by Colin Dexter
‘You’ve not told me your name.’
‘You’ve not told me yours.’
‘Sylvia. Sylvia Kaye.’
‘Look Sylvia.’ He tried to sound as loving towards her as he could. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we, you know, just thought of this as something beautiful that happened to us. Just the once. Here tonight.’
She turned nasty and sour then. ‘You don’t want to see me again, do you? You’re just like the rest. Bi’ of sex and a blow out and you’re off.’ She spoke differently, too. She sounded like a common slut, a cheap, hard pick-up from a Soho side-street. But she was right, of course – absolutely right. He’d got what he wanted. But hadn’t she? Was she a prostitute? He thought of his days in the army and the men who’d caught a dose of the pox. He must get out of here; out of this claustrophobic car and this dark and miserable yard. He put his hand in his pocket and found a £1 note. But for some loose silver, he had no more money on him.
‘A pound no’! One bloody pound no’! Chris’ – you must think I’m a cheap bi’ of goods. You ’ave a bi’ of money on you nex’ time mate – or else keep your bloody ’ands off.’
He felt a deep sense of shame and corruption. She got out of the car and he followed her.
‘I’ll find ou’ who you bloody are, mister. I will – you see!’
What had happened then he didn’t know. He remembered saying something and he vaguely remembered that she had said something back. He remembered his headlights swathing the yard and he remembered waiting for a gap in the traffic as he reached the main road. He remembered stopping to buy a double whisky and he remembered driving fast down the dual carriageway; and he remembered coming up behind a car and then swerving past it and flying through the night, his mind reeling. And on Thursday afternoon he had read in the Oxford Mail of the murder of Sylvia Kaye.
It had been foolish to write that letter, of course, but at least Peter would be out of trouble now. It was always asking for trouble – putting anything down on paper; but it had been a neat little arrangement until then. It was her suggestion anyway, and it seemed necessary. The post in North Oxford was really dreadful – 10.00 a.m. or later now – and no one seemed to mind the girls at the office getting letters. And so often he couldn’t be quite sure until the last minute. Sometimes things got into a complex tangle, but more often the arrangement had worked very smoothly. They had worked out a good system between them. Quite clever really. No one even looked at the date anyway. Sometimes he had incorporated a brief message, too – like that last time. That last time . . . Morse must have had his wits about him, but he hadn’t been quite clever enough to see the whole picture . . . He couldn’t have told Morse the whole truth, of course, but he hadn’t deliberately meant to mislead him. A bit, certainly. That height business, for example . . . He’d like to see Morse. Perhaps under other circumstances they could have got to know each other, become friends . . .
He dozed off completely and it was dark when he awoke. The lights were dim. The silent, white figure of a nurse sat behind a small table at the far end of the ward, and he saw that most of the other patients were lying asleep. The real world rushed back at him, and Margaret was dead. Why? Why? Was it as she said in the letter? He wondered how he could ever face life again, and he thought of the children. What had they been told?
Sharp spasms of agonizing pain leaped across his chest and he knew suddenly and with certitude that he was going to die. The nurse was with him, and now the doctor. He was drenched with sweat. Margaret! Had she killed Sylvia or had he? What did it matter? The pains were dying away and he felt a strange serenity.
‘Doctor,’ he whispered.
‘Take it gently, Mr Crowther. You’ll feel better now.’ But Crowther had suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and his chances of living on were tilted against him in the balances.
‘Doctor. Will you write something for me?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘To Inspector Morse. Write it down.’ The doctor took his note-book out and wrote down the brief message. He looked at Crowther with worried eyes: the pulse was weakening rapidly. The machine was working, its black dials turned up to their maximum readings. Bernard felt the oxygen mask over his face and saw in a strangely lucid way the minutest details of all around him. Dying was going to be much easier than he had ever hoped. Easier than living. He knocked away the mask with surprising vigour, and spoke his last words.
