Dover and the Claret Tappers

from picking up the receiver on the grounds that no communications could, with luck, mean no work.
‘Of course I answered it!’
‘And?’
Dover glared resentfully. Nag, nag, nag! ‘There was nobody there.’
‘I see.’
Dover resented MacGregor’s quiet air of superiority. ‘Well, what’s funny about that?’ he exploded. ‘The phones are always going cock-eyed. It’s the mice getting in the bloody switchboard.’
‘Oh, it may mean nothing at all, sir,’ agreed MacGregor soothingly, ‘but it is just one more small point, isn’t it?’ He got his notebook out. ‘Can you give me a description of the girl, sir?’
‘Eh?’
MacGregor tried again. ‘What did she look like, sir?’
‘Somebody’s sitting there!’
The lady who had been about to slide into the vacant seat next to Dover all but jumped out of her skin. ‘Oh, oh, I do beg your pardon!’ she gasped and, being rather sensitive, rushed off to the ladies’ room to have hysterics.
Dover moodily watched her go. ‘Youngish,’ he said in answer to MacGregor’s question. ‘And hairy.’
‘Hairy, sir?’
‘She’d got a lot of hair, you fool! On her head. Sticking out! Like they all wear it these days.’
‘Could it have been a wig, sir?’ asked MacGregor with sudden inspiration.
Dover groaned. ‘How should I know?’
‘Was she tall, sir?’
‘Not really.’
‘Fat?’
‘Sort of average,’ said Dover, conscious that he wasn’t cutting too good a figure. ‘She was just an ordinary girl.’
To tell the truth, MacGregor hadn’t actually expected anything better. He really would have been a fool if he’d expected Dover to take any notice of a mere popsie when there was food and drink in the same room. ‘Did she wear glasses, sir?’
Dover hadn’t the faintest idea. ‘No!’
‘Was she wearing a skirt or trousers, sir?’
Dover grimaced with relief. ‘I couldn’t see, could I?’ he asked. ‘The edge of the desk hid her bottom half.’
MacGregor drew little matchstick men all over his notebook. ‘She wasn’t wearing a uniform, I take it, sir?’ He glanced up to find Dover staring helplessly at him. ‘She wasn’t a policewoman?’
No, Dover was almost one hundred per cent sure that his lady visitor had not been a uniformed policewoman. ‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it?’ he demanded, infuriated by MacGregor’s barely veiled exasperation. ‘It must narrow the held down, for God’s sake.’
MacGregor shook his head. ‘Sir, there must be hundreds of women in Scotland Yard at any given moment. Legitimately there, I mean, if we’re actually looking for somebody who slipped through the security checks – well, then I don’t think we’ll ever find her.’
‘She was wearing a sort of overall!’ crowed Dover, swelling with pride. ‘A blue overall! Sort of shiny.’
‘And as soon as she gets out of your room, sir, she takes it off and pops it in her handbag. In other words, we’ve no idea how she was dressed. If, on top of that, she was wearing a wig . . .’
Dover caught MacGregor’s pessimism and glumly finished off his drink. ‘We’ll have to have an identity parade,’ he said.

Seven
WHAT DOVER HAD HAD IN MIND TURNED OUT TO be rather impracticable. He’d had visions of lolling back at his ease while the entire female work force of Scotland Yard paraded past his totally unlickerish gaze. It fell to MacGregor to indicate a few of the difficulties. The number of women concerned ran into several hundreds and they would never all be available for inspection at the same time. Then there was the quite unacceptable disruption such a procession would cause and, finally. . .
‘We’d have a strike on our hands, sir,’ said MacGregor. ‘Or a riot. The Yard’s full of Women’s Libbers, you know, and they wouldn’t take kindly to being put through a process which would strike some of them as being on a par with the selection of candidates for the harem.’
Dover, looking more disconsolate than any frustrated pasha, asked for alternative suggestions.
MacGregor was well used to doing Dover’s thinking for him and had come prepared to offer a solution. ‘I thought we might just stroll around, sir, and see if you could recognise anybody.’ It was a plan which relied rather heavily on the benevolence of Lady Luck for its success and required a mite too much effort on Dover’s part to be entirely palatable, but the chief inspector raised no objection.
‘Come on, then!’ he said.
MacGregor blinked. ‘Now, sir?’ It was live past nine on a damp Monday morning and Dover usually required at least an hour to recuperate from the rigours of his journey into the centre of London.
But Dover had got his dander up. I hat he should have suffered the indignities of being kidnapped was bad enough, but that they should drug him into submission in his own bloody office was unforgivable. ‘Now!’ he repeated, and off they went.
By eleven o’clock, of course, all Dover’s righteous anger had evaporated and his feet were playing him up something cruel. MacGregor spotted the danger signs and led the way to the nearest canteen. Dover sank down thankfully at one of the tables while MacGregor queued up for two cups of coffee and enough tasty snacks to feed a family of five for a week or, alternatively, to keep Dover going till lunch-time.
So far, the search for the elusive lady had been unsuccessful. Although he would have died rather than admit it, Dover’s eyesight wasn’t what it was and several women had already taken vociferous objection to the dose and intimate scrutiny to which they had been exposed. At least two of the more delicately nurtured females were even now penning their indignant resignations and one stalwart trade unionist, who prided herself on knowing a rapist when she saw one, had convened a protest meeting of sister lady-cleaners for one o’clock.
‘It’s not been a very fruitful morning so tar, has it, sir?’ said MacGregor, sipping his coffee like a proper little gentleman and trying to shut out the sounds of Dover’s uninhibited mastication.
‘Knew it wouldn’t be,’ replied Dover through a mouthful of cheese and pickle sandwich. ‘It was a damned stupid idea in the first place.’
MacGregor