THE CARPET-BAGGER

Chapter 1

There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity — where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated MACS SNAX — Open 24 Hour’s.
Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet, their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.
Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only relatively cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His feet felt bloody frozen — Christ, they did. But they weren’t really frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.
There were two newspapers in the cab: the Daily Telegraph (oddly?) and a late edition of The Oxford Mail. And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper...
He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.
It had been most unlike him to make one mistake — let alone two — on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.
At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water — as well as The Oxford Mail — prior to pulling into the next lay by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.
How come he’d been so careless?
Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase — of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though — just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.
Just a bit.
Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they could nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need some reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of The Oxford Mail, but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines — OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME — and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed — considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.
No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel — a device (as he was now learning) that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t understand the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it — discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?
He switched on the dimmish light in the roof of the cab and picked up one of the white discs, noting that two lines had already been completed, presumably in the cheap blue Biro that lay beside the pile: SMITH, JOHN; Southampton.
Danny shook his head; and turned to The Oxford Mail again.
The main editorial picked up the page-one article on car-related crime, and Danny smiled to himself as he read the last few sentences:
The truth is that some of us, especially in the present cold snap, find it difficult enough to start our cars anyway — in spite of the considerable advantage of possessing our own car-keys. So how is it that even some comparatively incompetent car thief can enter our vehicles in a matter of seconds, twist a couple of wires together (so we’re told), and be seen two minutes later outpacing a pursuing police car along the nearest motorway? Come on, you manufacturers! Let’s have a bit more resource and ingenuity in a fully committed nationwide crusade against this growing social evil.
Danny inclined his head slightly to the right and wondered what exactly the manufacturers could do — given the nature of electric current. And already it was considerably more difficult than the editor was suggesting. Four minutes it had taken him with this particular van at Southampton — a ramshackle heap that’d have about as much chance with a police car as a moped would with Nigel Mansell.
Brrr... was it cold, though! And getting colder.
He could have turned on the engine for a quarter of an hour or so, but he was reluctant to waste any diesel. There was a long journey north ahead of him; and while he reckoned he’d be safe enough on the busy daytime motorways, he didn’t really want to stop again. At the same time he daren’t drive any further, either — not until he’d had a few hours’ rest; or kip, if he were lucky. Twice, only an hour or so since, he’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, his eyes slowly drooping downwards... and further downwards, until his head followed them, only — suddenly! — to jerk upright in panic as consciousness reasserted itself.
Death had never figured prominently among his deepest fears, but he’d hardly had much of an innings as yet. And with all that cargo sitting there just behind him, well, it would have been criminal — extra criminal — to take any needless risks.
Thinking of all that cargo, though...
Why’d it taken him so long to think of it?
Earlier he’d leafed through the bundle of inventories and invoices, and counted at least — what, eighty? — eighty or more oriental rugs and carpets from Turkey, from Persia, from the Caucasus, from places sounding like Something-stan, with prices ranging from £4,500 (several such from Isfahan) to the cheapest (huh!) at only a thousand or so apiece. Danny’s skill at scoring for his local darts team had once been legendary and his mind dwelt lovingly now on those accumulated spondulicks.
But the carpets weren’t just precious, were they? They’d be warm, too. Climb into the back, lie down under a couple of those beautifully embroidered beauties and — like his mum used to say — he’d soon be as snug as a bug in a rug.
A Persian rug.
There was no key to be found for the rear doors, but opening locks was Danny’s hobby; his specialism. Some few people, he knew, could finish a fiendish crossword puzzle in a matter of minutes; a few others could spot a master-move to some complex chess problem in hardly any time at all. And he was like that with opening locks.
Only quicker.
And immediately disappointed.
Inside, no neatly laid-out pile of carpets presented itself for him to lie on, like the princess on the mattresses. Instead, facing him, from floor to ceiling, lying lengthways along the sides of the van, stood a honeycomb of tightly packaged carpets rolled up in their thick cardboard cylindrical wrappings. Jes-us! Even with an outsize Stanley knife it’d probably take him half an hour to liberate only one of them. And he couldn’t just slide one out and carve it up in the middle of the lay-by, now could he?
Aagh! Forget it.
He walked back, clambered up the two metal footholds, and sat once more in the front cab, now grown even chillier. One bit of luck, though. The Daily Telegraph proved to be a pretty substantial broadsheet, and he was dividing the multipaged wodge in half when he spotted the headline, in the Home News section, and was soon reading the article beneath it:
TRUSTY ABSCONDS
Wiltshire Police report the escape of Daniel Smithson from Winchester Gaol, where most recently he was serving a four-year sentence for robbery.
For the last three months it appears that Smithson had been privileged to enjoy the maximum range of freedom within the prison régime, and indeed during the past week had been working in a garden adjacent to the prison with a brick wall only some four feet high separating him from the outside world.
Although prison authorities are unwilling to give specific details, it is understood that the ex-soldier Smithson, who for the last twelve years has seen little except the inside of a cell in one of HM prisons, was due for release shortly.
Aged forty-three, he is five feet seven inches in height, of slim-to-medium build, and has shortish brown hair. Lightly tattooed on the back of the lower knuckles of the left hand are the letters I–L-Y-K, supposed by fellow prisoners to commemorate a former girlfriend: “I Love You Kate.”
The escapee has no record of any criminal violence, and it is the view of the prison officers at Winchester that he poses no threat whatsoever to the public at large. An early re-arrest is expected.
Characteristically, Danny tilted his head to the right, and glanced through the article again. Then nodded to himself. There were people who couldn’t cope with life outside the Rules and Regulations of an institution — just as there were people (hadn’t he just read it?) who couldn’t quite cope with all this crime. And it was easy to read between the lines of that last couple of sentences, wasn’t it? “No need to clap the darbies round the poor sod’s wrists. Nah! He’ll probably soon be knocking on the gates o’ the nearest nick hisself.”
Funny old business, life. Full o’ pitfalls — full of opportunities, too. Just watch out for the first — and make sure you grab hold o’ the second. Common sense, innit? That’s what his dad had told him.
Danny clasped his hands, left over right, and rubbed them vigorously together against the numbing cold. And even as he did so, he found himself looking down at the lower knuckles of his upper hand.

Chapter 2

“I coulda scored the bloody thing in me carpet slippers, honest I could.”
“You reckon?”
“And if Oxford hadn’t buggered up that last-minute penalty—”
“You’da won a fortune.”
“Third divi on the treble-chance.”
“About sixpence.”
“We’ve gone decimal, Sarge — remember?”
PC Watson accelerated up the slip-road into the A34 (N) from the Pear Tree roundabout, noting as he did so the miraculously civilized deceleration of a couple of cars behind him.
