Last Bus To Woodstock im-1

by Colin Dexter

  'You could always take them in.'

  'And get 'em back in about six months.'

  'You exaggerate.'

  'I'll get it finished in the morning.'

  'It'll probably be raining.'

  'Well, we could do with a drop of rain. Have you seen the lawn? It's like the plains of Abyssinia.'

  'You've never been to Abyssinia.'

  The conversation dropped. Bernard went to his desk and took out some papers. 'I thought you'd be watching the telly.'

  'I can't stick being with the children.'

  Bernard looked at her sharply. She was near to tears. "No,' he said. 'I know what you mean.' He looked soberly and almost tenderly at Margaret. Margaret, his wife! Sometimes he treated her so thoughtlessly, so very thoughtlessly. He walked across and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  'They're pretty insufferable, aren't they? But don't worry about it. All kids are the same. I'll tell you what. .'

  'Oh, don't bother! You've made all those promises before. I don't care. I don't care, I tell you. As far as I'm concerned they can go to hell — and you with them!'

  She began to sob convulsively and ran from the room. He heard her go into their bedroom above, and listened as the sobs continued. He put his head in his hands. He would have to do something, and he would have to do it very soon. He was in real danger now of losing everything. He might even have lost it already. . Could he tell Margaret everything? She would never, never forgive him. What about the police? He'd almost told them, or, at least, he'd almost told them part of it. He looked down at Dowson's works and saw where the page was open. He knew that Margaret had been reading it and his eyes fell upon the same poem:

  Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.

  Yes, it had been sweet enough, it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise; but how sour it tasted now. It would have been a huge relief to have ended it all long ago, above all to have broken free from the web of lies and deceit he had spun around himself. Yet how beguiling had been the prospect of those extra-marital delights. Conscience. Damned conscience. Nurtured in a sensitive school. Fatal.

  Though not a believer himself, Bernard conceded the empirical truth of the Pauline assertion that the wages of sin is death. He wanted desperately to be rid of the guilt and the remorse, and remembered vaguely from his school days in the bible-class how lustily they had all given voice to many a chorus on sin:

  Though your sins be as scarlet, scarlet, scarlet,

  They shall be whiter, yea whiter than snow.

  But he couldn't pray these days — his spirit was parched and desolate. His primitive, eager religiosity was dulled now and overlaid with a deep and hard veneer of learning, culture and cynicism. He was well rehearsed in all the theological paradoxes, and the fizz of academic controversy was no longer a delight. Whiter than snow, indeed! More like the driven slush.

  He walked over to the window which looked out on to the quiet road. Lights shone in most of the windows. A few people walked past; a neighbour was taking his dog to foul some other pavement. An L-driver was struggling to turn her car around, and was painfully succeeding, though the line of symmetry through MAC's Self-drive Zodiac rarely progressed more than seven or eight degrees at any one manoeuvre. More like a thirty-three point turn, he thought. The instructor must be a patient chap. He had tried to teach Margaret to drive once. . Still, he had made up for that. She had her own Mini now. He watched for several minutes. A man walked by, but though he thought he seemed familiar, Bernard didn't recognize him. He wondered who he was and where he was going, and kept him in sight until he turned right into Charlton Road.

  As Morse had walked past, he too was wondering what to do. Best have it out with Jennifer now? He didn't know, but he thought on the whole it was. Conscious that he had not covered himself with glory at the earlier interview, he decided mentally to rehearse his new approach.

  'You want to ask me some more questions?'

  'Yes' Tight-lipped and masterly.

  'Won't you come in?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well?'

  'Thus far you've told me nothing but a pack of lies. I suggest we start again.'

  'I don't know what you're talking about. .' Slowly and pointedly he would get up from the chair and walk towards the door. He would utter not one further word. But as he opened the door, Jennifer would say, 'All right, Inspector." And he would listen. He thought he had a good idea of what she would tell him.

  That he would have been wrong, he was not to learn for some time yet; for he discovered that Jennifer had gone out. The languid Sue, her long legs bronzed and bare, had no idea where she had gone. 'Won't you come in and wait, Inspector?' The full lips parted and quivered slightly. Morse both looked and felt alarmingly vulnerable. He consulted his wrist-watch for moral support. 'You're very kind but. . perhaps I'd better not.'

