by Colin Dexter
But she was not to be allowed to forget him. As she reached the house she saw the Lancia outside. Her heart pounded against her ribs and a wave of involuntary joy coursed through her blood. She let herself in and went straight to the living-room. There he was, sitting talking to Mary. He stood up as she came in.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo,’ she said weakly.
‘I really called to see Miss Coleby, but I gather she may not be back yet for a while. So I’ve been having a delightful little chat with Mary here.’
Mary indeed! Dumpy, freckled, little man-eater! Why don’t you go, Mary? Mary, why don’t you leave us alone – just for a few minutes? Please! She felt viciously jealous. But Mary seemed very taken with the charming Inspector and showed no signs of imminent surrender. Sue, still wearing her summer coat, sat on the arm of a chair, trying to resist the wave of desperation that threatened to engulf her.
She heard herself say: ‘She’ll catch the 8.15 from Paddington, I should think. Probably get here about ten.’
That was two hours. Two whole hours. If only Mary would go! He might ask her out for a drink and they could talk. But the wave swept her over, and she left the room and rushed upstairs. Morse got up as she left and thanked Mary for her hospitality. As he opened the front door he turned to Mary. Would she ask Sue to come down for a second? He would like to have a quick word with her. Mary, too, disappeared upstairs and blessedly faded from the scene. Morse stepped out into the concrete drive and Sue appeared, framed in the doorway. She stopped there.
‘You wanted a word with me, Inspector?’
‘Which room do you sleep in, Sue?’ She stepped out and stood next to him. Her arm brushed his as she pointed to the window immediately above the front door, and Morse felt a jagged ache between his temples. He wasn’t a tall man and she was almost his own height in the very high wedge-heeled shoes she wore. She dropped her arm and their hands met in an accidental, beautiful way. Leave your hand there, Sue. Leave it there, my darling. He felt the electric thrill of the contact and gently, softly he ran his finger tips along her wrist.
‘Why do you want to know that?’ Her voice sounded hoarse and breathless.
‘I don’t know. I suppose if I drive past and see a light on in your window I shall know it’s you in there.’
Sue could bear it no longer. She took her hand from his and turned away. ‘You came to see Jennifer, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell her, of course – when she comes in.’ Morse nodded.
‘You think she’s got something to do with the Woodstock business, don’t you?’
‘Something, perhaps.’
They stood in silence for a minute. Sue was wearing a sleeveless dress and she was trying not to shiver.
‘Well, I’d better be off.’
‘Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight.’ He turned towards the gate and had almost reached it when he turned round. ‘Sue?’ She stood in the doorway.
‘Yes?’
He walked back. ‘Sue, would you like to come out with me for a little while?’
‘Oh . . .’ Sue got no further. She flung her arms around him and cried joyfully on his shoulder, and neither heard the front gate open.
‘If you’ll excuse me, please?’ said a cool, well-spoken voice, and Jennifer Coleby edged past them into the house.
The other wanderers, too, were just returning. Bernard Crowther had returned from London on the same train as Jennifer Coleby; but they had travelled in separate parts of the train, and no one watching them alight at platform number 2 could have formed the slightest suspicion that either was aware of the other’s existence.
About this time, too, Peter Newlove was taking his leave of a red-headed, radiant girl in Church Street, Woodstock. They kissed again with eagerness and seeming insatiability.
‘I’ll be in touch, Gaye.’
‘Make sure you do – and thanks again.’
It had been an expensive weekend; very expensive, in fact. But it was, in Peter’s view, worth almost every penny.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
Monday, 18 October
ON MONDAY MORNING, Morse decided that however embarrassing it would be he had his job to do. How he dreaded it, though! Here was the big moment, the dénouement of the case (of that he felt quite confident) and yet he felt as if he himself were the guilty party. Lewis collected Jennifer Coleby in his own car; Morse felt he could just about spare her the official trappings. Bernard Crowther said he would make his own way, if that was all right. It was. Morse had tried to think out the likeliest approaches, but his concentration had been lapsing sadly. He decided to let things take their course.
At 10.25 a.m. Crowther arrived, five minutes early, and Morse poured him coffee and asked him a few casual questions about the ‘conference’.
‘Oh. The usual thing, you know. One long yawn,’ said Crowther.
‘What was it about exactly?’
‘University admissions. Arguing the toss about A-level requirements. We’ve not very popular with the Schools Council, you know. They think Oxford is the last bastion of academic élitism. Still, I suppose it is really . . .’ He had no chance to develop his theme. Lewis came in with Jennifer Coleby, and Crowther got to his feet.
‘You two know each other?’ asked Morse. There was not a hint of cynicism in his voice. Strangely, or so it seemed to Morse, Jennifer and Crowther shook hands. ‘Good mornings’ were exchanged, and Morse, a trifle nonplussed, poured two more coffees.
‘You do know each other?’ He sounded rather unsure of himself.
‘We live fairly near each other, don’t we, Mr Crowther?’
