‘Wassat?’
‘The papers you asked for, sir.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Dover was more interested in examining the contents of the top sandwich. Sardine and beetroot! Good-oh! He let the upper layer of bread sink back into its place and glanced up enquiringly at MacGregor. ‘You waiting for a bloody bus, laddie?’
MacGregor fought down the oft-recurring impulse to ram the old lout’s National Health dentures straight down his throat. ‘I thought you might like to know, sir, that the Assistant Commissioner is coming down here. By helicopter. They’re expecting him about two o’clock.’
‘Order me an early lunch, then!’ quipped Dover, quick as a flash.
‘Apparently there’s a high-level conference going on in London, sir,’ MacGregor went on. ‘The Home Secretary called it. It seems he’s not best pleased with the way things have turned out.’
‘And he’s not the only one!’ said Dover sanctimoniously. ‘This whole case has been mishandled right from the bloody beginning. If some people had taken my kidnapping a bit more seriously, we shouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. Anyhow,’ – Sandwich Number Three was excavated – ‘you shove off now, laddie, and leave me to sort things out.’ He grasped a sheaf of papers in a greasy hand and waved them vaguely in the air. ‘I’ve got some thinking to do, eh?’
‘I’ll give you a call at a quarter to one, sir.’ MacGregor failed to resist the temptation to be slightly malicious. ‘Just in case you get so engrossed that you forget what time it is.’
Fifteen
IT WILL COME AS NO SURPRISE TO EITHER OF Dover’s fans that the chief inspector was Hat out and snoring when MacGregor came tramping upstairs to break the glad tidings that lunch was ready. True, it was apparently going to consist of steak and kidney pudding with Spotted Dick for afters, but this wouldn’t worry Dover, who preferred quantity to quality where food was concerned.
MacGregor had been having a rough time with Superintendent Trevelyan who still wanted somebody’s guts for garters and would make do with a sergeant’s if he couldn’t get his hands on a chief inspector’s. The noise at times in the bar parlour had been unbearable as twenty or thirty sweating coppers all shouted at each other at once. MacGregor paused wearily in the comparative peace and quiet of Dover’s bedroom and reflected that he must be getting old. He just couldn’t take the strain like he used to.
In order to give himself a few more seconds respite before rousing the worst bellower of the lot, MacGregor began tidying things up again. This mania for neatness was starting to get the better of him. He picked up the sandwich plate from the floor and noted that it had almost certainly been licked clean. The bed, on the other hand, looked like the centre of a paper chase and MacGregor indulged in a little sigh of self-pity as he tried to restore some semblance of order to files which had been immaculate before Dover got his grubby paws on them.
And – oh dear! – he’d been scribbling again. That was funny because, usually, Dover only put pen to paper at gun-point. Maybe he was suffering from insomnia? The stentorian grunts, snorts and bubbling coming from the bed would appear to negate that idea and MacGregor returned to wasting some time which he could ill afford examining the scraps of paper. What in heaven’s name was this one? Hither a drawing of a middle-aged housewife in her curlers or the portrait of one of Her Majesty’s High Court judges in wig and gown. Then mere was another example of Dover’s obsession with – appropriately enough – the letter B. Bristol, Badminton and Bath written several times in several equally unformed scripts. MacGregor sighed again. Talk about having your mind in a groove! And what was this? He turned the paper round on the off-chance that he was looking at this final effort upside down.
He was!
Why, the dirty-minded old lecher!
MacGregor had been very nicely brought up and was still, in spite of his gruelling years in the police, something of a mother’s boy. It didn’t take all that much to bring a blush to his cheek, especially where people of Dover’s advanced age and senility were concerned. Activities and inclinations which MacGregor found perfectly natural in his contemporaries became unbelievably obscene when they were associated with his elders. To think that a worm-eaten old slob like Dover should even know about. . . much less draw it!
MacGregor, with a moue of prudish disgust, screwed the piece of paper up into a ball and flung it into the corner of the room. A split second later, he found himself following it. Hitting the wall with a most agonising crash, he discovered that his all-to-natural cries of pain and protest were being trapped in his throat as a forearm of steel slammed across his Adam’s apple.
Exerting all his strength, MacGregor tried to shove Dover off.
The whole incident was, as a matter of fact, an interesting illustration of the perversity of human nature. Dover, who was quite capable of sleeping peacefully through the combined efforts of Armageddon and the Last Trump, had on this occasion been roused to violence by the mere crumpling of a piece of paper.
It was some time before either party recovered from the encounter. Dover didn’t seem to know where he was, and MacGregor’s throat was too bruised for speech.
‘What did you do that for?’ croaked MacGregor when, eventually, he’d got his voice back.
Dover sank down on the bed. ‘You shouldn’t have come creeping up on me like a thief in the night,’ he complained. ‘You know I’ve got these razor-sharp reactions.’
‘Actually, sir,’ said MacGregor, trying to massage some feeling back into his neck, ‘I’d been standing there for some minutes.’
Dover stopped scratching his stomach. ‘Doing what?’ he demanded with
