In the corridor outside Lewis whispered briefly to Morse. 'You were right, sir. It rang for two minutes. Noakes confirms it.'
'Excellent. I think it's time to make a move then, Lewis. Car outside?'
'Yes, sir. Do you want me with you?'
'No. You get to the car; we'll be along in a minute.' He walked along the corridor, knocked quietly on the door, and entered. She was sitting at her desk signing letters, but promptly took off her reading glasses, stood up, and smiled sweetly. 'Bit early to take me for a drink, isn't it?'
'No chance, I'm afraid. The car's outside — I think you'd better get your coat.'
The man inside does not go out this same Wednesday morning. The paper boy lingers for a few seconds as he puts The Times through the letter box, but no lucrative errand is commissioned this morning; the milkman delivers one pint of milk; the postman brings no letters; there are no visitors. The phone has gone several times earlier, and at twelve o'clock it goes again. Four rings; then, almost immediately it resumes, and mechanically the man counts the number of rings again — twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. The phone stops, and the man smiles to himself. It is a clever system. They have used it several times before.
The man outside is still waiting; but expectantly now, for he thinks that the time of reckoning may be drawing near. At 4.20 pm. he is conscious of some activity at the back of the house, and a minute later the man inside emerges with a bicycle, rides quickly away up a side turning, and in less than five seconds has completely disappeared. It has been too quick, too unexpected. Constable Dickson swears softly to himself and calls up HQ, where Sergeant Lewis is distinctly unamused.
The car park is again very full today, and Morse is standing by the window in the buffet bar. He wonders what would happen if a heavy snowshower were to smother each of the cars in a thick white blanket; then each of the baffled motorists would need to remember exactly where he had left his car, and go straight to that spot — and find it. Just as Morse finds the spot again through his binoculars. But he can see nothing, and half an hour later, at 5.15 pm., he can still see nothing. He gives it up, talks to the ticket collector, and learns beyond all reasonable doubt that Roope was not lying when he said he'd passed through the ticket barrier, as if from the 3.05 train from Paddington, on Friday, 21st November.
As he steps out of his front door at 9.30 a.m. the next day, Thursday, 4th December, the man who has been inside is arrested by Sergeant Lewis and Constable Dickson of the Thames Valley Constabulary, CID Branch. He is charged with complicity in the murders of Nicholas Quinn and Philip Ogleby.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE CASE WAS over now, or virtually so, and Morse had his feet up on his desk, feeling slightly over-beered and more than slightly self-satisfied, when Lewis came in at 2.30 on Thursday afternoon. 'I found him, sir. Had to drag him out of a class at Cherwell School — but I found him. It was just what you said.'
'Well that's the final nail in the coffin and—' He suddenly broke off. 'You don't look too happy, Lewis. What's the trouble?'
'I still don't understand what's happening.'
'Lewis! You don't want to ruin my little party-piece in the morning, do you?'
Lewis shrugged a reluctant consent, but he felt like an examinee who has just emerged from the examination room, conscious that he should have done very much better. 'I suppose you think I'm not very bright, sir.'
'Nothing of the sort! It was a very clever crime, Lewis. I was just a bit lucky here and there, that's all.'
'I suppose I missed the obvious clues — as usual.'
'But they weren't obvious, my dear old friend. Well, perhaps. ' He put his feet down and lit a cigarette. 'Let me tell you what put me on to the track, shall I? Let's see now. First of all, I think, the single most important fact in the whole case was Quinn's deafness. You see Quinn was not only hard of hearing; he was very very deaf. But we learned that he was quite exceptionally proficient in the art of lip-reading; and I'm quite sure that because he could lip-read so brilliantly Quinn discovered the staggering fact that one of his colleagues was crooked. You see the real sin against the Holy Ghost for anyone in charge of public examinations is to divulge the contents of question papers beforehand; and Quinn discovered that one of his colleagues was doing precisely that. But, Lewis, I failed to take into account a much more obvious and a much more important implication of Quinn's being deaf. It sounds almost childishly simple when you think of it — in fact an idiot would have spotted it before I did. It's this. Quinn was a marvel at reading from the lips of others — agreed? He might just as well have had ears, really. But he could only, let's say, hear what others were saying when he could see them. Lip-reading's absolutely useless when you can't see the person who's talking; when someone stands behind you, say, or when someone in the corridor outside shouts that there's a bomb in the building. Do you see what I mean, Lewis? If someone knocked on Quinn's office door, he couldn't hear anything. But as soon as someone opened the door and said something — he was fine. All right? Remember this, then: Quinn couldn't hear what he didn't see.'
