Dead Easy for Dover

are you ready, sergeant?’ She waited calmly until MacGregor, pencil and notebook at the ready, indicated that he was all ears. ‘Do stop me if I go too fast for you. Now, on Wednesday the twelfth we had our evening meal rather early. Say about six o’clock. It was actually more of a snack as we occasionally find it more convenient to have our main meal in the middle of the day. When we’d finished eating, my husband came in here to watch the television. He does that every evening, unless we are entertaining guests, so that’s no problem.’
The Brigadier grinned sheepishly.
Mrs Esmond Gough went confidently on. ‘And I remained in the kitchen.’
‘Washing up?’ MacGregor recalled that Mrs Esmond Gough liked to represent herself as a highly domesticated woman who loved doing her household chores in spite of the numerous commitments which one might have imagined took up the greater part of her time.
If MacGregor’s question had been something in the nature of a little joke, Mrs Esmond Gough didn’t see it. ‘For a few minutes, yes. Then I got down to painting the posters.’
MacGregor’s racing pencil faltered. ‘Painting the posters?’
Mrs Esmond Gough nodded. ‘On Thursday the thirteenth, as you may remember, we had our Monster Rally and Demonstration in Westminster. We picketed the Abbey and Westminster Cathedral for an unbroken stretch of twelve hours. My organization is strictly non-denominational, of course.’
‘Your organization?’ MacGregor was asking the question more for Dover’s benefit than his own.
‘The Sorority for Sacerdotal Sex Equality.’ Mrs Esmond Gough rattled off the title with every appearance of pride and satisfaction. ‘Known as the S.S.S.E. for short, of course. We are having a Bumper Pray-In at St Paul’s next week,’ she added, anxious not to waste any chance of proselytizing. ‘Everyone is welcome. Gender is no bar. And you may be interested to know that I have plans in the near future for tackling the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is not an institution which impinges upon me personally, of course, but I feel I have a duty to attack and expose all forms of religious sexual discrimination wherever I may find it. The Orthodox Church . . .’
MacGregor put the brakes on. If Dover, sitting there with his eyes closed and his mouth gaping revoltingly open, were not yet actually asleep, he’d be beginning to find Mrs Esmond Gough very tedious. Besides, MacGregor still hadn’t cleared up this question of the posters. ‘You, yourself, Mrs Esmond Gough, were painting the posters?’
Mrs Esmond Gough shrugged as handsome a pair of shoulders as MacGregor was likely to see in the course of that particular murder investigation. ‘My Action Committee let me down at the eleventh hour – as usual. Some fool of a woman broke her arm, I understand. Really, some people have absolutely no consideration.’
‘You don’t have your posters done professionally?’ ‘No, no! Oh, believe me, sergeant, an amateurish-looking job is much more effective. It looks as though it’s a cry from the heart, you see, and it gets the media people talking about “ordinary folk” and “grass roots” and all that kind of thing. I haven’t used professionally prepared posters for years. I stick the odd spelling mistake in, too.’ Mrs Esmond Gough chuckled ruefully. ‘That’s usually guaranteed to catch the eye of some world-weary cameraman.’
Dover stirred restlessly. It might have been impatience, indigestion or just a bad dream, but MacGregor took the hint and dragged the interview back to the nitty-gritty again. He addressed his question to both the Esmond Goughs. ‘Did the murdered girl call here on the night of Wednesday the twelfth?’
Two heads shook as one.
‘Did anybody at all call here that night?’
Again the answer was firmly in the negative.
‘Have either of you ever seen the girl before?’
The Brigadier and his lady stared at one of the photographs which Inspector Walters had given MacGregor. The heads shook for a third time.
‘Poor girl!’ murmured Mrs Esmond Gough with rather slick compassion. ‘Poor, poor girl!’
The Brigadier, too, felt the pathos of that wan little face. ‘Damned shame!’ he growled and blew his nose loudly.
The powerful rumble of Dover’s stomach successfully ruined the tribute of a moment’s respectful silence which the Esmond Goughs were endeavouring to offer to the dear departed. It probably woke Dover up as well because his eyes suddenly opened and he began smacking his lips as though he’d got a very unpleasant taste in his mouth. Looking round for a bit of innocent sport, he naturally picked on the frailer spouse. ‘So you were all alone in this room, were you?’
The Brigadier agreed warily that that was so.
‘And the missus was shut away at the back of the house in the kitchen?’
‘Yes.’
Dover sniffed contemptuously. ‘Some bloody alibi!’ he commented before turning his attention to Mrs Esmond Gough. ‘What time did you clap eyes on him again?’
Mrs Esmond Gough, who had been stoking up for an explosion of righteous indignation, postponed it and concentrated on answering Dover’s question. ‘It would be ten o’clock,’ she said with a glance at her husband for confirmation. ‘Yes, I arrived just in time to watch the News.’
‘With our Ovaltine,’ added the Brigadier helpfully. ‘We have a cup every night and I would certainly have remembered if Moo had forgotten to bring it in.’
‘I have the evening quite clear in my mind,’ said Mrs Esmond Gough, her natural superiority reasserting itself. ‘I finished all the posters and cleared everything away in the kitchen while they were drying. Then I got our hot drinks ready.’
‘What were you working in the kitchen for?’ asked Dover in a half-hearted attempt to catch Mrs Esmond Gough napping.
‘In case I spilt any paint, of course!’ Mrs Esmond Gough laughed in a rather mocking way as though surprised that even a stupid male slob like Dover should need to be told that. ‘The kitchen floor is tiled and all the working surfaces are washable. One would hardly undertake such a potentially messy job on one’s best drawing room carpet, would one?’
Dover, harkening at last to