Last Seen Wearing Part 14

Baines got up, savouring supremely the moment of his power. 'Don't push me too far, Phillipson!

And just remember who you're talking to.'

162.

'Get out!' hissed Phillipson. The blood was pounding in his ears, and although a non-smoker he longed to light a cigarette. He sat motionless at his desk for many minutes and wondered how much longer the nightmare could go on. What a relief it would be to end it all - one way or another...

Gradually he grew calmer, and his mind wandered back again. How long ago was it now? Over three and a half years! And still the memory of that night came back to haunt him like a ghost unexorcized. That night ... He could picture it all so vividly still...

He felt quite pleased with himself. Difficult to tell for certain, of course; but yes, quite pleased with himself really. As accurately as it could his mind retraced the stages of the day's events; the questions'of the interviewing committee - wise and foolish; and his own answers - carefully considered...

163.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

In philological works ... a dagger t signifies an obsolete word. The ... sign, placed before a person's name, signifies deceased.

Rules for Compositors and Readers, OUP THIS SAME MONDAY night or, to be accurate, Tuesday morning, Morse was not in bed until 2.00 a.m., overtired and underbeered. The euphoria of the earlier part of the day had now completely pa.s.sed, partly as a result of Lewis's sceptical disparagement, but more significantly because of his own inability ever to fool himself for very long. He still believed that some of the pieces had clicked into place, but knew that many didn't fit at all; and a few didn't even look like pieces of the same jigsaw. He recollected how in the army he had been given a test for colour-blindness. A sheet of paper on which a chaotically confused conglomeration of colour blocks were printed had been magically metamorphosed when looked at through differently-coloured filter slides; a red filter, and there appeared an elephant; a blue filter, and a lion leaped out at the eyes; a green filter, and behold the donkey! Donkey... He'd been reading something about a donkey only a few days ago. Where had he read it? Morse was not a systematic reader, he was a dipper-in. He looked at the 164 small pile of books on his bedside table underneath the alarm clock. The Road to Xanadu, A Selection of Kipling's Short Stones, The Life of Richard Wagner and Selected Prose of A. E.

Housman. It was in Housman, surely, that bit about the donkey who couldn't make up its asinine mind which bundle of hay to start on first. Hadn't the stupid animal finally died of starvation? He soon found the pa.s.sage: An editor of no judgement, perpetually confronted with a couple of MSS to choose from, cannot but feel in every fibre of his being that he is a donkey between two bundles of hay.

Two MSS, and no judgement! That summed it up perfectly. One MS told him that Valerie Taylor was alive, and the other told him she was dead. And he still didn't know which MS a man of judgement should settle for. Oh Lord! Which of the wretched MSS had the correct reading? Had either?

He knew that at this rate he would never go to sleep, and he told himself to forget it all and think of something else. He picked up Kipling and began rereading his favourite short story, Love O' Women. He firmly believed that Kipling knew more about women than Kinsey ever had, and he came back to a pa.s.sage marked with vertical lines in the margin: ... as you say, sorr, he was a man with an educas.h.i.+n, an' he used ut for his schames; an' the same educas.h.i.+n an' talkin' an' all that made him able to do 165 fwhat he had a mind to wid a woman, that same wud turn back again in the long-run an' tear him alive.

Phew!

He thought back on what he'd learned about Valerie's s.e.x life. Nothing much, really. He thought of Maguire, and half-remembered something Maguire had said that didn't quite ring true. But he couldn't quite get hold of it and the memory slipped away again like a bar of soap in the bath.

Educas.h.i.+n. Most people were more interesting for a bit of education. More interesting to women ... some of these young girls must soon get tired of the drib-drab, wishy-washy drivel that sometimes pa.s.sed for conversation. Some of them liked older men for just that reason; interesting men with some show of pretence for cultured pursuits, with a smattering of knowledge -with something more in mind than fiddling for their bra-straps after a couple of whiskies.

What was Valerie like? Had she gone for the older men? Phillipson? Baines? But surely not Baines. Some of her teachers, perhaps? Ac.u.m? He couldn't remember the other names. And then he suddenly caught the bar of soap. He'd asked Maguire how many times he'd been to bed with Valerie, and Maguire had said a dozen or so. And Morse had told him to come off it and tell him the truth, fully expecting a considerably increased count of casual copulations. But no.

