Last Seen Wearing

by Colin Dexter

  ‘Personal call from a Mr Phillipson. Shall I put him through, sir?’ The girl on the switchboard sounded weary too.

  ‘You’re working late tonight, Inspector?’

  ‘I was just off,’ said Morse with a yawn in his voice.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Phillipson. ‘We’ve got a Parents’ Evening – shan’t be home till ten myself.’

  Morse was unimpressed and the headmaster got to the point.

  ‘I thought I’d just ring up to say that I checked up at Blackwells – you remember? – about buying a book.’

  Morse looked at Lewis’s notes and completed the sentence for him.

  ‘. . . and you bought Momigliano’s Studies in Historiography published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at £2.50.’

  ‘You checked, then?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Oh well. I thought, er, I’d just let you know.’

  ‘Thoughtful of you, sir. I appreciate it. Are you speaking from school?’

  ‘From my study, yes.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ve got a phone number for Mr Acum there?’

  ‘Just a minute, Inspector.’

  Morse kept the receiver to his ear and read through the rest of Lewis’s notes. Nothing from Peters yet about that second letter; nothing much from anybody . . .

  To anyone with less than extremely acute hearing it would have been quite imperceptible. But Morse heard it, and knew once again that someone had been eavesdropping on the headmaster’s telephone conversations. Someone in the office outside the head’s study; and Morse’s brain slid easily along the shining grooves.

  ‘Are you there, Inspector? We’ve got two numbers for Acum – one at school, one at home.’

  ‘I’ll take ’em both,’ said Morse.

  After cradling the receiver, he sat and thought for a moment. If Phillipson wanted to use the phone in his study, he would first dial 9, get an outside line automatically, and then ring the code and the number he wanted. Morse had noticed the set-up when he had visited the school. But if he, Morse, wanted to ring Phillipson, he wouldn’t be able to get him unless someone were sitting by the switchboard in the outer office; and he doubted that the faithful Mrs Webb would be required that evening for the Parents’ Evening.

  He waited a couple of minutes and rang.

  Brr. Brr. It was answered almost immediately.

  ‘Roger Bacon School.’

  ‘That the headmaster?’ enquired Morse innocently.

  ‘No. Baines here. Second master. Can I help you?’

  ‘Ah, Mr Baines. Good evening, sir. As a matter of fact it was you I was hoping to get hold of. I, er, wonder if we might be able to meet again fairly soon. It’s this Taylor girl business again. There are one or two points I think you could help me with.’

  Baines would be free about a quarter to ten, and he could be in the White Horse soon after that. No time like the present.

  Morse felt pleased with himself. He would have been even more pleased had he been able to see the deeply worried look on Baines’s face as he shrugged into his gown and walked down into the Great Hall to meet the parents.

  There was little point in going home now and he walked over to the canteen and found a copy of the Telegraph. He ordered sausages and mash, wrote the precise time in the right-hand margin of the back page and turned to 1 across. Has been known to split under a grilling (7). He smiled to himself. It was too many letters for bAINES, so he wrote SAUSAGE.

  Back in the office he felt he was in good form. Crossword finished in only seven and a half minutes. Still, it was a bit easier than The Times. Perhaps this case would be easy if only he could look at it in the right way, and as Baines had said there was no time like the present. A long, quiet, cool, detached look at the case. But it never worked quite like that. He sat back and closed his eyes and for more than an hour his brain seethed in ceaseless turmoil. Ideas, ideas galore, but still the firm outline of the pattern eluded him. One or two of the pieces fitted firmly into place, but so many wouldn’t fit at all. It was like doing the light-blue sky at the top of a jigsaw, with no clouds, not even a solitary sea-gull to break the boundless monochrome.

  By nine o’clock he had a headache. Leave it. Give it a rest and go back later. Like crosswords. It would come; it would come.

  He consulted the STD codes and found that he would have to get Caernarfon through the operator. It was Acum who answered.

