by Colin Dexter
She screamed hysterically.
It was 4.30 p.m. before the fingerprint man and the photographer were finished, and before the humpbacked surgeon straightened his afflicted spine as far as nature would permit.
‘Well?’ asked Morse.
‘Difficult to say. Anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours.’
‘Can’t you pin it down any closer?’
‘No.’
Morse had been in the house just over an hour, for much of which time he had been sitting abstractedly in one of the armchairs in the living room, waiting for the others to leave. He doubted they could tell him much, anyway. No signs of forcible entry, nothing stolen (or not apparently so), no fingerprints, no blood-stained footprints. Just a dead man, and a deep pool of blood and a fridge with an open door.
A police car jerked to a halt outside and Lewis came in. ‘He wasn’t at school this morning, sir.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ said Morse, without any conscious humour.
‘Do we know when he was murdered?’
‘Between eight o’clock and midnight, they say.’
‘Pretty vague, sir.’
Morse nodded. ‘Pretty vague.’
‘Did you expect something like this to happen?’
Morse shook his head. ‘Never dreamed of it.’
‘Do you think it’s all connected?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Somebody probably thought that Baines was going to tell us what he knew.’ Morse grunted non-committally. ‘Funny, isn’t it, sir?’ Lewis glanced at his watch. ‘He’d have told us by now, wouldn’t he? And I’ve been thinking, sir.’ He looked earnestly at the inspector. ‘There weren’t many who knew you were going to see Baines this afternoon, were there? Only Phillipson really.’
‘Each of them could have told somebody else.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Oh, it’s a good point. I see what you’re getting at. How did Phillipson take the news, by the way?’
‘Seemed pretty shattered, sir.’
‘I wonder where he was between eight o’clock and midnight,’ mumbled Morse, half to himself, as he eased himself out of the armchair. ‘We’d better try to look like detectives, Lewis.’
The ambulance men asked if they could have the body, and Morse walked with them into the kitchen. Baines had been eased gently on to his right side, and Morse bent down and eased the knife slowly from the second master’s back. What an ugly business murder was. It was a wooden-handled carving knife. ‘Prestige, Made in England’, some 35–36 centimetres long, the cutting blade honed along its entire edge to a razor-sharp ferocity. Globules of fresh pink blood oozed from the wicked-looking wound, and gradually seeped over the stiff clotted mess that once had been a blue shirt. They took Baines away in a white sheet.
‘You know, Lewis, I think whoever killed him was bloody lucky. It’s not too easy to stab a man in the back, you know. You’ve got to miss the spinal column and the ribs and the shoulder blades, and even then you’ve got to be lucky to kill someone straight off. Baines must have been leaning forward, slightly over to his right, and exposing about the one place that makes it comparatively easy. Just like going through a joint of beef.’
Lewis loathed the sight of death, and he felt his stomach turning over. He walked to the sink for a glass of water. The cutlery and the crockery from Baines’s last meal were washed up and neatly stacked on the draining board, the dish cloth squeezed out and draped over the bowl.
‘Perhaps the post-mortem’ll tell us what time he had his supper,’ suggested Lewis hopefully.
Morse was unenthusiastic. He followed Lewis to the sink and looked around half-heartedly. He opened the drawer at the right of the sink unit. The usual collection: teaspoons, tablespoons, wooden spoons, a fish slice, two corkscrews, kitchen scissors, a potato peeler, various meat skewers, a steel – and a kitchen knife. Morse picked up the knife and looked at it carefully. The handle was bone, and the blade was worn away with constant sharpening into a narrowed strip. ‘He’s had this a good while,’ said Morse. He ran his finger along the blade; it had almost the same cruel sharpness as the blade that had lodged its head in Baines’s heart.
‘How many carving knives do you keep at home, Lewis?’
‘Just the one.’
‘You wouldn’t think of buying another one?’
‘No point, really, is there?’
‘No,’ said Morse. He placed the murder weapon on the kitchen table and looked around. There seemed singularly little point in any inspection, however intelligently directed, of the tins of processed peas and preserved plums that lined the shelves of the narrow larder.
