by Colin Dexter
‘And there’s Acum, too, sir. Don’t forget him.’
Morse looked at his watch. It was 8.00 p.m. ‘You know, Lewis, it would be a real turn-up for the books if Acum was playing darts in the Jericho Arms last night, eh? Or sitting at a Bingo board in the Town Hall?’
‘He’d have a job wouldn’t he, sir? He’s in Caernarfon.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Lewis. Wherever Acum was last night he wasn’t in Caernarfon.’
He picked up the phone and dialled a number. The call was answered almost immediately.
‘Hello?’ The line crackled fitfully, but Morse recognized the voice.
‘Mrs Acum?’
‘Yes. Who is it?’
‘Morse. Inspector Morse. You remember, I rang you up—’
‘Yes, of course I remember.’
‘Is your husband in yet?’
‘No. I think I mentioned to you, didn’t I, that he wouldn’t be back until late tonight?’
‘How late will he be?’
‘Not too late, I hope.’
‘Before ten?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Has he got far to travel?’
‘Quite a long way, yes.’
‘Look, Mrs Acum. Can you please tell me where your husband has been?’
‘I told you. He’s been on a teachers’ conference. Sixth form French.’
‘Yes. But where exactly was that?’
‘Where? I’m not quite sure where he was staying.’
Morse was becoming impatient. ‘Mrs Acum, you know what I mean. Where was the conference? In Birmingham?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I see what you mean. It was in Oxford, actually.’
Morse turned to Lewis and his eyebrows jumped an inch. ‘In Oxford, you say?’
‘Yes. Lonsdale College.’
‘I see. Well, I’ll ring up again – about ten. Will that be all right?’
‘Is it urgent, Inspector?’
‘Well, let’s say it’s important, Mrs Acum.’
‘All right, I’ll tell him. And if he gets back before ten, I’ll ask him to ring you.’
Morse gave her his number, rang off, and whistled softly. ‘It gets curiouser and curiouser, does it not, Lewis? How far is Lonsdale College from Kempis Street?’
‘Half a mile?’
‘One more for the list, then. Though I suppose Acum’s got just as good, or just as bad, an alibi as the rest of ’em.’
‘Haven’t you forgotten one possible suspect, sir?’
‘Have I?’ Morse looked at his sergeant in some surprise.
‘Mrs Phillipson, sir. Two young children, soon in bed, soon asleep. Husband safely out of the way for three hours or so. She’s got as good a motive as anybody, hasn’t she?’
Morse nodded. ‘Perhaps she’s got a better motive than most.’ He nodded again and looked sombrely at the carpet.
With a startling suddenness, a large spider darted across the floor with a brief, electric scurry – and, as suddenly, stopped – frozen into a static, frightening immobility. A fat-bodied, long-legged spider, the angular joints of the hairy limbs rising high above the dark squat body. Another scurry – and again the frozen immobility – more frightening in its stillness than in its motion. It reminded Morse of a game he used to play at children’s parties called ‘statues’; the music suddenly stopped and – still! Freeze! Don’t move a muscle! Like the spider. It was almost at the skirting board now, and Morse seemed mesmerized. He was terrified of spiders.
‘Did you see that whopper in Baines’s bath?’ asked Lewis.
‘Shut up, Lewis. And put your foot on the bloody thing, quick!’
‘Mustn’t do that, sir. He’s got a wife and kids waiting for him somewhere.’ He bent down and slowly moved his hand towards the spider; and Morse shut his eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
John and Mary are each given 20p.
John gives 1p to Mary.
How much more does Mary have than John?
Problem set in the 11+ examination
THE URGE TO gamble is so universal, so deeply embedded in unregenerate human nature that from the earliest days the philosophers and moralists have assumed it to be evil. Cupiditas, the Romans called it – the longing for the things of this world, the naked, shameless greed for gain. It is the cause, perhaps, of all our troubles. Yet how easy it remains to understand the burning envy, felt by those possessing little, for those endowed with goods aplenty. And gambling? Why, gambling offers to the poor the shining chance of something got for nothing.