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sunday, 3 October

  MORSE SLEPT SOUNDLY for almost twelve hours, and awoke at 8.30 a.m. He had returned home immediately after his second call to Charlton Road with a splitting headache and a harassed mind. Now, as he blinked awake, he could scarcely believe how fresh he felt.

  The last book Morse himself had taken from the library and which now lay, three weeks overdue, on his writing desk, was Edward de Bono's A Five-Day Course in Lateral Thinking. He had followed the course conscientiously, refused to look at any of the answers in advance, and reluctantly concluded that even the most sympathetic assessment of his lateral potential was gamma minus minus. But he had enjoyed it. Moreover he had learned that a logical, progressive, 'vertical' assault upon a sticky problem might not always be the best. He had not really understood some of the jargon too well, but he had grasped the substantial points. 'How can one drive a car up a dark alley if the headlights are not working?' It didn't matter what the answer was. The thing to do was to suggest anything a driver might conceivably do: blow the horn, take the roof rack off, lift the bonnet up. It didn't matter. The mere contemplation of futile solutions was itself a potent force in reaching the right conclusion; for sooner or later one would turn on a blinker and, hey presto! the light would dawn. In an amateurish way Morse had tried out this technique and had surprised himself. If a name was on the tip of his tongue, he stopped thinking directly about it, and merely repeated anything he knew — the state capitals of the USA — anything; and it seemed to work.

  As he lay awake he decided temporarily to shelve the murder of Sylvia Kaye. He was making progress — he knew that. But his mind lacked incision; it was going a bit stale. With a rest today (and he'd deserved one) he'd be back on mental tip-toe in the morning.

  He got up, dressed and shaved, cooked himself a succulent looking mixture of bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, and felt good. He ran a leisurely eye through the Sunday papers, checked his pools, wondered if he was the only man in England who had picked in his 'any eight from sixteen' permutation not a single score-draw, and lit a cigarette. He would sit and idle the time away until noon, have a couple of pints and get lunch out somewhere. It seemed a civilized prospect. But he was never happy without something to do, and before long was mentally debating whether to put some Wagner on the record player or do a crossword. Crosswords were a passion with Morse, although since the death of the great Ximenes he had found few composers to please his taste. On the whole he enjoyed The Listener puzzles as much as any, and for this purpose took the periodical each week. On the other hand he delighted in Wagnerian opera and had the complete cycle of The Ring. He decided to do both, and to the opening bars of the richly scored Prelude to Das Rheingold, he sat back and turned to the penultimate page of The Listener. This was the life. The Rhinemaidens swam gracefully to and fro and it was a few minutes before Morse felt willing to let the music drift away to the periphery of his attention. He read the preamble to t
he crossword:

  'Each of the across clues contains, in the definition, a deliberate misprint. Each of the down clues is normal, although the words to be entered in the diagram will contain a misprint of a single letter. Working from 1 across to 28 down the missing — printed letters form a well-known quotation which solvers. .'

  Morse read no more. He leapt to his feet. A solo horn expired with a dying groan as he switched off the record player and snatched his car keys from the mantelpiece.

  His in-tray was high with reports, but he ignored them. He unlocked his cabinet, took out the file on the Sylvia Kaye murder, and extracted the letter addressed to Jennifer Coleby. He knew there had been something wrong with the whole thing. His mouth was dry and his hand trembled slightly, like a schoolboy opening his O-level results:

  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 our 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,

  How wrong-headed he had been! Instead of thinking, as he had done, with such supercilious arrogance, of the illiteracy and incompetence of some poor blockhead of a typist, he should have been thinking exactly the opposite. He'd been a fool. The clues were there. The whole thing was phoney — why hadn't he spotted that before? When you boiled it down it was a nonsense letter. He had first made the mistake of concentrating upon individual mistakes and not even bothering to see the letter as a synoptic whole. But not only that. He had compounded his mistake. For if he had read the letter as a letter, he might have considered the mistakes as mistakes—deliberate mistakes. He took a sheet of paper and started: 'asessing' — 's' omitted; 'mny'—'a' omitted; 'begining—'n' omitted; 'loose'—'o' inserted; 'Psycology'—'h' omitted. SANOH — whatever that signified. Look again, 'our'—shouldn't it be 'your"? 'y' omitted; 'routnie' — 'n' and 'i' transposed. What did that give him? SAYNOHNI. Hardly promising. Try once more, 'alloted'—surely two 't's? 't' omitted? And there it was staring him in the face. The 'G' of course from the signature, the only recognizable letter therein: SAY NOTHING. Someone had been desperately anxious for Jennifer not to say a word — and Jennifer, it seemed, had got the message.

