by Colin Dexter
For all his anti-Welsh prejudices, Morse let it go. 'She's on her own at last, then. She can do what she likes. She probably feels a wonderful sense of freedom, freedom to do something for herself — something that now, for the first time, can in fact be done.'
'I can see all that, sir. But why? That's what I want to know.'
'Lewis! Put yourself in the position Valerie and her mother and Acum and Phillipson and God knows who else must have found themselves. They've all got their individual and their collective secrets — big and little — and somebody else knows all about them. Baines knows. Somehow — well, we've got a jolly good idea how — he got to know things. Sitting all those years in that little office of his, with the telephone there and all the correspondence, he's been at the nerve-centre of a small community — the Roger Bacon School. He's second master there, and it's perfectly proper that he should know what's going on. All the time his ears are tuned in to the slightest rumours and suspicions. He's like a bug in the Watergate Hotel: he picks it all up and he puts it all together. And it gives to his sinister cast of character just the nourishment it craves for — the power over other people's lives. Think of Phillipson for a minute. Baines can put him out of a job any day he chooses — but he doesn't. You see, I don't think he gloried so much in the actual exercise of his power as—'
'He did actually blackmail Phillipson, though, didn't he?'
'I think so, yes. But even blackmail wouldn't be as sweet for a louse like Baines as the thought that he could blackmail — whenever he wanted to.'
'I see,' said the blind man.
'And Mrs. Taylor. Think what he knows about her: about the arrangements for her daughter's abortion, about her elaborate lies to the police, about her heavy drinking, about her money troubles, about her anxiety that George Taylor — the only man who's ever treated her with any decency — should be kept in the dark about some of her wilder excesses.'
'But surely everybody must have known she went to Bingo most nights and had a drop of drink now and then?'
'Do you know how much she spent on Bingo and fruit machines? Even according to George it was a pound a night, and she's hardly likely to tell him the truth, is she? And she drinks like a fish — you know she does. Lunch times as well.'
'So do you, sir.'
'Yes, but. . well, I only drink in moderation, you know that. Anyway, that's only the half of it. You've seen the way she dresses. Expensive clothes, shoes, accessories — the lot. And jewellery. You noticed the diamonds on her fingers? God knows what they're worth. And do you know what her husband is? He's a dustman! No, Lewis. She's been living way, way beyond her means — you must have realized that'
'All right, sir. Perhaps that's a good enough motive for Mrs. Taylor, but—'
'I know. Where does Valerie fit in? Well, I should think Mrs. Taylor probably kept in touch with her daughter by phone — letters would be far too dangerous — and Valerie must have had a pretty good idea of what was going on: that her mother was getting hopelessly mixed up with Baines — that she was getting like a drug addict, loathing the whole thing in her saner moments but just not being able to do without it. Valerie must have realized that one way or another her mother's life was becoming one long misery, and she probably guessed how it was all likely to end. Perhaps her mother had hinted that she was coming to the end of her tether and couldn't face up to things much longer. I don't know.
'And then just think of Valerie herself. Baines knows all about her, too: her promiscuous background, her night with Phillipson, her affair with Acum — and all its consequences. He knows the lot. And at any time he can ruin everything. Above all he can ruin David Acum, because once it gets widely known that he's likely to start fiddling around with some of the girls he's supposed to be teaching, he'll have one hell of a job getting a post in any school, even in these permissive days. And I suspect, Lewis, that in a strange sort of way Valerie has gradually grown to love Acum more than anyone or anything she's ever wanted. I think they're happy together — or as happy as anyone could hope to be under the circumstances. Do you see what I mean, then? Not only was her mother's happiness threatened at every turn by that bastard Baines, but equally the happiness of David Acum. And one day she suddenly found herself with the opportunity of doing something about it all: at one swift, uncomplicated swoop to solve all the problems, and she could do that by getting rid of Baines.'
Lewis pondered a while. 'Didn't she ever think that Acum might be suspected, though? He was in Oxford, too — she knew that.'
