by Colin Dexter
AS HE LAY abed on Sunday, 21 September, Morse was beset by the nagging feeling that there was so much to be done if only he could summon up the mental resolve to begin. It was like deferring a long-promised letter; the intention lay on the mind so heavily that the simple task seemed progressively to assume almost gigantic proportions. True, he had written to the headmaster of the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School – and had received an immediate and helpful reply. But that was all; and he felt reluctant to follow it up. Most of his fanciful notions about the Taylor girl had evaporated during the past week of sober, tedious routine, and he had begun to suspect that further investigation into Valerie’s disappearance would involve little more than an unwelcome continuation of similar sober and tedious routine. But he was in charge now. It was up to him.
Half-past nine already. His head ached and he resolved on a day of total abstinence. He turned over, buried his head in the pillow, and tried to think of nothing. But for Morse such a blessed state of nihilism was utterly impossible. He finally arose at ten, washed and shaved and set off briskly down the road for a Sunday morning newspaper. It was no more than twenty minutes’ walk and Morse enjoyed the stroll. His head felt clearer already and he swung along almost merrily, mentally debating whether to buy the News of the World or the Sunday Times. It was the regular hebdomadal debate which paralleled the struggle in Morse’s character between the Coarse and the Cultured. Sometimes he bought one; sometimes he bought the other. Today he bought both.
At half-past eleven he switched on his portable to listen to Record Review on Radio Three, and sank back in his favourite armchair, a cup of hot, strong coffee at his elbow. Life was good sometimes. He picked up the News of the World, and for ten minutes wallowed in the Shocking Revelations and Startling Exposures which the researchers of that newspaper had somehow managed to rake together during the past seven days. There were several juicy articles and Morse started on the secret sex life of a glamorous Hollywood pussycat. But it began to pall after the first few paragraphs. Ill-written and (more to the point) not even mildly titillating; it was always the same. Morse firmly believed that there was nothing so unsatisfactory as this kind of halfway house pornography; he liked it hot or not at all. He wouldn’t buy the wretched paper again. Yet he had made the same decision so many times before, and knew that next week again he would fall the same silly sucker for the same salacious front-page promises. But for this morning he’d had enough. So much so that he gave no more than a passing glance to a provocative photograph of a seductive starlet exposing one half of her million-dollar breasts.
After relegating (as always) the Business News Section to the wastepaper basket, he graduated to the Sunday Times. He winced to see that Oxford United had been comprehensively trounced, read the leading articles and most of the literary reviews, tried unsuccessfully to solve the bridge problem, and finally turned to the Letters. Pensions, Pollution, Private Medicine – same old topics; but a good deal of sound common sense. And then his eye caught a letter which made him sit bolt upright. He read it and a puzzled look came to his face. August 24? He couldn’t have bought the Sunday Times that week. He read the short letter again.
To the Editor. Dear Sir,
My wife and I wish to express our deep gratitude to your newspaper for the feature ‘Girls who run away from Home’ (Colour Suppt. August 24). As a direct result of reading the article, our only daughter, Christine, returned home last week after being away for over a year. We thank you most sincerely.
Mr and Mrs J. Richardson (Kidderminster).
Morse got up and went to a large pile of newspapers neatly bundled in string, that lay in the hallway beside the front door. The Boy Scouts collected them once a month, and although Morse had never been a tenderfoot himself he gave the movement his qualified approval. Impatiently he tore at the string and delved into the pile. Thirty-first August. Fourteenth September. But no 24 August. It may have gone with the last pile. Blast. He looked through again, but it wasn’t there. Now who might have a copy? He tried his next-door neighbour, but on reflection he might have saved himself the bother. What about Lewis? Unlikely, yet worth a try. He telephoned his number.
‘Lewis? Morse here.’
‘Ah. Morning, sir.’
‘Lewis, do you take the Sunday Times?’
‘’Fraid not, sir. We have the Sunday Mirror.’ He sounded somewhat apologetic about his Sabbath-day reading.
‘Oh.’
‘I could get you a copy, I suppose.’
‘I’ve got today’s. I want the copy for August the twenty-fourth.’
It was Sergeant Lewis’s turn to say, ‘Oh.’
‘I can’t really understand an intelligent man like you, Lewis, not taking a decent Sunday newspaper.’
‘The sport’s pretty good in the Sunday Mirror, sir.’
‘Is it? You’d better bring it along with you in the morning, then.’
Lewis brightened. ‘I won’t forget.’
