Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing

'I think that Valerie must have been put into a sack or some sort of rubbish bag, and consigned for the long night to the boot of Taylor's old Morris. And in the morning he drove off early, and dumped her there, amid all the other mouldering rubbish; and he started up the bulldozer and buried her under the mounds of soil that stood ready at the sides of the tip. That's about it, Lewis. I'm very much afraid that's just about what happened. I should have been suspicious before, especially about the police not being called in until the next morning.'

'Do you think they'll find her body after all this time?'

'I should think so. It'll be a horribly messy business — but I should think so. The surveyor's department will know roughly which parts of the tip were levelled when and where, and I think we shall find her. Poor kid!'

'They put the police to a hell of a lot of trouble, didn't they?'

Morse nodded. 'It must have taken some guts to carry it through the way they did, I agree. But when you've committed a murder and got rid of the body, it might not have been so difficult as you think.'

A stray thought had been worrying Lewis as Morse had expounded his views of the way things must have happened.

'Do you think Ainley was getting near the truth?'

'I don't know,' said Morse. 'He might have had all sorts of strange ideas before he'd finished. But whether he got a scent of the truth or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that other people thought he was getting near the truth.'

'Where do you think the letter fits in, sir?'

Morse looked away. 'Yes, the letter. Remember the letter was probably posted before whoever sent it knew that Ainley was dead. I thought at the time that the whole point of it was to concentrate police attention away from the scene of the crime and on to London; and it seemed a possibility that the Taylors had cooked it up themselves because they thought Ainley was coming a bit too close for comfort.'

'But you don't think so now?'

'No. Like you, I think we've got to accept the evidence that it was almost certainly written by Baines.'

'Any idea why he wrote it?'

'I think I have, although—'

The front door bell rang in mid-sentence, and almost immediately Mrs. Lewis appeared with the doctor. Morse shook hands with him and got up to go.

'There's no need for you to go. Shan't be with him long.'

'No, I'll be off,' said Morse. I'll call back this afternoon, Lewis.'

He let himself out and drove back to the police HQ at Kidlington. He sat in his black leather chair and looked mournfully at his in-tray. He would have to catch up with his correspondence very soon. But not today. Perhaps he had been glad of the interruption in Lewis's bedroom, for there were several small points in his reconstruction of the case which needed further cerebration. The truth was that Morse felt a little worried.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Money often costs too much.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

FOR THE NEXT HOUR he sat, without interruption, without a single telephone call, and thought it all through, beginning with the question that Lewis had put to him: why had Baines written the letter to the Taylors? At twelve noon, he rose from his chair, walked along the corridor and knocked at the office of Superintendent Strange.

Half an hour later, the door reopened and the two men exchanged a few final words.

'You'll have to produce one,' said Strange. 'There's no two ways about it, Morse. You can hold them for questioning, if you like, but sooner or later we want a body. In fact, we've got to have a body.'

'I suppose you're right, sir,' said Morse. 'It's a bit fanciful without a body, as you say.'

'It's a bit fanciful with a body,' said Strange.

Morse walked to the canteen, where the inevitable Dickson was ordering a vast plate of meat and vegetables.

'How's Sergeant Lewis, sir? Have you heard?'

'Much better. I saw him this morning. He'll be back any day.'

He thought of Lewis as he ordered his own lunch, and knew that he had not finally resolved the question that his sergeant had put to him. Why had Baines written that letter? He had thought of all the possible reasons that anyone ever had for writing a letter, but was still not convinced that he had a satisfactory answer. It would come, though. There was still a good deal about Baines he didn't know, but he had set inquiries in progress several days ago, and even bank managers and income tax inspectors didn't take all that long surely.

He ought to have had a closer look through his in-tray; and he would. For the moment, however, he thought that a breath of fresh air would do him good, and he walked out into the main road, turned right and found himself walking towards the pub. He didn't wish to see Mrs. Taylor, and he was relieved to find that she wasn't there. He ordered a pint, left immediately after he had finished it, and walked down towards the main road. Two shops he had never paid any attention to before lay off a narrow service road at the top of Hatfield Way, one a general provisions store, the other a fresh fruiterer, and Morse bought a small bunch of black grapes for the invalid. It seemed a kind thought. As he walked out, he noticed a small derelict area between the side of the provisions store and the next row of council houses. It was no more than ten square yards in extent, with two or three bicycle racks, the bric-a-brac of builders' carts from years ago — half-bricks, a flattened heap of sand; and strewing the area the inevitable empty cigarette cartons and crisps packets. Two cars stood in the small area, unobtrusive and unmolested. Morse stopped and took his bearings and realized that he was only some forty or fifty yards from the Taylors' house, a little further down towards the main road on the left. He stood quite still and gripped the bag of grapes more firmly. Mrs. Taylor was in the front garden. He could see her quite clearly, her hair piled rather untidily on top of her head, her back towards him, her slim legs more those of a schoolgirl than a mother. In her right hand she held a pair of secateurs, and she was bending over the rose trees and clipping off the faded blooms. He found himself wondering if he would have been able to recognize her if she suddenly rushed out of the gate in a bright school uniform with her hair flowing down to her shoulders; and it made him uneasy, for he felt that he would have been able to tell at once that she was a woman and not a girl. You couldn't really disguise some things, however hard you tried; and perhaps it was very fortunate for Mrs. Taylor that none of the neighbours had seen her that Tuesday lunchtime, and that old Joe Godberry's eyes had grown so tired and dim. And all of a sudden he saw it all plainly, and the blood tingled in his arms. He glanced around again at the small piece of waste land, shielded from the Taylors' home by the wall of the council house, looked again at the Taylors' front garden, where the wilted petals were now piled neatly at the edge of the narrow lawn, turned on his heel and walked back the long way round to Police HQ.

He had been right about his in-tray. There were detailed statements about Baines's financial position, and Morse raised his eyebrows in some surprise as he studied them, for Baines was better off than he had thought. Apart from insurance policies, Baines had over £5,000 in the Oxford Building Society, £6,000 tied up in a high-interest long-term loan with Manchester Corporation, £4,500 in his deposit account with Lloyds, as well as £150 in his current account with the same bank. It all added up to a tidy sum, and schoolmasters, even experienced second masters, weren't all that highly recompensed. The pay cheques for the previous year had all been paid directly into the deposit account, and Morse noticed with some surprise that the withdrawals on the current account had seldom amounted to more than £30 per month over that period. It seemed clear from the previous year's tax returns that Baines had no supplementary monies accruing to him from examination fees or private tuition, and although he may have risked not declaring any such further income, Morse thought that on the whole it was unlikely. The house, too, belonged to Baines: the final payment had been made some six years previously. Of course, he may well have been left a good deal of money by his parents and other relatives; but the fact remained that Baines somehow had managed to live on about seven or eight pounds a week for the last twelve months. Either he was a miser or, what seemed more likely, he was receiving a supply of ready cash fairly regularly from some quarter or quarters. And it hardly needed a mind as imaginative as Morse's to make one or two intelligent deductions on that score. There must have been several people who had shed no tears when Baines had died; indeed there had been one person who had been unable to stand it any longer and who had stuck him through with a carving knife.