Last Bus to Woodstock (6 page)

‘They got the crook in the picture,’ said Sandra.

‘And on the telly,’ said Ruth.

‘You shouldn’t believe all you see,’ said Judith.

Morse was sitting in his office at midday, when Lewis came in. ‘Well, sir? Any good?’

Morse shook his head.

‘No good at all?’

‘She thought two or three of them might be her.’

‘Well, that narrows it down a bit, sir.’

‘Not really. I’ve heard defending counsels make powdered mincemeat out of witnesses who swore on their grandfathers’ graves that they were absolutely
positive
about an identification. No, Lewis. It doesn’t help us much, I’m afraid.’

‘What about your other idea, sir? You know, the girl had a funny splayed sort of run.’

‘Oh, we got them to run all right.’

Lewis sensed he had landed on a sore point. ‘No good, sir.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘That’s right, Lewis. No good. And it might have occurred, it might just have occurred, Lewis, to members of the crime squad, to me, Lewis, and to you, that all girls run in the
same ham-footed bloody way
.’ He blasted the last few words at his sergeant, who waited for the hurricane to subside.

‘You could do with a pint of beer, sir.’

Morse looked a little happier. ‘You may be right.’

‘I’ve got a bit of news, sir.’

‘Let’s have it.’

‘Well, the bus – that’s out. I got the driver and conductor of the 6.30 p.m. 4E from Carfax. There were only a dozen or so on the bus anyway, most of them regulars. Our two girls pretty certainly didn’t get to Woodstock by bus.’

‘We don’t know for certain that both of them got to Woodstock anyway,’ said Morse.

‘But Sylvia got there, didn’t she, sir, and the other girl asked for the bus there?’

‘I’m beginning to wonder if Mrs Jarman is such a helpful witness, after all.’

‘I think she is, because that’s only the bad news.’

‘You’ve got some
good
news?’ Morse tried to sound a bit more cheerful.

‘Well, it’s that lorry the old girl told us about. Quite easy really to trace it. You see at Cowley there’s this system with car-bodies. When they . . .’

‘Yes, I know. You did a sharp job, Lewis. But cut the trimmings.’

‘He remembers them. A Mr George Baker – lives in Oxford. And listen to this, sir. He saw the two girls getting into a car. A
red
car – he was sure of that. Chap driving – not a woman. He remembered because he often picks up hitchers, especially if they’re girls; and he saw these two just beyond the roundabout – about fifty yards ahead. He would have given them a lift, he said, but this other car pulls up, and he has to pull out to get past. He saw the blonde all right.’

‘We’re a despicable lot, aren’t we?’ said Morse. ‘Would you have picked them up?’

‘I don’t usually, sir. Only if they’re in uniform. I was glad of a few lifts myself when I was in the Forces.’

Morse reflected carefully on the new evidence. Things were certainly moving.

‘What did you say about a pint?’

They sat silently in the White Horse at Kidlington and Morse decided that the beer was drinkable. Finally he broke the silence. ‘A red car, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Interesting piece of research for you. How many men in Oxford own red cars?’

‘Quite a few, sir.’

‘You mean a few thousand.’

‘I suppose so.

‘But we could find out?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Such a problem would not be beyond the wit of our efficient force?’

‘I suppose not, sir.’

‘But what if he doesn’t live in Oxford?’

‘Well, yes. There is that.’

‘Lewis, I think the beer is dulling your brain.’

But if alcohol was dimming Lewis’s intellectual acumen, it had the opposite effect on Morse. His mind began to function with an easy clarity. He ordered Lewis to take the weekend off, to get some sleep, to forget Sylvia Kaye, and to take his wife shopping; and Lewis was happy to do so.

Morse, not an addictive smoker, bought twenty king sized cigarettes and smoked and drank continuously until 2.00 p.m. What had really happened last Wednesday evening? He was tormented by the thought that a sequence of events, not in themselves extraordinary, had taken place; that each event was the logical successor of the one before it; that he knew what one or two of these events had been; that if only his mind could project itself into a series of naturally causal relationships, he would have it all. It needed no startling, visionary leap from ignorance to enlightenment. Just a series of logical progressions. But each progression landed him at a dead end, like the drawings in children’s annuals where one thread leads to the treasure and all the others lead to the edge of the page. Start again.

‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to drink up,’ said the landlord.

M
ORSE SPENT THE
afternoon of Saturday, 2 October, sitting mildly drunk in his office. He had smoked his packet of cigarettes by 4.30 p.m. and rang for more. His mind grew clearer and clearer. He thought he saw the vaguest pattern in the events of the evening of Wednesday, 29 September. No names – no idea of names, yet – but a pattern.

He looked through the letters he had copied from the Town and Gown: they seemed a sorry little package. Some he dismissed immediately: not even a deranged psychiatrist could have built the flimsiest hypotheses on five of the nine pieces of evidence. One of the postcards read: ‘Dear Ruth, Weather good, went swimming twice yesterday. Saw a dead jellyfish on the beach. Love, T.’ How very sad to be a jellyfish, thought Morse. Only three of the communications held Morse’s attention; then two; then one. It was a typewritten note addressed to Miss Jennifer Coleby and it read:

It was subscribed by someone who did not appear particularly anxious that his name be shouted from the house-tops. An initial ‘G’ was clear enough, but the surname to which it was floridly appended would have remained an enigma to the great Champollion himself.

So Miss Jennifer Coleby is after a new job, said Morse to himself. So what? Hundreds of people applied for new jobs every day. He sometimes thought of doing so himself. He wondered why he’d thought the letter worth a second thought. Typically badly written – unforgivable misprints. And misspellings. No one in the schools cared much these days about the bread-and-butter mechanisms of English usage. He’d been brought up in the hard school: errors of spelling, punctuation and construction of sentences had been savagely penalized by outraged pedagogues, and this had made its mark on him. He had become pedantic and fussy and thought back on the ill-written travesty of a report he had read from one of his own staff only two days before, when he had mentally totted up the mistakes like an examiner assessing a candidate’s work. ‘Asessing.’ Yes, that was wrong in this letter – among other things. The country was becoming increasingly illiterate – for all the fancy notions of the progressive educationalists. But if his own secretary had produced such rubbish, she would be out on her neck – today! But she was exceptional. Julie’s initials at the bottom of any letter were the sure imprimatur of a clean and flawless sheet of typing. Just a minute though . . . Morse looked again at the letter before him. No reference at all. Had G. Thingamajig typed it himself? If he had – what was he? A senior administrator of some university department? If he had . . . Morse grew more and more puzzled. Why was there no letter heading? Was he worrying his head over nothing?

Well, there was one way of deciding the issue. He looked at his watch. Already 5.30 p.m. Miss Coleby would probably be at home now, he thought. Where did she live? He looked at Lewis’s careful details of the address in North Oxford. An interesting thought? Morse began to realize how many avenues he had not even started to explore. He put on his greatcoat and went out to his car. As he drove the two miles down into Oxford, he resolved that he would rid himself as far as he could of all prejudice against Miss Jennifer Coleby. But it was not an easy thing to do; for, if Mrs Jarman’s memory could be trusted, the ambitious Miss Coleby was one of the three girls who may have made the journey to Woodstock that night with the late Miss Sylvia Kaye.

Jennifer Coleby rented, with two other working girls, a semi-detached property in Charlton Road where each paid a weekly rent of £8.25, inclusive of electricity and gas. It meant a fat rake-off of almost £25 a week for the provident landlord who had snapped up two such properties for what now seemed a meagre £6,500 some six years since. But it was also a blessing for three enterprising girls who, for such a manageable outlay, were reasonably happy to share the narrow bathroom and the even narrower lavatory. Each girl had a bedroom (one downstairs), the kitchen was adequate for their evening meals, and all of them used the lounge in which to sit around, to chat and watch TV when they were in. These arrangements, apart from the bathroom, worked surprisingly well. Seldom were the girls in together during the day, and so far they had avoided any major confrontation. The landlord had forbidden men-friends in the bedrooms and the girls had accepted this Diktat without contention. There had, of course, been a few infractions of the ban, but the household had never degenerated into overt promiscuity. One rule the girls imposed upon themselves – no record players; and for this, at least, their elderly neighbours were profoundly grateful. The house was kept tidy and clean, as Morse immediately saw as the door was opened by a sad girl eating a tomato sandwich.

