The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  “You’re acting now, aren’t you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re pretending you’re not surprised to see me.”

  “No, I’m not. I saw you sitting outside the Cotswold House yesterday; smoking a cigarette. I was walking down to Cutteslowe for a newspaper.”

  “Mind if I smoke now?”

  “Please do. I’ve, er, stopped myself.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since this morning.”

  “Would you like one?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Claire inhaled deeply, crossed her legs as she sat down again, and pulled her Jaeger skirt an inch or so below her knees.

  “Why didn’t you say hello?” she asked.

  “I was on the opposite side of the road.”

  “Not very pally, was it?”

  “Why didn’t you say hello to me?”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “I think you did, though.” His voice was suddenly gentle and she had the feeling that he knew far more about her than he should. “I think you saw me late Saturday afternoon as well—just after you’d arrived.”

  “You saw me? You saw me when you walked by with your booze?”

  Morse nodded.

  Blast him! Blast him! “I suppose you think you know why I’ve come here now.”

  Morse nodded again. “It’s not because I’m psychic, though. It’s just that Jim, Mr. O’Kane, he rang me yesterday …”

  “About this?” She held up the newspapers.

  “About the girl possibly calling there, yes. Very interesting, and very valuable, perhaps—I don’t know. They’re going to make a statement. Not to me though, I’m on holiday. Remember?”

  “So it’s a bit of a wasted journey. I was going to tell you—”

  “Not a wasted journey—don’t say that!”

  “I—I kept thinking about the girl—all day yesterday … well, quite a few times yesterday … You know, her calling there and perhaps not having the money and then—”

  “How much does a single room cost there now?”

  “I’m not sure. And you’re acting again! You know perfectly well I booked a double, don’t you? A double for two nights. You asked O’Kane—you nosey bloody parker!”

  For several seconds Morse seemed to look across the room at her with a steady intensity. “You’ve got beautifully elegant legs,” he said simply; but she sensed that her answer may have caused him a minor hurt. And suddenly, irrationally, she wanted him to come across the room to her, and take her hand. But he didn’t.

  “Coffee?” he asked briskly. “I’ve only got instant, I’m afraid.”

  “Some people prefer instant.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t suppose I can, er, pour you a glass of wine?”

  “What on earth makes you suppose that?”

  “Quite good,” she commented, a minute or so later.

  “Not bad, is it? You need a lot of it though. No good in small quantities.”

  She smiled attractively. “I see you’ve finished the crossword.”

  “Yes. It’s always easy on a Monday, did you know that? They work on the assumption that everybody’s a bit bleary-brained on a Monday morning.”

  “A lot of people take The Times just for the crossword.”

  “Yep.”

  “And the Letters, of course.”

  Morse watched her carefully. “And the Letters,” he repeated slowly.

  Claire unfolded her own copy of The Times, 13 July, and read aloud from a front-page article:

  Clues to missing student

  Both The Times offices and the Thames Valley Police are each still receiving about a dozen letters a day (as well as many phone calls) in response to the request for information concerning the disappearance a year ago of Karin Eriksson, the Swedish student who is thought to be the subject of the anonymous verses received by the police and printed in these columns (July 3). Chief Superintendent Strange of Thames Valley CID himself believes that the ingenious suggestions received in one of the latest communications (see Letters, page 15) is the most interesting and potentially the most significant hitherto received.

  “You must have read that?”

  “Yes. The trouble is, just like Mr. and Mrs. O’Kane said, you can’t follow up everything. Not even a tenth of the things that come in. Fortunately a lot of ’em are such crack-pot …” He picked up his own copy and turned to page 15, and sat looking (again) at the “ingenious suggestions”.

  “Clever—clever analysis,” he remarked.

  “Obviously a very clever fellow—the one who wrote that.”

  “Pardon?” said Morse.

  “The fellow who wrote that letter.”

  Morse read the name aloud: “Mr. Lionel Regis? Don’t know him myself.”

  “Perhaps nobody does.”

  “Pardon?”

  “See the address?”

  Morse looked down again, and shook his head. “Don’t know Salisbury very well myself.”

  “It’s my address!”

  “Really? So—are you saying you wrote this?”

  “Stop it!” she almost shrieked. “You wrote it! You saw my address in the visitors’ book at Lyme Regis, and you needed an address for this letter, otherwise your—your ‘ingenious suggestions’ wouldn’t be accepted. Am I right?”

  Morse said nothing.

  “You did write it, didn’t you? Please tell me!”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Why go to all this silly palaver?”

  “I just—well, I just picked someone from the top of my mind, that’s all. And you—you were there, Claire. Right at the top.”

  He’d spoken simply, and his eyes lifted from her legs to her face; and all the frustration, all the infuriation, suddenly drained away from her, and the tautness in her shoulders was wonderfully relaxed as she leaned back against the soft contours of the settee.

  For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Claire sat forward, emptied her glass, and got to her feet.

  “Have you got to go?” asked Morse quietly.

  “Fairly soon.”

  “I’ve got another bottle.”

  “Only if you promise to be nice to me.”

  “If I tell you what lovely legs you’ve got again?”

  “And if you put the record on again.”