  As succinctly as he could Morse explained the reason for his call, and Acum politely interjected the proper noises of understanding and approval. Yes, of course. Yes, of course he remembered Valerie and the day she had disappeared. Yes, he remembered it all well.

  ‘Did you realize that you were one of the very last people to see Valerie before she, er, before she disappeared?’

  ‘I must have been, yes.’

  ‘In fact, you taught her the very last school lesson she ever had, I think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mention this, sir, because I have reason to believe that you asked Valerie to see you after the lesson.’

  ‘Ye-es. I think I did.’

  ‘Remember why, sir?’ Acum took his time and Morse wished that he could see the schoolmaster’s face.

  ‘If I remember rightly, Inspector, she was due to sit her O-level French the next week, and her work was, well, pretty dreadful, and I was going to have a word with her about it. Not that she had much chance in the exam, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You said, sir, you were going to see her.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. As it happened I didn’t get a chance. She had to rush off, she said.’

  ‘Did she say why?’

  The answer was ready this time, and it took the wind out of Morse’s sails. ‘She said she’d got to see the head.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Another piece that didn’t fit. ‘Well, thank you, Mr Acum. You’ve been most helpful. I hope I’ve not interrupted anything important.’

  ‘No. No. Just marking a few books, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. Thanks very much.’

  ‘Not at all. If I can help in any other way, don’t hesitate to ring me, will you?’

  ‘Er, no. I won’t. Thanks again.’

  Morse sat still for many minutes and began to wonder if he ought not to turn the jigsaw upside down and work the blue sky in at the bottom. There was no doubt about it: he ought to have gone home as he’d promised himself earlier. He was just walking blindly in the forest bumping into one wretched tree after another. But he couldn’t go home yet; he had an appointment.

  Baines was there already and got up to buy the inspector a drink. The lounge was quiet and they sat alone in a corner and wished each other good health.

  Morse tried to size him up. Tweed jacket, grey slacks, balding on top and rather flabby in the middle, but obviously nobody’s fool. His eyes were keen and Morse imagined the pupils would never take too many liberties with Baines. He spoke with a slight North Country accent and as he listened to Morse he picked away at his lower nostrils with his index finger. Irritating.

  What was the routine on Tuesday afternoons? Why was there no register taken? Was there any likelihood that Valerie had, in fact, returned to school that afternoon, and only later disappeared? How did the pupils work the skiving that was obviously so widespread? Was there any sort of skivers’ den where the reluctant athletes could safely hide themselves away? Have a smoke perhaps?

  Baines seemed rather amused. He could give the boys and girls a few tips about getting off games! By jove, he could. But it was the staff’s fault. The PE teachers were a bloody idle lot – worse than the kids. Hardly bothered to get changed, some of them. And anyway there were so many activities: fencing, judo, table-tennis, athletics, rounders, netball – all this self-expression nonsense. No one really knew who was expected when and where. Bloody stupid. Things had tightened up a bit with the new head, but – well. Baines gave the impression that for all his possible virtues Phillipson had a long way still to go. Where they went to?
Plenty of places. He’d found half a dozen smoking in the boiler room one day, and the school itself was virtually empty. Quite a few of them just sloped off home though, and some didn’t turn up at all. Anyway, like the headmaster, he wasn’t really involved on Tuesday afternoons. It wasn’t a bad idea, though, to get away from school occasionally – have a free afternoon. The headmaster had tried to do it for all the staff. Put all their free periods together and let them have a morning or an afternoon off. Trouble was that it meant a hell of a lot of work for the chap who did the timetabling. Him!

