Last Bus to Woodstock

by Colin Dexter

  ‘Just what did you tell the Inspector, miss?’

  ‘You want me to go over all that again?’ Jennifer’s face showed all the impatience of a schoolgirl asked to rewrite a tedious exercise.

  ‘We shall have to have a signed statement in any case.’

  Jennifier sighed. ‘All right. You want me to account for my movements – I think that’s the phrase, isn’t it? – on Wednesday night.’

  ‘That’s right, miss.’

  ‘On Wednesday night . . .’ Laboriously Lewis began to write. ‘Shall I write it out for you?’ asked Jennifer.

  ‘I think I ought to get it down myself, miss, if you don’t mind. I haven’t got a degree in English, but I’ll do my best.’ A quick flash of caution gleamed in Jennifer’s eyes. It was gone immediately, but it had been there and Lewis had seen it.

  Half an hour later, Jennifer’s statement was ready. She read it, asked if she could make one or two amendments – ‘only spelling, Sergeant’ – and agreed that she could sign it.

  ‘I’ll just get it typed out, miss.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Oh, only ten minutes.’

  ‘Would you like me to do it? It’ll only take me about two.’

  ‘I think we ought to do it ourselves, miss, if you don’t mind. We have our regulations, you know.’

  ‘Just thought I might be able to help.’ Jennifer felt more relaxed.

  ‘Shall I get you another cup of coffee, miss?’

  ‘That would be nice.’ Lewis got up and left.

  Policewoman Fuller seemed singularly uncommunicative, and for more than ten minutes Jennifer sat in silence. When the door finally opened it was Morse who entered carrying a neatly typed sheet of foolscap.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Coleby.’

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘We’ve met before.’ The tide of relaxation which had reached high watermark with Lewis’s departure quickly ebbed and exposed the grating shingle of her nerves. ‘I walked down to the library after I left you yesterday,’ continued Morse.

  ‘You must enjoy walking.’

  ‘They tell me walking is the secret of perpetual middle age.’

  With an effort, Jennifer smiled. ‘It’s a pleasant walk, isn’t it?’

  ‘It depends which way you go,’ said Morse.

  Jennifer looked sharply at him and Morse, as Lewis earlier, noted the unexpected reaction. ‘Well, I would like to stay and talk to you, but I hope you will let me sign that statement and get back home. There are several things I have to do before tomorrow.’

  ‘I hope Sergeant Lewis mentioned that we have no authority to keep you against your will?’

  ‘Oh yes. The sergeant told me.’

  ‘But I shall be very grateful if you can agree to stay a little longer.’

  The back of Jennifer’s throat was dry. ‘What for?’ Her voice was suddenly a little harsher.

  ‘Because,’ said Morse quietly, ‘I hope you will not be foolish enough to sign a statement which you know to be false’ – Morse raised his voice – ‘and which I know to be false.’ He gave her no chance to reply. ‘This afternoon I gave instructions for you to be held for questioning since I suspected, and still suspect, that you are withholding information which may be of very great value in discovering the identity of Miss Kaye’s murderer. That is a most serious offence, as you know. It now seems that you are foolish enough to compound such stupidity with the equally criminal and serious offence of supplying the police with information which is not only inaccurate but demonstrably false.’ Morse’s voice had risen in crescendo and he ended with a mighty thump with his fist upon the table between them.

  Jennifer, however, did not appear quite so abashed as he had expected.

  ‘You don’t believe what I told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Am I allowed to ask why not?’ Morse was more than a little surprised. It was clear to him that the girl had recovered whatever nerve she may have lost. He clearly and patiently told her that she could not possibly have taken out her library books on Wednesday evening, and that this could be proved without any reasonable doubt. ‘I see.’ Morse waited for her to speak again. If he had been mildly surprised at her previous question, he was flabbergasted by her next. ‘What were you doing at the time of the murder last Wednesday evening, Inspector?’

  What was he doing? He wasn’t quite sure, but any such admission would hardly advance his present cause. He lied. ‘I was listening to some Wagner.’

