Dover Strikes Again

the floor of his rooms and clad only in a flowered bikini and a lady’s rubber bathing cap is, sartorially speaking, pretty well immune to shock.
Mr Lickes’s sensibilities were offended, however, by the frowzy atmosphere which Dover’s lengthy occupation had engendered. He bounced over to the window and, without so much as a by-your-leave, succeeded in opening it at least half an inch.
Dover scowled fearfully and sank even farther beneath the sheets.
‘That’s better!’ announced Mr Lickes and took up a position of rigid attention at the foot of the bed. Slowly he placed his hands on his hips and rose to the tips of his toes. ‘You wanted to see me about the murder of Mr Chantry, I believe?’
‘I suppose so,’ came a glum and muffled voice from the bed. The remark was followed by a deep sigh as Dover wondered where the hell to begin. ‘Knew Chantry, did you?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Everybody in Sully Martin knew Walter Chantry. He was one of the leading personalities in the village – the leading personality, I suppose.’
‘Popular chap, was he?’
Mr Lickes considered this whilst inclining his trunk in a series of sharp jerks to the left. ‘Yes, I think so. On the whole. Some people might have found him a bit overbearing but, on the other hand, he was a great one for getting things done.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things.’
Dover poked his head crossly out of the blankets. ‘Don’t give me any of that, laddie! If you want me to come over there and drag it out of you word by bloody word, I will – don’t you fret!’
‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Mr Lickes who could have made mincemeat out of an unhealthy lump like Dover with both hands tied behind him. ‘It’s just that it’s difficult to think of anything he wasn’t involved in. He was president of this and chairman of that and patron of the other. You name it. Boy Scouts, the Old People’s Welfare Committee, National Savings, Vicar’s Warden at the church, the Library Committee . . . Mr Sully Martin, I suppose you could call him. My wife always used to say that he was after an MBE or something in the Honours List but, personally, I don’t think it was just that. He was a very energetic man, you know, and he thoroughly enjoyed having a finger in every pie. He’d got some pretty big ideas for Sully Martin. If he’d had his way, he’d have put us on the map all right.’
‘As what, for God’s sake?’ asked Dover, who had not been impressed by what he’d seen so far.
‘Oh, a tourist centre.’
‘A tourist centre?’ Dover let fly with a nasty sort of laugh and pulled the sheets up even farther round his fat, policeman’s neck. ‘He must have been a bloody optimist!’
‘Well, it was only going to be on quite a small scale. He wasn’t planning to turn us into another Brighton or Stratford-on-Avon or anything. In fact, the tourists were going to be a sort of by-product, really. What he was actually after was to make Sully Martin a beautiful place to live in. You see, we’ve got the church, which is supposed to be a very fine one, and most of the houses are pretty old and basically rather charming. They just need doing up, that’s all. And that’s where poor old Chantry did run into a bit of opposition.’
Dover grunted a query.
‘Money,’ sighed Mr Lickes. ‘The local people haven’t got it and, even if they have, they’re not going to spend it stripping their Tudor oak beams or painting their front doors yellow. And the gardens, too. They were a great source of contention. Mr Chantry wanted flowers and the cottagers wanted rows of beans with untidy bits of coloured paper to keep the birds off. From Chantry’s point of view there was only one solution.’ Mr Lickes paused for another grunt of interrogation but Dover was feeling mean and refused to oblige. Mr Lickes had no choice but to carry on. ‘Get rid of the villagers,’ he explained. Dover yawned. ‘How?’
‘Buy them out and replace them with people who were ready and willing to spend a small fortune on conversions. Retired people, artists, writers, film stars – you know the sort of thing. It’s been done in other places.’
‘And Chantry would have made a packet out of it?’
‘Well, one imagines that he didn’t intend to lose on the transaction but things weren’t quite as simple as that. You’d need a terrific amount of capital to do the whole thing properly and Chantry just didn’t have it. He didn’t want to let anybody else in on the scheme so he had to be content with making a modest start here and there. Wing Commander Pile’s place, for example. Mr Chantry bought that up for about four hundred pounds, got the sitting tenant out, did it over and sold it to Pile for a cool four thousand.’
‘That must have made him a few enemies.’
‘Not murderous ones. Oh, some people had started muttering about Rachmanism but that was a gross exaggeration. His ideas were always a jolly sight bigger than his means.’
With a considerable amount of puffing and blowing Dover hoisted himself into a sitting position and began wondering morosely if he was getting bed sores. ‘Was he after this dump?’ he asked.
‘The Blenheim Towers?’ Mr Lickes shot a wary glance at the unkempt figure in the bed who was now scratching himself luxuriously under the armpits. It didn’t do, Mr Lickes reminded himself, to underestimate people. This chap was a high-ranking detective from Scotland Yard and he couldn’t possibly be as big a fool as he looked. On the contrary, to get away with this sort of behaviour, he must be a positive genius. Mr Lickes congratulated himself on having penetrated beneath the boorish exterior to the Great Detective lurking underneath. He was not, poor man, the first, nor would he be the last, to make this mistake.
‘Yes,’ said Dover,