by Colin Dexter
“What put you on it this time?” asked Lewis as they sat opposite each other in the small upstairs bar, Morse with a pint of real ale, Lewis himself with a much-iced orangeade.
“I think it wasn’t so much finding Daley like he was—out at Blenheim. It was the photographs they took of him there. I don’t think it hit me at the time; but when I looked at the photographs I got the idea somehow that he’d just been dumped there—that he hadn’t been shot there at all.”
“You mean you just—well, sort of had a feeling about it?”
“No. I don’t mean that. You may think I work that way, Lewis, but I don’t. I don’t believe in some unaccountable intuition that just happens occasionally to turn out right. There’s got to be something there, however vague. And here we had the hat, didn’t we? The hat Daley wore wherever he was, whatever the weather. Same bloody hat! He never took it off, Lewis!”
“Probably took it off in bed?”
“We don’t even know that, do we?” Morse drained his beer. “Plenty of time for another.”
Lewis nodded. “Plenty of time! Your round though, sir. I’ll have another orange. Lovely. Lots of ice, please!”
“You see,” resumed Morse, a couple of minutes later, “he was almost certainly wearing his hat when he was shot, and I very much doubt myself that it would have fallen off. I’d seen the tight sweat-mark round his forehead when we met him earlier. And even if it had fallen off—when he dropped dead—I just had the feeling …”
Lewis lifted his eyebrows.
“… it wouldn’t have fallen far.”
“So?”
“So, I reckon it was put down there deliberately, just beside his head—after he was shot. Remember where it was? Three or four feet away from his head. So the conclusion’s firm and satisfactory, as I see it. He was wearing his hat when he was shot, and like as not it stayed on his head. Then when he was moved, and finally dumped, it had come off; and it was placed there beside him.”
“What a palaver!”
Morse nodded. “But they had to do it. They had to establish an alibi—”
“For David Michaels, you mean?”
“Yes. It was Michaels who shot Daley—I’ve no doubts on that score. There was the agreement Hardinge told us about, wasn’t there, the agreement the four of them made—a statement by the way that contains quite as much truth as falsehood, Lewis. Then something comes along and buggers it all up. Daley got a letter spelling out his financial responsibilities for his boy, and Daley knew that he was the one who had a hold over—well, over all the others, really. But particularly over David Michaels! I reckon Daley probably rang him and said he couldn’t afford to stick by the agreement; said he was sorry—but he needed more money. And if he didn’t get more money pretty soon …”
“Blackmail!”
“Exactly. And there may well have been a bit more of that than we think.”
“Quite a hold over Michaels, though, when you think of it: knowing he was married to … a murderess.”
“Quite a hold. So Michaels agrees—pretends he agrees—to go along with it. They’ll meet at Wytham earlyish on Monday—quarter to ten, say. No one around much at that time. No birdwatchers allowed in the woods till ten—remember the notice?”
“The RSPB people were there.”
“They turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though.”
“Take it a bit slower, please!”
“Right. Let’s just go back a minute. The rendezvous’s settled. Daley drives up to Wytham. Michaels has said he’ll have some money ready—in notes, no doubt—just after the bank’s opened. He’s ready. He waits for Daley to drive up to his office. He waits for a clear view of him as he gets out of his estate van. I don’t know exactly where he was waiting, of course; what I do know is that someone as experienced as Michaels, with a telescopic sight, could hit this”—and Morse picked up his empty glass—“no problem!—from a hundred, let alone from fifty yards.”
But any further reconstruction of Daley’s murder was temporarily curtailed, since Johnson had walked in, and now sat down beside them.
“What’ll you have?” asked Morse. “Lewis here is in the chair.”
“Nothing for me, thank you, er, Lewis. Look! There’s this call for you from forensics about the van. I told ’em I wasn’t quite sure where you were—”
“What’d they say?”
“They found prints all over the shop—mostly Daley’s, of course. But like you said, they found other prints—on the tail-board, on the steering wheel.”
