by Colin Dexter
Morse read the letter through twice – each time slowly, and (much to Lewis’s delight) appeared to be highly satisfied.
‘What do you make of it, sir?’
Morse put the letter down and leaned back in the old black leather chair, his elbows resting on the arms, the tips of his middle fingers tapping each other lightly in front of a well-pleased mouth. ‘What would you say about that letter, Lewis, eh? What do you learn from it?’
Lewis usually hated moments such as this. But he had been asking himself exactly the same question since he’d first read the letter through, and he launched into what he hoped Morse would accept as an intelligent analysis.
‘It’s quite clear, sir, that Margaret Bowman was unfaithful to her husband over quite a while. He talks in the letter about night classes and I think they were probably held in the autumn term – say, for about three or four months – after he first saw her, like he says, in the summer. I’d say from about July onwards. That’s the first thing.’ (Lewis was feeling not displeased with himself.) ‘Second thing, sir, is this man’s age. He says he’s not been around quite as long as she has, and he’s underlined the word “quite”. He probably teased her a bit – like most people would – if she was a little bit older than he was: let’s say, six months or a year, perhaps. Now, Margaret Bowman – I’ve found out, sir – was thirty-six last September. So let’s put our prime suspect in the thirty-five age-bracket then, all right?’ (Lewis could recall few occasions on which he had seemed to be speaking with such fluent authority.) ‘Then there’s a third point, sir. He asks her to meet him outside the library at ten minutes to one – so he must know it takes about five minutes for her to get there from the Locals – and five minutes to get back. That leaves us with fifty minutes from the hour they’re given at the Locals for a lunch-break. But he mentions “forty minutes”: so, as I see things’ (how happy Lewis felt!) ‘he must live only about five minutes’ drive away from South Parade. I don’t think they just went to a pub and held hands, sir. I think, too, that this fellow probably lives on the west side of Oxford – let’s say off the Woodstock Road somewhere – because Summertown Library would be a bit of a roundabout place to pick her up if he lived on the east side, especially with such a little time they’ve got together.’
Morse had nodded agreement at several points during this exposition; and had been on the point of congratulating his sergeant when Lewis resumed – still in full spate.
‘Now if we add these new facts to what we’ve already discovered, sir, I reckon we’re not all that far off from knowing exactly who he is. We can be far more precise about where he lives – within five minutes’ drive, at the outside, from Summertown; and we can be far more precise about his age – pretty certainly thirty-four or thirty-five. So if we had a computerized file on everybody, I think we could spot our man straight away. But there’s something else – something perhaps much more helpful than a computer, sir: that night-school class! It won’t be difficult to trace the people in Mrs Bowman’s class; and I’d like to bet we shall find somebody who had a vague sort of inkling about what Margaret Bowman was up to. Seems to me a good line of inquiry; and I can get on with it straight away if you agree.’
Morse was silent for a little while before replying. ‘Yes, I think I do agree.’
Yet Lewis was conscious of a deeper undercurrent in Morse’s tone: something was worrying the chief, pretty surely so.
‘What’s the matter, sir?’
‘Matter? Nothing’s the matter. It’s just that – well, tell me what you make of that letter as a whole, Lewis. What sort of man is he, do you think?’
‘Bit of mixture, I’d say. Sounds as if he’s genuinely fond of the woman, doesn’t it? At the same time it sounds as if he’s got quite a cruel streak in him – bit of a coarse streak, too. As if he loved her – but always in a selfish sort of way: as if perhaps he might be prepared to do anything just to keep her.’
Morse nodded. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I think he was prepared to do almost anything to keep her.’
‘Have you got any idea of what really happened?’ asked Lewis quietly.
‘Yes! – for what it’s worth, I have. Clearly Bowman found this letter somewhere, and he realized that his wife was going with another fellow. I suspect he told her what he knew and gave her an ultimatum. Most men perhaps would have accepted the facts and called it a day – however much it hurt. But Bowman didn’t! He loved his wife more than she could ever have known, and his first instinctive reactions mustered themselves – not against his wife – but against her lover. He probably told her all this, in his own vague way; and I think he decided that the best way to help Margaret and, at the same time, to save his own deeply injured pride, was to get rid of her lover! We’ve been on a lot of cases together, Lewis – with lots of people involved; but I don’t reckon the motives are ever all that different – love, hate, jealousy, revenge . . . Anyway, I think that Bowman got his wife to agree to collaborate with him in a plot to get rid of the man who – at least for the moment – was a threat to both of them. What exactly that plan involved, we may never know – unless Margaret Bowman decides to tell us. The only firm thing we know about it so far is that Bowman himself wrote a wholly genuine letter which would rather cleverly serve two purposes when lover-boy was found murdered – that is, if any suspicion were ever likely to fall on either of the Bowmans: first, it would put Margaret Bowman in a wholly sympathetic light; second, it would appear to put Tom Bowman some few hundreds of miles away from the scene of the immediate crime.’