‘Let’s move next door, Lewis. You take the desk; I’ll have a look at the books.’
Most of the bookshelves were taken up with works on mathematics, and Morse looked with some interest at a comprehensive set of textbooks on the School Mathematics Project, lined up in correct order from Book 1 to Book 10, and beside them the corresponding Teacher’s Guide for each volume. Morse delved diffidently into Book 1.
‘Know anything about modern maths, Lewis?’
‘Modern maths? Ha! I’m an acknowledged expert. I do all the kids’ maths homework.’
‘Oh.’ Morse decided to puzzle his brain no more on how 23 in base 10 could be expressed in base 5, replaced the volume, and inspected the rest of Baines’s library. He’d been numerate all right. But literate? Doubtful. On the whole Morse felt slightly more sympathy with Maguire’s uncompromising collection.
As he stood by the shelves the grim, brutal fact of Baines’s murder slowly sank into his mind. As yet it figured as an isolated issue; he’d had no chance of thinking of it in any other context. But he would be doing so soon, very soon. In fact some of the basic implications were already apparent. Or was he fooling himself again? No. It meant, for a start, that the donkey knew for certain which bundle of hay to go for, and that, at least, was one step forward. Baines must have known something. Correction. Baines must have known virtually everything. Was that the reason for his death, though? It seemed the likeliest explanation. But who had killed him? Who? From the look of things the murderer must have been known to Baines – known pretty well; must have walked into the kitchen and stood there as Baines reached inside the fridge for something. And the murderer had carried a knife – surely that was a reasonable inference? Had brought the knife into the house. But how the hell did anyone carry a knife as big as that around? Stuff it down your socks, perhaps? Unless . . .
From across the room a low-pitched whistle of staggering disbelief postponed any answers that might have been forthcoming to these and similar questions. Lewis’s facial expression was one of thrilled excitement mingled with pained incredulity.
‘You’d better come over here straight away, sir.’ Morse himself looked down into the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk; and he felt the hairs at the nape of his neck grow stiff. A book lay in the drawer, an exercise book; an exercise book from the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School; and on the front of the exercise book a name, a most familiar name, was inscribed in capital letters: VALERIE TAYLOR: APPLIED SCIENCE. The two men looked at each other and said nothing. Finally Morse picked up the book gently, placing the top of each index finger along the spine; and as he did so, two loose sheets of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Morse picked them up and placed them on the desk. The sheets contained drafts of a short letter; a letter which began Dear Mum and Dad and ended Love Valerie. Several individual words were crossed out and the identical words, but with minor alterations to the lettering, written above them; and between the drafts were whole lines of individual letters, practised and slowly perfected: w’s, r’s, and t’s. It was Lewis who broke the long silence.
‘Looks as if you’re not the only forger in the case, sir.’ Morse made no reply. Somewhere at the back of his mind something clicked smoothly into place. So far in the case he had managed to catch a few of the half-whispers and from them half-divine the truth; but now it seemed
the facts were shouting at him through a megaphone.
Baines, it was clear, had written the letter to Valerie’s parents; and the evidence for Valerie being still alive was down to zero on the scale of probabilities. In one way Morse was glad; and in another he felt a deep and poignant sadness. For life was sweet, and we each of us had our own little hopes, and few of us exhibited overmuch anxiety to quit this vale of misery and tears. Valerie had a right to live. Like himself. Like Lewis. Like Baines, too, he supposed. But someone had decided that Baines had forfeited his right to live any longer and stuck a knife through him. And Morse stood silently at Baines’s desk and knew that everyone expected him to discover who that someone was. And perhaps he would, too. At the rate he was going he would be able to know the truth before the day was out. Perhaps all he had to do was look through the rest of the drawers and find the whole solution neatly copied out and signed. But he hardly expected to find much else, and didn’t. For the next hour he and Lewis carefully and patiently vetted the miscellaneous contents of each of the other drawers; but they found nothing more of any value or interest, except a recent photocopy of Phillipson’s expenses form.
