by Colin Dexter
It didn’t, she admitted, boil down to very much really, and it was all in the report in any case. But her guess was that the man whose bones were found in Pasticks was about thirty years of age, of medium height, had been dead for at least nine or ten months, might well have been murdered—with a knife-wound to the heart, and that perhaps delivered by a right-handed assailant. The traces of blood found beside and beneath the body were of group O; and although the blood could have been the result of other injuries, or other agencies, well, she thought it rather doubtful. So that was it. The body had most probably “exited” (Morse winced) on the spot where the bones were found: not likely to have been carried or dragged there after death. There were other tests that could be carried out, but (in Dr. Hobson’s view at least) there remained little more to be discovered.
Morse had been watching her carefully as she spoke. At their first meeting he’d found her north-country accent (Newcastle, was it? Durham City?) just slightly off-putting; but he was beginning to wonder if after a little while it wasn’t just a little on-putting. He noticed again, too, the high cheek-bones, and the rather breathless manner of her speaking. Was she nervous of him?
Morse was not the only one who looked at the new pathologist with some quiet admiration; and when she handed him the four typed sheets of her report, Lewis asked the question he’d wanted to put for the last ten minutes.
“You from Newcástle?”
“Good to hear it pronounced correctly! Just outside, actually.”
Morse listened none too patiently as the two of them swapped a few local reminiscences before standing up and moving to the door.
“Anyway,” said Lewis, “good to meet you.” Then, waving the report: “And thanks for this, luv!”
Suddenly her shoulders tightened, and she sighed audibly. “Look! I’m not your ‘luv’, Sergeant. You mustn’t mind me being so blunt, but I’m no one’s ‘luv’ or—”
But suddenly she stopped, as she saw Morse grinning hugely beside the door, and Lewis standing somewhat discomfited beside the desk.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that—”
“Please forgive my sergeant, Dr. Hobson. He means well—don’t you, Lewis?”
Morse watched the slim curves of her legs as she left the office, the colour still risen in her cheeks.
“What was all that about?” began Lewis.
“Bit touchy about what people call her, that’s all.”
“Bit like you, sir?”
“She’s nice, don’t you think?” asked Morse, ignoring the gentle gibe.
“To be truthful, sir, I think she’s a smasher.”
Somehow this plain statement of fact, made by an honest and honourable man, caught Morse somewhat off his guard. It was as if the simple enunciation of something extremely obvious had made him appreciate, for the first time, its truth. And for a few seconds he found himself hoping that Dr. Laura Hobson would return to collect something she’d forgotten. But she was a neatly organized young woman, and had forgotten nothing.
Just before Morse and Lewis were leaving for a cup of coffee in the canteen, a call came through from PC Pollard. This rather less-than-dedicated vigilante of Pasticks had been one of four uniformed constables detailed to the compass-point entrances of Blenheim Park; and he was now ringing, with some excitement in his voice, to report that the Wytham Woods Land-rover, driven by David Michaels (whom he’d immediately recognized), had just gone down to the garden centre there. Should he try to see what was happening? Should he—investigate?
Morse took the portable phone from Lewis. “Good man! Yes, try to see what’s going on. But don’t make it too obvious, all right?”
“How the hell’s he going to do that?” asked Lewis when Morse had finished. “He’s in uniform.”
“Is he? Oh.” Morse appeared to have no real interest in the matter. “Make him feel important though, don’t you think?”
Chief Inspector Johnson was on his second cup of coffee when Morse and Lewis walked into the canteen. Raising a hand he beckoned Morse over: he’d welcome a brief word, if that was all right? Just the two of them though, just himself and Morse.
Ten minutes later, in Johnson’s small office on the second floor, Morse learned of the red diary found the previous day on the person of Philip Daley. But before the two detectives discussed this matter, it was Johnson who’d proffered the olive-branch.
“Look. If there’s been a bit of bad feeling—well, let’s forget it, shall we? What do you say?”
