Last Bus to Woodstock (7 page)

‘Coming back to Wednesday a minute, Miss Coleby. You say you were back about eight.’

‘Yes, about then. It could have been quarter past, even half past, I suppose.’

‘Was anyone in when you got back?’

‘Yes. Sue was in. But Mary had gone off to the pictures.
Day of the Jackal
I think it was; she didn’t get back until eleven.’

‘I see.’

‘Shall I ask Sue to come down?’

‘No. No need to bother.’ Morse realized he was probably wasting his time, but he stuck it out. ‘How long does it take to walk to the library?’

‘About ten minutes.’

‘But it took you almost an hour, perhaps, if you didn’t get back until eight-thirty?’

Again the pleasant smile, the regular white teeth, a hint of gentle mockery around the lips. ‘Inspector, I think we’d better ask Sue if she remembers the time, don’t you?’

‘Perhaps we should,’ said Morse.

When Jennifer left the room Morse was looking around with sombre, weary eyes, when suddenly a thought flashed through his mind. He was deadly quick as he picked up
Villette
, turned to the inside of the cover and deftly replaced it over the arm of the chair. Sue came in, and quickly confirmed that as far as she could remember Jennifer had been back in the house at some time after eight. She couldn’t be more precise. Morse got up to take his leave. He hadn’t mentioned the very thing he had come to discuss, and he wasn’t going to. That could come later.

He sat for a few minutes in the driving seat of his car and his blood ran hot and cold. He had not quite been able to believe his eyes. But he’d seen it in black and white, or rather dark blue on white.

Morse knew the Oxford library routine only too well, for he rarely returned his own irregular borrowings without having to pay a late fine. The library worked in weeks, not days, for books borrowed, and the day that every ‘week’ began was Wednesday. If a book was borrowed on a Wednesday, the date for return was exactly 14 days later – that Wednesday fortnight. If a book was borrowed on Thursday, the date for return was a fortnight after the following Wednesday, 20 days later. The date-stamp was changed each Thursday morning. This working from Wednesday to Wednesday simplified matters considerably for the library assistants and was warmly welcomed by those borrowers who found seven or eight hundred pages an excessive assignment inside just fourteen days. Morse would have to check, of course, but he felt certain that only those who borrowed books on Wednesday had to return books within the strict 14-day limit. Anyone taking out a book
on any other day
would have a few extra days’ grace. If Jennifer Coleby had taken
Villette
from the library on Wednesday last, the date-stamp for return would have read Wednesday, 13 October. But it didn’t.
It read Wednesday, 20 October
. Morse knew beyond any reasonable doubt that Jennifer had lied to him about her movements on the night of the murder. And why? To that vital question there seemed one very simple answer.

Morse sat still in his car outside the house. From the corner of his eye he saw the lounge curtain twitch slightly, but he could see no one. Whoever it was, he decided to let things stew a while longer. He could do with a breath of fresh air, anyway. He locked the car doors and sauntered gently down the road, turned left into the Banbury Road and walked more briskly now towards the library. He timed himself carefully: nine and a half minutes. Interesting. He walked up to the library door marked
PUSH
. But it didn’t push. The library had closed its doors two hours ago.

B
ERNARD
C
ROWTHER
’
S WIFE
, Margaret, disliked the weekends, and effected her household management in such a way that neither her husband nor her twelve-year-old daughter nor her ten-year-old son enjoyed them very much either. Margaret had a part-time job in the School of Oriental Studies, and suspected that throughout the week she put in more hours of solid work than her gentle, bookish husband and her idle, selfish offspring put together. The weekend,
they
all assumed, was a time of well-earned relaxation; but they didn’t think of her. ‘What’s for breakfast, mum?’ ‘Isn’t dinner ready yet?’ Besides which, she did her week’s wash on Saturday afternoons and tried her best to clean the house on Sundays. She sometimes thought that she was going mad.

