Dover Strikes Again

judging from Mr Lickes’s hesitation that he had accidentally scored a bull’s eye, ‘the Blenheim Towers.’ He leered invitingly. ‘Why don’t you sit down, laddie, and tell me all about it?’

Four
Mr Lickes, for reasons best known to himself, preferred to stand and twitch alternate calf muscles.
‘Chantry, you and the Blenheim Towers,’ prompted Dover, pressing home his advantage with all the vigour of a damp sponge.
Mr Lickes was becoming more and more impressed with the sheer devilish cunning of Dover’s technique. ‘Motels,’ he said.
‘Motels?’
‘Mr Chantry was a great believer in motels. He thought they were the coming thing in the tourist industry. He was all for me turning the Blenheim Towers into one.’
‘And?’
‘Where would I find twenty-five thousand pounds? Don’t get me wrong. I’m as eager as the next man to make a million but I’m not the tycoon type and I never shall be. Even if the scheme had been a roaring success, I should have been in hock to my bank manager or whoever it was advanced the money for the rest of my life. And if it wasn’t a success – well,’ – he shuddered as he thought about it – ‘Mrs Lickes and I would have been out on the street, wouldn’t we? The Blenheim Towers may not exactly be the Ritz but it is mine and I can cope with it. I kept telling Mr Chantry that.’
‘But he wouldn’t listen?’
‘Too busy expounding his next bright idea,’ said Mr Lickes, pulling a rather rueful face. ‘That involved me selling out to one of the big hotel chains, getting them to convert us into a motel and putting me in charge of it as manager.’
‘Sounds all right,’ said Dover.
‘All Mr Chantry’s ideas sounded all right. It was only when you started looking into them that you saw the snags. Take this one, for example. No big hotel chain has ever shown the slightest interest in buying me out and they wouldn’t make me manager if they did. I know how these things work. The best I could hope for was enough capital to go and buy myself another hotel somewhere. Well, as I said to Mr Chantry, why bother? I’m perfectly happy and contented here.’
‘So he dropped the idea?’
‘Not really. That’s as far as we’d got before he was killed.’
Dover let his gaze wander wearily out of the window and tried to twist all this into a motive for murder. Was Mr Lickes the sort of man who would kill for the sake of a quiet life?
‘It was upsetting my regulars, too,’ said Mr Lickes, forcing his chin into his neck and squaring his shoulders.
‘What was?’
‘All this talk about converting the Blenheim Towers into a four-star motel. They could see themselves being turned out into the snow at a moment’s notice. You’d never seen such a panic. I even had Mrs Boyle weeping on my shoulder so you can imagine what a state the others were in. And of course the more I told them I wasn’t going to change anything, the less they believed me.’
Dover nodded, almost as though he was actually listening, and stared out of the window again. It was still raining.
Mr Lickes risked a surreptitious glance at his watch. He really was frightfully busy and, while it was one’s undoubted business to assist the police in every way one could, one would prefer not to spend the whole day doing it. He waited a moment or two and then cleared his throat as loudly as he dared.
Dover dragged his eyes away from the window and looked blankly at Mr Lickes.
‘Would you like me to tell you what I did on the night of the earthquake?’ asked Mr Lickes hopefully.
Dover’s bottom lip pouted out. It was all go. ‘You might as well, I suppose.’
The permission was grudging but Mr Lickes seized it eagerly and began to rattle at great speed through his story. The first part was pretty much what Dover had been led to expect from Miss Kettering’s evidence.
There had been the sudden, terrified awakening in the small hours as the earthquake shook the Blenheim Towers from attic to cellar. Then a few moments of bewilderment and near panic followed, in the case of Mr and Mrs Lickes, with a commendable concern for the safety of others. As soon as they gathered their wits, the pair of them rushed off to see that their guests were all right. Luckily they were, and Mr Lickes’s anxiety spread to wider fields.
‘I just had a sort of feeling,’ he explained to Dover, ‘that something terrible must have happened somewhere and, since we were comparatively unscathed, I felt free to go out and see if there was anything I could do. My wife decided to come with me.’
‘How long after the earthquake?’
Mr Lickes hunched his shoulders. ‘I’d have to guess – ten minutes, fifteen. Not much more, I don’t think.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, when we got out on to the drive, we could hear people shouting and screaming. It was coming from the direction of North Street and so we hurried off that way as quickly as we could. We’d had the foresight to bring a couple of torches with us and that proved a great help because, really, you could hardly see anything. I don’t remember noticing anybody in our lane but when we turned into East Street there seemed to be a bit more activity. We could see people in the distance, up towards North Street, moving about with torches and there was a lot of shouting going on. No,' said Mr Lickes, cleverly anticipating the question that Dover should have asked, ‘I didn’t recognize anybody, not at that stage. Well, we’d got nearly to the top of East Street when we practically bumped into Wing Commander Pile and his daughter. They were in a terrible state. The girl was crying and as near hysterical as makes no difference and the wing commander’s face was covered