  As he talked on Morse wondered whether he still felt bitter towards Phillipson; whether he would be all that eager to throw out a life-line to the drowning helmsman. He casually mentioned that he knew of Baines’s ill luck in being pipped for the job; and bought more beer. Yes (Baines admitted), he’d been a bit unlucky perhaps, and more than once. He thought he could have run a school as well as most, and Morse felt he was probably right. Greedy and selfish (like most men), but shrewdly competent. Above all, thought Morse, he would have enjoyed power. And now that there no longer seemed much chance of power, perhaps a certain element of dark satisfaction in observing the inadequacies of others and quietly gloating over their misfortunes. There wasn’t a word for it in English. The Germans called it Schadenfreude. Would Baines get the job if Phillipson left or if for some reason he had to leave? Morse thought he would be sure to. But how far would he go in actively promoting such a situation? Perhaps though, as usual, Morse was attributing too much cynical self-seeking to his fellow men, and he brought his attention back to the fairly ordinary man who sat opposite him, talking openly and amusingly about life in a comprehensive school.

  ‘Did you ever teach Valerie yourself?’ asked Morse.

  Baines chuckled. ‘In the first form – just for a year. She didn’t know a trapezium from a trampoline.’

  Morse grinned, too. ‘Did you like her?’

  It was a sobering question, and the shrewdness gleamed again in Baines’s eyes.

  ‘She was all right.’ But it was an oddly unsatisfactory answer and Baines sensed it. He went on glibly about her academic prowess, or lack of it, and veered off into an anecdote about the time he’d found forty-two different spellings of ‘isosceles’ in a first-year examination.

  ‘Do you know Mrs Taylor?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He stood up and suggested there was just time for another pint. Morse knew that the momentum had been broken, quite deliberately, and he felt very tempted to refuse. But he didn’t. Anyway, he was going to ask Baines a rather delicate favour.

  Morse slept fitfully that night. Broken images littered his mind, like the broken glass strewn about the rubbish tip. He tossed and turned; but the merry-go-round was out of control, and at 3.00 a.m. he got up to make himself a cup of tea. Back in bed, with the light left on, he tried to concentrate his closed, swift-darting eyes on to a point about three inches in front of his nose, and gradually the spinning mechanism began to slow down, slower and slower, and then it stopped. He dreamed of a beautiful girl slowly unbuttoning her low-cut blouse and swaying her hips sensuously above him as she slid down the zip at the side of her skirt. And then she put her long slim fingers up to her face and moved the mask aside, and he saw the face of Valerie Taylor.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I am a man under authority.

  Matthew, viii, 9

  IT WASN’T TOO bad working with Morse. Odd sort of chap, sometimes, and should have got himself married long ago; everybody said that. But it wasn’t too bad. He’d worked with him before, and enjoyed it most of the time. Sometimes he seemed a very ordinary sort of fellow. The real trouble was that he always had to find a complex solution to everything, and Lewis had enough experience of police work to know that most criminal activity owed its origins to simple, cheap, and sordid motives, and that few of the criminals themselves had sufficiently intelligent or tortuous minds to devise the cunning stratagems that Morse was wont to attribute to them. In Morse’s mind the simple facts of any case seemed somewhere along the line to get fitted out with hooks and eyes which rendered the possibility of infinite associations and combinations. What the great man couldn’t do, for all his gifts, was put a couple of simple facts together and come up with something obvious. The letters from Valerie were a case in point. The first one, Peters had said, was pretty certainly written by Valerie herself. Why then not work on the assumption that it was, and go on from there? But no. Morse had to believe the letter was forged, just because it would fit better with some fantastical notion that itself owed its abortive birth to some equally improbable hypothesis. And then there was the second letter. Morse hadn’t said much about that; probably learned his lesson. But even if he had to accept that Valerie Taylor had written the letters, he would never be prepared to believe anything so simple as the fact that she’d got fed up with home and with school, and had just gone off, as hundreds of other girls did every year. Then why not Valerie? The truth was that Morse would find it all too easy; no fit challenge for that thoroughbred mind of his. Yes, that was it.

  Lewis began to wish he could have a few days on his own in London; use his own initiative. He might find something. After all, Ainley probably had – well, according to Morse he had. But there again the chief was only guessing. There was no evidence for it. Wasn’t it far more likely that Ainley hadn’t found anything? If he was killed on the very day that he’d actually found some vital clue – after well over two years of finding nothing – it would be a huge coincidence. Too big. But no. Morse himself took such coincidences blithely in his stride.

