The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Where did you find the number-plate?”

  “Just behind the gate-post, in the hydrangea patch. Jeff saw it when he started clearing up.”

  At the door I hesitated: “Would you like me to ring Pagan and . . .”

  “. . . put him in the picture? I’d like that very much, yes.”

  In the early afternoon I heard the phone ringing in the front lounge; and very soon Jeff Lloyd pushed his head round my door. “For you, Philip: Doctor Russell Hughes, he says. Not being rusticated, are we?” He grinned, and I followed him up the passage.

  Dr Hughes, the Mods tutor at Lonsdale, was supervising both Morse and myself, and I’d found him a kindly and learned soul. He was so sorry to disturb me during the vac, etc; he wasn’t sure if I could help, etc; but . . . The burden of his call was as follows: Morse had a brilliant mind – probably the best he’d known in a decade; but the standard of some of his recent work, which he was at that very moment marking, was sadly far below expectations. Did I know any reason why this should be? Disappointments, illness, girlfriends, family, drugs, booze? I had no cause to lie to Dr Hughes – not at that point anyway – and I told him that I hadn’t the faintest idea. He then told me what he saw as the stark truth of the matter: if Morse went on like this, he wouldn’t even finish up with a “pass” degree, let alone a pedestrian third. And if I could in any way help, etc. With almost complete honesty, I told him that I would try very hard to do so. He gave me his direct home telephone-number, and rang off.

  The only thing I had not referred to was Morse’s sympathy with the widespread disillusionment and dissent of so many of his University peers. But although he attended a good many lengthy protest meetings, the only sign I witnessed of any active participation was in the Hilary Term when I observed him marching – silently – at the rear of a large and vociferous demonstration against the Vietnam war. Perhaps, at heart, he was a crypto-pacifist. But that was a personal matter, and no concern of Dr Hughes.

  During that telephone conversation I had been looking around the lounge again: furniture, photographs, bookshelves, pictures; and on the lower surface of the coffee-table I spied two books a-top each other: the dark-blue hardbacked Oxford Text of Homer; and the paperbacked Homeric Dictionary. Inside the former was a slim envelope, a pale-blue envelope, addressed, in handwriting I recognized only too readily, to E. Morse Esq.

  How on earth did those books get . . .?

  Jeff Lloyd, still in his gardening cap, was coming down the stairs as I made for my room.

  “Finished on the phone, Philip?”

  “Yep – all yours.”

  “Nothing, er, serious?”

  “No. Just reminding me I’d promised him an essay on Virgil before Christmas,” I lied.

  “Fancy a coffee?” called Mrs Lloyd, as I walked past the kitchen, where she was making mince-pies. I went into the kitchen, sat down, and put the two books on the table.

  “These are Pagan’s,” I said simply.

  “Ah, yes, I remember. I found them in his room when the decorators came in. I keep trying to remember . . .” she lied. “Anyway I’m going to have a bath and a lie-down. Don’t you think I deserve it?”

  That day, all roads it seemed, were leading to Morse, and I went along with the traffic.

  “And don’t you bother your head – I’ll ring Pagan.”

  “Today, perhaps?” she suggested quietly, as I took my coffee, took the two books, and walked back to an empty lounge.

  I rang the College immediately, being told by the solitary porter that they would be open again on the 27th. At least Morse had not lied there.

  “Oh dear! It’s Mr Morse I was hoping to—”

  The porter interrupted me. “I think I may know where he is, sir.”

  I too thought I knew where he was. And indeed, when I got down into Oxford, he was there, seated in the main bar of The Randolph, doing The Times crossword, with an almost empty glass of beer in front of him, alongside a completely empty tumbler of what (I doubted not) had been a whisky chaser.

  He looked up at me: “Philip!” He pointed to the glasses: “You’re just in time to replenish things. Make the Glenfiddich a large one, please.”

  With a half-pint of beer for myself, I sat opposite him at the round, glass-topped table, and told him simply and succinctly that Mrs Lloyd wanted to see him, adding only that there was no great rush because she was going to have a bath and a lie-down for a while.

