Actually, though, MacGregor had few doubts that it was Arthur George Knapper, piano tuner and stamp collector, and he began to work out his next steps on that basis. Clearly, all the people who had been with Knapper on that weekend at the Holiday Ranch at Bowerville-by-the-sea would now have to be interviewed as a matter of urgency. Even Dover would appreciate that. The order in which these potential suspects – because that’s what they probably were – were going to be seen needed sorting out, though. It was a nuisance that they seemed to be scattered all over the country. MacGregor got out a large-scale map of England and Wales and spread it out over his desk and began, with the help of the list of addresses extracted from Mr Pettitt, to work out his itinerary.
Mrs Nora Hall drew the number one spot on the agenda and it was the garden gate leading to her cottage that MacGregor dragged open for Dover on the following morning.
Dover, the embodiment of suburban blight, didn’t have much feeling for the country life. ‘’Strewth,’ he ejaculated as he picked his way gingerly up a chaotic little garden path bordered with beds of rotting cabbages and mouldering sprouts, ‘what a pong!’
MacGregor didn’t lightly agree with any sentiment expressed by Dover but, on this occasion, he had to admit that the old fool had hit the nail on the head. What with the shortcomings of rural sanitation and an obsessive devotion to fertilisers, the atmosphere surrounding Mrs Hall’s ramshackle cottage did come rather thick and strong.
MacGregor knocked on the front door and was immediately savaged by a rambling rose. ‘We’re probably expected to go round the back, sir,’ he said to Dover when he’d stopped the bleeding.
They both gazed disconsolately at the small lake of mud which lay between them and the rear of the cottage.
‘See if the door’s locked!’ urged Dover. ‘They never lock their doors in the country.’
Not true.
‘Bloody hell!’ said Dover.
MacGregor tried to peer through the windows but they were too well guarded with coarse lace curtains and dirt. He sighed, wished he wasn’t wearing his posh Italian shoes and offered Dover his arm. Not that he wouldn’t have been in ecstasy if Dover had fallen flat on his face in the slurry but he had learned not to be self-indulgent in these matters.
Moving slowly from one half-submerged stepping stone to another, the two detectives rounded the corner of the cottage only to find their way barred by parts of an old iron bedstead, behind which a half-grown billy goat waited hopefully for them with a dark, malicious little face.
Dover and MacGregor backed off. They would, indeed, have made a strategic withdrawal if it had not been for a gaggle of geese which moved in, hissing angrily, behind them.
Dover, although unaccustomed to making such value judgements, tried to work out where the main threat lay. As soon as he had got this straight, he intended to manoeuvre MacGregor’s unblemished young body into the front line.
Luckily, rescue was at hand and Dover was not called upon to make the supreme sacrifice of somebody else. A strange, bulky figure carrying a bucket emerged from one of the outbuildings. It was a woman and, taking in the situation at a glance, she came sloshing across through the mud and the muck, scattering a flock of bantams in all directions.
‘You must be the chappies from Scotland Yard!’ she bellowed, sending the billy goat on its way with a good-natured gum-boot up the backside. As her be-mittened fingers fumbled awkwardly with the binder twine and electric flex which held the iron bedstead shut, she turned and called back over her shoulder, ‘They’re here, Mavis!’ She manhandled the bedstead out of the way and addressed herself to Dover. ‘I’m Nora Hall,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable inside?’ She discouraged the geese from accepting the invitation by biffing them affectionately round the ears with her bucket.
Dover and MacGregor, watching very carefully where they put their feet, went round to the back door and into the tiny kitchen.
Mrs Hall kicked off her gum boots and cleared a space on the table for her bucket. ‘Sorry about the imbroglio but we’ve had one hell of a morning with the old sow.’
MacGregor eyed the kitchen table with dismay. Bits of food fought for lebensraum with unwashed crockery, grubby towels were draped higgledy-piggledy over blackened saucepans and a dishcloth lay forlornly across a thick brown liquid. In the middle of everything crouched a large ginger cat which interrupted its assiduous licking of a piece of butter paper only to glare at the intruders.
‘Come through into the parlour!’ invited Mrs Hall, conducting Dover and MacGregor into an even smaller room but which at least had the virtue, since it was never used, of being tidier.
Dover sank thankfully into an easy chair by the empty fireplace, and then wondered if he’d done the right thing. If he’d been worried about getting piles from the stone wall outside Mrs Knapper’s front door, what were his emotions as he sank into cushions so cold and clammy that you could have grown watercress on them? Dover tugged his overcoat more closely over his paunch, screwed his bowler hat further down his forehead, and miserably hoped for the bloody best.
MacGregor had naturally been taking a less subjective interest in his surroundings. He noted the musty, unlived-in atmosphere of the room, of course, but his attention was chiefly drawn to an overly large Victorian sideboard in a bellicose mahogany which stood against one wall. On the sideboard was evidence of Mrs Hall’s little hobby – a brand new Stanley Gibbon’s stamp catalogue, a stamp album, a, packet of stamp hinges and a pair of tweezers.
MacGregor was just about to get things under way by some friendly query about the attractions of philately when the hitherto unseen Mavis came padding in on stockinged feet.
‘Oh, please don’t get up!’
