The Way Through the Woods

by Colin Dexter

  Suddenly he was conscious of the applause all around him, as the curtain moved jerkily across to mark the end of Act I of The Mikado.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  As we passed through the entrance archway, Randolph said with pardonable pride, “This is the finest view in England”

  (Lady Randolph Churchill, on her first visit to Blenheim)

  On Monday, 3 August, Chief Inspector Harold Johnson had spent much of the morning with his City colleagues in St. Aldate’s, and it was not until just gone 11 A.M. that he was in his own office back at Kidlington HQ—where he immediately read the transcript of Hardinge’s evidence. Then reread it. It was all new to him, except the bits about the rucksack, of course. Naturally he had to admit that since Morse had been on the case the whole complexion of things had changed dramatically: clues, cars, corpses—why hadn’t he found any of them? Odd really, though: Morse’s obsession had been with Wytham; and his, Johnson’s, with Blenheim. And according to the statement Hardinge had made, both of them had been right all along. He rang through on the internal extension to Morse’s office, but learned that he had just left, with Lewis—destination undisclosed.

  Blenheim! He found the glossy brochure on Blenheim Palace still on his shelves, and he turned to the map of the House and Grounds. There it was—the lake! The River Glyme flowed into the estate from the east, first into the Queen Pool, then under Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge into the lake beyond: some two hundred odd acres in extent, so they’d told him, when first he’d mooted the suggestion of dragging the waters. Too vast an undertaking, though; still was. The Queen Pool was fairly shallow, certainly, and there had been a very thorough search of the ground at its periphery. But nothing had been found, and Johnson had always suspected (rightly, it seemed!) that if Karin Eriksson’s body had been disposed of in any stretch of Blenheim there, it had to be in the far deeper, far more extensive waters of the lake; had to be well weighted down too, so the locals had told him, since otherwise it would pretty certainly have surfaced soon after immersion, and floated down to the Grand Cascade, at the southern end of the lake, where the waters resume their narrow flow within the banks of the Glyme.

  Johnson flicked through the brochure’s lavish illustrations and promised himself he would soon take his new wife to visit the splendid house and grounds built by Queen Anne and her grateful parliament for the mighty Duke. What was that mnemonic they’d learned at school? BROM—yes, that was it: Blenheim, Ramilles, Oudenarde, Malplaquet—that musical quartet of victories. Then, quite suddenly, he had the urge to go and look again at that wonderful sight which bursts upon the visitor after passing through the Triumphal Gate.

  He drove out to Woodstock, past the Bear and the church on his left, then across a quadrangle and up to the gate where a keeper sat in his box, and where Johnson (to his delight) was recognized.

  “You going through, sir?”

  Johnson nodded. “I thought we had one of our lads at each of the gates?”

  “Right. You did, sir. But you took ’em off.”

  “When was that?”

  “Saturday. The fellow who was on duty here just said he wouldn’t be back—that’s all I know. Reckon as he thought the case was finished, like.”

  “Really?”

  Johnson drove on through, and there it was again, bringing back so many memories: in the middle distance the towers and finials of the Palace itself; and there, immediately to his right, the lake with the Grand Bridge and Capability Brown’s beechwood landscape beyond it. Breathtaking!

  Johnson accepted the fact that he was a man of somewhat limited sensitivity; yet he thought he was a competent police officer, and he was far from happy about the statement he’d just read. If this Hardinge fellow could be believed, the evidence Daley had given a year earlier had been decidedly uneconomical with the truth; and that, to Johnson, was irksome—very irksome. At the time, he’d spent a good while with Daley, going over that wretched rucksack business; and he wanted to have another word with Daley. Now!

  He drove down past the Palace to the garden centre; but no one there had seen Daley that morning. He might be out at the mill, perhaps? So Johnson drove out of the estate, through Eagle Lodge, and out on to the A4095, where he turned right through Bladon and Long Hanborough, then right again and in towards the western boundary of the estate, parking beside the piles of newly cut stakes in the yard of the Blenheim Estate Saw-Mill. Only once had he been there when earlier he’d been the big white chief, and he was suddenly aware that it would have been considerably quicker for him to have driven across the park instead of round the villages. Not that it much mattered, though.