“Better take a gander somewhere, I s’pose,” suggested Sergeant Hodges a couple of miles further on, pointing to one of the several lay-bys on the twin-track road that led up to the M40 interchange.
No snack bar here. Just the black hulks of two juggernauts; and tucked in behind them an old man in an old car studying an old map.
“Need any help, sir?”
“No!”
Sod you then, thought Watson, as he moved forward past the two container-lorries.
At the far end of the lay-by — not spotted earlier — was a Jaguar of indeterminate colour: “indeterminate” partly because during the hours of darkness light reflected oddly from the metallic sheen of some cars; and partly because Watson was in any case wholly colour-blind between the reds and the blues.
But he made no further advance as he saw the grey head of the driver jerk round and the dusky-headed young maiden beside him hasten to fasten up the buttons on her blouse.
“Any joy?” asked Hodges.
Watson shook his head as he got back into the car. “Well, ’cept for the fellow up front there in the Jag, perhaps.”
Half a mile or so further along, Hodges nodded again to his left, and this time the Vauxhall Senator pulled in behind a furniture van.
“Coffee for me, Barry. Not too much milk, and two sugars, please.”
But Watson was no more than a few seconds into his mission before he stopped and stared. When (only an hour since) he’d glanced through the briefing-files and the traffic telexes back in Kidlington Police HQ, the last three letters of one particular stolen vehicle had caught his notice. How otherwise? For those last three letters were the initials of his own name, Barry Robert Watson; and here, on the van in front of him, was the registration number C 674 BRW.
There was always an awful lot of luck needed in apprehending villains, Watson had already learnt that — unless you were looking for a ginger-bearded giant, with a wooden leg, and a dinosaur tattooed on his balding head. And this was a bit of luck. Surely so.
Back in the police car, Hodges rang through to the Control Room at HQ, where within only a few seconds an operator read from his Police National Computer screen that the said vehicle, reg. C 674 BRW, had been stolen earlier that evening in Southampton. The number had appeared in the Thames Valley briefing-files only because there seemed to be some suggestion that the vehicle might be heading north. Along the A34. Up into Oxfordshire.
His head cushioned on his arms, the driver appeared to be deeply asleep, since only after a series of staccato raps on the cab window did he raise his head above the steering-wheel.
“This your vehicle?” bawled Watson.
“Wha’?”
“Police!”
The driver slowly wound down his window. “Wha’s the trouble, mate?”
“This your vehicle?”
“Wha’, this? I wouldn’t have it if you gev it me!”
“Let’s see your licence, please.”
“What licence?”
“Not your bloody dog licence, is it!”
“You got so many days on producin’ yer licence, you know that.”
“Haven’t got one — is that what you’re saying?”
“Not on me, no.”
“What’s your name?” (It was Hodges who took over now.)
“John Smith.”
“Sorry, yeah. Shoulda known.”
“Anything else I can help you with?”
“You’d better get down and come along with us.”
“Have I got any option, mate?”
“Not much.”
“Hold on a tick, then. I’d better just fill in the old tacho thing here. Got to keep yer records up to date, you know — ’specially if you get delayed a bit.”
“Yeah, well, let’s say you look like getting delayed a bit.”
Beckoning Watson to the other side of the van, and with one foot now on the lower foot-hold, Hodges raised himself to look into the cab, where he saw the driver filling in a white tachometer disc — writing slowly and innocently enough with a cheap blue Biro.
The driver of the lorry in front walked back to the van.
“Everything OK, Officer?”
Hodges nodded and stepped down. “No problems.”
“Everything OK, Danny?” continued the other, as the cab-door now opened.
“Fine, yeah! Just forgot me licence, din I?”
“ ‘Danny,’ eh?” remarked Sergeant Hodges as he steered the man into the near-side rear seat of the Vauxhall, conscious that the slimly built, quietly spoken man beside him hardly fitted the stock profile of any tearaway joyrider.
“Yeah! What do we call you?” added PC Watson over his shoulder.
“ ‘Mr. Smith’?” suggested Danny quietly.

Chapter 3

If the Custody Suite at Bicester Police Station is not a match for the British Airways Club Class lounge at Heathrow, it is at least a well-lit, well-ventilated room — separated from the cell-area, and affording its present occupant a comfortable enough introit into his temporary detention.
In the presence of the arrested person himself (in the presence, too, of PC Watson) Sergeant Russell, the Custody Officer, standing in shirt-sleeves at a tall desk, has recited the statutory “Notice to Accused Persons,” and is now completing the Custody Record, as the law requires of him. Russell is an older man, a stickler for procedure, and he fills in the lengthy sections with scrupulous care. He has already made the decision to authorize the continued custody of the prisoner.
“Let me just put it to you once more, lad. What’s your real name?”
“Told you, din I? How many more times I got to tell you?”
Russell sighs wearily. There is little he can do if the man persists in such manifest falsehoods.
Yet Danny does so persist; has been so persisting for the past half-hour — ever since he’d slid a letter addressed to him beneath the driver’s seat in the front of the cab; ever since he’d jumped down into the strong arms of the law. Literally so.
“Still no news of your address?”
“No fixed abode, innit? Told you, din I? I’m a new-age traveller.”
“Occupation, then — Traveller.’ OK?”
“Yeah.”
“And you travelled down here in a vehicle stolen from a depot in Southampton at approximately 9:35 P.M. yesterday evening, right?”
“Who told you that?”
“Relax! I’ve got to put summat down here, that’s all — in the ‘Grounds for Detention’ bit. Don’t you understand that?”
Russell collects together his sheets of white A4, and prepares to call it a day. Or a night. “I just hope the Southampton boys’ve got as much patience as I have, that’s all.”
“Do we fingerprint him?” asks Watson.
“We do not! We follow the rule-book; and the rule-book says he’s got the right to a nice hot cuppa, if he wants one.”
Danny very much wants one, for his mouth is dry. But he is suddenly frightened and in danger of losing his self-control.
“You can’t bloody keep me ’ere!” The voice has grown harsh, the muscles are tightened in the neck. There is, for the first time since the arrest, a strong hint of a tightly coiled spring within the prisoner’s sinewy frame. His head moves forward over the desk which separates him from his interlocutor.
“Constable!” Russell is fully prepared; he experiences no fear as he steps towards the door at the back of the room which leads to his office. “Put the cuffs on him, will you? I shan’t be more’n a minute or two—”
“No!”
As suddenly as it has appeared, the tension has now gone. The voice is quiet once more; the muscles once more relaxed. The man breathes out a long, deep sigh, then holds up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.
And Russell steps back to the desk, lays down the Custody Record, and takes out his pen again.
“OK. Let’s be having things, lad.”
Ten minutes later, from his own office, Sergeant Russell has introduced himself, and is speaking on the telephone to a Senior Prison Officer at Winchester.
