Last Bus to Woodstock

by Colin Dexter

  Morse heard her out. As she had been talking a wildly improbable thought had taken root in his mind. He almost wanted to hear her repeat the tedious catalogue of constraints. ‘I’m most grateful to you, Matron. I do want to apologize . . .’

  ‘Oh, not at all. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. Now, please let me help in any way I can.’ She would do anything for him now, he knew that. But the situation had changed. There was just the wildest, slimmest chance now, where before there had been none at all. He rang off as soon as he could, the Matron almost begging for the chance of doing him some favour. But he wanted none: his course was now clear.

  Sue was having lunch while Morse was finishing his lengthy call to her immediate superior. She was thinking of him, too. Would she had known him earlier! She knew with a passionate certainty that he could have changed her life. Was it too late even now? Dr Eyres sat next to her, taking every opportunity he decently could of effecting the closest physical contact with the lovely staff nurse; but Sue loathed his proximity and his insinuations and, not worrying about a sweet, she left the table as quickly as she could. Oh Morse! Why didn’t I meet you before? She walked back to the outpatients’ room at the casualty clinic and sat down on one of the hard benches. Absently she picked up a long-outdated copy of Punch and flicked mechanically through the faded pages . . . What was she to do? He hadn’t been anywhere near since that wretched night when Jennifer had come home. Jennifer! And she had been fool enough to confide in Jennifer. David? She would have to write to David. He would be so upset; but to live with someone, to sleep with someone, forty, even fifty years – someone you didn’t really and truly love . . .

  Then she saw him. He stood there, an anxious, vulnerable look in his grey eyes. The tears started in her eyes and she felt an incredible joy. He came and sat beside her. He didn’t even try to hold her hand – there was no need of that. They talked, she didn’t know what about. It didn’t matter.

  ‘I shall have to go,’ she said. ‘Try to see me soon, won’t you?’ It was after half-past one.

  Morse felt desperately sick at heart. He looked at Sue long and hard, and he knew that he loved her so dearly.

  ‘Sue?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you got a photograph of yourself?’

  Sue rummaged in her handbag and found something. ‘Not all that good, is it, really?’

  Morse looked at the photograph. She was right. It didn’t really do her justice, but it was his Sue all right. He put it carefully into his wallet, and got up to go. Patients were already waiting: patients with bulky plasters over legs and arms; patients with bandages round their heads and wrists; a road casualty with blood around the mouth, the face an ashen white. It was time to go. He touched her hand lightly and their fingers met in a tender, sweet farewell. Sue watched him go, limping slightly, through the flappy, celluloid doors.

  It was almost a quarter to two as Morse walked down from the Radcliffe Infirmary to the broad, tree-lined avenue of St Giles’. He thought of postponing his next task; but it had to be done some time, and he was on the spot now anyway.

  Keeping to the right-hand side of St Giles’ as he made his way in the general direction of the Martyrs’ Memorial, Morse stopped at the first snack-bar he came to, the Wimpy Grill, and walked inside. On his own admission the small, swarthy Italian, turning beefburgers on a hotplate, ‘no speake, signor, the English so good,’ and promptly summoned his slatternly young waitress into the consultation. Morse left amid a general shaking of heads and a flurry of gesticulation; it wasn’t going to be easy. A few yards further down he stopped and entered the ‘Bird and Baby’ where he ordered a pint of bitter and engaged in earnest, quiet conversation for several minutes with the barman, who also as it happened was the landlord and who always stood lunch-time duty behind his bar. Sorry, no. Oh yes, he’d have noticed; but no. Sorry. It was going to be a long, dispiriting business, but one which only Morse himself could do.

  He worked his way methodically along the dozen likely places in the Cornmarket below the ABC Cinema, crossed the road at Carfax, and started up the other side. It was at a little (‘snacks served’) cake shop nestling alongside the giant pile of Marks and Spencer that he found the person he was searching for. She was a grey-haired, plumpish woman, with a kindly face and a friendly manner. Morse spoke to her for several minutes, and this time too there was much nodding of the head and pointing. But pointing not vaguely outside, up alleys or down side-streets; this time the pointing was towards a little room, beyond the shop, wherein the establishment’s snacks were served. To be precise, the pointing was towards one particular small table standing in the far corner of the room, with one chair on each side of it, both now empty, and a cruet, a dirty ashtray and a bottle of tomato sauce upon its red-and-white striped tablecloth.