  No one recognized him here. But he soon learned that Daley’s van wasn’t there; hadn’t been there since Friday afternoon in fact, when he’d been looking after some new plantation by the lake, and when he’d called at the saw-mill for some stakes for supporting saplings. One of the workers suggested that Daley would probably have taken the van home with him for the weekend—certainly so if he’d been working overtime that weekend; and the odds were that Daley was back planting trees that morning.

  Johnson thanked the man and drove to the edge of the estate, only just along the road really; then right along a lane that proclaimed “No Thoroughfare”, till he reached Combe Lodge where, Johnson had been told, the gate would probably be locked. But, well, he was a policeman, he’d said.

  Johnson read the notice on the tall, wooden, green-painted gate:

  ACCESS FOR KEYHOLDERS ONLY.

  ALL OTHER VEHICLES MUST USE THE GATE IN WOODSTOCK.

  DO NOT DISTURB THE RESIDENTS IN THE LODGE.

  But there was no need for him to disturb the (single) resident, since a tractor-cum-trailer was just being admitted, and in its wake the police car was waved through without challenge. A little lax perhaps, as Johnson wondered. Immediately in front of him the road divided sharply; and as a lone, overweight lady, jogging at roughly walking pace, took the fork to the right, Johnson took the fork to the left, past tall oak trees towards the northern tip of the lake. Very soon, some two or three hundred yards ahead on his left, he saw the clump of trees, and immediately realized his luck—for a Blenheim Estate van stood there, pulled in beside an old, felt-roofed hut, its wooden slats green with mildew. He drew in alongside and got out of the car to look through a small side-window of glass.

  Nothing. Well, virtually nothing: only a wooden shelf on which rested two unopened bags of food for the pheasants. Walking round to the front of the hut, he tried the top and bottom of the stable-type door: both locked. Then, as he stepped further round, something caught the right-hand edge of his vision, and he looked down at the ground just beyond and behind the hut—his mouth suddenly opening in horror, his body held momentarily in the freezing grip of fear.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Michael Stich (W. Germany) beat Boris Becker (W. Germany) 6–4, 7–6, 6–4

  (Result of the Men’s Singles Championship at Wimbledon, 1991)

  At the time that Chief Inspector Johnson had set out for Woodstock, Lewis was driving, at slightly above the national speed limit, along the A40 to Cheltenham. It appeared to have been a late, impulsive decision on Morse’s part:

  “You realize, Lewis, that the only person we’ve not bothered about in this case so far is auntie whatever-her-name-is from Llandovery.”

  “Not an ‘auntie’ exactly, sir. You know, it’s like when little girls sometimes call women their aunties—”

  “No. I don’t know, Lewis.”

  “Well, it seems Karin called her Auntie Dot or Doss—this Mrs. Evans. ‘Dorothy’, I seem to remember her Christian name was.”

  “You’ve profited from your weekend’s rest, Lewis!”

  “Don’t you think we ought to get Daley and Michaels in first though, sir? I mean, if they’re prepared to back up what Dr. Hardinge says—”

  “No! If I’m right about this case—which I am!—we’ll be in a far better position to deal with those two gentlemen once we’ve seen t
he Lady of Llandovery. Remember that sign at the Woodstock Road roundabout? Left to Wytham; right to Woodstock; straight over for the A40 to West Wales, right? So we can be there in …? How far is it?”

  “Hundred and thirty? Hundred and forty miles? But don’t you think we should give her a ring just in case—”

  “Get the car out, Lewis. The way you drive we’ll be there in three hours.”

  “Try for two and a half, if you say so,” replied Lewis with a radiant smile.