At 5.30 on the afternoon of Saturday, 2 October, she stood at the sink with bitter thoughts. She had cooked poached eggs for tea (‘What, again?’) and was now washing up the sticky yellow plates. The children were glued to the television and wouldn’t be bored again for an hour or so yet. Bernard (she ought to be thankful for small mercies) was cutting the privet hedge at the back of the house. She knew how he hated gardening, but that was one thing she was
not
going to do. She wished he would get a move on. The meticulous care he devoted to each square foot of the wretched hedge exasperated her. He’d be in soon to say his arms were aching. She looked at him. He was balding now and getting stout, but he was still, she supposed, an attractive man to some women. Until recently she had never regretted that she had married him fifteen years ago. Did she regret the children? She wasn’t sure. From the time they were in arms she had been worried by her inability to gossip in easy, cosy terms with other mums about the precious little darlings. She had read a book on Mothercraft and came to the worrying conclusion that much of motherhood was distasteful to her – even nauseating. Her maternal instincts, she decided, were sadly underdeveloped. As the children grew into toddlers, she had enjoyed them more, and on occasion she had only little difficulty in convincing herself that she loved them both dearly. But now they seemed to be getting older and worse. Thoughtless, selfish and cheeky. Perhaps it was all her fault – or Bernard’s. She looked out again as she stacked the last of the plates upright on the draining rack.

It was already getting dusk after another glorious day. She wondered, like the bees, if these warm days would never cease . . . Bernard had managed to advance the neatly clipped and rounded hedge by half a foot in the last five minutes. She wondered what he was thinking about, but she knew that she couldn’t ask him.

The truth was, and Margaret had descried it dimly for several years now, that they were drifting apart. Was that her fault, too? Did Bernard realize it? She thought he did. She wished she could leave him, leaving everything and go off somewhere and start a new life. But of course she couldn’t. She would have to stick it out. Unless something tragic happened – or was it
until
something tragic happened? And then she knew she would stand by him – in spite of everything.

Margaret wiped the formica tops around the sink, lit a cigarette and went to sit in the dining-room. She just could not face the petty arguments and the noise in the lounge. She picked up the book Bernard had been reading that afternoon,
The Collected Works of Ernest Dowson
. The name was vaguely familiar to her from her school-certificate days and she turned slowly through the poems until she found the lines her class had been made to learn. She was surprised how well she could recall them:

She read them again and for the first time seemed to catch the rhythm of their magical sound. But what did they
mean
? Forbidden fruits, a sort of languorous, illicit, painful delight. Of course, Bernard could tell her all about it. He spent his life exploring and expounding the beautiful world of poetry. But he wouldn’t tell her because she couldn’t ask.

It must have been an awful strain for Bernard meeting another woman once a week. How long had she known? Well, for certain, no more than a month or so. But in a strangely intuitive way, much longer than that. Six months? A year? Perhaps more. Not with that particular girl, but there may have been others. Her head was aching. But she’d taken so many codeine recently. Oh, let it ache! What a mess! Her mind was going round and round. Privet hedge, poached eggs, Ernest Dowson, Bernard, the tension and deceit of the past four days. My God! What was she going to do? It couldn’t go on like this.

Bernard came in. ‘My poor arms don’t half ache!’

‘Finished the hedge?’

‘I’ll finish it off in the morning. It’s those abhorrèd shears. I shouldn’t think they’ve been sharpened since we moved here.’

‘You could always take them in.’

‘And get ’em back in about six months.’

‘You exaggerate.’

‘I’ll get it finished in the morning.’

‘It’ll probably be raining.’

‘Well, we could do with a drop of rain. Have you seen the lawn? It’s like the plains of Abyssinia.’

‘You’re never been to Abyssinia.’

The conversation dropped. Bernard went to his desk and took out some papers. ‘I thought you’d be watching the telly.’

‘I can’t stick being with the children.’