  “CD actually. Bruckner Eight.”

  “Is that what it was? Not all that far off, was I?”

  “Very close, really,” said Morse. Then virtually to himself: for a minute or two, very close indeed.

  It was halfway through the second movement and three-quarters of the way through the second bottle that the front doorbell rang.

  “I can’t see you for the minute, I’m afraid, sir.”

  Strange sniffed, his small eyes suspicious.

  “Really? I’m a bit surprised about that, Morse. In fact I’m surprised you can’t see two of me!”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  In a Definition-and-Letter-Mixture puzzle, each clue consists of a sentence which contains a definition of the answer and a mixture of the letters

  (Don Manley, Chambers Crossword Manual)

  There were just two of them in Strange’s office the following morning, Tuesday, 14 July.

  It had surprised Strange not a little to hear of Morse’s quite unequivocal refusal to postpone a few days of his furlough and return immediately to HQ to take official charge of the case; especially in view of the latest letter—surely the break they’d all been hoping for. On the other hand there were more things in life than a blonde damozel who might or might not have been murdered a year ago. This bloody “joy” (huh!)-riding, for a start—now hitting the national news and the newspaper headlines. It all served, though, to put things into perspective a bit—like the letter he himself had received in the post (“Strictly Personal”) that very morning:

  To Chief Superintendent Strange,

  Kidlington Police HQ

/>   Dear Sir,

  It is naturally proper that our excellent whodunnit writers should pretend that the average criminal in the UK can boast the capacity for quite exceptional ingenuity in the commission of crime. But those of us who (like you) have given our lives to the detection of such crime should at this present juncture be reminding everyone that the vast majority of criminals are not (fortunately!) blessed with the sort of alpha-plus mentality that is commonly assumed.

  Obviously if any criminal is brought to book as a result of the correspondence etc. being conducted in sections of the national press, we shall all be most grateful. But I am myself most doubtful about such an outcome, and indeed in a wider sense I am very much concerned about the precedent involved. We have all heard of trial by TV, and we now seem to be heading for investigation by correspondence column. This is patently absurd. As I read things, the present business is pretty certainly a hoax in any case, with its perpetrator enjoying himself (or I suppose herself?) most hugely as various correspondents vie with one another in scaling ever steeper and steeper peaks of interpretive ingenuity. If the thing is not a hoax, I must urge that all investigation into the matter be communicated in the first instance to the appropriate police personnel, and most certainly not to radio, TV, or newspapers, so that the case may be solved through the official channels of criminal investigation.

  Yours sincerely,

  Peter Armitage

  (former Assistant Commissioner, New Scotland Yard) P.S. I need hardly add, I feel sure, that this letter is not for publication in any way.

  But this must almost certainly have been written before its author had seen the latest communiqué from the most intrepid mountaineer so far: the writer of the quite extraordinary letter which had appeared in the correspondence columns of The Times the previous morning.

  Strange now turned to Lewis. “You realize it’s the break, don’t you?”

  Lewis, like every other police officer at HQ, had read the letter; and, yes, he too thought it was the break. How else? But he couldn’t understand why Strange had asked him—him—along that morning. He was very tired anyway, and should by rights have been a-bed. On both Saturday and Sunday nights, like most officers in the local forces, his time had been spent until almost dawn behind a riot-shield, facing volleys of bricks and insults from gangs of yobbos clapping the skidding-skills of youths in stolen cars—amongst whom (had Lewis known it) was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy who was later to provide the key to the Swedish Maiden mystery.

  “Lewis! You’re listening, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “You do remember Morse belly-aching about transferring the search from Blenheim to Wytham?”

  “Yes, sir. But he wasn’t on the case more than a day or so.”

  “I know that,” snapped Strange. “But he must have had some reason, surely?”

  “I’ve never quite been able to follow some of his reasons.”

  “Do you know how much some of these bloody searches cost?”

  “No, sir.”

  Nor perhaps did Strange himself, for he immediately changed tack: “Do you think Morse was right?”

  “I dunno, sir. I mean, I think he’s a great man, but he sometimes gets things awfully wrong, doesn’t he?”

  “And he more often gets things bloody right!” said Strange with vehemence.

  It was an odd reversal of rôles, and Lewis hastened to put the record straight. “I think myself, sir, that—”

  “I don’t give a sod what you think, Sergeant! If I want to search Wytham Woods I’ll bloody well search ’em till a year next Friday if I—if I—think it’s worth the candle. All right?”

  Lewis nodded wordlessly across the table, watching the rising, florid exasperation in the Super’s face.

  “I’m not sure where I come into all this—” he began.

  “Well, I’ll tell you! There’s only one thing you can do and I can’t, Sergeant, and that’s to get the morose old bugger back to work here—smartish. I’m under all sorts of bloody pressure …”

  “But he’s on holiday, sir.”

  “I know he’s on bloody holiday. I saw him yesterday, drinking shampers and listening to Schubert—with some tart or other.”

  “Sure it was champagne, sir?”

  But quietly now, rather movingly, Strange was making his plea: “Christ knows why, Lewis, but he’ll always put himself out a bit for you. Did you realize that?”

