The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  The sun had already risen, a great ball of orange over the cliffs to the east, over Charmouth—where they said someone had discovered a dinosaur or a pterodactyl, or something, that had lived in some distant prehistoric age, some figure with about twelve noughts after it. Or was it twenty?

  Deciding that he really ought to learn more about the world of natural history, Morse drained his coffee and without shaving walked down to the deserted ground floor, out of the hotel, and left along Marine Parade—where his search began.

  The newsagent on the corner felt pretty sure that he hadn’t got a previous day’s Times: Sun, yes; Mirror, yes; Express, yes … but, no—no Times. Sorry, mate. Turning left, Morse struggled up the steep incline of Broad Street. Still out of breath, he enquired in the newsagent’s shop halfway up on the left. Telegraph, Guardian, Independent—any good? No? Sorry, sir. Morse got another “sir” in the newsagent’s just opposite—but no Times. He carried on to the top of the hill, turned left at a rather seedy-looking cinema, then left again into Cobb Road, and down to the western end of Marine Parade—where a fourth newsagent was likewise unable to assist, with the chief inspector reduced in rank to “mate” once more.

  Never mind! Libraries kept back numbers of all the major dailies; and if he were desperate—which he most certainly wasn’t—he could always go down on his knees and beg Mrs. Misery-guts to let him take a peek at her newspaper. If she’d still got it … Forget it, Morse! What’s it matter, anyway?

  What’s she matter?

  Strolling briskly now along the front, Morse breathed deeply on the early-morning air—cigarettes were going to be out that day. Completely out. He had, he realized, just walked a sort of rectangle; well, a “trapezium” really—that was the word: a quadrilateral with two parallel sides. And doubtless he would have told himself it wouldn’t be a bad idea to brush up on his geometry had he not caught sight of a figure in front of him, about two hundred yards distant. For there, beneath the white canopy of the buff-coloured Bay Hotel, with its yellow two-star AA sign, stood Mrs. Hardinge, Mrs. Crabcrumpet herself, dressed in a full-length black leather coat, and searching in a white shoulder-bag. For a purse, probably? But before she could find it she raised her right hand in greeting as a taxi drew up along the lower road, its driver manoeuvering 180 degrees in the turning area, then getting out and opening the near-side rear door for the elegant, luggageless woman who had just walked down the ramp. Morse, who had stopped ostensibly to survey the ranks of fruit machines in the Novelty Emporium, looked down at his wrist-watch: 7:50 A.M.

  The ground floor was still deserted, and as yet no delicious smell of fried bacon betrayed the opening of the hostelry’s daily routine. Morse passed by the giant potted-palm, passed by the statue of a maiden perpetually pouring a slow trickle from her water-jug into the pool at her feet, and was starting up the stairs when his eye fell on the reception desk to his right: a jar of artificial flowers; a tray of mineral water; a yellow RNLI collecting box; and below a stack of brochures and leaflets—the hotel register. He glanced around him. No one.

  He looked swiftly along the linear information once again:

  3–7–92—Mr. and Mrs. . A. Hardinge—16 Cathedral Mews, Salisbury—H 35 LWL—British—Rm 14

  It had been the Oxfordshire letter-registration, LWL, which had caught his eye that previous evening. Now it was something else: that . It was her all right though, for he’d seen the room number on her key-ring at dinner. And frowning slightly as he mounted the stairs, he found himself wondering how many married women were unable to write out the accepted formula for their wedded state without getting the wrong initial. Perhaps she was only recently married? Perhaps she was one of those liberated ladies who had suddenly decided that if only one initial were required it was going to be hers? Perhaps … perhaps they weren’t “Mr. and Mrs.” at all, and she had been momentarily confused about what names they were going under this time?

  The latter, he thought—a little sadly.

  Breakfast (8:45 A.M.—9:30 A.M.) was for Morse a solitary affair, yet he was finding it, as ever, the biggest single joy of any holiday. After some Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and a mixed grill, he strolled along the edge of the sea once more, feeling pleasantly replete and (he supposed) about as content as he was ever likely to be. The weather forecast was good, and he decided that he would drive out west to Ottery St. Mary and then, if the mood took him, north up to Nether Stowey, and the Quantocks.