  It had been after Cheltenham, after Gloucester and Ross-on-Wye, after Monmouth and the stretch of beautiful countryside between Brecon and Llandovery, that Morse had come to life again. Never, in Lewis’s experience, had he been any sort of conversationalist in a car; but that day’s silence had broken all records. And when finally he did speak, Lewis was once again conscious of the unsuspected processes of Morse’s mind. For the great man, almost always so ignorant of routes and directions and distances, suddenly jerked up in his passenger seat:

  “The right turn in a couple of miles, Lewis—the A483 towards Builth Wells.”

  “You don’t want to stop for a quick pint, sir?”

  “I most certainly do. But if you don’t mind, we’ll skip it, all right?”

  “I still think it would’ve been sensible to ring her, sir. You know, she might be off for a fortnight in Tenerife or something.”

  Morse sighed deeply. “Aren’t you enjoying the journey?” Then, after a pause: “I rang her yesterday afternoon, anyway. She’ll be there, Lewis. She’ll be there.”

  Lewis remained silent, and it was Morse who resumed the conversation:

  “That statement—that statement Hardinge made. They obviously got together the four of them—Hardinge, Daley, Michaels, and McBryde—got together and cooked up a story between them. Your porter couldn’t give us any names, you say; but he was pretty sure there were at least three, probably four, of ’em in Hardinge’s rooms on Friday night. And if they all stick to saying the same—well, we shall have little option but to believe them.”

  “Not that you will, sir.”

  “Certainly not. Some of it might be true, though; some of it might be absolutely crucial. And the best way of finding that out is seeing Auntie Gladys here.”

  “Dorothy.”

  “You see, there was only one really important clue in this case: the fact that the Swedish girl’s rucksack was found so quickly—had to be found—left beside the roadside—sure to be found.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see that,” said Lewis, unseeing, as he turned left now at Llanwrtyd Wells, and headed out across the Cambrian Hills.

  But not for long. After only a couple of miles, on the left, they came to a granite-built guest house, “B & B: Birdwatchers Welcome”. Perhaps it was destined to do a fairly decent trade. Was certainly so destined, if there were any birdwatchers around, since there was not another house to be espied anywhere in the deeply wooded landscape.

  Mrs. Evans, a smallish, dark, sprightly woman in her late forties showed them into the “parlour”; and was soon telling them something of herself. She and her husband had lived in East Anglia for the first fifteen years of their (childless) marriage; it was there that she’d met Karin for the first time eight or nine years ago. She, Mrs. Evans, was no blood relation at all, but had become friendly with the Eriksson family when they had stayed in the guest-house in Aldeburgh. The family had stayed the next year too, though minus Daddy that time; and thereafter the two women had corresponded off and on fairly regularly: birthday cards, Christmas cards, holiday postcards, and so on. And to the three young Eriksson girls she had become “Auntie Doss”. When Karin had decided to come to England in 1991, Mrs. Evans had known about it; and not having seen the girl for six years or so, had suggested to her mother that if Karin was going to get over towards Wales at all there would always be a welcome for her—and a bed. And some wonderful birdwatching, since the beautiful red kites were becoming an increasingly common sight there. What sort of girl was Karin? Of course, she’d only been thirteen or fourteen when she’d seen her last but, well—lovely, really. Lovely girl. Attractive—very proper, though.

  As the conversation between them developed, Lewis found himself looking idly round the room: armchairs, horse-hair settee, mahogany furniture, a coffee table piled high with country magazines, and on the wall above the fireplace a large map of Dyffed and the Cambrian Mountains. It seemed to him a rather bleak and sunless room, and he thought that had she reached this far, the young Karin Eriksson would not have felt too happy there …

  Morse had now got the good lady talking more rapidly and easily, her voice rising and falling in her native Welsh lilt; talking about why they’d moved back to Wales, how the recession was hitting them, how they advertised for guests—in which magazines and newspapers. On and on. And in the middle of it:

  “Oh! Would you both like a cup of tea?”

  “Very kind—but no,” said Morse, even as Lewis’s lips were framing a grateful “yes”.

