The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  For Johnson, the differentiation between what he had hitherto regarded as virtual synonyms—“idiot” and “fool”—was clearly beyond his etymological capacities; and he frowned a guarded puzzlement as his superior officer continued:

  “Some people are occasionally right for the wrong reasons. But Morse? He’s more often than not wrong for the right reasons. The right reasons … you understand me? So even if he sometimes drinks too much …”

  Johnson looked down at the file in front of him: he knew, alas, exactly what Strange was saying. “Would you rather Morse took over the case, sir?”

  “Yes, I think I would,” said Strange. “So would the CC, if you must know,” he added cruelly.

  “So when does he get back from leave …?”

  Strange sighed deeply. “Not soon enough. Let’s see what happens with this newspaper angle.”

  “He’s pretty sure to see it—if they print it.”

  “What? Morse? Nonsense! I’ve never seen him reading anything. He just spends half an hour on the crossword, that’s all.”

  “Ten minutes—last time I watched him,” said Johnson honestly, if somewhat grudgingly.

  “Wasted his life, Morse has,” confided Strange, after a pause.

  “Should’ve got married, you mean?”

  Strange began to extricate himself from his chair. “I wouldn’t go as far as that. Ridiculous institution—marriage! Don’t you think so?”

  Johnson, himself having married only six months previously, forebore any direct response, as Strange finally brought his vertebrae to the vertical, from which vantage point he looked down on the papers that Johnson had been consulting.

  “Isn’t that Morse’s writing?” he queried presbyopically.

  Yes, it was Morse’s handwriting; and doubtless Johnson would have preferred Strange not to have seen it. But at least it would prove his point. So he picked out the sheet, and handed it over.

  “Mm.” Chief Superintendent Strange held the piece of paper at arm’s length, surveying its import. Unlike Morse, he was an extremely rapid reader; and after only ten seconds or so he handed it back to Johnson: “See what you mean!”

  Johnson, in turn, looked down again at the sheet Morse had left him—the one he’d found on his desk that morning a year ago now, when Morse had been transferred to what had appeared more urgent enquiries:

  I never got to grips with the case as you know but I’d have liked answers to the following half-dozen qq:

  (a) Had Daley or his missus owned a camera themselves?

  (b) What was the weather like on Tuesday 9th July?

  (c) “It’s striped: what about ze panties?” (5)

  (d) What’s the habitat of “Dendrocopus Minor”?

  (e) What beer do they serve at the Royal Sun (or at the White Hart!)?

  (f) What’s the dog’s name?

  Strange now lumbered to the door. “Don’t ignore all this bloody nonsense, Johnson. That’s what I’m telling you. Don’t take too much notice of it; but don’t ignore it, understand?”

  For the second time within a short while the etymological distinction between a couple of unequivocal synonyms had completely escaped Inspector Johnson’s reasonably bright but comparatively limited brain.

  “As you say, sir.”

  “And, er, and one other thing … the wife’s just bought a new dog—little King Charles, lovely thing! Two hundred pounds it cost. Pisses everywhere, of course—and worse! But he’s, you know, he’s always glad to see you. More than the wife sometimes, eh? It’s just that we’ve only had the bloody thing a fortnight, and we still haven’t christened it.”

  “The dog’s name was ‘Mycroft’. Good name—be a good name for your dog, sir.”

  “Imaginative, yes! I’ll, er, mention it to the missus, Johnson. Just one little problem, though …”

  Johnson raised his rather bushy eyebrows.

  “Yes. She’s a she, Johnson!”

  “Oh.”

  “Anything else Morse said?” pursued Strange.

  “Well, yes. He, er, thought—he said he had a gut-feeling—”

  “Huh!”

  “—that we’d been searching for a body in the wrong place.”

  “In Blenheim, you mean?”

  Johnson nodded. “He thought we ought to have been looking in Wytham Woods.”

  “Yes. I remember him saying that.”

