Morse was unusually slow in his reply as they started to climb Cumnor Hill. “I wouldn’t know about those last two things, Lewis.”
They walked along the flagged path that bisected the well-tended lawn, weedless even in winter, and knocked on a front door which was immediately opened by a prematurely grey-haired man, slimly built, in his late forties or so, his eyes looking at them over half-lensed spectacles.
“You’re the police, I suppose?”
Morse showed his warranty. “Dr. Grainger?”
For a few seconds the man hesitated. Then stood back and ushered his visitors into a well-appointed lounge, three of its walls completely lined with books.
“Yes. I suppose we’d better get it over with.”
He spoke quite slowly, and without emotion — at least to begin with. Yes, he knew that Sheila Poster had been murdered. He’d read it in the Oxford Mail. Yes, he’d had an affair with her; she’d been putting pressure on him to leave his wife and go to live with her; she’d told him she was pregnant — though he’d doubted the claim. His wife now knew most of the truth, but had only become directly involved because Sheila had contrived somehow to get a job as a cleaning-woman in the house there, and then had sought to poison the marital relationship — what little there was left of it...
It was at this point that the belittled Lewis (seemingly to Morse’s mild amusement?) decided to assert himself.
“It’ll be up to Mrs. Grainger to give us details about her side of things, sir. You yourself weren’t here, were you, when Miss Poster was working for your wife?”
Grainger, who hitherto had been speaking directly to Morse, now turned his eyes upon Lewis.
“You mean you’re not prepared to take my word about what my wife has told me?”
“We’re not here to answer questions, Dr. Grainger — we’re here to ask them,” snapped Lewis.
Irritatedly, Grainger turned back to Morse. “Is it necessary for us to have this man with us, Inspector? I am not used to being spoken to in this way and I find it wholly and unnecessarily offensive!”
“This is a murder enquiry, sir,” began Morse rather lamely. “You must understand—”
“But I do understand. And I’m telling you you’re wasting your time if you think you’ll find any murderer in this house.”
“Where were you on Sunday night?” asked Morse quietly.
“Huh! I’ll tell you. I was in America — that’s where I was.”
“And you can prove that?”
Grainger stood up, and followed by Lewis walked over to a bureau on which, beside a framed wedding-photograph, lay an envelope (as it proved) of travel documents. He handed it to Morse.
“As you’ll see, I arrived back only yesterday afternoon — Monday. The plane, believe it or not, landed punctually at 4:15 P.M. I caught the Heathrow bus just after five o’clock, and I got to Oxford about quarter to seven.”
“It’ll certainly be pretty easy to check up, then,” said Lewis, smiling serenely; and it was Morse who now looked round at his sergeant, more in admiration than in anger. Yet he himself sat silent and listened only, as Grainger snarled at Lewis once more, the antagonism between the two men now almost physically tangible.
“Oh yes. It’ll hardly require a man of your calibre to check up on that. And it’ll be pretty easy to check up on my wife as well. But let me tell you something. Sergeant! It won’t be you who sees her. Is that clear? She’s extremely upset — and you can understand why, can’t you? Sheila was here working for her until a fortnight or so ago. All right? Now you might get a bit blasé about murders, Sergeant — but other people don’t. My wife is under sedation and she’s not going to see anyone — not today she isn’t. And she won’t see you, in any case! Your inspector here sounds a reasonably humane and civilized sort of fellow — and perhaps there are still a few others like him in the Force. So any of them can see my wife. All right? But it won’t be you, Sergeant. Why? Because I say so!”
Phew!
Morse now intervened between the warring parties: “That’ll be fine, sir. Have no fears! I’ll be interviewing your wife myself. But... but it would help us, sir, if you do happen to know where Mrs. Grainger was on Sunday night?”
“She went to some gala do in London with one of her friends — lady-friends. As I understand it, the pair of them missed the 11:20 from Paddington and had to catch the 12:20 — the ‘milk-float,’ I think they call it — landing up here at about 2 A.M. They got a taxi home from the station. That’s all I know.”
“Have you got this friend’s telephone number?”
“You won’t need it. She lives next door.”
Grainger pointed vaguely to the right; and Morse nodded his unspoken instruction to Lewis.
And Lewis left.
Morse was already seated in the Jaguar when Lewis rejoined him ten minutes later.
“He’s right, sir. They got back here to Cumnor about half-past two in the early hours of Monday morning.”
Morse showed no emotion, for he’d fully expected confirmation of Mrs. Grainger’s alibi.
And he began to explain.
“You see, Lewis, it’s not the who-dunnit aspect of this particular case that’s really important — but the why-dunnit. Why was Sheila Poster murdered? She must surely have posed a threat to someone, either a man or a woman. And more likely a man, I’m thinking. She must have stood in the way of some man’s hopes and calculated advancement. So much of a threat that when she refused to compromise, at some show-down between them, she was murdered precisely for that refusal of hers. So we’d no option but to work backwards — agreed? And we knew her side of things, to some extent, from the story she wrote. Now some things in that story reflected actuality fairly closely, didn’t they? The Graingers’ house — ‘The Grange,’ huh! — her job there — her affair with the husband — her overwhelming wish to force the issue with the wife—”
“Don’t forget the baby, sir!”
“No, I won’t forget the baby. But Grainger didn’t seem to think she was telling the truth about that, did he?”
“She was pregnant, though.”
“Yes, she was telling the truth about being pregnant. In fact, she was telling a whole lot more of the truth perhaps than she was prepared to admit — even to herself. Let’s make a hypothetical case. What, say, if she really wanted to murder not the married couple she was telling herself she hated? What if — in her story — she wanted to murder the very people she did in fact murder: the lady-of-the-house and that lady’s lover? What if the pair of them had fallen deeply in love? What if — again as in the story — the lady-of-the-house had been only too glad to learn of her husband’s infidelity? Because then she could divorce him, and marry her new lover... the man who stood by the flower-beds and tended the lawns there...”
“The man who came in for a cup of coffee, sir.”
“Perhaps so. But don’t forget she wasn’t just telling us a string of facts in the story — she was making a whole lot of it up as she went along.”