  ‘Which Wagner?’

  ‘Das Rheingold.’

  ‘Is there anyone who could back up your story? Did anyone see you?’

  Morse surrendered. ‘No.’ In spite of himself, he had to admire the girl. ‘No,’ he repeated, ‘I live on my own. I seldom have the pleasure of visitors – of either sex.’

  ‘How very sad.’

  Morse nodded. ‘Yes. But you see, Miss Coleby, I am not as yet suspected of dressing up in women’s clothes and standing at the top of the Woodstock Road hitching a lift with Sylvia Kaye.’

  ‘And I am?’

  ‘And you are.’

  ‘But presumably I’m not suspected of raping and murdering Sylvia?’

  ‘I hope you will allow me a modicum of intelligence.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that Sylvia probably enjoyed being raped?’ There was bitterness in her tone, and her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘That seems to assume that she was raped before she died, doesn’t it?’ said Morse quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry – that was a horrid thing to say.’

  Morse followed up his advantage. ‘My job is to discover what happened from the moment Sylvia and her friend – and I believe that was you – got into a red car on the other side of the Woodstock roundabout. For some reason this other girl has not come forward, and I don’t think the reason’s very hard to find. She knew the driver of the car, and she’s protecting him. She’s probably frightened stiff. But so was Sylvia Kaye frightened stiff, Miss Coleby. More than that. She was so savagely struck on the back of the head that her skull was broken in several places and lumps of bone were found in her brain. Do you like the sound of that? It’s an ugly, horrible sight is murder and the trouble with murder is that it usually tends to wipe out the only good witness of the crime – the victim. That means we’ve got to rely on other witnesses, normal ordinary people most of them, who accidentally get caught up at some point in the wretched business. They get scared; OK. They’d rather not get mixed up in it; OK. They think it’s none of their business, OK – but we’ve got to rely on some of them having enough guts and decency to come forward and tell us what they know. And that’s why you’re here, Miss Coleby. I’ve got to know the truth.’

  He took the statement that Jennifer had made and tore it into pieces. But he could not read her mind. As he had been speaking she had been gazing through the window of the little office into the outside yard, where the day before she had stood with her office colleagues.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I must have caused you a lot of trouble. It was on Thursday that I went to the library.’

  ‘And on Wednesday?’

  ‘I did go out. And I did go on the road to Woodstock – but I didn’t get as far as Woodstock. I stopped at the Golden Rose at Begbroke – that’s what, about two miles this side of Woodstock. I went into the lounge and bought a drink – a lager and lime. I drank it out in the garden and then went home.’

  Morse looked at her impatiently. ‘In the dark, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. About half past seven.’

  ‘Well – go on.’

  ‘What do you mean – “go on”? That was all.’

  ‘Do you want me to . . .’ began Morse, his voice fuming. ‘Fetch Lewis!’ he barked. Policewoman Fuller read the gale warning and hurried out.

  Jennifer appeared untroubled, and Morse’s anger sub
sided.

  It was Jennifer who broke the silence. ‘You mustn’t be too angry with me, Inspector.’ Her voice had become little more than a whisper. Her hand went to her forehead and for a while she closed her eyes. Morse looked at her closely for the first time. He had not noticed before how attractive she could be. She wore a light-blue summer coat over a black jumper, with gloves in matching black. Her cheek bones were high and there was animation in her face, her mouth slightly open revealing the clean lines of her white teeth. Morse wondered if he could ever fall for her, and decided, as usual, that he could.

  ‘I’ve been so flustered, and so frightened.’

  He had to lean forward slightly to catch her words. He noticed that Lewis had come in and motioned him silently to a chair.

  ‘Everything will be all right, you see.’ Morse looked at Lewis and nodded as the sergeant prepared to take down the second draft of the evidence of Miss Jennifer Coleby.

  ‘Why were you frightened?’ asked Morse gently.

