by Colin Dexter
* * *
It was not until just before 9 P.M. that Dr. Alan Hardinge arrived—explaining, excusing, but as vulnerable, as loving as ever. And—bless him!—he had brought a bottle of Brut Imperial, and a bottle of Skye Talisker malt. And almost, almost (as she later told herself) had Claire Osborne enjoyed the couple of hours they’d spent together that night between the immaculately laundered sheets in Room 1 in the Cotswold House in North Oxford.
Morse had arrived home at 2:30 P.M. that same day. No one, as far as he knew, was aware that he had returned (except Lewis?); yet Strange had telephoned at 4 P.M. Would Morse be happy to take on the case? Well, whether he would be happy or not, Morse was going to take on the case.
“What case?” Morse had asked, disingenuously.
At 5 P.M. he had walked down to Summertown and bought eight pint-cans of newly devised “draught” bitter, which promised him the taste of a hand-pulled, cask-conditioned drop of ale; and two bottles of his favourite Quercy claret. For Morse—considerably out of condition still—the weight felt a bit too hefty; and outside the Radio Oxford building he halted awhile and looked behind him in the hope of seeing the oblong outline of a red double-decker coming up from the city centre. But there was no bus in sight, so he walked on. As he passed the Cotswold House he saw amongst other things the familiar white sign “No Vacancies” on the door. He was not surprised. He had heard very well of the place. He wouldn’t mind staying there himself.
Especially for the breakfasts.
Chapter Nineteen
I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings
(Thomas Aldrich, Leaves from a Notebook)
Strange had been really quite pleased with all the publicity. Seldom had there been such national interest in a purely notional murder; and the extraordinary if possibly unwarranted ingenuity which the public had already begun to exercise on the originally printed verses was most gratifying—if not as yet of much concrete value. There had been two further offerings in the Letters to the Editor page in the Saturday, 11 July’s issue of The Times:
From Gillian Richard
Sir, Professor Gray (July 9) seems to me too lightly to dismiss one factor in the Swedish Maiden case. She is certainly, in my view, alive still, but seemingly torn between the wish to live—and the wish to die. She has probably never won any poetry competition in her life, and I greatly doubt whether she is to be found as a result of her description of the natural world. But she is out there, in the natural world—possibly living rough; certainly not indoors. I would myself hazard a guess, dismissed by Professor Gray, that she is in a car somewhere, and here the poem’s attribution (A. Austin 1853–87) can give us the vital clue. What about an A-registration Austin? It would be a 1983 model, yes; and might we not have the registration number, too? I suggest A 185—then three letters. If we suppose 3=C, 8=H, and 7=G (the third, eighth, and seventh letters of the alphabet), we have A 185 CGH. Perhaps then our young lady is languishing in an ageing Metro? And if so, sir, we must ask one question: who is the owner of that car? Find her!
Yours etc.,
GILLIAN RICHARD,
26 Hayward Road, Oxford.
From Miss Polly Rayner
Sir, I understand from your report on the disappearance a year ago of a Swedish student that her rucksack was found near the village of Begbroke in Oxfordshire. It may be that I am excessively addicted to your own crossword puzzles but surely we can be justified in spotting a couple of “clues” here? The “-broke” of the village name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word “brok”, meaning “running water” or “stream”. And since “beg” is a synonym of “ask”, what else are we to make of the first three words in line 7: “Ask the stream”? Indeed, this clue is almost immediately confirmed two lines later in the injunction “ask the sun”. “The Sun” is how the good citizens of Begbroke refer to their local hostelry, and it is in and around that hostelry where in my view the police should reconcentrate their enquiries.
Yours faithfully,
POLLY RAYNER,
President,
Woodstock Local History Society, Woodstock, Oxon.
That was more like it! Strange had earlier that day put the suggested car registration through the HQ’s traffic computer. No luck! Yet this was just the sort of zany, imaginative idea that might well unlock the mystery, and stimulate a few more such ideas into the bargain. When he had rung Morse that same Saturday afternoon (he too had read the postcard!) he had not been at all surprised by Morse’s apparent—surely only “apparent”?—lack of interest in taking over the case immediately. Yes, Morse still had a few days’ leave remaining—only to the Friday, mind! But, really, this case was absolutely up the old boy’s street! Tailormade for Morse, this case of the Swedish Maiden …
Strange decided to leave things alone for a while though—well, until the next day. He had more than enough on his plate for the minute. The previous evening had been a bad one, with the City and County police at full stretch with the (virtual) riots on the Broadmoor Lea estate: car-thefts, joy-riding, ram-raids, stone-throwing … With Saturday and Sunday evenings still to come! He felt saddened as he contemplated the incipient breakdown in law and order, contempt for authority—police, church, parents, school … Augh! Yet in one awkward, unexplored little corner of his mind, he knew he could almost understand something of it all—just a fraction. For as a youth, and a fairly privileged youth at that, he remembered harbouring a secret desire to chuck a full-sized brick through the window of one particularly well-appointed property …
But yes—quite definitely, yes!—he would feel so very much happier if Morse could take over the responsibility of the case; take it away from his own, Strange’s, shoulders.