“And I was right about them?”
Johnson nodded. “Yes. They’re Karin Eriksson’s.”
At lunch-time that same day, Alasdair McBryde came out of the tube station at Manor House and walked briskly down the Seven Sisters Road—finally turning into one of the parking-and-garage areas of a high-rise block of flats that flanks the Bethune Road. He had spotted the unmarked car immediately: the two men seated in the front, one of them reading the Sun. It was quite customary for him to spot danger a mile or so off; and he did so now. Number 14 was the garage he was interested in; but softly whistling the Prelude to Act Three of Lohengrin, he walked boldly into the nearest open garage (number 9), picked up a half-filled can of Mobiloil, before nonchalantly retracing his steps to the main road; where, still clutching the dirty can, he walked quietly and confidently away in the direction of Stamford Hill.
“False alarm!” said the policeman with the Sun, as he resumed his reading of various illicit liaisons among the glitterati.
At 3:25 P.M., no more than four or five yards from the spot where Chief Inspector Johnson had earlier stood, there amongst the nettles and the cow-parsley and other less readily recognizable plants and weeds, Constable Roy Wilks made his discovery: a .243 bullet—the bullet (surely!) for which the party had been searching. Never, in his life hitherto, had Wilks been the focus of such attention; and never again (as he duly recognized) would he be likely to experience such felicitous congratulations.
Most particularly from Morse.
Chapter Sixty-eight
The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed.
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone
(W. B. Yeats. The Countess Cathleen)
“Just simply, Morse! Just simply! I don’t want to know what a clever sod you are. Just a straightforward—brief!—account. If you can manage it.”
Following the final discoveries, new statements had been taken from both David Michaels and Karin Eriksson; and now, the following morning, as he sat in Strange’s office, Morse was able to confirm in nearly ever respect the pattern of events he’d outlined to Lewis in the White Hart.
Daley had been to the office in Wytham Woods on more than one occasion before, and a meeting had been arranged for 9:45 A.M. on Monday, 3 August. At that time there would, with any luck, be virtually no one around; but only if no one was around, would the deed take place. And the deed did take place. When Daley got out of the van, Michaels shot him dead with his .243 rifle—the latter buried later out on the Singing Way. To Michaels himself the report had sounded terrifyingly loud; but following it a strangely eerie silence had reasserted itself, and no one had come rushing into the compound there demanding explanation, seeking causes. Nothing. A newly still, clear morning in early August. And a body—which Michaels had swiftly wrapped in black plastic sheeting and lifted into the back of Daley’s own van. Only two or three minutes after the murder, this same van was being driven out through Wolvercote, over to the A44 towards Woodstock, left at Bladon, and then into Long Hanborough—and finally up to Combe Lodge, on the western side of the Blenheim Estate. The keys to the lodge gate would doubtless have been somewhere on the body, but the van-driver waited a while and was very quickly rewarded when the gate was opened for a tractor and trailer; and when the van driver, pulling Daley’s khaki-green hat down over her short, black hair, moved into the trailer’s wake, raising a hand in acknowledgement to any anonymous observer as
she drove gratefully through. A few hundred yards along she had spotted an ideal location in which to leave a van, and a body, and a hat. Daley had not been a heavy man, and she herself was a strong young woman; yet she had been unable to lift the corpse—just to pull it over the tail-board, whence it fell with a thud to the hard soil. The plastic sheet was messily sticky with blood, and she had taken it with her as she ran off, across the road, to the tip of the lake, where she washed the blood from her hands and wedged the sheet beneath some reeds. Then, following the arranged plan, she’d jogged her way back—though not, she claimed, through Combe Lodge, as Morse had suggested (and Williams could have sworn)—but down by the western side of the lake, across the small bridge that spans the River Glyme below the Grand Cascade, and out of the park via Eagle Lodge.
“Helluva long way, whichever route she took,” mumbled Strange.
