The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  But Morse was paying scant attention to him. After all, that was the manager’s job, wasn’t it? To make the most of what Morse had seen with his own eyes as a pretty limited bit of Lebensraum, especially for a married couple with one infant—at least one infant.

  “Didn’t you just say that the maximum for a short-term let was two hundred and fifty pounds a week?”

  Buckby grinned “Not for that place—well, you’ve seen it. And what makes you think it’s a short-term let, Inspector?”

  The blood was tingling at the back of Morse’s neck, and subliminally some of the specifications that Buckby had recited were beginning to register in his brain. He reached over and picked up the sheet.

  Hall, living room, separate dining room, well-fitted kitchen, two bedrooms, studio/study, bathroom, full gas CH, small walled garden

  Two bedrooms … and a sick wife sleeping in one of them … studio … and a little girl sitting on a swing … God! Morse shook his head in disbelief at his own idiocy.

  “I really came to ask you, sir, if you had any record of who was living in that property last July. But I think—I think—you’re going to tell me that it was Dr. Alasdair McBryde; that he hasn’t got a wife; that the people upstairs have got a little dark-haired daughter; that the fellow probably hails from Malta—”

  “Gibraltar, actually.”

  “You’ve got some spare keys, sir?” asked Morse, almost despairingly.

  In front of Seckham Villa the Jaguar sat undisturbed; but inside there were to be no further sightings of Dr. McBryde. Yet the little girl still sat on the swing, gently stroking her dolly’s hair, and Morse unlocked the french window and walked over the grass towards her.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name’s Lucy and my dolly’s name’s Amanda.”

  “Do you live here, Lucy?”

  “Yes. Mummy and Daddy live up there.” Her bright eyes lifted to the top rear window.

  “Pretty dolly,” said Morse.

  “Would you like to hold her?”

  “I would, yes—but I’ve got a lot of things to do just for the moment.”

  Inside his brain he could hear a voice shouting, “Help, Lewis!” and he turned back into the house and wondered where on earth to start.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Nine tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be

  (Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals)

  Lewis arrived at Seckham Villa at 2:15 that afternoon, bringing with him the early edition of The Oxford Mail, in which many column-inches were devoted to the wave of car crime which was hitting Oxfordshire—hitting the national press, too, with increasing regularity. Everyone and everything in turn was blamed: the police, the parents, the teachers, the church, the recession, unemployment, lack of youth facilities, car manufacturers, the weather, the TV, the brewers, left-wing social workers, and right-wing social workers; original sin received several votes, and even the Devil himself got one. Paradoxically the police seemed to be more in the dock than the perpetrators of the increasingly vicious crimes being committed. But at least the operation that morning had been successful, so Lewis reported: the only trouble was that further police activity in Wytham Woods was drastically curtailed—four men only now, one of them standing guard over the area cordoned off in Pasticks.

  The temporarily dispirited Morse received the news with little surprise, and briefly brought Lewis up to date with his own ambivalent achievements of the morning: his discovery of the garden where in all probability Karin Eriksson had spent some period of time before she disappeared; and his gullibility in allowing McBryde—fairly certainly now a key figure in the drama—more than sufficient time to effect a hurried escape.

  At the far end of the ground-floor entrance passage, fairly steep stairs, turning 180 degrees, led down to the basement area in Seckham Villa, and it was here that the first discovery was made. The basement comprised a large, modernized kitchen at the front; and behind this, through an archway, a large living area furnished with armchairs, a settee, coffee tables, bookshelves, TV, HiFi equipment—and a double-bed of mahogany, stripped down to a mattress of pale blue; and beside the bed, a jointed series of square, wooden boards, four of them, along which, for the length of about ten feet, ran two steel rails—rails where, it was immediately assumed, a cine-camera had recently and probably frequently been moving to and fro.

