Colin Dexter - Last Bus To Woodstock

As Morse had walked past, he too was wondering what to do. Best have it out with Jennifer now? He didn't know, but he thought on the whole it was. Conscious that he had not covered himself with glory at the earlier interview, he decided mentally to rehearse his new approach.

'You want to ask me some more questions?'

'Yes' Tight-lipped and masterly.

'Won't you come in?'

'Yes.'

'Well?'

'Thus far you've told me nothing but a pack of lies. I suggest we start again.'

'I don't know what you're talking about. .' Slowly and pointedly he would get up from the chair and walk towards the door. He would utter not one further word. But as he opened the door, Jennifer would say, 'All right, Inspector." And he would listen. He thought he had a good idea of what she would tell him.

That he would have been wrong, he was not to learn for some time yet; for he discovered that Jennifer had gone out. The languid Sue, her long legs bronzed and bare, had no idea where she had gone. 'Won't you come in and wait, Inspector?' The full lips parted and quivered slightly. Morse both looked and felt alarmingly vulnerable. He consulted his wrist-watch for moral support. 'You're very kind but. . perhaps I'd better not.'

CHAPTER NINE

Sunday, 3 October

MORSE SLEPT SOUNDLY for almost twelve hours, and awoke at 8.30 a.m. He had returned home immediately after his second call to Charlton Road with a splitting headache and a harassed mind. Now, as he blinked awake, he could scarcely believe how fresh he felt.

The last book Morse himself had taken from the library and which now lay, three weeks overdue, on his writing desk, was Edward de Bono's A Five-Day Course in Lateral Thinking . He had followed the course conscientiously, refused to look at any of the answers in advance, and reluctantly concluded that even the most sympathetic assessment of his lateral potential was gamma minus minus. But he had enjoyed it. Moreover he had learned that a logical, progressive, 'vertical' assault upon a sticky problem might not always be the best. He had not really understood some of the jargon too well, but he had grasped the substantial points. 'How can one drive a car up a dark alley if the headlights are not working?' It didn't matter what the answer was. The thing to do was to suggest anything a driver might conceivably do: blow the horn, take the roof rack off, lift the bonnet up. It didn't matter. The mere contemplation of futile solutions was itself a potent force in reaching the right conclusion; for sooner or later one would turn on a blinker and, hey presto! the light would dawn. In an amateurish way Morse had tried out this technique and had surprised himself. If a name was on the tip of his tongue, he stopped thinking directly about it, and merely repeated anything he knew — the state capitals of the USA — anything; and it seemed to work.

As he lay awake he decided temporarily to shelve the murder of Sylvia Kaye. He was making progress — he knew that. But his mind lacked incision; it was going a bit stale. With a rest today (and he'd deserved one) he'd be back on mental tip-toe in the morning.

He got up, dressed and shaved, cooked himself a succulent looking mixture of bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, and felt good. He ran a leisurely eye through the Sunday papers, checked his pools, wondered if he was the only man in England who had picked in his 'any eight from sixteen' permutation not a single score-draw, and lit a cigarette. He would sit and idle the time away until noon, have a couple of pints and get lunch out somewhere. It seemed a civilized prospect. But he was never happy without something to do, and before long was mentally debating whether to put some Wagner on the record player or do a crossword. Crosswords were a passion with Morse, although since the death of the great Ximenes he had found few composers to please his taste. On the whole he enjoyed The Listener puzzles as much as any, and for this purpose took the periodical each week. On the other hand he delighted in Wagnerian opera and had the complete cycle of The Ring . He decided to do both, and to the opening bars of the richly scored Prelude to Das Rheingold , he sat back and turned to the penultimate page of The Listener . This was the life. The Rhinemaidens swam gracefully to and fro and it was a few minutes before Morse felt willing to let the music drift away to the periphery of his attention. He read the preamble to the crossword:

'Each of the across clues contains, in the definition, a deliberate misprint. Each of the down clues is normal, although the words to be entered in the diagram will contain a misprint of a single letter. Working from 1 across to 28 down the missing — printed letters form a well-known quotation which solvers. .'

Morse read no more. He leapt to his feet. A solo horn expired with a dying groan as he switched off the record player and snatched his car keys from the mantelpiece.

His in-tray was high with reports, but he ignored them. He unlocked his cabinet, took out the file on the Sylvia Kaye murder, and extracted the letter addressed to Jennifer Coleby. He knew there had been something wrong with the whole thing. His mouth was dry and his hand trembled slightly, like a schoolboy opening his O-level results:

Dear Madam,

After asessing the mny applications we have received, we must regretfully inform you that our application has been unsuccessful. At the begining of November however, further posts will become available, and I should, in all honesty, be sorry to loose the opportunity of reconsidering our position then.

We have now alloted the September quota of posts in the Psycology Department; yet it is probable that a reliably qualified assistant may be required to deal with the routnie duties for the Principal's office.

Yours faithfully,

How wrong-headed he had been! Instead of thinking, as he had done, with such supercilious arrogance, of the illiteracy and incompetence of some poor blockhead of a typist, he should have been thinking exactly the opposite . He'd been a fool. The clues were there. The whole thing was phoney — why hadn't he spotted that before? When you boiled it down it was a nonsense letter. He had first made the mistake of concentrating upon individual mistakes and not even bothering to see the letter as a synoptic whole. But not only that. He had compounded his mistake. For if he had read the letter as a letter, he might have considered the mistakes as mistakes— deliberate mistakes . He took a sheet of paper and started: 'asessing' — 's' omitted; 'mny'—'a' omitted; 'begining—'n' omitted; 'loose'—'o' inserted; 'Psycology'—'h' omitted. SANOH — whatever that signified. Look again, 'our'—shouldn't it be 'your"? 'y' omitted; 'routnie' — 'n' and 'i' transposed. What did that give him? SAYNOHNI. Hardly promising. Try once more, 'alloted'—surely two 't's? 't' omitted? And there it was staring him in the face. The 'G' of course from the signature, the only recognizable letter therein: SAY NOTHING. Someone had been desperately anxious for Jennifer not to say a word — and Jennifer, it seemed, had got the message.

It had taken Morse two minutes, and he was glad that Jennifer had been out the previous evening. He felt sure that faced with her lies about the visit to the library, she would have said how sorry she was and that she must have got it wrong. It must have been Thursday, she supposed; it was so difficult to think back to events of even the day before, wasn't it? She honestly couldn't remember; but she would try very hard to. Perhaps she had gone for a walk — on her own, of course.

But she would find things more awkward now. Strangely Morse felt little sense of elation. He had experienced an odd liking for Jennifer when they had met, and in retrospect he understood how difficult it must have been for her. But he must look the fact squarely in the face. She was lying. She was shielding someone — that someone who in all probability had raped and murdered Sylvia. It was not a pretty thought. Every piece of evidence now pointed unequivocally to the fact that it was Jennifer Coleby who had stood at Fare Stage 5 with Sylvia on the night of the 29th; that it was she who had been given a lift by a person or persons unknown (pretty certainly the former) as far as Woodstock; that there she had witnessed something about which she had been warned to keep her silence. In short that Jennifer Coleby knew the identity of the man who had murdered Sylvia Kaye . Morse suddenly wondered if she was in danger, and it was this fear which prompted his immediate decision to have Jennifer held on suspicion of being an accessory to the crime of murder. He would need Lewis in.