'Did you ever teach Valerie yourself?' asked Morse.
Baines chuckled. 'In the first form — just for a year. She didn't know a trapezium from a trampoline.'
Morse grinned, too. 'Did you like her?'
It was a sobering question, and the shrewdness gleamed again in Baines's eyes.
'She was all right.' But it was an oddly unsatisfactory answer and Baines sensed it. He went on glibly about her academic prowess, or lack of it, and veered off into an anecdote about the time he'd found forty-two different spellings of 'isosceles' in a first-year examination.
'Do you know Mrs. Taylor?'
'Oh, yes.' He stood up and suggested there was just time for another pint. Morse knew that the momentum had been broken, quite deliberately, and he felt very tempted to refuse. But he didn't. Anyway, he was going to ask Baines a rather delicate favour.
Morse slept fitfully that night. Broken images littered his mind, like the broken glass strewn about the rubbish tip. He tossed and turned; but the merry-go-round was out of control, and at 3.00 a.m. he got up to make himself a cup of tea. Back in bed, with the light left on, he tried to concentrate his closed, swift-darting eyes on to a point about three inches in front of his nose, and gradually the spinning mechanism began to slow down, slower and slower, and then it stopped. He dreamed of a beautiful girl slowly unbuttoning her low-cut blouse and swaying her hips sensuously above him as she slid down the zip at the side of her skirt. And then she put her long slim fingers up to her face and moved the mask aside, and he saw the face of Valerie Taylor.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I am a man under authority.
(Matthew, viii, 9)
IT WASN'T TOO bad working with Morse. Odd sort of chap, sometimes, and should have got himself married long ago; everybody said that. But it wasn't too bad. He'd worked with him before, and enjoyed it most of the time. Sometimes he seemed a very ordinary sort of fellow. The real trouble was that he always had to find a complex solution to everything, and Lewis had enough experience of police work to know that most criminal activity owed its origins to simple, cheap, and sordid motives, and that few of the criminals themselves had sufficiently intelligent or tortuous minds to devise the cunning stratagems that Morse was wont to attribute to them. In Morse's mind the simple facts of any case seemed somewhere along the line to get fitted out with hooks and eyes which rendered the possibility of infinite associations and combinations. What the great man couldn't do, for all his gifts, was put a couple of simple facts together and come up with something obvious. The letters from Valerie were a case in point. The first one, Peters had said, was pretty certainly written by Valerie herself. Why then not work on the assumption that it was, and go on from there? But no. Morse had to believe the letter was forged, just because it would fit better with some fantastical notion that itself owed its abortive birth to some equally improbable hypothesis. And then there was the second letter. Morse hadn't said much about that; probably learned his lesson. But even if he had to accept that Valerie Taylor had written the letters, he would never be prepared to believe anything so simple as the fact that she'd got fed up with home and with school, and had just gone off, as hundreds of other girls did every year. Then why not Valerie? The truth was that Morse would find it all too easy; no fit challenge for that thoroughbred mind of his. Yes, that was it.
Lewis began to wish he could have a few days on his own in London; use his own initiative. He might find something. After all, Ainley probably had — well, according to Morse he had. But there again the chief was only guessing. There was no evidence for it. Wasn't it far more likely that Ainley hadn't found anything? If he was killed on the very day that he'd actually found some vital clue — after well over two years of finding nothing — it would be a huge coincidence. Too big. But no. Morse himself took such coincidences blithely in his stride.
He went to the canteen for a cup of tea and sat down by Constable Dickson.
'Solved the murder yet, sarge?'
'What murder?'
Dickson grinned. 'Now don't tell me they've put old Morse on a missing persons case, 'cause I shan't believe you. Come on, sarge, spill the beans.'
'No beans to spill,' said Lewis.
'Come off it! I was on the Taylor business, too, you know. Searched everywhere we did — even dragged the reservoir.'
'Well, you didn't find the body. And if you don't have the body, Dickson boy, you don't have a murder, do you?'
'Ainley thought she was bumped off, though, didn't he?'
'Well, there's always the possibility, but. . Look here, Dickson.' He swivelled round in his chair and faced the constable. 'You kill somebody, right? And you've got a body on your hands, right? How do you get rid of it? Come on, tell me.'
'Well, there's a hundred and one ways.'
'Such as?'
'Well, for a start, there's the reservoir.'
'But that was dragged, you say.'
Dickson looked mildly contemptuous. 'Yes, but I mean. A bloody great reservoir like that. You'd need a bit of luck, wouldn't you, sarge.'
'What else?'
'There was that furnace in the school boiler room. Christ, you wouldn't find much trace if they stuck you in there.'
'The boiler room was kept locked.'
'Come off it! S'posed to have been, you mean. Anyway, somebody's got keys.'
'You're not much help, are you, Dickson?'
'Could have been buried easy enough, couldn't she? It's what usually happens to dead bodies, eh, sarge?' He was inordinately amused by his own joke, and Lewis left him alone in his glory.
He returned to the office and sat down opposite the empty chair. Whatever he thought about Morse it wasn't much fun without him. .
He thought about Ainley. He hadn't known about the letters. If he had. . Lewis was puzzled. Why hadn't Morse worried more about the letters? Surely the two of them should be in London, not sitting on their backsides here in Kidlington. Morse was always saying they were a team, the two of them. But they didn't function as a team at all. Sometimes he got a pat on the back, but mostly he just did what the chief told him to. Quite right and proper, too. But he would dearly love to try the London angle. He could always suggest it, of course. Why not? Why indeed not? And if he found Valerie and proved Morse wrong? Not that he wanted to prove him wrong really, but Morse was such an obstinate blighter. In Lewis's garden ambition was not a weed that sprouted freely.
He noted that Morse had obviously read the notes he had made, and felt mildly gratified. Morse must have come back to the office after seeing the Taylors; and Lewis wondered what wonderful edifice his superior officer had managed to erect on the basis of those two interviews.
The phone rang and he answered it. It was Peters.
'Tell Inspector Morse it's the same as before. Different pen, different paper, different envelope, different postmark. But the verdict's the same as before.'
'Valerie Taylor wrote it, you mean?'