'No, I don't suppose she gave it a thought. I mean, the chance that Acum himself would go along to Baines's place at the very same time as she did — well, it's a thousand to one against, isn't it?'
'Odd coincidence, though.'
'It's an odd coincidence, Lewis, that the 46th word from the beginning and the 46th word from the end of the 46th Psalm in the Authorized Version should spell "Shakespear".'
Aristotle, Shakespeare and the Book of Psalms. It was all a bit too much for Lewis, and he sat in silence deciding that he'd missed out somewhere along the educational line. He'd asked his questions and he'd got his answers. They hadn't been the best answers in the world, perhaps, but they just about added up. It was, one could say, satisfactory.
Morse stood up and went over to the kitchen window. The view was magnificent, and for some time he stared across at the massive peaks of the Snowdon range. 'We can't stay here for ever, I suppose,' he said at last. His hands were on the edge of the sink, and almost involuntarily he pulled open the right-hand drawer. Inside he saw a wooden-handled carving knife, new, 'Prestige, Made in England', and he was on the point of picking it up when he heard the rattle of a Yale key in the front-door lock. Swiftly he held up a finger to his mouth and drew Lewis back with him against the wall behind the kitchen door. He could see her quite clearly now, the long, blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders, as she fiddled momentarily with the inner catch, withdrew the key, and closed the door behind her.
Thinly veiled anger yet little more than mild surprise showed on her face as Morse stepped into the hallway. 'That's your car outside, I suppose.' She said it in a bleak almost contemptuous voice. 'I'd just like to know what right you think you've got to burst into my house like this!'
'You've every right to feel angry,' said Morse defencelessly, lifting up his left hand in a feeble gesture of pacification. 'I'll explain everything in a minute. I promise I will. But can I just ask you one question first? That's all I ask. Just one question. It's very important'
She looked at him curiously, as if he were slightly mad.
'You speak French, don't you?'
'Yes.' Frowning she put down her shopping basket by the door, and stood there quite still, maintaining the distance between them. 'Yes, I do speak French. What's that?'
Morse took the desperate plunge. 'Avez-vous appris français à l'école?
For a brief moment only she stared at him with blank, uncomprehending eyes, before the devastating reply slid smoothly and idiomatically from her tutored lips. 'Oui. Je l'ai étudié d'abord à l'école et apres pendant trois ans à l'universite. Alors je devrais parler la langue assez bien, nest-ce pas?'
'Et avez-vous rencontré votre mari à Exeter?'
'Oui. Nous étions étudiants là-bas tous les deux. Naturellement, il parle français mieux que moi. Mais il est assez évident que vous parlez français comme un anglais typique, et votre accent est abominable.'
Morse walked back into the kitchen with the air of an educationally subnormal zombie, sat down at the table, and held his head between his hands. Why had he bothered anyway? He had known already. He had known as soon as she had closed the front door and turned her face towards him — a face still blotched with ugly spots.
'Would you both like a cup of tea?' asked Mrs. Acum, as the embarrassed Lewis stepped forward sheepishly from behind the kitchen door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day
Is crept into the b
osom of the sea.
(Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II),
AS HE SLUMPED back in the passenger seat, Morse presented a picture of stupefied perplexity. They had left Caernarfon just after 9.00 p.m., and it would be well into the early hours before they arrived in Oxford. Each left the other to his private thoughts, thoughts that criss-crossed ceaselessly the no-man's-land of failure and futility.
The interview with Acum had been a very strange affair. Morse seemed entirely to have lost the thread of the inquiry, and his early questions had been almost embarrassingly apologetic. It had been left to Lewis to press home some of the points that Morse had earlier made, and after an initial evasiveness Acum had seemed almost glad to get it all off his chest at last. And as he did so, Lewis was left wondering where the inspector's train of thought had jumped the rails and landed in such a heap of crumpled wreckage by the track; for many of Morse's assumptions had been correct, it seemed. Almost uncannily correct.
