by Colin Dexter
‘Thank you!’ she said.
At 8 a.m. John Smith told his wife that he wanted her to go up to the January sales in Oxford Street and buy herself a new winter coat. He gave her five £20 notes, and would countenance no refusal. He took her down to the station in the car, and waited on the platform with her until the 8.40 ‘125’ pulled in to carry her off to the West End.
As her train drew into Paddington’s platform 5 at 9.10 a.m., another ‘125’ was just pulling out of platform 2 and soon gliding along the rails at a high, smooth speed towards Reading. In a second-class compartment (as we have already seen), rather towards the rear of this train, and with only two wholly uncommunicative fellow-passengers for company, sat Morse, reading the Sun. At home he invariably took The Times, though not because he much enjoyed it, or even read it (apart from the letters page and the crossword); much more because the lady local councillor who ran the newsagent’s shop down in Summertown was fully aware of Morse’s status, and had (to Morse’s knowledge) more than once referred to him as ‘a really civilized gentleman’; and he had no wish prematurely to destroy such a flattering illusion.
If the serious-minded undergraduette from Lady Margaret Hall had bothered to lift her eyes from her reading, she would have seen a man of medium height who had filled out into a somewhat barrel-shaped figure, with his waist and stomach measurements little altered from his earlier days and yet with his shirt now stretching tight around his chest. His unshaven jowls (the young student might have thought) suggested an age of nearer sixty than fifty (in fact, the man was fifty-four), and his face seemed cast in a slightly melancholy mould, not at all brightened that morning by the insistence of the young ticket-collector that he was obliged to pay a surcharge on the day-return ticket he had paid for the previous evening.
The taxi carrying its fare from Reading railway station to the Smiths’ newly discovered address was told to pull up fifty yards into Eddleston Road, where Morse told the driver to wait as he walked across the road and rang the bell on the door of number 45.
When John Smith turned into the street, he immediately saw the taxi opposite his house, and stopped dead in his tracks at the corner shop where he appeared to take an inordinate interest in the hundred-and-one rectangular white notices which announced a multitude of wonderful bargains, from a pair of training shoes (hardly ever worn) to a collection of Elvis Presley records (hardly ever played). The taxi’s exhaust was still running, sending a horizontal stream of vapour across the lean, cold air; and reflected in the corner-shop window Smith could see a man in an expensive-looking dark grey overcoat seemingly reluctant to believe that neither of the occupants of the house could be at home. Finally, slowly, the importunate caller walked away from the house, stood back to take a last look at the property, and then got back into the taxi, which was off immediately in a spurt of dirty slush.
John Smith entered the shop, purchased a packet of twenty Silk Cut, and stood for three or four minutes at the magazine rack leafing through Wireless Weekly, Amateur Photographer, and the Angling Times. But apparently he had decided that none of these periodicals was exactly indispensable, and he walked out empty-handed into the street. He had always prided himself on being able to sniff out danger a mile away. But he sensed there was none now; and he strolled down the street with exaggerated unconcern, and let himself into number 45.
He had a fastidiously tidy mind, and even now was tempted to wash up the few breakfast things that stood in the kitchen sink, particularly the two knives that looked almost obscenely sticky from the polyunsaturated Flora and Cooper’s Thick Cut Oxford Marmalade. But the walls were closing in, he knew it. The BMW would have been the riskiest thing; and half an hour ago he had sold the three-year-old beauty at Reading Motors for a ridiculously low-pitched £6,000 in cash. Then he had gone along to the town-centre branch of Lloyds Bank, where he had withdrawn (again in cash) the £1,200 which stood in the joint account of John and Helen Smith.
Helen had spent a brief but successful time in Selfridges (she had bought herself a new white mackintosh) and was back in the house just after noon, when she immediately saw the note beside the telephone.
Helen, my love!
They are on to us, and there’s little option for me but to get away. I never told you quite everything about myself but please believe that if they catch up with me now I shall be sent to prison for a few years – I can’t face that. I thought they might perhaps confiscate the little savings we managed to put together, and so I cashed the lot and you’ll find thirty £20 notes in your favourite little hiding place – that’s a precaution just in case the police get here before you find this! If I ever loved anyone in the world, I loved you. Remember that! I’m sorry it’s got to be like this.
Ever yours,
John
She read the brief letter without any sense of shock – almost with a sense of resigned relief. It couldn’t have gone on for ever, that strange life she’d led with the oddly maverick confidence-man who had married her, and who had almost persuaded her at times that he loved her. Yes, that was the only really deep regret: if he had stayed – stayed with her and faced the music whatever tune they played – then life would indeed have been an undoubted triumph for the dark young lady from Yugoslavia.
She was upstairs in the front bedroom, changing her clothes, when she heard the front-door bell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Friday, January 3rd: mostly a.m.
As when heaved anew
Old ocean rolls a lengthened wave to shore
Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar
Burst gradual, with a wayward indolence.