The phone stood on the top of the desk, a white phone, the same phone that had rung at lunchtime when Mrs Webb had called a man who then lay cold and dead beside the opened fridge. And then, suddenly, Morse noticed it. It had been under his nose all the time but he had ignored it because it was an item so naturally expected: a plastic, cream-coloured rectangular telephone index-system, whereby one pressed the alphabetical letter and the index opened automatically at the appropriate place. Half expecting to find his own illustrious self recorded, Morse pressed the ‘M’; but there was nothing on the ruled card. Clearly none of Baines’s more intimate acquaintances boasted a surname beginning with ‘M’. So Morse pressed ‘N’; and again he found no entry. And ‘O’; and with the same result. Probably Baines had only recently acquired the index? It looked reasonably new and maybe he had not yet transcribed the numbers from an older list. But no such list had yet been found. Morse pressed ‘P’, and a slight shiver ran along his spine as he saw the one entry: Phillipson, with the headmaster’s Oxford telephone number neatly appended thereto. Morse continued systematically through the remainder of the alphabet. Under ‘R’ was the number of the Oxford branch of the RAC, but nothing more. And under ‘S’, the number of a Sun Insurance agent. And then ‘T’; and once again the slight, involuntary shiver down the spine. Taylor. And somewhere at the back of Morse’s mind something else clicked smoothly into place. ‘U’, ‘V’ – nothing. ‘W’, Mr Wright, with an Oxford number: builder and decorator. On to ‘X’, ‘Y’, ‘Z’ – nothing. ‘A’. Morse looked carefully at the card and frowned, and whistled softly. Only one entry: Acum, the personal number (not the school’s) written neatly in the appropriate column . . .
In all, there were fourteen entries only, most of which were as innocently explicable as the RAC and the interior decorator. And only three of the fourteen names appeared to have the slightest connection with the case: Acum, Phillipson, Taylor. Funny (wasn’t it?) how the names seemed to crop up in trios. First, it had been Acum, Baines and Phillipson, and now Baines had got himself crossed off the list and another name had appeared almost magically in his place: the name of Taylor. Somewhere, yet again, in the farthest uncharted corners of Morse’s mind, a little piece clicked smoothly into place.
Although the curtains had been drawn back as soon as the police arrived, the electric lights were still switched on, and Morse finally switched them off as he stood on the threshold. It was 5.30 p.m.
‘What’s next?’ asked Lewis.
Morse pondered a while. ‘Has the wife got the chips on, Lewis?’
‘I ’spect so, sir. But I’m getting rather fond of dried-up chips.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Alibi (L. alibi, elsewhere, orig. locative – alius, other); the plea in a criminal charge of having been elsewhere at the material time.
Oxford English Dictionary
‘HE’S NOT GOING to like it much.’
‘Of course he’s not going to like it much.’
‘It’s almost as good as saying we suspect him.’
‘Well? We do, don’t we?’
‘Among others, you mean, sir?’
‘Among others.’
‘It’s a pity they can’t be just a bit more definite about the time.’ Lewis sounded uneasy.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Morse. ‘Just get a complete schedule – from the time he left school to the time he went to bed.’
‘As I say, sir, he’s not going to like it very much.’
Morse got up and abruptly terminated the conversation. ‘Well, he’ll have to bloody well lump it, won’t he?’
It was just after 6.30 p.m. when Morse pushed his way through the glass doors, left Police HQ behind him and made his way slowly and thoughtfully towards the housing estate. He wasn’t looking forward to it, either. As Lewis had said, it was almost as good as saying you suspected them.
The Taylors’ green Morris Oxford was parked along the pavement, and it was the shirt-sleeved George himself who answered the door, hastily swallowing a mouthful of his evening meal.
‘I’ll call back,’ began Morse.
‘No. No need, Inspector. Nearly finished me supper. Come on in.’ George had been sitting by himself in the kitchen finishing off a plate of stew and potatoes. ‘Cup o’ tea?’
Morse declined and sat opposite George at the rickety kitchen table.
