Last Bus to Woodstock

by Colin Dexter

  ‘We’re a despicable lot, aren’t we?’ said Morse. ‘Would you have picked them up?’

  ‘I don’t usually, sir. Only if they’re in uniform. I was glad of a few lifts myself when I was in the Forces.’

  Morse reflected carefully on the new evidence. Things were certainly moving.

  ‘What did you say about a pint?’

  They sat silently in the White Horse at Kidlington and Morse decided that the beer was drinkable. Finally he broke the silence. ‘A red car, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Interesting piece of research for you. How many men in Oxford own red cars?’

  ‘Quite a few, sir.’

  ‘You mean a few thousand.’

  ‘I suppose so.

  ‘But we could find out?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Such a problem would not be beyond the wit of our efficient force?’

  ‘I suppose not, sir.’

  ‘But what if he doesn’t live in Oxford?’

  ‘Well, yes. There is that.’

  ‘Lewis, I think the beer is dulling your brain.’

  But if alcohol was dimming Lewis’s intellectual acumen, it had the opposite effect on Morse. His mind began to function with an easy clarity. He ordered Lewis to take the weekend off, to get some sleep, to forget Sylvia Kaye, and to take his wife shopping; and Lewis was happy to do so.

  Morse, not an addictive smoker, bought twenty king sized cigarettes and smoked and drank continuously until 2.00 p.m. What had really happened last Wednesday evening? He was tormented by the thought that a sequence of events, not in themselves extraordinary, had taken place; that each event was the logical successor of the one before it; that he knew what one or two of these events had been; that if only his mind could project itself into a series of naturally causal relationships, he would have it all. It needed no startling, visionary leap from ignorance to enlightenment. Just a series of logical progressions. But each progression landed him at a dead end, like the drawings in children’s annuals where one thread leads to the treasure and all the others lead to the edge of the page. Start again.

  ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to drink up,’ said the landlord.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Saturday, 2 October, p.m.

  MORSE SPENT THE afternoon of Saturday, 2 October, sitting mildly drunk in his office. He had smoked his packet of cigarettes by 4.30 p.m. and rang for more. His mind grew clearer and clearer. He thought he saw the vaguest pattern in the events of the evening of Wednesday, 29 September. No names – no idea of names, yet – but a pattern.

  He looked through the letters he had copied from the Town and Gown: they seemed a sorry little package. Some he dismissed immediately: not even a deranged psychiatrist could have built the flimsiest hypotheses on five of the nine pieces of evidence. One of the postcards read: ‘Dear Ruth, Weather good, went swimming twice yesterday. Saw a dead jellyfish on the beach. Love, T.’ How very sad to be a jellyfish, thought Morse. Only three of the communications held Morse’s attention; then two; then one. It was a typewritten note addressed to Miss Jennifer Coleby and it read:

  Dear Madam,

  After asessing the mny applications we have received, we must regretfully inform you that our application has been unsuccessful. At the begining of November however, further posts will become available, and I should, in all honesty, be sorry to loose the opportunity of reconsidering your position then.

  We have now alloted the September quota of posts in the Psycology Department; yet it is probable that a reliably qualified assistant may be required to deal with the routnie duties for the Principal’s office.

  Yours faithfully,

  It was subscribed by someone who did not appear particularly anxious that his name be shouted from the house-tops. An initial ‘G’ was clear enough, but the surname to which it was floridly appended would have remained an enigma to the great Champollion himself.

