Colin Dexter - Last Bus To Woodstock

'No,' said Morse. He felt more frustrated than depressed. He realized that he had already landed himself in a good deal of muddle and mess by his own inadequacies. He had refused the offer of the auxiliary personnel available to him, and this meant that few of the many possible leads had yet been checked and documented. Sanders, for example — surely to any trained officer the most obvious target for immediate and thorough investigation — he had thus far almost totally ignored. Indeed, even a superficial scrutiny of his conduct of the case thus far would reveal a haphazardness in his approach almost bordering upon negligence. Only the previous month he had himself given a lecture to fellow detectives on the paramount importance in any criminal investigation of the strictest and most disciplined thoroughness in every respect of the inquiry from the very beginning .

And yet, for all this, he sensed in some intuitive way (a procedure not mentioned in his lecture) that he was vaguely on the right track still; that he had been right in allowing Jennifer to go; that although his latest shot had been kicked off the line, sooner or later the goal would come.

For the next hour the two officers exchanged notes on the afternoon's interrogation, with Morse impatiently probing Lewis's reactions to the girl's evasions, glances, and gestures.

'Do you think she's lying, Lewis?'

'I'm not so sure now.'

'Come off it, man. When you're as old as I am you'll recognize a liar a mile off!'

Lewis remained doubtful: he was by several years the older man anyway. Silence fell between them.

'Where do we go from here, then?' said Lewis at last.

'I think we attack down the other flank.'

'We do?'

'Yes. She's shielding a man. Why? Why? That's what we've been asking ourselves so far. And you know where we've got with that line of inquiry? Nowhere. She's lying, I know that; but we haven't broken her — not yet. She's such a good liar she'd get any damned fool to believe her.'

Lewis saw the implication. 'You could be wrong, sir.'

Morse blustered on, wondering if he was. 'No, no, no. We've just been tackling the case from the wrong angle. They tell me, Lewis, that you can climb up the Eiger in your carpet slippers if you go the easy way.'

'You mean we've been trying to solve this the hard way?'

'No. I mean just the opposite. We've been trying to solve it the easy way. Now we've got to try the hard way.'

'How do we do that, sir?'

'We've been trying to find out who the other girl was, because we thought she could lead us to the man we want.'

'But according to you we have found her.'

'Yes. But she's too clever for us — and too loyal. She's been warned to keep her mouth shut — not that she needed much telling, if I'm any judge. But we're up against a brick wall for the time being, and there's only one alternative. The girl won't lead us to the man? All right. We find the man.'

'How do we start on that?'

'I think we shall need a bit of Aristotelian logic, don't you?'

'If you say so, sir.'

'I'll tell you all about it in the morning,' said Morse.

Lewis paused as he reached the door. That identification of Miss Coleby, sir. Did you think it was satisfactory — just to take the landlady's word for it?'

'Why not?'

'Well, it was all a bit casual, wasn't it? I mean, it wasn't exactly going by the book.'

'What book?' said Morse.

Lewis decided that his mind had got itself into a quite sufficient muddle for one day, and he left.

Morse's mind, too, was hardly functioning with crystalline lucidity; yet already emerging from the mazed confusion was the germ of a new idea. He had suspected from the start that Jennifer Coleby was lying; would have staked his professional reputation upon it. But he could have been wrong, at least in one respect. He had tried to break Jennifer's story, but had he been trying to break it at the wrong point?

What if all she had told him was perfectly true?. . The same revolving pro's and con's passed up and down before his eyes like undulating hobby-horses at a fairground, until his own mind, too, was in a dizzying whirl and he knew that it was time to give it all a rest.

CHAPTER TEN

Wednesday, 6 October

THE COCKTAIL LOUNGE of The Black Prince was seldom busy for the hour after opening time at 11.00 a.m., and the morning of Wednesday, 6 October, was to prove no exception. The shock-wave of the murder was now receding and The Black Prince was quickly returning to normality.

It was amazing how quickly things sank into the background, thought Mrs. Gaye McFee as she polished another martini glass and stacked it neatly among its fellows. But not really; only that morning an incoming air-liner had crashed at Heathrow with the loss of seventy-nine lives. And every day on the roads. .

'What'll it be, boys?' The speaker was a distinguished-looking man, about sixty years old, thick set, with silvery-grey hair and a ruddy complexion. Gaye had served him many times before and knew him to be Professor Tompsett (Felix to his friends, who were rumoured not to be legion) — emeritus Professor of Elizabethan Literature at Oxford University, and the recently retired Vice-Principal of Lonsdale College. His two companions, one a gaunt, bearded man in his late twenties, the other a gentle-looking bespectacled man of about forty-five, each ordered gin and tonic.

'Three gin and tonics.' Tompsett had an incisive, imperative voice, and Gaye wondered if he got his college scout to stir his morning coffee.

'Hope you're going to enjoy life with us, young Melhuish!' Tompsett laid a broad hand on his bearded companion's shoulder, and was soon engrossed in matters which Gaye was no longer able to follow. A group of American servicemen had come in and were losing no time in quizzing her about the brands of lager, the menu, the recent murder, and her home address. But she enjoyed Americans, and was soon laughing good-naturedly with them. As usual, the lager-pump was producing more froth than liquid substance and Gaye noticed, waiting patiently at the other end of the bar, the bespectacled member of the Oxford triumvirate.

'Shan't be a second, sir.'

'Don't worry. I'm in no great rush.' He smiled quietly at her, and she saw the glimmer of a twinkle in his dark eyes, and she hurriedly squared the account with the neighbourly Americans.

'Now, sir.'

'We'd all like the same again, please. Three gins and tonics.' Gaye looked at him with interest. The landlord had once told her that if anyone ordered 'gins and tonics' instead of the almost universal 'gin and tonics'—he really was a don. She wished he would speak again, for she liked the sound of his voice with its soft Gloucestershire accent. But he didn't. Nevertheless, she stayed at his end of the bar and lightly repolished the martini glasses

'Whatawe done to you, honeybunch?' and similar endearing invitations emanated regularly from her other clients, but Gaye quietly and tactfully declined their ploys; she watched instead the man from Gloucestershire. Tompsett was in full flow.

'He didn't even go to my inaugural when he was up. What do you think of that, Peter, old boy."

'Don't blame him really,' said Peter. 'We all sit and salivate over our own prose, Melhuish, and we kid ourselves it's bloody marvellous.'

The Professor of Elizabethan Literature laughed good-humouredly and half-drained his glass. 'Been here before, Melhuish?'

'No, I haven't. Rather nice, isn't it?'

'Bit notorious now, you know. Murder here last week.'

'Yes, I read about it.'

'Young blonde. Raped and murdered, right in the yard out there. Pretty young thing — if the newspapers are anything to go by.'

Melhuish, newly appointed junior fellow at Lonsdale, very bright and very anxious, was beginning to feel a little more at home with his senior colleagues.