Last Seen Wearing

by Colin Dexter

  It was Mrs Lewis again. The doctor had called. Pharyngitis. At least three or four days in bed. But could Morse come round? The invalid was anxious to see him.

  He certainly looked ill. The unshaven face was pale and the voice little more than a batrachian croak.

  ‘I’m letting you down, chief.’

  ‘Nonsense. You get better that’s all. And be a good boy and do as the quack tells you.’

  ‘Not much option with a missus like mine.’ He smiled wanly, and supporting himself on one arm reached for his glass of weakly pale orange juice. ‘But I’m glad you’ve come, sir. You see, last night I had this terrible headache, and my eyes went all funny – sort of wiggly lines all the time. I couldn’t recognize things very well.’

  ‘You’ve got to expect summat to go wrong with you if you’re ill,’ said Morse.

  ‘But I got to thinking about things. You remember the old boy on the Belisha crossing? Well, I didn’t mention it at the time but it came back to me last night.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Morse quietly.

  ‘It’s just that I don’t think he could see very well, sir. I reckon that’s why he got knocked over and I just wondered if . . .’

  Lewis looked at the inspector and knew instinctively that he had been right to ask him to come. Morse was nodding slowly and staring abstractedly through the bedroom window and on to the neatly kept strip of garden below, the beds trimmed and weeded, where a few late roses lingered languidly on.

  Joe was still in the old people’s home at Cowley, and lay in the same bed, half propped up on his pillows, his head lolling to the side, his thin mouth toothless and gaping. The sister who had accompanied Morse along the ward touched him gently.

  ‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’

  Joe blinked himself slowly awake and stared vaguely at them with unseeing eyes.

  ‘It’s a policeman, Mr Godberry. I think they must have caught up with you at last.’ The sister turned to Morse and smiled attractively.

  Joe grinned and his mouth moved in a senile chuckle. His hand groped feebly along the locker for his spectacle case, and finally he managed to hook an ancient pair of National Health spectacles behind his ears.

  ‘Ah, I remember you, sergeant. Nice to see you again. What can I do fo’ you this time?’

  Morse stayed with him for fifteen minutes, and realized how very sad it was to grow so old.

  ‘You’ve been very helpful, Joe, and I’m very grateful to you.’

  ‘Don’t forget, sergeant, to put the clock back. It’s this month, you know. There’s lots o’ people forgits to put the clocks back. Huh. I remember once . . .’

  Morse heard him out and finally got away. At the end of the ward he spoke again briefly to the sister.

  ‘He’s losing his memory a bit.’

  ‘Most of them do, I’m afraid. Nice old boy, though. Did he tell you to put the clock back?’

  Morse nodded. ‘Does he tell everybody?’

  ‘A lot of them seem to get a fixation about some little thing like that. Mind you, he’s right, isn’t he?’ She laughed sweetly and Morse noticed she wore no wedding ring. I hope you won’t be offended, Sister, if I tell you that I find you very attractive.

  But the words wouldn’t come, for he wasn’t an architect who slept beneath the railway viaduct, and he could never say such things. Just as she couldn’t. Morse wondered what she was thinking, and realized he would never know. He took out his wallet and gave her a pound note.

  ‘Put it in the Christmas fund, Sister.’

  Her eyes held his for a brief moment and he thought they were gentle and loving; and she thanked him nicely and walked briskly away. Fortunately the Cape of Good Hope was conveniently near.

  Clocks! It reminded him. There was a good tale told in Oxford about the putting back of clocks. The church of St Benedict had a clock which ran by electricity, and for many years the complexities of putting back this clock had exercised the wit and wisdom of clergy and laity alike. The clock adorned the north face of the tower and its large hands were manoeuvred round the square, blue-painted dial by means of an elaborate lever device, situated behind the clock-face and reached via a narrow spiral staircase leading to the tower roof. The problem had been this. No one manipulating the lever immediately behind the clock-face could observe the effects of his manipulations, and so thick were the walls of the church tower that not even with a megaphone could an accomplice, standing outside the church, communicate to the manipulator the aforementioned effects. Each year, therefore, one of the churchwardens had taken upon himself to mount the spiral staircase, to manipulate the lever in roughly the right direction, to descend the staircase, to walk out of the church, to look upwards at the clock, to ascend the staircase once more, to give the lever a few more turns before descending again and repeating the process, until at last the clock was cajoled into a reluctant synchronization. Such a lengthy and physically daunting procedure had been in operation for several years, until a mild-looking thurifer, rumoured to be one of the best incense-swingers in the business, had with becoming diffidence suggested to the minister that to remove the fuse from the fuse-box and to replace it after exactly sixty minutes might not only prove more accurate but also spare the rather elderly churchwarden the prospect of a coronary thrombosis. This idea, discussed at considerable length and finally accepted by the church committee, had proved wonderfully effective, and was now a firmly established practice.

  Someone had told Morse the story in a pub, and he recalled it now. It pleased him. Lewis, but for his illness, would even now be running up and down the spiral staircase looking at his alibis. But that was out – at least for several days. It was up to Morse himself now to take the fuse away and set the clock aright. But not just for an hour – for much, much longer than that. In fact for two years, three months and more, to the day when Valerie Taylor had disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  For having considered God and himself

  he will consider his neighbour.

