by Colin Dexter
“No?”
“How many bedrooms do you have?”
“Two.”
“And bedroom number two is free?”
“Just like bedroom number one.”
“No secret passage between them?”
“I could get the builders in.”
She smiled happily, and rose to her feet. “If there ever is going to be anything between us, Chief Inspector, it’ll have to be when we’re borth a bit more sorber. Better that way. I think you’d prefer it that way too, if you’re honest.” She laid a hand on his shoulder. “C’mon. Ring for a taxi.”
Ten minutes later she kissed him lightly on the lips, her own lips dry and soft and slightly opened.
Then she was gone.
An hour later Morse lay awake on his back. It was still hot in the bedroom and he had only a light cotton sheet over him. Many varied thoughts were crowding in upon his mind, his eyes ever darting around in the darkness. First it had been the lovely woman who had been there with him that evening; then the case of the Swedish Maiden, with only those last few lines of the complex equation to be completed now; then his failure thus far to locate the bullet that had killed George Daley—this last problem gradually assuming a dominance in his brain …
The bullet had been fired from about sixty or so yards—that seemed a firm assumption. So … So why hadn’t it been found? And why could no one in Blenheim be far more definite about hearing it being fired: shooting in Blenheim was not the common occurrence it was in other areas … in Wytham, for example. The rifle itself concerned him to a lesser extent: after all, it was far easier to get rid of a rifle than to get rid of a bullet that could have landed up anywhere … Morse got out of bed and went to find the Blenheim Park brochure—just as Johnson had done so recently before him. The place where Daley’s body had been found could be only—what?—four hundred yards or so from that narrow north-westerly tip of the lake, shaped like the head of one of those cormorants he’d seen in Lyme Regis not all that long ago … Yes! He would double the men on the search—on both searches, rather. There could be little doubt that Philip Daley must have dumped his father’s rifle there somewhere—in the lake itself, like as not. And once they’d found either of them, either the rifle or the bullet—
The phone rang, and Morse grabbed at it.
“That was quick, sir.”
“What do you want?”
“The Met, sir. They rang HQ, and Sergeant Dixon thought he ought to let me know—”
“Let you know, Lewis? Who the hell’s in charge of this bloody case? Just wait till I see Dixon!”
“They thought you’d be asleep, sir.”
“Well, I wasn’t, was I?”
“And, well—”
“Well, what?”
“Doesn’t matter, sir.”
“It bloody does matter! They thought I was in bed with a woman! That’s what they thought.”
“I don’t know,” admitted the honest and honourable Lewis.
“Or pretty much the worse for booze!”
“Perhaps they thought both,” said Lewis simply.
“Well?”
“Young Philip Daley, sir. Just over an hour ago. Threw himself under a westbound train on the Central Line, it seems—train coming into Marble Arch from Bond Street—driver had no chance, just as he came out of the tunnel.”
Morse said nothing.
“Police knew a bit about the boy. He’d been picked up for shoplifting from a wine store in the Edgware Road and taken in; but the manager decided not to prosecute—he got away with a right dressing-down—”
“That’s not all you’ve got to tell me, is it?” said Morse quietly.
“No, sir. You’ve guessed, I suppose. That was Monday morning, half an hour after the store opened.”
“You’re telling me he couldn’t have shot his dad, is that it?”
“Not even if he’d been the one to hire that helicopter, sir.”
“Does Mrs. Daley know?”
“Not yet.”
“Leave her, Lewis. Leave her. Let her sleep.”
An hour later Morse still lay awake, though now his mind was far more relaxed. It had been like puzzling over a crossword clue and finding a possible answer, but being dissatisfied with that answer, lacking as it did any satisfying inevitability; and then being given an erratum slip, telling him that the clue had been wrong in the first place; then being given the correct clue; and then …
Oh yes!
All along he’d been aware of his dissatisfaction with the motivation of Philip Daley for the death of his father. It could have happened that way, of course—far odder things in life occurred than that. But the sequence of sudden hatred and carefully plotted murder rang far from true; and Morse considered once more the original facts: the scene of George Daley’s murder, beside the little coppice in Blenheim Park, still cordoned off, with nothing but the corpse removed, and even now some weary PC standing guard, or sitting guard … Odd really, that! Morse had asked for an almost unprecedentedly large number of men in this case; what’s more he’d given them all a quite specific task. Yet no one had come up with anything.
And suddenly he knew why!
He jerked up in the bed, as though crudely galvanized, and considered the erratum slip, smiling now serenely to himself. It could be. It had to be! And the new answer to the clue was shining and wholly fitting; an answer that “filled the eye”, as the judges said of the champion dogs at Crufts.
It was 2:40 A.M., and Morse knew that he would have to do something if he were ever to get to sleep. So he made himself a rare cup of Ovaltine, and sat for a while at the kitchen table: impatient, as ever, yet content. What exactly made him remember Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, he was by no means sure. Physics had long been a closed science to him, ever since at school he had once tried, without success, to take some readings from an incomprehensible piece of equipment called the Wheatstone Bridge. But Heisenberg was a splendid name and Morse looked him up in his encyclopaedia: “There is always an uncertainty in the values obtained if simultaneous observation is made of position …” Morse nodded to himself. Time too, as doubtless old Heisenberg had known.
