Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (22 page)

“Or something,” repeated Lewis.

“Just you bear in mind all the adverse publicity we’re getting about ‘confessions under duress,’ OK? We’ve got to tread carefully, you know that.”

It was still only four o’clock, yet already the afternoon had darkened into early dusk.

“Can you guess, sir, why Dr. Grainger was so worried about
me
interviewing his wife?”

“He probably thought you were a bit crude, Lewis—preferred a sensitive soul like me. And by the way, don’t forget that there are few in the Force more competent at that sort of thing than me.”

“You can’t think of any other reason?”

“You
obviously can.”

Lewis savoured his moment of triumph. “Did you see the wedding-photo just now—the one Dr. Grainger had on the bureau?”

“Well, yes—at a distance.”

“Beautiful woman, Mrs. Grainger—
very
beautiful.”

“Taken quite a few years ago, that photo—she’s probably changed since then.”

“No! You’re wrong about that, sir.”

“How do
you
know?”

“Because I met her very recently. Met her yesterday morning, in fact. In the Westgate Library. She told me her name was Wendy Allsworth. But it isn’t, sir. It’s
Sylvia Grainger.”

“Extraordinary!” said Morse, his voice strangely flat.

“You don’t sound all that surprised.”

“Just tell me one thing. When you took the statement from—from Mrs. Grainger, do you think she knew about the murder?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You
didn’t tell her?”

“No. So unless they planned things—”

“Very doubtful!” interposed Morse.

“—Bayley must have rung her up early that morning.”

“Do you think
he
told her?”

“I don’t think so. If she’d known it was a murder enquiry … No, I don’t think he told her.”

“I agree. She was prepared to go a long way—
did
go a long way. Not that far, though.”

Lewis hesitated. “You’ll excuse me for saying so, but as I said you don’t sound very
surprised
about all this.”

“What? Of course I am. From where I sat I couldn’t have recognized the
Queen
if she’d been in that photo. The old eyes are not as sharp as they were.”

“You
knew
, though, didn’t you?” asked Lewis quietly.

“Not
all
of it, no,” lied Morse.

Yet Lewis’s silence was saddeningly eloquent, and Morse finally nodded. Then sighed deeply.

“I’ve always
told
you, Lewis, haven’t I? The person who finds the body is going to be your prime suspect. That’s always been my philosophy. It’s
compulsive
with these murderers—they want their victim
found
. It’d send ’em crackers if the body lay undiscovered somewhere for any length of time.”

“So?” asked Lewis dejectedly.

“So! So I had Bayley brought in this morning—this lunchtime.”

“While I was with the builder.”

“Yes. And Bayley continues to be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.”

“You interviewed him yourself?”

“Yes. And I just told you, there’s no one in the Force so firmly and fairly competent as me—not in that line of business.”

Lewis was smiling wryly now—first nodding, then shaking his head. He might well have known …

He nodded towards the Graingers’ home: “Shall we go and take
her
in as well?”

“Actually she’s, er, she’s already helping with our enquiries.”

Lewis almost exploded. “But you
can’t
—you
can’t
mean …”

“I do, yes. I had Bayley tailed and he went out to meet Sylvia Grainger—in the bar at The Randolph—about a quarter to twelve, that was. She’d told her husband she was going to her sister’s for a few hours. That’s what she said. So! So there’s really not much point in us sitting here freezing any longer, is there?”

Lewis turned the key in the ignition, the Jaguar spurted into life, and the two detectives now sat silently side by side for several minutes as they drove back down into Oxford.

It was Lewis who spoke first: “You know, it really is nonsense what you say, sir—about the first person finding the body. I just don’t know where the
evidence
is for that. And then you say it’s ‘compulsive’—didn’t you say that?—for murderers to want the body found. But some of ’em take enormous time and trouble for the body
never
to be found.”

“You’re right, I agree. I was exaggerating a bit.”

“So what
did
make you think it was Bayley? There must have been
something.”

“It’s all these wretched crosswords I do. You meet some odd words, you know. The first time I saw Bayley in his room I thought what a great big fat-arsed sod he was. And then, this morning, I read Sheila Poster’s story again—and well, things went sort of ‘click.’ You remember that long word Sheila Poster used—about the odd-job man? Mind you, she
was
an English graduate.”

Lewis did remember, but only vaguely; he’d look it up once they got back to HQ.

“It was always going to be a straightforward case,”
continued Morse. “We’d have been sure to find out where Bayley had been working, sooner or later.”

“ ‘Sooner or later,’ ” repeated Lewis. “And for once I thought it was me who was sooner. It’s just like I said: I’ve got a second-class mind—I’m just like a second-class—”

“Ah! That reminds me. Just pull in here a minute, will you?”

Lewis turned into a slip-road alongside a row of brightly lit shops just before the Thames Valley Police HQ buildings.

“Where exactly—?”

“Here! Here’s fine.”

Morse jabbed a finger to the left, and Lewis braked outside a sub post-office.

“Just nip in and get me a book of stamps, please.”

“First- or second-class?” For some reason Lewis was feeling reasonably happy again.

“No need to go wild, is there? I’ll have one book of second-class, all right? These days they get there almost as quickly as first, you know that.”

Morse had been pushing his hands one after the other into the pockets of overcoat, jacket, trousers—seemingly without success.