  Christopher Smart, My Cat Jeoffrey

  DETECTIVE CONSTABLE DICKSON soon realized he was on to something and he felt as secretly excited as the poor woman was visibly nervous. It was the sixth house he had visited, a house on the opposite side of the street from Baines’s and nearer the main road.

  ‘You know, madam, that Mr Baines across the way was murdered on Monday night?’ Mrs Thomas nodded quickly. ‘Er, did you know Mr Baines?’

  ‘Yes, I did. He’s lived in the street nearly as long as I have.’

  ‘I’m, er . . . we’re, er, obviously anxious to find any witness who might have seen someone going into Baines’s house that night – or coming out, of course.’ Dickson left it at that and looked at her hopefully.

  In her late sixties now, scraggy-necked and flat-chested, Mrs Thomas was a widow who measured her own life’s joy by the health and happiness of her white cat, which playfully and lovingly gyrated in undulating spirals around her lower leg as she stood on the threshold of her home. And as she stood there she was almost glad that this young police officer had called, for she had seen something; and several times the previous evening and again this Wednesday morning she had decided she ought to report it to someone. It would have been so easy in the first exciting hours when policemen had been everywhere; later, too, when they had come and placed their no-parking signs, like witches’ hats, around the front of the house. Yet it was all so hazy in her mind. More than once she wondered if she could have imagined it, and she would die of shame if she were to put the police to any trouble for no cause. It had always been like that for Mrs Thomas; she had hidden herself unobtrusively away in the corners of life and seldom ventured forth.

  But, yes; she had seen something.

  Her life was fairly orderly, if nothing else, and each evening of the week, between 9.30 and 10.00 p.m., she put out the two milk bottles and the two Co-op tokens on the front doorstep before bolting the door securely, making herself a cup of cocoa, watching the News at
Ten, and going to bed. And on Monday evening she had seen something. If only at the time she had thought it might be important! Unusual, certainly, but only afterwards had she realized exactly how unusual it had been: for never had she seen a woman knocking at Baines’s door before. Had the woman gone in? Mrs Thomas didn’t think so, but she vaguely remembered that the light was burning in Baines’s front room behind the faded yellow curtains. The truth was that it had all become so very frightening to her. Had the woman she had seen been the one who . . .? Had she actually seen the . . . murderer? The very thought of it caused her to shiver throughout her narrow frame. Oh God, please not! Such a thing should never be allowed to happen to her – to her of all people. And as the panic rose within her, she again began to wonder if she’d dreamed it after all.

  The whole thing was too frightening, especially since there was one thing that she knew might be very important. Very important indeed. ‘You’d better come in, officer,’ she said.

  In the early afternoon she felt far less at ease than she had done with the constable. The man sitting opposite her in the black leather chair was pleasant enough, charming even; but his eyes were keen and hard, and there was a restless energy about his questions.

  ‘Can you describe her, Mrs Thomas? Anything special about her – anything at all?’

  ‘It was just the coat I noticed – nothing else. I told the constable . . .’

  ‘Yes, I know you did; but tell me. Tell me, Mrs Thomas.’

  ‘Well, that’s all really – it was pink, just like I told the constable.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that?’

  She swallowed hard. Once more she was assailed by doubts from every quarter. She thought she was sure; she was sure, really, but could she just conceivably be wrong?

  ‘I’m – I’m fairly sure.’

  ‘What sort of pink?’

  ‘Well, sort of . . .’ The vision was fading rapidly now, had almost gone.

  ‘Come on!’ snapped Morse. ‘You know what I mean. Fuchsia? Cyclamen? Er, lilac?’ He was running out of shades of pink and received no help from Mrs Thomas. ‘Light pink? Dark pink?’

  ‘It was a fairly bright sort of . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  It was no good, though; and Morse changed his tack and changed it again and again. Hair, height, dress, shoes, handbag – on and on. He kept it up for more than twenty minutes. But try as she might Mrs Thomas was now quite incapable of raising any mental image whatsoever of Baines’s late-night caller. Suddenly she knew that she was going to burst into tears, and she wanted desperately to go home. And just as suddenly it all changed.

  ‘Tell me about your cat, Mrs Thomas.’

  How he knew she had a cat, she hadn’t the faintest idea, but the tension drained away from her like the pus from an abscess lanced by the dentist. She told him happily about her blue-eyed cat.

  ‘You know,’ said Morse, ‘one of the most significant physical facts about the cat is so obvious that we often tend to forget it. A cat’s face is flat between the eyes and so the eyes can work together. Stereoscopic vision they call it. Now, this is very rare among animals. You just think. The majority of animals have . . .’ He went on for several minutes and Mrs Thomas was enthralled. But more than that; she was excited. It was all so clear again and she interrupted his discourse on the facial structure of the dog and told him all about it. Cerise pink coat – it might have been a herring-bone pattern, no hat, medium height, brownish hair. About ten minutes to ten. She was pretty certain about the time because . . .