Thus it was that Strange had rung Morse that Saturday afternoon.
“What case?” Morse had asked.
“You know bloody well—”
“I’m still on furlough, sir. I’m trying to catch up with the housework.”
“Have you been drinking, Morse?”
“Just starting, sir.”
“Mind if I come and join you?”
“Not this afternoon, sir. I’ve got a wonderful—odd, actually!—got a wonderful Swedish girl in the flat with me just at the moment.”
“Oh!”
“Look,” said Morse slowly, “if there is a breakthrough in the case. If there does seem some reason—”
“You been reading the correspondence?”
“I’d sooner miss The Archers!”
“Do you think it’s all a hoax?”
Strange heard Morse’s deep intake of breath: “No! No, I don’t. It’s just that we’re going to get an awful lot of false leads and false confessions—you know that. We always do. Trouble is, it makes us look such idiots, doesn’t it—if we take everything too seriously.”
Yes, Strange accepted that what Morse had just said was exactly his own view. “Morse. Let me give you a ring tomorrow, all right? We’ve got those bloody yoiks out on Broadmoor Lea to sort out …”
“Yes, I’ve been reading about it while I was away.”
“Enjoy your holiday, in Lyme?”
“Not much.”
“Well, I’d better leave you to your … your ‘wonderful Swedish girl’, wasn’t it?”
“I wish you would.”
After Morse had put down his phone, he switched his CD player on again to the Immolation Scene from the finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung; and soon the pure and limpid voice of the Swedish soprano, Birgit Nilsson, resounded again through the chief inspector’s flat.
Chapter Twenty
When I complained of having dined at a splendid table without hearing one sentence worthy to be remembered, he [Dr. Johnson] said, “There is seldom any such conversation”
(James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)
In the small hours of Sunday, 12 July, Claire Osborne still lay awake,
wondering yet again about what exactly it was she wanted from life. It had been all right—it usually was “all right”. Alan was reasonably competent, physically—and so loving. She liked him well enough, but she could never be in love with him. She had given him as much of herself as she could; but where, she asked herself, was the memorability of it all? Where the abiding joy in yet another of their brief, illicit, slightly disturbing encounters.
“To hell with this sex lark, Claire!” her best friend in Salisbury had said. “Get a man who’s interesting, that’s what I say. Like Johnson! Now, he was interesting!”
“Doctor Johnson? He was a great fat slob, always dribbling his soup down his waistcoast, and he was smelly, and never changed his underpants!”
“Never?”
“You know what I mean.”
“But everybody wanted to hear him talk, didn’t they? That’s what I’m saying.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“Yeah!”
And the two women had laughed together—if with little conviction.
Alan Hardinge had earlier said little about the terrible accident: a few stonily spoken details about the funeral; about the little service they were going to hold at the school; about the unexpected helpfulness of the police and the authorities and support groups and neighbours and relatives. But Claire had not questioned him about any aspect of his own grief. She would, she knew, be trespassing upon a territory that was not, and never could be, hers …
It was 3:30 A.M. before she fell into a fitful slumber.
At the breakfast table the following morning she explained briefly that her husband had been called away and that there would be just her: coffee and toast, please—nothing more. A dozen or so newspapers, room-numbered in the top-right corner, lay in a staggered pile on a table just inside the breakfast room—The Sunday Times not amongst them.
Jim O’Kane seldom paid too much attention to the front page of the “Sundays”; but ten minutes before Claire had put in an appearance, he’d spotted the photograph. Surely he’d seen that young girl before! He took The Sunday Times through to the kitchen where, under the various grills, his wife was watching the progress of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, and sausages. He pointed to the black and white photograph on the front page:
“Recognize her?”
Anne O’Kane stared at the photograph for a few seconds, quizzically turning her head one way, then the other, seeking to assess any potential likeness to anyone she’d ever met. “Should I?”
“I think I do! You remember that young blonde girl who called—about a year ago—when we had a vacancy—one Sunday—and then she called again—later—when we hadn’t?”
“Yes, I do remember,” Anne said slowly. “I think I do.” She had been quickly reading the article beneath the photograph, and she now looked up at her husband as she turned over half a dozen rashers of bacon. “You don’t mean …?”
But Jim O’Kane did mean.
Claire was on her last piece of toast when she found her hostess standing beside her with the newspaper. “We pinched this for a minute—hope you didn’t mind.”
“Course not.”
“It’s just that”—Anne pointed to the reproduction—“well, it looks a bit like a young girl who called here once. A young girl who disappeared about a year ago.”
“Long time, a year is.”
“Yes. But Jim—my husband—he doesn’t often forget faces; and I think,” she added quietly, “I think he’s right.”
Claire glanced down at the photograph and the article, betraying (she trusted) not a hint of her excitement. “You’d better tell them—the police, hadn’t you?”
“I suppose we should. It’s just that Jim met one of the men from CID recently at a charity-do, and this fellow said one of the biggest problems with murders is all the bogus confessions and hoax calls you always get.”
