by Colin Dexter
He climbed into the Lancia. Oh God, such beautiful breasts! He sat motionless at the wheel for a short while, and then he smiled to himself. He reckoned that Constable Dickson could almost have hung his helmet there! It was an irreverent thought, but it made him feel a good deal better. He pulled carefully out of the car park and headed north on the final few miles of his journey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Merely corroborative detail, to add artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
A SMALL GROUP of boys was kicking a football around at the side of a large block of classrooms which abutted on to the wide sports field, where sets of rugby and hockey posts demarcated the area of grass into neatly white-lined rectangles. The rest of the school was having lunch. The two men walked three times around the playing fields, hands in pockets, heads slightly forward, eyes downcast. They were about the same build, neither man above medium height; and to the football players they seemed unworthy of note, anonymous almost. Yet one of the two men pacing slowly over the grass was a chief inspector of police, and the other, one of their very own teachers, was a suspect in a murder case.
Morse questioned Acum about himself and his teaching career; about Valerie Taylor and Baines and Phillipson; about the conference in Oxford, times and places and people. And he learned nothing that seemed of particular interest or importance. The schoolmaster appeared pleasant enough – in a nondescript sort of way; he answered the inspector’s questions with freedom and with what seemed a fair degree of guarded honesty. And so Morse told him, told him quietly yet quite categorically, that he was a liar; told him that he had indeed left the conference that Monday evening, at about 9.30 p.m., told him that he had walked to Kempis Street to see his former colleague, Mr Baines, and that he had been seen there; told him that, if he persisted in denying such a plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth, he, Morse, had little option but to take him back to Oxford where he would be held for questioning in connection with the murder of Mr Reginald Baines. It was as simple as that! And, in fact, it proved a good deal simpler than even Morse had dared to hope; for Acum no longer denied the plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth which the inspector had presented to him. They were on their third and final circuit of the playing fields, far away from the main school buildings, by the side of some neglected allotments, where the ramshackle sheds rusted away sadly in despairing disrepair. Here Acum stopped and nodded slowly.
‘Just tell me what you did, sir, that’s all.’
‘I’d been sitting at the back of the hall – deliberately – and I left early. As you say, it was about half-past nine, or probably a bit earlier.’
‘You went to see Baines?’ Acum nodded. ‘Why did you go to see him?’
‘I don’t know, really. I was getting a bit bored with the conference, and Baines lived fairly near. I thought I’d go and see if he was in and ask him out for a drink. It’s always interesting to talk about old times, you know the sort of thing – what was going on at school, which members of staff were still there, which ones had left, what they were doing. You know what I mean.’
He spoke naturally and easily, and if he were a liar he seemed to Morse a fairly fluent one.
‘Well,’ continued Acum, ‘I walked along there. I was in a bit of a hurry because I knew the pubs would be closed by half-past ten and time was getting on. I had a drink on the way and it must have been getting on for ten by the time I got there. I’d been there before, and thought he must be in because the light was on in the front room.’
‘Were the curtains drawn?’ For the first time since they had been talking together, Morse’s voice grew sharper.
Acum thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I’m almost certain they were.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, I thought, as I say, that he must be in. So I knocked pretty loudly two or three times on the door. But he didn’t answer, or at least he didn’t seem to hear me. I thought he might be in the front room perhaps with the TV on, so I went to the window and knocked on it.’
‘Could you hear the TV? Or see it?’
Acum shook his head; and to Morse it was all beginning to sound like a record stuck in its groove. He knew for certain what was coming next.
‘It’s a funny thing, Inspector, but I began to feel just a bit frightened – as if I were sort of trespassing and shouldn’t really be there at all; as if he knew that I was there but didn’t want to see me . . . Anyway, I went back to the door and knocked again, and then I put my head round the door and shouted his name.’
Morse stood quite still, and considered his next question with care. If he was to get his piece of information, he wanted it to come from Acum himself without too much prompting.
‘You put your head round the door, you say?’
‘Yes. I just felt sure he was there.’
‘Why did you feel that?’
‘Well, there was a light in the front room and . . .’ He hesitated for a moment, and seemed to be fumbling around in his mind for some fleeting, half-forgotten impression that had given him this feeling.
‘Think back carefully, sir,’ said Morse. ‘Just picture yourself there again, standing at the door. Take your time. Just put yourself back there. You’re standing there in Kempis Street. Last Monday night . . .’
Acum shook his head slowly and frowned. He said nothing for a minute or two.
‘You see, Inspector, I just had this idea that he was somewhere about. I almost knew he was. I thought he might just have slipped out somewhere for a few seconds because . . .’ It came back to him then, and he went on quickly. ‘Yes, that’s it. I remember now. I remember why I thought he must be there. It wasn’t just the light in the front window. There was a light on in the hall because the front door was open. Not wide open, but standing ajar as if he’d just slipped out and would be back again any second.’
‘And then?’
