Dover and the Claret Tappers Read online

  ‘Er – no,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, adding quickly while he’d the chance to get a word in, ‘though we are naturally leaving no avenue unexplored and no – er – theory uninvestigated.’

  The young lady interviewer nodded her head mechanically. She was there to ask questions, not listen to a bunch of boring old answers. ‘So, in spite of the fact that the kidnappers are demanding a ransom of one hundred thousand pounds for the safe return of Chief Inspector Dover, the authorities are working on the assumption that there is a political motive behind the crime?’

  ‘Er – yes.’ The Assistant Commissioner (Crime) was not best pleased at having a nubile, teenage moppet up-stage him. ‘There were, of course, other demands besides the – er – money.’

  The young lady interviewer, greatly daring, ventured a spontaneous query. ‘What other demands?’

  The Assistant Commissioner smiled a superior little smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to reveal that at this stage in the proceedings.’ Having been able to spurn a perfectly reasonable request for information he began to feel much better.

  ‘Is Chief Inspector Dover or his family in a position to pay a ransom of one hundred thousand pounds for his safe return?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Could police funds of any kind be made available?

  The Assistant Commissioner’s eyes all but popped out of his head. ‘What police funds?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the young lady interviewer rather crossly. ‘I’m asking you. I mean, where do the kidnappers think the money’s coming from?’

  ‘You’d better ask them!’ came the tart, if inevitable, answer.

  The young lady interviewer’s brow lowered and she was just about to give back as good as she was getting when she caught the producer’s frantic winding-up signals. God knows, there was more to life than missing policemen and there was that strike of dental surgeons in Gwent to tit in, to say nothing of the usual economic stuff and Bobby Buxton’s world shattering transfer from Liverpool to Everton for a reputed tee of two million. . .

  ‘I believe you have an announcement that you wish to make to the kidnappers of Detective Chiet Inspector Dover,’ snapped the young lady interviewer, her bosom (to which she owed so much of her success on the box) heaving sulkily as she scowled at the Assistant Commissioner. Dirty old lecher!

  ‘I have, indeed!’ The Assistant Commissioner, not realising that he was hors de combat in that particular sex war, straightened up as the cameras zoomed in on him. The watching audience got him full faced and naturally assumed that the faint smile playing round his lips was an indication of kindly benevolence. In a way, of course, it was: the Assistant Commissioner reckoned that what he was about to do was the best thing that had happened to the Metropolitan Police since the introduction of the whistle in 1884. Raising his chin, he let Number One camera have it straight in the lens.

  ‘I am speaking now,’ he began, ‘to those criminals who have been so foolish and misguided as to kidnap Detective Chief Inspector Dover, a valued colleague of mine . . . and a friend.’ The Assistant Commissioner gagged a bit over this but he got it out. M call upon them to release Wilfred Dover, their innocent victim, and return him unharmed and without delay to the bosom of his distressed family. Because, whatever you in your greed may think, crime does not pay – and this particular crime will certainly not pay. The combined might of every police force in this country will see to that and, sooner or later, you will be relentlessly hounded down and brought before the bar of British Justice!’ The Assistant Commissioner had learnt this stirring speech off by heart and didn’t need more than the odd glance at the teleprompter to refresh his memory. ‘Your punishment will be heavy. Don’t make it even more severe by daring to harm one hair of Wilf Dover’s head! For I have to tell you that neither Her Majesty’s government nor the Metropolitan Police is prepared to make any compromise in this matter. The conclusion has been reached, after much anguished heart searching, that to submit to threats of this nature is merely to invite further incidents of moral blackmail. Let me make the position crystal clear and tell you that our decision is final and irrevocable. None of your conditions for the safe release of Chief Inspector Dover from his durance vile will be met. Not one! We will not allow you to broadcast your so-called political manifesto. We will not release any so-called political prisoners from the jails where they are so justly serving heavy prison sentences for their crimes. And, lastly but by no means leastly, we will not pay a ransom of one hundred thousand pounds or any other sum of money, however trivial.’