  As he reached the second-floor landing after his return to the hotel, Room 14 was almost directly in front of him; and with the door slightly ajar, as one blue-uniformed room-maid came out with a hoover, he could see another maid inside the room replenishing the sachets of coffee and tea and the little tubs of milk. He took his chance. Knocking (not too hesitantly), he put his head round the door.

  “Mrs. Hardinge in?”

  “No, sur.” She looked no more than eighteen, and Morse felt emboldened.

  “It’s just that she promised to keep yesterday’s newspaper for me—we had dinner here together last night. The Times, it was.”

  The maid gave Morse a dubious look as he cast a swift glance over the room. The bed nearer the window had been slept in—the pillow deeply indented, a flimsy black negligée thrown carelessly over the duvet. But had Mr. Hardinge slept in the other? The bed could have been made up already, of course … but where was his case and his clothes and his other impedimenta?

  “I’m afraid there’s no newspaper as I can see ’ere, sur. In any case, I wouldn’t—”

  “Please, please! I fully understand. I mean, if it’s not in the waste-paper basket …”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “There’d be another basket, though? In the bathroom? It’s just that she did say …”

  The young girl peered cautiously round the bathroom door, but shook her head.

  Morse smiled affably. “It’s all right. She must have left it somewhere else for me. Probably in my room. Huh! Sorry to have bothered you.”

  Back in Room 27, he found his own bed made up, the floor hoovered, and his coffee cup washed and placed upside-down on its matching saucer. He stood for several minutes looking out at the sea again, telling himself he must re-read The Odyssey; and soon, almost unconsciously, finding himself smoking one of his forbidden cigarettes and wondering why the brown leather suitcase he had just seen lying closed on the set of drawers in Room 14 bore, in an attractive Gothic script, the gilt letters “C S O”. The only thing he knew with such initials was Community Service Order—but that seemed wholly unlikely. Must be her initials, surely. But whatever the C stood for—Carole? Catherine? Claire? Celia? Constance?—it was going to be obvious even to an under-achiever in the new seven-year-old reading tests that the O didn’t stand for “Hardinge”. It may reasonably have been the lady’s surname before she got married. But the case was a new one—a very new one …

  So what, Morse! So bloody what!

  He sat down and wrote a note.

  Dear Mrs. H, I shall be most grateful if you can save yesterday’s Times for me. Not the Business/Sport section; just the main newspaper—in fact I only really want to look at the bit on p. 1 (and probably a continuation on an inside page) about the “Sinister Verses” article. Your reward, which you must accept, will be a drink on me at the bar before dinner, when I promise to adhere religiously to every one of the management’s ordinances.

  Room 27

  Leaving this innocent, if rather pompous, communication with the proprietor, Morse walked along to the private garage, pondering the reason why the female half of Room 14 had not made use of car H 35 LWL instead of ordering a taxi. Pondering only briefly though, since he thought he now knew why Mrs. C. Something (Hardinge?) had been acting so strangely. Well, no—not “strangely”, not if you looked at it from her point of view. Forget it, Morse! Get your road atlas out and trace the easiest route to Ottery St. Mary.

  Soon the Jaguar was on its way, with the sun growing warmer by the minute, and hardly a cloud in
the bluest of skies. By the time he reached Honiton, Morse had almost forgotten the rather odd fact that when he had looked just now around the other cars in the hotel’s garage, there had been no sign whatsoever of any vehicle with the registration H 35 LWL.

  Chapter Five

  Extract from a diary dated 26 June 1992 (one week before Morse had found himself in Lyme Regis)

  Words! Someone—a Yank I think—said you can stroke people with words. I say—sod words! Especially sod the sight of words. They’re too powerful. “Naked” ‘s powerful. “Breasts” are powerful. Larkin said he thought the most splendid verb in the language was “unbutton”. But when the words are a joke? Oh God, help me! Please God, help me! Yesterday Tom wrote me a letter from his new house in Maidstone. Here’s part of what he wrote

  I’ve got a pair of great tits in the garden here. Now don’t you go and think that when I look down from my study window with the binocs you bought me there’s this bronzed and topless and vasty bosomed signora sunning herself on a Lilo. No! Just a wonderfully entertaining little pair of great tits who’ve taken up residence—a bit late aren’t they?—in the nesting-box we fixed under the beech tree. Remember that line we learned at school?

  Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi …

  Those are Tom’s words. Wouldn’t you think that any normally civilized soul would be delighted with the thought of those little blue black white yellow birds (my speciality!!) slipping their slim little selves into a nesting-box? Wouldn’t you think that only a depraved and perverted mind would dwell instead upon that picture of a woman on a sunbed? Wouldn’t you think that any sensitive soul would rejoice in that glorious Virgilian hexameter instead of seeing another “tit” in the opening word? Christ, it was only a pun wasn’t it! The Greek term is “paronomasia”. I’d forgotten that but I just looked it up in my book of literary terms. And still the words follow me. Looking through the p’s I found “pornography” again. Words! Bloody hell. God help me!

  “Common subjects of such exotic pornography are sadism, masochism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism (or scoptolagnia), narcissism, pederasty, and necrophilia. Less common subjects are coprophilia, kleptolagnia, and zoophilia.”

  Should it be a fraction of comfort that my tastes don’t yet run to these last three “less common” perversions—if that’s the right word. What does the middle one mean anyway? It’s not in Chambers.

  (Later) Dinner in SCR very good—“Barbue Housman”. I phoned C. afterwards and I almost dare to believe she’s really looking forward to next weekend. I just wish I could go to sleep and wake up on the 3rd. But I seem to spend half my time wishing my life away. I have drunk too much. Oh God, let me sleep well!

  Chapter Six

  … and hence through life

  Chasing chance-started friendships

  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “To the Revd. George Coleridge”)

  In mid-afternoon Morse looked back on his Coleridge pilgrimage with considerable disappointment.

  Half a dozen miles west of Honiton he had turned left off the A30 for the little market town of Ottery St. Mary. Parking had proved a virtually insuperable problem; and when he finally got to the Information Office he learned only that “Coleridge was born here in 1772 at the Rectory (gone), the tenth child of The Revd. J. Coleridge, vicar 1760–81, and master of the Grammar School (gone). The rapidly growing family soon occupied the old School House (gone) …”. St. Mary’s was still there though, and he walked around the large church consulting some printed notes on “Points of Interest”, fixed to a piece of wood shaped like a hand-mirror. He began to feel, as he read, that it was high time he re-familiarized himself with “corbels” and “mouldings” and “ogees”; but it was something of a surprise that the author of the notes appeared never to have heard of Coleridge. Indeed it was only by accident that as he was leaving the church he spotted a memorial plaque on the churchyard wall, with a low-relief bust of the poet beneath the outspread wings of an albatross.

  An hour and a half later, after a fast drive up the M5, Morse was equally disappointed with the village of Nether Stowey. “The small thatched cottage, damp and uncomfortable” wherein Coleridge had lived in 1796 was now enlarged, tiled, and (doubtless) centrally heated, too. More to the point, it was closed to the public—on Saturdays; and today was Saturday. Inside the church the leaflet available for visitors (“Please take—quite free!”) was a singularly uninformative document, and Morse felt no inclination to heed the vicar’s exhortation to join the church fellowship—“emphasis ever on joyous informality”. He put 50p in a slot in the wall and joylessly began the drive back to Lyme Regis.

  Perhaps Strange had been right all along. Perhaps he, Morse, was the sort of person who could never really enjoy a holiday. Even the pint of beer he’d drunk in a rather dreary pub in Nether Stowey had failed to satisfy, and he didn’t really know what he wanted. Or rather he did: he wanted a cigarette for a start; and he wanted something to engage his brain, like a cryptic crossword or a crime—or the previous day’s issue of The Times. But there was something else too, though he was hardly prepared to admit it even to himself: he would have wished Mrs. Hardinge (or Mrs. Whatever) to be beside him in the passenger seat.

  A voice in his brain told him that he was being quite extraordinarily foolish. But he didn’t listen.

  At 3:45 P.M. he parked the Jaguar in the hotel garage: only three other cars there now—none of the three with the Oxon registration.