‘I’ve called to see Miss Coleby, if I may. Is she in?’

Dark, languorous eyes looked at him carefully, and Morse found himself tempted to wink at her.

‘Just a minute.’ She walked leisurely away, but suddenly turned her head to ask, ‘Who shall I say?’

‘Er, Morse. Chief Inspector Morse.’

‘Oh.’

A cool, clean-looking Jennifer, dressed in blouse and jeans, came out to greet Morse, without apparent enthusiasm.

‘Can I help you, Inspector?’

‘I wonder if we could have a few words together? Is it convenient?’

‘It will have to be, I suppose. You’d better come in.’

Morse was shown into the lounge, where Miss Dark-eyes sat pretending to be deeply engrossed in a report on the Arsenal v. Tottenham match.

‘Sue, this is Inspector Morse. Do you mind if we speak here?’

Sue stood up, and a little too theatrically, thought Morse, switched off the set. He observed her slow, graceful movements and smiled to himself, approvingly. ‘I’ll be upstairs, Jen.’ She glanced at Morse before she left, saw the incipient smile at the corners of his mouth and afterwards swore to Jennifer that he had winked at her.

Jennifer motioned Morse to sit on the settee, and sat opposite him in an armchair.

‘How can I help, Inspector?’

Morse noticed a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette
balancing like a circumflex accent over the arm of her chair.

‘I’m having – purely routine, of course – to check the movements of all the er . . . persons . . .’

‘Suspects?’

‘No, no. Those who worked with Sylvia. You understand that this sort of thing has to be done.’

‘Of course. I’m surprised you haven’t done it before.’ Morse was a little taken aback. Indeed, why
hadn’t
he done it before? Jennifer continued. ‘Last Wednesday evening, I got home a bit later than usual – I went round Blackwells to spend a book token. It was my birthday last week. I got home about six, I should think. You know what the traffic’s like in the rush hour.’ Morse nodded. ‘Well, I had a bit to eat – the other girls were here – and went out about, let’s see, about half past six I should think. I got back about eight – perhaps a bit later.’

‘Can you tell me where you went?’

‘I went to the Summertown library.’

‘What time does the library close?’

‘Seven-thirty.’

‘You spent about an hour there.’

‘That seems to be a reasonable conclusion, Inspector.’

‘It seems a long time. I usually spend about two minutes.’

‘Perhaps you’re not very fussy what you read.’

That’s a point, thought Morse. Jennifer spoke with an easy, clear diction. A good education, he thought. But there was more than that. There was a disciplined independence about the girl, and he wondered how she got on with men. He thought it would be difficult to make much headway with this young lady – unless, of course,
she
wanted to. She could, he suspected, be very nice indeed.

‘Are you reading that?’

She laid a delicately manicured hand lightly upon
Villette
. ‘Yes. Have you read it?’

‘’Fraid not,’ confessed Morse.

‘You should do.’

‘I’ll try to remember,’ muttered Morse. Who was supposed to be conducting this interview? ‘Er, you stayed an hour?’

‘I’ve told you that.’

‘Did anyone see you there?’

‘They’d have a job not to, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, I suppose they would.’ Morse felt he was losing his way. ‘Did you get anything else out?’ He suddenly felt a bit better.

‘You’ll be interested to know that I got that as well.’ She pointed to a large volume, also lying open, on the carpet in front of the TV set. ‘Mary’s started to read it.’ Morse picked it up and looked at the title.
Who was Jack the Ripper?

‘Mm.’

‘I’m sure you’ve read that.’

Morse’s morale began to sag again. ‘I don’t think I’ve read that particular account, no.’

Jennifer suddenly smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I’m very much of a bookworm myself, and I have far more spare time than you, I’m sure.’