  It was 3.45 p.m. Morse went over to the table and sat down. He knew that the case was nearly over now, but he could feel no elation. His feet ached, especially the right one, and he was badly in need of something to cheer him up. Again he took out the picture of Sue from his wallet and looked at the face of the girl he loved so hopelessly. The grey-haired waitress came up to him.

  ‘Can I get you anything, sir? I’m sorry I didn’t realize you might . . .’

  ‘I’ll have a cup of tea, luv,’ said Morse. It was better than nothing.

  He was not back in his office until 4.45 p.m. A note from Lewis lay on his desk. His sergeant hoped it would be all right going off a bit early. Please to ring him if he was needed. His wife had a touch of ’flu and the kids were a bit of a handful.

  Morse screwed up the note and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Underneath the note lay the letter that Lewis had brought from Jennifer Coleby. Making certain that it was carefully sealed, Morse placed it unopened into the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and turned the key in the lock.

  He looked up a number in the directory and heard the drumming ‘purr purr, purr purr’. He looked at his watch: almost 5.00 p.m. It wouldn’t matter of course if he had gone, but he wanted to get things over straight away. ‘Purr purr, purr purr.’ He was on the point of giving up when the call was answered.

  ‘Hello?’ It was Palmer.

  ‘Ah. Glad to catch you, sir. Morse here.’

  ‘Oh.’ The little manager sounded none too overjoyed. ‘You’re lucky. I was just locking up, but I thought I’d better get back and answer it. You never know in this job. Could be important.’

  ‘It is important.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Palmer lived in the fashionable Observatory Street at the bottom of the Woodstock Road. Yes. He could meet Morse – of course, he could – if it was important. They arranged a meeting at the Bull and Stirrup in nearby Walton Street at 8.30 p.m. that evening.

  It was a mean-looking, ill-lighted, spit-and-sawdust type of pub; a dispiriting sort of place, with gee-gees, darts and football-pools the overriding claims upon the shabby clientele. Morse wanted to get things over and get out as quickly as he could. It was a struggle for a start, and Palmer was cagey and reluctant; but Morse knew too much for him. Grudgingly, but with apparent honesty, Palmer told his pitiable little tale.

  ‘I suppose you think I should have told you this before?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not married myself.’ Morse sounded utterly indifferent. It was 9.00 p.m. and he took his leave.

  He drove up the Woodstock Road at rather more than 30 mph; but spotting a police car up ahead he slackened off to the statutory speed limit. He swung round the Woodstock roundabout, the starting point of all this sorry mess, and headed for Woodstock. At the village of Yarnton he turned off and parked the Lancia outside the home of Mrs Mabel Jarman, where he stayed for no more than a couple of minutes.

  On his way home he called at police HQ. The corridors were darkened, but he didn’t bother to turn on the lights. In his office he unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer and took out the envelope. His hand shook slightly as he reached for his paper-knife and neatly slit open the top. He felt
like a cricketer who has made a duck, checking the score-book just in case an odd run made by the other batsman had been fortuitously misattributed to his own name. But Morse had no faith in miracles, and he knew what the note had to say before he opened it. He saw the note; he did not read it. He saw it synoptically, not as the sum of its individual words and letters. Miracles do not happen.

  He turned off the light, locked his office door, and walked back along the darkened corridor. The last piece had clicked into place. The jigsaw was complete.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  * * *

  Saturday, 23 October

  SINCE BREAKFAST SUE had been trying to write to David. Once or twice she had written half a page before screwing up the paper and starting a fresh sheet; but mostly the elusive phraseology had failed her after nothing more than a miserably brief sentence. She tried again.