  Morse’s eyes gleamed as he took a swallow of Scotch: “Lovely stuff! On Olympus they used to call it nectar, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Lovely thought, too – Helen in bed! She once told me she always slept in the altogether.”

  I could so easily have thrown my beer across his smiling face.

  “Do you know what she wants to see me about?”

  So I told him all about the felony inflicted on The Firs, and about Helen’s imbecilic interrogation by our vacuous detective. And (what a strange man Morse was) he interrupted only once, querying, with a grin, whether Watson had brought a tape-measure along with him. As a climax to my tale, I took out a postcard on which I had written the details of the give-away number-plate. But Morse seemed strangely unimpressed, merely echoing Watson’s words virtually verbatim: “Could well be of value to police enquiries.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Could equally well be stolen, though,” continued Morse. “I just hope she had enough nous not to hand it over to your dumb detective.”

  He handed back the postcard, and wrote in the final clue in the grid. “Good clue that!

  ‘It’s nice is scrambled eggs (7)’. Anagram of ‘it’s nice’—”

  “Thank you, Pagan! I just thought you’d be interested in knowing why Mrs Lloyd wanted—”

  “I am, Philip. And we’ll get a bus this very minute. Well . . .” he hesitated. “Perhaps we don’t want to find her in the bath, do we?” (Or do we, I wondered.) “Time for one for the bus-route?”

  “No!” I said.

  After a visit to the Gents, we walked down the broad front steps of the hotel, where Morse was stopped by the senior concierge, Roy, and was handed the two items he’d inadvertently left on the small table: The Times, and A. E. Housman: Collected Poems.

  The bus service up and down the Banbury Road must be the best of any road in any city in the UK; and barely a quarter of an hour later the pair of us stood in front of The Firs. There, by the light of an adjoining street-lamp, Morse bent down briefly to examine the damaged gate-post, a white chip of bare wood showing through the creosote, before turning, in the ever-darkening dusk, to survey the indentations on the lawn.

  “Should have brought that tape-measure – and a torch,” he said.

  I possessed one of these items, anyway. And when I got back from my room with it, I stood around, feeling vaguely helpless, as Morse flashed my torch’s beam randomly hither and thither, on the lawn, on the drive, on the Mini . . .

  “Somebody washed Helen’s car recently,” he said quietly.

  I shrugged. “Must have been Jeff Lloyd, I should think.”

  “Where’s his car?” he asked, peering through the garage windows.

  “Convalescing down at the garage – blown a couple of gaskets.”

  “I wonder what they are,” mumbled Morse, as he turned to me.

  “Any thoughts about things yet, Pagan?”

  “Certainly! The car that came through the fence, you mean? The tyres were Michelins, comparatively new, and done about 8,000 miles, no more; driven by a left-handed lady who rides the clutch a little too much; and purchased in Reading about two years ago. That puts your PC to shame, agreed?”

  “Don’t take any notice of him, Philip!” Mrs Lloyd stood at the front door, a winter coat covering her bathrobe; and Morse walked up to her and put his arms around her in a bear-hug; and she, in turn, put her arms around him tightly. Fortunately, the scene was fairly short-lived.

  “Come in, both of you! And stop your teasin
g, Pagan!” She turned to me.

  “He’s no genius, Philip! He’s just noticed the make of my tyres, looked at my mileometer, remembered I’m left-handed, saw which year the car reg letter is, as well as the Reading garage sticker on the rear-window. QED. Forget it all, Philip – he was just trying to tease you. We know whose car it was – and you’ve told Pagan all about that, I’m sure.” I felt very silly about it all.

  “Shan’t be long,” I said, as I left them in the lounge and got back to my room. I was missing something, lots of things, here. For example, why had Morse spoken so flippantly, as I now realized, about Mrs Lloyd’s own car? What, above all, had Morse’s classics volumes been doing in her lounge, since I was absolutely certain that Morse had been studying those same two books a week earlier? Yet Mrs Lloyd said she’d had them the whole term! I shook my head. You lied to me, Mrs Lloyd! There was just the one thing that I knew, and that Morse didn’t know (or did he, perhaps?): that I had found the letter. Not that I felt anything but guilt about it ever since Dr Hughes’s telephone call. But, yes, I still knew something about that secretive soul, Pagan, that he had never mentioned to anyone else in the world (or had he perhaps?). The books were now safely installed with me, and I took the letter out and read it yet again.

