Colin Dexter - Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

During the replay of this message, Lewis had been conscious that Morse was standing beside him, listening (it seemed) intently; and as Goodall signed off, Lewis noted that Morse’s eyes were shining with excitement; and impatience, too — like a camel sniffing the coolness of the air and eager to ride forth at evening from the wells...

Although Lewis himself would not have made that particular simile.

Morse’s verdict, whispered and intense, was barely audible in the now silent office:

“She did it! She murdered him!”

For a few moments Lewis looked across the desk with mouth agape, like a young lad bidden to display his tonsils to the doctor. He would have asked about that unspecified “She,” but already Morse had picked up the phone, asking to be put through to the Path lab — urgently. And as he covered the speaker with the palm of his left hand, he gave his instructions:

“Go and take a full statement from the manager, Lewis. I want to know exactly what she told him. Verbatim , as far as—

“Ah, Doctor Hobson?”

“You can drive back,” Morse had said the following morning when just after 10 A.M. he himself took the wheel of the maroon-coloured Jaguar and began the drive up to Shrewsbury, via Motorways 40, 42, 6, and 54. One hundred and ten miles. No Services. An hour and a half. Lewis, whose only indulgence in life (apart from eggs and chips) was speedy driving, would have cut fifteen minutes off the time.

Did cut fifteen minutes off, on the return journey.

“Difficult to know why anyone’d ever want to go from Shrewsbury to Oxford by British Rail,” declared Lewis, as Morse pulled up outside the elegantly appointed, detached house that stood at 53 Leominster Drive.

“Mrs. Sherwood,” began Morse, “we have some difficult things to tell you. When your husband went off to Oxford, we have every reason to believe, I’m afraid, that he’d arranged to spend two nights with a woman-friend — with a mistress — in The Randolph Hotel. She’d driven him down to Oxford in her own car—”

Mrs. Sherwood shook her head and closed her eyes, like a young girl refusing to believe that Santa Claus was just a dream.

“You’ve got it all wrong! He went to Oxford by train — I took him to the station myself. He knew he’d be having quite a lot to drink at the conference—”

“He went to Oxford by car,” countered Morse. “His mistress drove him there.”

“But that’s nonsense ! I’ve got the rail tickets—”

“Show me!”

From her handbag, Mrs. Sherwood took out her husband’s wallet; and from the wallet, the two tickets — which she handed to him.

“We decided to buy these for you, Mrs. Sherwood, because we wanted to spare you some of the anguish and the pain of all this trouble. And if you’d been more observant, you’d have spotted the wrong date on them. Until yesterday, you see, we’d no suspicion at all that your husband’s death was due to anything but natural causes.”

Her eyes flicked up sharply. “And now you’re saying...?”

Morse made no direct answer, but looked away from those compelling eyes, and slowly tore the rail tickets into smaller and smaller pieces, just as earlier he’d torn the photograph.

“Did you know your husband’s mistress?”

For a while it seemed that Mrs. Sherwood would challenge the premiss of Morse’s brutal question. But she didn’t.

“I know her.”

“We did find a photograph,” continued Morse, “but foolishly I tore it up, because, as I say, we wanted to—”

“She was hardly the first, Chief Inspector.”

“Please tell me who she is and where we can find her.”

But Mrs. Sherwood shook her head as she stared into some middle distance. “I felt jealous about his other women — of course I did. But I envied this one. I’d found out a few things about her and I think she was everything to Peter that I’d never been. You see, I’m so very careful and tight about life — about emotions, money, everything. And she’s open and vivacious, and wonderful in bed, for all I know...”

“And very young,” added Morse cruelly.

“About half Peter’s age, yes. Perhaps that’s what hurt more than anything.”

“But who is she, Mrs. Sherwood?”

Morse had lifted his fiercely blue eyes to challenge hers. Yet to no avail; and it was Lewis who pursued the questioning.

“We’re interested in two telephone calls, Mrs. Sher wood, made about the time your husband died: one just before six o’clock; and one five or ten minutes later. At first we believed both calls were made by the same person. Yesterday, though, a woman rang and admitted making the second call — the one asking for a doctor — but she claimed quite certainly that she hadn’t made any earlier call — a call, we thought, possibly asking for your husband’s room-number, or whatever it was she needed to know. She said she already knew the room-number: he’d gone upstairs with the luggage after checking in, and then come down and actually given her the key — before she drove off to park the car somewhere. So what reason could she have had for ringing him?”

Mrs. Sherwood shrugged her thin shoulders. “Doesn’t seem much point, does there?”

“Do you think it was one of his other lady-loves?”

“Could have been—”

“You , perhaps?” broke in Morse, very quietly.

Rising from her armchair, Mrs. Sherwood walked over to the french window and stood gazing out across the wide lawn.

“Is a wife not allowed to ring her husband? At least he almost always told me where he was staying, if not who he was staying with.”

“What time did you make the call?” continued Morse.

“Six — sixish? As you say.”

“Before or after?”

“Does it matter?”

“You said you’re — what was it? — a bit tight and careful about things like money.”

She nodded. “Silly really. We’d plenty of money — two salaries coming in.”

“You work in a pharmaceutical lab, I think?”

“Part-time, yes.”

“And you’re a Chemistry graduate.”

“Huh! You know all about me. But all you really want to know is about her . Am I right?”

“I’d like to know more about you, though. For example, the phone-rate gets cheaper after six o’clock, doesn’t it? So why didn’t you wait till after six o’clock — it was only a matter of a few minutes.”

“I didn’t think.”

“Come on, Mrs. Sherwood! You can do better than that.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You’ll have to, if you want us to find out who murdered your husband.”

She turned from the window, and in the pale face the eyes were now ablaze.

“Murdered?”

“Yes, murdered.”

“But you’re wrong! He died of a heart attack. That’s what they told me — the medical people — in Oxford.”

“We’ve had a further report from the police pathologist, Mrs. Sherwood. Sergeant!”

Lewis now read out the relevant extract from Dr. Hobson’s second report:

The glass capsule had shattered into small pieces, and the liquid contents had been almost entirely spilled. Our analysis however shows that the original insulin within the capsule had been injected with Sodium Fluoroacetate, a substance readily soluble in water; and extremely poisonous even in the smallest quantity, interfering fatally and almost immediately as it does with the Krebs cycle of metabolism. For obvious reasons this substance is never openly available to the general public.

“But would be available,” added Morse slowly, “to someone working in a pharmaceutical lab.”

“My husband died of a heart attack! I was told so. Are you now saying he didn’t?”