  “Only after we’d drawn a blank in Blenheim, though.”

  “Better wise after the event than never.”

  Augh, shut up! Johnson was becoming a little weary of all the innuendos: “If you recall, sir, it wasn’t just Morse who was in favour of a wider operation. But we hadn’t got the personnel available for a search of Wytham Woods. You said so. I came to ask you myself.”

  Strange was stung into retaliation. “Look, Johnson! You find me a body and I’ll find you all the bloody personnel you need, all right?”

  It was the chicken-and-egg business all over again, and Johnson would have said so—but Strange was already guiding his bulk downstairs, via the hand-rail on the HQ wall.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Only the keeper sees

  That, where the ring-dove broods,

  And the badgers roll at ease,

  There was once a road through the woods

  (Rudyard Kipling, The Way Through the Woods)

  It was to be Morse’s last breakfast at the Bay Hotel, that morning of Monday, 6 July 1992, six days after the long meeting just recorded between Strange and Johnson at Kidlington HQ in Oxfordshire. He would have wished to stay a further couple of days—but there were no vacancies; and, as the proprietor reminded him, he’d already had more than his share of luck.

  As he waited for his mixed grill he re-read the article, again high-profile page-one news—the article promised the previous Friday by Howard Phillipson, literary editor of The Times:

  A preliminary analysis

  INTEREST in the “Swedish Maiden” verses printed in these columns last week (Friday, July 3) has been sweeping this newspaper’s offices, but I am myself now somewhat more diffident than I originally was about solving the fascinating riddle-me-ree presented by the five stanzas. I had earlier assumed that there might well be sufficient “internal logic” in the information received by the Thames Valley Police to come to some firm conclusions. I am no longer so strongly of this opinion.

  Only with considerable hesitation therefore do I offer my own amateurish analysis of the riddle, in the fairly certain knowledge that very soon the cryptologists and cabalists, criminologists and cranks, will be making their own considerably more subtle interpretations of these tantalizing lines.

  For what it is worth, however, I suggest that the parameters of the problem may be set, albeit rather vaguely. In modern mathematics (as I understand the situation) pupils are asked, before tackling any problem: “What roughly do you think the answer might be? What sort of answer might you logically expect?” If, say, the problem involves the speed of a supersonic jet flying the Atlantic, the answer is perhaps unlikely to be 10 m.p.h., and any pupil coming up with such an improbable answer is advised to look back through his calculations and find out where he might have dropped a couple of noughts. If we are set to discover the time taken by those famous taps to fill the family tub, the answer is still rather more likely to be ten minutes than ten hours. Permit me then to make a few general comments on what would appear to be the sort of solution we might expect. (The verses are reprinted on page 2.)

  Clearly the poem is cast in a “sylvan” setting: we have “woodman”; “stream”; “riding” (sic!); “Thyme flow’ring”; “trapped”; “hunted deer”; etc. There will be no prizes, I realize, for such an analysis, but the neglect of the obvious is always the beginning of unwisdom.

  The setting of some wood or forest therefore must be our donné, and my suggestion to the Thames Valley CID would be to concentrate their doubtless limited resources of manpower within two of the local areas which seem to hold the greatest pro
mise: the forested areas around Blenheim Palace, and the Wytham Woods—the latter becoming increasingly famous for its fox and badger research.

  Let us now turn to the more specific import of the stanzas. The speaker of the poem, the “persona”, is clearly no longer a living being. Yet her dramatic message is quite unequivocal: she has been murdered; she has been drowned (or perhaps just dumped) in one of the lakes or streams situated in the wood(s); if such waters are searched and dredged her corpse will be found; finally the police may have been (somewhat?) remiss in not pursuing their enquiries with rather greater perseverance.

  What can be gathered from the nature of the verses themselves? Their composer is certainly no Herrick or Housman, yet in terms of technical prosody the writer is more than competent. Vocabulary (“tegament”, “azured”, etc.) is more redolent of the Senior Common Room than the Saloon Bar; and the versification, punctuation, and diction, all point to a literate and well-read man—or woman!