  SALLY DOWNES

  12.xii.69

  My dearest,

  Read those first two words again – for you will ever be my dearest. We both knew that I would soon have to make the biggest decision of my life – between you and mother, and it’s with despairing sadness I write to tell you that it must be mother. She is now so terribly handicapped with this devastating MS, so fragile, so vulnerable, that had you seen the joy that leapt into her old eyes when I told her she would always – always – have me with her, you would have begun to understand.

  Our days together this Christmas in Oxford would have been the happiest of my life, and of yours, I know that, my darling. Please don’t write to me or ring me – that would be too much for me to bear. Just remember the Kipling lines you taught me: “Thou wast allus my lad – my very own lad, and no one else”.

  S.

  And then, suddenly and almost miraculously, the light dawned on my bemused and second-class brain. I looked a last time at the name that headed the letter, before refolding it and replacing the envelope in the Oxford Text. It explained a lot – not everything of course, but such an awful lot.

  I had been sitting staring into space for several minutes when I heard a soft knock at my door. I knew who it was.

  “Can I come in?” said Morse quietly, holding the Collected Poems in his hand. I gestured towards the other chair and he sat down, placing Housman on top of Homer: “I get pretty careless, don’t I, about leaving books around.”

  There was a minute or so of silence between us before he came out with it: “I know you’ve read the letter.”

  I nodded: “Lots of times, I’m afraid. I’m so sorry, Pagan. It’s like breaking a trust and—”

  “I’d have done the same myself, Philip. Sally might have blamed you, but I don’t.”

  “There’s something else, though,” I said, as I took the white card from my pocket. But he waved it away.

  “I guessed you’d twigged, Philip, because I’ve got a higher opinion of your intelligence than you have.”

  “Doesn’t explain all that much, though.”

  “No, it doesn’t . . . Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

  Of course I did. And he told me.

  His father was in the car-business, and he’d seen in one of the Auto mags a list of personalized number-plates, amongst which was one that quite clearly would have been of considerable interest and pride to Sally Downes. And Morse went for it, clearing his worries about a Christmas present, and simultaneously clearing his own bank-balance. He had planned to give it to her on Christmas morning in their room at The Randolph.

  On the night of the “incident”, he had received a telephone call at The Randolph from Helen telling him, quite truthfully, that Jeff was out at a staff party at The Linton Lodge Hotel and wouldn’t be back till, well, “pretty late” – thankfully to return, as he’d gone, in a taxi, because the Rolls was undergoing some minor mechanical operation. So! So she wondered why she shouldn’t have an enjoyable evening, too. She was game, if he (Morse) was.

  He was.

  She’d parked momentarily outside The Randolph, poked her head inside the bar, seen him sitting there reading his Homer, and off they drove. Where to? The Trout Inn out at Wolvercote – no more than two or three miles away. Super time together! He, having drunk perhaps a little too much earlier, had resolutely stuck to beer; she, a little irresolutely, perhaps, had been rather more liberal; and each had taken a goodly share of complimentary counter-top canapés. In short they’d been mellowing gently and sentimentally; and, yes, he’d told Helen about the “Dear John” letter, and about the intended Christmas present for his beloved. Indeed, he had shown her the letter safely ensconced in the Oxford Text, which for once he’d remembered to pick up when Helen had called for him, but which later that same evening he’d forgotten to retrieve from the back of the Mini. Just after 10 p.m. they had agreed they should be getting away. But Helen had declared herself, she thought, incapable of driving back safely the short distance to The Firs.

  “So,” finished Morse, “I drove back here, pissed as the proverbial Triturus vulgaris. And . . . I don’t think you’ll need me to continue, except to say that I wasn’t really teasing you, was I, Philip? Helen was quite adamant about not ringing the police that night. They’d be sure to breathalize the driver – me. And that would hardly be good news, would it? Driving without a licence, drunk driving, dangerous driving – all three, like as not. Anyway, that’s all there is to say.”