  She left soon afterwards, happy and relieved, and a nice policeman saw her safely back to her own cosy front parlour, where the short-haired white cat lay indolently upon the sofa, momentarily opening the mysterious, stereoscopic eyes to greet his mistress’s return.

  Cerise. Morse got up and consulted the OED. ‘A light, bright, clear red, like the colour of cherries.’ Yes, that was it. For the next five minutes he stared vacantly through the window in the pose of Rodin’s Aristotle; and at the end of that time he lifted his eyebrows slightly and nodded slowly to himself. It was time to get moving. He knew a coat like that, although he’d only seen it once – the colour of bright-pink cherries in the summer time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller

  Knocking on the moonlit door.

  Walter de la Mare, The Listeners

  WITHIN THE PHILLIPSON family the financial arrangements were a matter of clear demarcation. Mrs Phillipson herself had a small private income accruing from interest received on her late mother’s estate. This account she kept strictly separate from all other monies; and although her husband had known the value of the original capital inheritance, he had no more idea of his wife’s annual income than she did of her husband’s private means. For Phillipson himself also had a private account, in which he accumulated a not negligible annual sum from his examining duties with one of the national boards, from royalties on a moderately successful textbook, written five years previously, on nineteenth-century Britain, and from various incidental perks associated with his headship. In addition to these incomes there was, of course, Phillipson’s monthly salary as a headmaster, and this was administered in a joint account on which both drew cash and wrote cheques for the normal items of household expenditure. The system worked admirably, and since by any standards the family was well-to-do, financial bickering had never blighted the Phillipsons’ marriage; in fact financial matters had never caused the slightest concern to either party. Or had not done so until recently.

  Phillipson kept his cheque book, his bank statements and all his financial correspondence in the top drawer of the bureau in the lounge, and he kept it locked. And in normal circumstances Mrs Phillipson would no more have dreamed of looking through this drawer than of opening the private and confidential letters which came through the letter-box week after week from the examination board. It was none of her business, and she was perfectly happy to keep it that way – in normal circumstances. But circumstances had been far from normal these last two weeks, and she had not lived with Donald for over twelve years without coming to know his moods and his anxieties. For she slept beside him every night and he was her husband, and she knew him. She knew with virtual certainty that whatever had lain so heavily upon his mind these last few days was neither the school, nor the inspector whose visit had been so strangely upsetting, nor even the ghost of Valerie Taylor that flitted perpetually across the twilit zone of his subconscious fears. It was a man. A man she had come to think of as wholly evil and wholly malignant. It was Baines.

  No specific incident had led her to open her husband’s drawer and to examine the papers within; it was more an aggregation of many minor incidents which had driven her lively imagination to the terminus – a terminus which the facts themselves may never have reached, but towards which (as she fearfully foresaw their implications) they seemed inevitably to be heading. Did he know that she had her own key to the drawer? Surely not. For otherwise, if there was something he was anxious to hide, he would have kept the guilty evidence at school and not at home. And she had looked – only last week, and many things were now so frighteningly clear. Assuredly she had heard the warning voices, and yet had looked and now could guess the truth: her husband was being blackmailed. And strangely enough she found that she could face the truth: it mattered less to her than she had dared to hope. But one thing was utterly certain. Never would she tell a living soul – never, never, never! She was his wife and she loved him, and would go on loving him. And if possible she would protect him; to the last ounce of her energy, to the last drop of her blood. She might even be able to do something. Yes, she might even be able to do something . . .

  She seemed neither surprised nor dismayed to see him, for she had learned a great deal about herself the past few days. Not only was it better to face up to life’s problems than to run away from them or desperately to pretend they didn’t exist; it seemed far easier, too.

>   ‘Can we talk?’ asked Morse.

  She took his coat and hung it on the hall-stand behind the front door, beside an expensive-looking winter coat, the colour of ripening cherries.

  They sat in the lounge, and Morse again noticed the photograph above the heavy mahogany bureau.

  ‘Well, Inspector? How can I help you?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ replied Morse quietly.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ She gave a little laugh and the hint of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. She spoke carefully, almost like a self-conscious teacher of elocution, the ‘d’ and the ‘t’ articulated separately and distinctly.

  ‘I think you do, Mrs Phillipson, and it’s going to be easier for both of us if you’re honest with me from the start because believe me, my love, you’re going to be honest with me before we’ve finished.’

  The niceties were gone already, the words direct and challenging, the easy familiarity almost frightening. As if she were looking in on herself from the outside, she wondered what her chances were against him. It depended, of course, on what he knew. But surely there was nothing he could know?

  ‘What am I supposed to be honest about?’

  ‘Can’t we keep this between ourselves, Mrs Phillip-son? That’s why I’ve called now, you see, while your husband’s still at school.’

  He noted the first glint of anxiety in the light-brown eyes; but she remained silent, and he continued. ‘If you’re in the clear, Mrs Phillipson—’ He had repeated her name with almost every question, and she felt uncomfortable. It was like the repeated blows of a battering ram against a beleaguered city.

  ‘In the clear? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I think you called at Mr Baines’s house on Monday night, Mrs Phillipson.’ The tone of his voice was ominously calm, but she only shook her head in semi-humorous disbelief.