  At the Corner Shop on Marine Parade, he succumbed to two temptations, and resisted a third. He bought twenty Dunhill International, and a copy of The Times; but the magazine with the seductively posed, semi-clad siren on its glossy cover remained on the top shelf—if only because he would be too embarrassed and ashamed to face the hard-eyed man behind the counter.

  Back in the hotel, he took a leisurely bath and then went down to the residents’ lounge, where he unfolded the cover from the full-sized billiard table, and for half an hour or so pretended he was Steve Davis. After all, didn’t The Oxford Companion to Music devote one entire page to “Mozart on the Billiard Table”? Morse, however, was unable to pot virtually anything, irrespective of angle or distance; and just as carefully as he had unfolded the cover he now replaced it, and returned to his room, deciding (if life should allow) to brush up on his cuemanship as well as on that glossary of architectural terms. This was exactly why holidays were so valuable, he told himself: they allowed you to stand back a bit, and see where you were going rusty.

  It was whilst lying fully clothed on his single bed, staring soberly at the ceiling, that there was a knock on the door and he got up to open it. It was the proprietor himself, carrying a Sainsbury’s supermarket carrier bag.

  “Mrs. Hardinge wanted you to have this, Mr. Morse. I tried to find you earlier, but you were out—and she insisted I gave it to you personally.”

  What was all this to Morse’s ears? Music! Music! Heavenly music!

  Inside the carrier bag was the coveted copy of The Times, together with a “Bay Hotel” envelope, inside which, on a “Bay Hotel” sheet of note-paper, was a brief letter:

  For 27 from 14. I’ve seen a paperback called The Bitch by one of the Collins sisters. I’ve not read it but I think it must be all about me, don’t you? If I’m not at dinner I’ll probably be in soon after and if you’re still around you can buy me a brandy. After all these newspapers do cost honest money you know!

  For Morse this innocent missive was balm and manna to the soul. It was as if he’d been trying to engage the attention of a lovely girl at a dinner party who was apparently ignoring him, and who now suddenly leaned forward and held her lips against his cheek in a more than purely perfunctory kiss.

  Strangely, however, before reading the article, Morse picked up the bedside phone and dialled police HQ at Kidlington.

  Chapter Seven

  I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction

  (Aneurin Bevan, quoted in The Observer, 3 April
1960)

  Police pass sinister verses to Times’ man

  THE LITERARY correspondent of The Times, Mr. Howard Phillipson, has been called upon by the Oxfordshire police to help solve a complex riddle-me-ree, the answer to which is believed to pinpoint the spot where a young woman’s body may be buried.

  The riddle, in the form of a five-stanza poem, was sent anonymously by a person who (as the police believe) knows the secret of a crime which for twelve months has remained on the unsolved-case shelves in the Thames Valley Police HQ at Kidlington. Oxfordshire.

  “The poem is a fascinating one,” said Mr. Phillipson, “and I intend to spend the weekend trying to get to grips with it. After a brief preliminary look I almost think that the riddle has a strong enough internal logic to be solvable within its own context, but we must wait and see.”

  According to Detective Chief Inspector Harold Johnson of Thames Valley CID the poem would fairly certainly appear to have reference to the disappearance of a Swedish student whose rucksack was found in a lay-by on the northbound carriageway of the A44, a mile or so south of Woodstock, in July 1991. Documents found in the side-panels of the rucksack had identified its owner as Karin Eriksson, a student from Uppsala, who had probably hitchhiked her way from London to Oxford, spent a day or so in the University City—and then? Who knows?

  “The case was always a baffling one,” admitted DCI Johnson. “No body was ever found, no suspicious circumstances uncovered. It is not unknown for students to be robbed of their possessions, or lose them. And of course some of them run away. But we’ve always thought of this as a case of potential murder.”

  At the time of her disappearance, Miss Eriksson’s mother informed the police that Karin had phoned her from London a week or so previously, sounding “brisk and optimistic”, albeit rather short of cash. And the Principal of the secretarial college where Karin was a student described her as “an attractive, able, and athletic young lady”. Since the discovery of the rucksack, no trace whatever has been found, although senior police officers were last night suggesting that this new development might throw fresh light on one or two possible clues discovered during the earlier investigation.