  ‘Well, it’s all been so strange – I don’t seem to be able to wake up properly since . . . I don’t seem to know what’s real and what’s not. So many funny things seem to be happening.’ She was still sitting with her head in her hand, looking blankly at the top of the table. Morse glanced at Lewis. Things were almost ready.

  ‘What do you mean – “funny things”?’

  ‘Just everything really. I’m beginning to wonder if I know what I am doing. What am I doing here? I thought I’d told you the truth about Wednesday – and now I realize I didn’t. And there was another funny thing.’ Morse watched her keenly. ‘I had a letter on Saturday morning telling me I’d not been chosen for a job – and I don’t even remember applying for it. Do you think I’m going mad?’

  So that was going to be her story! Morse experienced the agony of a bridge player whose ace has just been covered by the deuce of trumps. The two policemen looked at each other, and both were conscious that Jennifer’s eyes were on them.

  ‘Well, now.’ Morse hid his disappointment and disbelief as well as he was able. ‘Let’s just get back to Wednesday night, shall we? Can you repeat what you just told me? I want Sergeant Lewis to get it down.’ His voice sounded exasperated.

  Jennifer repeated her brief statement and Lewis, like the Inspector before him, looked temporarily bewildered.

  ‘You mean,’ said Morse, ‘that Miss Kaye went on to Woodstock, but that you only went as far as Begbroke?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘You asked this man to drop you at Begbroke?’

  ‘What man are you talking about?’

  ‘The man who gave you a lift.’

  ‘But I didn’t get a lift to Begbroke.’

  ‘You what?’ shrieked Morse.

  ‘I said I didn’t get a lift. I would never hitch-hike anyway. I think you ought to know something, Inspector. I’ve got a car.’

  While Lewis was getting the second statement typed, Morse retreated to his office. Had he been wrong all along? If what Jennifer now claimed was true, it would certainly account for several things. On the same road, on the same night and one of her own office friends murdered? Of course she would feel frightened. But was that enough to account for her repeated evasions? He reached for the phone and rang the Golden Rose at Begbroke. The jovial-sounding landlord was anxious to help. His wife had been on duty in the lounge on Wednesday. Could she possibly come down to Kidlington Police HQ? Yes. The landlord would drive her himself. Good. Quarter of an hour, then.

  ‘Do you remember a young lady coming in to the lounge last Wednesday? On her own? About half past seven time?’

  The richly ringed and amply bosomed lady wasn’t sure.

  ‘But you don’t often get women coming in alone, do you?’

  ‘Not often, no. But it’s not all that unusual these days, Inspector. You’d be surprised.’

  Morse felt that little would surprise him any more. ‘Would you recognize someone like that? Someone who just dropped in one night?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  Morse rang Lewis, who was still waiting with Jennifer in the interview room.

  ‘Take her home, Lewis.’

  The landlady of the Golden Rose stood beside Morse at the inquiry desk as Jennifer walked past with Lewis.

  ‘That her?’ he asked. It was his penultimate question.

  ‘Yes. I think it is.’

  ‘I’m most grateful to you,’ lied Morse.

  ‘I’m glad I could help, Inspector.’

  Morse showed her to the door. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to remember what she ordered, do you?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I think I do, Inspector. It was lager and lime, I think. Yes, lager and lime.’

  It was half an hour before Lewis returned. ‘Did you believe her, sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Morse. He felt more frustrated than depressed. He realized that he had already landed himself in a good deal of muddle and mess by his own inadequacies. He had refused the offer of the auxiliary personnel available to him, and this meant that few of the many possible leads had yet been checked and documented. Sanders, for example – surely to any trained officer the most obvious target for immediate and thorough investigation – he had thus far almost totally ignored. Indeed, even a superficial scrutiny of his conduct of the case thus far would reveal a haphazardness in his approach almost bordering upon negligence. Only the previous month he had himself given a lecture to fellow detectives on the paramount importance in any criminal investigation of the strictest and most disciplined thoroughness in every respect of the inquiry from the very beginning .

