Dover Beats the Band Read online

  MacGregor was making a note in his notebook, i must get on to the local police and see if they can find out what train Knapper caught from Bowerville-by-the-sea.’

  ‘You could check if he got a train to Muncaster,’ rumbled Dover, apparently enjoying one of his more inspired moments.

  ‘I’ll check all the trains out of Bowerville that Sunday morning, sir,’ promised MacGregor, ‘wherever they were going. And I’ll check the buses, too.’

  Dover waited until he’d got both hands clasped round his third pint before uttering again. ‘Have you seen the gents’ toilet in your travels, laddie?’

  It was a tedious journey out to the suburb where Mr Knapper had had – and perhaps still did have – his residence, but Dover stood it well. Thanks to his bad toe, which was giving him more gyp now than before Mr Pettitt had got his murderous hands on it, they’d gone the whole way by taxi and MacGregor had passed the time wondering miserably how on earth he was going to fiddle this on his expenses sheet.

  Number one hundred and seventy-six (or ‘Doreenland’) was, architecturally speaking, identical with all the other two hundred and four houses in the road but a gallant fight for individuality was being waged by the people who lived there. Number one hundred and seventy-six had not lagged behind in the drive to be different. No other house in the road (and probably not in the whole of North London) could boast a yellow front door and shutters plus a triangular goldfish pond under the bay window.

  MacGregor opened the simulated wrought-iron garden gate and led the way up the crazy paving. He rang the door chimes.

  Dover gave it a generous thirty seconds. ‘Nobody at home!’ he announced gratefully and prepared to waddle back down the path.

  Unluckily for him, the door opened. MacGregor raised his hat and politely asked the obvious question.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Carefully MacGregor explained that they were detectives from Scotland Yard engaged in making some enquiries. Carefully the lady who’d answered the door read through both warrant cards from first to last whilst Dover huffed and puffed with impatience on her doorstep.

  ‘I’m Mrs Knapper,’ admitted Mrs Knapper at last, and dared either man to take advantage of the fact. She was a woman who just missed being attractive. The eyes were a little too shrewd, the jaw a little too square, the arms a little too muscular.

  MacGregor flashed his dimples nonetheless. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘It’s really Mr Knapper we’d like to have a word with.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  Dover got a boot in before the door closed.

  Mrs Knapper’s face hardened. ‘Watch it, fattie!’ she advised. ‘One scratch on that paintwork and I’ll have you for willful and malicious damage!’

  ‘I wonder if you can tell us where we can get in touch with Mr Knapper?’ asked MacGregor, recklessly interposing his body between the point of Mrs Knapper’s chin and Dover’s fist. Not that the chief inspector would really have struck a defenceless woman, of course. Not in front of witnesses he wouldn’t.

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  The curtain twitching in the windows of the houses on either side was growing phrenetic while further down the street doorstep sweeping and cat-summoning was reaching epidemic proportions.

  MacGregor leaned forward. ‘Do you think we might perhaps step inside for just a moment, madam? I’m sure you don’t want all your neighbours . . .’

  ‘Stuff the neighbours!’ said Mrs Knapper, stepping forward to deliver a two-fingered salute up and down the road. ‘Mr Knapper’s scarpered,’ she said when she’d time to be bothered with the matter in hand again. ‘Done a bunk! Deserted me. And good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me. For all the good he was I might as well have taken my old grannie to bed with me.’

  The problem of Dover’s growing impatience went clean out of MacGregor’s mind. ‘Mr Knapper’s gone? When?’

  Mrs Knapper was not without a certain rude sense of humour. ‘Well, parts of him went years ago, if you must know, but he finally pushed off for good and all a couple of months ago.’ Her temporary good natured mood vanished as a dreadful thought struck her. ‘Here, don’t tell me you stupid bastards have gone and found the dirty-minded little bleeder?’

  Understandably MacGregor hesitated.

  ‘Well, he’s not coming back here!’ snapped Mrs Knapper in a voice that brooked no argument. ‘I’ve had enough of him and his nasty habits to last me a bloody life-time. If you want that sort of thing, I told him straight, you effing well go and pay for it. There’s some as don’t mind what they do for money but I’m not one of ’em.’