“No bad feeling on my side,” claimed Morse.
“Well, there was on mine,” said Johnson quietly.
“Yeah! Mine, too,” admitted Morse.
“OK then?”
“OK.”
The two men shook hands firmly, if unsmilingly, and Johnson now stated his case. There’d been a flood of information over the past few days, and one thing was now pretty certain: Daley Junior had been one of the four youths—though not the driver—in the stolen BMW that had killed Marion Bridewell. From all accounts, the back wheels had slewed round in an uncontrollable skid and knocked the poor little lass through a shop window.
“Bit of an odd coincidence, certainly—the boy being involved in both cases,” commented Morse.
“But coincidences never worried you much, did they?”
Morse shrugged. “I don’t reckon he had much to do with the Eriksson case, though.”
“Except he had the camera,” said Johnson slowly.
“Ye-es.” Morse nodded, and frowned. Something was troubling him a little; like a speck of grit in a smoothly oiled mechanism; like a small piece of shell in a soft-boiled egg.
Since the tragedy, Mrs. Lynne Hardinge, a slim, well-groomed, grey-haired woman of fifty, had thrown herself with almost frenetic energy into her voluntary activities: Meals on Wheels, Cruse, Help the Aged, Victim Support … Everyone was saying what a wonderful woman she was; everyone commented on how well she was coping.
At the time that Morse and Johnson were talking together, she got out of the passenger seat in the eight-windowed Volvo, and taking with her two tin-foiled cartons, main course and sweet, knocked firmly on a door in the Osney Mead estate.
Most of those who received their Meals on Wheels four times a week were grateful and gracious enough. But not quite all.
“It’s open!”
“Here we are then, Mrs. Gruby.”
“Hope it’s not that fish again!”
“Lamb casserole, and lemon pudding.”
“Tuesday’s was cold—did you know that?”
“Oh dear!”
The wonderfully well-coping voluntary worker said no more, but her lips moved fiercely as she closed the door behind her. Why didn’t you stick it in the fucking oven then, you miserable old bitch? Sometimes she felt she could go quite, quite mad. Just recently too she’d felt she could easily shoot somebody—certainly that pathetic two-timing husband of hers.
Chapter Fifty
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
It was immediately following Morse’s almost unprecedentedly alcohol-free lunch (cheese sandwich and coffee) that the crucial break in the case occurred. And it was Lewis’s good fortune to convey the tidings to the canteen, where Morse sat reading the Daily Mirror.
When earlier in the week Morse had argued that a car would have been required, that a car would have been essential, that a car would have to be disposed of—when earlier Morse had argued these points, the firing plugs in Lewis’s practical mind had sputtered into life: cars lost, cars stolen, cars vandalized, cars burned, cars abandoned, cars found on the streets, cars towed away—Lewis had straightaway gauged the possibilities; and drawing a vaguely twenty-mile radius round Oxford, after consultation with the Traffic Unit, he had been able to set in motion a programme of fairly simple checks, with attenti
on focused on the few days following the very last sighting of Karin Eriksson.
The key evidence would have been difficult to miss, really, once the dates were specified, since Lt. Col. Basil Villiers, MC, had rung the police on no less than twelve occasions during the period concerned, complaining that the car found abandoned and vandalized, and thereafter further vandalized and finally fired, was a blot on the beautiful landscape—–a disgrace, an eyesore, and an ugliness; that he (the aforesaid Colonel) had not fought against despotism, dictatorship, totalitarianism, and tyranny to be fobbed off with petty excuses concerning insurance, liability, obligation, and availability of personnel. But it had only been after considerable difficulty (number plates now gone, though registration markings still on the windows) that the owner of the vehicle had been traced, and the offending “eyesore” towed away from the neighbourhood of the Colonel’s bungalow to some vehicular Valhalla—with a coloured photograph the only memento now of what once had been a newborn, sleek, and shining offspring of some Japanese assembly line.
