Free Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure Page B

suspicious, Mr. Burgess visited the cellar yet again at 7 p.m. to have a little talk with Dobkin, who by that time was on duty. Dobkin was not very clear in his account of the fire. He seemed very jumpy, too. He advised Mr. Burgess not to go down into the cellar as it was dangerous; he said he himself had been down there and it was very rough. Mr. Burgess was not at all satisfied with this interview and more than suspected that Dobkin had started the fire himself. He confided these suspicions to his private diary.
    A description of the missing woman was circulated, with a photograph, in the Police Gazette . Miss Dubinski herself inserted a photograph and description of her sister in the News of the World , three times. But all with no result. Meanwhile, Inspector Davis and Sergeant Dawes searched the chapel on April 28 and again on May 1 and 2. They made a very interesting discovery. The cellar extended for some distance under the floor of the chapel itself, and away under here they found a freshly dug hole, shallow, like a grave, some six feet long by two feet wide. But it was empty. Had it been dug as an intended burial place for Mrs. Dobkin?
    Sergeant Dawes searched the place on all fours till he wore his trousers away at the knees, to use his own expression, but he found no body anywhere. Dobkin gave up his work as fire-watcher on May 20; the police, having drawn a blank, reluctantly abandoned their investigations; and the matter was forgotten, until the sunny Friday, fifteen months later, when the demolition workers pried up the flagstone…
    And now here we were all at the chapel, with Sergeant Dawes once again crawling on all fours under the chapel floor, to show Dr. Simpson and Mr. Keeling, also on all fours, where the intended grave had been.
    I wanted to crawl under the floor, too, but was firmly assured by a stern male chorus that it was too dirty for me. So I had to remain in the chapel above, with Messrs. Rawlings, Davis, and Hatton, peeking down at the three explorers from time to time through the cracks in the rotting floorboards.
    The chapel was by now a very dilapidated, jim-jammy old place indeed, especially in the rain—it was raining that morning. It made me think of a Tom Sawyer–Huck Finn ghost haunt. The roof was full of holes, through which the rain dripped onto the rows of dirty mute pews below, where hassocks and old hymnbooks moldered together. On the dais at the end of the building a battered harmonium lolled like a lunatic and pages of holy music lay scattered around it like grimy snow. The place seemed to be awaiting a congregation of Baptist ghosts.
    Presently CKS, DI Keeling, and Sergeant Dawes emerged from the cellar, all three rather red in the face from being bent double so long, and very dusty. It certainly did seem, observed CKS, that a hole had been dug under there as an intended grave. “Yes, and he never put her in it, miserable old swine,” said Sergeant Dawes, angrily rubbing his knees. “There was I sniffing around that empty grave, and the body not twenty yards from me, under the slab. So near, and yet so far!”
    And both he and Mr. Davis looked extremely glum, while Mr. Keeling grinned delightedly, for the case had now passed from the hands of Chief Inspector Davis to DDI Hatton, under the supervision of his area superintendent, Mr. Rawlings.
    This was because Miss Dubinski had originally reported her sister’s disappearance to Commercial Road police station, where Mr. Davis had at the time been DDI. He and Sergeant Dawes had consequently made the first investigations, which had resulted in such a disappointing blank. But now Mr. Davis was a chief inspector at the Yard, and, moreover, the body had been unearthed in Kennington and reported by the coroner, Mr. Wyatt, to the Southwark CID, and the chief of that CID division was Mr. Hatton. So the Dobkin case had become his pigeon. And Detective Inspector Keeling, his aide-de-camp, positively glowed with excitement to think that