  My dear David,

  You’ve been so kind and so loving to me that I know this letter will come as a terrible shock to you. But I feel I must tell you – it’s not fair to keep anything from you. The truth is that I’ve fallen in love with someone else and I . . .

  What else could she say? She couldn’t just leave it at that . . . She screwed up the latest draft and added it to the growing collection of tight paper balls upon the table.

  A sombre-looking Morse sat in his black leather chair that same morning. Another restless, fitful night. He must have some holiday.

  ‘You look tired, sir,’ said Lewis.

  Morse nodded. ‘Yes, but we’ve come to the end of the road, now.’

  ‘We have, sir?’

  Morse seemed to buoy himself up. He took a deep breath: ‘I’ve taken one or two wrong turnings, as you know, Lewis; but by some fluke I was always heading in the right direction – even on the night of the murder. Do you remember when we stood in that yard? I remember staring up at the stars and thinking how many secrets they must know, looking down on everything. I remember trying even then to see the pattern, not just the bits that form the pattern. There was something very odd, you know Lewis, about that night. It looked like a sex murder right enough. But things are not always what they seem, are they?’

  He seemed to be speaking in a dazed, sing-song sort of way, almost as if he were on drugs. ‘Now you can make things look a bit odd, but I’ve not met any of these clever killers yet. Or things just happen like that, eh? It was odd if Sylvia had been raped where she was found, wasn’t it? I know it was very dark in the yard that night, but cars with full headlights were coming in and out all the time. It’s surely stretching the imagination a bit to think that anyone would be crazy enough to rape a girl in the full blaze of motorists’ headlights.’ He seemed to Lewis to be relaxing a little and his eyes had lost their dull stare. ‘Well?’ That was more like the chief.

  ‘I suppose you’re right, sir.’

  ‘But it looked odd. A young, leggy blonde murdered and raped or raped and murdered. Whichever way round it was, it all pointed in the same way. We’ve got a sex-killer to find. But I wasn’t sure. Raping isn’t easy they tell me if the young lady isn’t too willing, and, as I say, I discounted the likelihood of Sylvia being raped in the yard. She could have screamed and yelled – unless of course she was dead already. But I’m a bit squeamish about that sort of thing, and I thought the chances of us having to deal with a Christie-like necrophiliac were a bit remote. Where does that leave us, then?’ Lewis hoped it was a rhetorical question, and so it was. ‘Well, let us concentrate our attention separately upon each of the two components – rape and murder. Let us assume two distinct actions – not one. Let us assume that she has intercourse with a man – after all, there was no doubt about the fact of intercourse. Let us assume further that this took place entirely with her consent. Now there was one shred of evidence to support this. Sylvia wasn’t a member of women’s lib, but she wasn’t wearing a bra, and it seemed to me, if not unusual, well – a little suggestive. We discovered that Sylvia had several white blouses, but no white bras. Why not? No one as conscious of her figure and her appearance as Sylvia Kaye is going to wear a black bra under a thin, white blouse, is she? I could draw only one conclusion – that Sylvia not infrequently went out without a bra; and if she did wear a bra, it would be a black one, because all the girls believe that black underwear is terribly sexy. Now all this suggested that perhaps she was a young lady of somewhat easy virtue, and I think it’s pretty clear she was.’

  ‘She wasn’t wearing pants either, sir.’