‘We do, yes. I’ve often seen you on the bus. It’s Miss Coleby, I think, isn’t it? You come round for the SPCC.’
Jennifer nodded.
Morse got up and passed the sugar basin round. He felt he couldn’t sit still.
During the next few minutes Lewis was forced to wonder if the Inspector had lost his grip completely. He um’d and ah’d and said ‘to be honest with you’ and ‘we have some reason to suppose’ and finally managed to suggest to his pair of prime suspects, almost apologetically, that they might be having an affair with each other.
Jennifer laughed almost aloud and Bernard smiled shyly. It was Bernard who spoke first. ‘I’m sure I feel very flattered, Inspector, and I very much wish perhaps that I was having some secret affair with Miss Coleby. But I’m afraid the answer’s no. What else can I say?’
‘Miss Coleby?’
‘I think I have spoken to Mr Crowther twice in my life – to ask him for a donation to the SPCC. I sometimes see him on the bus going into town – we get on and off at the same stops. But I think he always goes upstairs and I never do. I hate the smell of cigarettes.’
Morse, who was smoking his third cigarette, felt once more that he was getting the worst of things with Jennifer Coleby. He turned to Crowther.
‘I must ask you this, sir. Please think very carefully before you answer, and remember that you are here in connection with a murder, the murder of the girl who was travelling in your car.’ Morse saw a look of surprise on Jennifer’s face. ‘Was Miss Coleby here the other passenger you picked up that night?’
Bernard replied with an immediacy and conviction that sorely troubled Morse. ‘No, Inspector, she wasn’t. Of that you can be completely assured.’
‘And you, Miss Coleby. Do you deny that you were the other passenger in Mr Crowther’s car?’
‘Yes. I do deny. Absolutely.’
Morse drained his coffee.
‘Do you want us to sign anything, Inspector?’ There was a deep cynicism in Jennifer’s face.
Morse shook his head. ‘No. Sergeant Lewis has made notes on what you’ve both said. One more question though, Miss Coleby, if you don’t mind. Can you give me the address of the friends you stayed with in London this weekend?’
Jennifer took a plain envelope from her handb
ag and wrote down an address in Lancaster Gardens. As an afterthought she added the telephone number, and handed the envelope to Morse.
‘They’re lying – both of ’em,’ said Morse when they had gone.
Crowther had to get to the centre of Oxford and had gallantly offered a lift to his fellow-suspect. Morse wondered what they would be talking about. Lewis had said nothing.
‘Did you hear me?’ Morse was angry.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I said they’re a pair of prize liars. LIARS.’ Lewis remained silent. He thought the Inspector was wrong, terribly wrong. He himself was no stranger to interviewing liars and he had the firm conviction that both Crowther and Coleby were telling the plain truth.
Morse looked hard at his sergeant. ‘Come on! Out with it!’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘What do I mean? You know what I mean. You think I’m up the bloody pole, don’t you? You think I’m going bonkers. You’re willing to believe what everyone else says, but you don’t believe me. Come on. Tell me! I want to know.’
Lewis was upset. He didn’t know what to say, and Morse was losing the last remnants of his self-control, his eyes blazing and his voice growing vicious and deadly. ‘Come on. You tell me. You heard what I said. I want to know!’
Lewis looked at him and saw the bitter failure in the Inspector’s eyes. He wished he could put things right, but he couldn’t. It had been the quality in him that from the start had endeared him to Morse. It was his basic honesty and integrity.
‘I think you’re wrong, sir.’ It took a lot of saying, but he said it, and he deserved better than Morse’s cruel rejoinder.
‘You think I’m wrong? Well let me tell you something, Lewis. If anyone’s wrong here, it’s not me – it’s you. Do you understand that? YOU – not me. If you’ve not got the nous to see that those two slimy toads are lying, lying to save their own necks, you shouldn’t be on this case. Do you hear me? You shouldn’t be on this case.’
Lewis felt a deep hurt; but not for himself. ‘Perhaps you ought to have someone else with you, sir. On the case, I mean.’
‘You may be right.’ Morse was calming down a little and Lewis sensed it.
‘There’s this man Newlove, sir. Shouldn’t we . . .’
‘Newlove? Who the hell’s he?’ Lewis had said the wrong thing, and Morse’s latent anger and frustration rose to fever pitch again. ‘Newlove? We’ve never heard of the bloody man before. All right – he’s got a typewriter. That’s not a sin, is it? He didn’t write that letter. CROWTHER DID! And if you don’t see that you must be blind as a bloody bat!’
‘But don’t you think . . .’
‘Oh, bugger off, Lewis. You’re boring me.’
‘Does that mean I’m off the case, sir?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t care. Just bugger off and leave me alone.’ Lewis went out and left him alone.
