Last Bus to Woodstock (3 page)

At a quarter past midnight Morse came into the restaurant-room where everyone was now gathered. Gaye’s eyes met and held his briefly as he entered, and she felt a strong compulsion about the man. It was not so much that he seemed mentally to be undressing her, as most of the men she knew, but as if he had already done so. She listened to him with interest as he spoke.

He thanked them all for their patience and cooperation. It was getting very late and he didn’t intend to keep them there any longer. They would now know why the police were there. There had been a murder in the courtyard – a young girl with blonde hair. They would appreciate that all the cars in the courtyard must stay where they were until the morning. He knew this meant that some of them would have difficulty getting home, but taxis had been ordered. If anyone wished to report to him or to Sergeant Lewis anything at all which might be of interest or value to the inquiry, however unimportant it might seem, would such a person please stay behind. The rest could go.

To Gaye it seemed an uninspired performance. Happening to be on the scene of a murder ought surely to be a bit more exciting than this? She would go home now, where her mother and her young son would be fast asleep. And even if they weren’t, she couldn’t tell them much, could she? Already the police had been there over an hour and a half. It wasn’t exactly what she’d come to expect from her reading of Holmes or Poirot, who by this time would doubtless have interviewed the chief suspects, and made some startling deductions from the most trivial phenomena.

The murmuring which followed the end of Morse’s brief address died away as most of the customers collected their coats and moved off. Gaye rose, too. Had she seen anything of interest or value? She thought back on the evening. There was, of course, the young man who had found the girl . . . She had seen him before, but she couldn’t quite remember who it was he’d been with, or when. And then she had it – blonde hair! She’d been in the lounge with him only last week. But a lot of girls these days peroxided their hair. Perhaps it was worth mentioning? She decided it was and walked up to Morse.

‘You said the girl who has been murdered had blonde hair.’ Morse looked at her and slowly nodded. ‘I think she was here last week – she was with the man who found her body tonight. I saw them here. I work in the lounge.’

‘That’s very interesting, Miss – er?’

‘Mrs. Mrs McFee.’

‘Please forgive me, Mrs McFee. I thought you might have been wearing all those rings to frighten off the boys who come to drool at you over the counter.’

Gaye felt very angry. He was a hateful man. ‘Look, Inspector whatever your name is, I came to tell you something I thought might be helpful. If you’re going . . .’

‘Mrs McFee,’ broke in Morse gently, looking at her with an open nakedness in his eyes, ‘if I lived anywhere near, I’d come in myself and drool over you every night of the week.’

At just after 1.00 a.m. a primitive, if reasonably effective, relay of arc-lamps was fixed around the courtyard. Morse had instructed Lewis to detain the young man who had found the murdered girl until they had taken the opportunity of investigating the courtyard more closely. The two men now surveyed the scene before them. There was a great deal of blood, and as Sergeant Lewis looked down on her, he felt a deep revulsion against the violence and senselessness of murder. Morse appeared more interested in the starry heavens above.

‘Do you study the stars, Lewis?’

‘I read the horoscopes sometimes, sir.’

Morse appeared not to hear. ‘I once heard of a group of schoolchildren, Lewis, who tried to collect a million matchsticks. After they’d filled the whole of the school premises, they decided they’d have to pack it up.’ Lewis thought it his duty to say something, but all appropriate comment eluded him.

After a while, Morse reverted his attention to more terrestrial things, and the two of them looked down again at the murdered girl. The spanner and the solitary white button lay where Morse had seen them earlier. There was nothing much else to see but for the trail of dried blood that led almost from one end of the back wall to the other.

The young man sat in the manager’s office. His mother, though expecting him to be late, would be getting worried; and so was he. Morse finally came in at 1.30 a.m. whilst the police surgeon, the photographers and the fingerprint men busied themselves about the courtyard.

‘Name?’ he asked.

‘Sanders, John Sanders.’

‘You found the body?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘There’s not much to tell really.’

Morse smiled. ‘Then we needn’t keep you long, need we, Mr Sanders?’

The young man fidgeted. Morse sat opposite him, looked him hard in the eye and waited.

‘Well, I just walked into the courtyard and there she was. I didn’t touch her, but I knew she was dead. I came straight back in to tell the manager.’

Morse nodded. ‘Anything else?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘When were you sick, Mr Sanders?’

‘Oh yes. I was sick.’

‘Was it after or before you saw the girl?’

‘After. It must have upset me seeing her there – sort of shock, I suppose.’

‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’

‘What do you mean?’

Morse sighed. ‘You haven’t got your car here have you?’

‘I haven’t got a car.’

‘Do you usually have a stroll round the courtyard before you go home?’ Sanders said nothing. ‘How much drink did you have tonight?’

‘A few whiskies – I wasn’t drunk.’

‘Mr Sanders, do you want me to find out from someone else?’ It was clear from Sanders’s manner that he hardly welcomed an inquiry along such lines. ‘What time did you come here?’ continued Morse.

‘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.

A
S 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 semidetached 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 pretentions 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, ultramodern, 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 don’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 enquiry 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 particklar 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-à-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.’

It became clear to Lewis that the topic of conversation before his arrival had been horse racing. Morse picked up a copy of
Sporting Life
and walked over to the corner with his assistant.

‘You a betting man, Lewis?’

‘I sometimes put a few bob on the Derby and the National, sir, but I’m not a regular gambler.’

‘You keep it that way,’ said Morse, with a note of seriousness in his voice. ‘But look here, what do you think of that?’ He unfolded the racing paper and pointed to one of the runners in the 3.15 at Chepstow: The Black Prince. ‘Worth a quid, would you say, sergeant?’