  The Assistant Commissioner, who was beginning to sweat a little under the lights, paused dramatically to let his words sink in. Out of sight of the cameras pandemonium was breaking out. Everybody had been so sure, for some reason, that the Assistant Commissioner had come to capitulate to the demands of the kidnappers that nobody had actually bothered to ask him what he was going to say. The producer had merely implored him, as he implored every spokesman, to ‘try and keep it nice and short, lovie!’ The mimed panic soon resolved itself into a battle of wills between the distraught producer and the nubile young lady interviewer. He wanted her to resume her interrogation of the Assistant Commissioner in the face of this startling new development but she was determined not to appear before the cameras without a list of carefully prepared questions securely affixed to her clip-board. She was a conceited girl but, where her intellectual abilities were concerned, she recognised her limitations. The producer, although he was by no means the sort of man to lay hands lightly on a woman, was preparing to resort to physical coercion when the Assistant Commissioner continued with his oration.

  ‘So, in conclusion, let me appeal to you most sincerely to abandon this terrible plan. Release Chief Inspector Dover! You will gain nothing, either now or in the future, by continuing to detain him. Forget your brutal threats! Don’t get yourselves into any more trouble than you are in already. Believe me, if you so much as lay a finger on Wilf Dover, you will receive no mercy when we catch up with you – as catch up with you we most surely will. Thank you – and goodnight!’

  There was an awkward pause and then the producer, gratefully releasing his hold on the young lady interviewer and biting back his tears, flapped a limp hand at the news reader.

  Number Two camera came up and life went on. ‘The strike of dental surgeons in Gwent has, according to a statement issued by their association, already begun to bite . . .’

  Up in South Shields the middle-aged housewife spoke for us all. ‘Well,’ she chuckled as she nudged her husband into semi-wakefulness, ‘fancy that!’

  Two

  THE THREE CLARET TAPPERS SAT STARING AT THE talking heads, too stunned to move.

  At last the first kidnapper bestirred himself. ‘Switch that bloody thing oft’!’

  The third kidnapper, the one at the bottom of the pecking order, hurried to obey. The screen went dead.

  The second kidnapper was chicken. ‘They’re having us on, aren’t they?’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ The first kidnapper’s mind was roaring away like a Formula One car. If he didn’t watch it, he’d have the whole bloody business coming apart in his hands.

  The second kidnapper was desperate for reassurance. ‘It’s a bluff’, isn’t it? They’re trying to con us.’

  ‘Oh, belt up, for Christ’s sake! I’m trying to bloody think.’

  The third kidnapper was as white as a sheet. ‘How are we going to do it? I mean, he’s a big man. He isn’t just going to sit there and . . .’

  ‘Shut up, the bloody pair of you!’ The first kidnapper sucked in a great mouthful of air and tried to calm down. ‘Look,’ he said, speaking more quietly, ‘we’ve got to check this.’

  ‘Check?’

  ‘That’ – the first kidnapper jerked a would-be contemptuous thumb at the television set – ‘could be for the birds. Keeping up the public’s morale or something. The pigs just don’t want to lose face, that’s all. Don’t you sweat – they’ll n
egotiate behind the scenes.’

  His companions continued to look like a pair of cream-faced loons.

  ‘You never said what we was to do if they didn’t cough the cash up,’ Number Three accused his leader miserably. ‘You said they’d pay for sure. Oh, God, I don’t think I can kill anybody!’

  ‘You won’t have to!’ The chief Claret Tapper swung round angrily on his second-in-command, a broken reed if ever there was one but all he’d got. He pulled a handful of small change out of his pocket. ‘Here, go and phone your sister!’

  ‘Eh?’ The second kidnapper backed away from the proffered money as though it carried the plague. ‘Ring Jean? What for?’

  ‘To find out what’s going on, of course. She’ll know if the pigs are trying to pull a fast one, won’t she? Oh, go on! Get moving!’

  The second kidnapper fought a craven rear-guard action. ‘I don’t fancy ringing the Yard right now,’ he whined. ‘Suppose they get suspicious?’

