Dead Easy for Dover

answers the door – and there’s his illicit lady love, spelling BIG TROUBLE in capital letters. Being a man of action, he picks up the nearest blunt instrument, clouts her one on the nut with it and tips the body over the garden wall of the house next door. You’ve got to admit, laddie,’ said Dover, seizing hold of the one hard fact in his whole hypothesis, ‘that she was found in the garden of the house next door. Convenient, eh?’
‘You could make that sort of case out about absolutely anybody, sir,’ said MacGregor wearily. Why not just let the old fool go forging ahead and cut his own stupid throat once and for all? Well, one reason was that MacGregor bitterly resented being tarred by the same brush as Scotland Yard’s most unwanted detective. And another was that MacGregor had an awful suspicion that, in the event of any fiasco, he would find that he was the one left holding the baby. It had, he reminded himself, happened before.
Meanwhile Dover was proudly producing his clincher. ‘But not “absolutely anybody” would give themselves away like the Brigadier did, would they, laddie? Here’ – Dover’s air of triumph was quite sickening – ‘you did notice that, didn’t you?’
MacGregor frowned. He hadn’t really missed something so obvious that even Dover could spot it, had he?
‘It was when they were talking about not having had any blooming kids.’
MacGregor’s frown deepened. ‘Oh?’
‘You bloody don’t remember!’ Dover’s yelp of delight and one-up-manship would have earned a lesser man a punch up the nose. ‘He said, before she came in, that they hadn’t any children and that it was his fault.’
MacGregor nodded cautiously. ‘Yes, I remember that, sir. He said it was owing to some bug or other he’d picked up during his overseas service.’
‘I thought at the time it was a damned funny topic of conversation,’ boasted Dover. ‘It was only later when Mrs Who’s-your-father was seeing us off at the front door that the penny dropped.’
‘Mrs Esmond Gough, sir?’ MacGregor’s frown of puzzlement was replaced by a gasp of annoyance. Of course! ‘I remember, sir,’ he began eagerly.
But Dover wasn’t going to have his thunder stolen. ‘She said,’ he interrupted loudly, ‘that their marriage hadn’t been blessed by any brats and that it was her fault. Now, that’s what I call a bloody discrepancy.’
In his own, much more refined way, MacGregor could be almost as bloody-minded as Dover. He would go to almost any lengths to prove that the Chief Inspector, as usual, had got it wrong. ‘Maybe they were both being self-sacrificing, sir,’ he suggested quickly, ‘and both trying to take the blame so as to spare their partner’s feelings.’
Dover’s dandruff-flecked moustache twitched in disgust. ‘I’ve told you before, laddie,’ he pointed out sarcastically. ‘What you know about married life could be written on a silver threepenny bit and still leave room for the Lord’s Prayer. Husbands and wives just don’t go on like that.’
‘All right, sir.’ MacGregor wasn’t prepared to argue the point. ‘Well, perhaps there’s something wrong with both of them. That’s not impossible, is it?’
‘The odds are six million to one against!’ retorted Dover, doubling the number he first thought of to be on the safe side. He knew even less about infertility within marriage than his sergeant did, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. ‘No, old What’s-his-name was trying to give himself the perfect let-out and his fool of a wife, unconsciously and accidentally, blew the gaffe on him.’
MacGregor thoughtfully chewed his lip. ‘In other words, sir,’ he said slowly, ‘Brigadier Esmond Gough was trying to tell us that since he is sterile, he couldn’t in any circumstances be the father of the dead girl’s unborn child. And, if he wasn’t the father, he wasn’t presumably the murderer either.’
‘That’s it in a nutshell,’ agreed Dover. ‘It may take you a long time, laddie, but you get there in the end. And that’s not all, either!’
MacGregor swallowed his annoyance as best he could. ‘No, sir?’
‘Why bring up the question of babies at all?’
‘Sir?’
‘Look, we only found out ourselves about half-an-hour ago that the girl was in the Pudding Club. It can’t possibly be common knowledge yet, not even in this village. So, how come the Brigadier knows she was pregnant if he’s innocent, eh?’
MacGregor was trying to follow the logic of this. ‘But are we sure he did know, sir?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘Of course he bloody well knew!’ Dover’s heavy jowls wobbled with exasperation. ‘He wouldn’t have brought up the whole question of his inability to father kids otherwise, would he? You want to pull your flipping socks up, you do!’
There is no doubt that MacGregor would have gone on trying to get Dover to see the flaws in his line of reasoning, but he wasn’t given the opportunity. Their tete-a-tete was interrupted once again by the arrival of Inspector Walters. This time he was careful to remain outside the car and stand well back.
‘We’ve just had a bit of a break-through, sir,’ he said, addressing Dover through the window which MacGregor had obligingly leaned across and wound down for him.
‘Go on!’ Dover flicked his cigarette stub out of the window and was so diverted by the sight of Inspector Walters trying to take evasive action that he quite forgot to point out that breakthroughs were no longer of significance. The case had been solved without them.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Inspector Walters when he was quite sure that all the sparks had been extinguished. ‘The ticket collector at Chapminster railway station.’ Dover’s pasty face remained as innocent of comprehension as ever. ‘Chapminster is our nearest town, sir. It’s about three miles away. Er – I’m stationed at Chapminster, actually, sir.’
‘Bully for you!’ drawled Dover. ‘And it’s my lunch-time so get your bloody skates on!’
Inspector Walters went rather red but he managed to deny himself the satisfaction of planting the toe of his boot where it would do the most. . . ‘My men have been out, showing the