by Colin Dexter
The Chief Constable had returned from a fortnight’s furlough the previous day, and his first job had been to look through the correspondence which his very competent secretary had been unable, or unauthorized, to answer. The letter containing the “Swedish Maiden” verses had been in the in-tray (or so she thought) for about a week. It had come (she thought she remembered) in a cheap brown envelope addressed (she did almost remember this) to “Chief Constable Smith (?)”; but the cover had been thrown away—sorry!—and the stanzas themselves had lingered there, wasting as it were their sweetness on the desert air—until Monday the 29th.
The Chief Constable himself had felt unwilling to apportion blame: five stanzas by a minor poet named Austin were not exactly the pretext for declaring a state of national emergency, were they? Yet the “Swedish” of the first line combined with the “maiden” of the penultimate line had inevitably rung the bell, and so he had in turn rung Strange, who in turn had reminded the CC that it was DCI Johnson who had been—was—in charge of the earlier investigations.
A photocopy of the poem was waiting on his desk that day when Johnson returned from lunch.
It had been the following morning, however, when things had really started to happen. This time, certainly, it was a cheap brown envelope, addressed to “Chief Constable Smith (?), Kidlington Police, Kidlington” (nothing else on the cover), with a Woodstock postmark, and a smudged date that could have been “27 June”, that was received in the post room at HQ, and duly placed with the CC’s other mail. The letter was extremely brief:
Why are you doing nothing about my letter?
Karin Eriksson
The note-paper clearly came from the same wad as that used for the first letter: “Recycled Paper—OXFAM•Oxford•Britain” printed along the bottom. There was every sign too that the note was written on the same typewriter, since the four middle characters of “letter” betrayed the same imperfections as those observable in the Swedish Maiden verses.
This time the CC summoned Strange immediately to his office.
“Prints?” suggested Strange, looking up from the envelope and note-paper which lay on the table before him.
“Waste o’ bloody time! The envelope? The postman who collected it—the sorter—the postman who delivered it—the post room people here—the girl who brought it round—my secretary …”
“You, sir?”
“And me, yes.”
“What about the letter itself?”
“You can try if you like.”
“I’ll get Johnson on to it—”
“I don’t want Johnson. He’s no bloody good with this sort of case. I want Morse on it.”
“He’s on holiday.”
“First I’ve heard of it!”
“You’ve been on holiday, sir.”
“It’ll have to be Johnson then. But for Christ’s sake tell him to get off his arse and actually do something!”
For a while Strange sat thinking silently. Then he said, “I’ve got a bit of an idea. Do you remember that correspondence they had in The Times a year or so back?”
“The Irish business—yes.”
“I was just thinking—thinking aloud, sir—that if you were to ring The Times—”
“Me? What’s wrong with you ringing ’em?”
Strange said nothing.
“Look! I don’t care what we do so long as we do something—quick!”
Strange struggled out of his seat.
“How does Morse get on with Johnson?” asked the CC.
“He doesn’t.”
“Where is Morse going, by the way?”
“Lyme Regis—you know, where some of the scenes in Persuasion are set.”
“Ah.” The CC looked suitably blank as the Chief Superintendent lumbered towards the door.
* * *
“There we are then,” said Strange. “That’s what I reckon we ought to do. What do you say? Cause a bit of a stir, wouldn’t it? Cause a bit of interest?”
Johnson nodded. “I like it. Will you ring The Times, sir?”
“What’s wrong with you ringing ’em?”
“Do you happen to know—?”
“You—can—obtain—Directory—Enquiries,” intoned Strange caustically, “by dialling one-nine-two.”
Johnson kept his lips tightly together as Strange continued: “And while I’m here you might as well remind me about the case. All right?”
So Johnson reminded him of the case, drawing together the threads of the story with considerably more skill than Strange had thought him capable of.
Chapter Eleven
Nec scit qua sit iter
(He knows not which is the way to take)
(Ovid, Metamorphoses II)
Karin Eriksson had been a “missing person” enquiry a year ago when her rucksack had been found; she was a “missing person” enquiry now. She was not the subject of a murder enquiry for the simple reason that it was most unusual—and extremely tricky—to mount a murder enquiry without any suspicion of foul play, with no knowledge of any motive, and above all without a body.
So, what was known about Miss Eriksson?
Her mother had run a small guest-house in Uppsala, but soon after the disappearance of her daughter had moved back to her roots—to the outskirts of Stockholm. Karin, the middle of three daughters, had just completed a secretarial course, and had passed her final examination, if not with distinction at least with a reasonable hope of landing a decent job. She was, as all agreed, of the classic Nordic type, with long blonde hair and a bosom which was liable to monopolize most men’s attention when first they met her. In the summer of 1990 she had made her way to the Holy Land without much money, but also without much trouble it appeared, until reaching her destination, where she may or may not have been the victim of attempted rape by an Israeli soldier. In 1991 she had determined to embark on another trip overseas; been determined too, by all accounts, to keep well clear of the military, wherever she went, and had attended a three-month martial arts course in Uppsala, there showing an aptitude and perseverance which had not always been apparent in her secretarial studies. In any case, she was a tallish (5 foot 8½ inches), large-boned, athletic young lady, who could take fairly good care of herself, thank you very much.