‘I left. He wasn’t there. I just left, that’s all.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when I rang you, sir?’
‘I was frightened, Inspector. I’d been there, hadn’t I? And he was probably lying there all the time – murdered. I was frightened, I really was. Wouldn’t you have been?’
Morse drove into the centre of Caernarfon, and parked his car alongside the jetty under the great walls of the first Edward’s finest castle. He found a Chinese restaurant nearby, and greedily gulped down the oriental fare that was set before him. It was his first meal for twenty-four hours, and he temporarily dismissed all else from his mind. Only over his coffee did he allow his restless brain to come to grips with the case once more; and by the time he had finished his second cup of coffee he had reached the firm conclusion that, whatever improbabilities remained to be explained away, especially the reasons given for calling on Baines, both Mrs Phillipson and David Acum had told him the truth, or something approximating to the truth, at least as far as their evidence concerned itself with the visits made to the house in Kempis Street. Their accounts of what had taken place there were so clear, so mutually complementary, that he felt he should and would believe them. That bit about the door being slightly open, for example – exactly as Mrs Phillipson had left it before panicking and racing down to the lighted street. No. Acum could not have made that up. Surely not. Unless . . . It was the second time that he had qualified his conclusions with that sinister word ‘unless’; and it troubled him. Acum and Mrs Phillipson. Was there any link at all between that improbable pair? If link there was, it had to have been forged at some point in the past, at some point more than two years ago, at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School. Could there have been something? It was an idea, anyway. Yet as he drove out of the castle car park, he decided on balance that it was a lousy idea. In front of the castle he passed the statue erected to commemorate the honourable member for Caernarfon (Lloyd George, no less) and as he drove out along the road to Capel Curig, his brain was as jumbled and cluttered as a magp
ie’s nest.
He stopped briefly in the pass of Llanberis, and watched the tiny figures of the climbers, conspicuous only by their bright orange anoraks, perched at dizzying heights on the sheer mountain faces that towered massively above the road on either side. He felt profoundly thankful that whatever the difficulties of his own job he was spared the risk, at every second, and every precarious hand- and foot-hold, of a vertical plunge to a certain death upon the rocks far, far below. Yet, in his own way, Morse knew that he too was scaling a peak and knew full well the blithe exhilaration of reaching the summit. So often there was only one way forward, only one. And when one route seemed utterly impossible, one had to look for the nearly impossible alternative, to edge along the face of the cliff, to avoid the impasse, and to lever oneself painstakingly up to the next ledge, and look up again and follow the only route. On the death of Baines, Morse had considered only a small group of likely suspects. The murderer could, of course, have been someone completely unconnected with the Valerie Taylor affair; but he doubted it. There had been five of them, and he now felt that the odds against Mrs Phillipson and David Acum had lengthened considerably. That left the Taylors, the pair of them, and Phillipson himself. It was time he tried to put together the facts, many of them very odd facts, that he had gleaned about these three. It must be one of them surely; for he felt convinced now that Baines had been murdered before the visits of Mrs Phillipson and David Acum. Yes, that was the only way it could have been. He grasped the firm fact with both hands and swung himself on to a higher ledge, and discovered that from this vantage point the view seemed altogether different.
He drove to Capel Curig and there turned right on to the A5 towards Llangollen. And even as he drove he began to see the pattern. He ought to have seen it before; but with the testimony of Mrs Phillipson and Acum behind him, it became almost childishly easy now to fit the pieces into quite a different pattern. One by one they clicked into place with a simple inevitability, as on and on he drove at high speed, passing Shrewsbury and, keeping to the A5, rattling along the old Watling Street and almost missing the turning off for Daventry and Banbury. It was now nearly 8 p.m. and Morse was feeling the effects of his long day. He found his mind wandering off to that news item he had heard about the unfortunate lord in the Essex reservoir; and as he was leaving the outskirts of Banbury an oncoming car flashed its lights at him. He realized that he had been drifting dangerously over the centre of the road, and jerked himself into a startled wakefulness. He resolved not to allow his concentration to waver one centimetre, opened the side window and breathing deeply upon the cool night air, sang in a mournful baritone, over and over again, the first and only verse he could remember of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’.
