Dover One Read online

  Dover shook his head and resumed his questioning.

  ‘And Lady Counter?’

  ‘Lady Counter, I am glad to say, is dead, and has been these many years. She was an even more colourless woman than her daughter, if you can bring yourself to imagine such a thing. I have made very few mistakes in my life, Inspector, but marrying that woman came dangerously near to being one of them. I was nearly fifty when I married. Up till then I had always avoided matrimony like the plague, going on the principle that there is no need to throw yourself into the river to get a drink of water. But in 1926, I shall never forget the year, my valet, who’d been with me for over a quarter of a century, had the base ingratitude to leave me to go and keep a public house in some godforsaken backwater or other. I found him impossible to replace and, after some ghastly experiences with which I won’t bore you, I finally decided that the only solution was to get married.

  ‘The girl whom I selected was the daughter of an old friend of mine. She was a sickly, unattractive, dowdy individual who hadn’t enough spirit to say boo to a gosling. Her sole virtue was that she was a very wealthy woman in her own right, with large expectations from her father. I wasn’t exactly a pauper myself, but it is a common fallacy to believe that only the poor want money.

  ‘She died, rather to my surprise, I must admit, a year after we were married and left me with that.’ He jerked his head at the door through which his daughter had just gone. ‘I inherited all my wife’s money so I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the inconvenience she caused me. I got my sister to come and look after the girl until she was old enough to be packed off to school. I have, of course, never remarried. For the most part I have availed myself of the services of the maids. Whenever I hire a new girl, I make it quite clear to her what is expected. I flatter myself that I have never had one who turned the job down. Juliet Rugg is the latest in a not inconsiderable line.’ He popped another sweet into his mouth and crunched it loudly,

  Dover gaped in astonishment at the old man in front of him, sitting bolt upright with a rug over his knees. You might call Sir John wonderful for his age, marvellously active and surprisingly well preserved, but, none the less, he was still a very old man. Dover gazed blankly at the wrinkled parchment skin drawn tautly over the skull, at the eyes sunk deep under bushy white eyebrows, at the thin body lost in clothes which had been cut to fit a more robust frame, and at the thick knotted veins on the slightly trembling hands. He calculated rapidly. Good grief! The old roué must be well over eighty!

  ‘So Juliet Rugg was your mistress, Sir John?’ he asked in a non-committal voice.

  ‘She was, Inspector. Do I gather from your question that my daughter had not informed you of this fact? She, of course, neither approves nor understands. Having no sex life of her own she naturally considers herself well qualified to criticize that of others.’

  Dover groped for a moment, wondering how best to phrase his next question.

  ‘We have reason to believe, Sir John,’ he said, ‘that this girl, Juliet Rugg, has other men-friends. You yourself must know that she was the mother of an illegitimate child.’

  Sir John shrugged his shoulders. ‘I am a realist, Inspector, I always have been. Juliet is a lusty young wench with a rather insatiable appetite. I am no longer a young man. Obviously I couldn’t hope to satisfy all her demands. Of course she was having affairs with other men. She used to amuse me for hours telling me all about them.’

  ‘Did she give you any hint that she might run away with one of them?’

  ‘No, that would seem to imply love and I doubt if Juliet is capable of love-if, indeed, it exists at all. She is quite simply a nymphomaniac, Inspector, of a rather plebeian sort One man is pretty much the same as another from her point of view. Besides, her life here is very comfortable. She is living a life of luxury with ten pounds a week pocket money. It would have to be a very attractive offer to lure her away from that’

  ‘You know of no reason, then, why she should run off at this stage?’

  ‘No, rather the reverse. She had been trying for some time to get me to marry her. She rather fancied herself as the second Lady Counter.’

  Dover exchanged glances with Sergeant MacGregor, whose unobtrusive note-taking had been going on all through the interview.

  ‘Did you intend to marry her?’ asked Dover.