  He went to the canteen for a cup of tea and sat down by Constable Dickson.

  ‘Solved the murder yet, sarge?’

  ‘What murder?’

  Dickson grinned. ‘Now don’t tell me they’ve put old Morse on a missing persons case, ’cause I shan’t believe you. Come on, sarge, spill the beans.’

  ‘No beans to spill,’ said Lewis.

  ‘Come off it! I was on the Taylor business, too, you know. Searched everywhere we did – even dragged the reservoir.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t find the body. And if you don’t have the body, Dickson boy, you don’t have a murder, do you?’

  ‘Ainley thought she was bumped off, though, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well, there’s always the possibility, but . . . Look here, Dickson.’ He swivelled round in his chair and faced the constable. ‘You kill somebody, right? And you’ve got a body on your hands, right? How do you get rid of it? Come on, tell me.’

  ‘Well, there’s a hundred and one ways.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, for a start, there’s the reservoir.’

  ‘But that was dragged, you say.’

  Dickson looked mildly contemptuous. ‘Yes, but I mean. A bloody great reservoir like that. You’d need a bit of luck, wouldn’t you, sarge.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘There was that furnace in the school boiler room. Christ, you wouldn’t find much trace if they stuck you in there.’

  ‘The boiler room was kept locked.’

  ‘Come off it! S’posed to have been, you mean. Anyway, somebody’s got keys.’

  ‘You’re not much help, are you, Dickson?’

  ‘Could have been buried easy enough, couldn’t she? It’s what usually happens to dead bodies, eh, sarge?’ He was inordinately amused by his own joke, and Lewis left him alone in his glory.

  He returned to the office and sat down opposite the empty chair. Whatever he thought about Morse it wasn’t much fun without him . . .

  He thought about Ainley. He hadn’t known about the letters. If he had . . . Lewis was puzzled. Why hadn’t Morse worried more about the letters? Surely the two of them should be in London, not sitting on their backsides here in Kidlington. Morse was always saying they were a team, the two of them. But they didn’t function as a team at all. Sometimes he got a pat on the back, but mostly he just did what the chief told him to. Quite right and proper, too. But he would dearl
y love to try the London angle. He could always suggest it, of course. Why not? Why indeed not? And if he found Valerie and proved Morse wrong? Not that he wanted to prove him wrong really, but Morse was such an obstinate blighter. In Lewis’s garden ambition was not a weed that sprouted freely.

  He noted that Morse had obviously read the notes he had made, and felt mildly gratified. Morse must have come back to the office after seeing the Taylors; and Lewis wondered what wonderful edifice his superior officer had managed to erect on the basis of those two interviews.

  The phone rang and he answered it. It was Peters.

  ‘Tell Inspector Morse it’s the same as before. Different pen, different paper, different envelope, different postmark. But the verdict’s the same as before.’

  ‘Valerie Taylor wrote it, you mean?’

  Peters paused. ‘I didn’t say that, did I? I said the verdict’s the same as before.’

  ‘Same odds as before, then?’

  He paused. ‘The degree of probability is just about the same.’

  Lewis thanked him and decided to communicate the information immediately. Morse had told him that if anything important came up, a message would always get through to him. Surely this was important enough? And while he was on the phone he would mention that idea of his. Sometimes it was easier on the phone.

  He learned that Morse was in the witness box, but that he should be finished soon. Morse would ring back, and did so an hour later.

  ‘What do you want, Lewis? Have you found the corpse?’

  ‘No, sir. But Peters rang.’

  ‘Did he now?’ A note of sudden interest crept into Morse’s voice. ‘And what did the old twerp have to say, this time?’ Lewis told him and felt surprised at the mild reception given to this latest intelligence. ‘Thanks for letting me know. Look, Lewis, I’ve finished here now and I’m thinking of taking the afternoon off. I had a bloody awful night’s sleep and I think I’ll go to bed. Look after my effects, won’t you?’