‘Doctor. Tell my children that I loved them.’
His eyes closed and he seemed to fall into a deep sleep. It was 2.35 a.m. He died at 6.30 the same morning before the sun had risen in the straggly grey of the eastern sky and before the early morning porters came clattering along the corridors with their hospital trolleys.
Morse looked down at him. It was 8.30 a.m. and the last mortal remains of Bernard Crowther had been unobtrusively wheeled into the hospital mortuary almost two hours ago. Morse had liked Crowther. Intelligent face; good-looking man really. He thought that Margaret must have loved him dearly once; probably always had, deep down. And not only Margaret. There had been someone else, too, hadn’t there, Bernard? Morse looked down at the sheet of note-paper in his hand, and read it again. ‘To Inspector Morse. I’m so sorry. I’ve told you so many lies. Please leave her alone. She had nothing to do with it. How could she? I killed Sylvia Kaye.’
The pronouns were puzzling, or so they had seemed to the doctor as he wrote the brief message. But Morse understood them and he knew that Bernard Crowther had guessed the truth before he died. He looked at the dead man again: the feet were as cold as stone and he would babble no more o’ green fields.
Morse turned slowly on his heel and left.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
Friday, 22 October, a.m.
LATER THAT SAME Friday morning Morse sat in his office bringing Lewis up to date with the morning’s developments. ‘You see, all along the trouble with this case has been not so much that they’ve told us downright lies but that they’ve told us such a tricky combination of lies and the truth. But we’re nearly at the end of the road, thank God.’
‘We’re not finished yet, sir?’
‘Well, what do you think? It’s not a very tidy way of leaving things, is it? It’s always nice to have a confession, I know, but what do you do with two of ’em?’
‘Perhaps we shall never know, sir. I think that they were just trying to cover up for each other, you know – taking the blame for what the other had done.’
‘Who do you think did it, Sergeant?’
Lewis had his choice ready. ‘I think she did it, sir.’
‘Pshaw!’ Well, it had been a 50:50 chance, and he’d guessed wrong. Or at least Morse thought he was wrong. But he hadn’t been on very good form recently, had he? ‘Come on,’ said Morse. ‘Tell me. What makes you pick on poor Mrs Crowther?’
‘Well, I think she found out about Crowther going with this other woman and I believe what she said about following him and seeing him at Woodstock. She couldn’t have known some of the things she mentioned if she hadn’t been there, could she?’
‘Go on,’ said Morse.
‘I mean, for instance, about where the car was parked in the yard. About them getting in the back of the car – we didn’t know that; but it seems to fit in with the evidence we got when one of Sylvia’s hairs was found on the back seat. I just feel she couldn’t have made it up. She couldn’t have got those things from the newspapers because they were never printed.’
Morse nodded his agreement. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Lewis. She wasn’t at her Headington class on that Wednesday night. There’s no tick for her on the register anyway. I’ve looked.’
Lewis was grateful for the corroborative evidence. ‘But you don’t believe it was her, sir?’
‘I know it wasn’t,’ said Morse simply. ‘You see, Lewis, I think that if Margaret Crowther had been in murderous mood that night, it would have been Bernard’s skull
on the other end of a tyre-lever – not a nonentity like Sylvia’s.’
Lewis seemed far from convinced. ‘I think you’re wrong, sir. I know what you mean, but all women are different. You can’t just say a woman would do this and wouldn’t do that. Some women would do anything. She must have felt terribly jealous of this other girl taking her husband from her like that.’
‘She doesn’t say she was jealous, though; she says she felt “burning anger”, remember?’
Lewis didn’t, but he saw his opening. ‘But why are you all of a sudden so anxious to believe what she says, sir? I thought you said you didn’t believe her.’
