Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing

It had started some years back in the church hall at Kidlington. A dozen of them, no more, seated in rickety chairs with a clickety subfusc vicar calling the numbers with a dignified Anglican clarity. And then she had graduated to the Ritz in Oxford, where the acolytes sit comfortably in the curving tiers of the cinema seats and listen to the harsh metallic tones relayed by microphones across the giant auditorium. There is no show here of human compassion, little even of human intercourse. Only 'eyes down' in a mean-minded race to the first row, the first column, the first diagonal completed. Many of the players can cope with several cards simultaneously, a cold, pitiless purpose in their play, their mental antennae attuned only to the vagaries of the numerical combinations.

The game itself demands only an elementary level of numeracy, and not only does not require but cannot possibly tolerate the slightest degree of initiative or originality. Almost all the players almost win; the line is almost complete, and the card is almost full. Ye gods! Look down and smile once more! Come on, my little number, come! I'm there, if only, if only, if only. . And there the women sit and hope and pray and bemoan the narrow miss and curse their desperate luck, and talk and think 'if only'. .

Tonight Mrs. Taylor caught the № 2 bus outside the Ritz and reached Kidlington at 9.35 p.m.; she decided she would call in at the pub.

It was 9.35 p.m., too, when Acum rang, a little earlier than expected. He had been fortunate with the traffic (he said); on to the A5 at Towcester and a good clear run for a further five uncomplicated hours. He had left Oxford at 3.15, just before the conference had officially broken up. Jolly good conference, yes. The Monday night? Just a minute; let's think. In hall for dinner, and then there had been a fairly informal question-and-answer session afterwards. Very interesting. Bed about 10.30; a bit tired. No, as far as he remembered — no, he did remember; he hadn't gone out at all. Baines dead? What? Could Morse repeat that? Oh dear; very sorry to hear it. Yes, of course he'd known Baines — known him well. When did he die? Oh, Monday. Monday evening? Oh, yesterday evening, the one they'd just been speaking about. Oh, he saw now. Well, he'd told Morse what he could — sorry it was so little. Not been much help at all, had he?

Morse rang off. He decided that trying to interview by telephone was about as satisfactory as trying to sprint in divers' boots. There was no option; he would have to go up to Caernarfon himself, if. . if what? Was it really likely that Acum had anything to do with Baines's death? If he had, he'd picked a pretty strange way of drawing almost inevitable attention to himself. And yet. . And yet Acum's name had been floating unobtrusively along the mainstream of the case from the very beginning, and yesterday he had seen Acum's telephone number in the index file on Baines's desk. Mm. He would have to go and see him. He ought to have seen him before now, for whatever else he was or wasn't Acum had been a central figure during that school summer when she'd disappeared. But. . but you don't just come down to Oxford for a meeting and decide that while you're there you'll murder one of your ex-colleagues. Or do you? Who would suspect? After all, it was quite by accident that he himself had learned of Acum's visit to Oxford. Had Acum presumed. .? Augrrh! It was suddenly cold in the office and Morse felt tired. Forget it! He looked at his watch. 10 p.m. Just time for a couple of pints if he hurried.

He walked over to the pub and pushed his way into the overcrowded public bar. The cigarette smoke hung in blue wreaths, head-high like undispersing morning mist, and the chatter along the bar and at the tables was raucous and interminable, the subdeties of conversational silence quite unknown. Cribbage, dominoes and darts and every available surface cluttered with glasses: glasses with handles and glasses without, glasses empty, glasses being emptied and glasses about to be emptied, and then refilled with the glorious, amber fluid. Morse found a momentary gap at the bar and pushed his way diffidently forward. As he waited his turn, he heard the fruit machine (to the right of the bar) clunking out an occasional desultory dividend, and he leaned across the bar to look more carefully. A woman was playing the machine, her back towards him. But he knew her well enough.

The landlord interrupted a new and improbable line of thought. 'Yes, mate?'

Morse ordered a pint of best bitter, edged his way a little further along the bar, and found himself standing only a few feet behind the woman playing the machine. She pushed her glass over the bar.

'Stick another double in there, Bert.'

She opened an inordinately large leather handbag and Morse saw the heavy roll of notes inside. Fifty pounds? More? Had she had a lucky night at Bingo?

She had not seen Morse — he was sure of that — and he observed her as closely as he could. She was drinking whisky and swopping mildly ribald comments with several of the pub's habitues. And then she laughed — a coarse, common cackle of a laugh, and curiously and quite unexpectedly Morse knew that he found her attractive, dammit! He looked at her again. Her figure was still good, and her clothes hung well upon her. Yes, all right, she was no longer a beauty, he knew that. He noticed the fingernails bitten down and broken; noticed the index finger of her right hand stained dark-brown with nicotine. But what the hell did it matter! Morse drained his glass and bought another pint. The germ of the new idea that had taken root in his mind would never grow this night. He knew why, of course. It was simple. He needed a woman. But he had no woman and he moved to the back of the room and found a seat. He thought, as he often thought, of the attractiveness of women. There had been women, of course; too many women, perhaps. And one or two who still could haunt his dreams and call to him across the years of a time when the day was fair. But now the leaves were falling round him: mid-forties; unmarried; alone. And here he sat in a cheap public bar where life was beer and fags and crisps and nuts and fruit machines and. . The ashtray on the table in front of him was revoltingly full of stubs and ash. He pushed it away from him, gulped down the last of his beer and walked out into the night.

He was sitting in the bar of the Randolph Hotel with an architect, an older man, who talked of space and light and beauty, who always wore a bowler hat, who studied Greek and Latin verses, and who slept beneath a railway viaduct. They talked together of life and living, and as they talked a girl walked by with a graceful, gliding movement, and ordered her drink at the bar. And the architect nudged his young companion and gently shook his head in wistful admiration.

'My boy, how lovely, is she not? Extraordinarily, quite extraordinarily lovely.'

And Morse, too, had felt her beautiful and necessary, and yet had not a word to say.

Turning in profile as she left the bar the young girl flaunted the tantalizing, tip-tilted outline of her breasts beneath her black sweater, and the faded architect, the lover of the classical poets, the sleeper beneath the viaduct, stood up and addressed her with grave politeness as she passed.

'My dear young lady. Please don't feel offended with me, or indeed with my dear, young friend here, but I wish you to know that we find you very beautiful.'

For a moment a look of incredulous pleasure glazed the painted eyes; and then she laughed — a coarse and common cackle of a laugh.

'Gee, boys, you ought to see me when I'm washed!' And she placed her right hand on the shoulder of the architect, the nails pared down to the quick and the index finger stained dark brown with nicotine. And Morse woke up with a start in the early light of a cold and friendless dawn, as if some ghostly hand had touched him in his sleep.