“You’ve got somebody there who’s just scarpered, I think? Rather you haven’t got somebody there, if you see what I mean. Name o’ Smithson.”
“Oh God, no!”
“Pardon?”
“Just keep him, will you?”
“We are keeping him. He’s here — at Bicester — locked in his cell.”
“Excellent! As I say, just keep him there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we don’t want him back here, that’s what.”
“I’m not with you.”
“Either keep him, or lose him, that’s what I’m saying. Yes... Not a bad idea that, Sergeant. Why don’t you just lose him, and do us all a bloody favour?”
There is a chuckle at the Winchester end of the line before the voice continues, in a more serious vein, to explain these strange rejoinders.
Daniel Smithson had joined the army at the age of sixteen, as a boy-soldier; become a mercenary in Africa at the age of twenty-two; served in the SAS for six years after that; and then... and then served somewhere else — in prison, for virtually the whole of the past twelve years, his offences ranging from petty theft to hefty larceny. And (and this was the real point) the magistrates and the judges and the prison authorities were all becoming increasingly undecided about how to deal with the fellow. What he’d do was this. He’d keep his nose immaculately clean, cause no trouble to anybody, and end up by getting a “trusty” job. Then, well, he’d bugger off a day or two before he was due for release. Huh! Once outside, he’d pinch as much as his pockets could accommodate, nick a car, live it up for a few days; then (inevitably) get rearrested, and return to his old haunts and his old mates, with the Prison Governor treating him like the Prodigal Son. The simple truth was that Smithson just couldn’t settle down outside the prison walls: he needed — enjoyed! — the stable routine of a familiar nick. Though not a big fellow, he was a strong and wiry one, and his SAS history had reached the prison well ahead of him. No one buggered about (if that was the right word) with Mr. Danny Smithson.
“Oh no, Sergeant. No one.”
One thing has been troubling Russell during the recital of the Winchester prisoner’s CV: the fact that his man hardly looks the part of some ex-SAS paratrooper, or whatever; and Russell puts his thoughts into words.
“You sure we’ve got the right fellow — the fellow you’re talking about?”
“Put him on the line, if you like. I’ll soon tell you.”
“No, I don’t think I can allow that.”
“Easy enough to tell, anyway. He’s got some letters tattooed on the back of one of his hands — left hand, I think it is. They mentioned it in the papers. Hold on! Shan’t be a tick.”
In fact four minutes drag by before the Prison Officer reads from a folder; and Russell listens carefully.
“I’ll go and check straightaway. Shan’t be a tick.”
Danny is not asleep. He sits on the side of the bed, staring at the floor — and looking up with no apparent interest as Russell unlocks the door.
“Just lift up your hands, will you, Danny Boy.”
The prisoner lifts up his hands as if, once again, he is surrendering to the foe.
“Good. Now turn your hands round, please.”
So Danny turns his hands round; and on the lower joints of the fingers on his left hand Russell reads the letters I–L-Y-K.
This time it is the Winchester end which has waited through four long minutes.
“Well?”
“Yep — it’s him, all right. When’ll you be coming to fetch him?”
“Not before breakfast, I’ll tell you that! We’ll let you know.”
“OK.”
“By the way, what exactly are you holding him on?”
“Theft of vehicle; theft of goods in transit; driving without a licence; driving without—”
“Same old stuff.”
“Same old sentence, like as not.”
“Unless some judge suddenly decides to show a bit o’ sense and refuses to lock the silly sod away again.”
Russell is not prepared to enter any penological discussion, and prepares to sign off.
“Thanks anyway. Will you be coming yourself?”
“Me? God, no. I’ll be seeing him soon enough.”
“And no handcuffs, you say.”
“That’s it. No need. Let him have a stroll round Bicester after breakfast by all means — no problem. No cuffs, though. He’s one of those who can’t stand any physical contact with people. Know what I mean?”
“Doesn’t sound as if he’ll give us any trouble, anyway.”
“I wouldn’t go quite so far as that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing really. Just don’t be surprised if he — well, if he strings you along a bit. Know what I mean? He’s a bit of a joker is our Danny. Always was. Probably ask you for a bottle of champers for breakfast — say it’s doctor’s orders.”
“We do a nice little line in tea-bags down here in Bicester.”
“Cheers then.”
“Cheers.”
PC Watson has finished his report, and now looks in for the last time at his prisoner.
“Anything you want?”
Danny shakes his head. “Unless you’d like to gimme me Biro back.”
Returning to the Custody Suite, Watson passes on the request; and Sergeant Russell looks down, first at the cash envelope, then at the property bag — from the latter finally taking out the cheap blue pen with which Danny had written on the tacho-disc.
“No harm, I suppose. He probably wants to write a poem on the loo-paper.”

Chapter 4

At 8:20 A.M. the minibus from Winchester arrived in the front yard of Bicester Police Station, where one of the two prison personnel immediately alighted and reported to the Information Desk.
Everything was ready.
Driven now into the yard behind the main building (“Police Vehicles Only”), the minibus was backed up alongside the wall, its rear window coming to a halt only a few feet from the single external door of the Custody Suite.
The prisoner had not after all ordered champers for breakfast; instead he had done splendid justice to the sausages and beans brought to him an hour earlier. Yet he did make one request when the cell door was again unlocked for his departure, just after 8:30 A.M. Two spare blankets were folded beside the bed, and he’d asked if he could have one to put round him on the journey. He had no overcoat; it was a cold morning.
Not very much to ask at all really, was it?
It had all happened so very suddenly that no one afterwards had any particularly clear picture of the events. But it went something like this...
As he was walking through the exit door from the Custody Suite, the blanket which the prisoner was holding about his head and shoulders was dramatically whisked away and equally dramatically whipped over the head and shoulders of the tall, bearded officer who was about to unlock the near-side door of the minibus. Then, dodging lightly past him, the prisoner sprinted the thirty or so yards to the tall beech-hedge which enclosed the rear yard. The hedge was strengthened by a six-foot meshed-wire fence — the fence, in turn, supported every six or seven yards by concrete posts. These posts were some five feet in height, finishing a foot or so below the top of the hedge. One of the posts — and only one — was itself strengthened by a concrete strut which formed an angle of 45 degrees to the ground and which joined the post roughly halfway up, looking rather like a lambda in the Greek alphabet.
At full speed the prisoner leapt at this structure, his left foot landing firm on the top of the strut, his right foot equally firm on the top of the post; and then, propelled by such twin leverage, he had cleared the beech-hedge by several inches, landing neatly on the grass of a school playing-field beyond. Someone later said it was a bit like watching a Russian gymnast clearing a vaulting-horse at the Olympics.
The prisoner was gone.