Morse thanked him and rang off. He had almost said he would swop it for his own copy of the News of the World, but considered it not improper to conceal from his subordinates certain aspects of his own depravity.
He could always get a back copy from the Reference Library. It could wait, he told himself. And yet it couldn’t wait. Again he read the letter from the parents of the prodigal daughter. They would be extra-pleased now, with a letter in the newspaper, to boot. Dad would probably cut it out and keep it in his wallet – now that the family unit was functioning once more. We were all so vain. Cuttings, clippings and that sort of thing. Morse still kept his batting averages somewhere . . .
And suddenly it hit him. It all fitted. Four or five weeks ago Ainley had resurrected the Taylor case of his own accord and pursued it in his own spare time. Some reporter had been along to Thames Valley Police and got Ainley to spill the beans on the Taylor girl. Ainley had given him the facts (no fancies with Ainley!) and somehow, as a result of seeing the facts again, he had spotted something that he had missed before. It was just like doing a crossword puzzle. Get stuck. Leave it for ten minutes. Try again – and eureka! It happened to everyone like that. And, he repeated to himself, Ainley had seen something new. That must be it.
As a corollary to this, it occurred to Morse that if Ainley had taken a hand in the article, not only would Valerie Taylor have been one of the missing girls featured, but Ainley himself would almost certainly have kept the printed article – just as surely as Mr J. Richardson would be sticking his own printed letter into his Kidderminster wallet.
He rang Mrs Ainley. ‘Eileen?’ (Right this time.) ‘Morse here. Look, do you happen to have kept that bit of the Sunday Times – you know, that bit about missing girls?’
‘You mean the one they saw Richard about?’ He had been right.
‘That’s the one.’
‘Yes. I kept it, of course. It mentioned Richard several times.’
‘Can I, er, can I come round and have a look at it?’
‘You can have it with pleasure. I don’t want it any more.’
Some half an hour later, forgetful of his earlier pledge, Morse was seated with a pint of flat beer and a soggy steak-and-mushroom pie. He read the article through with a feeling of anticlimax. Six girls were featured – after the preliminary sociological blurb about the problems of adolescence – with a couple of columns on each of them. But the central slant was on the parents the girls had left behind them. ‘The light in the hall has been left on every night since she went,’ as one of the anguished mothers was reported. It was pathetic and it was distressing. There were pictures, too. First, pictures of the girls, although (of necessity) none of the photographs was of a very recent vintage, and two or three (including that of Valerie herself) were of less than definitive clarity. And thus it was for the first time that Chief Inspector Morse looked down upon the face of Valerie Taylor. Of the six she would certainly be in the running for the beauty crown – though run close by a honey of a girl from Brighton. Attractive face, full mouth,
come-hither eyes, nice eyebrows (plucked, thought Morse) and long dark-brown hair. Just the face – no figure to admire. And then, over the page, the pictures of the parents. Mr and Mrs Taylor seemed an unremarkable pair, seated unnaturally forward on the shabby sofa: Mr wearing a cheap Woolworth tie, with his rolled-up sleeves revealing a large purple tattoo on his broad right forearm; Mrs wearing a plain cotton dress with a cameo brooch somewhat ostentatiously pinned to the collar. And on a low table beside them, carefully brought into the focus of the photograph, a cohort of congratulatory cards for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. It was predictable and posed, and Morse felt that a few tears might well have been nearer the truth.
He ordered another pint and sat down to read the commentary on Valerie’s disappearance.
Two years ago, the month of June enjoyed a long, unbroken spell of sunny weather, and Tuesday 10 June was a particularly sweltering day at the village of Kidlington in the county of Oxfordshire. At 12.30 p.m. Valerie Taylor left the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School to walk to her home in Hatfield Way on the council estate nearby, no more than six or seven hundred yards from the school. Like many of her friends Valerie disliked school dinners and for the previous year had returned home each lunch-time. On the day of her daughter’s disappearance Valerie’s mother, Mrs Grace Taylor, had prepared a ham salad, with blackcurrant tart and custard for sweet, and together mother and daughter ate the meal at the kitchen table. Afternoon lessons began again at 1.45, and Valerie usually left the house at about 1.25. She did so on 10 June. Nothing seemed amiss that cloudless Tuesday afternoon. Valerie walked down the short front path, turned in the direction of the school, and waved a cheery farewell to her mother. She has never been seen again.
