Last Bus To Woodstock

back on mental tip-toe in the morning.

He got up, dressed and shaved, cooked himself a succulent looking mixture of bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, and felt good. He ran a leisurely eye through the Sunday papers, checked his pools, wondered if he was the only man in England who had picked in his 'any eight from sixteen' permutation not a single score-draw, and lit a cigarette. He would sit and idle the time away until noon, have a couple of pints and get lunch out somewhere. It seemed a civilized prospect. But he was never happy without something to do, and before long was mentally debating whether to put some Wagner on the record player or do a crossword. Crosswords were a passion with Morse, although since the death of the great Ximenes he had found few composers to please his taste. On the whole he enjoyed The Listener puzzles as much as any, and for this purpose took the periodical each week. On the other hand he delighted in Wagnerian opera and had the complete cycle of The Ring. He decided to do both, and to the opening bars of the richly scored Prelude to Das Rheingold, he sat back and turned to the penultimate page of The Listener. This was the life. The Rhinemaidens swam gracefully to and fro and it was a few minutes before Morse felt willing to let the music drift away to the periphery of his attention. He read the preamble to the crossword:

'Each of the across clues contains, in the definition, a deliberate misprint. Each of the down clues is normal, although the words to be entered in the diagram will contain a misprint of a single letter. Working from 1 across to 28 down the missing — printed letters form a well-known quotation which solvers. .'

Morse read no more. He leapt to his feet. A solo horn expired with a dying groan as he switched off the record player and snatched his car keys from the mantelpiece.

His in-tray was high with reports, but he ignored them. He unlocked his cabinet, took out the file on the Sylvia Kaye murder, and extracted the letter addressed to Jennifer Coleby. He knew there had been something wrong with the whole thing. His mouth was dry and his hand trembled slightly, like a schoolboy opening his O-level results:

Dear Madam,

After asessing the mny applications we have received, we must regretfully inform you that our application has been unsuccessful. At the begining of November however, further posts will become available, and I should, in all honesty, be sorry to loose the opportunity of reconsidering our position then.

We have now alloted the September quota of posts in the Psycology Department; yet it is probable that a reliably qualified assistant may be required to deal with the routnie duties for the Principal's office.

Yours faithfully,

How wrong-headed he had been! Instead of thinking, as he had done, with such supercilious arrogance, of the illiteracy and incompetence of some poor blockhead of a typist, he should have been thinking exactly the opposite. He'd been a fool. The clues were there. The whole thing was phoney — why hadn't he spotted that before? When you boiled it down it was a nonsense letter. He had first made the mistake of concentrating upon individual mistakes and not even bothering to see the letter as a synoptic whole. But not only that. He had compounded his mistake. For if he had read the letter as a letter, he might have considered the mistakes as mistakes—deliberate mistakes. He took a sheet of paper and started: 'asessing' — 's' omitted; 'mny'—'a' omitted; 'begining—'n' omitted; 'loose'—'o' inserted; 'Psycology'—'h' omitted. SANOH — whatever that signified. Look again, 'our'—shouldn't it be 'your'? 'y' omitted; 'routnie' — 'n' and 'i' transposed. What did that give him? SAYNOHNI. Hardly promising. Try once more, 'alloted'—surely two 't's? 't' omitted? And there it was staring him in the face. The 'G' of course from the signature, the only recognizable letter therein: SAY NOTHING. Someone had been desperately anxious for Jennifer not to say a word — and Jennifer, it seemed, had got the message.

It had taken Morse two minutes, and he was glad that Jennifer had been out the previous evening. He felt sure that faced with her lies about the visit to the library, she would have said how sorry she was and that she must have got it wrong. It must have been Thursday, she supposed; it was so difficult to think back to events of even the day before, wasn't it? She honestly couldn't remember; but she would try very hard to. Perhaps she had gone for a walk — on her own, of course.

But she would find things more awkward now. Strangely Morse felt little sense of elation. He had experienced an odd liking for Jennifer when they had met, and in retrospect he understood how difficult it must have been for her. But he must look the fact squarely in the face. She was lying. She was shielding someone — that someone who in all probability had raped and murdered Sylvia. It was not a pretty thought. Every piece of evidence now pointed unequivocally to the fact that it was Jennifer Coleby who had stood at Fare Stage 5 with Sylvia on the night of the 29th; that it was she who had been given a lift by a person or persons unknown (pretty certainly the former) as far as Woodstock; that there she had witnessed something about which she had been warned to keep her silence. In short that Jennifer Coleby knew the identity of the man who had murdered Sylvia Kaye. Morse suddenly wondered if she was in danger, and it was this fear which prompted his immediate decision to have Jennifer held on suspicion of being an accessory to the crime of murder. He would need Lewis in.

He reached for his outside phone and rang his sergeant's home number.

'Lewis?'

'Speaking.'

'Morse here. I'm sorry to ruin your weekend, but I want you here.'

'Straight away, sir?'

'If you can.'

'I'm on my way.'

Morse looked through his in-tray. Reports, reports, reports. He crossed through his own initials immediately, barely glancing at such uncongenial titles as The Drug Problem in Britain, The Police and the Public, and The Statistics for Crimes of Violence in Oxfordshire (second quarter). At the minute he was interested only in one statistic which would doubtless, in time, appear in the statistics of violent crime in Oxfordshire (third quarter). He'd no time for reports. He suspected that about 95 % of the written word was never read by anyone anyway. But there were two items which held his attention. A report from the forensic lab on the murder weapon, and a supplementary report from the pathology department on Sylvia Kaye. Neither did more than confirm what he already knew or at any rate suspected. The tire-lever proved to be a singularly unromantic specimen. Morse read all about its shape, size, weight. . But why bother? There was no mystery about the lever at all. The landlord of The Black Prince had spent the afternoons of Tuesday, 28th and Wednesday, 29th tinkering with an ancient Sunbeam, and had unwittingly left his tool kit outside the garage on the right at the back of the courtyard where he kept the car. There were no recognizable prints — just the ugly evidence, at one of the lever's curving ends, that it had crashed with considerable force into the bone of a human skull. There followed a gory analysis, which Morse was glad to skip.