Dover looked his victim right in the eye. ‘We found some playing cards in that room you tried What’s-his-name in. Having a hand or two of bridge, were you? Or poker, p’raps?’
Valentine thought about his answer for a fraction too long. MacGregor wasn’t the only one in the room to remember that, according to Osmond, a pack of playing cards had been used to select the murderer of Knapper. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Valentine said at last. ‘I didn’t play cards.’
‘Did anybody else?’
Mr Valentine thought carefully about that, too. ‘I really don’t know.’
Having thus shot his bolt to absolutely no avail, Dover slumped back in his chair and gave himself up to a glassy-eyed contemplation of his boots. MacGregor shouldered the burden of asking the questions once more and eventually brought the confrontation between Mr Valentine and the forces of Law and Order to an end. Nothing as usual had been achieved, unless . . .
MacGregor was still puzzling over what Dover might have been driving at when, several hours later, their train pulled into its London terminus and he was obliged to rouse Scotland Yard’s finest from his open-mouthed slumbers and get him out onto the platform. Of course, MacGregor could simply have asked Dover if the question about the playing cards had any deep significance, but even detective sergeants have their pride.
‘What a bloody cock-up!’ moaned Dover as they sat immobile in the middle of the rush-hour traffic with the meter on their taxi munching up the pound notes like a donkey consuming strawberries. ‘Bloody waste of time all round! Old Punchard’ll do his nut. We’re no nearer to finding out who knocked Knapper off that we were when we started.’
MacGregor forced himself into optimism. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t quite say that, sir. We’ve found out quite a lot . . . really. Considering that we started out with an unidentified dead body on a rubbish dump. We’ve broken through this Dockwra Society business and got through to the Steel Band underneath. We re on the right lines.’
‘We still don’t know which one of the buggers actually did it,’ grumbled Dover. ‘I’m all for nabbing the lot of ’em and charging ’em with conspiracy or something. Whichever way you look at it, they’re all accessories.’
It was a slap-dash sort of solution and it appalled MacGregor. ‘Oh, I doubt if the Director of Public Prosecutions would ever agree to that, sir.’
‘In that case we’ve had it. We’ll never thump a confession out of any of that lot. They’ll all be a damned sight more scared of the Steel Band bully boys than of me. It’ll be that young bleeder from Special Branch all over again – “it wasn’t me’’ and “I was too bloody panic-struck to see anything”.’
‘You’re probably right, sir,’ sighed MacGregor, averting his eyes from the ever-clicking taxi-meter, if a highly trained copper like Osmond can’t tell who the murderer is . . .’
‘There’s none so blind.’
‘Well, we shall just have to keep plugging away, shan’t we, sir?’
‘Plugging away?’ The prospect of yet more unrewarding toil stirred Dover to protest. ‘Over my dead body! Look, laddie, it is over, done with, finished. And the answer’s a bloody lemon. All we can do now is sit quiet and keep out of old Punchard’s way for a bit.’
‘We shall have to interview Mr Pettitt and Mrs Hall again, sir. And Mrs Knapper, too. Now we know about the Steel Band implications we shall have to take them all through their stories again. Even they’ll be expecting us to do that, sir.’
‘It’ll be like those three wise monkeys,’ said Dover miserably. ‘Or worse if that lawyer joker’s there.’
The taxi suddenly leapt into life and raced all of a hundred yards in a screaming bottom gear before coming to a halt once more.
‘It would,’ said Dover when he’d pushed MacGregor off and got himself wedged back in his own corner again, ‘be quicker to walk.’
MacGregor seized on the suggestion with pathetic naivety. It just shows how distraught he was. ‘Actually, sir,’ he said, pointing out Westminster Abbey as a landmark that even Dover might recognise, ‘we’re only a couple of minutes away from the Yard. We could just nip out here and . . .’
‘You know something, laddie?’ Dover asked the question with blistering, if weary, sarcasm. ‘That sense of humour of yours’ll be the bloody death of me.’
In the end, however, they had to reach Scotland Yard and they slipped as unobtrusively as possible through the glass doors. Dover didn’t feel really safe, though, until they were actually inside the converted broom cupboard which served them as an office. In a building where space was at a premium, Dover had been allocated a room to himself because they wouldn’t have him in the Squad room. BO, as one witty detective put it, has its privileges.
Dover’s first action after flopping down behind his desk was to reach out and turn up the radiator. Blood heat was reached in that confined space in a matter of seconds, and half a cigarette later you could barely see across the room. Dover sighed happily. Just time for forty winks before going home.
But, maybe because of the four-hour snooze he’d snatched in the train, sleep eluded him. Naturally he blamed MacGregor.
‘Can’t you stop rattling that bloody paper?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s just the pile of stuff that’s come in while we’ve been away. I don’t know if you want to have a look at any of it.’ MacGregor held up a copy of the Police Gazette, but Dover wasn’t tempted.
He tried to settle down again. ‘Anything on Knapper?’ he asked drowsily.
There’s the full post mortem report, sir,’ said MacGregor, riffling through several sheets of paper. ‘Nothing much that we didn’t know already, I’m afraid. Oh, and here’s a response at long last from the Central Fingerprint Bureau about Knapper. Goodness, they’ve taken their time, haven’t they? It’s ages since we asked them to make a check. Oh well, it
