Morse's Greatest Mystery

by Colin Dexter

  “Really, this is outrageous!” I objected—but Holmes held up his hand, and bid me hear his brother out.

  “What is clear, is that at some point when Wyndham was in France—and why did you not verify those dates spent abroad? I am sure Cook and Marchant would have provided them just as quickly as it furnished the wretched man’s description. But as I was saying, with Wyndham in France, mother and daughter found themselves in a little tête-à-tête one evening, during the course of which a whole basketful of dirty linen was laid bare, with the daughter bitterly disillusioned about the behaviour of her step-father, and the mother hurt and angry about her husband’s infidelity. So, together, the pair of them devised a plan. Now, we both agree on one thing at least, Sherlock! There appears to be no evidence whatsoever for the independent existence of Horatio Darvill except for what we have heard from Miss van Allen’s lips. Rightly, you drew our attention to the fact that the two men were never seen together. But, alas, having appreciated the importance of that clue, you completely misconceived its significance. You decided that there is no Darvill—because he is Wyndham. I have to tell you that there is no Darvill—because he is the pure fabrication of the minds of Mrs. Wyndham and her daughter.”

  Holmes was staring with some consternation at a pattern in the carpet, as Mycroft rounded off his extravagant and completely baseless conjectures.

  “Letters were written—and incidentally I myself would have been far more cautious about those ‘e’s and ‘t’s: twin faults, as it happens, of my very own machine! But, as I say, letters were written—but by Miss van Allen herself; a wedding was arranged; a story concocted of a nonexistent carriage into which there climbed a non-existent groom—and that was the end of the charade. Now, it was you, Sherlock, who rightly asked the key question: cui bono? And you concluded that the real beneficiary was Wyndham. But exactly the contrary is the case! It was the mother and daughter who intended to be the beneficiaries, for they hoped to rid themselves of the rather wearisome Mr. Wyndham—but not before he had been compelled, by moral and social pressures, to make some handsome money-settlement upon the pair of them—especially perhaps upon the young girl who, as Dr. Watson here points out, could well have done with some decent earrings and a new handkerchief. And the social pressure I mention, Sherlock, was designed—carefully and cleverly designed—to come from you. A cock-and-bull story is told to you by some wide-eyed young thing, a story so bestrewn with clues at almost every point that even Lestrade—given a week or two!—would probably have come up with a diagnosis identical with your own. And why do you think she came to you, and not to Lestrade, say? Because ‘Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the greatest investigator the world had ever known’—and his judgements are second only to the Almighty’s in their infallibility. For if you, Sherlock, believed Wyndham to be guilty—then Wyndham was guilty in the eyes of the whole world—the whole world except for one, that is.”

  “Except for two,” I added quietly.

  Mycroft Holmes turned his full attention towards me for the first time, as though I had virtually been excluded from his previous audience. But I allowed him no opportunity of seeking the meaning of my words, as I addressed him forthwith.

  “I asked Holmes a question when he presented his own analysis, sir. I will ask you the same: have you in any way verified your hypothesis? And if so, how?”

  “The answer, Dr. Watson, to the first part of your question is, in large measure, ‘yes.’ Mr. Wyndham, in fact, has quite enough money to be in no way embarrassed by the withdrawal of Miss van Allen’s comparatively minor contribution. As for the second part …” Mycroft hesitated awhile. “I am not sure what my brother has told you of the various offices I hold under the British Crown—”

  It was Holmes who intervened—and impatiently so. “Yes, yes, Mycroft! Let us all concede immediately that the, shall we say, ‘unofficial’ sources to which you are privy have completely invalidated my own reconstruction of the case. So be it! Yet I would wish, if you allow, to make one or two observations upon your own rather fanciful interpretation of events? It is, of course, with full justice that you accuse me of having no first-hand knowledge of what are called ‘the matters of the heart.’ Furthermore, you rightly draw attention to the difficulties Mr. Wyndham would have experienced in deceiving his step-daughter. Yet how you under-rate the power of disguise! And how, incidentally, you over-rate the intelligence of Lestrade! Even Dr. Watson, I would suggest, has a brain considerably superior—”

  For not a second longer could I restrain myself. “Gentlemen!” I cried. “You are both—both of you!— most tragically wrong.”

  The two brothers stared at me as though I had taken leave of my senses.

  “I think you should seek to explain yourself, Watson,” said Holmes sharply.

