Colin Dexter - The Way Through The Woods

That night, back in the cottage on the edge of the woods, Karin had become terrifyingly distraught; he had slept with her, for she wished it so; she had sought throughout that night the reassurance of his embrace, and of his love; and gladly, gloriously, he had met her needs.

It had been her plan, her plea, to go to Wales – away, away somewhere, away anywhere; and the next morning, setting out from Wytham just after 6 o'clock, he had driven there, leaving her in the hands of a kindly woman who must fairly soon (surely, he'd felt) have been in possession of most of the facts herself. The only thing from her rucksack she had taken was £60 – leaving the rest inside her money-wallet: it seemed to them all a convincing detail. From Wales, she had phoned David frequently – sometimes several times each evening. She it was, Karin, who had phoned her mother, together with whom, and with her sisters, the next phase of the plan was conceived: the simple substitution of Katarina's passport, sent to Karin in a plain brown envelope from Barcelona.

Finally, there had been the return to Oxford – and to David Michaels, the man she was learning increasingly to love, and whose solicitude for her, in turn, seemed now to know no bounds. With her hair cut and dyed black, with a pair of black-framed spectacles, she had lived in the cottage in an idyllic state of happiness with David and Bobbie – until a gradual integration into life again: a drink at the village pub, badminton at the village hall, membership of the local operatic society. And marriage! Strange, really, that she could live so happily so near the murder. Yet she could. The nightmare had passed. It was as if a partition existed, a sort of mesh between her and the whole of her life before she'd met David – a mesh like the network of twigs and branches in the spot where the blood had spurted over her.

For the first six months or so David had daily expected to discover the body, especially so as the trees grew bare in that late autumn; or expected others to discover it, as they roamed the ridings and observed the birds, badgers, foxes, squirrels, deer…But no. And when Morse had asked him where he himself might think of hiding a body, it had never occurred to him that Karin could have run so far, so very far from Pasticks out along by the Singing Way.

Just one more thing. Uncommonly for Swedish people, the Eriksson family were all Roman Catholic (something Lewis had suspected when he had seen the two crucifixes but, sadly, something he hadn't mentioned to Morse) and Karin had discovered the little church in the Woodstock Road. She had passed her driving test earlier that year, and was in the habit of going to Mass on Sunday mornings when David didn't require the Land-rover; and sometimes, when he did, waiting for him to pick her up after the service. Twice a month or so. Then to confession, about which she hadn't told her husband quite everything – certainly holding back from him her slowly formulating fear that her lack of contrition at having killed Myton was almost a greater sin than the killing itself had been; her fear that she might kill again, kill wildly and regardlessly if anyone came to threaten her own and David's happiness. Yet at the same time, an oddly contradictory wish was gradually growing too: the wish that someone would discover the truth of what she'd done; even that someone would divulge that truth…

But Father Richards could never do that, he'd said, as he'd comforted her, and prayed with her, and forgiven her in the name of the Almighty Father.

on the evening of the day following these events, Wednesday 5 August, Morse, Lewis, and Dr Laura Hobson had enjoyed a little celebration in Morse's office; and at 8.30 p.m. a sober Lewis had driven the other two down to Morse's flat in North Oxford.

'You won't want another drink?' Morse had asked of Lewis, as if the question were introduced by num., the Latin interrogative particle expecting the answer 'no'.

'What elegant equipment!' enthused Laura Hobson as she admired Morse's new CD player.

Ten minutes later the pair of them were sitting together, drinking in a diet of Glenfiddich and the finale of Gotterddmmerung.

'Nothing quite like it in the whole history of music,' announced Morse magisterially, after Briinnhilde had ridden into the flames and the waves of the Rhine had finally rippled into silence.

'You think so?'

'Don't you?'

'I prefer Elizabethan madrigals, really.'

For a few moments Morse said nothing, saddened by her lack of sensitivity, it seemed.

'Oh.'

'I loved it. Don't be silly!' she said. 'But I've got to be on my way.'

'Can I walk you home?'

'I live too far away. I'm in a temporary flat – in Jericho.'

'I'll drive you home, then.'

'You've had far too much to drink.'

'You can stay here, if you like? I've got a spare pair of pyjamas.'

'I don't usually wear pyjamas.'

'No?'

'How many bedrooms do you have?'

‘Two.'

'And bedroom number two is free?"

'Just like bedroom number one.'

'No secret passage between them?'

'I could get the builders in.'

She smiled happily, and rose to her feet. 'If there ever is going to be anything between us, Chief Inspector, it'll have to be when we're borth a bit more sorber. Better that way. I think you'd prefer it that way too, if you're honest.' She laid a hand on his shoulder. 'C'mon. Ring for a taxi.'

Ten minutes later she kissed him lightly on the lips, her own lips dry and soft and slightly opened.

Then she was gone.

An hour later Morse lay awake on his back. It was still hot in the bedroom and he had only a light cotton sheet over him. Many varied thoughts were crowding in upon his mind, his eyes ever darting around in the darkness. First it had been the lovely woman who had been there with him that evening; then the case of the Swedish Maiden, with only those last few lines of the complex equation to be completed now; then his failure thus far to locate the bullet that had killed George Daley – this last problem gradually assuming a dominance in his brain…

The bullet had been fired from about sixty or so yards – that seemed a firm assumption. So… So why hadn't it been found? And why could no one in Blenheim be far more definite about hearing it being fired: shooting in Blenheim was not the common occurrence it was in other areas… in Wytham, for example. The rifle itself concerned him to a lesser extent: after all, it was far easier to get rid of a rifle than to get rid of a bullet that could have landed up anywhere… Morse got out of bed and went to find the Blenheim Park brochure -just as Johnson had done so recently before him. The place where Daley's body had been found could be only – what? – four hundred yards or so from that narrow north-westerly tip of the lake, shaped like the head of one of those cormorants he'd seen in Lyme Regis not all that long ago… Yes! He would double the men on the search – on both searches, rather. There could be little doubt that Philip Daley must have dumped his father's rifle there somewhere – in the lake itself, like as not. And once they'd found either of them, either the rifle or the bullet-

The phone rang, and Morse grabbed at it.

'That was quick, sir.'

'What do you want?'

'The Met, sir. They rang HQ, and Sergeant Dixon thought he ought to let me know-'

'Let you know, Lewis? Who the hell's in charge of this bloody case? Just wait till I see Dixon!'