Dover and the Unkindest Cut of All

a deck chair at Filbury,’ he complained sullenly, ‘that’s what she’ll be doing. Drops you straight in the flaming dirt and then clears off without so much as an apology. Let it be a warning to you, laddie. You feed ’em and clothe ’em and work your fingers to the bone for ’em, and what happens? They shop you. Never get married, laddie, it’s a mug’s game.’
‘Oh, come now, sir!’ MacGregor tried to laugh him out of it. ‘Mrs Dover couldn’t have helped seeing what she saw.’
‘She could have kept her trap shut,’ said Dover truculently. ‘ I told her: “ Drive on,” I said, “it’s nothing to do with us.” Women! You might as well talk to a brick wall.’
‘Things might be worse, sir.’
‘I don’t know how,’ snorted Dover.
‘I was thinking, sir, if we could – well – get cracking and, you know, find out what drove Cochran to commit suicide, we might still be able to get away on leave. We’d have only lost a couple of days, say, and we might be able to tack them on to the other end.’
It was delicately put, but Dover bridled instinctively at the implications.
‘It shouldn’t be too difficult, sir,’ persisted MacGregor, ‘not if we put our backs into it.’
Dover regarded him with undisguised disgust. ‘And what,’ he asked sarcastically, ‘do you propose we do? Forge a farewell note? Hey! That’s an idea! If we could get a sample of his handwriting …’
‘I think,’ said MacGregor firmly, ‘ that we should re-investigate this Hamilton business.’
Dover’s bottom lip pouted out. ‘There’s no flaming evidence that it’s got anything to do with Cochran’s suicide,’ he protested.
‘Well, what do you suggest we do, sir?’ MacGregor controlled his impatience and tried to speak reasonably.
Dover thought. ‘Re-investigate the Hamilton business,’ he said after a long pause, and sighed.
MacGregor jumped in happily. ‘ You see, sir, it’s my theory that Hamilton’s killing may have been one of these ritualistic murders – because of the mutilation. Wallerton is a sea port, sir. There are probably all kinds of odd characters hanging around.’
‘Like one-eyed Lascars and sinister Chinamen, I suppose? I should have thought there were more boarding houses than opium dens in this dump.’
‘But the mutilations, sir, how do you explain them?’
‘I don’t,’ said Dover flatly.
‘If it was some sort of foreign gang that got Hamilton, Cochran may have got on to them and …’
‘And they put the voodoo on him and he jumped off Cully Point?’
‘Stranger things have happened, sir.’
‘Not in Wallerton they haven’t, laddie!’
With considerable reluctance Dover permitted himself to be bribed into some further study of the Hamilton case. MacGregor installed him in a small musty writing-room, fetched a couple of rounds of drinks and went upstairs to get the papers from the suitcase.
While Dover sat and moodily drank his beer MacGregor hunted happily through the contents of the suitcase. The investigation had been handled thoroughly if with, in MacGregor’s opinion, little imagination. There had been no less than 1,752 house-to-house inquiries which had produced no relevant information of any kind. MacGregor tut-tutted in a thrifty Scottish way over such lavish expenditure of public money.
‘There’s one thing, sir,’ he remarked to Dover in an effort to revive the Chief Inspector’s rapidly flagging interest, ‘Hamilton wasn’t mutilated in order to hinder identification.’
‘I never thought he was,’ said Dover scathingly. ‘ He’d have hardly been dumped in his own front garden with all his belongings piled up beside him if that was what they were after, would he?’
‘Er, no, sir. I suppose not. They must have done it for revenge, I should think. Look, sir, his face hasn’t been touched at all.’ MacGregor passed a large shiny photograph over.
‘Ugh!’ said Dover, passing it rapidly back again. ‘Do you mind? I’ve only just had my dinner.’
‘It is rather nasty, sir, isn’t it?’
‘Nasty? From the waist down he looks like a pile of butcher’s mince!’
‘All done after death, according to the path. report, sir,’ said MacGregor examining dozens of other photographs with, in Dover’s opinion, an unhealthy relish.
‘What with? A bacon slicer?’
‘A small sharp instrument, sir. Maybe a scalpel!’
‘Oh God, don’t tell me we’re looking for a mad doctor now! Didn’t they find any bloody clues?’
‘Apparently not, sir. There was the report by the lady who saw the green van with the two men in it and that’s about all.’
Dover sighed. ‘ Was he married?’
‘Hamilton? Oh, yes, sir.’
‘Right. We’ll go and see the wife.’
‘The wife, sir? I don’t think she’ll be much help. Her evidence doesn’t add up to anything. You see, sir, she …’
‘First rule of detection, laddie,’ said Dover ponderously as he rose to his feet. ‘When a husband’s murdered, it’s the wife who’s done it.’
‘Oh, not invariably, sir,’ said MacGregor with a nervous laugh. He was distressed to find that the celebrated Dover method of investigation was once again raising its head. As a system its sole merit was its simplicity.
‘Nine times out of ten, near as dammit,’ said Dover.
‘Ah, but the tenth time, sir!’
‘If you get through your career in C.I.D. solving nine murder cases out of ten, laddie, you’ll be Commissioner before you’re thirty,’ said Dover hitching up his trousers and yawning.
‘Well, yes, I know, sir, but you just can’t go around arresting the wife whenever a husband’s killed.’ MacGregor was uncomfortably aware that this was more or less precisely what Dover did do. ‘What about the exceptions, sir?’
‘You can’t win ’em all,’ said Dover philosophically. ‘We’ll go and see Mrs Hamilton in the morning. Meantime, you can go through that lot with a fine tooth comb. Who knows, you might spot something the local boys have missed.’
At ten o’clock the following morning it was still raining, though not so heavy. Dover and MacGregor made their way down Minton Parade.
‘This is the house, sir.’
‘And about time, too. When are they going to let us have a car?’
‘Tomorrow, sir. Or the day after.’
‘Or next Preston Guild! If I’ve got all this walking to do you’ll have to get a taxi.’
‘Well, I thought this morning, sir,