that would keep Dover out of his bed for just a little longer. ‘That’s all that’s left of Wing Commander Pile’s house, sir.’ He pointed to the heap of rubble directly in front of them. ‘It must have been very nice before all this happened. The back half split clean away – you can see where the line of the fault ran – and collapsed almost immediately, I imagine. This front part, though, remained
