Last Seen Wearing (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

A man is little use when his wife's a widow.

(Scottish proverb)

A
T THE WOODSTOCK
roundabout, on the northern ring-road perimeter of Oxford, Morse took the sharp left fork, and leaving the motel on his right drove over the railway bridge (where as a boy he had so often stood in wonder as the steam locomotives sped thunderously by) and down the hill into Wolvercote.

   The small village consisted of little more than the square stone-built houses that lined its main street, and was familiar to Morse only because each of its two public houses boasted beer drawn straight from the wood. Without being too doctrinaire about what he was prepared to drink, Morse preferred a flat pint to the fizzy keg most breweries, misguidedly in his view, were now producing; and he seldom passed through the village without enjoying a jug of ale at the King Charles. He parked the Lancia in the yard, exchanged a few pleasantries with the landlady over his beer, and asked for Wytham Close.

   He soon found it, a crescented cul-de-sac no more than a hundred yards back along the road on the right-hand side, containing ten three-storey terraced residences (pompously styled 'town houses'), set back from the adopted road, with steep concreted drives leading up to the built-in garages. Two street lamps threw a pale phosphorescence over the open-plan, well-tended grass, and a light shone from behind the orange curtains in the middle-storey window of No 2. The bell sounded harsh in the quiet of the darkened close.

   A lower light was switched on in the entrance hall and a vaguely-lineated shadow loomed through the frosted glass of the front door.

   'Yes?'

   'I hope I'm not disturbing you,' began Morse.

   'Oh. Hullo, Inspector.'

   'I thought . . .'

   'Won't you come in?'

   Morse's decision to refuse the offer of a drink was made with such obvious reluctance that he was speedily prevailed upon to reverse it; and sitting behind a glass of gin and tonic he did his best to say all the right things. On the whole, he thought, he was succeeding.

   Mrs. Ainley was small, almost petite, with light-brown hair and delicate features. She looked well enough, although the darkness beneath her eyes bore witness to the recent tragedy.

   'Will you stay on here?'

   'Oh, I think so. I like it here.'

   Indeed, Morse knew full well how attractive the situation was. He had almost bought a similar house here a year ago, and he remembered the view from the rear windows over the green expanse of Port Meadow across to the cluster of stately spires and the dignified dome of the Radcliffe Camera. Like an Ackerman print, only alive and real, just two or three miles away.

   'Another drink?'

   'I'd better not,' said Morse, looking appealingly towards his hostess.

   'Sure?'

   'Well, perhaps a small one.'

   He took the plunge. 'Irene, isn't it?'

   'Eileen.'

   It was a bad moment. 'You're getting over it, Eileen?' He spoke the words in a kindly way.

   'I think so.' She looked down sadly, and picked some non-existent object from the olive-green carpet. 'He was hardly marked, you know. You wouldn't really have thought . . .' Tears were brimming, and Morse let them brim. She was quickly over it. 'I don't even know why Richard went to London. Monday was his day off, you know.' She blew her nose noisily, and Morse felt more at ease.

   'Did he often go away like that?'

   'Quite often, yes. He always seemed to be busy.' She began to look vulnerable again and Morse trod his way carefully. It had to be done.

   'Do you think when he went to London he was, er . . .'

   'I don't know what he went for. He never told me much about his work. He always said he had enough of it at the office without talking about it again at home.'

   'But he was worried about his work, wasn't he?' said Morse quietly.

   'Yes. He always was a worrier, especially . . .'

   'Especially?'

   'I don't know.'

   'You mean he was more worried—recently?'

   She nodded. 'I think I know what was worrying him. It was that Taylor girl.'

   'Why do you say that?'

   'I heard him talking on the phone to the headmaster.' She made the admission guiltily as if she really had no business to know of it.

   'When was that?'

   'About a fortnight, three weeks ago.'

   'But the school's on holiday, isn't it?'

   'He went to the headmaster's house.'

   Morse began to wonder what else she knew. 'Was that on one of his days off . . .?'

