Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing

'And then?'

'I left. He wasn't there. I just left, that's all.'

'Why didn't you tell me all this when I rang you, sir?'

'I was frightened, Inspector. I'd been there, hadn't I? And he was probably lying there all the time — murdered. I was frightened, I really was. Wouldn't you have been?'

Morse drove into the centre of Caernarfon, and parked his car alongside the jetty under the great walls of the first Edward's finest castle. He found a Chinese restaurant nearby, and greedily gulped down the oriental fare that was set before him. It was his first meal for twenty-four hours, and he temporarily dismissed all else from his mind. Only over his coffee did he allow his restless brain to come to grips with the case once more; and by the time he had finished his second cup of coffee he had reached the firm conclusion that, whatever improbabilities remained to be explained away, especially the reasons given for calling on Baines, both Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum had told him the truth, or something approximating to the truth, at least as far as their evidence concerned itself with the visits made to the house in Kempis Street. Their accounts of what had taken place there were so clear, so mutually complementary, that he felt he should and would believe them. That bit about the door being slightly open, for example — exactly as Mrs. Phillipson had left it before panicking and racing down to the lighted street. No. Acum could not have made that up. Surely not. Unless. . It was the second time that he had qualified his conclusions with that sinister word 'unless'; and it troubled him. Acum and Mrs. Phillipson. Was there any link at all between that improbable pair? If link there was, it had to have been forged at some point in the past, at some point more than two years ago, at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School. Could there have been something? It was an idea, anyway. Yet as he drove out of the castle car park, he decided on balance that it was a lousy idea. In front of the castle he passed the statue erected to commemorate the honourable member for Caernarfon (Lloyd George, no less) and as he drove out along the road to Capel Curig, his brain was as jumbled and cluttered as a magpie's nest.

He stopped briefly in the pass of Llanberis, and watched the tiny figures of the climbers, conspicuous only by their bright orange anoraks, perched at dizzying heights on the sheer mountain faces that towered massively above the road on either side. He felt profoundly thankful that whatever the difficulties of his own job he was spared the risk, at every second, and every precarious hand- and foot-hold, of a vertical plunge to a certain death upon the rocks far, far below. Yet, in his own way, Morse knew that he too was scaling a peak and knew full well the blithe exhilaration of reaching the summit. So often there was only one way forward, only one. And when one route seemed utterly impossible, one had to look for the nearly impossible alternative, to edge along the face of the cliff, to avoid the impasse, and to lever oneself painstakingly up to the next ledge, and look up again and follow the only route. On the death of Baines, Morse had considered only a small group of likely suspects. The murderer could, of course, have been someone completely unconnected with the Valerie Taylor affair; but he doubted it. There had been five of them, and he now felt that the odds against Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum had lengthened considerably. That left the Taylors, the pair of them, and Phillipson himself. It was time he tried to put together the facts, many of them very odd facts, that he had gleaned about these three. It must be one of them surely; for he felt convinced now that Baines had been murdered before the visits of Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum. Yes, that was the only way it could have been. He grasped the firm fact with both hands and swung himself on to a higher ledge, and discovered that from this vantage point the view seemed altogether different.

He drove to Capel Curig and there turned right on to the A5 towards Llangollen. And even as he drove he began to see the pattern. He ought to have seen it before; but with the testimony of Mrs. Phillipson and Acum behind him, it became almost childishly easy now to fit the pieces into quite a different pattern. One by one they clicked into place with a simple inevitability, as on and on he drove at high speed, passing Shrewsbury and, keeping to the A5, rattling along the old Wading Street and almost missing the turning off for Daventry and Banbury. It was now nearly 8 p.m. and Morse was feeling the effects of his long day. He found his mind wandering off to that news item he had heard about the unfortunate lord in the Essex reservoir; and as he was leaving the outskirts of Banbury an oncoming car flashed its lights at him. He realized that he had been drifting dangerously over the centre of the road, and jerked himself into a startled wakefulness. He resolved not to allow his concentration to waver one centimetre, opened the side window and breathing deeply upon the cool night air, sang in a mournful baritone, over and over again, the first and only verse he could remember of 'Lead, Kindly Light'.

He drove straight home and locked up the garage. It had been a long day, he hoped he would sleep well.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

(Leo Tolstoy)

LEWIS WAS GETTING better. He got up for a couple of hours just after Morse had arrived back in Oxford, with the aid of the banister made his careful way downstairs, and joined his surprised wife on the sofa in front of the television set. His temperature was normal now, and though he felt weak on his legs and sapped of his usual energy, he knew he would soon be back in harness. Many of the hours in bed he had spent in thinking, thinking about the Taylor case; and that morning he had been suddenly struck by an idea so novel and so exciting that he had persuaded his wife to ring the station immediately. But Morse was out: off to Wales, they said. It puzzled Lewis: the Principality in no way figured in his own new-minted version of events, and he guessed that Morse had followed one of his wayward fancies about Acum, wasted a good many gallons of police petrol, and advanced the investigation not one whit. But that wasn't quite fair. In the hands of the chief inspector things seldom stood still; they might go sideways, or even backwards, and often (Lewis agreed) they went forwards. But they seldom stood still. Yes, Lewis had been deeply disappointed not to catch him. Everything — well, almost everything — fitted so perfectly. It had been that item on his bedside radio at eight o'clock that had started the chain reaction; that item about some big noise being washed up in a reservoir. He knew they had dredged the reservoir behind the Taylors' home; but you could never be sure in such a wide stretch of water as that; and anyway it didn't really matter much whether it was in the reservoir or somewhere else. That was just the starting point. And then there was that old boy at the Belisha crossing, and the basket, and — oh, lots of other things. How he wished he'd caught the chief at the station! The really surprising thing was that Morse hadn't thought of it himself. He usually thought of everything — and more! But later, as the day wore on, he began to think that Morse probably had thought of it. After all, it was Morse himself who had suggested, right out of the blue, that she was carrying a basket.

Laboriously, during the afternoon, Lewis wrote it all down, and when he had finished the initial thrill was already waning, and he was left only with the quiet certainty that it had indeed been, for him, a remarkable brainwave, and that there was a very strong possibility that he might be right. At 9.15 p.m., he rang the station himself, but Morse had still not shown up.