Morse nodded his approval. ‘That’s exactly what I mean. It’s all such a mixture of truth and falsehood. Our job is to sift the wheat from the chaff.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘Well, we need a bit of psychological insight, for one thing. And I think she was telling the truth when she said she was angry. To me, it’s got the right sort of ring about it. I’m pretty sure if she was making it up she’d have said she was jealous, rather than angry. And if she was angry, I think the object of her anger would be her husband, not Sylvia Kaye.’
To Lewis it all seemed thin and wishy-washy. ‘I’ve never cared much for psychology, sir.’
‘You’re not convinced?’
‘Not with that, sir. No.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Morse. ‘I’m not very convinced myself. But you’ll be glad to know that we don’t have to depend on my abilities as a psychologist. Just think a minute, Lewis. She said she entered the yard, keeping close in – that is, to her left – and edged her way behind the cars. She saw Crowther at the far end of the yard, also on the left. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘But the tyre-lever, if we can believe the evidence, and I can see no possible reason for not doing so, was either in, or beside, the tool-box at the farthest right-hand corner of the yard. The weapon with which Mrs Crowther claims she killed Sylvia Kaye was at least twenty yards away from where she stood. She mentions in her statement that she was not only angry but frightened, too. And I can well believe her. Who wouldn’t be frightened? Frightened of what was going on, frightened of the dark perhaps; but above all frightened of being seen. And yet you ask me to believe that she crossed the yard and picked up a tyre-lever that was almost certainly no more than four or five yards from where Bernard stood with his bottled blonde? Rubbish! She read about the tyre-lever in the papers.’
‘Someone could have moved it, sir.’
‘Yes. Someone could, certainly. Who do you suggest?’
Lewis felt that his arguing with Morse in this mood was almost as sacrilegious as Moses arguing with the Lord on Sinai. Anyway, he ought to have spotted that business about the spanner from the start. Very bad, really. But something else had bothered him about Margaret’s statement. It had seemed so obvious from the start that this was a man’s crime, not a woman’s. He had himself looked down on Sylvia that first night and he had known perfectly well, without any pathologist’s report, that she had been raped. Her clothes were torn and quite obviously someone had not been able to wait to get his hands on her body. It had been no surprise to him, or to Morse surely, that the report had mentioned the semen dribbling down her legs, and the bruising round her breasts. But all that didn’t square with Margaret Crowther’s evidence. She’d seen them in the back of the car, she said. But had she been right? The hair was found in the back of the car, but that didn’t prove very much, did it? It could have got there in a hundred different ways. No. Things didn’t add up either way. It beat him. He put his thoughts into words and Morse listened carefully.
‘You’re right. It’s a problem that caused me a great deal of anxiety.’
‘But it’s not a problem now, sir?’
‘Oh no. If that were our only problem we’d have some plain sailing ahead of us.’
‘And you don’t think we have?’
‘I’m afraid we’ve got some very stormy seas to face.’ Morse’s face was drawn and grey, and his voice was strained as he continued. ‘There’s one more thing I should have told you, Lewis. After I left the Radcliffe this morning, I called to see Newlove. He’d been to see Bernard yesterday afternoon and was quite willing to talk about him.’
‘Anything new, sir?’
‘Yes, I suppose you can say there is, in a way. Newlove didn’t want to talk about the personal side of things, but he told me that Crowther had spoken to him about the night of the murder. Very much what we already knew or what we’ve pieced together. Except for one thing, Lewis. Crowther said he thought there was someone else in the yard that night.’
‘Well we knew that, didn’t we, sir?’