“Some people are fitter than others, sir.”
“Not thinking of yourself, are you?”
“No!”
“Bit lucky, though—the fellow at the lodge remembering the van going through.”
“With all respect, sir, I don’t think that’s true. In fact, it led us all to believe that Daley was alive until after ten o’clock—when David Michaels was miles away with his RSPB pals round the bird-boxes. But Michaels could never have done it himself—not by himself—that morning. There was no way at all that he could have got out to Blenheim and somehow—somehow—got back to Wytham.”
“But his wife could. That’s what you’re saying.”
“His wife did.”
“She was a brave girl.”
“She is a brave girl, sir.”
“You know, if they’d only have played it straight up and down the wicket from the start—either of them—they’d probably have got away with justifiable homicide, self-defence, take your pick.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t sound very convinced.”
“I think she’s a rather more complex woman than that. Perhaps … perhaps she couldn’t quite persuade herself that killing Myton had been purely in self-defence.”
“You mean—you mean she might have enjoyed it?”
“I didn’t say that, sir.”
Strange shook his head. “I see what you’re getting at, though. Prepared—wasn’t she?—to drive Daley’s body out to Blenheim and …”
“She’s a complex woman, as I say, sir. I’m not sure I understand her at all really.”
“Perhaps she’s a bit of a mystery even to herself.”
Morse got up to leave. “Same thing in most cases, isn’t it? We never really understand people’s motives. In all these things it’s as if there’s a manifestation—but there’s always a bit of a mystery too.”
“Now don’t you start going all religious on me, Morse!”
“No chance of that.”
“I don’t suppose anyone’ll miss Daley all that much.”
“No. He was a small man—”
“Was he? How tall was he?”
“No. I didn’t mean small in that sense. But he was physically small, yes. Only weighed eight stone, four pounds.”
“How do you know that?”
“They weighed him, sir—post mortem.”
Chapter Sixty-nine
Just as every person has his idiosyncrasies, so has every typewriter
(Handbook of Office Maintenance, 9th edition)
The following day, Friday, 8 August, Morse’s attention was early drawn to the correspondence columns of The Times.
From Lt. Colonel Reginald Postill
Sir, Over these past years we have all become aware of the increasing influence of trial (and retrial) by TV. We have seen, for example, the collapse of cases brought against the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four; and doubtless in the years ahead we may confidently anticipate the acquittal of the Towcester Two and the Winchester One.
Are we now to become similarly conditioned to police enquiries conducted in the nation’s quality daily newspapers (including, of course, your own, sir)? I learn that the Thames Valley Police has now been able to prefer charges against persons in the “Swedish Maiden” case—and this in considerable measure thanks to the original verses published in your correspondence columns. Clearly we should be grateful for such an outcome. But am I alone in being troubled by such a precedent? Am I alone in believing that such affairs, both judicial and investigative, are better left in the hands of those men and women suitably trained in their respective specialisms?
Yours faithfully,
REGINALD POSTILL,
6 Baker Lane,
Shanklin,
Isle of Wight.
Lewis had come into his office as Morse was reading this; and duly read it himself.
“Bit hard that, isn’t it? I’d have thought it all helped us quite a bit. I can’t myself really see what’s wrong with getting a bit of public co-operation and interest.”
“Oh, I agree,” said Morse.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be too much worried about some retired old colonel from the Isle of Wight, sir.”
Morse smiled knowingly across at his old friend. “What makes you think he’s retired?” he asked very quietly.
That same evening, Morse’s celebratory mood was undi-minished; and he had walked down to Summertown immediately after The Archers and carried back up to his flat four bottles of champagne: not the dearest, it must be admitted—yet not the cheapest either. Strange, Johnson, Lewis—and himself. Four of them. Just for a congratulatory glass or two. Dr. Laura Hobson had been invited too (how otherwise?); but she had phoned earlier in the evening to make her apologies—an emergency; sorry, she’d loved to have been there; but these things couldn’t be helped, could they?
