Detective Chief Inspector Dover was a big man. His six-foot-two frame was draped, none too elegantly, in seventeen and a quarter stone of flabby flesh, an excessive proportion of which had settled round his middle. Well-cut clothing can, of course, do wonders to conceal such defects as the spread of middle age, but Dover bought his suits ready-made, and the one he was wearing had been purchased a long time ago. It was made of shiny blue serge. Round his thick, policeman’s neck he wore a blue-striped collar which was almost submerged in folds of fat, and a thin, cheap tie was knotted under the lowest of his double chins. He wore a long, dark blue overcoat and stout black boots.

Over the whole of this unprepossessing ensemble there was, naturally enough, Dover’s face. It was large and flabby like the rest of him. Only the details – nose, mouth and eyes – seemed out of scale. They were so tiny as to be almost lost in the wide expanse of flesh. Dover had two small, mean, button-like eyes, a snub little nose and a sulky rosebud of a mouth. He looked like one of those pastry men that children make on baking days out of odd scraps, with currants for eyes – an uncooked pastry man of course. His hair was thin and black and he had a small black moustache of the type that the late Adolf Hitler did so much to depopularise.

This, he thought, with not unjustified pessimism, was going to be another typical ‘Dover’ case. Magnificent inaction and no results. He didn’t give a damn about the chief inspector, but it just didn’t do a young, enthusiastic and rising detective sergeant any good at all to be associated with a seemingly unending stream of failures. Perhaps if he put another request in to the Assistant Commissioner, tactful but a bit stronger than the last time . . .