  So Miss Jennifer Coleby is after a new job, said Morse to himself. So what? Hundreds of people applied for new jobs every day. He sometimes thought of doing so himself. He wondered why he’d thought the letter worth a second thought. Typically badly written – unforgivable misprints. And misspellings. No one in the schools cared much these days about the bread-and-butter mechanisms of English usage. He’d been brought up in the hard school: errors of spelling, punctuation and construction of sentences had been savagely penalized by outraged pedagogues, and this had made its mark on him. He had become pedantic and fussy and thought back on the ill-written travesty of a report he had read from one of his own staff only two days before, when he had mentally totted up the mistakes like an examiner assessing a candidate’s work. ‘Asessing.’ Yes, that was wrong in this letter – among other things. The country was becoming increasingly illiterate – for all the fancy notions of the progressive educationalists. But if his own secretary had produced such rubbish, she would be out on her neck – today! But she was exceptional. Julie’s initials at the bottom of any letter were the sure imprimatur of a clean and flawless sheet of typing. Just a minute though . . . Morse looked again at the letter before him. No reference at all. Had G. Thingamajig typed it himself? If he had – what was he? A senior administrator of some university department? If he had . . . Morse grew more and more puzzled. Why was there no letter heading? Was he worrying his head over nothing?

  Well, there was one way of deciding the issue. He looked at his watch. Already 5.30 p.m. Miss Coleby would probably be at home now, he thought. Where did she live? He looked at Lewis’s careful details of the address in North Oxford. An interesting thought? Morse began to realize how many avenues he had not even started to explore. He put on his greatcoat and went out to his car. As he drove the two miles down into Oxford, he resolved that he would rid himself as far as he could of all prejudice against Miss Jennifer Coleby. But it was not an easy thing to do; for, if Mrs Jarman’s memory could be trusted, the ambitious Miss Coleby was one of the three girls who may have made the journey to Woodstock that night with the late Miss Sylvia Kaye.

  Jennifer Coleby rented, with two other working girls, a semi-detached property in Charlton Road where each paid a weekly rent of £8.25, inclusive of electricity and gas. It meant a fat rake-off of almost £25 a week for the provident landlord who had snapped up two such properties for what now seemed a meagre £6,500 some six years since. But it was also a blessing for three enterprising girls who, for such a manageable outlay, were reasonably happy to share the narrow bathroom and the even narrower lavatory. Each girl had a bedroom (one downstairs), the kitchen was adequate for their evening meals, and all of them used the lounge in which to sit around, to chat and watch TV when they were in. These arrangements, apart from the bathroom, worked surprisingly well. Seldom were the girls in together during the day, and so far they had avoided any major confrontation. The landlord had forbidden men-friends in the bedrooms and the girls had accepted this Diktat without contention. There had, of course, been a few infractions of the ban, but the household had never degenerated into overt promiscuity. One rule the girls imposed upon themselves – no record players; and for this, at least, their elderly neighbours were profoundly grateful. The house was kept tidy and clean, as Morse immediately saw as the door was opened by a sad girl eating a tomato sandwich.

  ‘I’ve called to see Miss Coleby, if I may. Is she in?’

  Dark, languorous eyes looked at him carefully, and Morse found himself tempted to wink at her.

  ‘Just a minute.’ She walked leisurely away, but suddenly turned her head to ask, ‘Who shall I say?’

  ‘Er, Morse. Chief Inspector Morse.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A cool, clean-looking Jennifer, dressed in blouse and jeans, came out to greet Morse, without apparent enthusiasm.

  ‘Can I help you, Inspector?’

  ‘I wonder if we could have a few words together? Is it convenient?’

  ‘It will have to be, I suppose. You
’d better come in.’

  Morse was shown into the lounge, where Miss Dark-eyes sat pretending to be deeply engrossed in a report on the Arsenal v. Tottenham match.

  ‘Sue, this is Inspector Morse. Do you mind if we speak here?’

  Sue stood up, and a little too theatrically, thought Morse, switched off the set. He observed her slow, graceful movements and smiled to himself, approvingly. ‘I’ll be upstairs, Jen.’ She glanced at Morse before she left, saw the incipient smile at the corners of his mouth and afterwards swore to Jennifer that he had winked at her.

  Jennifer motioned Morse to sit on the settee, and sat opposite him in an armchair.

  ‘How can I help, Inspector?’

  Morse noticed a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette balancing like a circumflex accent over the arm of her chair.

  ‘I’m having – purely routine, of course – to check the movements of all the er . . . persons . . .’

  ‘Suspects?’