  He rang from Morse’s own (empty) office.

  “Me, sir. Lewis.”

  “I’m on holiday.”

  “Super’s just had a word with me—”

  “Friday—that’s what I told him.”

  “You’ve seen the letter about Wytham, sir?”

  “Unlike you and your philistine cronies, Lewis, my daily reading includes the royal circulars in The Times, the editorials—”

  “What do I tell the Super, sir? He wants us—you and me—to take over straightaway.”

  “Tell him I’ll be in touch—tomorrow.”

  “Tell him you’ll ring, you mean?”

  “No. Tell him I’ll be back on duty tomorrow morning. Tell him I’ll be in my office any time after seven A.M.”

  “He won’t be awake then, sir.”

  “Don’t be too hard on him, Lewis. He’s getting old—and I think he’s got high blood pressure.”

  As he put down the phone, with supreme contentment, Lewis knew that Strange had been right—about Morse and himself; realized that in the case of the Swedish Maiden, the pair of them were in business again—w.e.f. the following morning.

  In his office, Strange picked up the cutting from The Times and read the letter yet again. Quite extraordinary!

  From Mr. Lionel Regis

  Sir, Like most of your other correspondents I must assume that the “Swedish Maiden” verses were composed by the person responsible for the murder of that unfortunate young lady. It is of course possible they were sent as a hoax, but such is not my view. In my opinion it is far more probable that the writer is exasperated by the inability of the police to come anywhere near the discovery of a body, let alone the arrest of a murderer. The verses, as I read them, are a cry from the murderer—not the victim—a cry for some discovery, some absolution, some relief from sleepless, haunted nights.

  But I would not have written to you, sir, merely to air such vague and dubious generalities. I write because I am a setter of crossword puzzles, and when I first studied the verses I had just completed a puzzle in which the answer to every clue was indicated by a definition of the word to be entered, and also by a sequenced anagram of the same word. It was with considerable interest therefore—and a good measure of incredulity—that I gradually spotted the fact that the word WYTHAM crops up, in anagrammatized form, in each of the five stanzas. Thus: THAW MY (stanza 1); [stre]AM WHY T[ell’st] (stanza 2); WHAT MY (stanza 3); [s]AW THYM[e] (stanza 4); and [no]W THY MA[iden] (stanza 5).

  The occurrence of five such instances is surely way beyond the bounds of coincidence. (I have consulted my mathematical friends on this matter.) “Wytham”, I learn (I am not an Oxford man), is the name of some woods situated to the west of Oxford. If the verse tells us anything then, it is surely that the body sought is to be found in Wytham Woods, and it is my humble suggestion that any further searches undertaken should be conducted in that quarter.

  Yours,

  LIONEL REGIS,

  16 Cathedral Mews, Salisbury.

  Like Lewis, Strange remembered exactly what Morse had said on his postcard: “I reckon I know what the poem means!”, and he pushed the newspaper aside, and looked out across the car park.

  “Lionel Regis, my arse!” he said quietly to himself.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  On another occasion he was considering how best to welcome the postman, for he brought news from a world outside ourselves. I and he agreed to stand behind the front door at the time of his arrival and to ask him certain questions. On that day, however, the postman did no
t come

  (Peter Champkin, The Sleeping Life of Aspern Williams)

  Wednesday, 15 July, was never going to be a particularly memorable day. No fire-faced prophet was to bring news of the Message or the name of the One True God. Just a fairly ordinary transitional sort of day in which events appeared discrete and only semi-sequential; when some of the protagonists in the Swedish Maiden case were moved to their new positions on the chessboard, but before the game was yet begun.

  At a slightly frosty meeting held in the Assistant Chief Constable’s office at 10:30 A.M., the Swedish Maiden case was reviewed in considerable detail by the ACC himself, Chief Superintendent Strange, and Detective Chief Inspectors Johnson and Morse. General agreement was reached (only one dissident voice) that perhaps there was little now to be gained from any prolongation of the extensive and expensive search-programme on the Blenheim Palace Estate. The decision was reported too, emanating from “higher authority”, that Morse was now i/c and that Johnson would therefore be enabled to take his midsummer furlough as scheduled. Such official verbiage would fool no one, of course—but it was possibly better than nothing at all.

  Amongst the items reviewed was yet another letter, printed that morning in The Times:

  From Mr. John C. Chavasse

  Sir, The Wood (singular not plural please) at Wytham is a place most familiar to me and I suspect to almost all generations of young men who have taken their degrees at Oxford University. Well do I remember the summer weekends in the late 40s when together with many of my fellow undergraduates I cycled up through Lower Wolvercote to Wytham.

  In lines 14 and 15 of the (now notorious!) verses, we find “A creature white” (sic) “Trapped in a gin” (sic), Panting like a hunted deer” (sic). Now if this is not a cryptic reference to a gin- and-whatnot in that splendid old hostelry in Wytham, the White Hart—then I’m a Dutchman, sir! But I am convinced (as an Englishman) that such a reference can only serve to corroborate the brilliant analysis of the verses made by Mr. Lionel Regis (Letters, July 13).

  Yours faithfully,

  JOHN C. CHAVASSE,