"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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Saturday, 2 October, p.m.
MORSE 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:
Dear Madam,
After asessing the mny applications we have received, we must regretfully inform you that our application has been unsuccessful. At the begining of November however, further posts will become available, and I should, in all honesty, be sorry to loose the opportunity of reconsidering our position then.
We have now alloted the September quota of posts in the Psycology Department; yet it is probable that a reliably qualified assistant may be required to deal with the routnie duties for the Principal's office.
Yours faithfully,
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 mis-spellings. 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 schooclass="underline" 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. 'Assessing.' 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 semidetached 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 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 his 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.