The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  “What is her name?”

  “Her birth-certificate name? I don’t really know.”

  Morse shook his head. Was there anyone telling him the truth in this case?

  “She never went to Seckham Villa herself—as far as I know,” resumed Hardinge. “I met her through an agency. McBryde—you’ve spoken to him?—through McBryde. They give you photographs—interests—you know what I mean.”

  “Measurements?”

  “Measurements.”

  “And you fell for her?”

  Hardinge nodded. “Not difficult to do that, is it?”

  “You still in love with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She with you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to give me the address of the agency.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “How do you manage to get all the stuff without your wife knowing?”

  “Plain envelopes—parcels—here—to my rooms. I get lots of academic material delivered here—no problem.”

  “No problem,” repeated Morse quietly, with some distaste in his voice at last, as the authority on the great tits wrote down a brief address.

  Hardinge watched from his window as the chief inspector walked along to the Porters’ Lodge beside the well-watered, weedless lawn of the front quad. He’d seemed an understanding man, and Hardinge supposed he should be grateful for that. If he’d been a little brighter, perhaps, he would have asked one or two more perceptive questions about Myton, though. Certainly Hardinge knew amongst other things the TV company the lecherous cameraman claimed to have worked for. Yet oddly enough the chief inspector had seemed considerably more interested in Claire Osborne than in the most odious man it had ever been his, Hardinge’s, misfortune to encounter.

  Chapter Forty

  Then the little Hiawatha

  Learned of every bird its language,

  Learned their names and all their secrets

  (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha)

  That afternoon PC Pollard was completely “pissed off” with life as he later reported his state of mind to his Kidlington colleagues. He’d spoken to no one for more than two hours, since the two fellows from the path lab had been along to examine the cordoned-off area, to dig several spits out of the brownly carpeted earth where the bones had lain, and to cart them off in transparent polythene bags. Not that they’d said much to him when they had been there just after lunch-time: the sort of men (Pollard had little doubt) with degrees in science and bio-chemistry and all that jazz. He appreciated the need for such people, of course, although he thought the force was getting a bit too full of these smart-alecs from the universities. He appreciated too that it was important to keep people away from the scene of the crime—if it was a crime. Exactly who these people were though, he wasn’t sure. It was a helluva way from the car park for a couple to carry a groundsheet for a bit of clandestine sex; and they wouldn’t go there, surely? He’d seen a few birdwatchers as he’d been driven along; but again, not there. Too dark and the birds couldn’t fly in there anyway; it’d be like aeroplanes flying through barrage-balloon cables.

  The afternoon was wearing tediously on, and for the umpteenth time Pollard consulted his wrist-watch: 4:25 P.M. A police car was promised up along the Singing Way at 5 P.M.: with further instructions, and hopefully with a relief—unless they’d decided to scrub the whole thing now the ground had been worked over, now the first excitement was over.

  4:45 P.M.

  4:55 P.M.

  Pollard folded away his copy of the Sun and picked up the flask they’d given him. He put on his black and white checkered cap, and walked slowly through the woodland riding, wholly unaware that a tiny white-fronted tree-creeper was spiralling up a beech tree to his left; that a little further on a lesser-spotted woodpecker was suddenly sitting very still on a short oak branch as the crunching steps moved alongside.

  Another pair of eyes too was watching the back of the shirt-sleeved constable as he walked further and further away; the eyes of a man who made no movement until the woodland around was completely still again, with only the occasional cries of the birds—the thin “tseet-tseet” of the tree-creeper, and after a while the high “qui-qui” of the woodpecker—to be heard in that late, still, summer afternoon. For unlike Constable Pollard this man knew much about the woods and about the birds.

  The man made his way into the area behind the cordoned square, and, leaning forward, his eyes constantly fixed to the ground, began to tread slowly, as systematically as the terrain would allow, for about twenty yards or so before turning and retracing his steps along a line four or five feet further into the forest; repeating this process again and again until he had covered an area of roughly fifteen yards square. Once or twice he picked up some object from the densely matted floor, only to throw it aside immediately. Such a pattern of activity he repeated on the left-hand side of the cordoned area—into which he ventured at no point—working his way patiently along, ever watchful, ever alert, and occasionally freezing completely like a statue-waltzer once the music has abruptly stopped. In this fashion he worked for over an hour, like an ox that pulls the ploughshare to the edge of the field, then turns round on itself and plods a parallel furrow, right to left … left to right. Boustrophedon.

  It was just after 6 P.M. when he found it. Almost he had missed it—just the top of the black handle showing. His eyes gleamed with the elation of the hunter pouncing on his quarry; but even as he pocketed his find his body froze once more. A rustle … nearby. Very near. Then, just as suddenly, he felt his shoulder muscles relax. Wonderfully so. The fox stood only three yards in front of him, ears pricked, staring him brazenly in the eye—before turning and padding off into the undergrowth, as if deciding that this intruder, at least, was unlikely to molest its time-honoured solitary territory.

