by Colin Dexter
Valerie looked at herself once more in the mirror. The spots looked better now, and she closed the bedroom door behind her . . . Morse! She smiled to herself as she walked down the creaking stairs. His face! Oui. Je l’ai étudié d’abord à l’école et après . . .
The phone rang in Caernarfon Police HQ and the switchboard put the call through to the duty inspector.
‘All right. Put him on.’ He clamped his hand firmly over the mouthpiece and mumbled a few hurried words sotto voce to the sergeant sitting opposite. ‘It’s Morse again.’
‘Morse, sir?’
‘Yes, you remember. That fellow from Oxford who buggered us all about at the weekend. I wonder what . . . Hello. Can I help you?’
Epilogue
There are tears of things and mortal matters touch the heart.
Virgil, Aeneid I
IT WAS NOT until Saturday morning that a somewhat disgruntled Lewis was at last summoned into Morse’s office to hear something of the final developments.
The Caernarfon police had felt (with some justification, admitted Morse) that they had insufficient evidence on which to hold Valerie Taylor – even if they accepted Morse’s vehement protestations that the woman living as Mrs Acum was Valerie Taylor. And when Morse himself had arrived on Wednesday morning, it had been too late: the driver of the 9.50 a.m. bus from Bont-Newydd to Bangor had remembered her clearly; and a petrol-pump attendant had noticed her (‘So would you have done, officer!’) as she stood beside the forecourt waiting to thumb a lift down the A5.
Lewis had listened carefully, but one or two things still puzzled him. ‘So it must have been Baines who wrote the letter?’
‘Oh yes. It couldn’t have been Valerie.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure, sir. She’s a pretty clever girl.’
And I’m a clown, thought Morse. The car, the French, and the spots: a combination of circumstance and coincidence which had proved too much even for him to accept; a triple-oxer over which he would normally have leaped with the blithest assurance, but at which, in this instance, he had so strangely refused. After all, it would have been very odd if a mechanically minded girl like Valerie hadn’t even bothered to take a driving test; and she wasn’t too bad at spoken French – even at school. Those reports! If only—
‘Big coincidence, wasn’t it – about the spots, I mean?’
‘No, not really, Lewis. Don’t forget that both of them were sleeping with Acum; and Acum’s got a beard.’
It was something else that Lewis hadn’t considered, and he let it go. ‘She’s gone to London, I suppose, sir?’
Morse nodded wearily, a wry smile upon his lips. ‘Back to square one, aren’t we?’
‘You think we’ll find her?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose so – in the end.’
On Saturday afternoon the Phillipson family motored to the White Horse Hill at Uffington. For Andrew and Alison it was a rare treat, and Mrs Phillipson watched them lovingly as they gambolled with gay abandon about the Downs. So much had passed between her and Donald these last few days. On Tuesday evening their very lives together had seemed to be hanging by the slenderest of threads. But now, this bright and chilly afternoon, the future stretched out before them, open and free as the broad landscape around them. She would write, she decided, a long, long letter to Morse, and try to thank him from the bottom of her heart. For on that terrible evening it had been Morse who had found Donald and brought him to her; it had been Morse who had seemed to know and to understand all things about them both . . .
On Saturday evening Mrs Grace Taylor sat staring blankly through the window on to the darkened street. They had returned from their holiday in mid-afternoon, and things seemed very much the same as she had left them. At a quarter-past eight, by the light of the street lamp, she saw Morse walking slowly, head down, towards the pub. She gave him no second thought.
Earlier in the evening she had gone out into the front garden and clipped off the heads of a few last fading roses. But there had been one late scarlet bloom that was still in perfect flower. She had cut that off too, and it now stood on the mantelshelf, in a cheap glass vase that Valerie had won on a shooting stall at St Giles’s Fair, beneath the ducks that winged their way towards the ceiling in the empty room behind her.
Some of them never did come home . . . never.