The Way Through The Woods

But I'd rather have a plate of egg and chips, myself. What about you, Constable Watson?' asked Lewis, turning in his chair.

'Me?' said the man by the door. 'I'd much rather watch a sex film.'

'You wouldn't want your wife to know, though?'

'No, Sarge.'

'Nor would you, would you, Mr Michaels?'

'No. I wouldn't want her to know about anything like that,' said Michaels quietly.

'I wonder if Mrs Daley knew – about her husband, I mean?'

'I dunno. As I say, I knew nothing about the man, really.'

'Last night you knew he'd been murdered.'

'A lot of people knew.'

'And a lot of people didn't know.'

Michaels remained silent.

'He was killed from a seven-millimetre gun, like as not.'

'Rifle, you mean.'

'Sorry. I'm not an expert on guns and things – not like you, Mr Michaels.'

'And that's why you took my rifle last night?'

'We'd've taken anyone's rifle. That's our job, isn't it?'

'Every forester's got a rifle that sort of calibre – very effective they are too.'

'So where were you between, say, ten o'clock and eleven o'clock yesterday morning?'

'Not much of a problem there. About ten – no -just after ten it must have been – I was with a couple of fellows from the RSPB. We – they – were checking on the nesting boxes along the Singing Way. You know, keeping records on first or second broods, weighing 'em, taking samples of droppings – that sort of thing. They do it all the time.'

'You were helping them?'

'Carrying the bloody ladder most of the time.'

'What about after that?'

'Well, we all nipped down to the White Hart – about twelve, quarter-past? – and had a couple of pints. Warm work, it was! Hot day, too!' i

'You've got the addresses of these fellows?'

'Not on me, no. I can get 'em for you easy enough.'

'And the barman there at the pub? He knows you?'

'Rather too well, Sergeant!'

Lewis looked at his wrist-watch, feeling puzzled and, yes, a little bit lost.

'Can I go now?' asked Michaels.

'Not yet, sir, no. As I say we need some sort of statement from you about what happened last July… then we shall just have to get this little lot typed up' – Lewis nodded to the tape recorder -'then we shall have to get you to read it and sign it… and, er, I should think we're not going to get through all that till…' Again Lewis looked at his watch, still wondering exactly where things stood. Then, turning round: 'We'd better see Mr Michaels has some lunch with us, Watson. What's on the menu today?'

'Always mince on Tuesdays, Sarge.'

'Most people'd prefer a sex film,' said Michaels, almost cheerfully.

Lewis rose to his feet, nodded to Watson, and made to leave. 'One other thing, sir. I can't let you go before the chief inspector gets back, I'm afraid. He said he particularly wanted to see you again.'

'And where's he supposed to be this morning?'

'To tell you the truth, I'm not at all sure.'

As he walked back to his office, Lewis reflected on what he had just learned. Morse had been correct on virtually everything so far j – right up until this last point. For now surely Morse must be dramatically wrong in his belief that Michaels had murdered Daley? In due course they would have to check up on his alibi; but it was wholly inconceivable that a pair of dedicated ornithologists had conspired with a barman from the local pub in seeking to pervert the course of natural justice. Surely so!

At 12.30 p.m., Dr Hobson rang through from South Parks Road to say that, whilst she was an amateur in the byways of ballistics, she would be astounded if Michaels' gun had been fired at any time within the previous few weeks.

' 'Rifle',' muttered Lewis, sotto voce.

'Is he, er, there?' the pathologist had asked tentatively.

'Back this afternoon some time.'

'Oh.'

It was beginning to look as if everyone wanted to see Morse.

Especially Lewis.

chapter fifty-nine

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own

(Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics]

the noon-day sun shone on the pale-cinnamon stone of the colleges, and the spires of Oxford looked down on a scene of apparent tranquillity as the marked police car drove down Headington Hill towards the Plain, then over Magdalen Bridge and into the High. In the back sat Morse, sombre, and now silent, for he had talked sufficiently to the rather faded woman in her mid-forties who sat beside him, her eyes red from recent weeping, her mouth still tremulous, but her small chin firm and somehow courageous in the face of the terrible events she had only learned about two hours before – when the front doorbell had rung in her sister's council house in Beaconsfield. Yet the news that her husband had been murdered and that her only son had run away from home had left her not so much devastated as dumbfounded, as though a separate layer of emotions and reactions had formed itself between what she knew to be herself, and the external reality of what had occurred. It had helped a bit too – talking with the chief inspector, who seemed to understand a good deal of what she was suffering. Not that she'd bared her soul too much to him about the increasing repugnance she'd felt for the man she'd married; the man who had slowly yet inevitably revealed over the years of their lives together the shallow, devious, occasionally cruel, nature of his character. There had been Philip, though; and for so long the little lad had compensated in manifold ways for the declining love and respect she was feeling for her husband. In nursery school, in primary school, even at the beginning of secondary school, certainly until he was about twelve, Philip had almost always turned to her, his mother; confided in her; had (so preciously!) hugged her when he was grateful or happy. She had been very proud that she was the loved and favoured parent.

Whether it was of deliberate, vindictive intent or not, she couldn't honestly say,,but soon after Philip had started at secondary school, George had begun to assert his influence over the boy and in some ways to steal his affection away from her; and this by the simple expedient of encouraging in him the idea of growing up, of becoming 'a man', and doing mannish things. At weekends he would take the boy fishing; often he would return from the Royal Sun in the evening bringing a few cans of light ale with him, regularly offering one to his young son. Then the air-gun! For Philip's thirteenth birthday George had bought him an air-gun; and very soon afterwards Philip had shot a sparrow at the bottom of the garden as it was pecking at some bird-seed she herself had thrown down. What a terrible evening that had been between them, husband and wife, when she had accused him of turning their son into a philistine! Progressively too there had been the coarsening of Philip's speech, and of his attitudes; the brittle