Dead Easy for Dover

would. If there was one thing he simply couldn’t stand it was having people take advantage of his good nature.’

3
The silence which descended upon the drawing room when Miss Henty-Harris went off to make some coffee was almost too precious to break, but MacGregor felt that he really had to rouse Dover from a meditation so profound that it was beginning to look suspiciously like outright sleep. ‘Er – have you any questions that you’d like to ask, sir?’
In normal circumstances an enquiry like that would have sparked off some glittering repartee but, in spite of Miss Henty-Harris’s hair-of-the-dog, on this occasion Dover couldn’t summon up anything more memorable than a sickly swivel of his bloodshot eyes and a belch.
‘I’ve just got a couple more myself,’ said MacGregor, refusing to notice this latest manifestation of Dover’s abdominal problems, ‘and then I think we can move on to the next people on our list. I don’t really see Miss Henty-Harris as our murderer, do you, sir?’
No, Dover didn’t, but it went against all his finer instincts to agree with his sergeant. ‘You never can tell with women,’ he grunted at his most piggish.
MacGregor looked up in amazement. ‘But what possible motive could she have had, sir?’
‘That’s for you to find out, laddie!’ Dover sighed and let his eyelids, plus everything else, sag downwards.
Miss Henty-Harris returned with the coffee. ‘Now, don’t force yourself, dear!’ she advised Dover as she deposited the plate of hot buttered scones right by his elbow. ‘If you don’t feel like eating anything, don’t! I shan’t be offended. I only brought a little snack along out of force of habit, really. Uncle Percy always liked to have a little something to chew on with his elevenses. And now, sergeant’ – she took up her own coffee and resumed her seat on the sofa – ‘is there anything more I can tell you?’
‘Did you know the dead girl, Miss Henty-Harris?’
‘Oh, good heavens, no!’ Miss Henty-Harris’s reply was vigorous and unequivocal. ‘I’m certain I’d never ever seen her before. Unless’ – she hesitated – ‘unless she’d been on the television, of course.’
‘Have you any reason to think that she was?’ asked MacGregor, wondering if some promising avenue of investigation was about to open up before them. .
‘Oh, no,’ said Miss Henty-Harris with her usual smile. ‘It’s only that Frenchy Botham is such a stuffy, respectable sort of place. We simply don’t seem to have teenagers like the dead girl knocking around. Or not more than one or two. That’s why I thought, if I ever had seen her, it was more likely to have been on the telly rather than in real life. That’s where I’ve had to go, you see, for all my information about the seamier side of things. Up till now, of course. Now that Uncle’s gone, I hope to be able to travel around a bit and see all this degeneracy they keep talking about for myself.’
MacGregor decided to forget about the television line of enquiry. ‘I believe you acted as companion to Sir Perceval for a number of years?’
‘Getting on for thirty,’ agreed Miss Henty-Harris with little sign of nostalgia and even less of enthusiasm. ‘And, believe me, dear, it seems a lot longer. Companion’s not the word I’d use, either. Secretary, nurse, cook, housemaid, general dogsbody and whipping boy – that’s what I was.’
‘So you weren’t exactly heart-broken when Sir Perceval died?’
‘I was not!’ said Miss Henty-Harris shortly.
Dover leaned forward to collar the last buttered scone. ‘Who gets the money?’
Miss Henty-Harris jumped. ‘What money?’
Dover encircled the drawing room with a greasy wave of his hand. ‘All this lot!’ he explained. ‘Whacking big house, posh furniture, choice knick-knacks! Don’t try telling me the old josser died a bloody pauper.’
‘Of course he didn’t,’ admitted Miss Henty-Harris. ‘Uncle Percy was a very rich man.’
‘So, who gets it?’ repeated Dover who, although he had every reason to be grateful to Miss Henty-Harris, wasn’t.
‘Really, you’re almost as bad as my relations,’ she said rather crossly. ‘Uncle Percy left everything to me. And why shouldn’t he? Dear heavens, I’ve earned it! Putting up with him with his meanness and his bad temper and his tantrums and all the rest of it for nearly thirty years. And for a mere pittance. “You’ll have it all when I’m gone, Charlotte,” he used to say. Well, now he has gone and I have got it and I mean to enjoy myself with it.’ Miss Henty-Harris drew herself up, clamped her mouth shut in a hard line and folded her arms defiantly. She looked a little too much like a thwarted hamster to carry total conviction, but there was no mistake but that these questions about the disposal of Sir Perceval’s estate had got her on the raw.
Dover, meanwhile, was definitely perking up. Miss Henty-Harris’s ministrations had done their work and he began to flex his muscles. After all, as he himself frequently said, why start mixing it with sixteen-stone desperadoes when there are lots of widows and orphans and frail little old ladies just asking to be shoved around. He got down to brass tacks with a crudity that brought the tears to MacGregor’s eyes. ‘What did this old geezer die of, anyhow?’
‘He died of old age,’ said Miss Henty-Harris stiffly. She was beginning to regret a number of kindnesses in the recent past. ‘He was ninety-one years old and even Knights of the British Empire cannot expect to live for ever.’
‘Where did he kick the bucket?’ Dover was away now like a house on fire.
‘Where? Why, here, of course. In this house. In the dining room if you want the precise location. We had it fitted up as a bedroom for him some fifteen years ago to save all that traipsing up and down the stairs.’
‘Anybody with him at the time?’
‘I was!’ snapped Miss Henty-Harris who had caught the drift of Dover’s questions and didn’t like it. ‘It happens to be quite impossible to engage