  Can anything more specific be said about the writer? For some while, as I read and re-read the verses, I toyed with the idea of their author being a relative of the dead girl. The reason for my thinking was the continued emphasis, throughout the poem, of the “find me” motif; and I was reminded of the Homeric heroes of the Iliad where death in battle was a fully expected and wholly honourable end—but where the most terrible fate of all was to die unrecognized, unburied, unfound, in some unknown and far-off land. Is the poem then above all a desperate cry for the Christian burial of the body? This would be most understandable. We have seen in recent years so many tragic instances (in the Middle East, for example) where the simple return of a dead body has paved the way for some peace initiative.

  But I no longer believe this to be the case. My firm conviction now is that the verses have been sent to the police by a person for whom the period—now a year—between the murder of Karin Eriksson and the present time has become an intolerable Hell. A person who is very near to breaking point. A person who wishes the crime at last to be uncovered, and who is now prepared to pay the penalty. In short, the murderer!

  Dare I go any further? I learned two further (hitherto unpublished) facts from Detective Chief Inspector Johnson. First, that the letter-writer was able to spell, correctly, the not very easy or obvious “Eriksson”; second, that the writer was aware of the previous Chief Constable’s surname, but not that of the current incumbent. On the old adage then that one might just as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I reckon the murderer to be male; to be between thirty and thirty-five years old; to have a degree in English literature; to have lived until about six or nine months ago in Oxfordshire; to have revisited the scene of his crime during the last month, say, whilst staying at one of the more upmarket hostelries in Woodstock, Oxon.

  I rest my case, m’lud!

  “Hi!” she said. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Please do,” said Morse, carefully mounting the last segment of his fried egg on the last square of his fried bread.

  “You ever read about cholesterol?” Her voice was very cultured, the two ‘t’s of her simple question affectedly exaggerated.

  Morse swallowed his latest mouthful and looked at the slim, expensively dressed woman who now sat opposite him, ordering black coffee and a croissant—nothing more.

  “They say we’ve all got to die of something.” He tried to make it sound reasonably cheerful.

  “Ridiculous attitude!” The lips, expertly outlined in some pale-crimson shade, looked severe, yet the grey eyes in the delicate, oval face might almost have been mocking him.

  “I suppose it is,” he said.

  “You’re overweight anyway, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” he repeated lamely.

  “You’ll have high blood pressure in your mid-fifties—unless you’re there now? Then you’ll probably have a stroke in your early sixties; and like as not die of a heart attack before you’re seventy.” She had already drained her coffee cup, and held up an elegant, imperious hand to the waitress. “What’s your job?”

  Morse sighed, and considered the last piece of toast in the rack. “I’m a policeman, and I come from Oxford, and I’m on holiday here until about ten o’clock this morning. I’m single and maybe I’m not much of a catch, but if I’d known I was going—”

  “—going to meet a beautiful girl like me! Surely you can be more original than that?” The eyes were mocking him again.

  Morse took the toast and started buttering it. “No, I can’t. I can’t do much better than that.”

  “Perhaps you underrate yourself.”

  “What about you? What do you do?”

  “Why don’t you tell me. You’re a policeman, you say?”

  For half a minute or so Morse looked at her, cocking his head slightly to the right. Then he gave his judgement: “You’re a beautician, possibly a dietitian too, which you probably spell with a ‘t’ and not a ‘c’; you’re in your late twenties, and you went to school at Cheltenham Ladies’; you’re married but you sometimes leave off your wedding ring—like now; you’re fond of pets but you tend to think children are something of an exaggerated pastime. And if you come for a walk with me along the prom, I’ll try to fill in a few more of the details as we go along.”

  “That’s much better.”

  “Well? How did I do?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Is your name Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Morse.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “No. I, er, saw you come in with your husband last night—when you went straight to bed and he—”

  “He stayed at the bar!”