  There might have been some even more dramatic revelations if Mrs Knapper’s spate had not been interrupted by a bellow from the back of the house. ‘Doreen!’ came a deep, masculine voice.

  Without turning her head Mrs Knapper bawled back. ‘What?’

  ‘Get your skates on, for Christ’s sake! You seen the time?’

  ‘I’m just coming!’

  Since Mrs Knapper didn’t appear to be going to offer any explanation of this exchange, MacGregor pressed on with his questions about her errant husband. ‘Could you tell me what happened exactly?’

  ‘Nothing happened!’ retorted Mrs Knapper. ‘He just cleared off one weekend and never come back. No explanation and no effing letter left on the mantelpiece.’

  ‘What about his things?’

  Mrs Knapper stiffened. ‘What about ’em?’

  ‘Did he take all his belongings or did he leave some of them behind?’

  ‘I gave him a fortnight,’ said Mrs Knapper, slightly on the defensive, ‘and then I flogged the lot. Clothes, books, bloody stamps, everything. I needed the room. Besides,’ – she folded her arms – ‘he told me to.’

  ‘He told you to?’ repeated MacGregor.

  ‘Years ago. When we were first married. “If anything happens to me, Doreen,” he said, “you destroy everything. Don’t hang about! Burn all my papers and get rid of the rest.” So I did.’

  ‘What did he say that for?’

  ‘How do I know?’ Mrs Knapper was beginning to get as fed up with all this doorstep interrogation as Dover was. ‘Probably trying to make himself look all romantic and mysterious. Like a spy or something. He was for ever playing silly buggers like that. I stopped paying him any attention years ago.’

  Dover lowered himself gingerly onto the little party wall which separated the Knapper front garden from its neighbour. He’d been pondering on the move for some time and had finally reached the conclusion that, while his poor feet were a present reality, piles were only a future possibility.

  MacGregor hurried on. ‘You say your husband went off one weekend? Have you any idea where he was going?’

  ‘If he said, I wasn’t listening. He was alway buzzing off some place or other.’

  ‘Did he ever mention Rankin’s Holiday Ranches? Or Bowerville-by-the-sea? Or Muncaster?

  As far as the gutter press was concerned, Mrs Knapper was a well-read woman. ‘That stiff they found on the rubbish heap?’ she asked with considerable interest. ‘You think that’s Arthur?’ MacGregor admitted that this possibility had indeed crossed the police mind. He repeated the official description of the body.

  Mrs Knapper had no doubts. ‘That’s him!’ she declared roundly. ‘Here, haven’t you got a picture or something?’ MacGregor reluctantly produced his gruesome photograph. ‘Cor strike a light!’ Even Mrs Knapper was taken aback. ‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘they give him a right going over, didn’t they? Still,’ – she recovered her natural optimism and handed the photograph back to MacGregor – ‘it’s him. I’ll take my Bible oath on it.’

  ‘Had your husband any identifying marks on his body?’

  ‘Smooth as a baby’s bottom!’ said Mrs Knapper cheerfully. ‘Just like a fat, white slug. Here,’ – her eyes sparkled – ‘there’ll be compensation for this, won’t there? Beside the insurance, I mean. Well, he’s been the victim of criminal violence, he has, and we were man and wife. I
’m his bleeding next of kin and everything.’ She ran her tongue over her lips. ‘I wonder if the Citizen’s Advice is still open? Oh, well,’ – she relaxed and propped herself up comfortably against the door jamb – ‘there’s no hurry, is there? First thing tomorrow morning’ll do.’

  Approaching footsteps came heavily down the hall and the figure of a man loomed up behind Mrs Knapper’s shoulder. He was a big man with an unshaven chin and a sweaty check shirt sagging seductively open to the navel.

  ‘What you doing, Doreen?’ he demanded.

  Mrs Knapper turned her head to smile at the newcomer with a smug, proprietary smile. ‘Shan’t be just a sec, George,’ she cooed. ‘It’s only the fuzz. You go and get yourself another beer or something, love.’

  ‘The fuzz? What the hell do they want?’

  ‘They’ve come about Arthur.’

  ‘That little sod!’

  ‘He’s dead, love,’ said Mrs Knapper in the mildest of mild reproof.