‘Didn’t we know most of that already—’
‘Let me finish, Lewis! At some particular point – I don’t know when – the plan was switched, and it was switched by the only person who could switch it – by Margaret Bowman, who decided that if she had to take a profoundly important decision about life (as she did!) she would rather throw in her lot with her illicit lover than with her licit husband. Is that clear? Forget the details for the minute, Lewis! The key thing to bear in mind is this: instead of having a plot involving the death of a troublesome lover, we have a plot involving the death of an interfering husband!’
‘You don’t think the letter helps much at all, then?’ Lewis’s initial euphoria slipped a notch or two towards his wonted diffidence.
‘My goodness, yes! And your own reading of that letter was a model of logic and lucidity! But . . .’
Lewis’s heart sank. He knew what Morse was going to say, and he said it for him. ‘But you mean I missed some vital clue in it – is that right?’
Morse waited awhile, and then smiled with what he trusted was sympathetic understanding: ‘No, Lewis. You didn’t miss one vital clue, at all. You missed two.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Tuesday, January 7th: p.m.
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair –
Lean on a garden urn –
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair
(T. S. ELIOT)
‘APART FROM YOUR own admirable deductions, Lewis, there are, as I say, a couple of other things you could have noticed, perhaps. First’ (Morse turned to the letter and found the appropriate reference) ‘he says, “You remember how careful I always was and how none of your colleagues ever knew”. Now that statement’s very revealing. It suggests that this fellow could have been very careless about meeting Margaret Bowman; careless in the sense that, if he’d wanted to, he could easily have made Margaret’s colleagues aware of what was going on between them – pretty certainly by others actually seeing the evidence. It means, I think, that the pair of them were very often near each other, and that he very sensibly agreed to avoid all contact with her in the place where they found themselves. And you don’t need me to tell you where that might have been – must have been – do you? It was on the Locals site itself, where twenty-odd workmen were employed on various jobs – but mostly on the roof – between May and September last year.’
‘Phew!’ Lewis looked down at the letter again.
If what Morse was saying were true . . .
‘But there’s a second thing,’ continued Morse, ‘that’s more specific still. There’s a rather nice little bit of English at the end of the letter – “but I think I was in love with you the very first time I saw the top of your golden head in the summer sunshine”. Now you were right in saying that this tells us roughly when he first met her. But it also tells us something else, and something even more important. Don’t you see? It tells us from which angle he first saw her, doesn’t it, Lewis? He saw her from above!’
Lewis was weighing up what Morse had just said: ‘You mean this fellow might have been on the roof, sir?’
‘Could be!’ Morse looked extremely pleased with himself. ‘Yes, he could have been on the roof. Or he could have been – higher, perhaps? The flat roof at the Locals has been causing a lot of trouble, and last summer they had a complete new go at the whole thing.’
‘So?’
‘So they had quite a few workmen there, and they’d need something to lift all that stuff . . .’
‘A crane!’ The words were out of Lewis’s excited lips in a flash.
‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘Did they have a crane on the site?’
‘Don’t know, do I.’
‘Do you remember,’ said Lewis slowly, ‘that it was me who suggested he might be a crane-driver?’
‘Nonsense!’ said Morse happily.
‘But I—’
‘You may have got the right answer, Lewis, but you got it for the wrong reasons, and you can’t claim much credit for that.’
Lewis’s smile was as happy as Morse’s. ‘Shall I give the Secretary a ring, sir?’
‘Think she’s still there? It’s gone half-past five.’
‘Some people stay on after office hours. Like I do!’
The Secretary was still at her desk. Yes, there had been a crane on the site – a big yellow thing – from May to October! And no, the Secretary had no objection at all to the police coming to look at the security passes kept all together in a filing cabinet in Reception.
Morse got up from his chair and pulled on his greatcoat. ‘And there’s something else, you know, Lewis. Something to crown the whole lot, really. They keep all their records carefully at the Locals – well, the chap on the desk does. All passes have to be shown and I’d like to bet that those workmen were given semi-permanent passes so that they could make use of the facilities there without having to get a badge every time they went to the lavatory or whatever. Just think of it! We sit here and rack our brains – and all the time the fellow we’re looking for is sitting there on a little card – in a little drawer at the Locals – with a photograph of himself on it! By Jove, this is the simplest case we’ve ever handled, my old friend. Come on. On your feet!’
But for a while, Lewis sat where he was, a wistful expression across his square, honest face. ‘You know, it’s a pity in a way, isn’t it? Like you say, we’ve done all this thinking – we’ve even given the fellow a name! The only thing we never got round to was deciding where he lives, that’s all. And if we’d been able to work that out – well, we wouldn’t need any photograph or anything, would we? We’d have, sort of, thought it all out.’
Morse sat on the edge of his desk nodding his balding head. ‘Ye-es. ’Tis a pity, I agree. Amazing, you know, what feats of logic the human brain is capable of. But sometimes life eludes logic – and sometimes when you build a great big wonderful theory you find there’s a fault in the foundations and the whole thing collapses round your ears at the slightest earth tremor.’