Maguire had come down, hadn't he? 'Well, three or four,' he'd said. Something like that.

Probably hadn't slept with her at all? Morse sat up and considered. Why, ah why, hadn't 166 he pressed this point with Maguire when he had seen him yesterday? Was she really pregnant after all? He had a.s.sumed so, and Maguire had seemingly confirmed his suspicions. But was she?

It made sense if she was. But made sense of what? Of the preconceived pattern that Morse was building up, and into which, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, the pieces were being forced into their places.

If only he knew what the problem was. Then he wouldn't be quite so restless, even if it proved beyond his powers. Problem! He remembered his old Latin master. Hm! Whenever he was confronted with an insoluble difficulty - a crux in the text, an absurdly complex chunk of syntax - he would turn to his cla.s.s with a serious mien: 'Gentlemen, having looked this problem boldly in the face, we must now, I think, pa.s.s on.' Morse smiled at the recollection ... It was getting very late. A crux in the Oxford Cla.s.sical Text, marked by daggers ... the daggered text ... He was falling asleep. Texts, ma.n.u.scripts, and a donkey in the middle braying and bellyaching, not knowing which way to turn ... like Morse, like himself..;. His head fell to the right and his ear strained no more for the incomprehensible nocturnal clues. He fell asleep, the light still burning and Kipling's stories still held loosely in his hand.

Earlier the same evening Baines had opened his front door to find an unexpected visitor.

'Well, well! This is a surprise. Come in, won't you? Shall I take your coat?'

167.

'No. I'll keep it on.'

'Well, at least you'll have a drop of something to cheer you up, eh? Can I offer you a gla.s.s of something? Nothing much in, though, I'm afraid.'

'If you like.'

His visitor following behind, Baines walked through to the small kitchen, opened the fridge, and looked inside. 'Beer? Lager?'

Baines squatted on his haunches and reached inside. His left hand lay on the top of the fridge, the fingernails slightly dirty; his right hand reached far in as he bent forward. There were two bald patches on the top of his head, with a greying tuft of hair between them, temporarily thwarting the impending merger. He wore no tie, and the collar of his light-blue s.h.i.+rt was grubbily lined. He would have changed it the next day.

168.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard FULL MORNING a.s.sEMBLY at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School began at 8.50. The staff stood at the back of the main hall, wearing (at least those authorized to do so) the insignia of their respective universities; it was something the head insisted on. Punctual to the second, and flanked at some short distance in the rear by the second master and the senior mistress, Phillipson, begowned and behooded, walked from the back of the hall, and the pupils rose to their feet as the procession made its way down the central gangway, climbed the short flight of steps at the side and mounted on to the stage itself. The routine seldom varied: a hymn sung, a prayer intoned, a pa.s.sage read from Holy Writ - and paid for one more day were the proper respects to the Almighty. The last unsynchron-ized 'Amen' marked the end of morning devotions, and gave the cue to the second master to recall the attention of the a.s.sembled host to more terrestrial things. Each morning he announced, in clear, unhurried tones, any changes in the day's procedure necessitated by staff absences, house activities, the times and places of 169 society meetings, and the results of the sports teams. And, always, reserved until the end, he read with doomsday gravity a list of names; the names of pupils who would report outside the staff room immediately after the a.s.sembly was finished: the recalcitrants, the anarchists, the obstructionists, the truants, the skivers, and the defectors in general from the rules that governed the corporate life of the establishment.

As the procession walked up the central aisle on Tuesday morning, and as the school rose en bloc from their seats, several heads turned towards each other and many whispered voices asked where Raines could be; not even the oldest pupils could remember him being away for a single day before. The senior mistress looked lopsided and lost: it was like the dissoludon of the Trinity.

Phillipson himself read the nodces, referring in no way to the absence of his adjutant. The girls'

hockey team had achieved a rare and decisive victory, and the school greeted the news with unwonted enthusiasm. The chess club would meet in the physics lab and 4C (for unspecified criminality) would be staying in after school. The following pupils, etc., etc. Phillip-son turned away from the rostrum and walked out through the wings. The school chattered noisily and prepared to go to their cla.s.srooms.

