Dover and the Unkindest Cut of All

before he’d been here five minutes. He was that type. But, soon after he got here, he chummed up with a chap called Bill Hamilton. Now we’ve never been able to pin anything on Hamilton but we’ve had our suspicions for years. He started off in the second hand car business when he first came here a year or two after the end of the war and, naturally, he flourished like a green bay tree. Then he branched out’ – the Sergeant chuckled – ‘if you’ll pardon the expression, into several other lines. Nothing absolutely bent, you understand, but everything he touched seemed to be just on the edge, if you see what I mean. Now, young Cochran was thirty years younger than Hamilton so it was an odd sort of friendship, even though they did have certain interests in common.’ The sergeant paused expectantly. Dover had now got his eyes shut – he always claimed he thought better that way so MacGregor kindheartedly obliged.
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Skirts!’ said the station sergeant with a knowing wink.
‘Oh, yes?’ said MacGregor, turning to a fresh page in his notebook. ‘Well, we’ll follow that up. It won’t do any harm to have a word with Mr … what did you say his name was?’
‘Hamilton,’ said the station sergeant, his face breaking into a delighted grin of anticipation. ‘William Hamilton.’
‘And where can we find him?’
‘Well now, that’s not a question I’m really qualified to answer.’ The station sergeant was rocking with barely suppressed mirth.
MacGregor smiled politely and waited.
‘He’s dead!’ chortled the station sergeant. ‘ Not four weeks ago!’ His laughter turned into a cough and he went dangerously red in the face. ‘Murdered!’ he spluttered as he leaned, choking and wheezing, over the Inspector’s desk.

Chapter Four
They had to wake Dover up to tell him the joke. It was some time before they could make him grasp the point.
‘Who was murdered?’ he demanded ferociously. ‘Here, what time is it? I want my lunch.’
‘William Hamilton,’ said MacGregor, enunciating the syllables loudly and clearly.
Dover glared at him. ‘And who’s William Hamilton when he’s at home?’
‘William Hamilton was a close friend of Cochran.’
‘Cochran?’ said Dover frowning. ‘All right!’ he roared as MacGregor opened his mouth to explain that, too. ‘I remember. Well, so what?’
‘William Hamilton was murdered only a few weeks ago.’
‘By Cochran?’
‘Oh, no!’ put in the station sergeant hastily.
‘Well, who did murder him then?’
‘We don’t know, sir.’
Dover’s mouth assumed its most petulant pout. His last shreds of patience were already exhausted. He was fed up, bored and hungry. ‘Then what the hell,’ he growled, ‘has he got to do with it?’
The station sergeant looked puzzled. ‘Do with what, sir?’
‘Anything!’ bellowed Dover. ‘What the blazes is going on here? Don’t you understand the Queen’s English, man?’
It was MacGregor who, as usual, stepped in where an angel would, with some justification, have feared to tread. ‘We were just discussing Cochran’s friends, sir, and the sergeant here happened to mention that one of his close associates, William Hamilton, had been murdered recently. I thought it might possibly be significant.’
Dover stared at him with unconcealed disgust. ‘If you’ve started thinking we’d all better look out, hadn’t we?’
The station sergeant was looking uncomfortable. ‘There is just one thing, sir,’ he said tentatively. ‘This chap, Hamilton, well – he wasn’t exactly what you might call, well, murdered exactly, if you see what I mean.’
Dover just contemplated the now gently sweating station sergeant. Then he turned slowly and just contemplated MacGregor. MacGregor industriously practised his signature in his notebook and waited for the storm to break.
Dover sucked in his breath. MacGregor and the station sergeant cringed instinctively. Dover rose in all his majesty to his feet and settled his bowler hat into the furrows on his forehead.
‘We’ll continue this when I’ve had my lunch,’ he announced with dignity and stalked out.
Unhappily the station sergeant hurried after him. ‘I’m off duty at two o’clock, sir.’
‘Indeed?’ said Dover with the sweet smile of a tiger faced by a particularly succulent lamb. ‘In that case we will all foregather in my room at the hotel at five p.m. this afternoon. We don’t want to keep you hanging around here in your free time, do we, Sergeant? Ah!’ A constable came up with Dover’s overcoat and helped him into it. ‘Thank you, laddie!’
Surreptitiously the constable wiped his hands on the seat of his uniform trousers.
‘I promised to take the wife to see her auntie this afternoon,’ the station sergeant whispered in an aggrieved tone to MacGregor. ‘She fixed it all up weeks ago. What am I going to do?’
‘You’re going to be in his hotel room at five o’clock, if you know what’s good for you,’ MacGregor told him with little sympathy. ‘What on earth did you say Hamilton was murdered for when he wasn’t?’
The station sergeant didn’t get time to answer. There was a muffled howl from the street outside as of a bullock being slaughtered. MacGregor took to his heels and ran.
Dover had fully intended to be up and dressed by the time the station sergeant arrived at five o’clock. Unfortunately that blithering idiot MacGregor didn’t return from his afternoon’s expeditions until ten minutes before zero hour. Dover decided to remain where he was – in bed. It was warm and comfortable, which was more than could be said of the rest of the hotel bedroom. Outside, the July rain streamed down out of a bleak July sky.
The station sergeant arrived promptly, if resentfully, upon his hour. MacGregor opened the door and hoped that the ill-tempered slating he had just received from Dover had not penetrated the solid woodwork. The station sergeant staggered into the room carrying a heavy suitcase.
‘I don’t remember inviting you to stay for a week,’ said Dover with heavy-handed irony.
‘Oh, no, sir!’ The station sergeant was about to take all in good part (it being one of the pleasanter traditions in the police that junior officers always laugh heartily at their superiors’ jokes) when he suddenly caught sight of Dover reclining on