Acum (on his own admission now) had indeed been attracted to Valerie Taylor and several times had intercourse with her; including a night in early April (not March) when his wife had returned home early one Tuesday (not Wednesday) evening from night school in Oxpens (not Headington) where she was attending art (not sewing) classes. Her teacher was down with shingles (not with flu), and the class was cancelled. It was just after eight o'clock (not a quarter to) when Mrs. Acum had returned and found them lying together across the settee (not in bed), and the upshot had been veritably volcanic, with Valerie, it seemed, by far the least confounded of that troubled trio. There followed, for Acum and his wife, a succession of bleak and barren days. It was all over between them — she insisted firmly upon that; but she agreed to stay with him until their separation could be effected with a minimum of social scandal. He himself decided he must move in any case, and applied for a job in Caernarfon; and although he had been questioned by Phillipson at some length about his motives for a seemingly meaningless move to a not particularly promising post, he had told him nothing of the truth. Literally nothing. He could only pray that Valerie would keep her mouth shut, too.
Not until about three weeks before her disappearance had he spoken personally to Valerie again, when she told him that she was expecting a baby, a baby that was probably his. She appeared (or so it seemed to Acum) completely confident and unconcerned and told him everything would be all right. She begged of him one thing only: that if she were to run away he would say nothing and know nothing — that was all; and although he had pressed her about her intentions, she would only repeat that she would be all right. Did she need any money? She told him she would let him know, but, smiling slyly as she told him, she said that she was going to be all right. Everything was 'all right'. Everything was always 'all right' with Valerie. (It was at this point in Lewis's interrogation, and only at this point, that Morse had suddenly pricked up his ears and asked a few inconsequential questions.) It appeared, however, that the money side of things was not completely 'all right', for only a week or so before the day she disappeared Valerie had approached Acum and told him she would be very grateful for some money if he could manage it. She hadn't pressed her claim on him in any way, but he had been only too glad to help; and from the little enough they had managed to save — and with his wife's full knowledge — he had raised one hundred pounds. And then she had gone; and like everyone else he hadn't the faintest idea where she had gone to, and he had kept his silence ever since, as Valerie had asked him to.
Meanwhile in the Acum household the weeping wounds were at last beginning to heal; and with Valerie gone they had tried, for the first time since that dreadful night, to discuss their sorry situation with some degree of rationality and mutual understanding. He told her that he loved her, that he realized now how very much she meant to him, and how desperately he hoped that they would stay together. She had wept then, and said she knew how disappointed he must be that she could have no children of her own. . And as the summer term drew towards its close they had decided — almost happily decided — that they would stay together, and try to patch their marriage up. In any case there had never been the slightest question of divorce: for his wife was a Roman Catholic.
So, continued Acum, they had moved together to North Wales, and life was happy enough now — or had been so until the whole thing had once more exploded in their faces with the murder of Reggie Baines, of which (he swore on his solemn honour) he was himself completely innocent. Blackmail? The whole idea was laughable. The only person who had any hold on him was Valerie Taylor, and of Valerie Taylor he had seen or heard nothing whatsoever since the day of her disappearance. Whether she were alive or whether she were dead, he had no idea — no idea at all.
There the interview had finished. Or almost finished. For it was Morse himself who had administered the coup de grace which finally put his tortured and tortuous theory out of all its pain.
'Does your wife drive a car?'
Acum looked at him with mild surprise. 'No. She's never driven a yard in her life. Why?'
Lewis relived the interview as he drove on steadily through the night. And as he recalled the facts that Acum had recounted, he felt a deepening sympathy with the sour, dejected, silent figure slumped beside him, smoking (unusually) cigarette after cigarette, and feeling (if the truth be told) unconscionably angry with himself. .