The records showed that Karin had flown to Heathrow on Wednesday, 3 July 1991, with almost £200 in one of her pockets, a multi-framed assemblage of hiking-gear, and with the address of a superintendent in a YWCA hostel near King’s Cross. A few days in London had apparently dissipated a large proportion of her English currency; and fairly early in the morning of Sunday, 7 July, she had taken the tube (perhaps) to Paddington, from where (perhaps) she had made her way up to the A40, M40—towards Oxford. The statement made by the YWCA superintendent firmly suggested that from what Karin had told her she would probably be heading—in the long run—for a distant relative living in mid-Wales.
In all probability K. would have been seen on one of the feeder roads to the A40 at about 10 A.M. or so that day. She would have been a distinctive figure: longish straw-coloured hair, wearing a pair of faded-blue jeans, raggedly split at the knees à la mode. But particularly noticeable—this from several witnesses—would have been the yellow and blue Swedish flag, some 9 inches by 6 inches, stitched across the main back pocket of her rucksack; and around her neck (always) a silk, tasselled scarf in the same national colours—sunshine and sky.
Two witnesses had come forward with fairly positive sightings of a woman, answering Karin’s description, trying to hitch a lift between the Headington and the Banbury Road roundabouts in Oxford. And one further witness, a youth waiting for a bus at the top of the Banbury Road in Oxford, thought he remembered seeing her walking fairly purposefully down towards Oxford that day. The time? About noon—certainly!—since he was just off for a drink at the Eagle and Child in St. Giles’. But more credence at the time was given to a final witness, a solicitor driving to see his invalid mother in Yarnton, who thought he could well have seen her walking a
long Sunderland Avenue, the hornbeam-lined road linking the Banbury Road and the Woodstock Road roundabouts.
At this point Johnson looked down at his records, took out an amateurishly drawn diagram, and handed it across to Strange.
“That’s what would have faced her, sir—if we can believe she even got as far as the Woodstock Road roundabout.”
With little enthusiasm, Strange looked down at the diagram and Johnson continued his story.
Karin could have gone straight over, of course—straight along the A40, a road where it would be very much easier for a hitch-hiker to get a lift than along the motorways and dual-carriageways she’d already negotiated successfully. In addition, the A40 would lead pretty directly towards the address of her third cousin, or whatever, near Llandovery. But it had not seemed to the detectives who considered the matter that she had taken the “Witney” option—or the “Wolvercote”—or the “City Centre” one; but had taken the road that led to Woodstock …
Chapter Twelve
Sigh out a lamentable tale of things,
Done long ago, and ill done
(John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy)
At about 7:15 (Johnson continued) on the sunny Tuesday morning of 9 July 1991, George Daley, of 2 Blenheim Villas, Begbroke, Oxon, had taken his eight-year-old King Charles spaniel for an early-morning walk along the slip-road beside the Royal Sun, a roadside ale-house on the northern stretch of the A44, a mile or so on the Oxford side of Woodstock. At the bottom of a hawthorn hedge, almost totally concealed by rank cow-parsley, Daley had spotted—as he claimed—a splash of bright colour; and as he ventured down, and near, he had all but trodden on a camera before seeing the scarlet rucksack.
Of course at this stage there had been no evidence of foul play—still wasn’t—and it was the camera that had claimed most of Daley’s attention. He’d promised a camera to his son Philip, a lad just coming up for his sixteenth birthday; and the camera he’d found, a heavy, aristocratic-looking thing, was a bit too much of a temptation. Both the rucksack and the camera he’d taken home, where cursorily that morning, in more detail later that evening, he and his wife Margaret had considered things.
“Finders keepers”, they’d been brought up to accept. And well, yes, the rucksack clearly—and specifically—belonged to someone else; but the camera had no name on it, had it? For all they knew, it had no connection at all with the rucksack. So they’d taken out the film, which seemed to be fully used up anyway, and thrown it on the fire. Not a crime, was it? Sometimes even the police—Daley had suggested—weren’t all that sure what should be entered in the crime figures. If a bike got stolen, it was a crime all right. But if the owner could be persuaded that the bike hadn’t really been stolen at all—just inadvertently “lost”, say—then it didn’t count as a crime at all, now did it?
“Was he an ex-copper, this fellow Daley?” asked Strange, nodding his appreciation of the point.
Johnson grinned, but shook his head and continued.
The wife, Margaret Daley, felt a bit guilty about hanging on to the rucksack, and according to Daley persuaded him to drop it in at Kidlington the next day, Wednesday—originally asserting that he’d found it that same morning. But he hadn’t really got his story together, and it was soon pretty clear that the man wasn’t a very good liar; and it wasn’t long before he changed his story.