  ‘Why the bloody hell should they? They’ll have enough to worry about without getting their knickers in a twist over some bloody girl getting a private telephone call when she’s on duty. If anybody asks you – which they bloody won’t – tell ’em your old grannie’s just up and kicked it.’

  The second kidnapper was still hovering by the door. ‘What are you going to do?’

  The first kidnapper scowled. Sometimes he couldn’t help longing for a bit of this blind, unthinking obedience you were always reading about. ‘I’m going to sit here, mate,’ he said grimly, ‘and think until the bloody ten o’clock news comes on the telly.’

  The second kidnapper came back into the centre of the room. ‘You think they’ll change their minds?’ he asked eagerly. ‘You think there’ll be another announcement and . . .’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ screamed the first kidnapper who merely hid his worries better than his companions, ‘sod off!’

  * * *

  The producer of commercial television’s ten o’clock news programme had worked himself up into a fair old paddy. He had, as a matter of routine, watched the rival newscast on the BBC at nine o’clock and the sheer, lousy unfairness of it all had got him down and chewing the carpet. Why had old Auntie BBC been handed this wonderful kidnapped copper story on an effing plate while the poor bleeding Independents were expected to scratch around on their own and make do with the left-overs.

  ‘O.K.,’ he bellowed eventually at the crowd of technicians, news-readers, secretaries and sycophants who had gathered round him in an orgy of commiseration, ‘if that’s the way they want to play it, we’ll show ’em!’ He reached for his telephone before pausing to toss a sop to his megalomania. ‘I’ll show ’em!’

  And, to his credit, he did.

  There was a bigger than usual audience for commercial television that evening owing to the fact that the alternative viewing was something less than compulsive, BBC I had a forty-five minute profile of one of the more boring and most dogmatic of trade union leaders while BBC 2 was showing its award winning film, A Day in the Life of the Narrow-Bordered Bee Hawk Moth, for the third time – and almost anything was better than that.

  L he producer of News at Ten hadn’t been able to achieve the completely impossible, of course. Both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary had declined invitations to appear at thirty minutes’ notice to explain their policy in respect of the outrageous kidnapping of a valued public servant, but Commander Brockhurst, head of the Murder Squad and Dover’s immediate superior, was only too happy to oblige. As he told his wife later, for that sort of money he would have appeared in A Day in the Life of the Narrow-Bordered Bee Hawk Moth.

  After a short resume of the story so far, Commander Brockhurst came up on the screen, looking the very epitome of your pink and cuddly neighbourhood policeman. The interviewer had been instructed to go hard for the human angle.

  ‘How, Commander Brockhurst, do you think Chief Inspector Dover is feeling at this moment?’

  The commander squirmed uneasily. ‘Well, I don’t suppose he’s feeling too chirpy,’ he admitted with evident reluctance, ‘but. . .’

  ‘Chief Inspector Dover has been snatched from the very heart of London by a gang of ruthless terrorists and held to ransom. Even where there is a readiness to pay the ransom, the victim of a kidnapping is all too frequently killed. What do you imagine Chief Inspector Dover’s thoughts are tonight, when he knows that there has been a blank refusal to bargain in any way with his captors?’

  Commander Brockhurst had had time to collect his thoughts. ‘Well, I dare say old Wilf Dover will be feeling a bit on the anxious side but he’ll be sustained by the knowledge that all his colleagues and chums in the Met will be working twenty-four hours a day to secure his safe release.’ Commander Brockhurst risked a surreptitious glance up at the studio ceiling. So far it seemed to be holding firm.

  ‘Won’t Chief Inspector Dover consider, though, that the community has betrayed him?’ pressed the interviewer. ‘That same community, moreover, that he has devoted his life to protecting.’

  Commander Brockhurst’s mind boggled slightly at the idea of Dover devoting his life to anything other than his own comfort, but he picked up the thread of his platitudes smoothly enough. ‘Old Wilf is a professional policeman,’ he assured the watching millions heartily, ‘and, like the rest of us, he’s used to taking the rough with the smooth. He’ll appreciate – as every thinking person in the country must – that a line has got to be drawn somewhere. The police have been advocating a tougher policy for years. The only way to get rid of these mindless thugs is to stamp on them – and stamp on them hard. Nobody is more sorry than I am that Wilf Dover is destined to be the guinea pig in this experiment but I know the man and there’ll be no whining or complaining from him.’

