Rather hurriedly MacGregor gave him a cigarette. With a bit of luck the sheer effort of puffing it would keep the old fool awake. ‘The Claret Tappers seem to be quite a small gang, sir. We appear to be looking for a group of about four. Three youngish men and a girl. They planned your kidnapping very carefully. They infiltrated the girl into New Scotland Yard itself either to pick a victim for them or to keep tabs upon one who had already been selected. When they are ready to go into action, the girl gives you a doped cup of tea so that you stay on at the Yard until long past the usual end of your working day. This ensures that, when you do finally leave, things are pretty quiet in the street outside and . . .’
‘That’s why I went to sleep in the taxi!’ crowed Dover.
‘Sir?’
‘Don’t you remember, numbskull? When I said I’d gone to sleep on the taxi ride to wherever it was they took me, you came over all toffee-nosed and implied I should have been counting the miles or seeing which way the wind was blowing or some other bloody trick. Well, the reason I didn’t was because I was doped. See?’
MacGregor knew the futility of arguing and, besides, there was just the possibility that Dover had a modicum of justice on his side. ‘My apologies, sir,’ he said generously.
Dover was not to be outdone in your olde-worlde courtesy. ‘And it was bloody coffee, you moron!’
There are limits beyond which even professional doormats will not go. ‘Tea, sir! You told me tea! Look,’ – MacGregor scrabbled through his sheets of paper and then grabbed for his notebook – ‘I wrote up my notes almost immediately and you definitely said . . .’
‘Coffee.’ When you get to Dover’s age, weight and general lumpishness, you take your kicks where you can get them.
‘It was tea, sir. Honestly.’
‘Coffee!’ insisted Dover, grinning like a sadistic jackass. ‘I should know,’ he pointed out, the incarnation of sweet reason and brute obstinacy.
It takes a couple of hours to go from London to Bath and MacGregor had visions of every last second of this time being taken up with a fruitless debate about non-alcoholic beverages. He swallowed his pride. ‘Coffee, sir,’ he agreed.
Dover sniggered fit to bust. ‘On second thoughts,’ he giggled, ‘it was tea.’
It was probably only the fortuitous arrival of the ticket collector that saved Dover from some very common assault.
‘We haven’t,’ said Dover when they were alone once more, ‘found the girl and we haven’t found the taxi.’
‘No, sir, agreed MacGregor. ‘Miss Mary Jones, if that’s her real name, is proving rather elusive and to date we haven’t got very’ far with Master Arnfield’s list of car numbers. Either that kid’s nothing like as smart as his doting parents think he is or the Claret Tappers were using phoney number plates. Either way, it’s my guess that they’ll have lumped that old taxi by now. Run it off a cliff into the sea or burned it up on a patch of waste ground somewhere. Still,’ – he sighed – ‘we’ll keep looking.’
‘This case is full of bloody clues that don’t lead anywhere,’ grumbled Dover. ‘Those two cons we slogged hall-way across the country to see – fat bleeding lot of good they were!’
‘Archie Gallagher and Lesley Whittacker,’ said MacGregor, although he knew he could have called them Robin Hood and Maid Marian for all the difference it would have made to Dover.
‘They’d never bloody well heard of the Claret Tappers.’
‘Or of each other, come to that,’ said MacGregor.
Dover, who wasn’t quite as stupid as he looked, glanced sharply at his sergeant. ‘Wadderyermean?’ he demanded. ‘We never asked ’em if they’d heard of each other.’
MacGregor was obliged to come clean. ‘I checked by phone later, sir,’ he confessed. I thought if there was some connection between Gallagher and Whittacker – other than the Claret Tappers, of course – it might open up an avenue that would be profitable to explore.’
Dover stared for a moment or two in silence. ‘You know your trouble, don’t you?’ he asked sourly.
‘No, sir.’
‘You think too bloody much! Here,’ – Dover’s grasshopper mind flitted away to a more congenial topic – ‘do we get lunch on this train?’
MacGregor prayed for strength. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’
‘There’ll be a refreshment car.’ Dover began to drag his feet off the seat.
‘Sir, we really ought to go over the investigation so far. We’re beginning to get bogged down. Every line of enquiry we try to pursue just seems to get us nowhere.’
‘I couldn’t have put it better myself!’ agreed Dover, marshalling his strength before getting to his feet. ‘Nothing seems to be any flaming good. Mary What’s-her-name’s disappeared into thin air and so’s that perishing taxi. We’ve found the house I was held prisoner in and, for all the bloody good it’s done us, we might as well not have bothered.’
‘The Photofit pictures of Mary Jones might. . .’
Dover hauled himself up into the perpendicular. ‘Stuff the Photofit pictures of Mary Jones!’ he advised. ‘They’ll be no bloody help. I tell you – we’ve had it! The ransom note didn’t lead us anywhere. Those two cons were a dead loss. And I’ll tell you something else for free!’ Dover had worked himself up into such a state that he’d even opened the door into the corridor for himself. ‘This blooming blue coat we’re going to ask about – that’ll turn out to be a complete frost, too.’
MacGregor was so ill-advised as to try and look on the bright side. Taint heart never won fair lady, sir!’ he quipped as he staggered along the swaying carriages in Dover’s wake.
‘Which explains why you’re still a bloody bachelor!’ snarled Dover.
* * *
MacGregor was still sulking when he pushed open the door of the Naicewhere Boutique in one of the more elegant streets of Bath. The way Dover kept equating the state of single-blessedness with a lack