  It had taken Morse two minutes, and he was glad that Jennifer had been out the previous evening. He felt sure that faced with her lies about the visit to the library, she would have said how sorry she was and that she must have got it wrong. It must have been Thursday, she supposed; it was so difficult to think back to events of even the day before, wasn't it? She honestly couldn't remember; but she would try very hard to. Perhaps she had gone for a walk — on her own, of course.

  But she would find things more awkward now. Strangely Morse felt little sense of elation. He had experienced an odd liking for Jennifer when they had met, and in retrospect he understood how difficult it must have been for her. But he must look the fact squarely in the face. She was lying. She was shielding someone — that someone who in all probability had raped and murdered Sylvia. It was not a pretty thought. Every piece of evidence now pointed unequivocally to the fact that it was Jennifer Coleby who had stood at Fare Stage 5 with Sylvia on the night of the 29th; that it was she who had been given a lift by a person or persons unknown (pretty certainly the former) as far as Woodstock; that there she had witnessed something about which she had been warned to keep her silence. In short that Jennifer Coleby knew the identity of the man who had murdered Sylvia Kaye. Morse suddenly wondered if she was in danger, and it was this fear which prompted his immediate decision to have Jennifer held on suspicion of being an accessory to the crime of murder. He would need Lewis in.

  He reached for his outside phone and rang his sergeant's home number.

  'Lewis?'

  'Speaking.'

  'Morse here. I'm sorry to ruin your weekend, but I want you here.'

  'Straight away, sir?'

  'If you can.'

  'I'm on my way.'

  Morse looked through his in-tray. Reports, reports, reports. He crossed through his own initials immediately, barely glancing at such uncongenial titles as The Drug Problem in Britain, The Police and the Public, and The Statistics for Crimes of Violence in Oxfordshire (second quarter). At the minute he was interested only in one statistic which would doubtless, in time, appear in the statistics of violent crime in Oxfordshire (third quarter). He'd no time for reports. He suspected that about 95 % of the written word was never read by anyone anyway. But there were two items which held his attention. A report from the forensic lab on the murder weapon, and a supplementary report from the pathology department on Sylvia Kaye. Neither did more than confirm what he already knew or at any rate suspected. The tire-lever proved to be a singularly unromantic specimen. Morse read all about its shape, size, weight. . But why bother? There was no mystery about the lever at all. The landlord of The Black Prince had spent the afternoons of Tuesday, 28th and Wednesday, 29th tinkering with an ancient Sunbeam, and had unwittingly left his tool kit outside the garage on the right at the back of the courtyard where he kept the car. There were no recognizable prints — just the ugly evidence, at one of the lever's curving ends, that it had crashed with considerable force into the bone of a human skull. There followed a gory analysis, which Morse was glad to skip.

  It was only a few minutes before Lewis knocked and entered.

  'Ah, Lewis. The gods, me thinks, have smiled weakly on our inquiries.' He outlined the developments in the case. 'I want Miss Jennifer Coleby brought in for questioning. Be careful. Take Policewoman Fuller with you if you like. Just held for questioning, you understand? There's no question at all of any formal arrest. If she prefers to ring up her legal advisers, tell her it's Sunday and they're all playing golf. But I don't think you'll have much trouble.' On the latter point, at least, Morse guessed correctly.

  Jennifer was sitting in interrogation room 3 by 3.45 p.m. On Morse's instructions, Lewis spent an hour with her, making no mention whatever of the information he had been given earlier in the afternoon. Lewis mentioned quietly that, in spite of all their inquiries, they had not been able to trace the young lady, seen by two independent witnesses, who had been with Sylvia Kaye an hour or so before she was murdered.

  'You must be patient, Sergeant.'

  Lewis smiled weakly, like the gods. 'Oh, we're patient enough, miss, and I think with a little cooperation we shall get there.'

  'Aren't you getting any co-operation?'

  'Would you like a cup of tea, miss?'

  'I'd prefer coffee.'

  Policewoman Fuller hurried off; Jennifer moistened her lips and swallowed; Lewis brooded quietly. In the tug-of-war silence which ensued it was Lewis who finally won.

  'You think I'm not co-operating, Sergeant?'

  'Are you?'

  'Look, I've told the Inspector what I know. Didn't he believe me?'

  '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.'

  Jennifer 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.'