  “No, it isn’t. You’ve not told me about the next bit.” Morse frowned. “Ah, yes. You mean the number-plate business. It would have been bloody stupid not to have thought of that. And Helen agreed. We’d both sobered up a lot by then, and it was Helen now who reversed the Mini over the lawn – twice! – to make a real muck-up of things. Then straight down to The Randolph again, where I took the lift up to my room, put the number-plate into an Elliston’s bag, got back into the car. So quick it all was, Philip! Helen parked the Mini in its usual spot, got a couple of buckets of water and washed down the front of it in case there were traces of creosote, whilst I sluiced down the mud from the tyres. Helen wasn’t worried at all about any dent in the front: said she’d acquired enough of those already! Then I walked up to the Banbury Road bus-stop and – voilà! You now know as much about things as I do.’

  Even more keenly than earlier I sensed that he was lying to me. It might all add up in a fairly logical way but . . . So I put my thoughts into words: “Why didn’t you leave everything just as it was? You tell me you’d both already decided not to ring the police until today – when you’d be back in The Randolph, and when Mrs Lloyd would be back to her customary sober self – unlike you!”

  Morse was pained by my outburst. “You don’t understand, do you? It’s one helluva shock – shock – when you do something like that. It’s dark and you’re jolted and frightened and panicky, and all you’re thinking about is how—”

  Before he could finish, the door had opened and Mrs Lloyd walked in, sparkling and sweetly scented. “What cock-and-bull story has he been telling you now, Philip?”

  “Just about, er, you know, how . . .”

  “Did you believe him?”

  I said it quietly but firmly: “No!”

  She smiled at me. “Don’t be cross with him! I think I know exactly the line he’s taken, the lies he’s been telling you. But please understand why he did it. He did it to paint me as a completely blameless person in all this. But I’m not blameless, Philip, far from it. You want to know who was driving the Mini? It was me.”

  The news sank in. Was it so much of a surprise? “But why all this rather silly subterfuge? I was just asking Pagan the same thing when you came in.”r />
  “Let me tell you. In six weeks’ time I’ve agreed to stand as a Conservative councillor for the Wolvercote ward. If any rumours – or facts! – get out about this, it will be curtains for my chances, my licence will be endorsed, and I can see the article in the Oxford Mail: ‘Mrs Helen Lloyd, unsuccessful aspirant to municipal honours . . .’. So I shall be eternally grateful to Pagan here for what he did. But it’s no great shakes, Philip: no one’s been injured; the Mini got off lightly; no one’s suffered, not even the insurance company, because Jeff, bless him, has refused point blank to put in any claim; and he tells me he’s going to dig up the lawn and re-seed it.”

  She said all this so genuinely and quietly that I knew I would probably be on her side whatever she did.

  “There’s one thing, Mrs Lloyd. If it’s any consolation, I’d vote for you – if I had a vote, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t, Helen,” broke in Morse. “But if you’ve got a glass of anything going? Glenfiddich, say, or . . .”

  Mrs Lloyd turned to me and placed her hand on my shoulder: “Would you like a glass of something, Philip?”

  Jeff was in the lounge just finishing a phone call to a fencing-firm as the three of us trooped in. “. . . No, only about four, five yards . . . Fine! . . . Second week in Jan, then . . . Fine! Thanks, Jim . . . Bye.”

  “Is that our punctured palisade?” his wife asked.

  Jeff smiled and took her hand. “Yep. Soon be all tickety-boo again.”

  “Has Tom fixed the Rolls yet? I’m out all day on the 28th, you know.”

  “All in hand, darling.” He turned to Morse and me. “Wonderful mechanic, Tom is. One of the old school. Pride in his work and all that. His missus hates going on holiday with him, because whenever he sees some poor sod parked in a lay-by with his head stuck under the bonnet, he just has to stop. Can’t help it!”

  Morse looked down with displeasure into his glass (“So sorry we’ve no Scotch, Pagan.”) as we sampled the red plonk, and said he must soon be going. But before he left, Jeff Lloyd had asked him a question.