Colin Dexter: Last Bus To Woodstock

'About half past seven.'

'And you got drunk and went out to be sick.' Reluctantly Sanders agreed. 'Do you usually drink on your own?'

'Not usually.'

'Who were you waiting for?' Sanders did not reply. 'She didn't show up?'

'No' he said flatly.

'But she did come, didn't she?'

'No, I told you. I was on my own all the time.'

'But she did come, didn't she?' repeated Morse quietly. Sanders looked beaten. 'She came,' continued Morse in the same quiet voice. 'She came and you saw her. You saw her in the courtyard, and she was dead.'

The young man nodded.

We'd better have a little chat, you and me,' said Morse ungrammatically.

CHAPTER THREE

Thursday, 30 September

AS HE STOOD alone in the bedroom of Sylvia Kaye, Morse felt measurably relieved. The grim duties of the night were over, and he switched on the natural defence mechanism of his weary mind. He wished to forget the awakening of Mrs. Dorothy Kaye, and the summoning of her husband from his night-shift in the welding division of the Cowley car plant; the fatuous, coarse recriminations and the overwhelming hurt of their bitter, empty misery. Sylvia's mother was now under sedation, postponing the day and the reckoning; whilst Sergeant Lewis sat at headquarters learning what he could from Sylvia's father. He took many pages of careful notes but doubted if it all amounted to much. He was to join Morse in half an hour.

The bedroom was small, one of three in a neat semi-detached house in Jackdaw Court, a quiet crescent with rotting wooden fences, a few minutes' walk off the Woodstock Road. Morse sat down on the narrow bed and looked around him. He wondered if the neatness of the bed was mum's doing, for the remainder of the room betrayed the slack and untidy living of the murdered girl. A vast coloured portrait of a pop artist was pinned rather precariously above the gas fire in the chimney breast, and Morse reminded himself that he might understand young people rather better if he had a teenage family of his own; as it was, the identity of the handsome youth was cloaked in anonymity and whatever pretentious he may have had would for Morse be for ever unknown. Several items of underwear draped the table and chair which, with a whitewood wardrobe, substantively comprised the only other furniture. Morse gingerly picked up a flimsy black bra lying on the chair. His mind flashed back to that first glimpse of Sylvia Kaye, rested there a few seconds and slowly returned through the tortuous byways of the last unpleasant hours. A pile of women's magazines was awkwardly stacked on the window-sill, and Morse cursorily flicked his way through make-up hints, personal problems and horoscopes. Not even a paragraph of pornography. He opened the wardrobe door and with perceptibly deeper interest examined the array of skirts, blouses, slacks and dresses. Clean and untidy. Mounds of shoes, ultra-modern, wedged, ugly: she wasn't short of money. On the table Morse saw a travel brochure for package trips to Greece, Yugoslavia and Cyprus, white hotels, azure seas and small print about insurance liability and smallpox regulations; a letter from Sylvia's employer explaining the complexities of VAT, and a diary, the latter revealing nothing but a single entry for 2 January: 'Cold. Went to see Ryan's Daughter .'

Lewis tapped on the bedroom door and entered. 'Find anything, sir?' Morse looked at his cheerful sergeant distastefully, and said nothing. 'Can I?' asked Lewis his hand hovering above the diary.

'Go ahead,' said Morse.

Lewis examined the diary, turning carefully through the days of September. Finding nothing, he worked meticulously through every page. 'Only one day filled in, sir.'

'I didn't even get that far,' said Morse.

'Do you think "cold" means it was a cold day or she had a cold?'

'How do I know,' snapped Morse, 'and what the hell does it matter?'

"We could find out where Ryan's Daughter was on in the first week of January,' suggested Lewis.

'Yes, we could. And how much the diary cost and who gave it to her and where she buys her biros from Sergeant! We're running a murder inquiry not a stationery shop!'

'Sorry.'

'You may be right though,' added Morse.

'I'm afraid Mr. Kaye hadn't got much to tell me, either, sir. Did you want to see him?'

'No. Leave the poor fellow alone.'

"We're not making very rapid progress then.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Morse. 'Miss Kaye was wearing a white blouse, wasn't she?'

'Yes.'

'What colour bra would your wife wear under a white blouse?'

'A lightish-coloured one, I suppose.'

'She wouldn't wear a black one?'

'It would show through.'

'Mm. By the way, Lewis, do you know when lighting-up time was yesterday evening?'

'Fraid I don't, off hand,' replied Lewis, 'but I can soon find out for you.'

'No need for that,' said Morse. 'According to the diary you just inspected, yesterday, 29 September, was St. Michael and All Angels' day and lighting-up time was 6.40 p.m.'

Lewis followed his superior officer down the narrow stairs, and wondered what was coming next. Before they reached the front door, Morse half turned his head: 'What do you think of Women's Lib, Lewis?'

At 11.00 a.m. Sergeant Lewis interviewed the manager of the Town and Gown Assurance Company, situated on the second and third storeys above a flourishing tobacconist's shop in the High. Sylvia had worked there — her first job — for just over a year. She was a copy-typist, having failed to satisfy the secretarial college at which she had studied for two years after leaving school that the ungainly and frequently undecipherable scrawls in her shorthand note-book bore sufficient relationship to the missives originally dictated. But her typing was reasonably accurate and clean, and the company, the manager assured Lewis, had no complaints about its late employee. She had been punctual and unobtrusive.

'Attractive?'

'Well — er, yes. I suppose she was,' replied the manager. Lewis made a note and wished Morse were there; but the Inspector said he felt thirsty and had gone into The Minster across the way.

'She worked, you say, with two other girls,' said Lewis. 'I think I'd better have a word with them if I can.'

'Certainly, officer.' The manager, Mr. Palmer, seemed a fraction relieved.

Lewis questioned the two young ladies at considerable length. Neither was 'a particular friend' of Sylvia. She had, as far as they knew, no regular beau. Yes, she had boasted occasionally of her sexual exploits — but so did most of the girls. She was friendly enough, but not really 'one of the girls'.

Lewis looked through her desk. The usual bric-a-brac . A bit of a broken mirror, a comb with a few blonde hairs in it, yesterday's Sun, pencils galore, rubbers, typewriter ribbons, carbons. On the wall behind Sylvia's desk was pinned a photograph of Omar Sharif, flanked by a typewritten holiday rota. Lewis saw that Sylvia had been on a fortnight's holiday in the latter half of July, and he asked the two girls where she'd been to.

'Stayed at home, I think,' replied the elder of the two girls, a quiet, serious-looking girl in her early twenties.

Lewis sighed. "You don't seem to know much about her, do you?' The girls said nothing. Lewis tried his best to elicit a little more co-operation, but met with little success. He left the office just before midday, and strolled over to The Minster .

'Poor Sylvia,' said the younger girl after he had gone.

'Yes, poor Sylvia,' replied Jennifer Coleby.

Lewis eventually, and somewhat to his surprise, discovered Morse in the 'gentlemen only' bar at the back of The Minster .

'Ah, Lewis.' He rose and placed his empty glass on the bar, "What's it to be?" Lewis asked for a pint of bitter. 'Two pints of your best bitter,' said Morse cheerfully to the man behind the bar, 'and have one yourself.'