‘I can’t bloody well understand it,’ he complained later when they’d been conveyed back past the baby goat and through the geese. ‘Fancy not having tea or coffee! It’s unnatural. They wouldn’t,’ he added grimly, ‘go around eating all that health-food muck if they had my stomach. Chicory wine? ’Strewth, I’d have had the runs for a week!’
‘Very odd, sir,’ agreed MacGregor. ‘Especially when they were expecting us.’
‘Eh?’
They had reached the car which was waiting for them out in the lane and MacGregor moved forward to open the door. ‘Didn’t you notice, sir? Mrs Hall knew all about us – our names, who we were, why we’d come, everything – without us having said a word.’
‘’Course I noticed!’ snarled Dover, in whose gullet the ready lie never stuck. ‘Think I’m an idiot or something?’
There was no answer to this so MacGregor covered the hiatus by retrieving Dover’s bowler hat from the gutter where it had landed during the complicated manoeuvres required to get its owner stuffed into the back seat. ‘Didn’t it strike you as odd, sir?’ asked MacGregor as he wondered whether he could clean the fresh mud off the bowler without actually touching the patina underneath with his bare hands. ‘I didn’t phone up to say we were coming.’
Dover had got himself settled and the rear off-side springs protested audibly as they took the strain. He grabbed his bowler hat from MacGregor and clapped it back on his head. ‘It was that poncy little toe-doctor!’ he growled. ‘I’ll lay you odds he started ringing round the whole bloody bunch of ’em as soon as we left.’ He dropped the blame fairly and squarely where it belonged – on somebody else’s shoulders. ‘You should have thought of that, laddie, and stopped him.’
MacGregor squeezed into the few square inches of space that Dover had left for him. ‘But don’t you see how suspicious this is, sir? If that group of stamp collectors are as innocent as they claim of Knapper’s murder, why does Pettitt have to tip everybody off that we’re on our way? What have they got to hide? We’re only making routine enquiries. I think somebody’s got a guilty conscience somewhere.’
Dover was paying more attention to the warning rumbles that were coming from his stomach than to what MacGregor was saying, but contradicting his sergeant was a way of life. ‘Guilty conscience, my foot!’ he jeered. ‘It’s a simple act of friendship. ’Strewth, if I knew one of my mates was going to have the bloody cops sicked on him, I’d give him a ring and tip him off. Any man with a spark of decency in him would.’
MacGregor was fascinated by this peep into Dover’s ethical standards. He hadn’t known that the old fool possessed any friends, certainly not any that he would go to so much trouble for.
But Dover’s bird brain was already alighting on a more concrete problem. Like food. ‘We’re not going to sit here all bloody day, are we?’ he enquired. ‘I want my lunch. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.’ He settled back – a sullen, ungainly lump – in his corner. ‘Tell that bloody girl to get her skates on!’
Nine
To his surprise, MacGregor had managed to borrow a car and driver from the police force upon whose patch they were temporarily operating. He naturally attributed this success to his own personal charm as provincial coppers were traditionally disobliging where peripatetic members of the Metropolitan Police were concerned. In acutal fact, the superintendent of the local traffic division had an axe of his own to grind.
He had recently, and unbeknown to his lady wife, taken a rather fetching young policewoman called Elvira under his wing. Elvira, it must be confessed, needed all the help and patronage she could get, as far as her professional duties were concerned. The superintendent had managed to get her transferred to where he could keep an avuncular eye on her but, after one or two hairy experiences, he had grown reluctant to have her driving about on her own. He was, therefore, continually on the look-out for nice little jobs which were within the range of her capabilities and which provided her with a strong masculine shoulder to lean on in case things went wrong again. He wasn’t completely blind, of course, to the dangers to which a young girl could be exposed, alone with some randy policeman in a car Elvira herself had probably forgotten to fill up with petrol. This was why, when MacGregor’s hesitant request for transport came through, the superintendent had been delighted to help. Chauffeuring a couple of sober and respectable detectives from London round the country was just about Elvira’s mark, and she was the ‘bloody girl’ to whom Dover had been referring.
So far she’d done very well. The roads were quiet, the pedestrians had been keeping their eyes skinned, and McGregor had been doing the map reading. Elvira had driven the two miles from the railway station to Mrs Hall’s cottage with practically no trouble at all. But now a sterner task lay ahead – a task, moreover, in which a pretty face and a smashing figure would do her no good at all as Dover was long since past all that sort of thing.
As Dover pictured it, the future was beautiful in its simplicity. En route to the home of Mr Keith Osmond, the next member of the Dockwra Society on their list, a stop would be made at some convenient hostelry for a luncheon break which Dover saw as stretching from opening time to closing time, at least. He left it to Elvira to find the type of establishment he had in mind.
Elvira wasn’t entirely to blame for what happened and it wouldn’t have made any difference even if she had been able to