The rucksack itself? Apart from the pocket-buttons rusting a bit, it seemed reasonably new, containing, presumably, all the young woman’s travelling possessions, including a passport which identified its owner as one Karin Eriksson, from an address in Uppsala, Sweden. Nothing, it appeared, had been tampered with overmuch by the Daleys, but the contents had proved of only limited interest: the usual female toiletries, including toothpaste, Tampax, lipstick, eyeshadow, blusher, comb, nail-file, tweezers, and white tissues; an almost full packet of Marlboro cigarettes with a cheap “throwaway” lighter; a letter, in Swedish, from a boyfriend, dated two months earlier, proclaiming (as was later translated) a love that was fully prepared to wait until eternity but which would also appreciate a further rendezvous a little earlier; a slim money-wallet, containing no credit cards or travellers’ cheques—just five ten-pound notes (newish but not consecutively numbered); a book of second-class English postage-stamps; a greyish plastic mac, meticulously folded; a creased postcard depicting Velasquez’s “Rokeby Venus” on one side, and the address of the Welsh relative on the other; two clean (cleanish) pairs of pants; one faded-blue dress; three creased blouses, black, white, and darkish red …
“Get on with it,” mumbled Strange.
Well, Interpol were contacted, and of course the Swedish police. A distraught mother, by phone from Uppsala, had told them that it was very unusual for Karin not to keep her family informed of where she was and what she was up to—as she had done from London the previous week.
A poster (“Have you seen this young woman?”) displaying a blown-up copy of the passport photograph had been printed, and seen by some of the citizens of Oxford and its immediate environs in buses, youth clubs, information offices, employment agencies, those sorts of places.
“And that’s when these people came forward, these witnesses?” interrupted Strange.
“That’s it, sir.”
“And the fellow you took notice of was the one who thought he saw her in Sunderland Avenue.”
“He was a very good witness. Very good.”
“Mm! I don’t know. A lovely leggy blonde—well-tanned, well-exposed, eh, Johnson? Standing there on the grass verge facing the traffic … Bit odd, isn’t it? You’d’ve thought the fellow would’ve remembered her for certain—that’s all I’m saying. Some of us still have the occasional erotic day-dream, y’know.”
“That’s what Morse said.”
“Did he now!”
“He said even if most of us were only going as far as Woodstock we’d have taken her on to Stratford, if that’s what she wanted.”
“He’d have taken her to Aberdeen,” growled Strange.
The next thing (Johnson continued his story) had been the discovery, in the long grass about twenty yards from where the rucksack had been found—probably fallen out of one of the pockets—of a slim little volume titled A Birdwatchers’ Guide. Inside was a sheet of white paper, folded vertically and seemingly acting as a bookmark, on which the names of ten birds had been written in neat capitals, with a pencilled tick against seven of them:
The lettering matched the style and slope of the few scraps of writing found in the other documents, and the easy conclusion was that Karin Eriksson had been a keen ornithologist, probably buying the book after arriving in London and trying to add to her list of sightings some of the rarer species which could be seen during English summers. The names of the birds were written in English and there was only the one misspelling: the “breaded tit”—an interesting variety of the “bearded plaice” spotted fairly frequently in English restaurants. (It had been the pedantic Morse who had made this latter point.)
Even more interesting, though, had been the second enclosure within the pages: a thin yellow leaflet, folded this time across the middle, announcing a pop concert in the grounds of Blenheim Palace on Monday, 8 July—the day before the rucksack was found: 8 P.M.—11:30 P.M., admission (ticket only) £4.50.
That was it. Nothing else really. Statements taken—enquiries made—searches organized in the grounds of Blenheim Palace—but …
“How much did Morse come into all this?” asked a frowning Strange.
Johnson might have known he’d ask it, and he knew he might as well come clean.
Chapter Thirteen
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood
(Samuel Johnson, The Idler)
The truth was that Morse had not figured on the scene at all during the first few days of the case—for it was not a case of homicide; and (as was to be hop
ed) still wasn’t. Yet the follow-up investigations had been worrying, especially of course the steadily growing and cumulative evidence that Karin Eriksson had been a responsible young woman who had never previously drifted into the drink-drugs-sex-scene.
Only after the case had grown a little cold had Morse spent a couple of hours one afternoon with Johnson, in that late July, now a year ago—before being side-tracked into a squalid domestic murder out on the Cowley Road.
“I reckon he thought it all a bit—a bit of a joke, sir, quite honestly.”
“Joke? Joke? This is no bloody joke, Johnson! Like as not, we shall be opening a couple of extra lines on the switchboard once these bloody newspapers get hold of it. It’ll be like an air disaster! And if the public come up with some brighter ideas than the police …”
Johnson gently reminded him: “But it’s your idea, sir—this business of sending the letters to The Times.”
“What did you mean—about Morse?” asked Strange, ignoring the criticism.
“What I meant, sir, is that he, well, he only skipped over the details with me, and he sort of said the first things that came into his head, really. I don’t think he had time to think about things much.”
“He’d have ideas though, wouldn’t he, Morse? Always did have. Even if he’d been on a case a couple of minutes. Usually the wrong ideas of course, but …”
“All I’m saying is that he didn’t seem to take the case at all seriously. He was sort of silly about things, really—”
Strange’s voice sounded suddenly thunderous: “Look here, Johnson! Morse may be an idiot, you’re right. But he’s never been a fool. Let’s get that straight!”