‘Aye, Milly Marsh,’ said the landlord, coming up for air with a burp Dover wouldn’t have been ashamed of. ‘Well, like I was saying, the general opinion round here was that she gave herself airs. Snooty, you know. Anyways, our home-grown Romeos soon remembered that there were more fish in the sea and gradually lost interest. Then, when old Lord Crouch kicked the bucket – drank like a fish, he did, without a word of a lie – and they shut Beltour up for a year, we all thought we’d seen the last of her. But, no – back she comes when they took up residence again and gets a nice bit of promotion into the bargain because that’s when they went public, you know, and young Milly stops being a servant and becomes a cashier, no less.
‘Well, life settled down again, though it took us a while to get used to the present Lord Crouch and all the cars and motor coaches that started streaming through the village. Milly Marsh hadn’t changed, though. She still kept all us muck-spreading yokels at arm’s length. Specially the men – and she wasn’t over-friendly with the women, either. Then this blooming baby arrives out of the blue. “My sister’s child,” says Milly Marsh. “Ho ho!” says us. “Now pull the other one!”’
Dover had finished his beer. He put his tankard down with a loud bang. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, always prepared to pinch somebody else’s punch line, ‘I’d heard a lot of people thought Miss Marsh was the kid’s mother.’
The landlord, who enjoyed quite a reputation as a raconteur, was justifiably annoyed and made a mental note to put both the toddy and the two beers down on this paunchy old bluebottle’s bill. ‘Well, yes,’ he admitted, ‘that’s what everybody reckoned at first. We all thought she’d pushed off up north or wherever it was, had a tumble in the hay and been left holding the baby. Of course, it’d have looked a sight too obvious if she’d brought the kid with her when she came back, so she waits a few months and then tries to palm it off on a sister nobody’s ever heard of. Well, nobody round here was going to have the wool pulled over their eyes like that and there was a fair amount of sniggering over how Miss High and Mighty had finally come a proper cropper. Then, as time went by, people found other things to gossip about and young Gary grew up like just any other kid, no better and no worse, if you ask me.’ The landlord took a long swig at his beer. ‘Mind you, all this happened a long time ago but I reckon it must have been round about the time Gary started going to school that the second batch of rumours started.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Dover was feeling decidedly sleepy but he didn’t want to drop off in case another pint of best bitter should be forthcoming. ‘You got any cigarettes behind that bar of yours?’
‘Of course. What sort do you want?’
‘Oh, something king-size,’ said Dover expansively. ‘Give us fifty of the best you’ve got, and a couple of boxes of matches.’
‘Do you want to pay cash or shall I book ’em for you?’
‘Stick ’em on my sergeant’s bill,’ said Dover. ‘In fact, anything I have you can stick on his bill.’
The landlord registered mild surprise.
‘It makes it easier when we’re claiming our expenses,’ explained Dover with a grin that would have made the most gullible of mugs uneasy. ‘Now, you were saying?’
‘Eh? Oh, about the new set of rumours?’ The landlord’s eyes sparkled as he handed the cigarettes over and sat down again. ‘Well, they were pretty juicy, I can tell you. The word went round like wildfire that young Gary was actually Lady Priscilla’s little bastard!’
‘Go on!’ chuckled Dover, dropping his extinguished, though still hot, match on the ginger cat in his delight.
‘I thought that’d make you open your eyes! Yes, well, you see – Lady Priscilla had always taken quite a lot of interest in the kid, though it’s obvious she’s not much of a one for children. She puts a good face on it at speech days and sports days and such like but a blind man could see she’s not the maternal type. But, where Gary Marsh was concerned, things were different. For instance, she found Milly Marsh that cottage on the estate, got her a better job, kept giving her bits of things for the baby. I did hear as how she’d offered to send Gary away to a posh school but Milly Marsh didn’t want to part with him. Well, you can’t be surprised if the tongues started wagging, can you? And, you see, the timing fitted Lady Priscilla just as snugly as it did Milly Marsh. Lady Priscilla had spent a whole year away from Beltour, hadn’t she? Sailing round the world or some such rubbish. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that some well-born young lady’s been shipped off on an extended holiday to get over a temporary embarrassment, would it? Why, there’s even some who reckoned it all happened here at Beltour and that was really why they closed the house in the first place. You could take your choice as to who the father was, but most people put their money on an under-gardener they had working there about that time. Good looking young spark, he was, and left a few aching hearts here in the village when he was sacked with a month’s wages in lieu of notice. So, you see, everything fitted together, neat as a jig-saw puzzle. And Milly Marsh could be trusted to keep a secret, specially if she was being well paid for it. Of course, nowadays, girls’d just brazen it out if they wanted to keep the kid with ’em, but they didn’t twenty odd years ago. Twenty years ago people still had a sense of what was decent. Mind you,’ – the landlord glanced up at the clock and got reluctantly to his feet – ‘ I’m just telling you what the local gossip is. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do. Opening time doesn’t wait for anyone. Do you fancy a refill before I go?’