  Sir John placed his finger-tips judiciously together. ‘I was thinking about it,’ he said. ‘It was a suggestion which merited thinking about. Juliet’s a common little tart, of course, but since I have virtually ceased going out in society nowadays, that wouldn’t matter all that much. My daughter,’ he glanced slyly at the chief inspector, ‘my daughter, however, didn’t like the idea at all. To be fair, Juliet as a stepmother would be hard for anybody to swallow. And, at the present moment, Eve is my sole heir, but if I married again and if I fathered another child – which is not beyond the realms of possibility – then her position would be very different.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dover and sighed. He decided to try another line of questioning.

  ‘According to our investigations, Sir John,’ he said, ‘Juliet Rugg was last seen at about five to eleven on Tuesday night. She was walking up the drive in the direction of this house. According to Miss Counter’s statement, she doesn’t appear to have got here. I take it, you didn’t see her that night?’

  ‘No, the last time I saw her was at lunch before she went off.’

  ‘Where were you at eleven o’clock, Sir John?’

  ‘I was in bed watching television. I have a second set in my bedroom. When the programme ended I switched off my light and went to sleep.’

  ‘Would you have heard her if she had come into the house?’ Sir John thought for a minute. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘My room is quite a distance from the front door and, of course, my hearing is not so acute as it was. By the way, who saw Juliet at that time?’

  ‘It was Colonel Bing.’

  ‘Ah, the Irlam Amazon! Well, the woman’s a fool, but I’ve no doubt she can see straight enough.’

  ‘Had Miss Rugg any friends or contacts among the people who live up here? Was she perhaps – er – friendly with any of the men?’

  ‘Not as far as I know, Inspector, though if she were having an affair with any man up here I think she’d be shrewd enough not to tell me about it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I should not’ – Sir John paused to pop another toffee in his mouth’-I should not be quite so complaisant at finding her carrying on with somebody in my own social set as I was about her amorous adventures with farm labourers and shop assistants. It is illogical, I admit, but I wouldn’t tolerate her sleeping with one of my neighbours. However, I am sure my daughter would have been very quick to tell me if something of that sort had been going on. As far as the women up here are concerned’ – he shook his head – ‘I doubt if any of them ever passed more than the time of day with her. She is a servant, you know, and not an oversavoury one at that. In fact, I can’t see her popping in to pay a social call at eleven o’clock at night with anybody in Irlam Old Hall – if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Are there any single men in the houses or flats?’

  ‘Two, I believe – that’s not counting Freel who lives with his sister. There’s Bondy, a retired soldier, who does the caretaking in the Old Hall itself. He’s about sixty, I suppose, and I don’t think he’d touch Juliet with gloves on, if you see what I mean. Then there’s this foreigner chap, Bogolepov. Now, he’s a different kettle of fish. He’s one of these gaunt, hungry-looking young men – the sort that women are supposed to want to mother. Jew he is, and they’re an oversexed lot, if you like. I’ve caught him looking at Juliet once or twice with those big dark eyes. Looked as though he could eat her – you know, practically slavering at the lips.

  ‘Yes, if anything has happened to Juliet, he’s your man ! Might be well worth your while to go and give him a bit of third degree – it’s all these damned foreigners understand. If I
were ten years younger, he’d have had the toe of my boot up his backside, I can tell you! I don’t hold any brief for Hitler, Inspector, obviously he went much too far, but he was on the right lines where the Jews were concerned, I can never understand why Kitty Chubb-Smith ever let him have that house in the first place. I told her she was lowering the tone of the whole set-up. Lazy young whelp wanders about half the day in his pyjamas, shaves about once a week and doesn’t look as if he’d had a wash since he came here.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Dover, who’d had enough of Sir John but who was loath to leave the comfort of his armchair, ‘I think that’s about all for the moment. Thank you very much for your help, sir.’

  ‘Not at all, Inspector. I miss Juliet-for obvious reasons-and I’m only too pleased to do anything I can to help get her back. Sure you won’t have a toffee before you go? They’re very good. I have them specially sent down from London.’

  ‘No thank you, sir,’ said Dover, and rose reluctantly to his feet. ‘Oh, there is one thing, sir. You don’t by any chance happen to have a photograph of Miss Rugg?’