  Morse himself (with Lewis and one of the DCs) spent most of his time that afternoon in this area, once the fingerprint men, the senior scenes-of-crime officer and the photographer had completed their formal tasks. Clear fingerprints on the (unwashed) non-stick saucepan and cutlery found in the kitchen sink would doubtless match the scores of others found throughout the flat, would doubtless be McBryde’s, and (as Morse saw things) would doubtless advance the investigation not one whit. No clothing, apart from two dirty pairs of beige socks found in one of the bedrooms; no toiletries left along the bathroom shelves; no videos; no correspondence; no shredded letters in either of the two waste-paper baskets or in the dustbin outside the back door. All in all it seemed fairly clear that the flat had been slimmed down—recently perhaps?—for the eventuality of a speedy get-away. Yet there were items that had not been bundled and stuffed into the back of the white van which (as was quickly ascertained) McBryde had used for travelling; and cupboards in both the ground-floor and the basement contained duvets, sheets, pillow-cases, blankets, towels, and table cloths—clearly items listed on the tenant’s inventory; and the kitchen pantry was adequately stocked with tins of beans, fruit, salmon, spaghetti, tuna fish, and the like.

  Naturally however it was the trackway beside the basement double bed which attracted the most interest, much lifting of eyebrows, and many lascivious asides amongst those investigators whose powers of detection, at least in this instance, were the equal of the chief inspector’s. Indeed, it would have required a man of monumental mutton-headedness not to visualize before him the camera and the microphone moving slowly alongside the mattress to record the assorted feats of fornication enacted on that creaking charpoy. For himself Morse tried not to give his imagination too free a rein. Sometimes up at HQ there were a few pornographic videos around, confiscated from late-night raids or illegal trafficking. Often had he wished to view some of the crude, corrupting, seductive things; yet equally often had he made it known to his fellow officers that he at least was quite uninterested in such matters.

  In a corner of the kitchen, bundled neatly as if for some subsequent collection by Friends of the Earth, was a heap of old newspapers, mostly the Daily Mail, and various weeklies and periodicals, including Oxford Today, Oxcom, TV Times, two RSPB journals, and the previous Christmas offers from the Spastic Society. Morse had glanced very hurriedly through, half hoping perhaps to find the statutory girlie magazine; but apart from spending a minute or so looking at pictures of the black-headed gulls on the Loch of Kinnordy, he found nothing there to hold his interest.

  It was Lewis who found them, folded away inside one of the free local newspapers, The Star. There were fourteen A4 sheets, stapled together, obviously photocopied (and photocopied ill) from some glossier and fuller publication. On each sheet several photographs of the same girl were figured (if that be the correct verb) in various stages of undress; and at the bottom of each sheet there appeared a Christian name, followed by details of height, bust, waist, hips, dress-shoe- and glove-measurements, and colour of hair and eyes. In almost every case the bottom left-hand picture was of the model completely naked, and in three or four cases striking some sexually suggestive pose. The names were of the glitzy showgirl variety: Jayne, Kelly, Lindy-Lu, Mandy … and most of them appeared (for age was not given) to be in their twenties. But four of the sheets depicted older women, whose names were possibly designed to reflect their comparative maturity: Elaine, Dorothy, Mary, L
ouisa … The only other information given (no addresses here) was a (i), (ii), (iii), of priority “services”, and Lewis, not without some little interest himself (and amusement), sampled a few of the services on offer: sporting-shots, escort duties, lingerie, stockings, leather, swim-wear, summer dresses, bras, nude-modelling, hair-styling, gloves. Not much to trouble the law there, surely. Three of the girls though were far more explicit about their specialisms, with Mandy listing (i) home videos, (ii) pornographic movies, (iii) overnight escort duties; and with Lindy-Lu, pictured up to her thighs in leather boots, proclaiming an accomplished proficiency in spanking.

