'You work on Sundays?'
'Sunday's a good day for sin, Inspector. And we had a client willing and waiting -if she came.'
'And she came?'
'She rang us from a call-box in Wentworth Road in North Oxford and Selina here went up in the Mini to fetch her-'
Morse could contain himself no longer. 'Bloody hell! Do you realize how much time and trouble you could have saved us? No wonder we've got so much unsolved crime when-'
'What crime exactly are we talking about, Inspector?'
Morse let it go, and asked her to continue.
But that was about it -little more to say. Selina had brought her there, to Abingdon Road: attractive, bronzed, blonde, full-figured, skimpily dressed; with a rucksack -yes, a red rucksack, and with very little else. The client from Seckham Villa had been on the look-out for such and similar offerings. A phone call. A verbal agreement: £100 for a one-hour session -£80 to the girl, £20 to the agency.
'How did she get up to Park Town?'
'Dunno. She said she'd walk up to the centre -only five minutes -and get a bite to eat. Didn't seem to want much help. Independent sort of girl.'
So that was that. At least for the present.
Before he left Morse asked to look through the current Model Year Book, a thick black-covered brochure from which, fairly certainly -or from a previous edition of which -the selected photocopies found at Seckham Villa had been taken. The photographs were all in black and white, but in this edition Morse could find neither Claire nor Louisa amongst the elegant ladies in their semi-buttoned blouses and suspendered stockings. No Karin either among the Ks: just Katie, and Kelly, and Kimberly, and Kylie . . .
'If I can take this?'
'Of course.'
'And I may have to bother you again, I'm afraid - with my sergeant.'
As Morse was leaving the phone rang and Selina made forward as if to take the call. But the senior partner picked up the receiver first, placed her hand over the mouthpiece, and bade her visitor farewell. Thus it was Selina the Silent who accompanied the chief inspector to the door, and who, a little to Morse's surprise, walked out with him to the Jaguar.
'There's something I want you to know,' she said suddenly. 'It's not important, I know, but. . .'
Unlike the Cockney ancestry of her partner's speech, the vowels here were curiously curly: the vowels of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
'I picked her up, you see. She was a lovely girl.'
'Yes?'
'Don't you see? I wanted her, Inspector. I asked her if she would see me -afterwards. I've got plenty of money, and she'd got she'd got nothing.' A tear, soon to roll slowly down the thin cheek, had formed in the right eye of Selina, the sleeping, weeping partner of the Agency.
Morse said nothing, trusting that for once his instincts were right.
'She said "no",' continued the woman simply. 'That's what I want you to know really: she wouldn't have done . . . some things. She just wouldn't. She wasn't for sale -not in the way most of them are.'
Morse laid a hand on a bony shoulder, and smiled at her under-standingly, hoping that he'd assimilated whatever it was she'd wanted to tell him. He thought he had.
As he drove away, Morse could see the mightily dimensioned Michelle still busily engaged with the needs of another client. She was certainly the dominant partner in the business; but he wondered who might be the dominant partner in the bed.
He was not back in Kidlington HQ until a quarter to seven, where he learned that some directive was needed - pretty soon! -about the personnel in Wytham Woods. Was the police team there to be disbanded? On the whole Morse thought it was becoming a waste of time to maintain any further watch. But logic sometimes held less sway in Morse's mind than feeling and impulse, and so he decided that perhaps he would continue with it after all.
He drove out of the HQ car park and turned on the radio; but' he'd just missed it -blast! - and he heard the signing-off signature-tune of The Archers as he headed towards Oxford, wondering how much else he might have missed that day.
Turning right at the Banbury Road roundabout he continued down to Wolvercote and called in at the Trout, where for more than an hour he sat on the paved terrace between the sandstone walls of the inn and the low parapet overlooking the river: drinking, and thinking -thinking about the strangely tantalizing new facts he was learning about the death of the Swedish Maiden.
Lewis rang at 10.15 p.m. He was back. He'd had a reasonably successful time, he thought. Did
Morse want to see him straightaway?
'Not unless you've got some extraordinary revelation to report.'
'I wouldn't go quite so far as that.'
'Leave it till the morning, then,' decided Morse.
Not that any decision Morse made that night was to be of very much relevance, since the routines of virtually every department at police HQ were to be suspended over the next three or four days. Trouble had broken out again at Broadmoor Lea, where half the inhabitants were complaining bitterly of under-policing and the other half protesting violently about police over-reaction; council workmen there were being intimidated; copy-cat criminality was being reported from neighbouring Bucks and Berks; another high-level two-day conference had been called for Thursday and Friday; the Home Secretary had stepped in to demand a full report; and the investigation of a possible crime committed perhaps a year earlier in either Blenheim Park or Wytham Woods or wherebloody-ever (as the ACC had put the case the following morning) was not going to be the number-one priority in a community where the enforcement of Law and Order was now in real jeopardy.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
To some small extent these Greek philosophers made use of observation, but only
spasmodically until the time of Aristotle. Their legacy lies elsewhere: in their
astonishing powers of deductive and inductive reasoning
(W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers)
LEWIS'S report from Sweden had been far more interesting, far more potentially suggestive, than Morse could have hoped. The flesh was being put on the bones, as it were -though no longer those particular bones which had been discovered in Pasticks. The thoughts of others too appeared to be shifting away from any guesswork concerning the likeliest spot in which to dig for the Swedish Maiden, and towards the possible identity of the murderer who had dug the hole in the first place - his (surely a 'he'?) interests, his traits, his psychological identikit, as it were. Especially the thoughts behind the latest letter to The Times, which Morse read with considerable interest on the morning of Friday, 2 4 July.
From the Reverend David M. Sturdy Sir, Like so many of your regular readers I have been deeply impressed by the ingenuity expended by your correspondents on the now notorious Swedish Maiden verses. All of us had hoped that such ingenuity would eventually reap its reward -especially the wholly brilliant analysis (July 13) resulting in the 'Wytham hypothesis'. It was therefore with much disappointment that we read (Tuesday, July 21) the findings of the police pathologist in Oxford.
I cannot myself hope to match the deductive logic of former correspondents. But is it not profitable to take a leaf out of Aristotle's book, and to look now for some inductive hypothesis? Instead of asking what the original author intended as clues, we should perhaps be asking an entirely different question, viz., what do the verses tell us about the person who wrote them, especially if such a person were trying to conceal almost as much as he was willing to reveal.
Two things may strike the reader immediately. First, the archaisms so prevalent in the verses ('tell'st', 'know'st', 'Wither', 'thy', 'thee', etc.) which strongly suggest that the author is wholly steeped in the language of Holy Writ. Second, the regular resort to hymnological vocabulary: "The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended' (1. n); 'As pants the hart for cooling streams' (1. 15); 'When I survey the wondrous cross' (1. 17) - all of which seem to corroborate the view that the author is a man regularly conditioned by such linguistic influences.