“But if you do recognize her—”
“Not one hundred per cent. Not really. What I do remember is that this girl I’m thinking of called and asked if we’d got a room and then when she knew what it would cost she just sort of … Well, I think she couldn’t afford it. Then she called back later, this same girl …”
“And you were full?”
Anne O’Kane nodded sadly, and Claire finished a last mouthful of toast. “Not always easy to know what to do for the best.”
“No.”
“But if your husband knows this CID man he could always just, you know, mention it unofficially, couldn’t he?”
“Ye-es. Wouldn’t do any harm. You’re right. And he only lives just up the road. In one of the bachelor flats.”
“What’s his name? Lord Peter Wimsey?”
“Morse. Chief Inspector Morse.”
Claire looked down at her empty plate, and folded her white linen table napkin.
“More toast?” asked Anne O’Kane.
Claire shook her head, her flawlessly painted lips showing neither interest nor surprise.
Chapter Twenty-one
It is only the first bottle that is expensive
(French proverb)
Claire Osborne had discovered what she wanted that same morning. However, it was not until the following morning, 13 July (Sunday spent with Alan Hardinge), that she acted upon her piece of research. It had been terribly easy—just a quick look through the two-inch-thick phone-book for Oxford and District which lay beside the pay-phone: several Morses, but only one “Morse, E.”—and the phone number, to boot! Leys Close, she learned from the Oxford street-map posted on the wall just inside the foyer, looked hardly more than two hundred yards away. She could have asked the O’Kanes, of course … but it was a little more exciting not to.
It was another fine sunny morning; and having packed her suitcase and stowed it in the boot of the Metro, and with permission to leave the car (“Shouldn’t be all that long,” she’d explained), she walked slowly up towards the roundabout, soon coming to the sign “Residents Only: No Public Right of Way”, then turning left through a courtyard, before arriving at a row of two-storey, yellow-bricked, newish properties, their woodwork painted a uniform white. The number she sought was the first number she saw.
After knocking gently, she noticed, through the window to her left, the white shelving of a kitchen unit and a large plastic bottle of Persil on the draining board. She noticed, too, that the window directly above her was widely open, and she knew that he must be there even before she saw the vague silhouette behind the frosted glass.
What the hell are you doing here?—is that what she’d expected him to say? But he said nothing as he opened the door, bent down to pick up a red-topped bottle of semi-skinned Co-op milk, stood to one side, inclined his head slightly to the right, and ushered her inside with an old-world gesture of hospitality. She found herself in a large lounge with two settees facing each other, the one to her left in a light honey-coloured leather, to which Morse pointed, and in which she now sat—a wonderfully soft and comfortable thing! Music was playing—something with a sort of heavyweight sadness about it which she thought she almost recognized. Late nineteenth century? Wagner? Mahler? Very haunting and beautiful. But Morse had pressed a panel in the sophisticated bank of equipment on the shelves just behind the other settee, a smaller one in black leather, in which he seated himself and looked across at her, his blue eyes showing a hint of amusement but nothing of surprise.
“No need to turn it off for me, you know.”
“Of course not. I turned it off for me. I can never do two things at the same time.”
Looking at the almost empty glass of red wine which stood on the low coffee table beside him, Claire found herself doubting the strictly literal truth of the statement.
“Wagner, was it?”
Morse’s eyes lit up with some interest. “It does show some Wagnerian harmonic and melodic traits, I agree.”
What a load of crap, the pompous oaf! Blast him. Why didn’t he just tell her? She pointed to the bottle of Quercy: “I thought
you couldn’t cope with two things at once?”
“Ah! But drinking’s like breathing, really. You don’t have to think about it, do you? And it’s good for you—did you know that? There’s this new report out saying a regular drop of booze is exceedingly good for the heart.”
“Not quite so good for the liver, though.”
“No.” He smiled at her now, leaning back in the settee, his arms stretched out along the top, wearing the same short-sleeved pink shirt she’d seen him in the previous Saturday. He probably needed a woman around the house.
“I thought you were supposed to wait till the sun had passed the yard-arm, or something like that.”
“That’s an odd coincidence!” Morse pointed to The Times on the coffee table. “It was in the crossword this morning: ‘yard-arm’.”
“What is a yard-arm, exactly?”
Morse shook his head. “I’m not interested in boats or that sort of thing. I prefer the Shakespeare quote—remember? That line about ‘the prick of noon’?”
“ ‘The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of the noon’?”
“How on earth did you know that?”
“I once played the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet.”
“Not the sort of thing for a schoolgirl—”
“University, actually.”
“Oh. I was never on the boards much myself. Just the once really. I had a line ‘I do arrest thee, Antonio’. For some reason it made the audience laugh. Never understood why …”
Still clutching her copies of the previous day’s Sunday Times and the current issue of The Times, Claire looked slowly around at the book-lined walls, at the stacks of records everywhere, at the pictures (one or two of them fractionally askew). She especially admired the watercolour just above Morse’s head of the Oxford skyline in a bluey-purple wash. She was beginning to enjoy the conversational skirmishing, she admitted that; but there was still something irritating about the man. For the first time she looked hard, directly across at him.