Harold Johnson was the first to leave, at 9:15 P.M. One glass of bubbly, and the plea that the wife be awaiting him. Yet of all of them it was probably Johnson who was the most grateful soul there that evening: the procedures surrounding the prosecutions of two suspected murderers—David Michaels and Mrs. Michaels—would be entrusted now to him, to Johnson and his team, since Morse had announced his intention of resuming immediately his truncated furlough which had begun (so long ago it seemed) in the Bay Hotel at Lyme Regis.
Three glasses of bubbly and ten minutes later, Strange had struggled to his feet and announced his imminent departure.
“Thanks! And enjoy your holiday!”
“If you’ll let me.”
“Where are you going this time?”
“I was thinking of Salisbury, sir.”
“Why Salisbury?”
Morse hesitated. “They’ve just tarted up the cathedral there, and I thought—”
“You sure you’re not going religious on me, Morse?”
Two of the champagne bottles were finished, and Morse picked up a third, starting to twist open the wire round its neck.
“No more for me,” said Lewis.
Morse put the bottle back on the sideboard. “Would you prefer a Newcastle Brown?”
“I think I would, to be honest, sir.”
“C’mon, then!”
Morse led the way through to the cluttered kitchen.
“You trying for my job, sir?” Lewis pointed to the ancient portable typewriter that stood at one end of the kitchen table.
“Ah! That! I was just writing a brief line to The Times.” He handed Lewis his effort: a messy, ill-typed, xxxx-infested missive.
“Would you like me to re-type it for you, sir? It’s a bit …”
“Yes, please. I’d be grateful for that.”
So Lewis sat there, at the kitchen table, and re-typed the brief letter. That it took him rather longer than it should have done was occasioned by two factors: first, that Lewis himself could boast only semi-competence in the keyboard-skills; second, that he had found himself looking, with increasingly puzzled interest, at the very first line he’d typed. And then at the second. And then at the third … Especially did he find himself examining the worn top segment of the low
er-case “e”, and the slight curtailment of the cross-bar in the lower-case “t” … For the moment, however, he said nothing. Then, when his reasonably clean copy was completed, he wound it from the ancient machine and handed it to Morse.
“Much better! Good man!”
“You remember, sir, that original article in The Times? When they said the typewriter could pretty easily be identified if it was ever found? From the ‘e’s and the ‘t’s … ?”
“Yes?”
“You wrote those verses about the girl yourself, didn’t you, sir?”
Morse nodded slowly.
“Bloody hell!” Lewis shook his head incredulously.
Morse poured himself a can of beer. “Champagne’s a lovely drink, but it makes you thirsty, doesn’t it?”
“Think anyone else suspected?” asked Lewis, grinning down at the typewriter.
“Just the one person. Someone from Salisbury.”
“Didn’t you say you would be going there, though? To Salisbury?”
“Might be, Lewis. Depends.”
Half an hour after Lewis had left, Morse was listening to Lipatti playing the slow movement of the Mozart piano concerto No. 21, when the doorbell rang.
“It’s a bit late I know but …”
What had been a semi-scowl on Morse’s face now suddenly burgeoned into a wholly ecstatic smile.
“Nonsense! It just so happens I’ve got a couple of bottles of bubbly …”
“Will that be enough, do you think?”
“Come in! I’ll just turn this off—”
“Please not! I love it. K 467? Right?”
“Where’ve you parked?”
“I didn’t come by car. I thought you’d probably try to get me drunk.”
Morse closed the door behind them. “I will turn it off, if you don’t mind. I’ve never been able to cope with two beautiful things at the same time.”
She followed Morse into the lounge where once more he picked up bottle number three.
“What time will you have to go, my love?”
“Who said anything about going, Chief Inspector?”
Morse put down the bottle and swiftly retraced his steps to the front door, where he turned the key, and shot the bolts, both top and bottom.