MacGregor tried to lower the emotional tension by asking a few routine questions. Predictably, Mrs. Ongar was of little help.
“Last night was my birthday party,” she reminded MacGregor. “A happy day, but a tiring one. I didn’t get to bed until after eleven and then I slept like a log. All the noise and the excitement and the rich food. .” She relaxed back deeper into her pillows. “Oh, well, it’s not every day that one reaches the age of seventy-five, is it?”
There seemed little point in prolonging the interview. Mrs. Ongar seemed very tired and so, if the sagging jowls and the drooping eyelids were anything to go by, did Dover.
MacGregor smiled sympathetically at Mrs. Ongar. “Well, we’ll leave you to get some rest,” he murmured.
“Rest?” Mrs. Ongar’s head jerked up. “There’s no rest for me, young man.”
“No?”
“I have to draw up a new will. I’ve already sent for my solicitor.”
“A new will?”
Mrs. Ongar looked cross. “Haven’t you realized that it’s my life that’s in danger. Michael was killed for my money.”
“But if you leave your money to one of the others—”
“Precisely! And if I don’t make a will, my niece, Christine, will inherit everything. Suppose it was one of the Finch family that murdered Michael? Do you think they would hesitate to kill me in my turn?”
MacGregor tried to suppress the thought that a second murder in the Ongar household might make it a good deal easier to solve the first. “What are you going to do, then?”
“That’s my secret!” snapped Mrs. Ongar. “But you can rest assured that I shall take every precaution. In the meantime I want Michael’s murderer found without delay. And I also want all the remaining members of my family out of this house as soon as possible. My safety must be your prime concern.”
Dover and MacGregor retired to the dining room, which had been set aside for their use. Dover propped his elbows on the highly polished mahogany table and glowered disconsolately at Mrs. Ongar’s list of potential murderers. “We’re never going to solve this one.”
MacGregor tried to take a more positive attitude. “Oh, I expect we’ll get to the bottom of it, sir.”
Dover pushed the list away and reached for the packet of cigarettes MacGregor had laid out on the table as a sweetener. “Not a single bloody clue for a start,” he grumbled as he accepted a light from MacGregor’s elegant gold lighter. “This joker creeps downstairs in the middle of the night, stabs What’s-his-name with his own bloody bayonet, and creeps back to bed again. No fingerprints, no footprints, no bloodstains, didn’t drop anything, and a motive that’s shared with half a dozen other people. We’re on a hiding to nothing.”
MacGregor opened his notebook and laid his pencil ready. “Careful questioning of the suspects, sir—”
“Why don’t you grow up, laddie?” demanded Dover. “Careful bloody questioning? Look” — he dropped his voice to a tempting murmur — “why don’t we rough ’em up a bit?”
“We can’t do that, sir.”
“Why not? As long as we’re careful not to thump ’em where it shows, it’ll be their word against ours. And, if we stick together—”
MacGregor was reluctant to waste time discussing the extent to which Dover’s fist could be considered a legitimate instrument of justice. “Why don’t we just see how far we get playing it by the book first, sir?”
Dover’s thirst for violence was a good deal less passionate than his desire for a quiet life. “Oh, suit yourself!” he grunted as a lump of cigarette ash joined the rest of the debris on his waistcoat. “Let’s have this security fellow to start with. Major What’s-his-name. I rather fancy him.”
Major Finch knew the value of reinforcements and arrived accompanied by his lady-wife and his somewhat less than ladylike teenage daughter. “We’re all three in exactly the same boat,” he explained, “and I thought it would save time.”
Dover shrugged his shoulders to indicate that it was no skin off his nose.
The Finches had heard nothing, seen nothing, and knew nothing.
“We were all dog-tired.” drawled Mrs. Finch, who tried to distance herself from her lavatory-paper connections by affecting an air of languid sophistication. “That ghastly dinner party! I had a splitting head. I had to take a sleeping pill, so the whole house could have gone up in flames for all I cared.”
“Pretty grim.” agreed her husband. “And the way Auntie fawned over that disgusting young punk didn’t help. Talk about killing the fatted calf!”
“You’d have thought the rest of us simply didn’t exist,” complained Mrs. Finch. “I’d like to know what she’d have said if we’d turned up without a birthday present. That damned paisley shawl cost over fifty quid and for all the thanks we got you’d think we’d bought it in a sale at Woolworth’s.”
Samantha-Ivette, the teenage daughter with four earrings in one ear and pink hair, found contradicting her elders more natural than breathing and twice as much fun. “Mick didn’t know it was her birthday.”
“Then it was an amazing coincidence, darling, that he arrived all the way from Australia just in time for it.”
“And he got her that red rose.”
“A single red rose!” snorted Major Finch. “Very romantic! Especially when he’d had the damned cheek to touch me for a fiver to buy the old girl something, and then comes back with that damned bayonet for himself. Well, much good it did him!”
MacGregor tried to muscle in. “Who knew about the bayonet?”
“Everybody knew about the bayonet,” said Major Finch impatiently. “He was fooling about with it all through dinner, the damned idiot. I suppose we ought to be grateful he didn’t buy himself a submachine gun and a couple of live hand-grenades while he was about it.”
“He didn’t buy the bayonet.” Samantha-Ivette chipped in proudly. “He nicked it. From that shop by the post office. I helped him. I had to keep the old man talking while Mick pinched the bayonet. It was terrific fun.”
“Samantha-Ivette!” wailed Mrs. Finch.
“He pinched the red rose, too. From the cemetery.”
“My God!” exploded Major Finch. “Well, I just hope all this has taught Auntie Beryl a lesson.”
“You mean you hope she’ll leave Ongar’s to Mummy now, don’t you?” inquired Samantha-Ivette pertly. “Why should she? I think she liked Mick, really.”
“She was appalled by him! And with good reason.”
“Well, at least he wasn’t a fuddy-duddy old stick-in-the-mud.”
“He was a vicious young lout!”
“You think everybody who smokes a bit of pot is a moral degenerate.”
“Smokes pot?” Mrs. Finch clutched her heart. “I didn’t know he smoked pot. Why didn’t somebody say? Auntie would have thrown him out of the house.”
“Oh, Mummy, don’t be so prehistoric!”
Dover got enough of this sort of thing at home without having to put up with it at work as well. He fixed Major Finch with a beady eye. “Hear you’re a security officer,” he grunted. “Thought that was a job for an ex-copper.”
Major Finch took a second or two to catch up, but eventually he agreed that many security officers were indeed former policemen. “Not that background is all that important, you know. Any conscientious, reasonably intelligent man with good organizing ability can cope.”
Dover was less interested in the qualifications than the rewards. “How much do you get paid?”