  ‘Not before bleeding time!’ growled George and withdrew from the scene.

  Mrs Knapper smiled indulgently after him and, this time, vouchsafed an explanation. ‘He’s my lodger. He’s a lovely man but he can’t bear being kept waiting, if you follow my meaning.’

  MacGregor preferred not to. ‘When did you last see your husband?’

  ‘A couple of months ago, I suppose. I forget.’

  ‘And you say he often went away from home?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Mrs Knapper shrugged her shoulders in eloquent indifference. ‘To tell you the truth, it got so’s I hardly noticed. He’d got his hobbies and I’d’ – she jerked her head ever so slightly in the direction of the absent George – ‘I’d got mine.’

  MacGregor watched rather hopelessly as Mrs Knapper took a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and flicked her lighter. It was a spectacle calculated to have Dover running amuck. ‘Why didn’t you report Mr Knapper’s disappearance to the police?’ asked MacGregor as he assiduously gave Dover his own nicotine comforter.

  ‘How was I to know he’d snuffed it? I thought he’d just taken a powder or something. And what with him being so secretive and everything, I reckoned the last thing he wanted was publicity.’

  ‘But what about his work?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Didn’t anybody come round making enquiries when he didn’t show up?’

  ‘Piano tuner,’ said Mrs Knapper shortly. ‘Self-employed. One or two of ’em did ring up to ask where the hell he’d got to so I just said he was poorly and he’d be getting in touch.’

  Even a cigarette wasn’t going to hold Dover much longer. MacGregor broke into a gabble. ‘Is there anything left that might have Mr Knapper’s fingerprints on it?’

  ‘So’s you can compare ’em with the corpse’s?’ Mrs Knapper shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I made a clean sweep, you see, while I was at it. Still’ – she flipped her lighted cigarette end, neatly and accurately, into her next-door neighbour’s front garden – ‘you don’t have to bother about things like that. I’ll identify him for you. No trouble.’

  There were numerous other questions that MacGregor felt he ought to ask but Dover was already thinking about clambering to his feet. MacGregor accepted the inevitable and politely raised his hat. ‘Very well, madam,’ he said, ‘I’ll make all the necessary arrangements. I’m afraid we shall have to ask you to go up to Muncaster to make the identification and give evidence at the inquest.’

  ‘Just as long as I get my expenses,’ said Mrs Knapper comfortably.

  MacGregor felt that, in the interest of justice, he ought to issue a warning. ‘You do realise that you mustn’t say the dead man is your husband unless you’re absolutely sure? It’s a criminal offence to . . .’

  But Mrs Knapper was lending both ears to another raucous bellow from the back of the house. George was getting restless again, ‘I’ll be sure, dear,’ she promised MacGregor with a vague but kindly smile. Although nothing like the man George was, the sergeant was quite a handsome, well-set-up young fellow . . . and you never knew, i mean, even if the face’s gone, the body’s still there, isn’t it? I’ll recognise that all right, or bits of it.’

  Dover began tottering back painfully down the garden path and MacGregor fired off yet another question before Mrs Knapper was lost to him, perhaps for ever. ‘Had your husband any enemies?’

  ‘He was his own worst, dear. I was always telling him that.’

  ‘Had he any friends or acquaintances who might be able to help us with our enquiries?’

  Mrs Knapper’s reply came through the rapidly narrowing crack in the door. ‘He kept himself very much to himself.’

  ‘You don’t know of anyone who . . .?’

  ‘Sorry, dear!’

  It was a good thirty-six hours before the next development of any importance took place in the great Muncaster Municipal Dump Murder Mystery, the mills of God having very little on Chief Inspector Dover when it came to a slow grind.

  Eight

  Not that everything came to a standstill, of course. There was the usual mountain of paperwork to be completed and the activities of a large team of investigators to be coordinated. The backroom boys needed supervision and then there was the mass of complicated travel arrangements which had to be put in hand in order to get Mrs Knapper up to the mortuary in Muncaster to see if the dead man was her husband.

  While all these chores fell to MacGregor’s lot, it mustn’t be thought that Chief Inspector Dover sat there for a day and a half just twiddling his thumbs. Far from it. Each hour of Dover’s time was so action-packed with eating and sleeping that he’d practically no time left over for thumb-twiddling at all.