Crude analysis! For to some it is gambling itself, the very process and the very practice of gambling that is so immensely pleasurable. So pleasurable indeed that gambling needs, for them, no spurious raison d’être whatsoever, no necessary prospect of the jackpots and the windfalls and the weekends in Bermuda; just the heady, heavy opiate of the gambling game itself with the promise of its thousand exhilarating griefs and dangerous joys. Win a million on the wicked spinning-wheel tonight, and where are you tomorrow night but back around the wicked spinning-wheel?
Every society has its games, and the games are just as revealing of the society as are its customs – for in a sense they are its customs: heads or tails, and rouge ou noir; and double or quits and clunk, clunk, clunk, in the pay-off tray as the triple oranges align themselves along the fruit machine; and odds of 10 to 1 as the rank outsider gallops past the post at Kempton Park; and then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained ten pounds. And he said unto him, Well done, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities. And once a week, a hope a light-year distant, of half a million pounds for half a penny stake, where happiness is a line of Xs and a kiss from a buxom beauty queen. For some are lucky at the gambling game. And some are not, and lose more than they can properly afford and try to recoup their losses and succeed only in losing the little that is left; and finally, alas, all hope abandoned, sit them down alone in darkened garages and by the gas rings in the kitchens, or simply slit their throats – and die. And some smoke fifty cigarettes a day, and some drink gin or whisky; and some walk in and out of betting shops, and the wealthier reach for the phone.
But what wife can endure a gambling husband, unless he be a steady winner? And what husband will ever believe his wife has turned compulsive gambler, unless she be a poorer liar than Mrs Taylor is. And Mrs Taylor dreams she dwells in Bingo halls.
It had started some years back in the church hall at Kidlington. A dozen of them, no more, seated in rickety chairs with a clickety subfusc vicar calling the numbers with a dignified Anglican clarity. And then she had graduated to the Ritz in Oxford, where the acolytes sit comfortably in the curving tiers of the cinema seats and listen to the harsh metallic tones relayed by microphones across the giant auditorium. There is no show here of human compassion, little even of human intercourse. Only ‘eyes down’ in a mean-minded race to the first row, the first column, the first diagonal completed. Many of the players can cope with several cards simultaneously, a cold, pitiless purpose in their play, their mental antennae attuned only to the vagaries of the numerical combinations.
The game itself demands only an elementary level of numeracy, and not only does not require but cannot possibly tolerate the slightest degree of initiative or originality. Almost all the players almost win; the line is almost complete, and the card is almost full. Ye gods! Look down and smile once more! Come on, my little number, come! I’m there, if only, if only, if only . . . And there the women sit and hope and pray and bemoan the narrow miss and curse their desperate luck, and talk and think ‘if only’ . . .
Tonight Mrs Taylor caught the No 2 bus outside the Ritz and reached Kidlington at 9.35 p.m.; she decided she would call in at the pub.
It was 9.35 p.m., too, when Acum rang, a little earlier than expected. He had been fortunate with the traffic (he said); on to the A5 at Towcester and a good clear run for a further five uncomplicated hours. He had left Oxford at
3.15, just before the conference had officially broken up. Jolly good conference, yes. The Monday night? Just a minute; let’s think. In hall for dinner, and then there had been a fairly informal question-and-answer session afterwards. Very interesting. Bed about 10.30; a bit tired. No, as far as he remembered – no, he did remember; he hadn’t gone out at all. Baines dead? What? Could Morse repeat that? Oh dear; very sorry to hear it. Yes, of course he’d known Baines – known him well. When did he die? Oh, Monday. Monday evening? Oh, yesterday evening, the one they’d just been speaking about. Oh, he saw now. Well, he’d told Morse what he could – sorry it was so little. Not been much help at all, had he?
