Both Dover and MacGregor looked considerably crestfallen when they heard what their role was to be. The thought of going over all that dreary old stuff yet again was enough to make hearts far stouter than theirs quail. However, needs must when a senior police officer drives, and the pair of them prepared to make the best of a bad job in their different ways.
MacGregor summed up his eager-beaver grin. ‘You can rely on us, sir! We’ll sift through everything with a fine tooth comb!’
‘Yes,’ agreed Dover through one of his enormous yawns. ‘Leave it to us, eh? We’ll get cracking on it first thing in the morning.’
‘First thing in the morning, Dover? For God’s sake, this is an emergency, man! You’re to start now!’
‘But we’ve had no bloody sleep!’ whimpered Dover. ‘’Strewth, I haven’t had my bloody head down for eighteen hours!’
‘Come and see me when you haven’t been to bed for eighteen days!’ came the cruel rejoinder. ‘Now, get moving!’
Thirteen
ANOTHER TROUBLE WITH WORK WAS THAT IT ALWAYS went straight to Dover’s stomach. The morning after the kidnapping of the Sleights’s baby proved to be no exception and the chief inspector’s forays down the corridor got steadily longer and more frequent. MacGregor, forced to remain behind holding the fort in the office, rightly suspected that Dover was taking the opportunity to snatch a quiet nap out there.
Endless cardboard cups of tasteless canteen coffee didn’t help, either.
‘Oh, ’strewth!’ Dover pushed aside the bits of paper he’d been scribbling on and began extricating himself once more from behind his desk. Hospital’s where I ought to be, not sitting here sweating my guts out! Ooh,’ – he turned to MacGregor in the hope of halving his troubles – ‘it feels like having your tripes twisted by somebody’s cold hands!’
MacGregor suppressed a little frisson of distaste. ‘Really, sir?’
Dover had reached the door. ‘Back in a couple of shakes!’ he promised bravely.
MacGregor got up and stretched his legs. He looked at his watch. Half past eleven, and they’d been at it since three. God, it was turning out to be a long, hard morning. MacGregor gave himself a break and, still trying to ease the ache in his back, wandered around emptying ashtrays. The air was thick with smoke and, in defiance of regulations designed to cut the cost of the central heating, he opened a window and let the sharp, spring zephyrs come whistling in. Soon be Easter, he thought, apropos of absolutely nothing. He started tidying up the papers on his desk, straightening the files dealing with Dover’s kidnapping and sweeping the screwed up bits of scribble paper into the waste-paper basket.
There was still no sign of Dover returning.
MacGregor, giving his passion for neatness a field day, moved over and prepared to deal with the shambles on the desk of his lord and master. There was ash everywhere – over the toffee papers and the disposable coffee cups and the spent matches and. . . MacGregor went and got the duster out that he kept in his desk drawer. Ugh, talk about a pig sty! The scraps of paper on which Dover had been doodling presented more of a problem than the other items of useless rubbish and MacGregor gave them a perfunctory glance before chucking them away. The results of Dover’s long hours of work were revealing. Several sheets of paper had apparently been devoted to handwriting practice and were covered with Dover’s name and address in a variety of styles and scripts. Then there was the Art section. Animal studies. Very, very long dachshund type dogs alternating with crude representations of cats made up of two circles, two ears, whiskers and a tail. MacGregor sighed. You’d get better from a pre-school play-group of slow learners! He slung the dogs and cats into the waste-paper basket after the calligraphy and picked up the next sheet. For a moment he couldn’t quite make out what it was. He had to turn the paper round several times before he got it. That uncertain scrawl wandering from top to bottom of the paper was a large capital B. Once you’d spotted that, the rest of the writing – adminton, ristol and ath – slotted neatly into place. Dover had just laboriously noted down the names of three of the towns which had figured, however peripherally, in his abduction. Badminton, Bristol and Bath. MacGregor placed the paper precisely in the middle of Dover’s now denuded desk. It must have been the alliteration that had taken the old fool’s fancy.
MacGregor shook his duster out of the window and folded it thoughtfully.
Or was it? That was the trouble with Dover. You never knew whether he was wandering in his wits or whether he really had got hold of something. If there was one thing that really got up MacGregor’s nose, it was being out-smarted by an illiterate slob like Dover. Just in case this was liable to happen again, the sergeant began to rack his brains. Badminton – now, that was where Archie Gallagher, the public school bigamist, had been arrested and Bath was where the Claret Tapper girl, Mary Jones, had bought her blue suede jacket. And the third one? MacGregor moved back to Dover’s desk to refresh his memory about the third town and was thus caught red-handed when the chief inspector burst into the room. Dover’s speed was the result of his mistaken impression that Commander Brockhurst was after him, but that particular terror was forgotten when he saw MacGregor hovering round his desk.
‘What the hell are you doing there?’ he roared, leaping across the room, grabbing his piece of paper and clutching it protectively to his manly chest. ‘And shut that bloody window!’
MacGregor meekly complied with this last instruction
