Dover got it all right and sank back miserably in his chair, his pasty face growing gradually pastier as he contemplated the awful prospect that lay ahead of him. ’Strewth, he’d be lucky if he sneaked more than a couple of days off for the next bloody fortnight!
Meanwhile MacGregor was looking all bright-eyed and eager. ‘How do we know that this kidnapping is the work of the Claret Tappers, sir? Have they already made contact?’
‘They have,’ said Commander Brockhurst grimly. He was really no fonder of clever young sergeants than he was of addle-pated old chief inspectors.
‘It might just be another gang using the Claret Tappers’ name, sir, in order to put us off the scent. After all, the Claret Tappers did get a tremendous amount of publicity when Chief Inspector Dover was . . .’
‘Sergeant!’ Commander Brockhurst remembered what they’d taught him on that man-management course and modified his tone to the merely brusque. ‘In the message that we got from the gang who’ve kidnapped the Prime Minister’s grandchild, mention was made of the exact room in which Mr Dover here was detained in that house in Flamborough Close. Now, nobody knew about that except a tiny handful of people here at the Yard and the kidnappers themselves. Right?’
‘Well,’ began MacGregor.
Commander Brockhurst rolled right over him. ‘Suppose you keep your questions until you’re in possession of all the facts, sergeant.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Commander Brockhurst cleared his throat and Dover realised with a sinking heart that they were in for a long night He regretted not having made a brief stop-off earlier but he had thought it wiser not to keep the commander waiting. Should he excuse himself now, or try and think about something else in the hope that it would pass off?
‘Dover! Are you listening, man?’
Dover blinked. Loud-mouthed bully! ‘I’m all ears,’ he grunted.
‘Well, I hope so, because if there’s a cock-up this time, I will personally dismember you with a blunt knife! Now, I’m going to give you a brief outline of what’s happened so far, just to put you in the picture.’
‘May we ask questions, sir?’ MacGregor’s face was the picture of innocence.
Commander Brockhurst would have liked to say ‘no’ but knew he couldn’t. ‘So long as you keep ’em short and to the point,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘Now then, as far as we are aware at the moment, the kidnapping took place sometime yesterday morning. Round about ten o’clock is the guess, but we could be out an hour or more either way. The Sleights live in a pretty isolated house on the outskirts of the village and there were, to the best of our knowledge, no witnesses to the kidnapping.’ Although he wasn’t really used to dealing with Dover, Commander Brockhurst seemed to know by instinct that you had to spell it all out slowly for the old fool. ‘The Sleights are the parents of the missing child. And Mrs Sleight, let me remind you once again, is the Prime Minister’s youngest daughter.’
‘I remember her wedding,’ said MacGregor fatuously.
‘Wednesday,’ Commander Brockhurst went on, making a mental note to delay MacGregor’s next promotion, if any, by at least a year, ‘is Mrs Sleight’s hospital day. By that I mean she goes off to the nearby town of Granbury to dish out library books in the local hospital or engage in other such charitable work. While she is away, the child – Rodney Colin Murdoch, would you believe? – is left in the care of the au pair girl. Mr Sleight is a solicitor and he has an office in Granbury. Naturally, he wasn’t at home yesterday morning, either. There are no other servants and nobody else lives in the house. No tradesmen call on a Wednesday and the milk and morning post and the newspapers all come before eight o’clock.’
MacGregor raised a hand. Dover would have liked to raise one, too, but for a different reason. ‘Was the fact that the au pair girl was alone with the baby on Wednesday generally known, sir?’
‘People in the area would know for sure, sergeant. There’s a lot of interest taken in the Sleights’s doings, with her being related to the PM. Strangers could have found out easily enough, I reckon. Naturally I’m having enquiries made in case anybody’s been over-inquisitive lately.’
‘The au pair girl could have been the source of the kidnappers’ information, sir.’
Give ’em an inch, thought the commander bitterly. ‘That thought had crossed my mind, thank you, sergeant,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Now, to return to the actual kidnapping. We think the kidnappers drove up to the house at about ten o’clock. The baby would have been outside in its pram because the weather down there was cold but tine. At some stage during the kidnapping, the au pair girl was shot and killed outright. Her name was Greta van Pronk, incidentally. Age eighteen. Dutch. Been over here with the Sleights for about six months. We don’t know why she was killed. She could have been trying to stop the kidnappers or they were afraid she would be able to identify them or raise the alarm too soon or anything.’
‘She might have known who they were, sir,’ said the unsinkable MacGregor. ‘Suppose she’d given them the information? She might not have realised what was involved and, naturally, they couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.’
‘I’m well aware of all those possibilities, thank you, sergeant!’ Commander Brockhurst began to wonder if he hadn’t been a bit hard on Dover all these years. With a clever young devil like MacGregor tied round your neck twenty-four hours a day . . . ‘We’re following up every line of enquiry, though Mrs Sleight claims the girl was very quiet and didn’t go out much at all. She had a boy friend back in Holland. Now then, where was I?’ Commander Brockhurst