   She nodded slowly and then looked up at Morse. 'You seem very interested.'

   Morse sighed. 'I ought to have told you straight away. I'm taking over the Taylor case.'

   'So Richard found something after all.' She sounded almost frightened.

   'I don't know,' said Morse.

   'And . . . and that's why you came, I suppose.' Morse said nothing. Eileen Ainley got up from her chair and walked briskly over to a bureau beside the window. 'Most of his things have gone, but you might as well take this. He had it in the car with him.' She handed to Morse a Letts desk diary, black, about six inches by four. 'And there's a letter for the accountant at the station. Perhaps you could take it for me?'

   'Of course.' Morse felt very hurt. But he often felt hurt—it was nothing new.

   Eileen left the room to fetch the envelope and Morse quickly opened the diary and found Monday, 1 September. There was one entry, written in neatly-formed, minuscule letters: 42 Southampton Terrace. That was all. The blood tingled, and with a flash of utter certitude Morse knew that he hardly needed to look up the postal district of 42 Southampton Terrace. He would check it, naturally; he would look it up immediately he got home. But without the slightest shadow of doubt he knew it already. It. would be EC4.

   He was back in his North Oxford bachelor home by a quarter to eleven, and finally discovered the street map of London, tucked neatly away behind
The Collected Works of Swinburne
and
Extracts from Victorian Pornography.
(He must put that book somewhere less conspicuous.) Impatiently he consulted the alphabetical index and frowned as he found Southampton Terrace. His frown deepened as he traced the given coordinates and studied the grid square. Southampton Terrace was one of the many side-streets off the Upper Richmond Road, south of the river, beyond Putney Bridge. The postal district was SW12. He suddenly decided he had done enough for one day.

   He left the map and the diary on top of the bookshelf, made himself a cup of instant coffee and selected from his precious Wagner shelf the Solti recording of
Die Walküre.
No fat man, no thin-lipped woman, no raucous tenor, no sweaty soprano distracted his mind as Siegmund and Sieglinde poured forth their souls in an ecstasy of recognition. The coffee remained untouched and gradually grew cold.

   But even before the first side was played through, a fanciful notion was forming in his restless brain. There was surely a very simple reason for Ainley's visit to London. He should have thought of it before. Day off; busy, preoccupied, uncommunicative. He'd bet that was it! 42 Southampton Terrace. Well, well!
Old Ainley had been seeing another woman, perhaps.

CHAPTER FOUR

As far as I could see there was no connection between them beyond the tenuous nexus of succession.

(Peter Champkin)

I
N DIFFERENT PARTS
of the country on the Monday following Morse's interview with Strange, four fairly normal people were going about their disparate business. What each was doing was, in its own way, ordinary enough—in some cases ordinary to the point of tediousness. Each of them, with varied degrees of intimacy, knew the others, although one or two of them were hardly worthy of any intimate acquaintanceship. They shared one common bond, however, which in the ensuing weeks would inexorably draw each of them towards the centre of a criminal investigation. For each of them had known, again with varied degrees of intimacy, the girl called Valerie Taylor.

   Mr. Baines had been second master in Kidlington's Roger Bacon Comprehensive School since its opening three years previously. Before that time he had also been second master, in the very same buildings, although then they had housed a secondary modern school, now incorporated into the upper part of a three-tier comprehensive system—a system which in their wisdom or unwisdom (Baines wasn't sure) the Oxfordshire Education Committee had adopted as its answer to the problems besetting the educational world in general and the children of Kidlington in particular. The pupils would be returning the following day, Tuesday, 16 September, after a break of six and a half weeks, for much of which time, whilst some of his colleagues had motored off to Continental resorts, Baines had been wrestling with the overwhelmingly complex problems of the timetable. Such a task traditionally falls upon the second master, and in the past Baines had welcomed it. There was a certain intellectual challenge in dovetailing the myriad options and combinations of the curriculum to match the inclinations and capacities of the staff available; and, at the same time (for Baines), a vicarious sense of power. Sadly, Baines had begun to think of himself as a good loser, a best man but never the groom. He was now fifty-five, unmarried, a mathematician. He had applied for many headships over the years and on two occasions had been the runner-up. His last application had been made three and a half years ago, for the headship of his present school, and he thought he'd had a fairly good chance; but even then, deep down, he knew that he was getting past it. Not that he had been much impressed by the man they appointed, Phillipson. Not at the time, anyway. Only thirty-four, full of new ideas. Keen on changing everything—as if change inevitably meant a change for the better. But over the last year or so he had learned to respect Phillipson a good deal more. Especially after that glorious showdown with the odious caretaker.

