Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing

Acum (on his own admission now) had indeed been attracted to Valerie Taylor and several times had intercourse with her; including a night in early April (not March) when his wife had returned home early one Tuesday (not Wednesday) evening from night school in Oxpens (not Headington) where she was attending art (not sewing) classes. Her teacher was down with shingles (not with flu), and the class was cancelled. It was just after eight o'clock (not a quarter to) when Mrs. Acum had returned and found them lying together across the settee (not in bed), and the upshot had been veritably volcanic, with Valerie, it seemed, by far the least confounded of that troubled trio. There followed, for Acum and his wife, a succession of bleak and barren days. It was all over between them — she insisted firmly upon that; but she agreed to stay with him until their separation could be effected with a minimum of social scandal. He himself decided he must move in any case, and applied for a job in Caernarfon; and although he had been questioned by Phillipson at some length about his motives for a seemingly meaningless move to a not particularly promising post, he had told him nothing of the truth. Literally nothing. He could only pray that Valerie would keep her mouth shut, too.

Not until about three weeks before her disappearance had he spoken personally to Valerie again, when she told him that she was expecting a baby, a baby that was probably his. She appeared (or so it seemed to Acum) completely confident and unconcerned and told him everything would be all right. She begged of him one thing only: that if she were to run away he would say nothing and know nothing — that was all; and although he had pressed her about her intentions, she would only repeat that she would be all right. Did she need any money? She told him she would let him know, but, smiling slyly as she told him, she said that she was going to be all right. Everything was 'all right'. Everything was always 'all right' with Valerie. (It was at this point in Lewis's interrogation, and only at this point, that Morse had suddenly pricked up his ears and asked a few inconsequential questions.) It appeared, however, that the money side of things was not completely 'all right', for only a week or so before the day she disappeared Valerie had approached Acum and told him she would be very grateful for some money if he could manage it. She hadn't pressed her claim on him in any way, but he had been only too glad to help; and from the little enough they had managed to save — and with his wife's full knowledge — he had raised one hundred pounds. And then she had gone; and like everyone else he hadn't the faintest idea where she had gone to, and he had kept his silence ever since, as Valerie had asked him to.

Meanwhile in the Acum household the weeping wounds were at last beginning to heal; and with Valerie gone they had tried, for the first time since that dreadful night, to discuss their sorry situation with some degree of rationality and mutual understanding. He told her that he loved her, that he realized now how very much she meant to him, and how desperately he hoped that they would stay together. She had wept then, and said she knew how disappointed he must be that she could have no children of her own. . And as the summer term drew towards its close they had decided — almost happily decided — that they would stay together, and try to patch their marriage up. In any case there had never been the slightest question of divorce: for his wife was a Roman Catholic.

So, continued Acum, they had moved together to North Wales, and life was happy enough now — or had been so until the whole thing had once more exploded in their faces with the murder of Reggie Baines, of which (he swore on his solemn honour) he was himself completely innocent. Blackmail? The whole idea was laughable. The only person who had any hold on him was Valerie Taylor, and of Valerie Taylor he had seen or heard nothing whatsoever since the day of her disappearance. Whether she were alive or whether she were dead, he had no idea — no idea at all.

There the interview had finished. Or almost finished. For it was Morse himself who had administered the coup de grace which finally put his tortured and tortuous theory out of all its pain.

'Does your wife drive a car?'

Acum looked at him with mild surprise. 'No. She's never driven a yard in her life. Why?'

Lewis relived the interview as he drove on steadily through the night. And as he recalled the facts that Acum had recounted, he felt a deepening sympathy with the sour, dejected, silent figure slumped beside him, smoking (unusually) cigarette after cigarette, and feeling (if the truth be told) unconscionably angry with himself. .

Why had he gone wrong? Where had he gone wrong? The questions re-echoed in Morse's mind as if repeated by some interminable interlocutor installed inside his brain. He thought back to his first analysis of the case — the one in which he had cast Mrs. Taylor as the murderer not only of Reginald Baines but also of her daughter Valerie. How easy now to see why that was wrong! His reasoning had run aground upon the Rock Improbable and the Rock Impossible: the glaring improbability that Mrs. Taylor had murdered her only daughter (mothers just didn't do that sort of thing very often, did they?); and the plain impossibility that anyone had murdered Valerie on the day she disappeared, since three days later, alive and well, she had climbed into the back of a taxi outside a London abortion clinic. Yes, the first analysis had been brutally smashed to pieces by the facts, and now lay sunk without a trace beneath the sea. It was as simple as that.

And what of the second analysis? That had seemed on the face of it to answer all the facts, or nearly all of them. What had gone wrong with that? Again his logic had foundered upon the Reef of Unreason: the glaring improbability that Valerie Taylor had either sufficient motive or adequate opportunity to murder a man who seemed to pose little more than a peripheral threat to her future happiness; and the plain impossibility that the woman living with David Acum was Valerie Taylor. She wasn't. She was Mrs. Acum. And Analysis One lay side by side with Analysis Two — irrecoverable wrecks upon the ocean floor.

Almost frenetically Morse tried to wrench his thoughts away from it all. He tried to conjure up a dream of fair women; and failing this he essayed to project upon his mind a raw, uncensored film of rank eroticism; he tried so very hard. . But still the wretched earth-bound realities of the Taylor case crowded his brain, forbade those flights of half-forbidden fancies, and jolted him back to his inescapable mood of gloom-ridden despondency. Facts, facts, facts! Facts that one by one he once again reviewed as they marched and counter-marched across his mind. If only he'd stuck to the facts! Ainley was dead — that was a fact. Somebody had written a letter the very day after he died — that was a fact. Valerie had been alive on the days immediately following her disappearance — that was a fact. Baines was dead — that was a fact. Mrs. Acum was Mrs. Acum — that was a fact. But where did he go from there? He began to realize how few the facts had been; how very, very few. A lot of possible facts; a fair helping of probable facts; but few that ranked as positive facts. And once again the facts remarshalled themselves and marched across the parade ground. . He shook his head sharply and felt he must be going mad.

Lewis, he could see, was concentrating hard upon the road. Lewis! Huh! It had been Lewis who had asked him the one question, the only question, that had completely floored him: Why had Baines written the letter? Why? He had never grappled satisfactorily with that question, and now it worried away at his brain again. Why? Why? Why?