Gary Alexander - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

MacGregor opened his notebook and laid his pencil ready. “Careful questioning of the suspects, sir—”

“Why don’t you grow up, laddie?” demanded Dover. “Careful bloody questioning? Look” — he dropped his voice to a tempting murmur — “why don’t we rough ’em up a bit?”

“We can’t do that, sir.”

“Why not? As long as we’re careful not to thump ’em where it shows, it’ll be their word against ours. And, if we stick together—”

MacGregor was reluctant to waste time discussing the extent to which Dover’s fist could be considered a legitimate instrument of justice. “Why don’t we just see how far we get playing it by the book first, sir?”

Dover’s thirst for violence was a good deal less passionate than his desire for a quiet life. “Oh, suit yourself!” he grunted as a lump of cigarette ash joined the rest of the debris on his waistcoat. “Let’s have this security fellow to start with. Major What’s-his-name. I rather fancy him.”

Major Finch knew the value of reinforcements and arrived accompanied by his lady-wife and his somewhat less than ladylike teenage daughter. “We’re all three in exactly the same boat,” he explained, “and I thought it would save time.”

Dover shrugged his shoulders to indicate that it was no skin off his nose.

The Finches had heard nothing, seen nothing, and knew nothing.

“We were all dog-tired.” drawled Mrs. Finch, who tried to distance herself from her lavatory-paper connections by affecting an air of languid sophistication. “That ghastly dinner party! I had a splitting head. I had to take a sleeping pill, so the whole house could have gone up in flames for all I cared.”

“Pretty grim.” agreed her husband. “And the way Auntie fawned over that disgusting young punk didn’t help. Talk about killing the fatted calf!”

“You’d have thought the rest of us simply didn’t exist,” complained Mrs. Finch. “I’d like to know what she’d have said if we’d turned up without a birthday present. That damned paisley shawl cost over fifty quid and for all the thanks we got you’d think we’d bought it in a sale at Woolworth’s.”

Samantha-Ivette, the teenage daughter with four earrings in one ear and pink hair, found contradicting her elders more natural than breathing and twice as much fun. “Mick didn’t know it was her birthday.”

“Then it was an amazing coincidence, darling, that he arrived all the way from Australia just in time for it.”

“And he got her that red rose.”

“A single red rose!” snorted Major Finch. “Very romantic! Especially when he’d had the damned cheek to touch me for a fiver to buy the old girl something, and then comes back with that damned bayonet for himself. Well, much good it did him!”

MacGregor tried to muscle in. “Who knew about the bayonet?”

“Everybody knew about the bayonet,” said Major Finch impatiently. “He was fooling about with it all through dinner, the damned idiot. I suppose we ought to be grateful he didn’t buy himself a submachine gun and a couple of live hand-grenades while he was about it.”

“He didn’t buy the bayonet.” Samantha-Ivette chipped in proudly. “He nicked it. From that shop by the post office. I helped him. I had to keep the old man talking while Mick pinched the bayonet. It was terrific fun.”

“Samantha-Ivette!” wailed Mrs. Finch.

“He pinched the red rose, too. From the cemetery.”

“My God!” exploded Major Finch. “Well, I just hope all this has taught Auntie Beryl a lesson.”

“You mean you hope she’ll leave Ongar’s to Mummy now, don’t you?” inquired Samantha-Ivette pertly. “Why should she? I think she liked Mick, really.”

“She was appalled by him! And with good reason.”

“Well, at least he wasn’t a fuddy-duddy old stick-in-the-mud.”

“He was a vicious young lout!”

“You think everybody who smokes a bit of pot is a moral degenerate.”

“Smokes pot?” Mrs. Finch clutched her heart. “I didn’t know he smoked pot. Why didn’t somebody say? Auntie would have thrown him out of the house.”

“Oh, Mummy, don’t be so prehistoric!”

Dover got enough of this sort of thing at home without having to put up with it at work as well. He fixed Major Finch with a beady eye. “Hear you’re a security officer,” he grunted. “Thought that was a job for an ex-copper.”

Major Finch took a second or two to catch up, but eventually he agreed that many security officers were indeed former policemen. “Not that background is all that important, you know. Any conscientious, reasonably intelligent man with good organizing ability can cope.”

Dover was less interested in the qualifications than the rewards. “How much do you get paid?”

Major Finch was shocked. “I m afraid my salary is a confidential matter,” he said coldly. “Strictly between myself and Ongar’s.”

And five minutes of intensive browbeating failed to make the major unseal his lips, in spite of Dover’s repeated warnings that such an uncooperative attitude did a murder suspect little good. In the end it was Dover who got fed up first and the Finch family, more than a little confused about what was going on, were allowed to take their leave.

Daniel Ongar, when he was shown into the dining room, got a smoother ride as Dover harbored no pipe dreams about becoming a personnel officer. However, his suggestion that the murderer had been some passing maniac tramp was received without enthusiasm.

“But why should any of us want to kill the little blackguard?” he asked, adjusting his cuffs and running a hand over his thinning hair.

Dover told him.

Daniel Ongar waved the explanation aside. “Nobody knows which one of us will get Ongar’s now,” he pointed out. “Beryl’s quite potty on the subject or she’d never have made that nasty Montgomery boy her sole heir in the first place. Dear God, she’d never even seen him. Now, I don’t pretend to be any more moral than the next chap, but you don’t really see me committing murder, do you, just to see the whole kit and caboodle go to Toby Stockdale or one of Dickie Bird’s lot?”

Dickie Bird?

“Richard Finch. That’s what they used to call him in the Army. And what about him as a prime suspect? He was in the infantry and if you want somebody who knows how to use a bayonet—”

“Have you no idea who the next heir will be, sir?”

Daniel Ongar stared imperturbably at MacGregor. “None, except that it’s unlikely to be me. I’m sixty and. in dear Beryl’s book, that’s geriatric. She talks about keeping it in the family but it could be the cats’ home or the Chancellor of the Exchequeur or something equally daft. I mean, where was the logic in leaving it all to young Montgomery, apart from the fact that he was tucked away safe on the other side of the world and unlikely to come bothering her? Poor Beryl, she thinks everybody’s after her money. I’ll bet she’s told you one of us is going to murder her next.”

“Don’t you think she’s every reason to be anxious, sir?”

“No, I damned well don’t! Can’t you see that Beryl is more valuable to us alive than dead? Dickie Bird. Toby, and I have got pretty well paid jobs. Mrs. Wilkins, too, if it comes to that. What guarantee have we got that Beryl’s successor, whoever it is, won’t give the whole bang shoot of us the sack?”

“Speaking of well paid jobs,” said Dover, “how much will your chief security officer be getting?”

Daniel Ongar frowned. “Dickie Finch? A damned sight more than we’d pay an outsider, that’s for sure. About twenty thousand, I should think.”

“ ’Strewth!” said Dover.

While MacGregor went off to fetch the last suspect for questioning, Dover busied himself with some simple arithmetic on the margins of the girlie magazine he had absent-mindedly removed from the scene of the crime. After much head-scratching and a heavy precipitation of dandruff he achieved a result which took his breath away. With his pension, even allowing for early retirement, and twenty thousand plus perks — well, there was bound to be a bit of a fiddle somewhere — he’d be bloody rolling in it!