Dover Three

triumph. ‘It shows I’m hungry. Regular meals, that’s what the doctor said I had to have.’
MacGregor nodded and hoped they weren’t going to have another session on the vagaries of Dover’s stomach. Coming down in the train had been bad enough. Dover had started off by insisting that a rather fetching and very surprised young lady should give up her seat by the corridor to him in case he had to make a quick dash to the toilet, as he had explained to her with an over-generous wealth of detail. The young lady had looked very pointedly at the communication cord and then removed herself from the compartment in a dudgeon so high as to have snow on it. Dover took the comer seat without batting an eyelid. For the rest of the journey, when he wasn’t sound asleep and snoring with his mouth open, he regaled MacGregor and the rest of his fellow passengers with a twinge-by-twinge account of his latest bout of sick leave. By the time they reached their destination, MacGregor wasn’t feeling too good himself.
At the County Police Headquarters they had had a very curt and frigid interview with the Chief Constable. Without actually putting it into words he had made his attitude quite clear. He tossed a bulky police file across the desk in the general direction of MacGregor, told them that if they didn’t hurry they’d miss the last bus to Thornwich, and wished them a firm goodbye. Dover and MacGregor shuffled unhappily out. The Chief Inspector hadn’t even had time to work up steam and blow his top. He usually managed to have a blazing row with every chief constable he’d ever been sent to assist, and he felt unfulfilled as he and MacGregor huddled together in the pouring rain waiting for their bus. However, there is no point in keeping a sergeant if you can’t bark at him, so Dover relieved the tedium by bawling MacGregor out.
‘Well,’ said the bus conductor suddenly in a voice of complete indifference, ‘this is Thornwich. Are you getting off or not?’
The two detectives got off. The bus departed in a flurry of black smoke.
‘Where,’ demanded Dover with suppressed fury, ‘the hell are we?’
He did well to ask. Not many people will have heard of Thornwich. It was a nasty little village clinging, without apparent rhyme or reason, to the lee side of a hill and separated from civilization by seven miles of bleak moors on one side and nine on the other. Why anybody should have ever settled in Thornwich in the first place is a puzzle lost in the mists of time. Why anybody should live there now is an even greater enigma. It was one of Thornwich’s numerous misfortunes to have a busy main road running slap bang through the middle of it. Heavy traffic roared through the village day and night in both directions, belching diesel fumes and shedding dirty oily rags in its wake. There was some respite in the depths of winter when the snows came and the moors were impassable. In these grim periods the villagers sought some compensation for the deathly quiet which descended in fleecing the unfortunate truck-drivers who could proceed no farther. Prices in Thornwich showed a distressing tendency to fluctuate with the depth of snow.
Dover and MacGregor were, of course, unaware of these minor points of rural economy as they stumbled around in the dark of a Saturday night looking for The Jolly Sailor, the village’s only hostelry, where they were destined to stay during the course of their investigations. It was still raining and bitterly cold. Thornwich was on the lee side of its formidable hill only when the wind blew from the west. When it blew from the east, and it always did during the winter, the village caught it full blast. There seemed to be nobody about – apart from the lorries grinding their way uphill from the direction of Bearle or hurtling downhill on dubious brakes from the direction of Cumberly.
After being thoroughly cursed by Dover for his inefficiency in not immediately locating their lodging, MacGregor found a front door and knocked on it, This was no mean achievement. a? the alternation of pitch-darkness and glaring headlights made seeing anything at all extremely difficult.
The Jolly Sailor, it appeared, was right opposite on the other side of the road. The large man in shirt-sleeves who had responded to MacGregor’s inquiry leaned speculatively in his open doorway, not only wondering who the tall dark handsome stranger was, but whether he’d make it safely across the road or not. It was damned cold away from the fire, but it’d be a pity to miss anything. Some of them blighters came down the hill on nothing but their sidelights.
MacGregor picked up the suitcases, waited his opportunity and made a dash for it. Dover, encumbered only by his own weight, charged across in his wake.
Saturday night it might be, but one would never have guessed it from the interior of The Jolly Sailor. Things were very quiet. Dead, you might say. There were only two men in the public, one with a whippet dog on a piece of string. The saloon bar didn’t even have a light on.
The two men and the whippet stared with interest as Dover and MacGregor, cold and breathless, came crashing in.
‘Bert!’ shouted the man with the whippet. ‘They’re here!’ He grinned a toothless welcome at the detectives. ‘Come on in out of the cold, lads, and make yourselves at home. Bert’s just coming.’
Not even the warmth of his smile could cheer up the public bar of The Jolly Sailor. It was dingy, dirty and flyblown. The only source of heat, a one-bar electric fire, was safely tucked away behind the counter where its efforts were restricted to bringing comfort and solace to the legs of the landlord.
Bert Quince, when he appeared (and he wasn’t the man to hurry himself for anybody), assumed a strategic position behind the bar and let the warmth