‘What was Mr Buckley talking about, sir?’ asked MacGregor when he had got Dover comfortably installed in the car.
‘Who’s Mr Buckley?’
‘He’s the publican, sir. Of The Bull Reborn. Wasn’t he saying something about Gary Marsh?’
Dover grunted. It might have meant anything or – more probably – nothing.
‘We’d better have a word with him later, don’t you think, sir? He may have some useful information.’
‘And pigs might fly,’ said Dover, as co-operative and constructive as ever. Still, he didn’t want to let MacGregor think that he hadn’t got the situation under control. ‘ I’m letting him stew a bit.’
‘Oh,’ said MacGregor. He might have been tempted to pursue the matter further if his eye hadn’t alighted on the village shop. He opened the car door again. ‘Do you mind just hanging on for a second, sir? I’ve – er – run out of cigarettes.’
Dover gave another of his all purpose grunts and closed his eyes. Many great men have had the priceless ability to drop off to sleep at any time and in any circumstances, and Chief Inspector Dover was no exception. He was well away by the time MacGregor climbed back into the car and thus missed seeing the little parcel that his sergeant hid with all possible speed in the glove compartment. Even Dover might have thought that it didn’t look much like a packet of cigarettes.
MacGregor swung the car out on the road which led to the Beltour estate and grinned to himself. Twenty-seven new pence was a small price to pay for a good night’s sleep. That was what the tin of best quality, middle cut salmon had just cost him. He trusted that the ginger cat would enjoy it.
The Tiffins’ cottage lay only a few minutes’ walk from the big house at Beltour and was mercifully hidden from it by a slight dip in the ground. Originally the cottage must have looked pretty much like the others in the neighbourhood – simple and undistinguished, but pleasing. The Tiffins had changed all that. They had seen the possibilities and had exploited them with a ruthlessness and lack of taste that had to be seen to be believed. No fewer than three coaching lamps (wired for the electric) surrounded the front door and fought it out for lebensraum with a particularly rampant Dorothy Perkins. The front door itself sported, on a background of bright yellow, a brass knocker and a brass letter box, a wooden poker-work name plate and a complete set of antique plastic nail heads. Each window had its matching yellow non-functional shutters and in the small front garden a pair of old cart wheels, with each spoke painted a different colour, loomed disproportionately large.
MacGregor shuddered fastidiously and opened the mail-order, wrought iron, bargain offer gate with reluctance. From there he picked his way up the do-it-yourself, crazy paving path and felt grateful that the day was decently overcast. On a bright and sunny afternoon the Tiffins’ pad would have been quite unbearable.
Dover, on the other hand, was full of admiration and envy. He spent a great deal of his time dreaming about his retirement and this was just the sort of place he had in mind. He could just picture himself, snoozing happily in a deck chair in the fresh air and sunshine while his wife dug the garden or chopped the wood. What bliss! As he stood waiting for the front door to be opened, he stared longingly at the sundial and the plaster stork standing next to the little artificial pond. Some people had it with jam on!
‘Sir!’
Dover turned round to find the front door open and MacGregor, as befitted a mere underling, standing respectfully to one side. The happy day dreams faded and Dover sighed in an orgy of self pity. Back to the bloody grindstone!
Mrs Tiffin was an admirable match for the cottage, having also been tarted up with more enthusiasm than skill but Dover found her a real queen amongst women. It must be admitted, however, that this realization didn’t come to him until he found himself confronted by an afternoon tea of truly heroic proportions. True that, once she was settled presiding over the teapot, Mrs Tiffin turned out to be no mean conversationalist, but with such a feast spread before him Dover was prepared to forgive her even that.
‘I made our Charmian go in to work today,’ said Mrs Tiffin as she poured out. ‘ Just to take her mind off things. Well, life has to go on, hasn’t it? And it’s no good crying over spilt milk. I told her she was doing no good to anybody, moping around the house looking like a wet weekend. She’ll be home in about an hour, though, if you want to have a word with her, and her dad comes in about the same time though I don’t see that either of them’ll be able to tell you anything much. It’s a real mystery to us and, believe you me, there’s been nothing else discussed in this house since it happened. We’ve gone on and on about it until I’ve been fit to scream.’
‘It must have been a great shock,’ murmured MacGregor.
‘I could kill Gary Marsh for getting himself murdered!’ said Mrs Tiffin bitterly. ‘I really thought we’d done it this time.’
MacGregor took a polite nibble at his ham sandwich and duly noted the margarine. ‘Done it?’
‘Got our Charmian settled,’ explained Mrs Tiffin, stirring her tea resentfully. ‘I warned Arthur what would happen if we buried ourselves down here in the country before we’d got her off our … before we’d got her nicely settled.’
‘Arthur is your husband?’
Mrs Tiffin nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘So you’ve not been at Beltour long?’
‘A couple of years. We came here just after I’d had my operation.’
‘Really?’ MacGregor pushed a plate of sausage rolls nearer to Dover. The longer he could keep the old glutton feeding his face, the less likelihood there was of him chipping in and ruining everything.
