He spoke naturally and easily, and if he were a liar he seemed to Morse a fairly fluent one.
'Well,' continued Acum, 'I walked along there. I was in a bit of a hurry because I knew the pubs would be closed by half-past ten and time was getting on. I had a drink on the way and it must have been getting on for ten by the time I got there. I'd been there before, and thought he must be in because the light was on in the front room.'
'Were the curtains drawn?' For the first time since they had been talking together, Morse's voice grew sharper.
Acum thought for a moment. 'Yes, I'm almost certain they were.'
'Go on.'
'Well, I thought, as I say, that he must be in. So I knocked pretty loudly two or three times on the door. But he didn't answer, or at least he didn't seem to hear me. I thought he might be in the front room perhaps with the TV on, so I went to the window and knocked on it.'
'Could you hear the TV? Or see it?'
Acum shook his head; and to Morse it was all beginning to sound like a record stuck in its groove. He knew for certain what was coming next
'It's a funny thing, Inspector, but I began to feel just a bit frightened — as if I were sort of trespassing and shouldn't really be there at all; as if he knew that I was there but didn't want to see me. . Anyway, I went back to the door and knocked again, and then I put my head round the door and shouted his name.'
Morse stood quite still, and considered his next question with care. If he was to get his piece of information, he wanted it to come from Acum himself without too much prompting.
'You put your head round the door, you say?'
'Yes. I just felt sure he was there.'
'Why did you feel that?'
'Well, there was a light in the front room and. .' He hesitated for a moment, and seemed to be fumbling around in his mind for some fleeting, half-forgotten impression that had given him this feeling.
'Think back carefully, sir,' said Morse. 'Just picture yourself there again, standing at the door. Take your time. Just put yourself back there. You're standing there in Kempis Street. Last Monday night. .'
Acum shook his head slowly and frowned. He said nothing for a minute or two.
'You see, Inspector, I just had this idea that he was somewhere about. I almost knew he was. I thought he might just have slipped out somewhere for a few seconds because. .' It came back to him then, and he went on quickly. 'Yes, that's it. I remember now. I remember why I thought he must be there. It wasn't just the light in the front window. There was a light on in the hall because the front door was open. Not wide open, but standing ajar as if he'd just slipped out and would be back again any second.'
'And then?'
'I left. He wasn't there. I just left, that's all.'
'Why didn't you tell me all this when I rang you, sir?'
'I was frightened, Inspector. I'd been there, hadn't I? And he was probably lying there all the time — murdered. I was frightened, I really was. Wouldn't you have been?'
Morse drove into the centre of Caernarfon, and parked his car alongside the jetty under the great walls of the first Edward's finest castle. He found a Chinese restaurant nearby, and greedily gulped down the oriental fare that was set before him. It was his first meal for twenty-four hours, and he temporarily dismissed all else from his mind. Only over his coffee did he allow his restless brain to come to grips with the case once more; and by the time he had finished his second cup of coffee he had reached the firm conclusion that, whatever improbabilities remained to be explained away, especially the reasons given for calling on Baines, both Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum had told him the truth, or something approximating to the truth, at least as far as their evidence concerned itself with the visits made to the house in Kempis Street. Their accounts of what had taken place there were so clear, so mutually complementary, that he felt he should and would believe them. That bit about the door being slightly open, for example — exactly as Mrs. Phillipson had left it before panicking and racing down to the lighted street. No. Acum could not have made that up. Surely not. Unless. . It was the second time that he had qualified his conclusions with that sinister word 'unless'; and it troubled him. Acum and Mrs. Phillipson. Was there any link at all between that improbable pair? If link there was, it had to have been forged at some point in the past, at some point more than two years ago, at the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School. Could there have been something? It was an idea, anyway. Yet as he drove out of the castle car park, he decided on balance that it was a lousy idea. In front of the castle he passed the statue erected to commemorate the honourable member for Caernarfon (Lloyd George, no less) and as he drove out along the road to Capel Curig, his brain was as jumbled and cluttered as a magpie's nest.
He stopped briefly in the pass of Llanberis, and watched the tiny figures of the climbers, conspicuous only by their bright orange anoraks, perched at dizzying heights on the sheer mountain faces that towered massively above the road on either side. He felt profoundly thankful that whatever the difficulties of his own job he was spared the risk, at every second, and every precarious hand- and foot-hold, of a vertical plunge to a certain death upon the rocks far, far below. Yet, in his own way, Morse knew that he too was scaling a peak and knew full well the blithe exhilaration of reaching the summit. So often there was only one way forward, only one. And when one route seemed utterly impossible, one had to look for the nearly impossible alternative, to edge along the face of the cliff, to avoid the impasse, and to lever oneself painstakingly up to the next ledge, and look up again and follow the only route. On the death of Baines, Morse had considered only a small group of likely suspects. The murderer could, of course, have been someone completely unconnected with the Valerie Taylor affair; but he doubted it. There had been five of them, and he now felt that the odds against Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum had lengthened considerably. That left the Taylors, the pair of them, and Phillipson himself. It was time he tried to put together the facts, many of them very odd facts, that he had gleaned about these three. It must be one of them surely; for he felt convinced now that Baines had been murdered before the visits of Mrs. Phillipson and David Acum. Yes, that was the only way it could have been. He grasped the firm fact with both hands and swung himself on to a higher ledge, and discovered that from this vantage point the view seemed altogether different.
He drove to Capel Curig and there turned right on to the A5 towards Llangollen. And even as he drove he began to see the pattern. He ought to have seen it before; but with the testimony of Mrs. Phillipson and Acum behind him, it became almost childishly easy now to fit the pieces into quite a different pattern. One by one they clicked into place with a simple inevitability, as on and on he drove at high speed, passing Shrewsbury and, keeping to the A5, rattling along the old Wading Street and almost missing the turning off for Daventry and Banbury. It was now nearly 8 p.m. and Morse was feeling the effects of his long day. He found his mind wandering off to that news item he had heard about the unfortunate lord in the Essex reservoir; and as he was leaving the outskirts of Banbury an oncoming car flashed its lights at him. He realized that he had been drifting dangerously over the centre of the road, and jerked himself into a startled wakefulness. He resolved not to allow his concentration to waver one centimetre, opened the side window and breathing deeply upon the cool night air, sang in a mournful baritone, over and over again, the first and only verse he could remember of 'Lead, Kindly Light'.