   Baines was sitting in the small office which served as a joint HQ for himself and for Mrs. Webb, the headmaster's secretary—a decent old soul who like himself had served in the old secondary modern school. It was mid-morning and he had just put the finishing touches to the staff dinner-duty roster. Everyone was neatly fitted in, except the headmaster, of course. And himself. He had to pick up his perks from somewhere. He walked across the cluttered office clutching the handwritten sheet.

   'Three copies, my old sugar.'

   'Immediately, I suppose,' said Mrs. Webb good-naturedly, picking up another sealed envelope and looking at the addressee before deftly slitting it along the top with a paperknife.

   'What about a cup of coffee?' suggested Baines.

   'What about your roster?'

   'OK. I'll make the coffee.'

   'No you won't.' She got up from her seat, picked up the kettle, and walked out to the adjacent cloakroom. Baines looked ruefully at the pile of letters. The usual sort of thing, no doubt. Parents, builders, meetings, insurance, examinations.
He
would have been dealing with all that if . . . He poked haphazardly among the remaining letters, and suddenly a flicker of interest showed in his shrewd eyes. The letter was lying face down and on the sealed flap he read the legend Thames Valley Police'. He picked it up and turned it over. It was addressed to the headmaster with the words PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL typed across the top in bold red capitals.

   'What are you doing going through my mail?' Mrs. Webb plugged in the kettle and with mock annoyance snatched the letter from him.

   'See that?' asked Baines.

   Mrs. Webb looked down at the letter. 'None of our business, is it?'

   'Do you think he's been fiddling his tax returns?' Baines chuckled deeply.

   'Don't be silly.'

   'Shall we open it?'

   'We shall
not,'
said Mrs. Webb.

   Baines returned to his cramped desk and started on the prefects' roster. Phillipson would have to appoint half a dozen new prefects this term. Or, to be more precise, he would ask Baines to give him a list of possible names. In some ways the head wasn't such a bad chap.

   Phillipson himself came in just after eleven. 'Morning, Baines. Morning, Mrs. Webb.' He sounded far too cheerful. Had he forgotten that school was starting tomorrow?

   'Morning, headmaster.' Baines always called him 'headmaster'; the rest of the staff called him 'sir'. It was only a little thing, but it was something.

   Phillipson walked across to his study door and paused by his secretary's desk. 'Anything important, Mrs. Webb?'

   'I don't think so, sir. There's this, though.' She handed him the letter marked 'Private and Confidential', and Phillipson, with a slightly puzzled frown upon his face, entered his study and closed the door behind him.

In the newly-appointed county of Gwynedd, in a small semi-detached house on the outskirts of Caernarfon, another schoolmaster was acutely conscious that school restarted on the morrow. They had returned home only the previous day from a travesty of a holiday in Scotland—rain, two punctures, a lost Barclaycard and more rain—and there was a host of things to be done.

   The lawn, for a start. Benefiting (where he had suffered) from a series of torrential downpours, it had sprouted to alarming proportions during their absence, and was in urgent need of an instant crop. At 9.30 a.m. he discovered that the extension for the electric mower was not functioning, and he sat himself down on the back doorstep with a heavy heart and a small screwdriver.

   Life seldom seemed to run particularly smoothly for David Acum, until two years ago assistant French master at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School in Kidlington, and now, still an assistant French master, at the City of Caernarfon School.

