Last Bus To Woodstock

Palmer lived in the fashionable Observatory Street at the bottom of the Woodstock Road. Yes. He could meet Morse — of course, he could — if it was important. They arranged a meeting at The Bull and Stirrup in nearby Walton Street at 8.30 p.m. that evening.

It was a mean-looking, ill-lighted, spit-and-sawdust type of pub; a dispiriting sort of place, with gee-gees, darts and football-pools the overriding claims upon the shabby clientele. Morse wanted to get things over and get out as quickly as he could. It was a struggle for a start, and Palmer was cagey and reluctant; but Morse knew too much for him. Grudgingly, but with apparent honesty, Palmer told his pitiable little tale.

'I suppose you think I should have told you this before?'

'I don't know. I'm not married myself.' Morse sounded utterly indifferent. It was 9.00 p.m. and he took his leave.

He drove up the Woodstock Road at rather more than 30 mph; but spotting a police car up ahead he slackened off to the statutory speed limit. He swung round the Woodstock roundabout, the starting point of all this sorry mess, and headed for Woodstock. At the village of Yarnton he turned off and parked the Lancia outside the home of Mrs. Mabel Jarman, where he stayed for no more than a couple of minutes.

On his way home he called at police HQ. The corridors were darkened, but he didn't bother to turn on the lights. In his office he unlocked the bottom left-hand drawer and took out the envelope. His hand shook slightly as he reached for his paper-knife and neatly slit open the top. He felt like a cricketer who has made a duck, checking the score-book just in case an odd run made by the other batsman had been fortuitously misattributed to his own name. But Morse had no faith in miracles, and he knew what the note had to say before he opened it. He saw the note; he did not read it. He saw it synoptically, not as the sum of its individual words and letters. Miracles do not happen.

He turned off the light, locked his office door, and walked back along the darkened corridor. The last piece had clicked into place. The jigsaw was complete.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Saturday, 23 October

SINCE BREAKFAST SUE had been trying to write to David. Once or twice she had written half a page before screwing up the paper and starting a fresh sheet; but mostly the elusive phraseology had failed her after nothing more than a miserably brief sentence. She tried again.

My dear David,

You've been so kind and so loving to me that I know this letter will come as a terrible shock to you. But I feel I must tell you — it's not fair to keep anything from you. The truth is that I've fallen in love with someone else and I. .

What else could she say? She couldn't just leave it at that. . She screwed up the latest draft and added it to the growing collection of tight paper balls upon the table.

A sombre-looking Morse sat in his black leather chair that same morning. Another restless, fitful night. He must have some holiday.

'You look tired, sir,' said Lewis.

Morse nodded. 'Yes, but we've come to the end of the road, now.'

'We have, sir?'

Morse seemed to buoy himself up. He took a deep breath: 'I've taken one or two wrong turnings, as you know, Lewis; but by some fluke I was always heading in the right direction — even on the night of the murder. Do you remember when we stood in that yard? I remember staring up at the stars and thinking how many secrets they must know, looking down on everything. I remember trying even then to see the pattern, not just the bits that form the pattern. There was something very odd, you know Lewis, about that night. It looked like a sex murder right enough. But things are not always what they seem, are they?'

He seemed to be speaking in a dazed, sing-song sort of way, almost as if he were on drugs. 'Now you can make things look a bit odd, but I've not met any of these clever killers yet. Or things just happen like that, eh? It was odd if Sylvia had been raped where she was found, wasn't it? I know it was very dark in the yard that night, but cars with full headlights were coming in and out all the time. It's surely stretching the imagination a bit to think that anyone would be crazy enough to rape a girl in the full blaze of motorists' headlights.' He seemed to Lewis to be relaxing a little and his eyes had lost their dull stare. Well?' That was more like the chief.

'I suppose you're right, sir.'

'But it looked odd. A young, leggy blonde murdered and raped or raped and murdered. Whichever way round it was, it all pointed in the same way. We've got a sex-killer to find. But I wasn't sure. Raping isn't easy they tell me if the young lady isn't too willing, and, as I say, I discounted the likelihood of Sylvia being raped in the yard. She could have screamed and yelled — unless of course she was dead already. But I'm a bit squeamish about that sort of thing, and I thought the chances of us having to deal with a Christie-like necrophiliac were a bit remote. Where does that leave us, then?' Lewis hoped it was a rhetorical question, and so it was. 'Well, let us concentrate our attention separately upon each of the two components — rape and murder. Let us assume two distinct actions — not one. Let us assume that she has intercourse with a man — after all, there was no doubt about the fact of intercourse. Let us assume further that this took place entirely with her consent. Now there was one shred of evidence to support this. Sylvia wasn't a member of women's lib, but she wasn't wearing a bra, and it seemed to me, if not unusual, well — a little suggestive. We discovered that Sylvia had several white blouses, but no white bras. Why not? No one as conscious of her figure and her appearance as Sylvia Kaye is going to wear a black bra under a thin, white blouse, is she? I could draw only one conclusion — that Sylvia not infrequently went out without a bra; and if she did wear a bra, it would be a black one, because all the girls believe that black underwear is terribly sexy. Now all this suggested that perhaps she was a young lady of somewhat easy virtue, and I think it's pretty clear she was.'

'She wasn't wearing pants either, sir.'

'No. But the pathologist's report suggests that she had been — there were the marks of elastic round her waist. Yes, I'm pretty sure that she had been wearing pants and that they got stuck in someone's pocket and later got thrown away or burned. Anyway, it's not important. To get back to the separate components of the crime. First, a man had intercourse with Sylvia — pretty certainly without too much opposition. Second, someone murdered her. It could have been the same man, but it's not easy to see the motive. The evidence we got at a very early stage seemed to suggest that this was a completely casual acquaintanceship, a chance pick-up on the road to Woodstock.