Dover began tottering back painfully down the garden path and MacGregor fired off yet another question before Mrs Knapper was lost to him, perhaps for ever. ‘Had your husband any enemies?’
‘He was his own worst, dear. I was always telling him that.’
‘Had he any friends or acquaintances who might be able to help us with our enquiries?’
Mrs Knapper’s reply came through the rapidly narrowing crack in the door. ‘He kept himself very much to himself.’
‘You don’t know of anyone who . . .?’
‘Sorry, dear!’
It was a good thirty-six hours before the next development of any importance took place in the great Muncaster Municipal Dump Murder Mystery, the mills of God having very little on Chief Inspector Dover when it came to a slow grind.
Eight
Not that everything came to a standstill, of course. There was the usual mountain of paperwork to be completed and the activities of a large team of investigators to be coordinated. The backroom boys needed supervision and then there was the mass of complicated travel arrangements which had to be put in hand in order to get Mrs Knapper up to the mortuary in Muncaster to see if the dead man was her husband.
While all these chores fell to MacGregor’s lot, it mustn’t be thought that Chief Inspector Dover sat there for a day and a half just twiddling his thumbs. Far from it. Each hour of Dover’s time was so action-packed with eating and sleeping that he’d practically no time left over for thumb-twiddling at all.
By late afternoon on the day after their encounter with Mrs Knapper, MacGregor began to feel that things were moving at last. He received a telephone call from one of his opposite numbers in Muncaster to the effect that Mrs Knapper had identified the body from the rubbish dump as Mr Knapper. So positive was she that she had, in fact, made the identification even before the mortuary attendant had raised the corner of the sheet from the corpse’s face. It had apparently been a very emotional business, with Mrs Knapper weeping hysterically and vowing to sue her husband’s murderer for every penny he possessed.
‘Sue him?’ asked MacGregor, mildly intrigued. ‘On what grounds?’
‘Would you believe alienation of affections?’ asked the man in Muncaster. ‘She reckons that whoever croaked her old man deprived her of her marital rights.’ He chuckled at the joke.
‘She’d probably win,’ said MacGregor who’d grown very cynical over the years. ‘It wouldn’t be any dafter than some of the things the courts have been doing recently. Still,’ – he returned conscientiously to the matter in hand – ‘she made a positive identification, you say? Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult to confirm that, now we know where to look.’
‘By the way,’ said the Muncaster man, who enjoyed a chat when he wasn’t paying for the call, ‘she said something that might be significant when we were having a cup of tea together afterwards.’
‘Oh?’
‘I was sort of twitting her about not reporting it when her old man went missing and she said he’d had a premonition that something was going to happen to him.’
MacGregor cocked an ear. ‘She mentioned something like that when I spoke to her.’ ,
‘If you ask me, she’s probably making the whole thing up but she claims he warned her months ago that he was involved in something dangerous and that he might have to make a run for it and go into hiding at a moment’s notice.’
‘You know the man was a piano tuner!’
‘Well, that’s as maybe, but Mrs K was quite adamant that he was afraid he might have to drop out of circulation all of a sudden and, if he did, she was to keep her trap shut about it. No tattling to the cops or the neighbours or anybody.’
Down in London MacGregor shook his head doubtfully. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘All she’s doing is trying to cover up for what she actually did – which was damn all. The truth is that the lodger moved in as soon as the husband was out of sight, if not before – and she flogged all old Knapper’s personal belongings for what she could get for ’em.’
‘Well, I’m just giving you her version,’ said the man in Muncaster easily. ‘And warning you that she’ll stick to it. I reckon she’s getting ready to answer a few awkward questions from the coroner.’
MacGregor couldn’t resist the temptation to probe a little further. ‘Did she say that Knapper was worried about being killed?’
The telephone wires crackled gently. ‘No, I don’t think she did exactly. More that he might have to disappear suddenly – whatever that means.’
‘She didn’t ask?’
‘Not her. Too chuffed at seeing the back of the poor sod, or hoping to, rather. That’s always assuming, of course, that there’s a word of truth in her story – which I doubt.’
As soon as MacGregor had expressed his fulsome gratitude for all the whole-hearted cooperation he had received from the stout-hearted lads up there in good old Muncaster, he put the phone down and, almost immediately, picked it up again. He had to try and organise some further proof that their dead man really was Arthur Knapper. In spite of Mrs Knapper’s alleged spring cleaning, MacGregor still thought it worth expending a few man-hours in giving the Knapper matrimonial home a good going over. Anything – a hair, a fingerprint, an old toothbrush – could well prove invaluable in bolstering up the widow’s somewhat facile evidence. Then Knapper’s doctor and his dentist had to be contacted to see if they could help, and there were several more avenues that could be explored should these initial efforts come to naught. It was always easier, MacGregor reflected ruefully, to find