Morse was soon asleep.
When he awoke, at 7 A.M., he thought he might perhaps have dreamed of a choir of beautiful women singing Elizabethan madrigals. But it was all a bit vague in his mind; about as vague as exactly what, as a principle, “Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901–76)” had had in mind.
Chapter Sixty-five
How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events, religiously preserve the merest trifles
(Sir Richard Burton, Sind Revisited)
“You appreciate therefore, Lewis”—the two of them stood on the scene of Daley’s murder the following morning—“the paramount importance of leaving everything exactly as it was here.”
“But we’ve had everybody trampling all over the place.”
Morse beamed. “Ah, but we’ve got this, haven’t we?” He patted the roof of the Blenheim Estate van affectionately.
“Unless one of the lads’s been sitting in there having a smoke.”
“If he has, I’ll sever his scrotum!”
“By the way, did you have a word with Dixon this morning?”
“Dixon? What the ’ell’s Dixon got to do with anything?”
“Nothing,” murmured Lewis, as he turned away to have a final word with the two men standing by the recovery truck.
“Without getting inside at all, you say?” asked the elder of the two.
“That’s what the chief inspector wants, yes.”
“We can’t do it without touching the bloody thing though, can we, Charlie?”
Morse himself was standing beside the van, deep in thought, it seemed. Then he walked slowly round it, peering with apparently earnest attention at the ground. But the soil was rock-hard there, after weeks of cloudless weather, and after a little while he lost interest and walked back to the
police car.
“That’s enough here, Lewis. Let’s get over to the lodge: it’s time we had another word with Mr. Williams.”
As before, Williams’ evidence, in specific terms, was perhaps unsatisfactory; but, in general outline, it did serve to establish a working framework for the murder—the only one really the police had. Certainly the crucial point—that Daley had driven through Combe Lodge Gate on the morning of his murder—could be pretty confidently re-affirmed. There had been a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing of two blue tractors, with their trailers, that morning, each of them making three trips from the saw-mill down to the area near the Grand Bridge to load up with recently felled timber. Williams had checked up (he said) with the drivers, and the ferrying had not begun until about 9:45 A.M., or a little later perhaps; and if there was one thing he could feel reasonably confident about it was the fact that Daley had come through the gate at the same time as one of the tractors—because although the gate was opened quite frequently that morning, it had not been specifically opened (Williams was almost sure) for the estate van. He did remember the van though—quite definite he was about that. He hadn’t known Daley well; spoken to him a few times of course, and Daley had often come through the lodge, to and from the saw-mill. Usually, between those working at Blenheim, there would be a hand raised in acknowledgement or greeting. And there was another thing: Daley almost always wore his hat, even in the summer; and, yes, Daley had been wearing his hat that Monday morning.
Morse had pressed him on the point. “You’re sure about that?”
Williams breathed out noisily. He felt he was sure, yes. But it was a frightening business, this being questioned and giving evidence, and he was now far less sure than he had been about one or two of the things he’d said earlier. That shot he thought he’d heard, for example: he was less and less sure now that he’d heard it at all. So it was better, fairer too, to play it a bit more on the cautious side … that’s what he thought.
“Well, I think so. Trouble is really about the time. You see, it might have been a bit later, I think.”
But Morse appeared no longer interested in the time—or in the shot, for that matter.
“Mr. Williams! I’m sorry to keep on about this but it’s very important. I know that Mr. Daley always wore his hat around the park, and I believe you when you say you saw his hat. But let’s put it another way: are you sure it was Mr. Daley who was wearing the hat on Monday morning?”
“You mean,” said Williams slowly, “you mean it mightn’t have been him—driving the van?”
“Exactly.”
Oh dear! Williams didn’t know … hadn’t even considered …
Two women joggers appeared at the lodge, twisted through the kissing-gate and continued their way into the park itself, their breasts bouncing, their legs (as viewed from the rear) betraying the slightly splay-footed run of the fairer sex. Morse followed them briefly with his eyes, and asked his last question:
“Did you notice any jogger coming this way, out of the park, on Monday morning? About, let’s say, half-past ten? Eleven?”
Williams pondered the question. While everything else seemed to be getting more and more muddled in his mind, the chief inspector had just sparked off a fairly vivid recollection. He thought he had noticed someone, yes—a woman. There were always lots of joggers at weekends, but not many in the week; not many at all; and certainly not in the middle of the morning. He thought he could remember the woman though; could almost see her now, with the nipples of her breasts erect and pushing through the thin material of her T-shirt. Was that Monday morning, though? The simple truth was that he just couldn’t be certain and again he was unwilling to commit himself too positively.
“I may have done, yes.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
What exactly he was being thanked for, Mr. Williams was not quite clear, and he was aware that he must have appeared a less-than-satisfactory witness. Yet the chief inspector had looked mightily pleased with himself as he’d left; and he’d said “very much”, hadn’t he? It was all a bit beyond the gate-keeper of Combe Lodge in Blenheim Park.