Neither of the heavy Winchester men could hope to match such a nimble-footed feat of levitation; and it was ten minutes before a wailing police car, forced to take the long way round the front of the station, was crisscrossing the maze of streets in the King’s End estate behind, where (it was believed) the prisoner was last sighted.
But not sighted again.

Chapter 5

The loo-paper in the cells at Bicester may by no means be described as “Savoy Soft,” stiffly reluctant as it is to accommodate itself to the contours of the average human backside. Yet (as Sergeant Russell had earlier intimated) it makes unexpectedly fine writing-paper; and it was two sheets of this paper which one of the cleaners found just before lunchtime that same day — between the folds of the remaining blanket in the cell which had housed the escaped prisoner.
The escape had caused no little embarrassment to the officers concerned, and (worse still) would almost certainly hit the national headlines the following day. Thus it was that Chief Inspector Page of Thames Valley CID (no less) had little compunction in summoning the now off-duty officers Russell, Hodges, and Watson, to his office in Kidlington at 11 A.M. to review the matter — and the cleaner’s discovery.
The spelling and punctuation were both a bit shaky, but the import of the letter could hardly have given a clearer answer to what had hitherto seemed the increasingly bewildering question of the escaped man’s identity:
The Torygraph did it, very useful paper and a lot of criminals vote tory. It was Smithson give me the idea because we got the same name see. If he got nicked he gets good treatment but if I got nicked no, so what about him and me changing places for a little wile and no harm done is it? Besides, probably gives me a best chance of scarpering — lots of that now days, perhaps its the resession to blame like for every thing else. There was just that one problem, that tatoo I read about and when you coppers thought I was filling in the old tacko with the blue byro I was just writing out them four letters on the old nuckles see, easy! Then I done a pretty good job really with all that stuff about me name, dont you think so? Well well Danny Smithson boy, I wonder where you are, have you desided to keep out this time, why not?
I’ll leave this letter in the bottom blanket because I’ve got ideas with the top one. If I get away what a big laugh for me when you find it, and if I dont its your turn for the big laugh
Samuel (Danny) Lambert
P.S. you can give me old comb and spare hanky to Oxfam or the Sally army, its up to you
Newly recruited to the Force, PC Watson was; glad to have someone to chat with — even a subdued looking Sergeant Russell — as they stood in the lunch queue in the HQ canteen.
“Rotten bit o’ luck, Sarge...” he began.
“You make your own luck, lad. I shoulda been far more careful checking out that tattoo.”
“I was thinking more about both of ’em being named ‘Danny.’ ”
“Nicknamed, you mean — one of ’em.”
“Yeah. I mean, there’s your ‘Pongo’ Warings...”
“And your ‘Nobby’ Clarks...”
“How come your ‘Danny’ Lamberts, though?”
“Dunno.”
The queue moved a couple of feet, and the plainclothes man in front of them turned round to proffer a suggestion:
“Might be someone from Stamford? Stamford in Lincolnshire? Lamberts there often get called ‘Danny,’ after Daniel Lambert — fellow who weighed fifty-two stone odd — still in the Guinness Book of Records.”
“Who’s he when he’s at home?” asked Watson, after they’d been served.
“You don’t know?”
Watson shook his head.
“That, my lad, was Chief Inspector Morse.”
Watson frowned slightly. He’d never heard of the man; yet for a fleeting second he’d thought he’d almost recognized the profile as that grey head had turned towards them in the queue...
Next morning, the Governor of HM Prison Winchester received a full report of the case, now becoming widely known as the “Cock-up at Bicester Corral,” including a photocopy of the letter found in the escapee’s cell. He immediately summoned the Senior Prison Officer from D Wing, where Smithson had spent so many comparatively contented months and years.
“You’ll be interested in this.” The Governor handed over the file.
Price, a thick-set Irishman, sat down and began reading.
“No news of our Danny?” interrupted the Governor.
Price shook his head. Then, halfway through the letter, his eyes suddenly widened with a new and startling notion.
“You don’t think, sorr...?” he began slowly, pointing to the letter.
The Governor groaned, permitting himself also, albeit briefly, to contemplate the unimaginable.
“Don’t tell me that! Please! Don’t tell me it’s Smithson’s writing?”
Price studied the writing of the letter again. “Yes, sorr. I’m sorry. But I’m pretty sure it is.”
And for a few moments the two men sat there in silence, each of them visualizing their erstwhile prisoner perched aloft in the cabin of a stolen van, and carefully over-tracing his own tattoos with a cheap blue Biro pen...

Chapter 6

Not too carefully — not carefully at all really — Morse looked down at the man lying supine on the double bed, dressed only in an unbuttoned white shirt, Oxford-blue pants, and black socks. The paleness of the man’s skin precluded the probability of any recent holiday on the Greek islands — with only the dullish-red V below the throat suggesting the possibility of any life outside the executive-suited higher echelons of British management.
Late forties, by the look of him; a firmly built man, with a pleasantly featured, clean-shaven face, and frizzy, grey-flecked hair. The jacket of a subfusc herring-bone suit was hanging inside the open-doored wardrobe, a maroon tie over it; and neatly aligned at the near side of the bed was a pair of soft black leather shoes.
A methodical, successful businessman, thought Morse.
A quiet knock on the door of Room 231 of The Randolph Hotel heralded the arrivals of Sergeant Lewis and Dr. Laura Hobson — the latter immediately stepping forward to peer down at the dead man’s face. Blood was still seeping slowly from a deep gash that slanted over the closed right eye like some monstrous acute accent. But there was no other sign of red in the face, for the lips were a palish shade of purple.
“Probably had a heart attack,” volunteered the pathologist.
Lewis looked down at the Corby trouser-press, standing to the left of the bathroom door, on which a pair of subfusc herring-bone trousers were draped over the opened leaf.
“Probably bashed his head on that?” suggested Lewis.
And Morse nodded.
The cream paint of the left-hand door-jamb was splashed with elongated flecks of scarlet, and two feet inside the bathroom itself, on the blue-and-white-tiled floor, was a patch of darkly dried blood.
“If he’d tripped it could have brought on a heart attack, don’t you think, sir?”
Again Morse nodded. “And if he’d had a heart attack he could have tripped and cracked his head, yes.”
Turning her head momentarily towards them, Dr. Hobson put the situation rather more simply: “Which came first — the chicken or the egg?”
“The chicken?” said Morse.
But the blonde pathologist was clearly in favour of an each-way bet. “Like as not it happened contemporaneously.”
Lewis’s eyebrows shot up. “Big word, that.”
Dr. Hobson smiled at him, attractively. “I’ve finished with it for now, Sergeant. It’s all yours if you’d like to have it.”