Morse rang off. He decided that trying to interview by telephone was about as satisfactory as trying to sprint in divers’ boots. There was no option; he would have to go up to Caernarfon himself, if . . . if what? Was it really likely that Acum had anything to do with Baines’s death? If he had, he’d picked a pretty strange way of drawing almost inevitable attention to himself. And yet . . . And yet Acum’s name had been floating unobtrusively along the mainstream of the case from the very beginning, and yesterday he had seen Acum’s telephone number in the index file on Baines’s desk. Mm. He would have to go and see him. He ought to have seen him before now; for whatever else he was or wasn’t Acum had been a central figure during that school summer when she’d disappeared. But . . . but you don’t just come down to Oxford for a meeting and decide that while you’re there you’ll murder one of your ex-colleagues. Or do you? Who would suspect? After all, it was quite by accident that he himself had learned of Acum’s visit to Oxford. Had Acum presumed . . .? Augrrh! It was suddenly cold in the office and Morse felt tired. Forget it! He looked at his watch. 10 p.m. Just time for a couple of pints if he hurried.
He walked over to the pub and pushed his way into the overcrowded public bar. The cigarette smoke hung in blue wreaths, head-high like undispersing morning mist, and the chatter along the bar and at the tables was raucous and interminable, the subtleties of conversational silence quite unknown. Cribbage, dominoes and darts and every available surface cluttered with glasses: glasses with handles and glasses without, glasses empty, glasses being emptied and glasses about to be emptied, and then refilled with the glorious, amber fluid. Morse found a momentary gap at the bar and pushed his way diffidently forward. As he waited his turn, he heard the fruit machine (to the right of the bar) clunking out an occasional desultory dividend, and he leaned across the bar to look more carefully. A woman was playing the machine, her back towards him. But he knew her well enough.
The landlord interrupted a new and improbable line of thought. ‘Yes, mate?’
Morse ordered a pint of best bitter, edged his way a little further along the bar, and found himself standing only a few feet behind the woman playing the machine. She pushed her glass over the bar.
‘Stick another double in there, Bert.’
She opened an inordinately large leather handbag and Morse saw the heavy roll of notes inside. Fifty pounds? More? Had she had a lucky night at Bingo?
She had not seen Morse – he was sure of that – and he observed her as closely as he could. She was drinking whisky and swopping mildly ribald comments with several of the pub’s habitués. And then she laughed – a coarse, common cackle of a laugh, and curiously and quite unexpectedly Morse knew that he found her attractive, dammit! He looked at her again. Her figure was still good, and her clothes hung well upon her. Yes, all right, she was no longer a beauty, he knew that. He noticed the fingernails bitten down and broken; noticed the index finger of her right hand stained dark-brown with nicotine. But what the hell did it matter! Morse drained his glass and bought another pint. The germ of the new idea that had taken root in his mind would never grow this night. He knew why, of course. It was simple. He needed a woman. But he had no woman and he moved to the back of the room and found a seat. He thought, as he often thought, of the attractiveness of women. There had been women, of course; too many women, perhaps. And one or two who still could haunt his dreams and call to him across the years of a time when the day was fair. But now the leaves were falling round him: mid-forties; unmarried; alone. And here he sat in a cheap public bar where life was beer and fags and crisps and nuts and fruit machines and . . . The ashtray on the table in front of him was revoltingly full of stubs and ash. He pushed it away from him, gulped down the last of his beer and walked out into the night.
He was sitting in the bar of the Randolph Hotel with an architect, an older man, who talked of space and light and beauty, who always wore a bowler hat, who studied Greek and Latin verses, and who slept beneath a railway viaduct. They talked together of life and living, and as they talked a girl walked by with a graceful, gliding movement, and ordered her drink at the bar. And the architect nudged his young companion and gently shook his head in wistful admiration.
‘My boy, how lovely, is she not? Extraordinarily, quite extraordinarily lovely.’
And Morse, too, had felt her beautiful and necessary, and yet had not a word to say.
Turning in profile as she left the bar the young girl flaunted the tantalizing, tip-tilted outline of her breasts beneath her black sweater, and the faded architect, the lover of the classical poets, the sleeper beneath the viaduct, stood up and addressed her with grave politeness as she passed.