‘The doctors told us I had to take things easy,’ Mrs Tiffin went on with the easy complacency of the hypochondriac. ‘I’d had a very bad time, you know. Well, the surgeon said he’d never seen anything like it in his life, never. If they hadn’t cut me open and taken it out when they did, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now.’ Mrs Tiffin smiled modestly. ‘Touch and go, it was.’
‘Fancy,’ said MacGregor.
‘Of course, up till then, me and Arthur had always worked as a team, you see. He was butler and I did the housekeeping. But, after my operation, they said I had to have a complete rest so Arthur started looking round for a job on his own.’
‘You’ve always been in service, then?’ asked MacGregor as he unobtrusively got his notebook out, a feat of legerdemain which Dover assisted by shoving his cup across and distracting Mrs Tiffin’s attention by imperiously demanding a refill.
‘Oh, yes, always.’ Mrs Tiffin handed the teacup back and gave a nervous little start as Dover’s other hand shot out like a rapier to grab the last cheese’n’pickle munchie off the plate. ‘Mind you, we’ve always picked our places. We like titled people. They’re usually much more considerate and understanding than the merely rich. Oh, well, we did oblige a bishop once, but that was Arthur. He’s always been of a very religious turn of mind and his Lordship came from a very good family – unlike some I could name. We did think at one time of trying one of those American millionaires but you never know somehow with foreigners, do you?’ Mrs Tiffin filled up the teapot from the hot water jug. ‘Mind you, we wouldn’t have touched this job here in the normal course of events.’
‘No?’ MacGregor told himself that you never knew when all these snippets of information might prove valuable.
Mrs Tiffin shook her tightly permed head. ‘Well, this is no job for a highly trained, experienced butler like Arthur, is it? It’s not a proper butlering job at all. Well, between you and me, I doubt if Lord Crouch and his sister would know what to do with a proper butler if they engaged one. The way they live! Disgusting for titled people, I call it. Pigging it up there in those blooming old box rooms!’
‘You can say that again!’ growled Dover. He was beginning to show signs of restlessness now that all the food had gone.
MacGregor was quick to recognize the danger signs and he got his cigarette case out. In a couple of seconds he had got Dover sucking away contentedly like a baby. MacGregor returned to Mrs Tiffin. ‘What precisly are your husband’s duties, Mrs Tiffin?’ he asked.
Mrs Tiffin sniffed disparagingly. ‘Being a tailor’s dummy!’ she said. ‘He’s just there to impress these blooming trippers they have swarming all over the place. Well, he’s supposed to sort of keep an eye on things as well. See they don’t scratch anything or pinch the cutlery or anything. Oh, and he opens the door to important visitors, too, but mostly he’s just there for show. That’s why Lord Crouch was so keen on getting Arthur, you see, because he is such a fine figure of a man. He’s got presence, Arthur has. He really looks the part.’ Mrs Tiffin smiled contentedly. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I was all against him taking the position.’
‘Really?’ MacGregor was wondering how and when he was ever going to get Mrs Tiffin down to what some of his detective colleagues liked to call the nitty-gritty stuff. ‘ Er …’
‘You can’t afford to let your standards slip,’ said Mrs Tiffin firmly. ‘They soon start taking advantage of you, if they think they can get away with it. Like I said to Arthur at the time, how much ice is a reference from Lord Crouch going to cut? Everybody who is anybody knows the style him and his sister live in. It’s all very fine, I said to Arthur, you saying you only did it to oblige but who’s going to believe you?’
Who, indeed? MacGregor smiled the uncertain smile of one who is hopelessly lost.
Mrs Tiffin took pity on him. ‘Arthur was Lord Crouch’s batman,’ she explained. ‘Donkey’s years ago now, of course. Well, you’d think that was grounds for Lord Crouch doing Arthur a good turn, wouldn’t you, instead of the other way round? What’s got into you? I said to Arthur. You’ve never so much as mentioned your Army service these past twenty years and now here you are taking a stupid position like this on the strength of it. Well, he mumbled something about the money being very good. Just like a man. And then there’s our Charmian to think of, I told him.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said MacGregor feebly.
‘I wasn’t a bit keen on coming down here to the back of beyond because of her. I mean, whichever way you look at it, a girl has more chances in London than she does in the country. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Oh, I know Gary turned up here in Beltour but that still doesn’t alter the principle of the thing. Arthur was like a dog with two tails when they announced their engagement but, don’t count your chickens, I said. There’s many a slip, I said. And I was right! Our Charmian’s worse off now than if she’d never met the dratted boy!’
‘Ah, yes, Gary Marsh!’ MacGregor stole a glance at Dover and tried to calculate how much longer Mrs Tiffin’s substantial tea was going to keep him pinned down in his chair. The time for ruthlessness had come and MacGregor cut through Mrs Tiffin’s bitter maternal lamentations over the loss of a prospective son-in-law. ‘I believe Gary Marsh spent most of the day he was killed here, Mrs Tiffin?’