The phone rang a few minutes later. Morse picked the receiver up and closed his mind to everything. ‘I’m not here,’ he snapped, ‘I’ve gone home.’ He slammed down the receiver and sat brooding savagely within himself. He even forgot Sue. The last castle had finally collapsed. Having stood the flood so long, it was now a flattened heap of formless sand. But even as it fell a curious clarification was dawning across his mind. He got up from his leather chair, opened the cabinet and took out the file on Sylvia Kaye. He opened it at the beginning and was still reading it late into the afternoon, when the shadows crept across the room and he found it difficult to read, and a new and horrifying thought was taking birth in the depths of his tortured mind.
The dramatic news broke at a quarter-past seven. Margaret Crowther had committed suicide.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
Monday, 18 October
BERNARD CROWTHER, AFTER dropping Jennifer Coleby in the High, had been lucky in finding a parking space in Bear Lane. Not even the dons were permitted to park outside the college now. He had lunched in the Senior Common Room and spent the afternoon and early evening working. Both the children were away for a week on a school camping holiday in nearby Whitham Woods. On such ventures it was customary for the parents to visit their children on one evening during the week, but the young Crowthers had told their parents not to bother; and that was that. At least it would be a chance for Bernard and Margaret to have a few decent meals, instead of the inevitable chips and tomato sauce with everything.
Bernard left college at about twenty-past six. The roads were getting free again by now and he had an easy journey home. He let himself in with his Yale key and hung up his coat. Funny smell. Gas?
‘Margaret?’ He put his brief-case in the front room. ‘Margaret?’ He walked to the kitchen and found the door locked. ‘Margaret!’ He rattled the knob of the kitchen door, but it was firmly locked on the other side. He banged on the door. ‘Margaret! Margaret! Are you there?’ He could smell the gas more strongly now. His mouth went completely dry and there was wild panic in his voice. ‘MARGARET!’ He rushed back to the front door, through the side gate, and tried the back door. It was locked. He whimpered like a child. He looked into the kitchen through the large window above the sink. The electric light was on and for a fraction of a second a last ember of hope flared up, and glowed, and then was gone. The surrealistic sight that met his eyes was so strangely improbable that it registered itself blankly as a meaningless picture on the retina of his eyes – a sight without significance – a waxwork model, bright-eyed and brightly hued, with a fixed, staring smile. What was she doing sitting on the floor like that? Cleaning the oven?
He picked up a house-brick lying by the side of the wall, smashed a pane in the window, and cut his fingers badly as he reached for the catch and opened the window from the inside. The nauseating smell of gas hit him with an almost physical impact, and it was some seconds before, holding his handkerchief to his face, he climbed awkwardly in through the window and turned off the gas. Margaret’s head was just inside the oven, resting on a soft red cushion. In a numbed, irrational way he thought he should put the cushion back where it came from; it was from the settee in the lounge. He looked down with shocked, zombie-like eyes at the jagged cuts on his hand and mechanically dabbed them with his handkerchief. He saw the sticky brown paper lining the gaps by the door-jambs and the window, and noticed that Margaret had cut the ends as neatly as she always did when she wrapped the children’s birthday presents. The children! Thank God they were away! He saw the scissors on the formica top over the washing machine, and like an automaton he picked them up and put them in the drawer. The smell was infinitely sickly still, and he felt the vomit rising in his gorge. And now the horror of it all was gradually seeping into his mind, like a pool of ink into blotting paper. He knew that she was dead.
He unlocked the kitchen door, picked up the phone in the hall and in a dazed, uncomprehending voice he asked for the police. A letter addressed to him was lying beside the telephone directory. He picked it up and put it in his breast pocket and returned to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later the police found him there, sitting on the floor beside his wife, his hand on her hair, his eyes bleak and glazed. He had been deaf to the strident ringing of the front door bell.
Morse arrived only a few minutes after the police car and the ambulance. It was Inspector Bell of the Oxford City Police who had called Morse; Crowther had insisted on it. The two Inspectors had met several times before and stood in the hallway talking together in muted voices. Bernard had been led unresistingly from the kitchen by a police doctor and was now sitting in the lounge, his head sunk into his hands. He appeared unaware of what was going on or what was being said, but when Morse came into the lounge he seemed to come to life again.
‘Hullo, Inspector.’ Morse put his hand on Crowther’s shoulder, but could think of nothing to say that might help. Nothing could help. ‘She left this, Inspector.’ Bernard reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope.
‘It’s
for you, you know, sir; it’s addressed to you – not to me,’ said Morse quietly.
‘I know. But you read it. I can’t.’ He put his head in his hands again, and sobbed quietly.
Morse looked enquiringly at his fellow-Inspector. Bell nodded and Morse carefully opened the letter.
Dear Bernard,
When you read this I shall be dead. I know what this will mean to you and the children and it’s only this that has kept me from doing it before – but I just can’t cope with life any longer. I am finding it so difficult to know what to say – but I want you to know that it’s not your fault. I have not been all that a wife should be to you and I have been a miserable failure with the children, and everything has built up and I long for rest and peace away from it all. I just can’t go on any longer. I realize how selfish I am and I know that I’m just running away from everything. But I shall go mad if I don’t run away. I must run away – I haven’t the courage to stand up to things any longer.