  Out of camera range the producer, getting bored with Commander Brockhurst’s stout determination to be brave at some other poor bugger’s expense, began to make his wind-it-up signs.

  Commander Brockhurst got in one last gesture from the Boy’s Own Paper code. Raising his thumb to the camera he grinned cheerfully. ‘Chins up, Dover!’ he counselled, and his use of the plural was a perfectly understandable Freudian slip.

  The newscaster was Hashing his teeth again. ‘We’re going to take a short break now,’ he announced as though it was some kind of special treat, ‘but after the break we shall be bringing you an interview with Chief Inspector Dover’s wife, as well as the latest news on the dentists’ strike in Wales and Bobby Buxton on what it feels like to be worth two million pounds.’ The eyes crinkled appealingly. ‘Join us then!’

  For connoisseurs of the human condition, Mrs Dover was a treat worth waiting for. She had been filmed earlier on in the evening in her own kitchen and she appeared on the screen looking astonishingly bright and cheerful. By a fortunate coincidence she had paid her monthly visit to the hairdresser’s that very morning and now faced the world from under a passing fair imitation of a corrugated iron roof. There had been some vague idea at first that she should be filmed performing some trivial domestic chore – like ironing her husband’s pyjamas. That, of course, had been before the television people had actually seen Dover’s pyjamas. When they had, they decided not to bother.

  Mrs Dover was experiencing some difficulty in stopping talking. It only needed one word from her interlocutor and she was off, nineteen to the dozen. Yes, shocked simply wasn’t the word for what she’d felt when they’d told her that Wilfred had been kidnapped. She’d gone weak at the knees, really. And everything had started to go quite black and . . . No, of course she’d never imagined her husband would ever be so silly as to go and get himself kidnapped! Why on earth should she? The idea had never even crossed her mind. Things like that just simply didn’t happen to people like them and . . . Well, yes, naturally she was worried about him because, quite apart from anything else, his health wasn’t all that good and he was terribly prone to chills on the stomach and . . . Eh? Oh, yes, she did appeal to the kidnappers, wherever and whoe
ver they might be, to let her husband go.

  It was at this point that careful watchers might have detected a slight diminution in Mrs Dover’s sparkling good humour. The prospect of her husband’s safe return made her look fractionally less like a football pools winner than heretofore.

  The interviewer carried on. ‘What do you think, Mrs Dover, about the decision of the authorities to refuse absolutely and entirely to compromise with the chief inspector’s abductors? Don’t you feel it grossly unfair that your husband’s life should be put at risk in this way?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Mrs Dover vacillated and pleated her best frock with nervous lingers. ‘Well . . .’ She took a deep breath and started again. ‘They did explain it to me and I can quite sec their point of view, you know. I mean, you can’t let this sort of thing go on for ever, can you? You’ve got to take a stand somewhere, don’t you? It’s just Wilfred’s hard luck that. . .’ Mrs Dover’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Quite!’ The interviewer was shown nodding sympathetically in a shot that had been filmed half an hour after the interview had ended.

  Mrs Dover smiled shyly. ‘A hundred thousand pounds is quite a lot of money,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Indeed! Yes, I think we would all agree with that. And now, Mrs Dover, what are your plans for the immediate future?’

  ‘Oh, well, now I’ve been thinking about that. I shall pack in this place, of course, and move in with my younger sister. She’s got ever such a nice little house down in Essex and she’s a widow, too, so there’ll be plenty of room for me and my bits and pieces there.’

  The interviewer was a little confused. ‘Temporarily, you mean? Just while you’re waiting for news about your husband’s fate?’ he asked.

  Mrs Dover smiled forgivingly at the silly boy. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, her earlier cheerfulness breaking through again, ‘I mean permanently. For good. I wouldn’t dream, of course,’ she added virtuously, ‘of leaving this house until after the funeral, though. Well, it wouldn’t be right, would it?’