‘I’d still need a recognisable face, old son.’.
‘A middle-aged man, sir,’ prompted MacGregor. ‘False teeth. Darkish hair. About five foot eight. A bit overweight.’
Captain Maguire shook his head. ‘It could be anybody.’
‘Think!’ urged Dover, almost as if he cared. ‘Has anybody gone missing recently? Round about a couple of months or so ago? Cleared off without giving notice or saying anything?’ Captain Maguire shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re always doing that,’ he objected. ‘Idle lot of buggers! Talk about here today and gone tomorrow. I can’t think of anybody who’d fit the bill, word of honour. Actually, we don’t employ all that many men, you know. The cleaners are all women, and most of the catering staff. Girls in the office, too.’
‘All right, the holiday-makers, then! Anybody leaving in suspicious circumstances there? Like without paying their bloody bill?’
Captain Maguire looked at Dover as though unable to believe his ears. No wonder civilisation as we know it was crumbling if coppers were as dim as this! ‘You must be joking, old man!’ he said. ‘Look, you don’t think somebody who’s as fly as old Sir Bert is going to let sodding little clerks and factory hands welsh on him, do you? For God’s sake! They have to pay for everything in advance, my old china! Cash on the nail or ten working days if they offer one of their grotty little cheques. After that, who cares? The buggers are on their own. If they don’t want to stick it out to the bitter end, that’s their affair. All a premature departure means to Rankin’s bleeding Holiday Ranches is a fraction more profit. Christ, one of the great unwashed goes missing and you reckon I call out the watch? No way, old son! The only time we take any action is if they depart with any of our furniture and fittings which, if you’ve seen the way our so-called bunk houses are equipped, is not a frequent occurrence.’
MacGregor was still reluctant to throw in the towel. ‘Are you sure you can’t help us, sir?’
‘Frightfully sorry, old chap. But hasn’t your stiff got any family or chums? Why hasn’t his wife reported him missing?’
‘She probably croaked him,’ said Dover who believed that murder and matrimony were just two sides of the same coin.
MacGregor sighed. ‘Then we shall just have to mount a full-scale, nation-wide enquiry, I’m afraid. I shall want the names and addresses, sir, of all the people who’ve been here on holiday since Easter, and of all your employees for the same period.’
‘Hell’s steaming teeth!’ exclaimed Captain Maguire. His secretary wasn’t going to take kindly to this, paperwork not being her strong point nor, indeed, what she’d been hired for. ‘It’ll take years! Can’t you narrow it down a bit?’
‘I suppose we could ignore anybody who’s only been here in the last month,’ said MacGregor, not too enthusiastically. ‘The chap’s been dead at least that long.’
‘But, if you’ve got the date of death, couldn’t you manage with people who were here round about that time?’
Unfortunately MacGregor was one of those people who believe in doing a job well. It was a philosophy to which Dover also subscribed, with the proviso that it was somebody else who did the work.
‘I’m afraid, sir,’ said MacGregor, ‘that would be making too big an assumption. The time the blue bead w(as acquired may have no connection at all with the time of death. However, we’ll start with the people who were staying here round about that period. We may strike lucky and not have to bother with the rest.
Captan Maguire still wasn’t very happy. Damn it all, it was only last week that Doris had been yowling on that she couldn’t be at it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. ‘It’s going to put my staff to one hell of a lot of trouble, sergeant.’
MacGregor sighed. Captain Maguire seemed to be making a great deal of fuss about nothing but, since the police were always being urged to be nice to the general public . . . He leafed back through the pages of his notebook. He couldn’t agree to any skimping that would jeopardise the investigation but he’d got this idea at the back of his mind that there was something somewhere which might economise on the amount of time and . . .
‘Venison,’ said Dover, his devotion to things comestible finally paying off.
MacGregor could have spat.
‘Venison?’ Captain Maguire’s face brightened. ‘Why the hell didn’t you say that before?’
‘I was just about to, sir,’ said MacGregor, going pink with mortification. Well, it was true. Another second or so and he would have remembered all about the . . . Oh, it was sickening, it really was! If there was one thing worse than having Dover sitting around all day on his back-side doing damn-all, it was having the disgusting old fool opening his stupid trap and sticking his oar in. ‘The post mortem revealed that the dead man had eaten some venison shortly before he was killed,’ MacGregor went on hurriedly, trying to regain control of the interview. ‘Does that help?’
‘I’ll say!’ Captan Maguire plunged into action with typical military dash and vigour. ‘Doris!’ he bawled. ‘Dig out that bill from Cooper’s for that venison they flogged us, there’s a good girl! Some time in October, I think. Bring it round when you’ve found it, eh? We’ll be in the bar.’ He snatched up the heavy riding crop without which he never ventured outside his office and looked across at Dover. ‘Come on, old dear!’ he urged hospitably. ‘Show a leg there! We’re wasting good drinking time.’
Five
Captain Maguire settled himself down at one end of the bar in the Keir Hardie Saloon as though he’d been drinking there for years, which he had. It was not at all clear why he had bothered to move out of his office. He can’t have
