Dover stood in the middle of the pavement outside and let the tourists flow round him. ‘Did you notice how that silly cow in there kept calling everything “wee”?’ he demanded crossly as MacGregor, having made the apologies and given the thanks, joined him.
‘Not particularly, sir,’ said MacGregor.
‘Well, I bloody well did!’ snapped Dover, looking up and down the street with some anxiety. ‘Where do you reckon the nearest gents’ toilet is?’
* * *
And it was on that note that the attempt to bring the kidnappers of Detective Chief Inspector Dover to book really came to an end. In the public lavatory at the bus station in Bath. Like most of the criminal investigations with which Dover was associated, it expired not with a bang but with a whimper and you’d have been hard put to it to find anybody who cared tuppence either way. The top brass at the Yard weren’t pushing things. I hey’d decided that the kidnapping of Dover didn’t herald a full-scale attack on the forces of law and order, and that was all they were really worried about. Even Sergeant MacGregor tailed signally to work up much enthusiasm for the capture of the men who had taken Dover off his back for a few short, glorious hours.
And what about Dover himself? Well, our hero had been keen enough on vengeance at the beginning but it soon penetrated even his thick skull that you couldn’t carry on a vendetta without involving yourself in a quite unacceptable amount of work. And work, in Dover’s estimation, was the worst of all the four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words.
The Great British Public, of course, had packed it in weeks ahead of anybody else and would have responded now with a look of blank astonishment if anybody had asked them who either Dover or the Claret Tappers were.
Not that the Bath fiasco brought all activity to a grinding halt. Dover managed to maintain the appearance of being busy whenever anybody looked at him and kept MacGregor on the hop with various niggling little jobs. Reports continued to dribble in as police forces throughout the country and various departments in New Scotland Yard pursued their enquiries until they reached the blankest of blank walls. The fingerprint boys failed to identify any of the prints in the house in Flam borough Close. An old Austin taxi was found burnt out on the sands at Southport but whether it was the one in which Dover had been abducted no-one could say.
From time to time Dover made the odd telephone call, urging his colleagues to greater efforts but he knew as well as anybody that things couldn’t go on like this much longer. Commander Brockhurst was wonderfully generous and it was only when he simply couldn’t stand Dover making the whole of Scotland Yard look shabby and untidy any longer that he took the easy way out. There was a particularly dreary murder up in Northumberland. The local police took one look at it, declared themselves baffled and called in the Yard. They got Dover. Within a matter of hours both he and MacGregor had disappeared into those Northern mists. New Scotland Yard smartened up overnight, Commander Brockhurst was seen to smile again and – well – who cares about a few disgruntled Northumbrians?
It was then that the Claret Tappers struck for the second time.
Twelve
FOR REASONS WHICH MUST REMAIN SECRET FOR many years to come, Dover spent most of Maundy Thursday sitting in a tool shed on one of the better-known Northumbrian golf courses. For company he had a couple of oily grass-cutters, a rusty hand lawn-mower, and a platoon of spiders which kept peeping out at him from behind a mouldering heap of old rakes and brushes. By early afternoon he had consumed all the coffee and sandwiches he’d brought with him and was idly wondering if time would ever remove the marks which the empty beer crate he was using as a chair had cut into his ample posterior.
The shed was cold, damp and smelly.
Dover was fed up.
At four o’clock MacGregor arrived, soaked to the skin and looking worried.
‘And about bloody time!’ Dover welcomed him.
MacGregor sensibly refused to be drawn into an argument about the justice or otherwise of their system of watch-keeping. ‘We’ve got to go back to London, sir.’
‘Thank God!’ said Dover piously and began to put some real effort into working the stiffness out of his joints. ‘We’ll never be able to pin it on that Sunday School teacher, not if we hang around this dump till the bloody cows come home. I told Brockhurst that months ago.’
‘We can catch a train at six, sir.’
‘Tonight?’ Dover was understandably outraged. They’d been stuck up in Northumberland for three weeks doing damn all and nobody seemed to have missed them. ‘What’s all the sweat about?’
I don’t know, sir,’ admitted MacGregor. ‘I just got a very curt message from the commander. They did want us to fly down but I pointed out that it would be much quicker by train.’ MacGregor shivered. ‘Especially in this weather.’
‘I won’t have time to pack,’ complained Dover. ‘And what about this murder? Are we supposed just to chuck our hands in and leave it hanging in mid air?’
‘We’ve got to catch the six o’clock train, sir,’ said MacGregor patiently. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘But, why?’ demanded Dover as they left the shed together and braved the howling gale and the driving rain outside. ‘What do they want us in London for?’
MacGregor had been feeding his ulcers with worries like that. ‘They didn’t say, sir. It all seems to be a bit hush-hush.’ Dover completed the manoeuvres which placed him