  “We had one or two drinks together, and I asked him who the beautiful woman was—”

  “And he said, ‘That’s not a beautiful woman: that’s my wife!’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And he talked about me?”

  “He talked nicely about you.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “He’s sleeping it off?” Morse pointed to the ceiling.

  She nodded her dark curls. “So he won’t mind much if you take me on that walk, will he, Mr. Morse? When you’ve finished your toast, of course. And wouldn’t you spell dietitian with a ‘t’?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to break the bank of our answers

  (Antonio Machado, Juan de Mairena)

  On the same morning that Morse was packing his single suitcase (“On the day of their departure guests are respectfully requested to vacate their rooms by 10:30 A.M.”) Sergeant Lewis knocked on Johnson’s door, soon seating himself opposite the chief inspector, and beside Sergeant Wilkins.

  “Good of you to spare a few minutes.”

  “If I can help in any way …” said Lewis warily.

  “You know Morse better than most.”

  “Nobody knows him all that well.”

  “You’ve got a reasonable idea how his mind works though.”

  “He’s got a strange sort of mind—”

  “Not many’d disagree with you.”

  “He’s good at some things.”

  “Such as?”

  “He’s not bad at catching murderers for a start.”

  “And you do realize the odds are we’re trying to catch another murderer now, don’t you, Sergeant?”

  “If it is murder.”

  “Did Morse think it was murder?”

  “As I remember, sir, he was only on it with you for a day or so.”

  “Less than that.” (Wilkins had made his first contribution.)

  “You’re following this—this newspaper business, I presume, Lewis?”

  “Everybody reads The Times before the Sun now.”

  “What do you make of this?” Johnson handed a photocopy of Morse’s “half dozen qq.” across the desk.

  Lewis looked down at the list and smiled. “Bit of a joke—some of this, isn’t it?”

  “Tak
e my advice, Lewis, and don’t try telling that to the Super!”

  “I don’t know the answer to any of ’em,” admitted Lewis, “except (e)—well, part of (e). It’s a ‘Morrell’s’ pub, the Royal Sun. I’ve bought quite a few pints there, I reckon.”

  “What, for Morse, you mean?”

  “Who else?”

  “But had he ever bought you any, Lewis? That’s the real question, eh, Wilkins?”

  The two men sniggered. And suddenly Lewis hated them both.

  “What about the White Hart?” continued Johnson.

  “Lot of ‘White Harts’ about.”

  “Yes, we know that!” Johnson gestured to Wilkins, the latter now reading from his notes: “Headington, Marston, Wolvercote, Wytham, Minster Lovell, Eynsham …”

  “I expect Morse could probably add to the list,” ventured Johnson.

  Lewis, determining henceforth to be as minimally helpful as possible, made only a brief comment: “She’d’ve got past the first two.”

  Johnson nodded. “What about Eynsham and Minster Lovell? Just off the A40, both of them—if she ever travelled along the A40, that is.”

  Lewis said nothing.

  “What about the other two: Wolvercote and Wytham? Which would you put your money on?”

  “Wytham, I suppose.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The woods there—easy enough to hide a body.”

  “Did you know that Morse asked the Chief Super about a search of Wytham Woods last year?”

  Lewis did, yes. “Only after the search in Blenheim didn’t come up with anything.”

  “Do you know how big Wytham Woods is, man?”

  Lewis had a good idea, yes. But he merely shrugged his shoulders.

  “Why would Morse be interested in the dog?”

  “Don’t know. He told me once he’d never had any pets when he was a lad.”

  “Perhaps he should get one now. Lots of bachelors have dogs.”

  “You must suggest it to him, sir,” replied Lewis, with a note of confidence in his voice, and a strange exhilaration flooding his limbs, for he suddenly realized that it was Johnson who was on the defensive here, not himself. They were trying to pick his (Lewis’s) brains because they were envious of his relationship with Morse!