“You’ll never believe it, Lewis, but …”

“I think I will, sir. Remember what that fellow Diogenes Small wrote about people’s flights of imagination?”

“You’ve been soaring up there yourself, you mean?”

“Not quite, no. All I’m saying is it wouldn’t take a detective to see what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Which is?”

“You haven’t got any money.”

“Ah!”

Morse looked down silently at the car-mat; and Lewis, now smiling happily, opened the driving-seat door of the Jaguar, and was soon to be seen walking towards the premises of the sub post-office in Kidlington, Oxon.

It wasn’t often that Professor Rawlins bothered her with his personal letters. Occasionally, though—like this afternoon; and like yesterday afternoon, come to think of it. But he always insisted on putting his own stamps on such letters, never allowing them through the Department’s franking-machine. Bit too obviously self-righteous, she thought. She glanced at the tiny gold watch (a wedding present) on her left wrist: almost a quarter to five. TGFF. Thank God For Friday!

Rawlins took off his half-glasses, pinched the top of his nose, turned over a page of his desk diary, lit another cigarette, and looked across at Carol Summerson.

“Professor Smithson’s coming on Monday morning. Will you nip out first thing and get me a bottle of Glenfiddich?”

Carol made a note, closed her shorthand book, uncrossed her elegant legs, and smiled as she looked at him. And he, half smiling himself, looked back across at
her; and she felt pleasingly surprised. (Or was it surprisingly pleased?) There had been so few moments of real communication between them during the three months she’d been working for him—the man she’d more than once heard described as “the cleverest fellow in Oxford.”

She was glad to get out of his office, though. He would never open the window and the smell in the room was invariably horrid. How she wished he’d stop smoking! (John never smoked, thank goodness.) How old was he? Sixty? Overweight, and with a chest that sounded like a loose-strung harp, he was just the sort to die before his time from heart trouble or lung cancer or chronic bronchitis or emphysema—or like as not the whole lot of them listed on his death certificate. Why didn’t his
wife
do something about him, for Christ’s sake?

“Good night, sir,” she heard herself say; and for a moment she fancied that she’d almost like to look after him herself.

John was waiting for her, sitting on his wife’s swivel-chair and turning over the papers that lay on her desk. (He always picked Carol up on Fridays.) While she was out in the cloakroom, he looked through a few more recent carbons, each neatly stapled to its originating letter. One carbon in particular caught his eye:

Carol looked at her husband as she re-entered her office. At twenty-two, he was a year younger than herself; yet in many ways since their marriage two years previously, he’d shown himself the more mature, the more dependable, of the two. There had been a few patches of squabbling—mostly her fault; and the one continuing sadness … But she was glad she’d married him.

That, at least, is what Carol Summerson was telling herself that December afternoon.

“You reading my boss’s correspondence again?”

He nodded.

“Interesting?”

“Not really.”

As she unhooked her coat from the wall-cupboard, John glanced quickly at the originating letter, stapled behind the carbon he had just been reading. A letterhead announced a “J. Wingate, Gunsmith,” with an address in Guildford, the letter itself reporting the forthcoming auction of a revolver that had belonged to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery—reserve price £3,000.

“I didn’t know he was interested in revolvers,” said John, unlocking the nearside door to the Metro.

“I’ve told you
before
. You shouldn’t read—”

“Didn’t mind, did you?”

“Course not!” She brushed her full lips against his cheek as she fastened her safety-belt.

“His big hobby. One of the girls went to his house once when he’d got bronchitis or something and she said he’d got all these revolvers like in cases sort of thing hanging round the walls. Not very nice really, is it? You’d think that with all those young children—”

She stopped suddenly and a silence fell between them.

At 5:20
P.M.
Rawlins locked the door of his office and left the Department. Florence (at thirty-two, exactly half his age) would have the fish all ready. TGFF. Thank God For Florence!

That night, for no immediately apparent reason, Frank Rawlins dreamed of Carol Summerson.

It was just before 11
A.M.
the following Monday that Smithson arrived. Carol was not introduced to him, but from her adjacent room she could hear his voice; could hear, too, the occasional gurgle of Glenfiddich and the clink of the office glasses. Just over an hour later, after the pair of them had walked past her window, she entered Rawlins’s office, took the two glasses, washed them out in the ladies’ loo, and bent down to put them back in the cupboard beside the bottle—now empty.

“Hello!”

She hadn’t heard him come back in, and she felt slightly confused as he steered her by the elbow into her own office.

“Don’t you think it’s about time I treated my confidential secretary to lunch?”

He looked—and sounded—surprisingly sober; and she
felt flattered. Soon he was holding her coat ready, and she was slipping her arms into the sleeves.

Easily.

He was interesting—no doubt about that. He told her of the time he and Smithson had worked together in a VD clinic in Vienna; and as he reminisced of this and other experiences Carol felt herself enriched, and newly important.

“Another?”

“I’ve had enough, thank you.”

“Nonsense!” He picked up her glass and made his slightly unsteady way to the bar once more.

Her third gin-and-tonic tasted strong. Nice, though! Was it a double? His own drink looked very much like the orange juice he’d promised himself; and after he’d left her to visit the gents’ she took a sip of it: it tasted even more strongly of gin than hers.