Colin Dexter - The Way Through The Woods

'They thought you'd be asleep, sir.'

'Well, I wasn't, was I?'

'And, well-'

'Well, what?'

'Doesn't matter, sir.'

'It bloody does matter! They thought I was in bed with a woman! That's what they thought."

'I don't know,' admitted the honest and honourable Lewis.

'Or pretty much the worse for booze!'

'Perhaps they thought both,' said Lewis simply.

'Well?'

'Young Philip Daley, sir. Just over an hour ago. Threw himself under a westbound train on the Central Line, it seems – train coming into Marble Arch from Bond Street – driver had no chance, just as he came out of the tunnel.'

Morse said nothing.

'Police knew a bit about the boy. He'd been picked up for shoplifting from a wine store in the Edgware Road and taken in; but the manager decided not to prosecute – he got away with a right dressing-down-'

That's not all you've got to tell me, is it?' said Morse quietly.

'No, sir. You've guessed, I suppose. That was Monday morning, half an hour after the store opened.'

'You're telling me he couldn't have shot his dad, is that it?'

'Not even if he'd been the one to hire that helicopter, sir.'

'Does Mrs Daley know?'

'Not yet.'

'Leave her, Lewis. Leave her. Let her sleep.'

An hour later Morse still lay awake, though now his mind was far more relaxed. It had been like puzzling over a crossword clue and finding a possible answer, but being dissatisfied with that answer, lacking as it did any satisfying inevitability; and then being given an erratum slip, telling him that the clue had been wrong in the first place; then being given the correct clue; and then…

Oh yes!

All along he'd been aware of his dissatisfaction with the motivation of Philip Daley for the death of his father. It could have happened that way, of course – far odder things in life occurred than that. But the sequence of sudden hatred and carefully plotted murder rang far from true; and Morse considered once more the original facts: the scene of George Daley's murder, beside the little coppice in Blenheim Park, still cordoned off, with nothing but the corpse removed, and even now some weary PC standing guard, or sitting guard… Odd really, that! Morse had asked for an almost unprecedentedly large number of men in this case; what's more he'd given them all a quite specific task. Yet no one had come up with anything.

And suddenly he knew why!

He jerked up in the bed, as though crudely galvanized, and considered the erratum slip, smiling now serenely to himself. It could be. It had to be! And the new answer to the clue was shining and wholly fitting; an answer that 'filled the eye', as the judges said of the champion dogs at Crufts.

It was 2.40 a.m., and Morse knew that he would have to do something if he were ever to get to sleep. So he made himself a rare cup of Ovaltine, and sat for a while at the kitchen table: impatient, as ever, yet content. What exactly made him remember Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, he was by no means sure. Physics had long been a closed science to him, ever since at school he had once tried, without success, to take some readings from an incomprehensible piece of equipment called the Wheatstone Bridge. But Heisenberg was a splendid name and Morse looked him up in his encyclopaedia: 'There is always an uncertainty in the values obtained if simultaneous observation is made of position …" Morse nodded to himself. Time too, as doubtless old Heisenberg had known.

Morse was soon asleep.

When he awoke, at 7 a.m., he thought he might perhaps have dreamed of a choir of beautiful women singing Elizabethan madrigals. But it was all a bit vague in his mind; about as vague as exactly what, as a principle, 'Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-76)' had had in mind.

'You appreciate therefore, Lewis' – the two of them stood on the scene of Daley's murder the following morning – 'the paramount importance of leaving everything exactly as it was here.'

'But we've had everybody trampling all over the place.'

Morse beamed. 'Ah, but we've got this, haven't we?' He patted the roof of the Blenheim Estate van affectionately.

'Unless one of the lads's been sitting in there having a smoke.'

'If he has, I'll sever his scrotum!'

'By the way, did you have a word with Dixon this morning?'

'Dixon? What the 'ell's Dixon got to do with anything?'

'Nothing,' murmured Lewis, as he turned away to have a final word with the two men standing by the recovery truck.

'Without getting inside at all, you say?' asked the elder of the two.

'That's what the chief inspector wants, yes.'

'We can't do it without touching the bloody thing though, can we, Charlie?'

Morse himself was standing beside the van, deep in thought, it seemed. Then he walked slowly round it, peering with apparently earnest attention at the ground. But the soil was rock-hard there, after weeks of cloudless weather, and after a little while he lost interest and walked back to the police car.

'That's enough here, Lewis. Let's get over to the lodge: it's time we had another word with Mr Williams.'

As before, Williams' evidence, in specific terms, was perhaps unsatisfactory; but, in general outline, it did serve to establish a working framework for the murder – the only one really the police had. Certainly the crucial point – that Daley had driven through

Combe Lodge Gate on the morning of his murder – could be pretty confidently re-affirmed. There had been a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing of two blue tractors, with their trailers, that morning, each of them making three trips from the saw-mill down to the area near the Grand Bridge to load up with recently felled timber. Williams had checked up (he said) with the drivers, and the ferrying had not begun until about 9.45 a.m., or a little later perhaps; and if there was one thing he could feel reasonably confident about it was the fact that Daley had come through the gate at the same time as one of the tractors – because although the gate was opened quite frequently that morning, it had not been specifically opened (Williams was almost sure) for the estate van. He did remember the van though – quite definite he was about that. He hadn't known Daley well; spoken to him a few times of course, and Daley had often come through the lodge, to and from the sawmill. Usually, between those working at Blenheim, there would be a hand raised in acknowledgement or greeting. And there was another thing: Daley almost always wore his hat, even in the summer; and, yes, Daley had been wearing his hat that Monday-morning.

Morse had pressed him on the point. 'You're sure about that?'

Williams breathed out noisily. He felt he was sure, yes. But it was a frightening business, this being questioned and giving evidence, and he was now far less sure than he had been about one or two of the things he'd said earlier. That shot he thought he'd heard, for example: he was less and less sure now that he'd heard it at all. So it was better, fairer too, to play it a bit more on the cautious side… that's what he thought. -

'Well, I think so. Trouble is really about the time. You see, it might have been a bit later, I think.'

But Morse appeared no longer interested in the time – or in the shot, for that matter.

'Mr Williams! I'm sorry to keep on about this but it's very important. I know that Mr Daley always wore his hat around the park, and I believe you when you say you saw his hat. But let's put it another way: are you sure it was Mr Daley who was wearing the hat on Monday morning?'