Bernard looked at her sharply. She was near to tears. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean.’ He looked soberly and almost tenderly at Margaret. Margaret, his wife! Sometimes he treated her so thoughtlessly, so very thoughtlessly. He walked across and laid a hand on her shoulder.

‘They’re pretty insufferable, aren’t they? But don’t worry about it. All kids are the same. I’ll tell you what . . .’

‘Oh, don’t bother! You’ve made all those promises before. I don’t care. I don’t care, I tell you. As far as I’m concerned they can go to hell – and you with them!’

She began to sob convulsively and ran from the room. He heard her go into their bedroom above, and listened as the sobs continued. He put his head in his hands. He would have to do something, and he would have to do it very soon. He was in real danger now of losing everything. He might even have lost it already . . . Could he tell Margaret everything? She would never, never forgive him. What about the police? He’d almost told them, or, at least, he’d almost told them part of it. He looked down at Dowson’s works and saw where the page was open. He knew that Margaret had been reading it and his eyes fell upon the same poem:

Yes, it had been sweet enough, it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise; but how sour it tasted now. It would have been a huge relief to have ended it all long ago, above all to have broken free from the web of lies and deceit he had spun around himself. Yet how beguiling had been the prospect of those extra-marital delights. Conscience. Damned conscience. Nurtured in a sensitive school. Fatal.

Though not a believer himself, Bernard conceded the empirical truth of the Pauline assertion that the wages of sin is death. He wanted desperately to be rid of the guilt and the remorse, and remembered vaguely from his school days in the bible-class how lustily they had all given voice to many a chorus on sin:

But he couldn’t pray these days – his spirit was parched and desolate. His primitive, eager religiosity was dulled now and overlaid with a deep and hard veneer of learning, culture and cynicism. He was well rehearsed in all the theological paradoxes, and the fizz of academic controversy was no longer a delight. Whiter than snow, indeed! More like the driven slush.

He walked over to the window which looked out on to the quiet road. Lights shone in most of the windows. A few people walked past; a neighbour was taking his dog to foul some other pavement. An L-driver was struggling to turn her car around, and was painfully succeeding, though the line of symmetry through MAC’s Self-drive Zodiac rarely progressed more than seven or eight degrees at any one manoeuvre. More like a thirty-three point turn, he thought. The instructor must be a patient chap. He had tried to teach Margaret to drive once . . . Still, he had made up for that. She had her own Mini now. He watched for several minutes. A man walked by, but though he thought he seemed familiar, Bernard didn’t recognize him. He wondered who he was and where he was going, and kept him in sight until he turned right into Charlton Road.

As Morse had walked past, he too was wondering what to do. Best have it out with Jennifer now? He didn’t know, but he thought on the whole it was. Conscious that he had not covered himself with glory at the earlier interview, he decided mentally to rehearse his new approach.

‘You want to ask me some more questions?’

‘Yes.’ Tight-lipped and masterly.

‘Won’t you come in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘Thus far you’ve told me nothing but a pack of lies. I suggest we start again.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .’ Slowly and pointedly he would get up from the chair and walk towards the door. He would utter not one further word. But as he opened the door, Jennifer would say, ‘All right, Inspector.’ And he would listen. He thought he had a good idea of what she would tell him.

That he would have been wrong, he was not to learn for some time yet; for he discovered that Jennifer had gone out. The languid Sue, her long legs bronzed and bare, had no idea where she had gone. ‘Won’t you come in and wait, Inspector?’ The full lips parted and quivered slightly. Morse both looked and felt alarmingly vulnerable. He consulted his wrist-watch for moral support. ‘You’re very kind but . . . perhaps I’d better not.’

M
ORSE SLEPT SOUNDLY
for almost twelve hours, and awoke at 8.30 a.m. He had returned home immediately after his second call to Charlton Road with a splitting headache and a harassed mind. Now, as he blinked awake, he could scarcely believe how fresh he felt.