‘Rupert Pettitt, sir? No, he’s not, actually.’ MacGregor was on a hiding to nothing, and he knew it. Whichever way he responded to Dover’s question, he was laying himself open to the old fool’s nit-picking.
Dover didn’t disappoint him. ‘You damned fool, suppose he’s not in? If I go traipsing all the way across London to Wapping and then find . . .’
‘It’s Hither Green, actually, sir.’
‘Same thing!’ snarled Dover. He scowled. ‘Now you’ve made me forget what I was bloody saying!’
‘I didn’t want to warn him, sir. Forewarned is forearmed, you know.’
‘You reckon this joker’s a wrong ’un?’ Dover was ever on the look-out for a speedy and spectacular conclusion.
‘I don’t know anything about him at all, sir. He may even have no connection with the case. It’s simply that I’d sooner not give him the chance to cook up some story or other before we can get at him.’
‘Cook up some story?’ parroted Dover, who knew what he was talking about. ‘You want to watch it, laddie. They call that sort of talk “police harrassment’’ these days.’
‘I’m only going to ask a few perfectly straightforward questions, sir.’
‘ Then why,’ demanded Dover in a squawk of vulgar triumph as MacGregor neatly entered the trap and closed the door behind him, ‘didn’t you warn him we were coming? Take it from me, laddie, if I’ve been dragged all the way out to Kempton Park on a bloody wild goose chase, you’ll not live long enough to regret it!’
MacGregor sighed and got his cigarettes out. They were in a non-smoking compartment but what the hell if it put a gag in Dover’s mouth for a bit.
If Hither Green can be said to have a Caribbean Quarter, Mr Pettitt lived slap-bang in the middle of it. He occupied a largish, three-storied house – the only one in the entire terrace which, if the absence of a bank of doorbells was anything to go by, hadn’t been turned into flats. This apparent anomaly was explained by the fact that Mr Pettitt used part of his house for his business.
‘A chiropodist?’ said Dover when he’d limped his way from the taxi across the pavement. Mr Pettitt’s profession was proclaimed only very modestly on a small brass plate, but Dover’s failing eyesight rarely missed anything which might be turned to his advantage. He fancied that he could improve this shining hour and snatched MacGregor’s hand away from the bell.
‘Hang on a minute! We haven’t worked out how we’re going to play this one.’
MacGregor bit his lip. Dear God, it was like running in double harness with a reject from the Boy’s Own Paper! ‘Oh, I think we “play it” perfectly straight, sir. I’ll just tell him who we are and . . .’
Dover was still hanging onto MacGregor’s arm. Well, it was marginally better than taking the whole weight on his own aching feet. ‘I’ve had a better idea,’ he hissed. ‘Let’s pretend I’m a patient. Then, while he’s having a dekko at this corn of mine, we can sort of manoeuvre the conversation round to holiday camps and then’ – even Dover’s imagination occasionally had its limits – ‘play it by ear.’
MacGregor shook his head and, detaching Dover’s fingers, rang the bell. ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said. ‘That kind of duplicity tends to give the police a bad name. After all, we aren’t undercover agents, are we? We’re simply going to ask for information and assistance from a respectable, law-abiding citizen.’
‘Says who?’ demanded Dover who believed everybody guilty until proved innocent, and sometimes even afterwards. He was infuriated that his plan had been rejected and, was determined that somebody should pay for it. It could be MacGregor or it could be this blooming toe-doctor – at the moment he didn’t care much which.
A woman in a white coat answered the door and conducted the two detectives into an empty waiting room. After the statutory delay of three or four minutes, another door opened and Mr Pettitt himself invited them into his surgery.
In spite of the chiropodist’s efforts to direct him elsewhere Dover made a bee-line for the treatment chair and heaved himself into it. MacGregor found a seat at a table and cleared a space for his notebook amongst the jumble of sharp-bladed instruments, packets of lamb’s wool and reels of sticking plaster.
This left Mr Pettitt standing forlornly in the middle of his own surgery but eventually he pulled himself together and sat down on a small white stool. Since this was where he habitually sat when he was working, it was near the treatment chair. Dover rattled a heavy boot like a mendicant friar shaking his begging bowl.
Mr Pettitt wiped the palms of his hands down the front of his white coat and peered up at Dover through pebble-thick glasses.
‘No point in sitting there doing nothing,’ said Dover with every appearance of reasonableness. ‘Left foot, little toe.’
Mr Pettitt, two of whom would hardly have furnished even a Continental breakfast for Dover, failed to tell the great man exactly where he could stick his left foot. He contented himself with a discontented pout and, bending down, began to fiddle with the laces on Dover’s boot.
MacGregor opened the interrogation. ‘I believe you are the secretary of the Dockwra Society, sir?’
The little chiropodist paused in his struggle with the knots in Dover’s laces. ‘Honorary secretary,’ he corrected in a light, precise voice.
‘I wonder if you could tell us, sir, what precisely this Dockwra Society is.’
Mr Pettitt took his time. He got the laces untied and, removing Dover’s boot, placed it neatly on the floor before replying. ‘Why do you wish to know?’
‘We think it might help us with our enquiries, sir.’
Unperturbed by the large holes and the