The keying-in of the registration number now (as presumably a year earlier?) had produced, within a few seconds, the name and address of the owner: James Myton, of 24 Hickson Drive, Ealing; or rather formerly of 24 Hickson Drive, Ealing, since immediate enquiries at this address had confirmed only that James Myton had not lived there for more than a year. Swansea DVLC had sent three letters to the said address, but without reply. LMJ 594E was a lapsed registration, though still not deleted, it appeared, from the official records kept in South Wales.
As for Myton himself, his name had appeared on Scotland Yard’s missing-persons list for the second half of 1991. But in that year over 30,000 persons were registered as “missing” in London alone; and a recent report, wholly backed by Sir Peter Imbert himself, suggested that the index was becoming so inaccurate that it should be restarted from scratch, with a completely fresh re-check on each of the legion names listed. As Morse saw things though, it was going to take considerably more than a “re-check” to revive any hopes of the missing Mr. James Myton ever being found alive again.
By mid-afternoon there was firm corroboration from Ealing that the body found in Pasticks was that of James William Myton, who as a boy had first been taken “into care” by the local authority; later looked after by an ageing couple (now deceased) in Brighton; and thereafter supervised for a time by HM Borstal Service on the Isle of Wight. But the young man had always shown a bit of practical talent; and in 1989, aged twenty-six, he had emerged into the outside world with a reputation for adequate competence in carpentry, interior design, and photography. For eighteen months he had worked in the TV studios at Bristol. A physical description from a woman living two doors away from him in Ealing suggested “a weakish sort of mouth in which the lower teeth were set small and evenly spaced, like the crenellations of a young boy’s toy-fort”.
“She should have been a novelist!” said Morse.
“She is a novelist,” said Lewis.
At all events Myton was not now to be found; and unlikely to be found. Frequently in the past he had been a man of no permanent address; but in the present Morse was sure that he was a permanent dweller in the abode of the dead—as the lady novelist might have phrased it in one of her purpler passages.
Yet things were going very well on the whole—going very much as Morse had predicted. And for the rest of the afternoon the case developed quietly: no surprises; no setbacks. At 5:45 P.M. Morse called it a day and drove down to his flat in North Oxford.
For about two hours that afternoon, as on every weekday afternoon, the grossly overweight wife of Luigi Bertolese sat at the receipt of custom in the Prince William Hotel, whilst her husband conducted his daily dealings with Mr. Ladbroke, Turf Accountant. The early edition of the Evening Standard lay beside her, and she fixed her pair of half-lenses on to her small nose as she began reading through. At such times she might have reminded some of her paying guests of an owl seated quietly on a branch after a substantial meal—half dopey as the eyelids slowly descended, and then more than commonly wise as they rose … as they rose again now when number 8 came in, after his lunch. And after his drink—by the smell of him.
The photograph was on the front page, bottom left: just a smallish photograph and taken when he’d had a beard, the beard he’d shaved off the day after his arrival at the hotel. Although Maria Bertolese’s English was fairly poor, she could easily follow the copy beneath: “The police are anxious to interview this man, Alasdair McBryde …”
She gave him the room-key, handed over two twenty-pound notes, and nodded briefly to the newspaper.
“I doan wanna no trouble for Luigi. His heart is not good—is bad.”
The man nodded, put one of the twenties in his wallet, and gave her back the other: “For the breakfast girl, please.”
When Luigi Bertolese returned from the betting shop at four o’clock, number 8, cum luggage, had disappeared.
At the ticket office in the mainline Paddington terminus, McBryde asked for a single to Oxford. The 16:20, calling at Reading, Didcot Parkway, and Oxford, was already standing at Platform 9; but there was ten minutes to spare, and from a British Telecom booth just outside the Menzies bookshop there he rang a number (direct line) in Lonsdale College, Oxford.
