'The penis mightier than the sword.'
It was now 12.15 p.m., and if Acum were coming home to lunch, there was an obvious danger of his passing Morse in the opposite direction. Well, there was one pretty certain way of finding out. He left the Lancia at The Prince of Wales and walked.
St. Beuno's Road led off right from the main road. The houses were small here, built of square, grey, granite blocks, and tiled with the purplish-blue Ffestiniog slate. The grass in the tiny front gardens was of a green two or three shades paler than the English variety, and the soil looked tired and undernourished. The front door was painted a Cambridge blue, with the black number 16 dextrously worked in the florid style of a Victorian theatre-bill. Morse knocked firmly, and after a brief interval the door opened; but opened only slightly, and then to reveal a strangely incongruous sight. A woman stood before him, her face little more than a white mask, with slits left open for the eyes and mouth, a blood-red towel swathed around the top of her head where (as, alas, with most blondes) the tell-tale roots of the hair betrayed its darker origins. It was curious to witness the lengths to which the ladies were prepared to go in order to improve upon the natural gifts their maker had endowed them with; and in the depths of Morse's mind there stirred the dim remembrance of the fair-haired woman with the spotty face in the staff photograph of the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School. He knew that this must be Mrs. Acum. Yet it was not the beauty pack, smeared though it doubtless was with a practised skill, that chiefly held the inspector's rapt attention. She was holding a meagre white towel to the top of her shoulders, and as she stood half hidden by the door, it was immediately apparent that behind the towel the woman was completely naked. Morse felt as lecherous as a billy-goat. A Welsh billy-goat, perhaps. It must have been the beer.
'I've called to see your husband. Er, it is Mrs. Acum, isn't it?'
The head nodded, and a hair-line fracture of the carefully assembled mask appeared at the corners of the white mouth. Was she laughing at him?
'Will he be back home for lunch?'
The head shook, and the top of the towel drooped tantalizingly to reveal the beautifully-moulded outline of her breasts.
'He's at school, I suppose?'
The head nodded, and the eyes stared blandly through the slits.
'Well, I'm sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Acum, especially at, er, such, er. . We've spoken to each other before, you know — over the phone, if you remember. I'm Morse. Chief Inspector Morse from Oxford.'
The red towel bobbed on her head, the mask almost breaking through into a smile. They shook hands through the door, and Morse was conscious of the heady perfume on her skin. He held her hand for longer than he need have done, and the white towel dropped from her right shoulder; and for a brief and beautiful moment he stared with shameless fascination at her nakedness. The nipple was fully erect and he felt an almost irresistible urge to hold it there and then between his fingers. Was she inviting him in? He looked again at the passive mask. The towel was now in place again, and she stood back a little from the door; it was fifty-fifty. But he had hesitated too long, and the chance, if chance it was, was gone already. He lacked, as always, the bogus courage of his own depravity, and he turned away from her and walked back slowly towards The Prince of Wales. At the end of the road he stopped, and looked back; but the light-blue door was closed upon him and he cursed the conscience that invariably thus doth make such spineless cowards of us all. It was perhaps something to do with status. People just didn't expect such base behaviour from a chief inspector, as if such eminent persons were somehow different from the common run of lewd humanity. How wrong they were! How wrong! Why, even the mighty had their little weaknesses. Good gracious, yes. Just think of old Lloyd George. The things they said about Lloyd George! And he was a prime minister. .
He climbed into the Lancia. Oh God, such beautiful breasts! He sat motionless at the wheel for a short while, and then he smiled to himself. He reckoned that Constable Dickson could almost have hung his helmet there! It was an irreverent thought, but it made him feel a good deal better. He pulled carefully out of the car park and headed north on the final few miles of his journey.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Merely corroborative detail, to add artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
(W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado)
A SMALL GROUP OF boys was kicking a football around at the side of a large block of classrooms which abutted on to the wide sports field, where sets of rugby and hockey posts demarcated the area of grass into neatly white-lined rectangles. The rest of the school was having lunch. The two men walked three times around the playing fields, hands in pockets, heads slightly forward, eyes downcast. They were about the same build, neither man above medium height; and to the football players they seemed unworthy of note, anonymous almost. Yet one of the two men pacing slowly over the grass was a chief inspector of police, and the other, one of their very own teachers, was a suspect in a murder case.
Morse questioned Acum about himself and his teaching career; about Valerie Taylor and Baines and Phillipson; about the conference in Oxford, times and places and people. And he learned nothing that seemed of particular interest or importance. The schoolmaster appeared pleasant enough — in a nondescript sort of way; he answered the inspector's questions with freedom and with what seemed a fair degree of guarded honesty. And so Morse told him, told him quietly yet quite categorically, that he was a liar; told him that he had indeed left the conference that Monday evening, at about 9.30 p.m., told him that he had walked to Kempis Street to see his former colleague, Mr. Baines, and that he had been seen there; told him that, if he persisted in denying such a plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth, he, Morse, had little option but to take him back to Oxford where he would be held for questioning in connection with the murder of Mr. Reginald Baines. It was as simple as that! And, in fact, it proved a good deal simpler than even Morse had dared to hope; for Acum no longer denied the plain, incontrovertible statement of the truth which the inspector had presented to him. They were on their third and final circuit of the playing fields, far away from the main school buildings, by the side of some neglected allotments, where the ramshackle sheds rusted away sadly in despairing disrepair. Here Acum stopped and nodded slowly.
'Just tell me what you did, sir, that's all.'
'I'd been sitting at the back of the hall — deliberately — and I left early. As you say, it was about half-past nine, or probably a bit earlier.'
'You went to see Baines?' Acum nodded. 'Why did you go to see him?'
'I don't know, really. I was getting a bit bored with the conference, and Baines lived fairly near. I thought I'd go and see if he was in and ask him out for a drink. It's always interesting to talk about old times, you know the sort of thing — what was going on at school, which members of staff were still there, which ones had left, what they were doing. You know what I mean.'