‘Lucky you mentioned that venison, old chap,’ Captain Maguire said as he watched Dover hoist seventeen and a quarter stone of over-indulgence onto a bar stool. ‘It’s going to save a hell of a lot of trouble. And I do mean terrouble!’
Dover’s interest was temporarily occupied by watching the barman deposit, without a word being spoken by anybody, a row of doubles in front of his latest customers. ‘Ah,’ said Dover vaguely and then, although completely unpractised in the art, caught the barman’s eye. ‘Bring Sunny Jim, here, a tomato juice!’ he ordered grandly, and helped himself quickly to his sergeant’s whisky.
MacGregor cringed and prayed without success that the floor would open and swallow him.
Meanwhile Captain Maguire, having lubricated his own larynx with the vin du pays of Bonnie Scotland, was continuing with the conversation. ‘If it had been sheep’s brains,’ he averred, his enunciation only slightly slurred, ‘or tripe and onions, we’d have been right up the creek. We dish them out every other day, but – venison – that was a one-off job. Old Cooper offered me a few pounds at a very reasonable rate. Well, it was either that or have the stuff go rotten on him. We only just caught it in time. Next day even Attila turned his nose up at it.’ A faint alarm bell came tinkling through the swirling mists of booze. ‘I say,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘this joker of yours – he didn’t die of food poisoning, did he?’
Dover hastened to reassure his new-found friend. ‘Shtrangled,’ he said, getting his tongue round the word at the third time of asking.
‘Good-oh!’ Captain Maguire summoned up another round of the same in celebration. ‘Well, like I said, we served this venison stuff one Saturday lunch. Pearls before swine, old man! You should have heard ’em. Still, they ate it in the end, it being that or nothing. I don’t know what they were whining about. It looked palatable enough to me. Anyhow, I never repeated the experiment. I get enough aggro in this job without going round manufacturing it.’
Since Dover appeared unwilling to pursue the matter further, MacGregor fastidiously dabbed a trace of tomato juice off his upper lip and took up the questioning. ‘So, what you’re saying, sir, is that on one specific Saturday this season, you served venison. To your staff and the holiday-makers?’
Captain Maguire was much amused. ‘Catch my staff eating that muck!’
‘Then, whoever ate the venison would be a holiday-maker?’
‘I should think so. I reckon we had that venison about a couple of months ago. Does that fit in with the time your chap cashed his chips? Still, as soon as Doris gets here with the files we’ll be able to sort out all the details.’
MacGregor began to feel they were making progress at last. ‘And you’ll be able to let me have a list of the holiday-makers who were staying here at the time, sir?’
‘Nothing simpler!’ Captain Maguire raised an eyebrow and, twenty yards away, the barman reached for the whisky bottle. ‘Actually, from what I remember, most of the paying customers were old-age pensioners that weekend. Special out-of-season rates.’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘Our chap wasn’t an old-age pensioner, sir. Far too young.’
‘Oh, there’d be a few others here as well, I expect,’ said Captain Maguire indifferently. He unscrewed the empty glass from Dover’s hand and replaced it with a full one. ‘Dirty weekenders, if nothing else.’
As has already been hinted, Doris as an employee was more accommodating than efficient, and by the time she finally arrived in the Keir Hardie Saloon with a sufficiency of books and documents, MacGregor was the only one capable of taking much interest. He ordered the girl a cherry brandy on the house and settled down to sort through the dog-eared pile she’d dumped disconsolately on the bar counter.
Captain Maguire, the back still ramrod though the eye was glassy, had been trying to induce a paralytic Dover to join him in some bawdy, tap-room ditty, the tempo of which he was thrashing out with his riding crop. When Doris appeared, however, he promptly let Dover sag back into his amorphism and gave all the attention of which he was capable to the girl.
The thing took some sorting out but, in the end, MacGregor flattered himself that he’d more or less got the picture. On the weekend that there’d been venison on the menu, the Bowerville-by-the-sea Holiday Ranch must have been nine-tenths empty. According to MacGregor’s researches there were only two groups in residence and no individual holiday-makers at all.
Of the two group bookings, MacGregor felt that he could dispense with the Golden Lads and Lassies Sodality from Wootle. They were a party of senior citizens – thirty-seven ladies and three men – who had spent ten fun-filled days at Bowerville-by-the-sea. In addition to the pensioners themselves, there had been a couple of volunteer female handlers and the coach driver. The coach driver was a possibility as the dead man at Muncaster, but MacGregor didn’t really fancy him. The Golden Lads and Lassies had presumably returned without difficulty to Wootle and MacGregor felt certain that even they would have noticed if their driver had gone missing.
The other lot looked more promising. This was an organisation called the Dockwra Society, with headed notepaper to prove it. Through their Honorary Secretary they had booked four adjacent chalets (or bunk-houses as they were known at Rankin’s) which had provided them with accommodation for seven people in single rooms plus an extra room in which they could have their meetings.
MacGregor turned to Captain