'Am I supposed to see why all that's important, sir?'
'Oh yes. And you will do, Lewis, if only you think back to the Friday when Quinn was murdered.'
'He was definitely murdered on the Friday, then?'
'I think if you pushed me I could tell you to within sixty seconds!' He looked very smug about the whole thing, and Lewis felt torn between the wish to satisfy his own curiosity and a reluctance to gratify the chiefs inflated ego even further. Yet he thought he caught a glimpse of the truth at last. Yes, of course. Noakes had said. He nodded several times, and his curiosity won.
'What about all this business at the cinema, though? Was that all a red herring?'
'Certainly not. It was meant to be a red herring, but as things turned out — not too luckily from the murderer's point of view — it presented a series of vital clues. Just think a minute. Everything we began to learn about Quinn's death seemed to take it further and further forward in time: he rang up a school in Bradford at about 12.20; he went to Studio 2 at about half past one, after leaving a note in his office for his secretary; he came back to the office about a quarter to five, and drove home; he left a note for his cleaning woman and got some shopping in; he's heard on the phone about ten past five; certainly no one except Mrs. Evans comes to see him before six-thirty or so, because Mrs. Greenaway is keeping an eagle eye on the drive. So? So Quinn must have been murdered later that evening, or even on the following morning. The medical report didn't help us much either way, and we had little option but to follow our noses — which we did. But when you come to add all the evidence up, no one actually saw Quinn after midday on Friday. Take the phone call to Bradford. If you're a schoolmaster — and all of the staff at the Syndicate had taught at one point — you know that 12.20 is just about the worst time in the whole day to try to get a member of staff. School lessons may finish earlier in a few schools but the vast majority don't. In other words that call was made with not the least expectation that its purpose would be successful. That is, unless the purpose was to mislead me—in which case I'm afraid it was highly successful. Now, take the note Quinn left. We know that Bartlett is a bit of a tartar about most aspects of office routine; and one of his rules is that his assistant secretaries must leave a note when they go out. Now, Quinn had been with the Syndicate for three months, and being a keen young fellow and anxious to please his boss, he must have left dozens of little notes during that time; and anyone, if he or she was so minded, could have taken one, especially if that someone needed one of the notes to further an alibi. And someone did. Then there's the phone call Mrs. Greenaway heard. But note once again that she didn't actually see him making it. She's nervous and anxious: she thinks the baby's due, and the very last thing she wants to indulge in is a bit of eavesdropping. All she wants is the line to be free! When she hears voices she doesn't want to listen to them — she wants them to finish. And if the other person — the one she thinks Quinn is ringing — is doing most of the talking at that point. You see what I was getting at with Roope, Lewis? If Roope were talking — putting in just the occasional "yes" and "no" and so on — Mrs. Greenaway, who says she doesn't hear too well anyway, would automatically assume it was Quinn. Both Quinn and Roope came from Bradford, and both spoke with a pretty broad northern accent, and all Mrs. Greenaway remembers clearly is that one of the voices was a bit cultured and donnish. Now, that doesn't take us much further, I agree. At the most it tells us that the telephone conversation wasn't between Quinn and Roope. But I knew that, Lewis, because I knew that Quinn must have been dead for several hours when someone spoke from Quinn's front room.'