  “Tell me more about Karin,” continued Morse. “ ‘Proper’ you said. Do you mean ‘prim and proper’—that sort of thing? You know, a bit prudish; a bit … straightlaced?”

  “Nor, I dorn’t mean that. As I say it’s five or six years back, isn’t it? But she was … well, her mother said she’d always got plenty of boyfriends, like, but she knew, well … she knew where to draw the line—let’s put it like that.”

  “She didn’t keep a packet of condoms under her pillow?”

  “I dorn’t think so.” Mrs. Evans seemed far from shocked by the blunt enquiry.

  “Was she a virgin, do you think?”

  “Things change, dorn’t they? Not many gels these days who ought to walk up the aisle in white, if you ask me.”

  Morse nodded slowly as if assimilating the woman’s wisdom, before switching direction again. What was Karin like at school—had Mrs. Evans ever learned that? Had she been in the—what was it?—Flikscouten, the Swedish Girl Guides? Interested in sport, was she? Skiing, skating, tennis, basketball?

  Mrs. Evans was visibly more relaxed again as she replied: “She was always good at sport, yes. Irma—Mrs. Eriksson—she used to write and tell me when her daughters had won things; you know, cups and medals, certificates and all that.”

  “What was Karin best at, would you say?”

  “Dorn’t know really. As I say it’s a few years since—”

  “I do realize that, Mrs. Evans. It’s just that you’ve been so helpful so far—and if you could just cast your mind back and try—try to remember.”

  “Well, morst games, as I say, but—”

  “Skiing?”

  “I dorn’t think so.”

  “Tennis?”

  “Oh, she loved tennis. Yes, I think tennis was her favourite game, really.”

  “Amazing, aren’t they—these Swedes! They’ve only got about seven million people there, is that right? But they tell me about four or five in the world’s top-twenty come from Sweden.”

  Lewis blinked. Neither tennis nor any other sport, he knew, was of the slightest interest to Morse who didn’t know the difference between side-lines and touch-lines. Yet he understood exactly the trap that Morse was digging; the trap that Mrs. Evans tumbled into straightaway.

  “Edberg!” she said. “Stefan Edberg. He’s her great hero.”

  “She must have been very disappointed about Wimbledon last year, I should think, then?”

  “She was, yes. She told me she—”

  Suddenly Mrs. Evans’s left hand shot up to her mouth, and for many seconds she sat immobile in her chair as if she’d caught a glimpse of the Gorgon.

  “Don’t worry,” said Morse quietly. “Sergeant Lewis will take it all down. Don’t talk too fast for him, though: he failed his forty words per minute shorthand test, didn’t you, Sergeant?”

  Lewis was wholly prepared. “Don’t worry about what he says, Mrs. Evans. You can talk just how you like. It’s not as if”—turning to Morse—“she’s done much
wrong, is it, sir?”

  “Not very much,” said Morse gently; “not very much at all, have you, Mrs. Evans?”

  “How on earth did you guess that one?” asked Lewis an hour later as the car accelerated down the A483 to Llandovery.

  “She’d’ve slipped up sooner or later. Just a matter of time.”

  “But all that tennis stuff. You don’t follow tennis.”

  “In my youth, I’ll have you know, I had quite a reliable backhand.”

  “But how did you—”

  “Prayer and fasting, Lewis. Prayer and fasting.”

  Lewis gave it up. “Talking of fasting, sir, aren’t you getting a bit peckish?”

  “Yes, I am. Hungry and thirsty. So perhaps if we can find one of those open-all-day places …”

  * * *

  But they got little further. The car-telephone rang and Morse himself picked it up. Lewis could make out none of the words at the other end of the line—just Morse’s syncopated rôle:

  “What?”

  “You sure?”

  “Bloody ’ell!”

  “Who?”

  “Bloody ’ell!”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes!”

  “Two and a half hours, I should think.”

  “No! Leave things exactly as they are.”

  Morse put down the phone and stared ahead of him like some despondent zombie.

  “Something to do with the case?” ventured an apprehensively hesitant Lewis.