On the dressing table to the right of the bathroom door, beside the phone, lay two items which had been recovered from the bathroom floor: a calibrated syringe, its orange hood still in place over the needle; and the glass fragments of what had been a small phial, some three inches long, which had contained (as indicated by its label) “Human Actrapid Insulin” — the colourless liquid having almost completely seeped away into a layer of white tissue-paper.
For a minute or so longer, Chief Inspector Morse stood exactly where he was, visualizing much — visualizing almost everything, perhaps — of what had happened there on the threshold of the bathroom, his eyes finally concentrating on the telephone, its receiver cradled firmly on its base.
Then he announced his strategy: “I think we’ll just nip down to the bar, Lewis — which Doctor Hobson finishes off here.” He looked at his wrist-watch. “That’s two nights running I’ve missed The Archers. For nothing, too — there’s been no murder here.”
But before leaving Room 231, he dipped a hand gently into the inside breast-pocket of the dead man’s jacket, withdrawing a wallet of pigskin leather.
“Do we know who found him — and how?” asked Lewis, as the two detectives walked down the grandly wide staircase to the reception area of The Randolph.
“That’s exactly what I hope you’re going to find out for me.”
Three-quarters of an hour later Sergeant Lewis had discovered all there was to be known. Not much, but enough. And he reported to Morse.
Sherwood had reserved the double-bedded, en suite, five-star room by phone only the previous evening — with no opportunity thus afforded for any written confirmation. He had booked in, on his own, at about 5:40 P.M. But the form, duly completed at reception, was comparatively uninformative: Name(s) — “Sherwood”; Home Address — “53 Leominster Drive, Shrewsbury”; Signature — “Peter Sherwood.” The two boxes beside the questions Are you here on business? On leisure? remained unticked, and the space for Car Registration was completed with a dismissive dash. That was all, except for a tick in the Cash box alongside How do you intend to settle your account?
The Guest Registration Card thus negotiated, £140 (in twenties) had been paid; and no further details were disclosed by Sherwood or demanded by the chicly uniformed receptionist. Any wake-up call in the morning? “No.” Any newspaper? “Yes — the Telegraph.” Sherwood had taken the key, politely declined the offer of help with his two suitcases, and that was that.
No woman on the scene — no one remembered a woman at all.
Sherwood was scheduled to attend a two-day conference on Computer Technology being held at Rewley House — very close by, just up at the top of St. John Street, almost immediately opposite The Randolph.
Now clearly of importance had been two telephone calls. The first, probably an outside call, asking to be put through to Mr. Sherwood; the second, presumably made from inside the hotel, reporting to the operator that medical assistance was urgently required in Room 231. The Senior Concierge, Roy Harden, had immediately gone up to the room, where he’d found the door slightly ajar — and Sherwood lying across the threshold of the bathroom. Already dead by the look of him. From the room itself Harden had promptly telephoned the house-doctor; and then the manager, with whose assistance two minutes later he’d carried Sherwood’s body over to the bed. A room-maid had cleared up the broken glass from the bathroom — for there seemed to be no suspicious circumstances at the time. It was only because of the house-doctor’s marginal unease over the head wound that the manager had deemed it prudent to call in the police. Just to be on the safe side.
“What do you think so far?” asked Morse.
“Same as you, sir. Cherchez la belle femme. He’s off to another conference — he invites his mistress — they know how to work things — he has a heart attack — she’s scared out of her wits — rings for the doc — and then gets pretty smartish out of it.”
“Ye-es...” Morse picked up the dead man’s wallet. “No railway tickets in here, Lewis.”
“So?”
“They don’t very often collect railway tickets from passengers these days, do they?”
Lewis followed the drift of Morse’s thinking. “They probably came by car, you mean?”
“Her car, like as not. He tells his wife he’s going to the railway station, and his lady-love picks him up there. Then when she gets him here, she just nips off and parks her car somewhere nearby — and there’s no need for anyone to know her registration number or anything. Very neat. Very easy.”
Lewis nodded agreement. “It’s getting easier all the time to commit adultery.”
Morse looked up sharply. “Let’s be slightly more accurate about things, Lewis. What you mean is that the preconditions for adultery are easier to handle: fewer eyebrows raised; fewer questions asked; fewer details to be filled in; just fork out your fee for the room... But whether it’s really become emotionally easier, psychologically easier... physically easier — well, I just wouldn’t know, would I?”
Saving Lewis the possible embarrassment of any reply, the young pathologist now appeared beside them in the Chapters Bar.
Morse beamed happily, and pushed forward his emptied glass. “Ah, Doctor Hobson! What’ll you have to drink? Lewis here is in the chair.”
But Dr. Hobson shook her pretty head. “I can’t stay, I’m afraid.”
“Pity!”
“You’re feeling all right, Chief Inspector?”
“Pardon?”
“They told me the only thing you ever wanted from any pathologist was an estimated time of death.”
“Oh, I know that already,” replied Morse. “Six o’clock — to the minute, I’d say.”
Laura Hobson smiled, refusing to rise to the bait. “About six o’clock, yes. I hope you don’t expect me to be quite so precise as you, though? I’m just a humble medical scientist myself. No foul-play, though. I’m fairly sure of that.”
“Fairly sure?”
“As I say, I’m just a scientist. Good night.”
“He was a neat and tidy enough man,” resumed Lewis. “The bag he’d packed for himself — well, it was all laid out with sort of military precision. You know, socks, hankies, spare pants, washing kit — all in their proper compartments.”
“Condoms?”
“Yes, sir, in a little compartment at the front.”
“It’s all very sad, isn’t it?”
“More sad for the wife, if you ask me.”
“It was the wife I was thinking of,” replied Morse quietly.
Lewis thought it wise to change tack. “You seem very sure about the time?”
“There a Diabetic Card here in the wallet, giving details and times of daily injections: 7 A.M.; 6 P.M.; 10:30 P.M. ‘Military precision,’ did you say? I think you’re right.”
“We’d know it was just before or just after six anyway, wouldn’t we? From the telephone calls, I mean.”
“Ye-es.”
“Who do you think made the first call, sir?”
“Same woman who made the second. She rang from a phone-box outside — said she’d parked OK — asked him for the room number — told him to leave the door slightly ajar — promised she’d be with him in just a few minutes...”
“...saw him lying there — realized he was dead — and rang for help.”
“Where did she ring from, though?” asked Morse slowly.
“Bedroom, I should think?”
“I wonder... She’d have to stand just over him when she rang, wouldn’t she?”
“Not everybody’s quite so put off by dead bodies as you, sir.”
The Senior Concierge, now re-summoned, briskly confirmed his earlier evidence, and Morse had only one additional question.
“Was the telephone off the hook when you went into the room?”
“Yes, sir. Dangling on the cord.”
“And you replaced it?”
“I replaced it.”
“I see.”
“Should I have left it?”
“No, no!” For some reason Morse seemed almost relieved, and the concierge left.