Why had he gone wrong? Where had he gone wrong? The questions re-echoed in Morse's mind as if repeated by some interminable interlocutor installed inside his brain. He thought back to his first analysis of the case — the one in which he had cast Mrs. Taylor as the murderer not only of Reginald Baines but also of her daughter Valerie. How easy now to see why that was wrong! His reasoning had run aground upon the Rock Improbable and the Rock Impossible: the glaring improbability that Mrs. Taylor had murdered her only daughter (mothers just didn't do that sort of thing very often, did they?); and the plain impossibility that anyone had murdered Valerie on the day she disappeared, since three days later, alive and well, she had climbed into the back of a taxi outside a London abortion clinic. Yes, the first analysis had been brutally smashed to pieces by the facts, and now lay sunk without a trace beneath the sea. It was as simple as that.
And what of the second analysis? That had seemed on the face of it to answer all the facts, or nearly all of them. What had gone wrong with that? Again his logic had foundered upon the Reef of Unreason: the glaring improbability that Valerie Taylor had either sufficient motive or adequate opportunity to murder a man who seemed to pose little more than a peripheral threat to her future happiness; and the plain impossibility that the woman living with David Acum was Valerie Taylor. She wasn't. She was Mrs. Acum. And Analysis One lay side by side with Analysis Two — irrecoverable wrecks upon the ocean floor.
Almost frenetically Morse tried to wrench his thoughts away from it all. He tried to conjure up a dream of fair women; and failing this he essayed to project upon his mind a raw, uncensored film of rank eroticism; he tried so very hard. . But still the wretched earth-bound realities of the Taylor case crowded his brain, forbade those flights of half-forbidden fancies, and jolted him back to his inescapable mood of gloom-ridden despondency. Facts, facts, facts! Facts that one by one he once again reviewed as they marched and counter-marched across his mind. If only he'd stuck to the facts! Ainley was dead — that was a fact. Somebody had written a letter the very day after he died — that was a fact. Valerie had been alive on the days immediately following her disappearance — that was a fact. Baines was dead — that was a fact. Mrs. Acum was Mrs. Acum — that was a fact. But where did he go from there? He began to realize how few the facts had been; how very, very few. A lot of possible facts; a fair helping of probable facts; but few that ranked as positive facts. And once again the facts remarshalled themselves and marched across the parade ground. . He shook his head sharply and felt he must be going mad.
Lewis, he could see, was concentrating hard upon the road. Lewis! Huh! It had been Lewis who had asked him the one qu
estion, the only question, that had completely floored him: Why had Baines written the letter? Why? He had never grappled satisfactorily with that question, and now it worried away at his brain again. Why? Why? Why?
It was as they swept along the old Wading Street, past Wellington, that Morse in a flash conceived a possible answer to this importunate question; an answer of astonishing and devastating simplicity. And he nursed his new little discovery like a frightened mother sheltering her only child amid the ruin of an earthquake-stricken city. . The merry-go-round was slowing now. . the pubs were long shut and the chips were long cold. . his mind was getting back to normal now. . This was better! Mediodically he began to undress Miss Yvonne Baker.
Lewis had the road virtually to himself now. It was past 1.00 a.m. and the two men had not exchanged a single word. Strangely, the silence had seemed progressively to reinforce itself, and conversation now would seem as sacrilegious as a breaking of the silence before the cenotaph.
As he drove the last part of the journey his mind roved back beyond the oddly unreal events of the last few hours, and dwelt again on the early days of the Valerie Taylor case. She'd just hopped it, of course — he'd said so right at the beginning: fed up with home and school, she'd yearned for the brighter lights, the excitement and the glamour of the big city. Got shot of the unwanted baby, and finished up in a groovy, swinging set. Contented enough; even happy, perhaps. The last thing she wanted was to go back home to her moody mother and her stolid step-father. We all felt like that occasionally. We'd all like a fresh start in a new life. Like being born again. . He'd felt like running away from home when he was her age. . Concentrate, Lewis! Oxford 30 miles. He glanced at the inspector and smiled quietly to himself. The old boy was fast asleep.