  By late afternoon on the day after their encounter with Mrs Knapper, MacGregor began to feel that things were moving at last. He received a telephone call from one of his opposite numbers in Muncaster to the effect that Mrs Knapper had identified the body from the rubbish dump as Mr Knapper. So positive was she that she had, in fact, made the identification even before the mortuary attendant had raised the corner of the sheet from the corpse’s face. It had apparently been a very emotional business, with Mrs Knapper weeping hysterically and vowing to sue her husband’s murderer for every penny he possessed.

  ‘Sue him?’ asked MacGregor, mildly intrigued. ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Would you believe alienation of affections?’ asked the man in Muncaster. ‘She reckons that whoever croaked her old man deprived her of her marital rights.’ He chuckled at the joke.

  ‘She’d probably win,’ said MacGregor who’d grown very cynical over the years. ‘It wouldn’t be any dafter than some of the things the courts have been doing recently. Still,’ – he returned conscientiously to the matter in hand – ‘she made a positive identification, you say? Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult to confirm that, now we know where to look.’

  ‘By the way,’ said the Muncaster man, who enjoyed a chat when he wasn’t paying for the call, ‘she said something that might be significant when we were having a cup of tea together afterwards.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was sort of twitting her about not reporting it when her old man went missing and she said he’d had a premonition that something was going to happen to him.’

  MacGregor cocked an ear. ‘She mentioned something like that when I spoke to her.’ ,

  ‘If you ask me, she’s probably making the whole thing up but she claims he warned her months ago that he was involved in something dangerous and that he might have to make a run for it and go into hiding at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘You know the man was a piano tuner!’

  ‘Well, that’s as maybe, but Mrs K was quite adamant that he was afraid he might have to drop out of circulation all of a sudden and, if he did, she was to keep her trap shut about it. No tattling to the cops or the neighbours or anybody.’

  Down in London MacGregor shook his head doubtfully. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘All she’s doing is trying to cover up for what she ac
tually did – which was damn all. The truth is that the lodger moved in as soon as the husband was out of sight, if not before – and she flogged all old Knapper’s personal belongings for what she could get for ’em.’

  ‘Well, I’m just giving you her version,’ said the man in Muncaster easily. ‘And warning you that she’ll stick to it. I reckon she’s getting ready to answer a few awkward questions from the coroner.’

  MacGregor couldn’t resist the temptation to probe a little further. ‘Did she say that Knapper was worried about being killed?’

  The telephone wires crackled gently. ‘No, I don’t think she did exactly. More that he might have to disappear suddenly – whatever that means.’

  ‘She didn’t ask?’

  ‘Not her. Too chuffed at seeing the back of the poor sod, or hoping to, rather. That’s always assuming, of course, that there’s a word of truth in her story – which I doubt.’

  As soon as MacGregor had expressed his fulsome gratitude for all the whole-hearted cooperation he had received from the stout-hearted lads up there in good old Muncaster, he put the phone down and, almost immediately, picked it up again. He had to try and organise some further proof that their dead man really was Arthur Knapper. In spite of Mrs Knapper’s alleged spring cleaning, MacGregor still thought it worth expending a few man-hours in giving the Knapper matrimonial home a good going over. Anything – a hair, a fingerprint, an old toothbrush – could well prove invaluable in bolstering up the widow’s somewhat facile evidence. Then Knapper’s doctor and his dentist had to be contacted to see if they could help, and there were several more avenues that could be explored should these initial efforts come to naught. It was always easier, MacGregor reflected ruefully, to find what you were looking for when you knew where it was.

  Actually, though, MacGregor had few doubts that it was Arthur George Knapper, piano tuner and stamp collector, and he began to work out his next steps on that basis. Clearly, all the people who had been with Knapper on that weekend at the Holiday Ranch at Bowerville-by-the-sea would now have to be interviewed as a matter of urgency. Even Dover would appreciate that. The order in which these potential suspects – because that’s what they probably were – were going to be seen needed sorting out, though. It was a nuisance that they seemed to be scattered all over the country. MacGregor got out a large-scale map of England and Wales and spread it out over his desk and began, with the help of the list of addresses extracted from Mr Pettitt, to work out his itinerary.