“I wish all our witnesses were as bright and unequivocal as Mr. Harden, Lewis!”
“Important, is it, this phone business?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not now.”
Lewis looked at his watch. “We shall have to do something about his wife, sir.”
“You know the routine better than I do.”
Yes, Lewis did.
“Tell ’em to be gentle with her. Just to say her husband’s had a fatal heart attack. We can arrange transport — well, they can — if she wants to come to Oxford tomorrow. Not tonight, though. Get her local GP in. Well — you know the ropes.”
Morse drained his beer and his eyes reflected the curious sadness he clearly felt for the woman left alone that night in Shrewsbury.
“Another pint?” suggested Lewis.
But Morse shook his head and stood up to go, the pigskin wallet held tightly in his right hand.
Three-quarters of an hour later, a police car drew up outside the double-garaged property that stood at 53 Leominster Drive, Shrewsbury. Accompanying the police sergeant was a young smartly attractive WPC, who did the talking:
“Mrs. Sherwood?”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news for you.”
Sometimes the police had the lousiest job in the whole world.
Mid-morning the following day Morse had received Dr. Hobson’s preliminary report:
Heart attack — death following almost immediately. Little or no chance of survival, even if any more sophisticated treatment had been available earlier. Massive h.a. Subject a heavily dependent insulin diabetic, with (probably) high blood-pressure. Often a risky — sometimes fatal — combination. Every indication that onset of h.a. precipitated subject’s imbalance and collapse, with head injury incurred only subsequently. Blood sugar at time of death: 26.8. Very high.
Doing one or two other little tests. Will keep you informed.
L.H.
And now Lewis read through the findings.
“Things seem to have happened, er, contemporaneously, sir.”
“Clears it up, certainly, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Mrs. Sherwood’s coming down this morning. Identify the body and...”
Morse nodded. “Keep her out of The Randolph, if you can. No need for her to know anything about the room or... or anything.”
“I suppose not.”
“Look! Nobody’s going to profit from parading any dirty linen, agreed?”
“Least of all Mrs. Sherwood.”
“And her family.”
“OK.”
“Have we discovered much about her?”
Lewis consulted his note-book.
“Aged forty-five; son and daughter — both early twenties; she works part-time; bags o’ money; everybody seemed to think the marriage was fine.”
Morse nodded sombrely. “Death’s bad enough, but... Remember that Greek Archbishop, Lewis? Had a heart attack in his local knocking-shop at Athens? Poor sod!”
“At least he hadn’t got a wife.”
“How do you know?”
“Perhaps Mrs. Sherwood was having a bit on the side, too.”
But Morse appeared not to be listening. He took from the dead man’s wallet a passport-sized colour photograph of a duskily tressed and deeply tanned young beauty, wearing thinly rimmed schoolma’amish spectacles, and looking half-seriously into the camera — yet with lips beginning to curl in a sensuous smile.
“Lovely!” said Morse. “Lovely!”
“And that’s...?”
“That’s Mr. Sherwood’s ‘bit on the side,’ as you so elegantly phrase things.”
Then Morse, after glancing briefly at the back of the photo, slowly tore it into smaller and smaller pieces.
“Destroying evidence, that is. Could be valuable in the case—”
“What case?”
Lewis shrugged. “You’re in charge, sir.”
Morse was now on his feet. “Just nip me down to Oxford, will you? Railway station for a couple of minutes — then on to St. Aidâtes. What time’s Mrs. Sherwood due here?”
“Eleven-thirty. Driving down — dunno if it’s the Rolls or the BMW, though!”
Morse shot off at an odd angle: “Do you believe in any after-life, Lewis?”
“Not sure, really. What about you?”
“No, not me. I think death’s just a process of chemical disintegration.”
“Perhaps she could tell us — Mrs. Sherwood. She took a Chemistry degree at Cambridge.”
“How on earth did you find that out?”
Lewis, too, now rose. “I’m a detective, sir, remember?”
“She must have been a clever lass at school.”
“But you still don’t want to see her?”
“No.”
As he’d promised, Morse spent only a brief while inside Oxford railway station; and five minutes later Lewis was driving down St. Aidâtes, when Morse peremptorily announced a slight change of plan. It was just after 11 A.M.
“Drop me anywhere here! I’ll just nip in to see how the landlord is.”
He gestured vaguely to the Bulldog, and Lewis brought the police car to a stop opposite Christ Church.
“Just give this to Mrs. Sherwood, will you?”
Lewis took the proffered wallet. “No more photos in it?”
“Only one of the four of ’em: mum and dad and the two kids. Everything’s all right now.”
Lewis had arrived back at Kidlington HQ at 2 P.M. to find that the chief had not yet returned — from wherever.
Mrs. Sherwood had been a quarter of an hour late (in the BMW), and Lewis had looked quickly through the contents of her late husband’s wallet as he’d waited in a small ante-room in the Pathology Institute. The usual plastic cards were there, relating to monies and memberships; £110 in banknotes; the family photograph that Morse had mentioned (but no others); and something else, yes — two green-and-orange British Rail tickets, one “Out” and one “Return,” between Shrewsbury and Oxford. Neither had received the attention of any ticket-collector’s clip. Yet they looked genuine enough. Were genuine enough, except for the fact that the date printed on each of them was not yesterday’s — but today’s.
Lewis smiled wryly to himself.
Mrs. Pamela Sherwood had turned out to be a slim, well-groomed, delicately featured woman — distressed, yes, but well in control. Lewis himself never really knew what to do or what to say in times of bereavement; but that was exactly why (as Morse well knew) he performed the job so successfully, since it was not unusual on such sad occasions for roles to be reversed and for the bereaved themselves to feel an instinctively reciprocal sympathy with the good sergeant.
As now.
Over coffee, and after identifying her husband’s body, Mrs. Sherwood herself had looked quickly through the contents of the wallet, her eyes intent as she took out one item after another, including the tickets.
One item after another... except of course for the photograph of the dusky siren whose features for a little while had recently held the Chief Inspector mesmerized.
But it was the message on Morse’s Ansaphone which displaced any thoughts of Mrs. Sherwood; a message left by the manager of The Randolph; a message which Lewis, now for the third time, replayed as he waited for Morse to return.