‘Just a minute, Lewis. Let’s just picture the scene, if we can. Crowther gets out of the front seat and into the back, right? Sylvia Kaye does the same. Now there was precious little room where the car was, and this was certainly not the place or the occasion for old-world gallantry; and I reckon it’s odds-on that she got out the front nearside and into the back nearside and that he did the same on his side. In other words they sat on the same sides in the back of the car as they did in the front – he on the right, she on the left. Now whatever peculiar posture Crowther got himself into, I think that for most of the time he had his back to where his wife was standing – in other words she was almost directly behind him. But Bernard hadn’t got eyes in the back of his head, and Margaret, as we’ve said, was probably scared stiff of being seen. And it tends to lead to one conclusion, as I see it, and one conclusion only: Crowther did not see his wife that night. I’m sure she was there, but I don’t think he saw her. But he did see somebody else. In other words there was yet another person in the yard that night, another person much nearer to him than Margaret ever got; someone standing very near to the tool-kit, and someone Crowther caught a shadowy glimpse of, as he sat in the back of his car. And I think it may have been that person, Lewis, who murdered Sylvia Kaye.’
‘You don’t think it was Bernard either, then?’
For the first time Morse seemed oddly hesitant. ‘He could have done it, of course.’
‘But I just don’t see a motive, do you sir?’
‘No,’ said Morse flatly, ‘I don’t.’ He looked around the room dejectedly.
‘Did you get anything else from Mr Newlove, sir?’
‘Yes. Crowther told him he’d used his typewriter.’
‘Newlove’s typewriter, you mean?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘You mean Crowther did write that letter after all?’ Morse gave him a look of pained disappointment.
‘You’ve never doubted that, surely?’
He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a sealed white envelope which he handed across to Lewis. It was addressed to Jennifer Coleby. ‘I want you to go to see her, Lewis, and give her this, and stay with her while she opens it. Inside there’s one sheet of paper and a return envelope addressed to me. Tell her to answer the question I’ve asked and then to seal up her answer in the return envelope. Is that clear?
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to ring her up, sir?’
Morse’s eyes suddenly blazed with anger, although when he spoke his words were quiet and controlled. ‘As I was saying, Lewis, you will stay with her and when she has written her answer you will make sure that the envelope is sealed tight. You see, I don’t want you to see the question I’ve asked, nor the answer that she gives.’ The voice was icy now, and Lewis quickly nodded his understanding. He had never realized quite how frightening the Inspector could be, and he was glad to get away.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
Friday, 22 October, p.m.
AFTER LEWIS HAD gone, Morse sat and thought of Sue. So much had happened since Monday, but Sue had remained uppermost in his thoughts for almost all the time. He had to see her again. He looked at his watch. Midday. He wondered what she was doing, and suddenly spurred himself into action.
‘Yes.’
‘Accident department, please.’
‘I’m putting you through, sir.’
‘Hallo. Accident department.’ It wasn’t Sue.
‘I want to have a quick word with Miss Widdowson, please.’
‘You mean Staff Nurse Widdowson.’ He hadn’t known that.
‘Susan, I think her Christian name is.’
‘I’m sorry, sir. We’re not allowed to take outside telephone calls except . . .’
‘It might be an emergency,’ interrupted Morse hopefully.
‘Is it an emergency, sir?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘Look, this is the police.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Obviously she had heard that one before.
Slowly Morse was getting angry again. ‘Is the Matron there?’
‘You want me to put you through to Matron?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He had to wait a good two minutes. ‘Hullo. Matron here.’
‘Matron, I’m speaking from Thames Valley Police Station. Chief Inspector Morse. I want to speak to Staff Nurse Widdowson. I understand you have your rules about this, and of course I wouldn’t in the normal way wish to break them . . .’
‘Is it urgent?’ Vox auctoritatis.
‘Well, let’s say it’s important.’
For the next few minutes Matron coolly and lucidly explained the regulations governing the delivery of personal mail to, and the acceptance of incoming telephone calls by, members of ‘my’ nursing staff. She spelled out the rules and the reasons for the rules, and Morse fidgeted at his table, the fingers on his left hand drumming the top of his desk in characteristic fashion.
‘You see, you have no idea of the volume of official letters and telephone calls that all my departments receive every day. And if we had the additional complication of all personal letters and calls, where would it all end? I have tried and I think I have succeeded . . .’