Mrs Tiffin agreed sadly that he had. ‘And I was so looking forward to it, too,’ she complained. ‘You see, Gary didn’t often get a weekend off and, when he came home in the middle of the week, our Charmian was at work. I thought this weekend was going to be a wonderful opportunity for us all to get to know one another better.’
‘You didn’t know Gary Marsh well, then?’
‘Not really. Well, until our Charmian started going out with him a month or so ago, I don’t even remember so much as seeing him. I must have done, I suppose, but he just didn’t register somehow.’
MacGregor felt he could understand that. ‘Did you or Mr Tiffin have any objections to the engagement?’
‘Good heavens, no! Gary was a very nice boy … really. Once you got to know him. And, of course, anything Charmian wanted was all right by her father and me. She’s our only child, you know, so I suppose we do tend to spoil her a bit. Still, she’s a very sensible girl and we do want to see her settled. She’s had one or two disappointments in the past, you know, and we did so hope everything was going to work out this time.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me exactly what happened on Sunday,’ said MacGregor, earning top marks for dogged determination. ‘ Did Gary seem perfectly normal?’
‘Well,’ – Mrs Tiffin paused as she gave her answer some thought – ‘he hadn’t much to say for himself but, then, I think he was probably always a bit like that. You’d have to ask our Charmian.’ Mrs Tiffin looked coy. ‘She’s the one who’d know whether he was his usual self or not.’
‘What did you do on Sunday?’
‘Do? Well,’ – Mrs Tiffin sat back with a sigh – ‘ I don’t know that we actually did anything. Charmian and her dad went to church and Gary met them there. I gave it a miss that morning because I had to see to the dinner. I wanted it to be something a bit special. Well, after church Arthur and Gary went to The Bull Reborn for a drink and Charmian came straight back here to give me a hand. Then we had dinner and, after dinner, Charmian and Gary watched television in here. Arthur came and gave me a hand with the washing up and then we just sort of generally kept out of the way. Well, you do, don’t you? Round about five o’clock I got the tea ready and took it in. By the time we’d finished that it was time for Gary to leave. I did suggest that Charmian might like to walk over with Gary to Beltour and maybe even wait while he saw Lord Crouch and then go to the station with him, but her dad wouldn’t hear of it. Mind you, it was coming on to rain but she could have taken her mac. Arthur said he wasn’t having her come all that way back from the station by herself in the dark. In view of what happened to poor Gary, I suppose he was right but I wasn’t too pleased with him at the time, I don’t mind telling you. Well, you know what young couples are like and a nice walk through the woods can be so romantic, can’t it?’
MacGregor was scribbling away like a maniac, much to Dover’s sardonic and sleepy amusement, but the sergeant was keeping a firm grip on the essentials. ‘Just a minute, Mrs Tiffin! You knew that Gary Marsh was going to see Lord Crouch that evening?’
‘Oh, yes. Gary mentioned it at dinner.’
‘And you knew he would be walking from Beltour House, through Bluebell Wood and across the Donkey Bridge to the railway station?’
‘Yes.’
‘He told you that, too?’
Mrs Tiffin wrinkled her brow. ‘Well, no, not in so many words, I suppose. I just assumed that’s what he’d do. I mean, if you’re walking, it’s the obvious way, isn’t it? Miles quicker than going round by the road.’ She glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Good heavens, is that the time? Well, if you want to ask me any more questions, you’ll just have to wait a bit. I’ve got to get Arthur’s tea ready for him. He likes to have it as soon as he gets in. Would either of you two gentlemen like another cup?’
Dover heard that all right. ‘ Yes,’ he said and yawned noisily as he watched Mrs Tiffin begin to pile up the empty plates. ‘ Here,’ he said, generous to a fault, ‘my sergeant’ll give you a hand with that. Come on, MacGregor! Where’s your manners?’ Dover gave Mrs Tiffin a conspiratorial wink. ‘You play your cards properly, missus, and he might even wash up for you! He’s very domesticated. Make some girl a first-rate husband!’
Mrs Tiffin examined MacGregor with renewed interest. ‘He’s not married, then?’ she asked with a little laugh, as though it was all some big joke.
‘An unplucked rose!’ Dover assured her maliciously.
‘Fancy!’ Mrs Tiffin subjected MacGregor to another shrewd going over. ‘Er – are you likely to be staying in the district for long?’
Dover dragged his chair nearer to the fire as MacGregor banged crossly out into the kitchen with the load of plates a beaming Mrs Tiffin had handed him. ‘No idea,’ said Dover. ‘Sometimes these cases take days to clear up, sometimes weeks.’
‘Weeks?’ echoed Mrs Tiffin thoughtfully. ‘Fancy! Well, I just hope you’ll look upon this house as your second home while you’re here. Pop in any time you feel like a drink or a meal. We’ll always be very glad to see you. Both of you, of course.’
‘I’ll remember that!’ promised Dover with a smirk.
MacGregor came back from the kitchen only to receive another armful of plates from a now gushing Mrs Tiffin. ‘ Come on!’ she exhorted him gaily. ‘I’ll wash and you can wipe. All right, dear?’