‘My dear young lady. Please don’t feel offended with me, or indeed with my dear, young friend here, but I wish you to know that we find you very beautiful.’
For a moment a look of incredulous pleasure glazed the painted eyes; and then she laughed – a coarse and common cackle of a laugh.
‘Gee, boys, you ought to see me when I’m washed!’ And she placed her right hand on the shoulder of the architect, the nails pared down to the quick and the index finger stained dark brown with nicotine. And Morse woke up with a start in the early light of a cold and friendless dawn, as if some ghostly hand had touched him in his sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Life can only be understood backwards,
but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
MORSE WAS IN his office by 7.30 a.m.
When he was a child, the zenith of terrestrial bliss had been a long, luxuriating lie in bed. But he was no longer a child, and the fitful bouts of sleep the night before had left him tired and edgy. His thoughts as he sat at his desk were becoming obsessive and his ability to concentrate had temporarily deserted him. The drive to the office had been mildly therapeutic, and at least he had The Times to read. The leaders of the superpowers had agreed to meet at Vladivostok, and the economy continued its downhill slide towards inevitable disaster. But Morse read neither article. He was becoming increasingly less well-informed about the state of the nation and the comings and goings of the mighty. It was a cowardly frame of mind, he knew that, but not entirely reprehensible. Certainly it wasn’t very sensible to know too much about some things, and he seemed to be becoming peculiarly susceptible to auto-suggestion. Even a casual reminder that a nervous breakdown was no rarity in our society was enough to convince him that he would likely as not be wheeled off into a psychiatric ward tomorrow; and the last time he had braced himself to read an article on the causes of coronary thrombosis he had discovered that he exhibited every one of the major symptoms and had worked himself into a state of advanced panic. He could never understand why doctors could be anything but hyper-hypochondriacs, and supposed perhaps they were. He turned to the back page of The Times and took out his pen. He hoped it would be a real stinker this morning. But it wasn’t. Nine and a half minutes.
He took a pad of paper and began writing, and was still writing when the phone rang an hour later. It was Mrs Lewis. Her husband was in bed with a soaring temperature. Flu, she thought. He’d been determined to go in to work, but her own wise counsels had prevailed and, much it appeared to her husband’s displeasure, she had called the doctor. Morse, all sympathy, praised the good lady’s course of action and warned her that the stubborn old
so-and-so had better do as she told him. He would try to call round a bit later.
Morse smiled weakly to himself as he looked through the hurriedly written notes. It had all been for Lewis’s benefit, and Lewis would have revelled in the routine. Phillipson: ticket office at the Playhouse; check row and number; occupants of seats on either side; check, trace, interview. The same with the Taylors and with Acum. The Ritz, the Jericho Arms and Lonsdale College. Ask people, talk to people, check and re-check, slowly and methodically probe and reconstruct. Yes, how Lewis would have enjoyed it. And, who knows? Something might have come of it. It would be irresponsible to neglect such obvious avenues of inquiry. Morse tore the sheets across the middle and consigned them to the waste-paper basket.
Perhaps he ought to concentrate his attention on the knife. Ah yes, the knife! But what the dickens was he supposed to do with the knife? If Sherlock were around he would doubtless deduce that the murderer was about five feet six inches tall, had tennis elbow and probably enjoyed roast beef every other Sunday. But what was he supposed to say about it? He walked to the cabinet and took it out; and summoning all his powers of logical analysis he stared at it with concentrated intensity, and discovered that into his open and receptive mind came nothing whatsoever. He saw a knife – no more. A household knife; and somewhere in the country, most probably somewhere in the Oxford area, there was a kitchen drawer without its carving knife. That didn’t move forward the case one millimetre, did it? And could anyone really be sure whether a knife had been sharpened by a left- or a right-handed carver? Was it worth trying to find out? How fatuous the whole thing was becoming. But how the knife had been carried – now that was a much more interesting problem. Yes. Morse put the knife away. He sat back in the black leather chair, and once again he pondered many things.
The phone rang again at half-past ten, and Morse started abruptly and guiltily in his chair, and looked at the time in disbelief.