Morse’s voice had sounded strangely earnest, and Lewis noticed how tired his chief looked. ‘You don’t think we’re in for an earthquake, do you?’
‘Hope not! Above all I hope we get a chance to save Margaret Bowman – save her from herself as much as anything. Nice looker, you know, that woman. Lovely head of hair!’
‘Especially when viewed from the top of a crane,’ said Lewis, as he finally rose to his feet and pulled on his coat.
As they were leaving the office, Morse paused to look at a large white map of Oxford City that was fastened on the wall to the left of the door. ‘What do you think, Lewis? Here we are: South Parade – that’s where he picked her up. Now we want somewhere no more than five minutes away, so you say. Well, one thing’s certain – he either turned left or he turned right at the Woodstock Road, agreed?’ Morse’s finger slowly traced a route that led off to the south: it seemed most unlikely that the man would be living in any of the large villa-type residences that lined the road for most of the way down to St Giles’, and Morse found himself looking at the map just below St John’s College playing fields, and especially at the maze of little streets that criss-crossed the heart of Jericho. For his part, Lewis’s eyes considered the putative route that might have been taken if the man had turned right and towards the north; and soon he spotted a small cluster of streets, between the Woodstock Road itself and, to the west of it, the canal and the railway. The writing on the map was very small but Lewis could just about read the names: St Peter’s Road; Ulfgar Road; Pixey Place; Diamond Close . . . All council property, if Lewis recalled correctly – or used to be until, in the 1980s, the Tories remembered Anthony Eden’s promises of a property-owning democracy.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Tuesday, January 7th: p.m.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew):
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
(RUDYARD KIPLING)
THE MOST OBVIOUS improvements effected by those who had bought their own red-brick houses had been to the doors and the windows: several of the old doors were replaced completely by stout oaken affairs – or at the very least painted some colour other than the former regulation light blue: and most of the old windows, with their former small oblong panes, were now replaced by large horizontal sheets of glass set in stainless-steel frames. In general, it seemed fairly clear, the tone of the neighbourhood was on the ‘up’; and number 17 Diamond Close was no exception to this pattern of improved properties. A storm door (behind which no light was visible) had been built across the small front porch; and the front fence and garden had been redesigned to accommodate a medium-sized car – like the light-green Maestro which stood there now. Under the orange glare of the street-lamps, the close was strangely still.
The two police cars had moved slowly along St Peter’s Road and then stopped at the junction with Diamond Close. Morse, Lewis and Phillips were in the first car; two uniformed constables and a plainclothes detective in the second. Both Phillips and the plain-clothes man had been issued with regulation revolvers; and these two (as prearranged) got out of their cars and without slamming the doors behind them walked silently along the thirty or so yards to the front of number 17, where, with the plain-clothes man rather melodramatically pointing his revolver to the stars, Sergeant Phillips pushed the white button of the front-door bell. After a few seconds, a dull light appeared from somewhere at the back of the house, and then a fuller light and the silhouette of a figure seen through the glass of the outer door. At that moment the watching faces of Morse and Lewis betrayed a high degree of tension: yet, in retrospect, there had been nothing whatsoever to occasion such emotion.
From the outset the man in the thick green sweater had proved surprisingly co-operative. He had requested to be allowed to finish his baked beans (refused), to collect a packet of cigarettes (granted), to drive to Police HQ in his own car (refused), and to take his scarf and duffel coat (granted). At no stage had he mentioned writs, warrants, lawyers, solicitors, civil rights, unlawful arrest or Lord Longford, and Morse himself was beginning to feel a little shamefaced about the death-or-glory scenario of the arrest. But one never knew.
In the interview room it was Lewis who began the questioning.
‘Your full name is Edward Wilkins?’
‘Edward James Wilkins.’
�
�Your date of birth?’
‘Twentieth September, 1951.’
‘Place of birth?’
‘17 Diamond Close.’
‘The house you live in now?’
‘Yes. My mother lived there.’
‘Which school did you go to?’
‘Hobson Road Primary – for a start.’
‘And after that?’
‘Oxford Boys’ School.’
‘You passed the eleven plus to go there?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you leave?’
‘In 1967.’
‘You took your O levels?’
‘Yes. I passed in Maths, Physics and Engineering Drawing.’
‘You didn’t take English Literature?’
‘Yes, I did. But I failed.’
‘Did you read any Milton?’ interrupted Morse.
‘Yes, we read Comus.’
‘What did you do after you left school?’ (Lewis had taken up the questioning once more.)
‘I got an apprenticeship at Lucy’s Ironworks in Jericho.’
‘And then?’
‘I didn’t finish it. I stuck it for eighteen months and then I got offered a much better job with Mackenzie Construction.’
‘You still work for them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your job, exactly?’
‘I’m a crane-driver.’
‘You mean you sit up in the cabin and swing all the loads round the site?’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘This company – Mackenzie Construction – they did some re-roofing last year at the Oxford Delegacy – Oxford Locals, I think you call it. Is that right?’
‘Yes. About April to September.’
‘You worked there all that time?’