   He could find no fault with the fittings at either end of the extension wire, and finally went inside again. No sign of life. He walked to the bottom of the stairs and yelled, his voice betraying ill-temper and exasperation, 'Hey! Don't you think it's about time you got out of that bloody bed?'

   He left it at that and, back in the kitchen, sat down cheerlessly at the table where half an hour earlier he had made his own breakfast, and dutifully taken a tray of tea and toast upstairs. Ineffectually he tinkered once more with one of the wretched plugs. She joined him ten minutes later, dressing-gowned and beslippered.

   'What's eating you?'

   'Christ! Can't you see? I suppose you buggered this up the last time you hoovered—not that I can remember when that was!'

   She ignored the insult and took the extension from him. He watched her as she tossed her long blonde hair from her face and deftly unscrewed and examined the troublous plugs. Younger than he was—a good deal younger, it seemed—he found her enormously attractive still. He wondered, as he often wondered, whether he had made the right decision, and once more he told himself he had.

   The fault was discovered and corrected, and David felt better.

   'Cup of coffee, darling?' All sweetness and light

   'Not just yet. I've got to get cracking.' He looked out at the overgrown lawn and swore softly as faintly dotted lines of slanting drizzle formed upon the window pane.

A middle-aged woman, blowzy, unkempt, her hair in cylindrical curlers, materialized from a side door on the ground floor; her quarry was bounding clumsily down the stairs.

   'I want to speak to yer.'

   'Not now, sweetheart. Not now. I'm late.'

   'If yer can't wait now yer needn't come back. Yer things'll be in the street.'

   'Now just a minute, sweetheart.' He came close to her, leaned his head to one side and laid a hand on each of her shoulders. 'What's the trouble? You know I wouldn't do anything to upset you.' He smiled pleasantly enough and there was something approaching an engaging frankness in his dark eyes. But she knew him better.

   'Yer've got a woman in yer room, 'aven't yer?'

   'Now there's no need for you to get jealous, you know that.'

   She found him repulsive now, and regretted those early days. 'Get 'er out and keep 'er out—there's to be no more women 'ere.' She slapped his hands from her shoulders.

   'She'll be going, she'll be going—don't worry. She's only a young chick. Nowhere to kip down—you know how it is.'

   'Now!'

   'Don't be daft. I'm late already, and I'll lose the job if I ain't careful. Be reasonable.'

   'Yer'll lose yer bed an' all if yer don't do as I tell yer.'

   The youth took a dirty five-pound note from his hip pocket. 'I suppose that'll satisfy you for a day or two, you old bitch.'

   The woman took the money, but continued to watch him. 'It's got to stop.'

   'Yeah. Yeah.'

   'How long's she been 'ere?'

   'A day or two.'

   'Fortnight, nearer, yer bleedin' liar.'

   The youth slammed the door after him, ran down to the bottom of the road, and turned right into the Upper Richmond Road.

Even by his own modest standards, Mr. George Taylor had not made much of a success of his life. Five years previously, an unskilled manual worker, he had accepted 'voluntary redundancy' money after the shake-up that followed the reorganization of the Cowley Steel plant, had then worked for almost a year driving a bulldozer on the M40 construction programme and spent the next year doing little but casual jobs, and drinking rather too much and gambling rather too much. And then that terrible row and, as a result of it, his present employment. Each morning at 7.15 he drove his rusting, green Morris Oxford from his Kidlington council house into the city of Oxford, down past Aristotle Lane into Walton Street, and over the concreted track that led through the open fields, between the canal and the railway line, where lay the main city rubbish dump. Each morning of the working week for the past three years—including the day when Valerie had disappeared—he had made the same journey, with his lunchtime sandwiches and his working overalls beside him on the passenger seat.

   Mr. Taylor was an inarticulate man, utterly unable to rationalize into words his favourable attitude towards his present job. It would have been difficult for anyone. The foul detritus of the city was all around him, rotten food and potato peelings, old mattresses, piles of sheer filth, rats and always (from somewhere) the scavenger gulls. And yet he liked it.