Bamber Goodall here, Chief Inspector. I had a personal call this morning just before twelve. A woman, youngish woman by the sound of her, said she’d got to speak to me and I accepted the call. She said she was feeling guilty because she was the woman who was going to stay with Mr. Sherwood. She said she’d driven him down in her own car. She’d kept out of the way when he’d booked in, and when he’d gone up to the room with their luggage. Then he’d come down again, given her the room-key, and said he’d expect her in about ten or fifteen minutes, after she’d parked the car — which she had done, up in Norham Gardens. It seems they’d both been worried about leaving the car in the hotel garage. Then when she got back and walked up to their room she’d opened the door to find him lying there, and she’d just “panicked” — her word — and grabbed her case — still unopened — and got the hell out of things. She drove out to the Cotswolds, and then back home this morning. She was still feeling awful about it, she said. Somehow she’d known he was dead — though she didn’t say how she knew. Well, that’s it really. When I said she ought to talk to the police she said she couldn’t. I tried to keep her talking but it was no good. She just kept saying that if only Mrs. Sherwood could be kept out of it all — you know — kept in the dark about things, about her, well, she’d be extremely grateful. So that’s it, really. I’ll be in the hotel here till about eight-thirty this evening... if you want me.
During the replay of this message, Lewis had been conscious that Morse was standing beside him, listening (it seemed) intently; and as Goodall signed off, Lewis noted that Morse’s eyes were shining with excitement; and impatience, too — like a camel sniffing the coolness of the air and eager to ride forth at evening from the wells...
Although Lewis himself would not have made that particular simile.
Morse’s verdict, whispered and intense, was barely audible in the now silent office:
“She did it! She murdered him!”
For a few moments Lewis looked across the desk with mouth agape, like a young lad bidden to display his tonsils to the doctor. He would have asked about that unspecified “She,” but already Morse had picked up the phone, asking to be put through to the Path lab — urgently. And as he covered the speaker with the palm of his left hand, he gave his instructions:
“Go and take a full statement from the manager, Lewis. I want to know exactly what she told him. Verbatim, as far as—
“Ah, Doctor Hobson?”
“You can drive back,” Morse had said the following morning when just after 10 A.M. he himself took the wheel of the maroon-coloured Jaguar and began the drive up to Shrewsbury, via Motorways 40, 42, 6, and 54. One hundred and ten miles. No Services. An hour and a half. Lewis, whose only indulgence in life (apart from eggs and chips) was speedy driving, would have cut fifteen minutes off the time.
Did cut fifteen minutes off, on the return journey.
“Difficult to know why anyone’d ever want to go from Shrewsbury to Oxford by British Rail,” declared Lewis, as Morse pulled up outside the elegantly appointed, detached house that stood at 53 Leominster Drive.
“Mrs. Sherwood,” began Morse, “we have some difficult things to tell you. When your husband went off to Oxford, we have every reason to believe, I’m afraid, that he’d arranged to spend two nights with a woman-friend — with a mistress — in The Randolph Hotel. She’d driven him down to Oxford in her own car—”
Mrs. Sherwood shook her head and closed her eyes, like a young girl refusing to believe that Santa Claus was just a dream.
“You’ve got it all wrong! He went to Oxford by train — I took him to the station myself. He knew he’d be having quite a lot to drink at the conference—”
“He went to Oxford by car,” countered Morse. “His mistress drove him there.”
“But that’s nonsense! I’ve got the rail tickets—”
“Show me!”
From her handbag, Mrs. Sherwood took out her husband’s wallet; and from the wallet, the two tickets — which she handed to him.
“We decided to buy these for you, Mrs. Sherwood, because we wanted to spare you some of the anguish and the pain of all this trouble. And if you’d been more observant, you’d have spotted the wrong date on them. Until yesterday, you see, we’d no suspicion at all that your husband’s death was due to anything but natural causes.”
Her eyes flicked up sharply. “And now you’re saying...?”
Morse made no direct answer, but looked away from those compelling eyes, and slowly tore the rail tickets into smaller and smaller pieces, just as earlier he’d torn the photograph.
“Did you know your husband’s mistress?”
For a while it seemed that Mrs. Sherwood would challenge the premiss of Morse’s brutal question. But she didn’t.
“I know her.”
“We did find a photograph,” continued Morse, “but foolishly I tore it up, because, as I say, we wanted to—”
“She was hardly the first, Chief Inspector.”
“Please tell me who she is and where we can find her.”
But Mrs. Sherwood shook her head as she stared into some middle distance. “I felt jealous about his other women — of course I did. But I envied this one. I’d found out a few things about her and I think she was everything to Peter that I’d never been. You see, I’m so very careful and tight about life — about emotions, money, everything. And she’s open and vivacious, and wonderful in bed, for all I know...”
“And very young,” added Morse cruelly.
“About half Peter’s age, yes. Perhaps that’s what hurt more than anything.”
“But who is she, Mrs. Sherwood?”
Morse had lifted his fiercely blue eyes to challenge hers. Yet to no avail; and it was Lewis who pursued the questioning.
“We’re interested in two telephone calls, Mrs. Sher wood, made about the time your husband died: one just before six o’clock; and one five or ten minutes later. At first we believed both calls were made by the same person. Yesterday, though, a woman rang and admitted making the second call — the one asking for a doctor — but she claimed quite certainly that she hadn’t made any earlier call — a call, we thought, possibly asking for your husband’s room-number, or whatever it was she needed to know. She said she already knew the room-number: he’d gone upstairs with the luggage after checking in, and then come down and actually given her the key — before she drove off to park the car somewhere. So what reason could she have had for ringing him?”
Mrs. Sherwood shrugged her thin shoulders. “Doesn’t seem much point, does there?”
“Do you think it was one of his other lady-loves?”
“Could have been—”
“You, perhaps?” broke in Morse, very quietly.
Rising from her armchair, Mrs. Sherwood walked over to the french window and stood gazing out across the wide lawn.
“Is a wife not allowed to ring her husband? At least he almost always told me where he was staying, if not who he was staying with.”
“What time did you make the call?” continued Morse.
“Six — sixish? As you say.”
“Before or after?”
“Does it matter?”
“You said you’re — what was it? — a bit tight and careful about things like money.”
She nodded. “Silly really. We’d plenty of money — two salaries coming in.”
“You work in a pharmaceutical lab, I think?”
“Part-time, yes.”
“And you’re a Chemistry graduate.”
“Huh! You know all about me. But all you really want to know is about her. Am I right?”
“I’d like to know more about you, though. For example, the phone-rate gets cheaper after six o’clock, doesn’t it? So why didn’t you wait till after six o’clock — it was only a matter of a few minutes.”
“I didn’t think.”
“Come on, Mrs. Sherwood! You can do better than that.”
“No, I can’t.”
“You’ll have to, if you want us to find out who murdered your husband.”
She turned from the window, and in the pale face the eyes were now ablaze.
“Murdered?”
“Yes, murdered.”
“But you’re wrong! He died of a heart attack. That’s what they told me — the medical people — in Oxford.”
“We’ve had a further report from the police pathologist, Mrs. Sherwood. Sergeant!”