Chapter Sixty-six
As when that divelish yron engin, wrought
In deepest hell, and framd by furies skill,
With windy nitre and quick sulphur fraught,
And ramd with bollett rownd, ordaind to kill,
Conceiveth fyre
(Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene)
The semi-circular area where birdwatchers and the occasional loving couple were wont to park was packed with police cars and vans when, half an hour after leaving Blenheim, Lewis drove through the perimeter gate (“The woods are closed to Permit Holders until 10:00 A.M. every day except Sunday”) and into the compound, on his left, marked off with its horizontal four-barred, black-creosoted fencing. Here, under the direction of Chief Inspector Johnson, some fifty or so policemen—some uniformed, some not—were systematically conducting their search.
“No luck yet?” asked Morse.
“Give us a chance!” said Johnson. “Lot of ground to cover, isn’t there?”
The large wooden sheds, the stacks of logs and fencing-posts, the occasional clump of trees, the rank growth of untended bushes—all precluded any wholly scientific search-pattern. But there was plenty of time; there were plenty of men; they would find it, Johnson was confident of that.
Morse led the way up the curving track towards the furthest point from the compound entrance, towards the hut where David Michaels had his office, right up against the recently erected deer-fence. To the left of this track was a line of forty or so fir trees, about thirty feet high; and to the right, the hut itself, the main door standing padlocked now. On the wooden sides of this extensive hut, at the top, were six large bird-boxes, numbered 9–14; and at the bottom there grew rank clumps of nettles. Morse looked back down the sloping track; retraced his steps, counting as he went; then stopped at a smaller open-sided shed in which stood a large red tractor with a timber-lifting device fixed to it. For a minute or two he stood beside the tractor, behind the shed wall, and then, as if he were a young boy with an imaginary rifle, lifted both his arms, curled his right index-finger round an imaginary trigger, closed his left eye, and slowly turned the rifle in an arc from right to left, as if some imaginary vehicle were being driven past—the rifle finally remaining stationary as the vehicle’s imaginary driver dismounted, in front of the head forester’s hut.
“You reckon?” asked Lewis quietly.
Morse nodded.
“That means we probably ought to be concentrating the search up there, sir.” Lewis pointed back toward Michaels’ office.
“Give him a chance! He’s not so bright as you,” whispered Morse.
“About fifty, fifty-five yards. I paced it too, sir.”
Again Morse nodded, and the two of them rejoined Johnson.
“Know much about rifles?” asked Morse.
“Enough.”
“Could you use a silencer on a seven-millimetre?”
“ ‘Sound-moderator’—that’s the word these days. No, not much good. It’d suppress the noise of the explosion, but it couldn’t stop the noise of the bullet going through the sound-barrier. And incidentally, Morse, it might be a .243—don’t forget that!”
“Oh!”
“You were thinking it might be around here, weren’t you?” Johnson kicked aside a few nettles along the bottom of the shed, and looked at Morse shrewdly, if a little sadly.
Morse shrugged. “I’d be guessing, of course.”
Johnson looked down at the flattened nettles. “You never did have much faith in me, did you?”
Morse didn’t know what to say, and as Johnson walked away, he too looked down at the flattened nettles.
“You’re quite wrong, you know, sir. He’s a whole lot brighter than me, is Johnson.”
But again Morse made no reply, and the pair of them walked down to the low, stone-built cottage where until very lately Michaels and his
Swedish wife had lived so happily together.
Just as they were entering, they heard a shot from fairly far off. But they paid little attention to it. As Michaels had informed them, no one was ever going to be too disturbed about hearing a gun-shot in Wytham: game-keepers shooting squirrels or rabbits, perhaps; farmworkers taking a pot at the pestilential pigeons.
Inside the cottage, just beside the main entrance, stood the steel security cabinet from which Michaels’ rifle had been taken for forensic examination. But there was no longer any legal requirement for the cabinet to be locked, and it now stood open—and empty. Lewis bent down and looked carefully at the groove in which the rifle had stood, noting the scratches where the butt had rested; and beside it a second groove—with equally tell-tale signs.
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Lewis.
“If you remember,” said Morse, “he told us himself, Michaels did. When you told him you’d seen no rifles in the hut he said … he said ‘Oh, I couldn’t keep ’em there’—those were his exact words, I think.”
“You’re still certain he did it, sir?”
“Yes.”
“What about that ‘Uncertainty Principle’ you were on about this morning?”
“What about it?” asked Morse. Infuriatingly.
“Forget it.”
“What’s the time?”
“Nearly twelve.”
“Ah, the prick of noon!”
“Pardon?”
“Forget it.”
“We can walk down if you like, sir. A nice little ten-minute walk—do us good. We can work up a thirst.”
“Nonsense!”
“Don’t you enjoy walking—occasionally?”
“Occasionally, yes.”
“So?”
“So drive me down to the White Hart, Lewis! What’s the problem?”
Chapter Sixty-seven
Scire volunt secreta domus, atque inde timeri
(They watch for household secrets hour by hour And feed therefrom their appetite for power)
(Juvenal, Satire III)