  And then, as Morse and Lewis were considering these things, the big discovery was made. One of the two DCs who had been given the job of searching the main lounge above had found, caught up against the top of one of the drawers in the escritoire, a list of names and addresses: a list of clients, surely! Clients who probably received their pornographic material in plain brown envelopes with the flap licked down so very firmly. And there, fourth from the top, was the name that both Morse and Lewis focused on immediately: George Daley, 2 Blenheim Villas, Begbroke, Oxon.

  Morse had been delighted with the find—of course he had! And his praise for the DC had been profuse and (in Lewis’s view) perhaps a trifle extravagant. Yet now as he sat on the settee, looking again at the unzippings and the unbuttonings of the models, reading through the list of names once more, he appeared to Lewis to be preoccupied and rather sad.

  “Everything all right, sir?”

  “What? Oh yes! Fine. We’re making wonderful progress. Let’s keep at it!”

  But Morse himself was contributing little towards any further progress; and after desultorily walking around for ten minutes or so, he sat down yet again, and picked up the sheet of addresses. He would have to tell Lewis, he decided—not just yet but … He looked again at the seventeenth name on the list: for he was never likely to forget the name that Kidlington HQ had given him when, from Lyme Regis, he’d phoned in the car registration H 35 LWL:

  Dr. Alan Hardinge.

  He picked up the pictures of the models and looked again through their names and their vital statistics and their special proficiencies. Especially did he look again at one of the maturer models: the one who called herself ‘Louisa’; the one who’d had all sorts of fun with her names at the Bay Hotel in Lyme Regis; the woman who was photographed here, quite naked and totally desirable.

  Claire Osborne.

  “Pity we’ve no address for—well, it must be a modelling agency of some sort, mustn’t it?”

  “No problem, Lewis. We can just ring up one of these johnnies on the list.”

  “Perhaps they don’t know.”

  “I’ll give you the address in ten minutes if you really want it.”

  “I don’t want it for myself, you know.”

  “Of course not!”

  Picking up his sheets, Morse decided that his presence in Seckham Villa was no longer required; and bidding Lewis to give things another couple of hours or so he returned to HQ; where he tried her telephone number.

  She was in.

  “Claire?”

  “Morse!” (She’d recognized him!)

  “You could have told me you worked for an escort agency!”

  “Why?”

  Morse couldn’t think of an answer.

  “You thought I was wicked enough but not quite so wicked as that?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Why don’t you get yourself in your car and come over tonight? I’d be happy if you did …”

  Morse sighed deeply. “You told me you had a daughter—”

  “So?”

  “Do you still keep in touch with the father?”

  “The father? Christ, come off it! I couldn’t tell you who the father was!”

  Like the veil of the Temple, Morse’s heart was suddenly rent in twain; and after asking her for the name and address of the modelling agency (which she refused to tell him) he rang off.

  Ten minutes later, the phone went on Morse’s desk, and it was Claire—though how she’d got his number he didn’t know. She spoke for only about thirty seconds, ignoring Morse’s interruptions.

  “Shut up, you silly bugger! You can’t see more than two inches in front of your nose, can you? Don’t you realize I’d have swapped all the lecherous sods I’ve ever had for you—and instead of trying to understand all you ask me—Christ!—is who fathered—”

  “Look, Claire—”

  “No! You bloody look! If you can’t take what a woman tells you about herself without picking over the past and asking bloody futile questions about why and who he was and—” But her voice broke down completely now.

  “Look, please!”

  “No! You just fuck off, Morse, and don’t you ring me again because I’ll probably be screwing somebody and enjoying it such a lot I won’t want to be interrupted—”

  “Claire!”

  But the line was dead.

  For the next hour Morse tried her number every five minutes, counting up to thirty double-purrs each time. But there was no answer.

  Lewis had discovered nothing new in Seckham Villa, and he rang through to HQ at 6 P.M., as Morse had wished.

  “All right. Well, you get off home early, Lewis. And get some sleep. And good luck tomorrow!”