  “A man,” I began, “was proposing to go to Scotland for a fortnight with his newly married wife, and he had drawn out one hundred pounds in cash—no less!—from the Oxford Street branch of the Royal National Bank on the eve of his wedding. The man, however, was abducted after entering a four-wheeler on the very morning of his wedding-day, was brutally assaulted, and then robbed of all his money and personal effects—thereafter being dumped, virtually for dead, in a deserted alley in Stepney. Quite by chance he was discovered later that same evening, and taken to the Whitechapel Hospital. But it was only after several days that the man slowly began to recover his senses, and some patches of his memory—and also, gentlemen, his voice. For, you see, it was partly because the man was suffering so badly from what we medical men term ‘suppurative tonsilitis’—the quinsy, as it is commonly known—that he was transferred to St. Thomas’s where, as you know, Holmes, I am at present engaged in some research on that very subject, and where my own professional opinion was sought only this morning. Whilst reading through the man’s hospital notes, I could see that the only clue to his identity was a tag on an item of his underclothing carrying the initials ‘H. D.’ You can imagine my excitement—”

  “Humphry Davey, perhaps,” muttered Mycroft flippantly.

  “Oh no!” I replied, with a smile. “I persisted patiently with the poor man, and finally he was able to communicate to me the name of his bank. After that, if I may say so, Holmes, it was almost child’s play to verify my hypothesis. I visited the bank, where I learned about the withdrawal of money for the honeymoon, and the manager himself accompanied me back to St. Thomas’s where he was able to view the patient and to provide quite unequivocal proof as to his identity. I have informed you, therefore, that not only does Mr. Horatio Darvill exist, gentlemen, he is at this precise moment lying in a private ward on the second floor of St. Thomas’s Hospital!”

  For some little while a silence fell upon the room. Then I saw Holmes, who these last few minutes had been standing by the window, give a little start. “Oh, no!” he groaned. And looking over his shoulder I saw, dimly beneath the fog-beshrouded lamplight, an animated Mr. Wyndham talking to a legal-looking gentleman who stood beside him.

  Snatching up his cape, Holmes made hurriedly for the door. “Please tell Mr. Wyndham, if you will, Watson, that I have already written a letter to him containing a complete recantation of my earlier charges, and offering him my profound apologies. For the present, I am leaving—by the back door.”

  He was gone. And when, a minute later, Mrs. Hudson announced that two angry-looking gentlemen had called asking to see Mr. Holmes, I noticed Mycroft seemingly asleep once more in his corner armchair, a monograph on polyphonic plainchant open on his knee, and a smile of vague amusement on his large, intelligent face.

  “Show the gentlemen in, please, Mrs. Hudson!” I said—in such peremptory fashion that for a moment or two that good lady stared at me, almost as if she had mistaken my voice for that of Sherlock Holmes himself.

  THE INSIDE

  STORY

  Part One

  Dido attempted to raise her heavy eyes again, but failed; and the deep wound gurgled in her breast.

  (Virgil, Aeneid IV, 688–9) />
  “Get a move on!”

  “I’ll get there as fast as I can, sir—I always do.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Lewis turned left at Carfax, down into the High, and then over Magdalen Bridge, car siren wailing, before driving past the Asian grocers’ shops and the Indian restaurants in the Cowley Road.

  “I mean,” replied Lewis finally, “that here we are with another murder, and you’ll get there, won’t you? You always do.”

  “Nearly always,” conceded Morse.

  “And I won’t. I’ve got a second-class mind—”

  “Don’t underrate yourself, Lewis! Let others do it for you.”

  Lewis grunted humourlessly. “I’m like a second-class stamp, and well you know it.”

  “But second-class stamps usually get there in the end.”

  “Exactly. Just take a dickens of a lot longer—”

  “Slowdown!”

  Morse had been consulting an Oxford street plan, and now jabbed a finger to his right.

  “That’s it, Lewis: Jowett Place. What number did you say?”

  “Probably where those two police cars are parked, sir.”

  Morse grinned weakly. “Maintain that level of deductive brilliance, Lewis, and we’ll be through this case before the pubs are open.”

  It was 8:50 on the dull, intermittently drizzly morning of Monday, 15 February 1993.

  The Oxford City Police had contacted Kidlington CID an hour or so earlier after receiving a 999 call from one Paul Bayley, first-floor tenant of the narrow, two-storey property that stood at 14 Jowett Place. Bayley, an erstwhile History graduate from Magdalen College, Oxford, had found himself out of milk that morning—had walked downstairs—knocked on the door of the woman tenant directly below him, Ms. Sheila Poster—had found the door unlocked—and there …

  Or so he said.

  * * *

  Morse looked down at the fully dressed woman lying just inside the ground-floor living-room, the left arm extended, the pleasingly manicured fingernails straining, it appeared, to reach the door. Beneath and in front of the body was a distressingly copious pool of dully matted blood; and although the weapon had been removed it was possible even for such a non-medical man as Morse to unjumble the simple truth that the woman had most probably been stabbed through the heart. Longish dark curls framed the pale face—from which the large brown eyes now stared, for ever fixedly, at a threadbare square of the lime-green carpet.

  “Lovely looking girl,” said Lewis quietly.

  Morse averted his eyes from the terrible sight, glanced across the the curtained window, then stepped outside the room into the narrow hallway, where Dr. Laura Hobson, the police pathologist, stood in subdued conference with a scene-of-crime officer.