Dover remained by the fire until dinner time, dozing in the snug warmth, drinking and dribbling over the menu. By the time the enormous, stomach distending meal he had ordered for himself was ready, there was still no sign of MacGregor. Dover didn’t bother waiting for him but took himself off to the little dining room and was soon stuffing himself with as much satisfying stodge as he could get his teeth round. That nasty, rabbit-food luncheon at Beltour House was soon no more than a faint, nauseating memory.
All around Dover in the dining room the reporters covering the murder were cheerfully and noisily scoffing down everything that was put in front of them. They had been just as cheerful and noisy in the bar earlier and although one or two speculative glances had been cast at Dover, deep and somnolent in his chair by the fire, nobody had actually approached him. This was not from fear or any sense of diffidence but simply because Dover’s reputation had preceded him.
‘There’s no point in asking him for any information,’ the cynical TV cameraman had proclaimed as he reached for his fourth double gin. ‘ He knows about as much of what’s going on as that bloody ginger tom-cat does. Probably less.’
The cub reporter from the local rag wasn’t so sure. He sipped his medium sweet cider with the air of a man of the world. ‘Maybe he’s a thinker,’ he said. ‘ Maybe he just sits there like a spider in the middle of its web, gathering all the strands of information together and weaving them into …’
The cameraman let out a scornful bark of a laugh. ‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything! Take it from me, son, all that old boozer uses his head for is somewhere to stick his hat. And the next time you find yourself in a public library, get yourself a book on arachnology!’
‘Eh?’
The cameraman turned away to find a more congenial companion. ‘Because you know even less about bloody spiders than you do about old Dover there!’
MacGregor came panting into the dining room just as Dover was shovelling most of the contents of the cheese board on to his plate. ‘Ah, there you are, sir! Er – are you feeling better?’
Dover raised a face flushed with over-indulgence. ‘ Not so’s you’d notice,’ he rumbled. ‘ I’m going straight to bed as soon as I’ve finished my supper. You can give us a hand upstairs.’
‘Of course, sir!’ MacGregor turned with thankfulness away from the guzzling on the other side of the table to exercise his charm on the waitress who had arrived to take his order. ‘ I’ll have …’
‘We’ve kept your dinner warm for you,’ interrupted the totally unimpressed young lady. ‘You don’t mind if I bring it in all at once, do you? Only I’m due off in five minutes.’
Congealed sheep’s brains is not to every man’s taste and was so little so on this occasion that, for once in his life, even Dover balked at gobbling up his sergeant’s leftovers.
It was only later when he was tucked up in MacGregor’s bed and sipping a double nightcap that Dover bethought himself to ask what his underling had been up to.
‘Oh, nothing very much,’ said MacGregor as he cleared the chinaware away from the old-fashioned wash-stand which he was hoping to use as a desk. ‘ The light won’t worry you, will it, sir?’
‘Yes, it will!’ said Dover who didn’t see any point in beating about the bush where his personal comfort was concerned. ‘ What have you been doing?’
‘Well, I went back to the temporary murder headquarters, sir, and gave them a hand with the clearing up there. There wasn’t much real damage actually and, once we’d got the caravan back on an even keel, everything could have carried on as before. But the Chief Constable wasn’t too keen. He decided that he could run things just as well from Claverhouse, especially since you and I were on hand down here.’
Dover showed his unerring sense for the unimportant once again. ‘Where’s Claverhouse?’ he demanded.
‘It’s the town we arrived at, sir. The one with the railway station. It’s got a biggish police station as well and, from now on, the local police will be working from there.’
‘Good,’ grunted Dover. ‘It’ll keep ’em out of my hair. Well?’
‘Sir?’
‘You were on the loose for the best part of four hours, laddie and I’m still waiting to hear what you were doing. You’re being bloody cagey about it. What are you hiding?’
‘Nothing, sir. I gave them a hand with the caravan and then I had to go over to Beltour House and collect your things and explain about the accident and everything.’
‘That’d have taken me four minutes!’ sneered Dover.
‘Well, after that, sir, I helped them pack up all the stuff that had been in the caravan and take it back to Claverhouse.’ MacGregor saw the look on Dover’s face and was stung to defend himself. ‘Well, we do have to work with them don’t we sir? I thought if I gave them a bit of a helping hand, now, it might pay dividends later.’
‘Crawler!’ said Dover. ‘You’re a right mug, you are! God help us the day we need anything from that bunch of country bumpkins! As a matter of fact, I’m already well on the way to solving this case by my own unaided efforts.’ He glanced at MacGregor to see if this subtle shaft had gone home. ‘Well, go on! What else?’
‘That really took up most of the time, sir. Oh, well, when we’d finished, Inspector Dawkins did stand me a couple of jars.’
‘Ah,’ said Dover, nodding his head sagely and addressing the ceiling, ‘now we’re getting down to it! And who’s Inspector Dawkins when he’s at home?’
MacGregor began unloading the contents of his briefcase onto the cleared surface of the wash-stand. ‘ He’s the local CID inspector who was in charge of the investigation before we arrived, sir. I found his comments on the case very useful. You see, he is quite convinced that the killer is a local man.’