Dr. Alan Hardinge put the phone down slowly. A fluke he’d been in his rooms really. But he supposed McBryde would have caught up with him somewhere, sometime; there would have been a morning or an afternoon or an evening when there had to come a rendering of accounts, a payment of the bill, eine Rechnung, as the Germans said. He’d agreed to meet the man of course. What option had he? And he would see him; and they would have a distanced drink together, and talk of many things: of what was to be done, and what was not to be done.
And then?
Oh God! What then?
He put his head in his hands and jerked despairingly at the roots of his thick hair. It was the cumulative nature of all these bloody things that was so terrible. Several times over the last few days he’d thought of ending it all. But, strangely perhaps, it had not been any fear concerning death itself that had deterred him; rather his own inability to cope with the practical aspects of any suicide. He was one of those people against whom all machinery, all gadgetry, would ever wage perpetual war, and never in his life had he managed to come to terms with wires and switches and fuses and screws. There was that way of ending things in the garage, for example—with closed doors and exhaust fumes; but Hardinge suspected he’d cock that up completely. Yet he’d have to do something, for life was becoming intolerable: the failure of his marriage; his rejection by the only woman he’d really grown to love; the futility of academic preferment; his pathetic addiction to pornography; the death of his daughter; and now, just a few minutes ago, the reminder of perhaps the most terrible thing of all …
The second performance of The Mikado, as Morse recalled, was scheduled, like the first, for 7:30 P.M. Still plenty of time to get ready and go, really. But that evening too he decided against it.
The first night had been all right, yes—but all a bit nervy, a bit “collywobbly”, as the other girls had said. They’d be in really good form that second night, though. David had said she’d been fine the first night—fine! But she’d be better now; she’d show him!
With five minutes to go, she peeped round the curtain again and scanned the packed audience. David’s ticket for each of the three nights had been on the back row, and she could see one empty seat there now, next to the narrow gangway. But she could see no David. He must, she thought, be standing just outside the hall, talking to somebody before the show began. But seat K5 was destined to remain unoccupied that evening until, during the last forty minutes, one of the programme-sellers decided she might as well give her aching feet a welcome rest.
Chapter Fifty-one
He that is down needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride
(John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress)
Whether M
orse had been expecting something of the kind, Lewis wasn’t at all sure. But certain it was that the Chief Inspector appeared less than surprised when the telephone call came through from Dr. Alan Hardinge the following morning. Could he see Morse, please? It wasn’t desperately urgent—but well, yes it was desperately urgent really, at least for him.
Morse was apparently perfectly content for Lewis to interject one or two obvious questions, just to keep things flowing—the meanwhile himself listening carefully, though with a hint of cynicism around his lips. Perhaps, as Lewis saw things, it had been the preliminary niceties that had soured his chief a little:
MORSE: I was very sorry to learn of your daughter’s accident, Dr. Hardinge. Must have been a—a terrible—
HARDINGE: How would you know?
You’ve no children of your own.
MORSE: How did you know that?
HARDINGE: I thought we had a mutual friend, Inspector.
No, it hadn’t been a very happy start, though it had finished far more amicably. Hardinge had readily agreed to have his statement recorded on tape; and the admirably qualified WPC Wright was later to make a very crisp and clean transcription, pleasingly free from the multi-Tipp-Exed alterations that usually characterized Lewis’s struggles with the typewriter:
On Sunday, July 7, 1991, I joined four other men in Seckham Villa, Park Town, Oxford. I am more embarrassed than ashamed about the shared interest that brought us together. Those present were: Alasdair McBryde, George Daley, David Michaels, James Myton, and myself. McBryde informed us that we might be in for an interesting afternoon since a young Swedish student would be coming to sit for what was euphemistically termed a photographic session. We learned she was a beautiful girl, and desperately in need of money. If we wished to watch, that would be an extra £50: £100 in toto. I agreed. So did Daley. So did Michaels. I myself had arrived first. Daley and Michaels arrived together a little later, and I had the impression that the one had probably picked the other up. I knew next to nothing about these two men except that they were both in the same line of business—forestry, that sort of thing. I had met each of them two or three times before, I had never met them together before.