Inspector Walters was so unnerved by this display of unashamed hostility that the obvious answer to Dover’s question never so much as crossed his mind. ‘I thought – we thought – it might narrow the search down, sir,’ he bleated. ‘Starting from Barford-in-the-Meadow, you see, and then widening out in ever increasing circles.’
‘I’ll give you ever increasing circles!’ threatened Dover.
It was left to MacGregor to find some more constructive line of enquiry. ‘Where precisely did they find this paper bag?’
Inspector Walters responded with touching gratitude. The relief of hearing a human voice! ‘It was in her shoe, sergeant.’
‘Her shoe?’
‘Yes, she’d got a hole in the sole of her left shoe and this paper bag had been folded up and placed in the shoe, evidently in an attempt to keep the wet out. All her clothing was cheap, rubbishy stuff. Tatty. Her shoes were the same. I doubt if they would have stood up to re-soling, even supposing she’d got the money to pay for it. The lab people have been going through all her clothing with a fine tooth-comb in an effort to track down where she hailed from. It was all chain-store stuff. The sort you can buy in any one of a couple of hundred towns. It was pure chance, really, that one of the team thought of having a look at the soles of her shoes. They were looking more for particles of coal dust or sand or cement or something. The shoes had dried out a bit by then and he realized that there’d been this amateurish attempt to repair them. And that’s how they found the paper bag.’
Inspector Walter’s account tailed off lamely as Dover produced, without benefit of decently concealing hand, one of his enormous, jaw-cracking yawns. It was an awesome spectacle and, in its time, had put better men than Inspector Walters off their stride.
‘And you think we might be able to trace the girl back through this?’ MacGregor was merely ruminating aloud. The day had not yet dawned when he would seek advice from a provincial copper, however worthy.
Inspector Walters nodded. ‘It’s the only clue we’ve got.’
MacGregor was well aware of that. ‘Barford-in-the-Meadow is quite a little tourist centre,’ he pointed out. ‘And a half-way stop for the long distance coaches. I can’t see anybody at Ermengilda’s Kitchen remembering a casual customer.’
‘If she was a bloody customer at all,’ contributed Dover, running a stubby finger round the inside of his glass and then licking off the very last traces of brandy. ‘She could have picked that bag up in the street somewhere.’
‘That’s true, sir,’ agreed MacGregor. He wouldn’t have picked a paper bag up in the street himself, but he appreciated that not everyone would be so particular. ‘And from what little we know about the girl, it does seem rather unlikely that she would be making purchases in a place like Ermengilda’s Kitchen.’ He tapped the plastic sandwich with an authoritative finger. ‘These tourist-trap places are generally on the expensive side.’
‘Doesn’t that make it more likely that they would remember her, if she had been a customer?’ asked Inspector Walters, and got two very bleak scowls for his pains.
Meanwhile, Dover, too, had been thinking. He was getting very bored with Frenchy Botham and a nice little run out into the country wouldn’t come at all amiss. Especially one at the taxpayer’s expense. They could have lunch at Barford-in-the-Meadow, ask a few questions and be back at The Laughing Dog in plenty of time for supper. A few hours’ delay in reaching a final solution wouldn’t worry Pomeroy Chemicals Limited all that much, and they’d be highly unlikely ever to find out the reason why. Dover felt almost happy and, since he was clearly going to put himself out on Inspector Walters’s behalf, he considered he was fully justified in inviting that lucky man to stand another round of drinks. ‘One,’ he said with a winning leer, ‘for the road, eh?’
Inspector Walters gathered up the empties.
Dover vouchsafed a final suggestion. ‘How about making’em doubles this time?’
If there were any justice in the world, Dover’s day trip to Barford-in-the-Meadow would have been accomplished in either a thick fog or a blinding snowstorm. The day broke, however, bright and sunny and, although it was some hours before Dover got out of bed, the weather continued to be really rather superb. He and MacGregor had a most enjoyable drive in the police car which, in accordance with Dover’s instructions, progressed slowly so that they could enjoy the burgeoning beauties of the English countryside.
All in all, it made a very nice break – a pleasant little interlude in the hard, unrelenting and exhausting grind of a murder investigation. They stopped for coffee and biscuits at The Caltraps in Lesser Wibbley, beer and crisps at The William & Mary in Horwill, and reached Barford-in-the-Meadow in time for an early lunch.
At three o’clock, when the bar closed, MacGregor managed to get Dover out of The Ploughboy’s Arms and staggering once more along the path of duty. Having sensibly found out the location of Ermengilda’s Kitchen while Dover was regaling the drinking public in the Snug with tales of his derring do, MacGregor was able to steer their steps past all the Ingle-nooks, the Copper Warming Pans and Delicatessens, and the Olde Patisserie Stores with which Barford-in-the-Meadow swarmed.
Ermengilda’s Kitchen (Gifte Shoppe & Cafe) was an aggressive pastiche of what a middle-European set designer for an American film might have thought an eighteenth-century English coffeehouse looked like. It was so quaint that it hurt. The windows were archly bowed and one in five of the little panes of glass was carefully distorted. The Kitchen was entered through an old-fashioned glass door which rang an old-fashioned bell – thus giving notice of the approach of yet another well-heeled sucker. It might have been better if the warning about the step had been printed in something more legible than olde English black letter, but MacGregor picked himself up