‘So am I!’ snapped Dover.
MacGregor could see that Lord Crouch was about to raise his ugly head again and resolutely went on talking. ‘The point is, sir, that Inspector Dawkins thinks that only a local man would have known about that path to the railway station through Bluebell Wood. He also believes that the crime was probably premeditated because nobody, coming away from the railway station, could have had any reason to be on the path at that time. And, if it was premeditated, that points even more to a local man because only a local man would have known that he could tear a lump of wood off the bridge to use as a weapon. It looks to me like a reasonable working hypothesis.’
‘Could still have been a homicidal tramp,’ grumbled Dover, sticking a spoke in for the sheer hell of it.
‘It could, sir.’ Since MacGregor was having to share a bedroom with Dover he was more inclined than usual to humour the old fool. ‘On the other hand, there aren’t really all that number of homicidal tramps knocking around these days, are there? Certainly there’s been nobody of anything approaching that description seen anywhere in the neighbourhood of Beltour.’
Dover’s mind had already flitted off to a happier topic and he rattled his brandy glass against the bedhead. MacGregor obediently came over to relieve his master of the burden.
‘Are you going to lie down now, sir?’
‘Not that I’ll be able to sleep,’ came the surly response as Dover sank down under the bedclothes with all the grace of a torpedoed ironclad. ‘ I’ve had a busy evening, too, you know!’ he remembered, poking his head up out of the blankets. ‘I haven’t been sitting around on my backside, twiddling my thumbs, like some I could name.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Fr’instance,’ Dover went on, ‘did you know it’s quite on the cards that Lady Priscilla is Gary Marsh’s mother?’
‘No, sir, I didn’t. But I’m not really surprised.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, sir, I have suspected all along that Lord Crouch and his sister probably had some ulterior motive for inviting you to stay at Beltour. Obviously they knew all about the mystery surrounding Marsh’s birth and they wanted to get their version in first. Not that I think Gary Marsh’s parentage is of any importance to our enquiries.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Good heavens, no, sir! Why on earth should it have?’
Dover didn’t know so he changed the subject. ‘Are you going to keep that light on all blooming night?’
‘I’ll shade it, sir.’
Dover sniffed loudly and then thought of something else. ‘I want a glass of water!’ he whined.
‘Of course, sir!’ MacGregor poured out a glass from the carafe which he had tidied away on to the floor. ‘Here you are!’
He closed his eyes as Dover solemnly dropped both sets of his false teeth into the proffered tumbler.
‘And don’t droth ’ em!’ came the lisped instruction.
MacGregor got a grip on himself. ‘ I’ll put them here on your bedside table, sir.’
‘Yeth, you do thath.’
MacGregor then returned to his wash-stand and, sitting down, picked up a sheet of paper and began to read it.
Dover moved around restlessly as his digestive juices fought it out with the gargantuan meal which had just been wolfed down so mercilessly. ‘ Whath’th that?’ he demanded fretfully over the gurglings of his guts.
‘Just the log the local police kept, sir,’ said MacGregor, praying that Dover wasn’t going to go on nattering all night. It was getting late and MacGregor was counting on snatching a few hours of sleep himself before facing the rigours of yet another day with Scotland Yard’s most unwanted man. It was then that pure inspiration struck. If there was one thing guaranteed to send Dover speeding off to the Land of Nod … ‘I’ll give you the gist of it, shall I, sir?’
There was an unintelligible grunt and some twanging of springs from the bed.
MacGregor smiled grimly to himself and settled back in his chair. ‘Gary Marsh’s body,’ he began in a dull, monotonous voice, ‘was initially discovered in the stream by the Donkey Bridge by two small boys, namely Angus Gideon Kemble and George Tupper – both aged ten. On Monday morning – that is, the day after the murder – they were, I regret to say, playing truant from school and had gone to Bluebell Wood to fish for sticklebacks and frog spawn. They came across the body at about ten o’clock and were luckily far too scared to go near it or touch anything. Unluckily, they were also frightened of contacting anybody about it in case they got into trouble for playing truant. They ran off and then hung around in another part of the park, arguing about what, if anything, they should do. In the end their public spirit prevailed. They sneaked into the village and tried to make an anonymous 999 call from the public phone box. The operator at the other end was naturally extremely suspicious, especially as the kids refused to give their names and addresses, so he kept them talking and alerted a patrol car which happened to be in the area. The boys made their emergency call at 10.47 and were apprehended running away from the telephone kiosk by the occupants of the patrol car at 10.52.
‘At 11.00 hours precisely, finally convinced by the boys that this was not a leg-pull, Constable Muldoon set off for the Donkey Bridge, arriving there at 11.17. Once there he ascertained that there was, indeed, a body and that, to the best of his knowledge, it was dead. At 11.29 he radioed back to his headquarters …’
MacGregor let his voice trail softly away and listened for a few seconds to the steady snores coming from the bed. It had worked! He put the log sheet to one side and, not without a deep sigh of self pity, unscrewed his pen and got down to the tricky business of writing a report which, without actually lying, implied that considerably more progress had been made than was, in fact, the case.