At lunchtime Phillipson spoke to his secretary. 'No word from Mr Baines yet?' 'Nothing. Do you think we should give him a ring?'

170.

Phillipson considered for a moment. 'Perhaps we should. What do you think?'

'Not like him to be away, is it?'

'No, it isn't. Give him a ring now.'

Mrs Webb rang Baines's Oxford number and the distant burring seemed to echo in a vaulted, ominous silence.

'There's no answer,' she said.

At 2.15 p.m. a middle-aged woman took from her handbag the key to Baines's house; she cleaned for him three afternoons a week. Oddly, the door was unlocked and she pushed it open and walked in. The curtains were still drawn and the electric light was still turned on in the living room, as well as in the kitchen, the door to which stood open wide. And even before she walked through to the kitchen she saw the slumped figure of Baines in front of the refrigerator, a long-handled household knife plunged deep into his back, the dried blood forming a horrid blotch upon the cotton s.h.i.+rt, like a deranged artist's study in claret and blue.

She screamed hysterically.

It was 4.30 p.m. before the fingerprint man and the photographer were finished, and before the humpbacked surgeon straightened his afflicted spine as far as nature would permit 171 'Well?'asked Morse.

'Difficult to say. Anywhere from sixteen to twenty hours.'

'Can't you pin it down any closer?'

'No.'

Morse had been in the house just over an hour, for much of which time he had been sitting abstractedly in one of the armchairs in the living room, waiting for the others to leave. He doubted they could tell him much, anyway. No signs of forcible entry, nothing stolen (or not apparently so), no fingerprints, no blood-stained footprints. Just a dead man, and a deep pool of blood and a fridge with an open door.

A police car jerked to a halt outside and Lewis came in. 'He wasn't at school this morning, sir.'

'Hardly surprising,' said Morse, without any conscious humour.

'Do we know when he was murdered?'

'Between eight o'clock and midnight, they say.'

'Pretty vague, sir.'

Morse nodded.'Pretty vague.'

'Did you expect something like this to happen?'

Morse shook his head. 'Never dreamed of it.'

'Do you think it's all connected?'

'What do you think?'

'Somebody probably thought that Baines was going to tell us what he knew.' Morse grunted noncommittally. 'Funny, isn't it, sir?' Lewis glanced at his watch. 'He'd have told us by now, wouldn't he? And I've been thinking, sir.' He looked earnestly at the inspector. 'There weren't many who knew you were going to 172.

see Baines this afternoon, were there? Only Phillipson really.'

'Each of them could have told somebody else.'

*Yes, but-'

'Oh, it's a good point I see what you're getting at How did Phillipson take the news, by the way?"

'Seemed pretty shattered, sir.'

'I wonder where he was between eight o'clock and midnight,' mumbled Morse, half to himself, as he eased himself out of the armchair. 'We'd better try to look like detectives, Lewis.'

The ambulance men asked if they could have the body, and Morse walked with them into the kitchen. Baines had been eased gently on to his right side, and Morse bent down and eased the knife slowly from the second master's back. What an ugly business murder was. It was a wooden-handled carving knife. 'Prestige, Made in England', some 35-36 centimetres long, the cutting blade honed along its entire edge to a razor-sharp ferocity. Globules of fresh pink blood oozed from the wicked-looking wound, and gradually seeped over the stiff clotted mess dial once had been a blue s.h.i.+rt They took Baines away in a white sheet.

You know, Lewis, I think whoever killed him was b.l.o.o.d.y lucky. It's not too easy to stab a man in the back, you know. You've got to miss the spinal column and the ribs and the shoulder blades, and even then you've got to be lucky to kill someone straight off. Baines must have been leaning forward, slighdy over to his right and exposing about the one place that makes it comparatively easy. Just like going dirough a joint of beef.'

173.

Lewis loathed the sight of death, and he felt his stomach turning over. He walked to the sink for a gla.s.s of water. The cudery and the crockery from Raines's last meal were washed up and ready stacked on the draining board, the dish cloth squeezed out and draped over the bowl.

'Perhaps the post-mortem'll tell us what time he had his supper,' suggested Lewis hopefully.