  The police car was very late (“Traffic!” the driver said) and the four of them—the three at the vehicular access points to the woods, and Pollard himself—couldn’t alas be relieved until 7 P.M. Priority was still with the joy-riding kids, and no one seemed to know who was in charge of things there anyway: Sergeant Lewis had buggered off for a skiing holiday in Sweden—Christ!—and Chief Inspector bloody Morse was temporarily “unavailable”, probably in a pub. Pity the walkie-talkie wouldn’t function a bit better, probably all those bloody trees, eh?

  The tree-creeper was gone, and the lesser-spotted woodpecker was gone, as Pollard plodded reluctantly back to his post.

  And something else was gone too.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Little by little the agents have taken over the world. They don’t do anything, they don’t make anything —they just stand there and take their cut

  (Jean Giradoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot)

  Whether the agency was very busy, or whether the phone was out of order, or whether someone just didn’t want to speak to him, Morse couldn’t know. But it was 4:30 P.M. before he finally got through, and 5 P.M. before, crawling with the other traffic, he finally pulled into the small concrete parking area of the Elite Booking Services in Abingdon Road. The establishment (as it seemed to Morse) should ideally have been a glitzy, marble-and-glass affair, with a seductive and probably topless brunette contemplating her long scarlet fingernails at reception. But things were not so.

  The front room of the slightly seedy semi-detached property was so cluttered with file-cases and cardboard boxes that room could be found for only two upright chairs—for the two women proprietors: one, very large, and certainly ill-advised to be wearing a pair of wide, crimson culottes; the other rather small and flat-chested, black-stockinged and minimally skirted. Both were smoking menthol cigarettes; and judging from the high-piled ashtrays around the room, both were continuously smoking menthol cigarettes. Instinctively Morse felt that the latter (if either) would be the boss. But it was the large woman (in her late twenties?) who spoke first:

  “This is Selina—my assistant. I’m Michelle—Michel
le Thompson. How can I help you?”

  The smile, on the rounded dimpled cheeks, seemed warm enough—attractive even—and Morse, reluctantly taking Selina’s seat, asked his questions and received his answers.

  The agency was the receptor, the collator, and the distributor of “information”, from all quarters of the country, which might be of interest and use to assorted businesses, ranging from TV companies to film producers, clothes designers to fashion organizers, magazine editors to well, all right, purveyors of rather less salubrious products. In its Terms and Conditions contracts, the agency dissociated itself officially, legally, completely, from any liability arising from the misuse of its services. When a particular client hired a particular model, such a booking was made with the strict proviso that any abuse of contractual obligation was a matter to be settled between model and client—never model and agency. But such trouble was rare—very rare. McBryde had been a client for about two years: a very good client, if full and prompt payment were the criterion—80 per cent of the negotiated fee to the model; 20 per cent to the agency.

  Each spring a Model Year Book was produced; there were always new models, of course, and always new clients—with new, differing interests. But one of the Terms and Conditions (“Terribly important, Inspector!”) was that any information originally divulged to the agency concerning individual models, and any information subsequently learned by the agency about the activities of either clients or models, would always remain a matter of the strictest confidentiality. Must still remain so now, unless, well … But at least the inspector could understand that once trust was gone …

  “And that’s why you never contacted the police?”

  “Exactly,” asserted Ms. Thompson.

  The link with the YWCA in London was very simple. The woman the police had earlier interviewed, Mrs. Audrey Morris, was her sister. On the Friday before Karin had hitch-hiked to Oxford, Audrey had phoned to say that they had a young Swedish student with them who was down to her last few pennies; that the YWCA had given her a ten-pound note from the charity fund; that Audrey had written out the name, address, and telephone number of the Elite agency, and assured Michelle that the young lady was shapely, very photogenic, and probably sufficiently worldly-wise to know that a suitable session with a photographer might well work wonders for an impoverished pocket.

  “You work on Sundays?”

  “Sunday’s a good day for sin, Inspector. And we had a client willing and waiting—if she came.”

  “And she came?”

  “She rang us from a call-box in Wentworth Road in North Oxford and Selina here went up in the Mini to fetch her—”

  Morse could contain himself no longer. “Bloody hell! Do you realize how much time and trouble you could have saved us? No wonder we’ve got so much unsolved crime when—”

  “What crime exactly are we talking about, Inspector?”

  Morse let it go, and asked her to continue.

  But that was about it—little more to say. Selina had brought her there, to Abingdon Road: attractive, bronzed, blonde, full-figured, skimpily dressed; with a rucksack—yes, a red rucksack, and with very little else. The client from Seckham Villa had been on the look-out for such and similar offerings. A phone call. A verbal agreement: £100 for a one-hour session—£80 to the girl, £20 to the agency.

  “How did she get up to Park Town?”

  “Dunno. She said she’d walk up to the centre—only five minutes—and get a bite to eat. Didn’t seem to want much help. Independent sort of girl.”

  So that was that. At least for the present.

  Before he left Morse asked to look through the current Model Year Book, a thick black-covered brochure from which, fairly certainly—or from a previous edition of which—the selected photocopies found at Seckham Villa had been taken. The photographs were all in black and white, but in this edition Morse could find neither Claire nor Louisa amongst the elegant ladies in their semibuttoned blouses and suspendered stockings. No Karin either among the Ks: just Katie, and Kelly, and Kimberly, and Kylie …

  “If I can take this?”