  Sir John had the grace to be, just a little, put off his stride. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I – er – have, Inspector. Constable!’ He waved a hand at MacGregor. ‘Could you go into that top left-hand drawer over there – yes, that’s the one — you’ll find a cardboard box. Just bring it over here, please !’

  Sir John opened the box and took out about six or seven halfplate photographs. He looked at them for a moment with pursed lips, and then handed them to Dover.

  ‘I don’t know if these will be much use to you, Inspector, but perhaps you’ve got an artist or somebody who could – er – paint the clothes in . . . ’

  Dover looked at the photographs with a carefully blank face. They were all of Juliet Rugg, taken in the nude in the sort of poses which generally land the photographer up in court.

  ‘Hm,’ he said, raising his eyebrows slightly, ‘unfortunately, the faces are a little blurred.’

  ‘Well, you may be right.’ Sir John, who had taken the photographs himself, sounded a little offended at this lack of appreciation. ‘But, I can assure you, otherwise they are an excellent likeness.’

  ‘I shall have to take your word for that, Sir John,’ said Dover, tucking them away in his wallet.

  Eve Counter, summoned by an imperious ring from her father, came to conduct them up to Juliet’s bedroom. They followed her up the wide staircase to the first floor.

  ‘We gave Juliet one of the main bedrooms,’ she explained, ‘nobody ever stays here and my father didn’t want her too far away.’

  Juliet’s room was spacious and well furnished, with her own private bathroom leading off. Like her mother, she was clearly extremely untidy and slovenly in her habits. Bits and pieces of clothing were littered round the room, the bed had been straightened rather than made, and the bedside table bore a number of disfiguring cigarette bums. The top of the dressing-table was covered with sticky-looking bottles and jars of cream, most of them with the lids left off. There were a couple of dirty broken combs, several lipsticks, a large box of face powder, bits of soiled cotton wool, orange sticks and a pile of plastic hair-curlers. The whole sordid mess was covered with a fine film of pink powder and more lay scattered around on the carpet.

  Dover eyed a row of nail-varnish bottles ranging through all possible shades of red with a shudder of disgust.

  ‘Just have a search round, Sergeant,’ he said, determined not to grub about in this lot with his own hands. ‘See if you can find anything.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ replied MacGregor, for once not displaying his usual enthusiasm.

  The inspector sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and waited. Eve Counter started to fiddle restlessly with the shade on the bedside lamp.

  ‘Inspector,’ she began abruptly.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said Dover resignedly. It had been too much to expect that he would be allowed to enjoy a few minutes’ peace and quiet.

  ‘I suppose my father told you that Juliet was his mistress? Well, it’s not true! He’s just boasting, like a little boy. He tells everybody the same thing – and it’s just too stupid for words! He’s just not capable of that sort of thing any longer.’ Her face was bright scarlet.

  Dover sighed. What the hell did it matter anyhow?

  ‘I know what I’m talking about, Inspector,’ Miss Counter went doggedly on, determined to make her point. ‘His doctor told me. He’s just too old.’

  Dover shrugged his shoulders, ‘He was apparently toying with the idea of getting married again,’ he observed, and watched Eve Counter’s face.

  She turned away and gave the lamp-shade a few more pokes. ‘That’s quite ridiculous,’ she said in a strangled voice, ‘he’s eighty-five and Juliet’s eighteen. What on earth would everybody say?’

  ‘It’s been done before, madam.’

  ‘I know, but not by men like my father.’ She turned with a jerk to face Dover, her chin up. ‘My father, Inspector, has had plenty of opportunities to re-marry, but he’s remained faithful all these years to the memory of my mother. She died after they’d been married only a year and I don’t think my father has ever got over it He doesn’t love me very much -1 suppose you’ve noticed that – but that’s because my mother died when I was born and it’s quite natural, in a way, that he should blame me for it.’

  It was a gallant effort, but it didn’t convince Dover. Eve Counter didn’t look as though it had convinced her either.

  Sergeant MacGregor emerged from the bathroom, fastidiously wiping his hands on his handkerchief.