Mr George Taylor, an employee of the Oxford City Corporation, returned from work at 6.10 p.m. to find his wife in a state of considerable anxiety. It was quite unlike Valerie not to tell her mother if she was likely to be late, yet at that point there seemed little cause for immediate concern. The minutes ticked by; the quarters chimed on the Taylors’ grandfather clock, and then the hours. At 8.00 p.m. Mr Taylor got into his car and drove to the school. Only the caretaker was still on the premises and he could be of no help. Mr Taylor then called at the homes of several of Valerie’s friends, but they likewise could tell him nothing. None of them could remember seeing Valerie that afternoon, but it had been ‘games’ and it was nothing unusual for pupils to slip away quietly from the sports field.
When Mr Taylor returned home it was 9.00 p.m. ‘There must be some simple explanation,’ he told his wife; but if there was, it was not forthcoming, and the time pressed slowly on. 10.00 p.m. 11.00 p.m. Still nothing. George Taylor suggested they should notify the police, but his wife was terrified of taking such a step.
When I interviewed them this week both Mr and Mrs Taylor were reluctant (and understandably so) to talk about the agonies they suffered that night. Throughout the long vigil it was Grace Taylor who feared the worst and suffered the most, for her husband felt sure that Valerie had gone off with some boyfriend and would be back the next morning. At 4.00 a.m. he managed to persuade his wife to take two sleeping tablets and he took her upstairs to bed.
She was sleeping when he left the house at 7.30 a.m., leaving a note saying that he would be back at lunch-time, and that if Valerie still had not returned they would have to call the police. In fact the police were notified earlier than that. Mrs Taylor had awoken at about nine and, in a distraught state, had rung them from a neighbour’s telephone.
Detective Chief Inspector Ainley of the Thames Valley Police was put in charge of the case, and intensive inquiries were immediately begun. During the course of the next week the whole of the area in the vicinity of Valerie’s home and the area of woodland behind the school were searched with painstaking care and patience; the river and the reservoir were dragged . . . But no trace was found of Valerie Taylor.
Inspector Ainley himself was frankly critical of the delay. At least twelve hours had been lost; fifteen, if the police had been notified as soon as the Taylors’ anxiety had begun to deepen into genuine alarm.
Such delay is a common feature of the cases assembled here. Vital time lost; perhaps vital clues thrown to the wind – and all because parents think they will be wasting the time of the police and would seem to look foolish if the wayward offspring should suddenly turn up whilst the police were busy taking statements. It is a common human weakness, and it is only too easy to blame parents like the Taylors. But would we ourselves have acted all that differently? I knew exactly what Mrs Taylor meant when she said to me, ‘I felt all the time that if we called the police something dreadful must have happened.’ Illogical, you may say, but so very understandable.
Mr and Mrs Taylor still live on the council estate in Hatfield Way. For over two years now they have waited and prayed for their daughter to return. As in the five other cases discussed here, the police files remain open. ‘No,’ said Inspector Ainley, ‘we shan’t be closing them until we find her.’
Not bad reporting, thought Morse. There were several things in the article that puzzled him slightly, but he deliberately suppressed the fanciful notions that began to flood his mind. He had been right earlier. When Ainley had got the hard facts down on paper, he had spotted something that for over two years had lurked in the darkness and eluded his grasp. Some clue or other which had monopolized his attention and filled his spare time, and eventually, if indirectly, led to his death.
Just stick to the facts, Morse, stick to the facts! It would be difficult, but he would try. And tomorrow he and Lewis would start on the files wherein lay the facts as Ainley had gleaned them. Anyway, Christine was back in Kidderminster and, like as not, Valerie would be back in Kidlington before the end of the month. The naughty girls were all coming home and would soon be having the same sort of rows they’d had with mum and dad before they left. Life, alas, was like that.
Over his third pint of beer Morse could stem the flood of fancy no longer. He read the article through quickly once again. Yes, there was something wrong here. Only a small thing, but he wondered if it was the same small thing that had set Ainley on a new track . . . And the strangest notion began to formulate in the mind so recently dedicated to the pursuit of unembellished fact.
CHAPTER SIX
He certainly has a great deal of fancy, and a very good memory; but, with a perverse ingenuity, he employs these qualities as no other person does.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
AS HE KNOCKED at the door of Morse’s office Sergeant Lewis, who had thoroughly enjoyed the police routine of the previous week, wondered just what was in store for him now. He had worked with the unpredictable inspector before and got on fairly well with him; but he had his reservations.
Morse was seated in his black leather chair and before him on his untidy desk lay a green box-file.