(JOHN KEATS)
MORSE HAD FELT tempted to ring Lewis to tell him not to bother with their original plan of meeting in Eddleston Road at 11 a.m. But he didn’t so do. The prospect of more trains and more taxis was an intolerable one; and in any case he was now almost completely out of ready cash. At 10.50 he was again knocking on the door of the Smiths’ house; once again without getting any reply. The road was part of a reasonably elegant residential quarter. But heading off from it, on the southern side, were smaller, meaner streets of Victorian two-storey red-brick terraced houses; and as Morse strolled through this area he began to feel pleasantly satisfied with life, a state of mind that may not have been unconnected with the fact that he was in unfamiliar circumstances, with nothing immediately or profitably to be performed, with a small public house on the next corner facing him and with his wrist-watch showing only a minute or so short of opening time.
The Peep of Dawn (as engagingly named a pub as Morse could remember) boasted only one bar, with wooden wall-seats, and after finding out from the landlord which bitter the locals drank he sat with his pint in the window alcove and supped contentedly. He wasn’t quite sure whether his own oft-repeated insistence that he could always think more lucidly after an extra ration of alcohol was wholly true. He certainly believed it to be true, though; and quite certainly many a breakthrough in previous investigations had been made under such attendant circumstances. It was only in recent months that he had found himself querying his earlier assumption about such a post hoc, ergo propter hoc proposition; and it had occasionally occurred to him that fallacious logic was not infrequently the offspring of wishful thinking. Yet for Morse (and he quite simply accepted the fact) the world did invariably seem a much warmer, more manageable place after a few pints of beer; and quite certainly he knew that (for himself, at any rate) it was on such occasions that the imaginative processes usually started. It may have been something to do with the very liquidity of alcohol, for he had often seen these processes in terms of just such a metaphor. It was as if he were lulled and sitting idly on the sea-front, and watching, almost entranced, as some great Master of the Tides drew in the foam-fringed curtains of the waters towards his feet and then pulled them back in slow retreat to the creative sea.
But whatever the truth of the matter, he knew he would have to do some serious thinking very soon
, and for the moment the problem that was uppermost in his mind was how a letter which had been written from a non-existent address had also been received at the very same non-existent address. It was easy of course to write anything from anywhere in the world – say from ‘Buckingham Palace, Kidlington’; but how on earth, in turn, was it possible for a letter to be delivered to such improbably registered premises? Yet that is what had happened, or so it seemed. The man who had been murdered was, on the face of things, the husband of a woman who had booked a room from an address which did not exist; had booked the room by letter; and had received confirmation of the booking, also by letter – with the pair of them duly arriving on December 31st, taking part in the evening’s festivities (incidentally, with outstanding success), and finally, after joining their fellow guests in wishing themselves, one and all, a happily prosperous new year, walking back to their room in the annexe. And then . . .
‘You’d not forgotten me, had you?’ said a voice above him.
‘Lewis! You’re a bit late aren’t you?’
‘We agreed to meet at the house, if you remember, sir!’
‘I went there. There’s no one at home.’
‘I know that. Where do you think I’ve been?’
‘What’s the time now?’
‘Twenty past eleven.’
‘Oh dear! I am sorry! Get yourself a drink, Lewis – and a refill for me, please. I’m a bit short of cash, I’m afraid.’
‘Bitter, was it?’
Morse nodded. ‘How did you find me?’
‘I’m a detective. Had you forgotten that, too?’
But it would have taken more than Morse’s meanness with money, and more than Morse’s cavalier notions of punctuality, to have dashed Lewis’s good spirits that morning. He told Morse all about his encounter with the Welsh optician; and Morse, in turn, told Lewis (almost) all about his encounter with the fair Philippa at Paddington. At a quarter to twelve Lewis made another fruitless visit to Eddleston Road. But half an hour later, this time with Morse, it was immediately clear that someone had returned to number 45. It was the only house in the row whose occupants had dispensed with the need for keeping its front garden in any neat trim by the simple (albeit fairly drastic) expedient of covering the whole area with small beige pebbles, which crunched noisily as the two men walked up the sinking shingle to the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Friday, January 3rd: p.m.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
(JAMES THURBER)
THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE of the last five years (admitted Helen Smith) the two of them had successfully contrived to defraud dozens of honourable institutions of their legitimate income. But neither her husband John nor herself had the means whereby to make any reparation even fractionally commensurate with such deceit. She, Helen, fully understood why society at large should expect some expiation for her sins; but (she stressed the point) if such compensation were to be index-linked to its £ s. d. equivalents, there was no prospect whatsoever of any settlement of the overdue account. She showed Lewis the note she had found on her return from London; and would be happy to show him, too, the little hidey-hole beneath the second floorboard from the left in the spare bedroom where she had duly found the £600 referred to – that is if Lewis wanted to see it. (Lewis didn’t.) Unshakably, however, she refused to hazard any information about where her husband might have made for; and indeed her refusal was genuinely founded in total ignorance, both of his present whereabouts and of his future plans.