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Only this, sir.’ MacGregor reopened a drawer in the dressing-table. Under a pile of voluminous underwear lay an envelope containing fifty-four one-pound notes. ‘She’d have hardly left this lot behind, would she, sir?’

  To say that Dover was annoyed would be an unfair understatement. Scowling heavily, he stamped out of the house with the fury of an enraged bull elephant. He flung himself petulantly into the car and the springs sagged with the shock. Sergeant MacGregor followed him apprehensively. The two men sat in silence, gazing vacantly through the windscreen.

  After a few minutes Dover broke the impasse.

  ‘What time is it?’ he growled.

  ‘Getting on for half-past five, sir.’

  Dover’s habit of always asking somebody else what the time was and never bothering to look at his own watch was one of those irritating little things which before now have led to violent physical assault, and even murder.

  Dover grunted sulkily. ‘Let’s have a cigarette,’ he said.

  Sergeant MacGregor took a conscious grip on himself, otherwise he might have fallen to screaming and foaming at the mouth. With a restrained sigh, he meekly produced his cigarette- case. The chief inspector was a heavy smoker, but since he was rarely known to buy a packet, he depended on his sergeants to keep him supplied. He wasn’t too pleased if he was offered filter-tips either.

  When he had lit both their cigarettes Sergeant MacGregor judged that the atmosphere had eased enough to make conversation possible. He appreciated Dover’s frame of mind. Ever since he had first heard of the case, the chief inspector had been squealing loudly that it was a complete waste of time. But now, even after the little they had learned so far, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that Juliet Rugg had just skipped off quietly of her own free will to enjoy a honeymoon unsanctified by church or state, Dover now found himself in the uncomfortable situation of having to admit that, possibly, his original view of the case was, to put it bluntly, wrong.

  This was, however, not a particularly novel experience for Chief Inspector Dover. His judgment had frequently been at fault, not only in the initial stages of a case but, occasionally, right up to the end as well. The fact that his career as a detective had endured, and even flourished in a mild way, was almost entirely due to the fact that most criminals, incredible as it may seem, were even more stupid and inept than he was.


  Sergeant MacGregor, who was really quite a nice young man, tried to be tactful about it.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s beginning to look as though something really has happened to that girl, isn’t it, sir?’

  Dover grunted and stretched his legs out as far as they would go. ‘Yes,’ he agreed complacently. ‘Of course, it was obvious from the start that there was something fishy going on.’

  This was a bit too rapid a volte-face even for Sergeant MacGregor’s loyalty. ‘But, sir,’ he protested, ‘you . . . ’

  ‘The trouble with you young men’ – Dover steamrollered on, ignoring the interruption – ‘is that you always start formulating theories and jumping to conclusions before you’ve got the facts. It’s a very dangerous habit to get into, Sergeant, prejudices your whole attitude to a case. A good detective’s got to keep an open mind until he’s got real evidence in his hands – then you don’t have to make up theories, the facts speak for themselves.’

  The chief inspector paused to flick a chunk of cigarette ash off his waistcoat.

  Sergeant MacGregor was beyond arguing. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said in an expressionless voice. Life was easier that way.

  ‘Now, just let’s have a look at what we’ve got,’ Dover continued with the air of a kindly sage speaking to an idiot child, ‘The girl was seen, alive and well, here on this very drive late on Tuesday night, going, apparently, straight home. She never got there. So she must have gone, willingly or unwillingly, somewhere else. Right? Now, let’s assume that she’s gone off somewhere under her own steam-your original theory, Sergeant. We’ve got three points to take into account here. One, she didn’t hint either to her mother or to her employer that she was going to skip, though, when you consider the terms she was on with the pair of ’em, it doesn’t seem very likely that either would have batted an eyelid if they knew she was off for a dirty week-end somewhere.

  ‘Two, she left over fifty pounds in ready cash behind, and according to Eve Counter, none of her belongings are missing. Of course, it’s possible that her departure was voluntary but unpremeditated, though it’s a bit hard to stomach that she made her mind up in the depths of the country after eleven o’clock at night.