Colin Dexter - Last Seen Wearing

Half-past nine already. His head ached and he resolved on a day of total abstinence. He turned over, buried his head in the pillow, and tried to think of nothing. But for Morse such a blessed state of nihilism was utterly impossible. He finally arose at ten, washed and shaved and set off briskly down the road for a Sunday morning newspaper. It was no more than twenty minutes' walk and Morse enjoyed the stroll. His head felt clearer already and he swung along almost merrily, mentally debating whether to buy the News of the World or the Sunday Times. It was the regular hebdomadal debate which paralleled the struggle in Morse's character between the Coarse and the Cultured. Sometimes he bought one; sometimes he bought the other. Today he bought both.

At half-past eleven he switched on his portable to listen to Record Review on Radio Three, and sank back in his favourite armchair, a cup of hot, strong coffee at his elbow. Life was good sometimes. He picked up the News of the World, and for ten minutes wallowed in the Shocking Revelations and Startling Exposures which the researchers of that newspaper had somehow managed to rake together during the past seven days. There were several juicy articles and Morse started on the secret sex life of a glamorous Hollywood pussycat. But it began to pall after the first few paragraphs. Ill-written and (more to the point) not even mildly titillating; it was always the same. Morse firmly believed that there was nothing so unsatisfactory as this kind of halfway house pornography; he liked it hot or not at all. He wouldn't buy the wretched paper again. Yet he had made the same decision so many times before, and knew that next week again he would fall the same silly sucker for the same salacious front-page promises. But for this morning he'd had enough. So much so that he gave no more than a passing glance to a provocative photograph of a seductive starlet exposing one half of her million-dollar breasts.

After relegating (as always) the Business News Section to the wastepaper basket, he graduated to the Sunday Times. He winced to see that Oxford United had been comprehensively trounced, read the leading articles and most of the literary reviews, tried unsuccessfully to solve the bridge problem, and finally turned to the Letters. Pensions, Pollution, Private Medicine — same old topics; but a good deal of sound common sense. And then his eye caught a letter which made him sit bolt upright. He read it and a puzzled look came to his face. August 24? He couldn't have bought the Sunday Times that week. He read the short letter again.

To the Editor. Dear Sir,

My wife and I wish to express our deep gratitude to your newspaper for the feature 'Girls who run away from Home' (Colour Suppt. August 24). As a direct result of reading the article, our only daughter, Christine, returned home last week after being away for over a year. We thank you most sincerely.

Mr. and Mrs. J. Richardson (Kidderminster).

Morse got up and went to a large pile of newspapers neatly bundled in string, that lay in the hallway beside the front door. The Boy Scouts collected them once a month, and although Morse had never been a tenderfoot himself he gave the movement his qualified approval. Impatiently he tore at the string and delved into the pile. Thirty-first August. Fourteenth September. But no 24 August. It may have gone with the last pile. Blast. He looked through again, but it wasn't there. Now who might have a copy? He tried his next-door neighbour, but on reflection he might have saved himself the bother. What about Lewis? Unlikely, yet worth a try. He telephoned his number.

'Lewis? Morse here.'

'Ah. Morning, sir.'

'Lewis, do you take the Sunday Times?'

' 'Fraid not, sir. We have the Sunday Mirror.' He sounded somewhat apologetic about his Sabbath-day reading.

'Oh.'

'I could get you a copy, I suppose.'

'I've got today's. I want the copy for August the twenty-fourth.'

It was Sergeant Lewis's turn to say, 'Oh.'

'I can't really understand an intelligent man like you, Lewis, not taking a decent Sunday newspaper.'

'The sport's pretty good in the Sunday Mirror, sir.'

'Is it? You'd better bring it along with you in the morning, then.'

Lewis brightened. 'I won't forget.'

Morse thanked him and rang off. He had almost said he would swop it for his own copy of the News of the World, but considered it not improper to conceal from his subordinates certain aspects of his own depravity.

He could always get a back copy from the Reference Library. It could wait, he told himself. And yet it couldn't wait. Again he read the letter from the parents of the prodigal daughter. They would be extra-pleased now, with a letter in the newspaper, to boot. Dad would probably cut it out and keep it in his wallet — now that the family unit was functioning once more. We were all so vain. Cuttings, clippings and that sort of thing. Morse still kept his batting averages somewhere. .

And suddenly it hit him. It all fitted. Four or five weeks ago Ainley had resurrected the Taylor case of his own accord and pursued it in his own spare time. Some reporter had been along to Thames Valley Police and got Ainley to spill the beans on the Taylor girl. Ainley had given him the facts (no fancies with Ainley!) and somehow, as a result of seeing the facts again, he had spotted something that he had missed before. It was just like doing a crossword puzzle. Get stuck. Leave it for ten minutes. Try again — and eureka! It happened to everyone like that. And, he repeated to himself, Ainley had seen something new. That must be it.

As a corollary to this, it occurred to Morse that if Ainley had taken a hand in the article, not only would Valerie Taylor have been one of the missing girls featured, but Ainley himself would almost certainly have kept the printed article — just as surely as Mr. J. Richardson would be sticking his own printed letter into his Kidderminster wallet.

He rang Mrs. Ainley. 'Eileen?' (Right this time.) 'Morse here. Look, do you happen to have kept that bit of the Sunday Times —you know, that bit about missing girls?'

'You mean the one they saw Richard about?' He had been right.

'That's the one.'

'Yes. I kept it, of course. It mentioned Richard several times.'

'Can I, er, can I come round and have a look at it?'

'You can have it with pleasure. I don't want it any more.'

Some half an hour later, forgetful of his earlier pledge, Morse was seated with a pint of flat beer and a soggy steak-and-mushroom pie. He read the article through with a feeling of anticlimax. Six girls were featured — after the preliminary sociological blurb about the problems of adolescence — with a couple of columns on each of them. But the central slant was on the parents the girls had left behind them. 'The light in the hall has been left on every night since she went,' as one of the anguished mothers was reported. It was pathetic and it was distressing. There were pictures, too. First, pictures of the girls, although (of necessity) none of the photographs was of a very recent vintage, and two or three (including that of Valerie herself) were of less than definitive clarity. And thus it was for the first time that Chief Inspector Morse looked down upon the face of Valerie Taylor. Of the six she would certainly be in the running for the beauty crown — though run close by a honey of a girl from Brighton. Attractive face, full mouth, come-hither eyes, nice eyebrows (plucked, thought Morse) and long dark-brown hair. Just the face — no figure to admire. And then, over the page, the pictures of the parents. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor seemed an unremarkable pair, seated unnaturally forward on the shabby sofa: Mr. wearing a cheap Woolworth tie, with his rolled-up sleeves revealing a large purple tattoo on his broad right forearm; Mrs. wearing a plain cotton dress with a cameo brooch somewhat ostentatiously pinned to the collar. And on a low table beside them, carefully brought into the focus of the photograph, a cohort of congratulatory cards for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. It was predictable and posed, and Morse felt that a few tears might well have been nearer the truth.