He drove straight home and locked up the garage. It had been a long day, he hoped he would sleep well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy
LEWIS WAS GETTING better. He got up for a couple of hours just after Morse had arrived back in Oxford, with the aid of the banister made his careful way downstairs, and joined his surprised wife on the sofa in front of the television set. His temperature was normal now, and though he felt weak on his legs and sapped of his usual energy, he knew he would soon be back in harness. Many of the hours in bed he had spent in thinking, thinking about the Taylor case; and that morning he had been suddenly struck by an idea so novel and so exciting that he had persuaded his wife to ring the station immediately. But Morse was out: off to Wales, they said. It puzzled Lewis: the Principality in no way figured in his own new-minted version of events, and he guessed that Morse had followed one of his wayward fancies about Acum, wasted a good many gallons of police petrol, and advanced the investigation not one whit. But that wasn’t quite fair. In the hands of the chief inspector things seldom stood still; they might go sideways, or even backwards, and often (Lewis agreed) they went forwards. But they seldom stood still. Yes, Lewis had been deeply disappointed not to catch him. Everything – well, almost everything – fitted so perfectly. It had been that item on his bedside radio at eight o’clock that had started the chain reaction; that item about some big noise being washed up in a reservoir. He knew they had dredged the reservoir behind the Taylors’ home; but you could never be sure in such a wide stretch of water as that; and anyway it didn’t really matter much whether it was in the reservoir or somewhere else. That was just the starting point. And then there was that old boy at the Belisha crossing, and the basket, and – oh, lots of other things. How he wished he’d caught the chief at the station! The really surprising thing was that Morse hadn’t thought of it himself. He usually thought of everything – and more! But later, as the day wore on, he began to think that Morse probably had thought of it. After all, it was Morse himself who had suggested, right out of the blue, that she was carrying a basket.
Laboriously, during the afternoon, Lewis wrote it all down, and when he had finished the initial thrill was already waning, and he was left only with the quiet certainty that it had indeed been, for him, a remarkable brainwave, and that there was a very strong possibility that he might be right. At 9.15 p.m., he rang the station himself, but Morse had still not shown up.
‘Probably gone straight home – or to a pub,’ said the desk sergeant. Lewis left a message, and prayed that for the morrow the chief had planned no trip to the Western Isles.
Donald Phillipson and his wife sat silently watching the nine o’clock news on BBC television. They had said little all evening, and now that the children were snugly tucked up in bed, the little had dried up to nothing. Once or twice each of them had almost asked a question of the other, and it would have been the same question: is there anything you want to tell me? Or words to that effect. But neither of them had braved it, and at a quarter-past ten Mrs Phillipson brought in the coffee and announced that she was off to bed.
‘You’ve had your fill tonight, haven’t you?’
He mumbled something inaudible, and lumbered along unsteadily, trying with limited success to avoid bumping into her as they walked side by side along the narrow pavement. It was 10.45 p.m. and their home was only two short streets away from the pub.
‘Have you ever tried to work out how much you spend a week on beer and fags?’
It hurt him, and it wasn’t fair. Christ, it wasn’t fair.
‘If you want to talk about money, my gal, what about your Bingo. Every bloody night nearly.’
‘You just leave my Bingo out of it. It’s about the one pleasure I’ve got in life, and don’t you forget it. And some people win at Bingo; you know that, don’t you? Don’t tell me you’re so ignorant you don’t know that.’
‘Have you won recently?’ His tone was softer and he hoped very much that she had.
‘I’ve told you. You keep your nose out of it. I spend my own money, thank you, not yours; and if I win that’s my business, isn’t it?’
‘You were lashing out a bit with your money tonight, weren’t you? Bit free with your favours all round, if you ask me.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Her voice was very nasty.
‘Well, you—’
‘Look, if I want to treat some of my friends to a drink, that’s my lookout, isn’t it? It’s my money, too!’
‘I only meant—’
They were at the front gate now and she turned on him, her eyes flashing. ‘And don’t you ever dare to say anything again about my favours! Christ! You’re a one to talk, aren’t you – you – bastard!’
Their holiday together, the first for seven years, was due to begin at the weekend. The omens seemed hardly favourable.
It was half-past eleven when Morse finally laid his head upon the pillows. He shouldn’t have had so much beer really, but he felt he’d deserved it. It would mean shuffling along for a pee or two before the night was out. But what the hell! He felt at peace with himself and with the world in general. Beer was probably the cheapest drug on
the market, and he only wished that his GP would prescribe it for him on the National Health. Ah, this was good! He turned into the pillows. Old Lewis would be in bed, too. He would see Lewis first thing in the morning; and he was quite sure that however groggy his faithful sergeant was feeling he would sit up in his sick bed and blink with a pained, incredulous surprise. For tomorrow morning he would be able to reveal the identity of the murderer of Valerie Taylor and that of the murderer of Reginald Baines, to boot. Or, to be slightly more accurate, just the one identity; for it had been the same hand which had murdered them both, and Morse now knew whose hand it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.
Shakespeare, As You Like It
‘HOW’RE YOU DOING then, my old friend?’
‘Much better, thanks. Should be fit again any day now.’
‘Now you’re not to rush things, remember that. There’s nothing spoiling.’
‘Isn’t there, sir?’ The tone of the voice caught the inspector slightly unawares, and he looked at Lewis curiously.
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘I tried to get hold of you yesterday, sir.’ He sat up in bed and reached to the bedside table. ‘I thought I had a bright idea. I may be wrong, but . . . Well, here it is anyway, for what it’s worth.’ He handed over several sheets of notepaper, and Morse shelved his own pronouncements and sat down beside the bed. His head ached and he stared reluctantly at his sergeant’s carefully written notes.