‘Ah. Come in, Lewis. I didn’t want to start without you. Wouldn’t be fair, would it?’ He patted the box-file with a gesture of deep affection. ‘It’s all there, Lewis, my boy. All the facts. Ainley was a fact man – no daydreaming theorist was Ainley. And we shall follow where the great man trod. What do you say?’ And without giving his sergeant the slightest opportunity to say anything, he emptied the contents of the file face downwards upon the desk. ‘Shall we start at the top or the bottom?’
‘Might be a good idea to start at the beginning, don’t you think, sir?’
‘I think we could make out a good case for starting at either end – but we shall do as you say.’ With some difficulty Morse turned the bulky sheaf of papers the right way up.
‘What exactly are we going to do?’ asked Lewis blankly.
Morse proceeded to recount his interview with Strange, and then passed across to Lewis the letter received from Valerie Taylor. ‘And we’re taking over, Lewis – you happy about that?’ Lewis nodded halfheartedly. ‘Did you remember the Sunday Mirror?’
Lewis dutifully took the paper from his coat pocket and handed it to
Morse, who took out his wallet, found his football coupon and with high seriousness began to check his entry. Lewis watched him as his eyes alternately lit up and switched off, before the coupon was comprehensively shredded and hurled in the general direction of the waste-paper basket.
‘I shan’t be spending next week in the Bahamas, Lewis. What about you?’
‘Nor me, sir.’
‘Do you ever win anything?’
‘Few quid last year, sir. But it’s a million to one chance – getting a big win.’
‘Like this bloody business,’ mumbled Morse, distastefully surveying the fruits of Ainley’s labours.
For the next two and a half hours they sat over the Taylor documents, occasionally conferring over an obscure or an interesting point – but for the most part in silence. It would have been clear to an independent witness of these proceedings that Morse read approximately five times as quickly as his sergeant; but whether he remembered five times as much of what he read would have been a much more questionable inference. For Morse found it difficult to concentrate his mind upon the documents before him. As he saw it, the facts, the bare unadulterated facts, boiled down to little more than he had read in the pub the previous day. The statements before him, checked and signed, appeared merely to confirm the bald, simple truth; after leaving home to return to school Valerie Taylor had completely vanished. If Morse wanted a fact, well, he’d got one. Parents, neighbours, teachers, classmates – all had been questioned at length. And amidst all their well-meaning verbosity they all had the same thing to say – nothing. Next, reports of Ainley’s own interviews with Mr and Mrs Taylor, with the headmaster, with Valerie’s form tutor, with her games mistress and with two of her boyfriends. (Ainley had clearly liked the headmaster, and equally clearly had disapproved of one of the boyfriends.) All nicely, neatly written in the small, rounded hand that Morse had already seen. But – nothing. Next, reports of general police inquiries and searches, and reports of the missing girl being spotted in Birmingham, Clacton, London, Reading, Southend, and a remote village in Moray. All wild-goose chases. All false alarms. Next, personal and medical reports on Valerie herself. She did not appear academically gifted in any way; or if she was, she had so far successfully concealed her scholastic potential from her teachers. School reports suggested a failure, except in practical subjects, to make the best of her limited abilities (familiar phrases!), but she seemed a personable enough young lady, well liked (Morse drew his own conclusions) by her fellow pupils of either sex. On the day of her disappearance she was attested by school records to be seventeen years and five months old, and five feet six inches in height. In her previous academic year she had taken four CSE subjects, without signal success, and she was at that time sitting three GCE O-level subjects – English, French and Applied Science. From the medical report it appeared that Valerie was quite remarkably healthy. There were no entries on her National Health medical card for the last three years, and before that only measles and a bad cut on the index finger of her left hand. Next, a report over which Ainley had obviously (and properly) taken considerable pains, on the possibility of any trouble on the domestic front which may have caused friction between Valerie and her parents, and led to her running away from home. On this most important point Ainley had gone to the trouble of writing out two sheets of foolscap in his own fair hand; but the conclusions were negative. On the evidence of Valerie’s form tutor (among whose manifold duties something designated ‘pastoral care’ appeared a high priority), on the evidence of the parents themselves, of the neighbours and of Valerie’s own friends, there seemed little reason to assume anything but the perfectly normal ups-and-downs in the relationship between the members of the Taylor clan. Rows, of course. Valerie had been home very late once or twice from dances and discos, and Mrs Taylor could use a sharp tongue. (Who couldn’t?) Ainley’s own conclusion was that he could find no immediate cause within the family circle to account for a minor squabble – let alone the inexplicable departure of an only daughter. In short – nothing. Morse thought of the old Latin proverb. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing you’ll get nothing. Not that it helped in any way.