  And yet, for all this, he sensed in some intuitive way (a procedure not mentioned in his lecture) that he was vaguely on the right track still; that he had been right in allowing Jennifer to go; that although his latest shot had been kicked off the line, sooner or later the goal would come.

  For the next hour the two officers exchanged notes on the afternoon’s interrogation, with Morse impatiently probing Lewis’s reaction to the girl’s evasions, glances, and gestures.

  ‘Do you think she’s lying, Lewis?’

  ‘I’m not so sure now.’

  ‘Come off it, man. When you’re as old as I am you’ll recognize a liar a mile off!’

  Lewis remained doubtful: he was by several years the older man anyway. Silence fell between them.

  ‘Where do we go from here, then?’ said Lewis at last.

  ‘I think we attack down the other flank.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes. She’s shielding a man. Why? Why? That’s what we’ve been asking ourselves so far. And you know where we’ve got with that line of inquiry? Nowhere. She’s lying, I know that; but we haven’t broken her – not yet. She’s such a good liar she’d get any damned fool to believe her.’

  Lewis saw the implication. ‘You could be wrong, sir.’

  Morse blustered on, wondering if he was. ‘No, no, no. We’ve just been tackling the case from the wrong angle. They tell me, Lewis, that you can climb up the Eiger in your carpet slippers if you go the easy way.’

  ‘You mean we’ve been trying to solve this the hard way?’

  ‘No. I mean just the opposite. We’ve been trying to solve it the easy way. Now we’ve got to try the hard way.’

  ‘How do we do that, sir?’

  ‘We’ve been trying to find out who the other girl was, because we thought she could lead us to the man we want.’

  ‘But according to you we have found her.’

  ‘Yes. But she’s too clever for us – and too loyal. She’s been warned to keep her mouth shut – not that she needed much telling, if I’m any judge. But we’re up against a brick wall for the time being, and there’s only one alternative. The girl won’t lead us to the man? All right. We find the man.’

  ‘How do we start on that?’

  ‘I think we shall need a bit of Aristotelian logic, don’t you?’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

&nb
sp; ‘I’ll tell you all about it in the morning,’ said Morse.

  Lewis paused as he reached the door. ‘That identification of Miss Coleby, sir. Did you think it was satisfactory – just to take the landlady’s word for it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it was all a bit casual, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t exactly going by the book.’

  ‘What book?’ said Morse.

  Lewis decided that his mind had got itself into a quite sufficient muddle for one day, and he left.

  Morse’s mind, too, was hardly functioning with crystalline lucidity; yet already emerging from the mazed confusion was the germ of a new idea. He had suspected from the start that Jennifer Coleby was lying; would have staked his professional reputation upon it. But he could have been wrong, at least in one respect. He had tried to break Jennifer’s story, but had he been trying to break it at the wrong point?

  What if all she had told him was perfectly true? . . . The same revolving pro’s and con’s passed up and down before his eyes like undulating hobby-horses at a fairground, until his own mind, too, was a dizzying whirl and he knew that it was time to give it all a rest.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  Wednesday, 6 October

  THE COCKTAIL LOUNGE of the Black Prince was seldom busy for the hour after opening time at 11.00 a.m., and the morning of Wednesday, 6 October, was to prove no exception. The shockwave of the murder was now receding and the Black Prince was quickly returning to normality.

  It was amazing how quickly things sank into the background, thought Mrs Gaye McFee as she polished another martini glass and stacked it neatly among its fellows. But not really; only that morning an incoming air-liner had crashed at Heathrow with the loss of seventy-nine lives. And every day on the roads . . .

  ‘What’ll it be, boys?’ The speaker was a distinguished-looking man, about sixty years old, thick set, with silvery-grey hair and a ruddy complexion. Gaye had served him many times before and knew him to be Professor Tompsett (Felix to his friends, who were rumoured not to be legion) – emeritus Professor of Elizabethan Literature at Oxford University, and the recently retired Vice-Principal of Lonsdale College. His two companions, one a gaunt, bearded man in his late twenties, the other a gentle-looking bespectacled man of about forty-five, each ordered gin and tonic.