Last Seen Wearing

Morse got up and went to a large pile of newspapers neatly bundled in string, that lay in the hallway beside the front door. The Boy Scouts collected them once a month, and although Morse had never been a tenderfoot himself he gave the movement his qualified approval. Impatiently he tore at the string and delved into the pile. Thirty-first August. Fourteenth September. But no 24 August. It may have gone with the last pile. Blast. He looked through again, but it wasn't there. Now who might have a copy? He tried his next-door neighbour, but on reflection he might have saved himself the bother. What about Lewis? Unlikely, yet worth a try. He telephoned his number.

'Lewis? Morse here.'

'Ah. Morning, sir.'

'Lewis, do you take the Sunday Times?'

' 'Fraid not, sir. We have the Sunday Mirror.' He sounded somewhat apologetic about his Sabbath-day reading.

'Oh.'

'I could get you a copy, I suppose.'

'I've got today's. I want the copy for August the twenty-fourth.'

It was Sergeant Lewis's turn to say, 'Oh.'

'I can't really understand an intelligent man like you, Lewis, not taking a decent Sunday newspaper.'

'The sport's pretty good in the Sunday Mirror, sir.'

'Is it? You'd better bring it along with you in the morning, then.'

Lewis brightened. 'I won't forget.'

Morse thanked him and rang off. He had almost said he would swop it for his own copy of the News of the World, but considered it not improper to conceal from his subordinates certain aspects of his own depravity.

He could always get a back copy from the Reference Library. It could wait, he told himself. And yet it couldn't wait. Again he read the letter from the parents of the prodigal daughter. They would be extra-pleased now, with a letter in the newspaper, to boot. Dad would probably cut it out and keep it in his wallet — now that the family unit was functioning once more. We were all so vain. Cuttings, clippings and that sort of thing. Morse still kept his batting averages somewhere. .

And suddenly it hit him. It all fitted. Four or five weeks ago Ainley had resurrected the Taylor case of his own accord and pursued it in his own spare time. Some reporter had been along to Thames Valley Police and got Ainley to spill the beans on the Taylor girl. Ainley had given him the facts (no fancies with Ainley!) and somehow, as a result of seeing the facts again, he had spotted something that he had missed before. It was just like doing a crossword puzzle. Get stuck. Leave it for ten minutes. Try again — and eureka! It happened to everyone like that. And, he repeated to himself, Ainley had seen something new. That must be it.

As a corollary to this, it occurred to Morse that if Ainley had taken a hand in the article, not only would Valerie Taylor have been one of the missing girls featured, but Ainley himself would almost certainly have kept the printed article — just as surely as Mr. J. Richardson would be sticking his own printed letter into his Kidderminster wallet.

He rang Mrs. Ainley. 'Eileen?' (Right this time.) 'Morse here. Look, do you happen to have kept that bit of the Sunday Times—you know, that bit about missing girls?'

'You mean the one they saw Richard about?' He had been right.

'That's the one.'

'Yes. I kept it, of course. It mentioned Richard several times.'

'Can I, er, can I come round and have a look at it?'

'You can have it with pleasure. I don't want it any more.'

Some half an hour later, forgetful of his earlier pledge, Morse was seated with a pint of flat beer and a soggy steak-and-mushroom pie. He read the article through with a feeling of anticlimax. Six girls were featured — after the preliminary sociological blurb about the problems of adolescence — with a couple of columns on each of them. But the central slant was on the parents the girls had left behind them. 'The light in the hall has been left on every night since she went,' as one of the anguished mothers was reported. It was pathetic and it was distressing. There were pictures, too. First, pictures of the girls, although (of necessity) none of the photographs was of a very recent vintage, and two or three (including that of Valerie herself) were of less than definitive clarity. And thus it was for the first time that Chief Inspector Morse looked down upon the face of Valerie Taylor. Of the six she would certainly be in the running for the beauty crown — though run close by a honey of a girl from Brighton. Attractive face, full mouth, come-hither eyes, nice eyebrows (plucked, thought Morse) and long dark-brown hair. Just the face — no figure to admire. And then, over the page, the pictures of the parents. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor seemed an unremarkable pair, seated unnaturally forward on the shabby sofa: Mr. wearing a cheap Woolworth tie, with his rolled-up sleeves revealing a large purple tattoo on his broad right forearm; Mrs. wearing a plain cotton dress with a cameo brooch somewhat ostentatiously pinned to the collar. And on a low table beside them, carefully brought into the focus of the photograph, a cohort of congratulatory cards for their eighteenth wedding anniversary. It was predictable and posed, and Morse felt that a few tears might well have been nearer the truth.

He ordered another pint and sat down to read the commentary on Valerie's disappearance.

Two years ago, the month of the June enjoyed a long, unbroken spell of sunny weather, and Tuesday 10 June was a particularly sweltering day at the village of Kidlington in the county of Oxfordshire. At 12.30 p.m. Valerie Taylor left the Roger Bacon Comprehensive School to walk to her home in Hatfield Way on the council estate nearby, no more than six or seven hundred yards from the school. Like many of her friends Valerie disliked school dinners and for the previous year had returned home each lunch-time. On the day of her daughter's disappearance Valerie's mother, Mrs. Grace Taylor, had prepared a ham salad, with blackcurrant tart and custard for sweet, and together mother and daughter ate the meal at the kitchen table. Afternoon lessons began again at 1.45, and Valarie usually left the house at about 1.25. She did so on 10 June. Nothing seemed amiss that cloudless Tuesday afternoon. Valarie walked down the short front path, turned in the direction of the school, and waved a cheery farewell to her mother. She has never been seen again.

Mr. George Taylor, an employee of the Oxford City Corporation, returned from work at 6.10 p.m. to find his