Chief Inspector Dover sobered up in time for supper. He usually did. MacGregor had suggested that a cold shower might work wonders, but Dover knew that forty winks on top of the bed would bring him up as fresh as a daisy. He was somewhat overstating the case, of course, but he emerged from the Land of Nod quite fit enough to crawl downstairs and do full justice to Mrs Plum’s fish and chip supper.
Over their meal the two detectives naturally talked shop. MacGregor might have preferred a rest from the subject of sudden and violent death when he was eating, but at least the discussion took his mind off Dover’s table manners. He briefed Dover about what had happened at Mr de la Poche’s house and afterwards.
‘I was thinking we might leave this business of the choirboys to the local police, sir,’ he concluded. ‘We don’t want to get ourselves involved in any minor breaches of the law which may have been going on. Our interest should, in my opinion, be limited to seeing if Clifford de la Poche can, in fact, produce an alibi for that evening.’
But Dover wasn’t prepared to let Mr de la Poche slip through his greasy fingers as easily as that. Pausing only to help himself to those chips which the fastidious MacGregor had left unconsumed on his plate, the Master Mind succinctly outlined his theory that de la Poche did it. ‘Look,’ he said through a mouthful of disintegrating potato, ‘we can still get him, even allowing for the fact that he’s not likely to have fathered that girl’s kid.’ MacGregor, following the direction of Dover’s bulging eyes, passed over his bread roll. ‘How do you make that out, sir?’ he asked out of pure politeness. The day he couldn’t keep three jumps ahead of an old bungler like Dover, he told himself, he’d pack it in.
Dover replied in a spray of bread-crumbs. ‘The girl arrives in The Grove looking for this particular house where her boyfriend lives. Right? So, it’s dark. All the houses have got their gates left wide open so you can’t read the blooming names without going into the driveway, if then.’
‘There are only five houses in The Grove, sir. She couldn’t possibly not be able to find the one she wanted. It may be slightly inconvenient to read the house names, but it’s not impossible. They’re all there.’
Dover scowled and pushed his plate petulantly away. ‘All right, she didn’t know the name of the house. That’s bloody possible, isn’t it?’
‘It’s possible, sir,’ admitted MacGregor, ‘but rather improbable, really. The point is that, in my opinion, she was looking up the address of her gentleman friend when she was at the station in Chapminster. You may recall, sir, that she only asked the ticket collector how to get to Frenchy Botham after she’d emerged from the phone box. In other words, before that she’d only known that lover boy lived somewhere in the Chapminster area, but not his precise address.’
‘It’s all supposing,’ grumbled Dover, never slow at picking holes in other people’s theories. ‘You don’t know that she didn’t actually make a phone call and tell him she was coming.’
‘No, sir,’ agreed MacGregor equably. ‘But I do know that, if she did look up the name of any resident in The Grove, she would have found the name of his house in the phone book. They’re all there, you see: Les Chenes, Ilfracombe, Otterly House, Fairacre and Lilac View. I’ve checked.’
‘You would!’ snarled Dover. ‘All right, so she knew the name of the bloody house when she was in Chapminster, but by the time she got out here she’d forgotten it. People do, you know. Not everybody’s got a memory like a bloody ostrich.’
‘No, sir,’ agreed MacGregor meekly.
‘When she gets to The Grove, she naturally has to go and ask where Mr So-and-So lives. Anything wrong with that?’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘No, sir.’ He supposed they owed all this intense mental activity on Dover’s part to Pomeroy Chemicals.
‘All unbeknowing,’ Dover went on, ‘she picks on that blooming pansy’s house. She rings the bell. “Where can I find Mr What’s his-name?”’
There was a pause.
‘And then, sir?’
‘And then,’ said Dover, groping around for the knock-out punch, ‘she sees something.’
MacGregor, rather than sit there all night, was prepared to help out. ‘Like some improper behaviour between Mr de la Poche and this unknown choirboy, for example, sir?’
‘Precisely!’ said Dover, relieved to find he hadn’t forgotten what he was talking about after all. ‘Well, Mr de la What’s-his-name knows it’s disgrace and prison if he gets caught, even in these enlightened days, so he kills her to shut her mouth and then disposes of the body as per usual in amongst the rhododendrons. I haven’t,’ said Dover hurriedly as he sensed that MacGregor was about to start nit-picking again, ‘worked out all the details yet, but that’s the general idea.’
MacGregor straightened his pudding spoon and fork and brushed the odd crumb off the table-cloth. ‘What about the missing handbag, sir?’
‘What about it?’ Dover pretended to