The pattern had seldom varied: ringing round half a dozen hotels at holiday periods; taking advantage of late cancellations (an almost inevitable occurrence); there and then accepting, by phone, any vacancy which so lately had arisen; promising a.s.a.p. a confirmatory letter (with both parties appreciating the unreliability of holiday-time postal services); staying only two nights where ‘The Businessman’s Break’ was scheduled for three; or staying just the one night where it was scheduled for two. And that was about it. Easy enough. There were of course always a few little secrets about such professional deception: for example, it was advisable always to carry as little baggage as was consistent with reasonably civilized standards of hygiene; again, it was advisable never to park a car on the hotel premises, or to fill in the section on the registration form asking for car-licence numbers. Yet there was one principle above all that had to be understood, namely, that the more demands you made upon the establishment, the more enhanced would be your status vis-à-vis the management and staff of all hotels. Thus it was that the Smiths had learned always to select their meals from the higher echelons of the à la carte specialities of the chef, and wines and liqueurs from any over-valued vintage; to demand room-service facilities at the most improbable periods of day or night; and, finally, never to exchange too many friendly words with anyone in sight – from the manager down, through receptionist to waitress, porter or cleaner. Such (Helen testified) were the basic principles she and her husband had observed in their remarkably successful bid to extract courtesy and respect from some of the finest hotels across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The only thing then left to be staged was their disappearance, which was best effected during that period when no one normally booked out of hotels – mid-afternoon. And that had usually been the time when the Smiths had decided to take leave of their erstwhile benefactors – sans warning, sans farewell, sans payment, sans everything.
When Helen Smith came to court (inevitably so, as Lewis saw things) it seemed wholly probable that this darkly attractive, innocent-looking defendant would plead guilty to the charges brought against her, and would pretty certainly ask, too, for one-hundred-and-one other offences to be taken into consideration. But she hardly looked or sounded like a criminal, and her account of the time she had spent at the Haworth Hotel appeared honest and clear. Four (yes!) bottles of champagne had been ordered – they both liked the lovely stuff! – two on New Year’s Eve and two on New Year’s Day, with the last of the four still in the larder if Lewis wanted to see it. (Lewis did.) Yes, she remembered a few things about the Ballards, and about the Palmers; but her recollections of specific times and specific details were even hazier than Philippa Palmer’s had been the previous evening. Like Philippa, though, she thought that the evening had been well organized – and great fun; and that the food and drink had been very good indeed. The Smiths, both of them, enjoyed fancy-dress parties; and that New Year’s Eve they had appeared – an oddly uncomplementary pair! – as a seductive Cleopatra and as a swordless Samurai. Would Lewis like to see the costumes? (Lewis would.) Whether Ballard had eaten much or drunk much that evening, she couldn’t remember with any certainty. But she did remember, most clearly, Ballard walking back with her through the snow (Oh yes! it had been snowing heavily then) to the hotel annexe, and ruining the right shoulder-lapel of her mackintosh, where his right hand had left a dirty dark-brown stain – which of course Lewis could see if he so desired. (As Lewis did.)
During the last part of this interview Morse had seemed only minimally interested in Lewis’s interrogation, and had been leafing through an outsize volume entitled The Landscape of Thomas Hardy. But now, suddenly, he asked a question.
‘Would you recognize Mrs Ballard if you saw her again?’
‘I – I don’t really know. She was in fancy dress and—’
‘In a yashmak, wasn’t she?’
Helen nodded, somewhat abashed by the brusqueness of his question.
‘Didn’t she eat anything?’
‘Of course, yes.’
‘But you can’t eat anything in a yashmak!’
‘No.’
‘You must have seen her face, then?’
Helen knew that he was right; and suddenly, out of the blue, she did remember something. ‘Yes,’ she began slowly. ‘Yes, I did see her face. Her top lip was a bit red, and there were red sort of pin-pricks – you know, sort of little red spots . . .’
But even as Helen spoke these words,
her own upper lip was trembling uncontrollably, and it was clear that the hour of questioning had left her spirits very low indeed. The tears were suddenly springing copiously and she turned her head sharply away from the two policemen in total discomfiture.
In the car, Lewis ventured to ask whether it might not have been wiser to take Helen Smith back to Oxford there and then for further questioning. But Morse appeared unenthusiastic about any such immediate move, asserting that, compared with the likes of Marcinkus & Co. in the Vatican Bank, John and Helen Smith were sainted folk in white array.
It was just after they had turned on to the A34 that Morse mentioned the strange affair of the yashmak’d lady’s upper lip.
‘How did you guess, Lewis?’ he asked.
‘It’s being married, sir – so I don’t suppose you ought to blame yourself too much for missing it. You see, most women like to look their best when they go away, let’s say for a holiday or a trip abroad or something similar; and the missus has a bit of trouble like that – you know, a few unsightly hairs growing just under the chin or a little fringe of hairs on the top lip. A lot of women have the same trouble especially if they’ve got darkish sort of hair—’
‘But your missus has got fair hair!’
‘All right; but it happens to everybody a bit as they get older. You get rather self-conscious and embarrassed about it if you’re a woman, so you often go to one of the hair clinics like the Tao or something and they give you electrolysis and they put a needle sort of thing into the roots of the hairs and – well, sort of get rid of them. Costs a bit though, sir!’