Morse was unenthusiastic. He followed Lewis to the sink and looked around half-heartedly. He opened the drawer at the right of the sink unit. The usual collection: teaspoons, tablespoons, wooden spoons, a fish slice, two corkscrews, kitchen scissors, a potato peeler, various meat skewers, a steel - and a kitchen knife. Morse picked up the knife and looked at it carefully. The handle was bone, and the blade was worn away with constant sharpening into a narrowed strip.

'He's had Uiis a good while,' said Morse. He ran his finger along the blade; it had almost the same cruel sharpness as the blade that had lodged its head in Baines's heart.

'How many carving knives do you keep at home, Lewis?'

'Just the one.'

'You wouldn' t think of buying another one?'

'No point, really, is there?"

'No,' said Morse. He placed the murder weapon on the kitchen table and looked around. There seemed singularly little point in any inspection, however intelli-gently directed, of the tins of processed peas and preserved plums dial lined the shelves of the narrow larder.

174.

'Let's move next door, Lewis. You take the desk; I'll have a look at the books.'

Most of the bookshelves were taken up with works on mathematics, and Morse looked with some interest at a comprehensive set of textbooks on the School Mathematics Project, lined up in correct order from Book 1 to Book 10, and beside them the corresponding Teacher's Guide for each volume. Morse delved diffidently into Book 1.

'Know anything about modern maths, Lewis?'

'Modern maths? Ha! I'm an acknowledged expert. I do all the kids' maths homework.'

'Oh.' Morse decided to puzzle his brain no more on how 23 in base 10 could be expressed in base 5, replaced the volume, and inspected the rest of Baines's library. He'd been numerate all right.

But literate? Doubtful. On the whole Morse felt slightly more sympathy with Maguire's uncompromising collection.

As he stood by the shelves the grim, brutal fact of Baines's murder slowly sank into his mind. As yet it figured as an isolated issue; he'd had no chance of thinking of it in any other context. But he would be doing so soon, very soon. In fact some of the basic implications were already apparent. Or was he fooling himself again? No. It meant, for a start, that the donkey knew for certain which bundle of hay to go for, and that, at least, was one step forward. Baines must have known something. Correction. Baines must have known virtually everything. Was that the reason for his death, though? It seemed the likeliest explanation. But who had killed him? Who? From the look of things the 175.

murderer must have been known to Baines - known pretty well; must have walked into the kitchen and stood there as Baines reached inside the fridge for something. And the murderer had carried a knife -surely that was a reasonable inference? Had brought the knife into the house.

But how the h.e.l.l did anyone carry a knife as big as that around? Stuff it down your socks, perhaps? Unless ...

From across the room a low-pitched whistle of staggering disbelief postponed any answers that might have been forthcoming to these and similar questions. Lewis's facial expression was one of thrilled excitement mingled with pained incredulity.

"You'd better come over here straight away, sir." Morse himself looked down into the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk; and he felt the hairs at the nape of his neck grow stiff. A book lay in the drawer, an exercise book; an exercise book from the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School; and on the front of the exercise book a name, a most familiar name, was inscribed in capital letters: VALERIE TAYLOR: APPLIED SCIENCE. The two men looked at each other and said nodiing.

Finally Morse picked up the book gently, placing the top of each index finger along the spine; and as he did so, two loose sheets of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. Morse picked them up and placed them on the desk. The sheets contained drafts of a short letter; a letter which began Dear Mum and Dad and ended Love Valerie. Several individual words were crossed out and the identical words, but with minor alterations to the lettering, written above them; and 176 between the drafts were whole lines of individual letters, practised and slowly perfected: w's, r's, and t's. It was Lewis who broke the long silence.

'Looks as if you're not the only forger in the case, sir.' Morse made no reply. Somewhere at the back of his mind something clicked smoothly into place. So far in the case he had managed to catch a few of the half-whispers and from them half-divine the truth; but now it seemed the facts were shouting at him through a megaphone.

Baines, it was clear, had written the letter to Valerie's parents; and the evidence for Valerie being still alive was down to zero on the scale of probabilities. In one way Morse was glad; and in another he felt a deep and poignant sadness. For life was sweet, and we each of us had our own little hopes, and few of us exhibited overmuch anxiety to quit this vale of misery and tears.