  ‘No. But the pathologist’s report suggests that she had been – there were the marks of elastic round her waist. Yes, I’m pretty sure that she had been wearing pants and that they got stuck in someone’s pocket and later got thrown away or burned. Anyway, it’s not important. To get back to the separate components of the crime. First, a man had intercourse with Sylvia – pretty certainly without too much opposition. Second, someone murdered her. It could have been the same man, but it’s not easy to see the motive. The evidence we got at a very early stage seemed to suggest that this was a completely casual acquaintanceship, a chance pick-up on the road to Woodstock. All right. But since it was established that Bernard Crowther was the man who had stopped at the Woodstock roundabout, certain aspects of the case seemed to get more puzzling rather than less. I could well imagine that Crowther was the sort of man who might now and then be unfaithful to his wife; from what we now know, his relationship with his wife seems to have drifted over the last few years from idyllic bliss to idiotic bickering. But if we were looking for a sex-crazed maniac, I felt fairly sure Crowther wasn’t the man we were looking for. He seemed to me an essentially civilized man. You remember when you looked at those photographs of Sylvia, Lewis? You remember you said you’d like to get the bastard who did it? But you had a composite picture of the crime in your mind, I think: you were putting together the rape and the murder and something else – the obvious interference with Sylvia’s scanty clothing. Now I couldn’t fit Crowther into that picture; and if Mrs Crowther’s evidence was right in any respect, it was surely right at the point where she described what she saw in the car. You made that point yourself, Lewis. What have we got then? First, he makes love to the girl in the back of the car. Second, he may have had a quarrel with her about something. Let’s say she’s a mercenary young tart and she agreed to make love with him on the sort of terms a common prostitute would ask. Let’s say he couldn’t or wouldn’t pay her. Let’s say they quarrel and he kills her. It’s a possibility. But I just couldn’t believe that if this had been the sequence of events that we should have found Sylvia in the condition we did – with her blouse torn and ripped away from her. Or at least not if we were right in thinking of Crowther as the guilty party.’

  Lewis interrupted him quietly. ‘You said that you knew who did that.’

  ‘I think you do, too,’ replied Morse. ‘As the case progressed there seemed to be only one person who had a mind sufficiently warped and perverted to interfere with the body of a murdered girl. A man who had been waiting to see her anyway; a man we know who perpetually tantalized and tortured himself by thoughts of sex; a man who feasted on a weekly diet of blue films and pornography. You know all about him, Lewis. And I went to see him a week ago. His bedroom is cluttered with the whole paraphernalia of dirty postcards, Danish magazines, hard pornography and all the rest. He’s sick, Lewis, and he knows he’s sick, and his mother knows he’s sick. But he’s not a vicious type of chap. In fact he’s not unlikeable in a nasty sort of way. He told me that he’d often had a dream about undressing the body of a dead girl.’

  ‘My God!’ said Lewis.

  ‘You shouldn’t feel too surprised about it, you know,’ said Morse. ‘I’m told that Freud mentions that sort of dream as being quite a common form of sexual fantasy among frustrated voyeurs.’ Lewis remembered the film. He’d found it a bit erotic himself, hadn’t he? But he hadn’t wanted to admit it – even to himself.

  ‘He’d met Sylvia several times before. The
y usually met in the cocktail lounge of the Black Prince, had some booze and then went back to his house – to his bedroom. He paid for it. He told me so.’

  ‘He had quite a lot of expense one way or another, sir.’

  ‘He did indeed. Anyway, on the night when Sylvia was murdered he’d been waiting since about a quarter to eight. He drank more and more and felt more and more desperate as the time ticked by and Sylvia didn’t appear. He went out several times to look for her. But he saw nothing. When he did find her he was sick in mind and body: sick from pent-up sexual frustration and sick from too much drink. He found her quite by chance – so he says – and I believe him.’

  ‘And then . . . you mean he . . . he fiddled about with her?’

  Morse nodded. ‘Yes. He did.’

  ‘He needs treatment, sir.’

  ‘He’s promised me to see a psychiatrist – but I’m not very optimistic about that. I only ever knew one psychiatrist. Funny chap. If ever a man was in need of psychiatric treatment it was him.’ Morse smiled ruefully, and Lewis felt his chief was becoming more like his normal self.

  ‘So that’s cleared that bit up, sir.’

  ‘Yes. But it didn’t help all that much, did it? I was as sure as I could be that Sylvia Kaye was not murdered by Mr John Sanders. She was murdered, so the pathology reports says, between 7 and 8 p.m. or thereabouts. Now we know all that stuff about the murderer going back to the scene of the crime, but I just couldn’t believe that Sanders had stood for about two and a half to three hours drinking whisky no more than fifty-odd yards away from where his victim lay murdered. He’d have hopped it, that’s for sure. What seemed so odd to me was why she wasn’t found earlier. But you cleared that up.’