  “Of course.”

  “And I may have to bother you again, I’m afraid—with my sergeant.”

  As Morse was leaving the phone rang and Selina made forward as if to take the call. But the senior partner picked up the receiver first, placed her hand over the mouthpiece, and bade her visitor farewell. Thus it was Selina the Silent who accompanied the chief inspector to the door, and who, a little to Morse’s surprise, walked out with him to the Jaguar.

  “There’s something I want you to know,” she said suddenly. “It’s not important, I know, but …”

  Unlike the Cockney ancestry of her partner’s speech, the vowels here were curiously curly: the vowels of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

  “I picked her up, you see. She was a lovely girl.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you see? I wanted her, Inspector. I asked her if she would see me—afterwards. I’ve got plenty of money, and she’d got … she’d got nothing.” A tear, soon to roll slowly down the thin cheek, had formed in the right eye of Selina, the sleeping, weeping partner of the Agency.

  Morse said nothing, trusting that for once his instincts were right.

  “She said ‘no’,” continued the woman simply. “That’s what I want you to know really: she wouldn’t have done … some things. She just wouldn’t. She wasn’t for sale—not in the way most of them are.”

  Morse laid a hand on a bony shoulder, and smiled at her understandingly, hoping that he’d assimilated whatever it was she’d wanted to tell him. He thought he had.

  As he drove away, Morse could see the mightily dimensioned Michelle still busily engaged with the needs of another client. She was certainly the dominant partner in the business; but he wondered who might be the dominant partner in the bed.

  He was not back in Kidlington HQ until a quarter to seven, where he learned that some directive was needed—pretty soon!—about the personnel in Wytham Woods. Was the police team there to be disbanded? On the whole Morse thought it was becoming a waste of time to maintain any further watch. But logic sometimes held less sway in Morse’s mind than feeling and impulse, and so he decided that perhaps he would continue with it after all.

  He drove out of the HQ car park and turned on the radio; but he’d just missed it—blast!—and he heard the signing-off signature-tune of The Archers as he headed towards Oxford, wondering how much else he might have missed that day.

  Turning right at the Banbury Road roundabout he continued down to Wolvercote and called in at the Trout, where for more than an hour he sat on the paved terrace between the sandstone walls of the inn and the low parapet overlooking the river: drinking, and thinking—thinking about the strangely tantalizing new facts he was learning about the death of the Swedish Maiden.

  Lewis rang at 10:15 P.M. He was back. He’d had a reasonably successful time, he thought. Did Morse want to see him straightaway?

  “Not unless you’ve got some extraordinary revelation to report.”

  “I wouldn’t go quite so far as that.”

  “Leave it till the morning, then,” decided Morse.

  Not that any decision Morse made that night was to be of very much relevance, since the routines of virtually every department at police HQ were to be suspended over the next three or four days. Trouble had broken out again at Broadmoor Lea, where half the inhabitants were complaining bitterly of under-policing and the other half protesting violently about police over-reaction; council workmen there were being intimidated; copy-cat criminality was being reported from neighbouring Bucks and Berks; another high-level two-day conference had been called for Thursday and Friday; the Home Secretary had stepped in to demand a full report; and the investigation of a possible crime committed perhaps a year earlier in either Blenheim Park or Wytham Woods or wherebloodyever (as the ACC had put the case the following morning) was not going to be the number-one priority in a community where the enfo
rcement of Law and Order was now in real jeopardy.

  Chapter Forty-two

  To some small extent these Greek philosophers made use of observation, but only spasmodically until the time of Aristotle. Their legacy lies elsewhere: in their astonishing powers of deductive and inductive reasoning

  (W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers)

  Lewis’s report from Sweden had been far more interesting, far more potentially suggestive, than Morse could have hoped. The flesh was being put on the bones, as it were—though no longer those particular bones which had been discovered in Pasticks. The thoughts of others too appeared to be shifting away from any guesswork concerning the likeliest spot in which to dig for the Swedish Maiden, and towards the possible identity of the murderer who had dug the hole in the first place—his (surely a “he”?) interests, his traits, his psychological identikit, as it were. Especially the thoughts behind the latest letter to The Times, which Morse read with considerable interest on the morning of Friday, 24 July.

  From the Reverend David M. Sturdy

  Sir, Like so many of your regular readers I have been deeply impressed by the ingenuity expended by your correspondents on the now notorious Swedish Maiden verses. All of us had hoped that such ingenuity would eventually reap its reward—especially the wholly brilliant analysis (July 13) resulting in the “Wytham hypothesis”. It was therefore with much disappointment that we read (Tuesday, July 21) the findings of the police pathologist in Oxford. I cannot myself hope to match the deductive logic of former correspondents. But is it not profitable to take a leaf out of Aristotle’s book, and to look now for some inductive hypothesis? Instead of asking what the original author intended as clues, we should perhaps be asking an entirely different question, viz., what do the verses tell us about the person who wrote them, especially if such a person were trying to conceal almost as much as he was willing to reveal.