  Lewis was due to catch the 7:30 plane to Stockholm the following morning.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrifying of those extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality

  (Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination)

  The death of Max was still casting a cloak of gloom round Morse as he sat in his office the following morning. During the previous night his thoughts had been much preoccupied with death, and the mood persisted now. As a boy, he had been moved by those words of the dying Socrates, suggesting that if death were just one long, unbroken, dreamless sleep, then a greater boon could hardly be bestowed upon mankind. But what about the body? The soul might be able to look after itself all right, but what about the physical body? In Morse’s favourite episode from The Iliad, the brethren and kinsfolk of Sarpedon had buried his body, with mound and pillar, in the rich, wide land of Lycia. Yes! It was fitting to have a gravestone and a name inscribed on it. But there were those stories that were ever frightening—stories about people prematurely interred who had awoken in infinite and palpitating terror with the immovable lid of the coffin only a few inches above them. No! Burning was better than burying, surely … Morse was wholly ignorant of the immediate procedures effected once the curtains closed over the light-wooded coffins at the crematoria … like the curtains closing at the end of Götterdämmerung, though minus the clapping, of course. All done and finished quickly, and if somebody wanted to sprinkle your mortal dust over the memorial gardens, well, it might be OK for the roses, too. He wouldn’t mind a couple of hymns either: “The day thou gavest”, perhaps. Good tune, that. So long as they didn’t have any prayers, or any departures from the Authorized Version of Holy Writ … Perhaps Max had got it right, neatly side-stepping the choice of interment or incineration: the clever old sod had left his body to the hospital, and the odds were strongly on one or two of his organs giving them plenty to think about. Huh!

  Morse smiled to himself, and suddenly looked up to see Strange standing in the doorway.

  “Private joke, Morse?”

  “Oh, nothing, sir.”

  “C’mon! Life’s grim enough.”

  “I was just thinking of Max’s liver—”

  “Not a pretty sight!”

  “No.”

  “You’re taking it a bit hard, aren’t you? Max, I mean.”

  “A bit, perhaps.”

  “You seen the latest?”

  Strange pushed a copy of The Times across the desk, with a brief paragraph on the front page informing its readers that “the bones discovered in Wytham Woods are quite certainly not those of the Swedish st
udent whose disappearance occasioned the original verses and their subsequent analysis in this newspaper. (See Letters, page 13)”.

  “Anything to help us there?” asked Morse dubiously, opening the paper.

  “Scraping the barrel, if you ask me,” said Strange.

  Morse looked down at page 13:

  From Mr. Anthony Beaulah

  Sir, Like the text of some early Greek love-lyric, the lines on the Swedish student would appear to have been pondered over in such exhaustive fashion that there is perhaps little left to say. And it may be that the search is already over. Yet there is one significant (surely?) aspect of the verses which has hitherto received scant attention. The collocation of ‘the tiger’ with ‘the burning of the night’ (lines 9 and 12) has indeed been commented upon, but in no specific context. In my view, sir, one should perhaps interpret the tiger (the cat) as staring back at drivers in the darkness. And the brilliantly simple invention which has long steered the benighted driver through the metaphorical forest of the night? Cat’s eyes!

  I myself live too far away from Oxford to be able to test such a thesis. But might the police not interpret this as a genuine clue, and look for some stretch of road (in or around Wytham?) where cat’s eyes have recently been installed?

  Yours,

  ANTHONY BEAULAH,

  Felsted School,

  Essex.

  “Worth getting Lewis on it?” queried Strange, when Morse had finished reading.

  “Not this morning, sir. If you remember he’s, er, on his holidays.” Morse looked at his wrist-watch. “At this minute he’s probably looking out of the window down at Jutland.”

  “Why didn’t you go, Morse? With all these Swedish blondes and that …”

  “I thought it’d be good experience for him.”

  “Mm.”

  For a while the two were silent. Then Strange picked up his paper and made to leave.