Lewis now read out the relevant extract from Dr. Hobson’s second report:
The glass capsule had shattered into small pieces, and the liquid contents had been almost entirely spilled. Our analysis however shows that the original insulin within the capsule had been injected with Sodium Fluoroacetate, a substance readily soluble in water; and extremely poisonous even in the smallest quantity, interfering fatally and almost immediately as it does with the Krebs cycle of metabolism. For obvious reasons this substance is never openly available to the general public.
“But would be available,” added Morse slowly, “to someone working in a pharmaceutical lab.”
“My husband died of a heart attack! I was told so. Are you now saying he didn’t?”
“No.”
“So please tell me what you are saying! What’s all this about murder?”
“You wished to murder your husband, Mrs. Sherwood. You poisoned the insulin capsule. That’s what I’m saying.”
She turned to stare out of the window again.
“And if I did?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know,” replied Morse simply. “But I believe you intended to poison your husband. You’d lived with him for twenty-odd years and you knew him to be an extremely meticulous and methodical man. You knew perfectly well that in Oxford, just as here at home, he’d almost certainly be taking his insulin at six o’clock that evening. And the reason you rang him up just before six o’clock was to make sure he didn’t inject himself from the capsule you’d poisoned. Please tell me if I’m wrong, Mrs. Sherwood! But I think that in spite of all that had happened, in spite of all his infidelities, you didn’t hate him quite enough to go through with your plan. In the last analysis, you wanted him to stay alive. Perhaps you even hoped he’d come to love you once again.”
She nodded weakly, and spoke in a sing-song voice as if the events she now described were distanced and unreal.
“Five to six, it was when I rang. The line was engaged at first and I began to panic. But then I did get through. It was just like when I was a girl; when I used to play little games with myself. I just asked him if he was going to sleep with her that night... I wanted to shock him, you see... And if he said ‘no,’ I was going to tell him about the insulin.”
She stopped.
“And if he said ‘yes’?”
“It never got that far. I just — I just heard a great crash.”
“Don’t you think you may have murdered him just as surely as if you’d poisoned him yourself?”
She shook her head, more in bewilderment, it seemed, than in denial. “What will happen to me?”
“I just don’t know,” said Morse.
At the front door, she laid a hand lightly on his arm, and lowered her eyes.
“It was very kind of you — what you did.”
“But you won’t tell me who this other woman is?”
“No.”
Once the Jaguar had disappeared from view, Mrs. Sherwood moved back inside the house, a semi-smile upon her lips.
Too clever for his own good, that man! She’d played it mostly by ear, of course. But how easy he’d made it for her! With him pointing out the escape route she’d so desperately been seeking after his mention of the Sodium Fluoroacetate; him suggesting the blessedly mitigating circumstance that it was she, Pamela Sherwood, who had rung her husband; she who had tried not to cause, but to prevent her husband’s death. Why he’d even told her the time of that telephone call — a call she’d never made, of course.
Oh, she’d willingly enough have faced the consequences of poisoning her husband, because above all things in life she’d wanted him dead. But now? If by some happy chance she were to be seen as guilty only of causing him a heart attack — well, she’d settle for that all right. Why not? He was dead, that was the main thing. And that Jane bloody Ballantyre — pox-ridden strumpet! — would have to seek some other demerara daddy now.
“You were kind, you know,” said Lewis as he drove the Jaguar out of Leominster Drive.
“How come?”
“Well, the photo—”
“ ‘Stupid,’ do you mean?”
“—and the rail tickets.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do. You probably know you haven’t got a reputation for being too generous with money—”
“No?”
“—but I reckon underneath you’re a bit of an old softie, really. I mean, forking out of your own pocket for those tickets...”
Morse opened his mouth as if to reply; but decided against it. He would (he promised himself) inform Lewis about the expenses claim he had already submitted for £26 — but not for the time being.
“Where to now, sir?”
“We’re going to try to trace Peter Sherwood’s mistress.”
“But — but haven’t we cleared things up?”
“What? You didn’t believe all that stuff we got from Mrs. Sherwood, did you?”
“You mean — you mean you didn’t?”
“Lewis! Lewis! Why do you think she refused to tell us anything about her husband’s latest conquest?”
Lewis had no idea, and mercifully Morse continued.
“Because our dusky maiden is the only one who knows the truth in this case. And Mrs. Sherwood doesn’t want us to know the truth, does she?”
“Perhaps not,” mumbled Lewis, uncomprehendingly.
“So you ask me where were going? Well, it’s a longish shot, but not a hopeless one. The initials on the back of the photo were ‘JB’; she looked deeply tanned—”
“Perhaps she’s just back from a topless two weeks in Torremolinos.”
“You know, Lewis, you don’t often come out with such a splendid sentence as that.”
Lewis felt better. “You mean she might belong to a local health centre?”
“Lying on a sun-bed, yes. And if Mrs. Sherwood was able to find out a few things about her—”
“—she might not live a million miles from Leominster Drive.”
“Exactly so.”
“Sounds like my sort of job, sir.”
“Just what I was thinking, Lewis. So, if you’ll just drop me off at the nearest pub?”
Late that same afternoon, in a luxury flat rather less than a mile from the Sherwood residence, a dark-haired, totally and fatally attractive young woman, wearing thinly rimmed, schoolma’amish spectacles, was still in an agitated frame of mind.
For she knew that she had killed her lover.
Had it been foolish to ring the manager of The Randolph? Certainly the questions he’d asked were disturbingly shrewd; yet her conscience had compelled her to do something. Yes, even she had a conscience...
It had been five minutes to six when she’d finally managed to park the car — up in Norham Gardens, rather further out than she’d anticipated. But at least a telephone booth had stood nearby, and (as arranged) she’d dialled the hotel and been put through without delay. And virtually verbatim could she recall that brief — that fatal — conversation:
“Peter?”
“Jane!”
“Everything OK?”
“Will be once you get here. Room 231.”
“Is it nice?”
“Lovely double bed!”
“I can hardly wait.”
“I’ll leave the door ajar.”
“Peter?”
“Yes?”
“I’m wanting you like crazy.”
“Jane! Please don’t say things like that!”
“Why on earth not?”
“You make me — you make me so excited—”
That was when she’d heard a great crash, although the terrible truth had not immediately dawned upon her consciousness...
Who the two men were she now saw walking up to the block of flats, she hadn’t the faintest notion. But they looked a well enough heeled pair, and the posh car parked at the kerbside hardly suggested a couple of double-glazing double-dealers. And when she answered the door-bell (yes, they had called to see her) she acknowledged to herself that she could really rather fancy one of the two men, the one whose hair looked somewhat prematurely grey. For in spite of her anxieties, she was already casting round (as Mrs. Sherwood had suspected) for some replacement demerara daddy.
“Jane Ballantyre?”
She smiled invitingly. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
“You know, I rather think you can,” said the man whose hair looked somewhat prematurely grey.