  ‘No, no. Those who worked with Sylvia. You understand that this sort of thing has to be done.’

  ‘Of course. I’m surprised you haven’t done it before.’ Morse was a little taken aback. Indeed, why hadn’t he done it before? Jennifer continued. ‘Last Wednesday evening, I got home a bit later than usual – I went round Blackwells to spend a book token. It was my birthday last week. I got home about six, I should think. You know what the traffic’s like in the rush hour.’ Morse nodded. ‘Well, I had a bit to eat – the other girls were here – and went out about, let’s see, about half past six I should think. I got back about eight – perhaps a bit later.’

  ‘Can you tell me where you went?’

  ‘I went to the Summertown library.’

  ‘What time does the library close?’

  ‘Seven-thirty.’

  ‘You spent about an hour there.’

  ‘That seems to be a reasonable conclusion, Inspector.’

  ‘It seems a long time. I usually spend about two minutes.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re not very fussy what you read.’

  That’s a point, thought Morse. Jennifer spoke with an easy, clear diction. A good education, he thought. But there was more than that. There was a disciplined independence about the girl, and he wondered how she got on with men. He thought it would be difficult to make much headway with this young lady – unless, of course, she wanted to. She could, he suspected, be very nice indeed.

  ‘Are you reading that?’

  She laid a delicately manicured hand lightly upon Villette. ‘Yes. Have you read it?’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ confessed Morse.

  ‘You should do.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember,’ muttered Morse. Who was supposed to be conducting this interview? ‘Er, you stayed an hour?’

  ‘I’ve told you that.’

  ‘Did anyone see you there?’

  ‘They’d have a job not to, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they would.’ Morse felt he was losing his way. ‘Did you get anything else out?’ He suddenly felt a bit better.

  ‘You’ll be interested to know that I got that as well.’ She pointed to a large volume, also lying open, on the carpet in front of the TV set. ‘Mary’s started to read it.’ Morse picked it up and looked at the title. Who was Jack the Ripper?

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve read that.’

  Morse’s morale began to sag again. ‘I don’t think I’ve read that particular account, no.’

  Jennifer suddenly smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I’m very much of a bookworm myself, and I have far more spare time than you, I’m sure.’

  ‘Coming back to Wednesday a minute, Miss Coleby. You say you were back about eight.’

  ‘Yes, about then. It could have been quarter past, even half past, I suppose.’

  ‘Was anyone in when you got back?’

  ‘Yes. Sue was in. But Mary had gone off to the pictures. Day of the Jackal I think it was; she didn’t get back until eleven.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Shall I ask Sue to come down?’

  ‘No. No need to bother.’ Morse realized he was probably wasting his time, but he stuck it out. ‘How long does it take to walk to the library?’

  ‘About ten minutes.’

  ‘But it took you almost an hour, perhaps, if you didn’t get back until eight-thirty?’

  Again the pleasant smile, the regular white teeth, a hint of gentle mockery around the lips. ‘Inspector, I think we’d better ask Sue if she remembers the time, don’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps we should,’ said Morse.

  When Jennifer left the room Morse was looking around with sombre, weary eyes, when suddenly a thought flashed through his mind. He was deadly quick as he picked up Villette, turned to the inside of the cover and deftly replaced it over the arm of the chair. Sue came in, and quickly confirmed that as far as she could remember Jennifer had been back in the house at some time after eight. She couldn’t be more precise. Morse got up to take his leave. He hadn’t mentioned the very thing he had come to discuss, and he wasn’t going to. That could come later.

  He sat for a few minutes in the driving seat of his car and his blood ran hot and cold. He had not quite been able to believe his eyes. But he’d seen it in black and white, or rather dark blue on white.

