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

Even when Toby Stockdale, an uninspiring young man in his middle twenties, was sitting opposite him across the dining-room table, Dover seemed unable to drag his popping eyes away from the girlie magazine, an apparent preoccupation which did little to enhance his public image.

Toby Stockdale claimed to have slept the sweet sleep of the deeply inebriated. “Still feeling a mite fragile,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “Took me by surprise, really, the old girl pushing the boat out like that. Usually it’s one small dry sherry and a glass of grocer’s plonk.”

MacGregor looked up from his notebook. “Did Michael Montgomery drink a lot?”

“Swilling it down like there was no tomorrow. Well, you know what Australians are like when it comes to booze. Paralytic. Funny, really.”

“What is?”

“Auntie Beryl letting her hair down like that. I mean, when he first turned up, right out of the blue, I thought she looked pretty sick. Cheered me up because I reckoned she’d have second thoughts about leaving Ongar’s to a yobbo like him. Talk about your wild colonial boy! And when he came in at tea-time with that stupid bayonet thing, I thought he’d really cooked his goose. Well, it was a bit much. Pretending to stab people with it and everything. Childish. Still, that single red rose must have done the trick because she was all over him at the birthday dinner. Egging him on, laughing, joking, dancing with everybody.”

“Dancing?”

“Hopping around like a two-year-old. We had the radio on. Bit obscene, I thought, at her age. Not that I said anything, of course.”

A loud rumble from Dover’s stomach warned everybody that it was lunchtime, and Toby Stockdale, although somewhat bemused, didn’t wait to be told twice that he could go.

Dover, usually such a rapacious trencherman, didn’t however move.

MacGregor eyed him anxiously. Was the old fool sickening for something? If so, dear Lord, please let it be lingering, painful, and fatal.

Dover sighed and, folding up his girlie magazine, stuffed it into his pocket. “We could pin it on one of ’em, I suppose,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Fiddle the evidence a bit. Just for the look of things.”

MacGregor’s heart sank.

“Wouldn’t stand up in court, of course. Still, I wouldn’t mind putting that Major What’s-his-name out of circulation for a bit.”

“Major Finch, sir?”

“On remand six months at least before the case came to trial,” mused Dover, demonstrating that even his sluggish brain cells could be galvanized into life with the right motivation. “And no bail on a murder charge. You couldn’t expect Ongar’s to do without a chief security officer all that time, could you?”

MacGregor flattered himself that he could see the light at the end of this particular murky tunnel. “You’re not thinking of applying for the job yourself, are you, sir?”

Dover grinned with nauseating complacency. “Mrs. Ongar took quite a fancy to me.”

MacGregor resisted the temptation to debate the point. “She might like you a great deal more, sir, if you found out who really murdered her great-nephew.”

“Use your head, laddie! All that old biddy wants is the whole thing to just fade away.”

“Surely not, sir?”

“She hardly knew the joker,” insisted Dover. “And, I ask you, who cares about some blooming foreigner getting knocked off?” He dropped his cigarette in the general direction of the ashtray and hauled himself up. “Think I’ll go and have a word with her. See how she’d like to play it.”

“You mean whether she’d sooner have Major Finch framed for the crime or just let the whole investigation fizzle out?”

Cheap sarcasm was wasted on Dover. “You wait here, laddie. I shan’t be a tick.”

In the event, Dover was away for ten minutes — a period of time which left MacGregor perplexed. It was too long for Mrs. Ongar just to have sent Dover off with a flea in his ear but too short, surely, for any meaningful discussion to have taken place.

Luncheon was taken, on the recommendation of the uniformed inspector who finally got a bit of his own back, in a low-class pub full of hot and sweaty customers swilling pints of beer and carefully avoiding the bar snacks. Dover, having opted for the shepherd’s pie with a double helping of chips and half a bottle of tomato sauce, gobbled his way to apoplexy in as much silence as his distressing table manners would allow. Steamed ginger pudding and custard followed. Dover thought about cheese and biscuits but decided it was just too hot and went for a large brandy instead, just to settle his stomach. In the meantime, a quick trip to the Gents wouldn’t come amiss.

Dover stood up and made the supreme sacrifice to a temperature now soaring up into the nineties. He dragged his overcoat off and dropped it, with an audible clunk, on his chair.

MacGregor watched Dover waddle clumsily out of the bar. Although the sergeant’s mind was mostly occupied with the probable cost of a double brandy, his keen ears had caught that clunk — and it set the alarm bells ringing.

The Ongar house had contained many valuable knickknacks and trinkets which would fit quite nicely into the overcoat pocket of any light-fingered detective chief inspector who happened to be passing. MacGregor lived in dread not of Dover actually nicking something — he’d got used to that long ago — but of Dover being caught red-handed actually nicking something. The situation called for drastic action, and MacGregor was not found wanting. Hesitating only for a second, he plunged his bare hand into the pocket of Dover’s overcoat and found, together with several other articles too disgusting to bear closer examination, an electric torch.

MacGregor put the torch on the table in front of him. Why in God’s name had Dover purloined an electric torch? It was neither valuable nor especially attractive. Of course, Dover’s standards, even of dishonesty, were not high but—

Fifteen minutes of considerable discomfort spent in the pub’s outside convenience had done nothing to sweeten Dover’s mood. For one thing, there had been no Ongar’s toilet paper with which to while away the time.

“Just lousy little squares of newspaper threaded on a string,” he complained, and would no doubt have developed the theme further if he hadn’t spotted the electric torch on the table. “What the hell...?”

“Sir—”

“I didn’t steal it,” said Dover quickly. “Old Mrs. What’s — her-name gave it me.”

“Mrs. Ongar gave it you, sir?”

Dover scowled. “As a souvenir.”

“And she’ll confirm that, sir, will she? If asked.”

“Don’t be so bloody wet, laddie! She’ll deny she’s ever set eyes on it.” Dover dropped his overcoat onto the floor and sat down. “Where’s my bloody brandy?”

MacGregor’s brain was in turmoil. It was humiliating enough when Dover failed to solve a crime, but it was a thousand times worse when, by a pure fluke of course, the disgusting old fool spotted the solution first. MacGregor nodded at the torch. “That’s a vital clue, isn’t it, sir?”

“You want your brains examining!”

“It’s the only electric torch in that house, isn’t it, sir?”

Dover’s bottom lip stuck out. “How do I know? I haven’t looked and neither have you. Could be hundreds of ’em. I just suggested to Mrs. Ongar that she’d be better off without this one.”

“My God,” breathed MacGregor, “the murderer must have had a torch! He couldn’t have put the main light on if he’d wanted to because the switch was right on the other side of the room beyond the camp bed. And with all Montgomery’s possessions strewn over the floor... And then he had to locate the bayonet... He had to have a torch. And there was no moon last night, either.”