  “She’s all yours,” said Morse, in a tone suggesting that the abdication of responsibility for the body was something of a relief. As indeed it was, for Morse had always recoiled from the sight of violent death.

  “Funny name—‘Poster’!” volunteered Lewis as the two detectives stepped up the narrow stairs of Number 14.

  “Is it?” asked Morse, his voice betraying no real interest in the matter.

  Bayley was sitting beside a police constable in his untidy living room—a large-buttocked, lank-haired, yet handsome sort of fellow, in his late twenties perhaps; unshaven, pony-tailed, with a small earring in his left ear. To whom, predictably, Morse took an instant and intense dislike.

  He had been out drinking (Bayley claimed) throughout most of the previous evening, not leaving the King’s Arms in Broad Street until closing time. After which he’d gone back to a friend’s flat to continue the celebrations, and in fact had slept there—before returning to Jowett Place at about a quarter past seven that morning. The rest he’d already told the police, OK?

  As he gave his evidence, Bayley’s hands were nervously opening and closing the Penguin translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, and Morse noted (again with distaste) the lines of ingrained dirt beneath the fingernails.

  “You slept with a woman last night?”

  Bayley nodded, eyes downcast.

  “We shall have to know her name—my sergeant here will have to check with her. You understand that?”

  Again Bayley nodded. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “You didn’t leave her at all?”

  “Went to the loo coupla times.”

  “You in the habit of sleeping around?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that, no.”

  “Ever sleep with—with the woman downstairs?”

  “Sheila? No, never.”

  “Ever ask her?”

  “Once.”

  “And?”

  “She said if we were going to have a relationship it would have to be cerebral—not conjugal.”

  “Quite a way with words she had, then?”

  “You could say that.”

  “When did you last speak to her?”

  “Week or so ago? We were talking—she was talking—about epic poetry. She … lent me this … this book. I was going to give it back to her … today.”

  Lewis looked away in some embarrassment as a curtain of tears now covered Bayley’s eyes; but for a while longer Morse himself continued to stare cynically at the young man seated opposite him.

  Downstairs, in the second of the two rooms which (along with the kitchen) were offered for rent at 14 Jowett Place, Morse contemplated the double bed in which, presumably, the murdered tenant had usually slumbered overnight. Two fluffy pillows concealed a full-length, bottle-green nightdress, which Morse now fingered lightly before turning back the William-Morris-patterned duvet and examining the undersheet.

  “No sign of any recent nocturnal emissions, sir.”

  “You have a genteel way of putting things,” said Morse.

  The room was sparsely furnished, sparely ornamented—with a large mahogany wardrobe taking up most of the space left by the bed. On the bedside table stood a lamp; an alarm clock; a box containing half a dozen items of cheap jewellery; and a single book: Reflections on Inspiration and Creativity, by Diogenes Small (Macmillan, £14.99).

  Picking up the latter, Morse opened its pages at the point where a blue leather bookmarker (“Greetings from Erzincan”) had been placed—and then with no obvious enthusiasm read aloud the few sentences which had been highlighted in the text with a yellow felt-tipped pen:

  Obviously our writer will draw upon character and incident taken from personal experience. Inevitably so. Laudibly so. Yet always it is those fictional addenda which will effect the true alchemy; which will elevate our earth-bound artist, and send him forth high-floating on the wings of freedom and creativity.

  “Bloody ’ell!”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Can’t even spell,” muttered Morse, as Lewis picked up the bookmarker.

  “Where’s Erzincan?”

  “Dunno. When I was at school we had to do one of the three ’G’s: Greek, German, or Geography.”

  “And you didn’t do Geography …”

  But a silent Morse was standing now at the window (curtains drawn back) which looked out onto a patch of leaf-carpeted lawn at the rear of the house. Strangely, something had stirred deep down in his mind, like the opening chords of Das Rheingold; chords that for the moment, though, remained below his audial range.

  Lewis opened the wardrobe doors, exposing a modest collection of dresses and coats hanging from the rail; and half a dozen pairs of cheap shoes stowed neatly along the bottom.

  Overhead they heard the creaking of floorboards as someone—must be Bayley?—paced continuously to and fro. And Morse’s eyes rose slowly to the ceiling.

  But he said nothing.

  Neither the bedroom nor the kitchen had yielded anything of significant interest; and Morse was anxious to hear Dr. Hobson’s verdict, however tentative, when half an hour later she emerged from the murder-room.

  “Sharp knife by the look of things—second attempt—probably entering from above.
Bled an awful lot—as you saw … still, most of us would—with the knife-blade through the heart. Shouldn’t be too difficult to be fairly precise about the time—I’ll be having a closer look, of course—but I’d guess, say, eight to ten hours ago? No longer, I don’t think. Eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock last night?”