  Morse knew the Oxford library routine only too well, for he rarely returned his own irregular borrowings without having to pay a late fine. The library worked in weeks, not days, for books borrowed, and the day that every ‘week’ began was Wednesday. If a book was borrowed on a Wednesday, the date for return was exactly 14 days later – that Wednesday fortnight. If a book was borrowed on Thursday, the date for return was a fortnight after the following Wednesday, 20 days later. The date-stamp was changed each Thursday morning. This working from Wednesday to Wednesday simplified matters considerably for the library assistants and was warmly welcomed by those borrowers who found seven or eight hundred pages an excessive assignment inside just fourteen days. Morse would have to check, of course, but he felt certain that only those who borrowed books on Wednesday had to return books within the strict 14-day limit. Anyone taking out a book on any other day would have a few extra days’ grace. If Jennifer Coleby had taken Villette from the library on Wednesday last, the date-stamp for return would have read Wednesday, 13 October. But it didn’t. It read Wednesday, 20 October. Morse knew beyond any reasonable doubt that Jennifer had lied to him about her movements on the night of the murder. And why? To that vital question there seemed one very simple answer.

  Morse sat still in his car outside the house. From the corner of his eye he saw the lounge curtain twitch slightly, but he could see no one. Whoever it was, he decided to let things stew a while longer. He could do with a breath of fresh air, anyway. He locked the car doors and sauntered gently down the road, turned left into the Banbury Road and walked more briskly now towards the library. He timed himself carefully: nine and a half minutes. Interesting. He walked up to the library door marked PUSH. But it didn’t push. The library had closed its doors two hours ago.

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Saturday, 2 October

  BERNARD CROWTHER’S WIFE, Margaret, disliked the weekends, and effected her household management in such a way that neither her husband nor her twelve-year-old daughter nor her ten-year-old son enjoyed them very much either. Margaret had a part-time job in the School of Oriental Studies, and suspected that throughout the week she put in more hours of solid work than her gentle, bookish husband and her idle, selfish offspring put together. The weekend, they all assumed, was a time of well-earned relaxation; but they didn’t think of her. ‘What’s for breakfast, mum?’ ‘Isn’t dinner ready yet?’ Besides which, she did her week’s wash on Saturday afternoons and tried her best to clean the house on Sundays. She sometimes thought that she was going mad.

  At 5.30 on the afternoon of Saturday, 2 October, she stood at the sink with bitter thoughts. She had cooked
poached eggs for tea (‘What, again?’) and was now washing up the sticky yellow plates. The children were glued to the television and wouldn’t be bored again for an hour or so yet. Bernard (she ought to be thankful for small mercies) was cutting the privet hedge at the back of the house. She knew how he hated gardening, but that was one thing she was not going to do. She wished he would get a move on. The meticulous care he devoted to each square foot of the wretched hedge exasperated her. He’d be in soon to say his arms were aching. She looked at him. He was balding now and getting stout, but he was still, she supposed, an attractive man to some women. Until recently she had never regretted that she had married him fifteen years ago. Did she regret the children? She wasn’t sure. From the time they were in arms she had been worried by her inability to gossip in easy, cosy terms with other mums about the precious little darlings. She had read a book on Mothercraft and came to the worrying conclusion that much of motherhood was distasteful to her – even nauseating. Her maternal instincts, she decided, were sadly underdeveloped. As the children grew into toddlers, she had enjoyed them more, and on occasion she had only little difficulty in convincing herself that she loved them both dearly. But now they seemed to be getting older and worse. Thoughtless, selfish and cheeky. Perhaps it was all her fault – or Bernard’s. She looked out again as she stacked the last of the plates upright on the draining rack.

  It was already getting dusk after another glorious day. She wondered, like the bees, if these warm days would never cease . . . Bernard had managed to advance the neatly clipped and rounded hedge by half a foot in the last five minutes. She wondered what he was thinking about, but she knew that she couldn’t ask him.

  The truth was, and Margaret had descried it dimly for several years now, that they were drifting apart. Was that her fault, too? Did Bernard realize it? She thought he did. She wished she could leave him, leaving everything and go off somewhere and start a new life. But of course she couldn’t. She would have to stick it out. Unless something tragic happened – or was it until something tragic happened? And then she knew she would stand by him – in spite of everything.