‘What can I do for you, Inspector Morse?’ He filled an outsize cup with deep-brown tea and lit a Woodbine. Morse told him of Baines’s murder. The news had broken just too late for the final edition of the Oxford Mail, a copy of which lay spread out on the table.
George’s reaction was flat and unconcerned. He’d known Baines, of course – seen him at parents’ evenings. But that was all. It seemed to Morse curious that George Taylor had so little to say or (apparently) to feel on learning of the death of a fellow human being he had known; yet neither was there a hint of machination or of malice in his eyes, and Morse felt now, as on the previous occasion they had met, that he rather liked the man. But sooner or later he had to ask him, in the hallowed phrases, to account for all his movements on the previous evening. For the moment he stood on the brink and postponed the evil moment; and mercifully George himself did a good deal of the work for him.
‘The missus knew him better’n me. I’ll tell her when she gets in. Mondays and Tuesdays she’s allus off at Bingo down in Oxford.’
‘Does she ever win?’ The question seemed oddly irrelevant.
‘Few quid now and then. In fact she won a bit last night, I reckon. But you know how it is – she spends about a quid a night anyway. Hooked on it, that’s what she is.’
‘How does she go? On the bus?’
‘Usually. Last night, though, I was playing for the darts team down at the Jericho Arms, so I took her down with me, and she called in at the pub after she was finished, and then came home with me. It’s on the bus, though, usually.’
Morse took a deep breath and jumped in. ‘Look, Mr Taylor, it’s just a formality and I know you’ll understand, but, er, I’ve got to ask you exactly where you were last night.’
George seemed not in the least put out or perturbed. In fact – or was it a nothing, an imperceptibility, a fleeting flash of Morse’s imagination? – there might have been the merest hint of relief in the friendly eyes.
Lewis was already waiting when Morse arrived back in his office at 7.30 p.m., and the two men exchanged notes. Neither of them, it appeared, had been in too much danger of flushing any desperado from his lair. The alibis were not perfect – far from it; but they were good enough. Phillipson (according to Phillipson) had arrived home from school about 5.15 p.m.; had eaten, and had left home, alone, at 6.35 p.m. to see the Playhouse production of St Joan. He had left his car in the Gloucester Green car park and reached the theatre at 6.50 p.m. The play had lasted from 7.
15 to 10.30 p.m., and apart from walking to the bar for a Guinness in the first interval he had not left his seat until just after 10.30 when he collected his car and drove back home. He remembered seeing the BBC2 news bulletin at 11.00 p.m.
‘How far’s Gloucester Green from Baines’s house?’ asked Morse.
Lewis considered. ‘Two, three hundred yards.’
Morse picked up the phone and rang the path lab. No. The humpbacked surgeon had not yet completed the scrutiny of various lengths of Baines’s innards. No. He couldn’t be more precise about the time of death. Eight to midnight. Well, if Morse were to twist his arm it might be 8.30 to 11.30 – even 11.00, perhaps. Morse cradled the phone, stared up at the ceiling for a while, and then nodded slowly to himself.
‘You know, Lewis, the trouble with alibis is not that some people have ’em and some people don’t. The real trouble is that virtually no one’s likely to have a really water-tight alibi. Unless you’ve been sitting all night handcuffed to a couple of high court judges, or something.’
‘You think Phillipson could have murdered Baines, then?’
‘Of course he could.’
Lewis put his notebook away. ‘How did you get on with the Taylors, sir?’
Morse recounted his own interview with George Taylor, and Lewis listened carefully.
‘So he could have murdered Baines, too.’
Morse shrugged noncommittally. ‘How far’s the Jericho Arms from Baines’s place?’
‘Quarter of a mile – no more.’
‘The suspects are beginning to queue up, aren’t they, Lewis?’
‘Is Mrs Taylor a suspect?’
‘Why not? As far as I can see, she’d have had no trouble at all. Left Bingo at 9.00 p.m. and called in at the Jericho Arms at 9.30 p.m. or so. On the way she walks within a couple of hundred yards of Baines’s place, eh? And where does it all leave us? If Baines was murdered at about 9.30 last night – what have we got? Three of ’em – all with their telephone numbers on Baines’s little list.’
